“Wait a moment,” I interrupted. “How do you know all this?”
They exchanged glances with each other, and a few words in their own language. Then one said:
“We’re artists. We’re still students as every artist is always a student. We do different things, but we’re all caught in the white man’s snare. Without him we’re helpless, we don’t eat. With him we’re meat which he slices as he wishes. The system protects him as he ravages our flesh. He smells out our talents before we’re aware of it, then he sells our talent for his benefit. He becomes the agent. In the case of a painter or sculptor, he offers the work to galleries in the cities where we couldn’t get into the door without his help, then he prices the work and takes the biggest slice. In the case of a musician, there is the recording studio. The white agent negotiates and often winds up owning the copyright. Sometimes his name appears on the record as composer. Same thing with live performances. I’ve yet to hear of a black musician earning thirty Rand a performance in spite of a full house.”
The faces around me were now grim, bitter masks, the suppressed hatred of years spilling out with their words.
“You write books, my friend, and you get the credit. They make movies of your work and you get the credit and the money. You can come here and live in a hotel like this, a big room like this. In your country you can be a real artist. Here we are shit.”
A waiter wheeled our breakfast into the room, looking with some surprise at me and my guests. I told him we’d help ourselves, tipped him, and he left.
“You have an agent?” one asked. “What’s he like? Black? White?”
“White and she’s a woman.”
“I hear that over there you pay the agent a percentage. Right?”
“Right.”
“Here the man who represents you pays you something—or nothing. What we tell ourselves all the time is ‘Come together. Close ranks. End the squabbles among ourselves. Stop underselling each other. Let’s find our direction, present what we want, where we want it and how we want it.’ How will we achieve this? By striving for good standards like the white man did. By working at perfecting our art, not for any exotic superficialities, but for quality. Shit, the white man was not born with his high standards. He worked for them. We can work for them too. Not his, but our own.”
I liked what they were saying and felt my reservations evaporating rapidly.
“How will you achieve all this?” I asked.
“By working together, supporting each other. By accepting hunger and pain until we can speak for ourselves, negotiate for ourselves. Some of our brothers have formed an organization. Mdali, in Johannesburg. Its purpose is to get all our people involved in discovering our talents and our arts. Up to now we’ve been preoccupied with showing off our talents and our arts to the white man, selling ourselves to him. Now we must forget that shit. We must take our art and talent to our people in the ghettos. If and when our art is good enough, the white man will come to us. In the ghettos. He will watch us perform among our people and will respect our people because he’ll have to respect all of it. The art and the people.”
“Listen, friend,” one said. “When we talk of supporting our own, we are talking more to ourselves than to you. The habits of eating, of warm clothing, of sleeping under a roof with a woman make slaves of us all. I am also a sculptor and after years of work, what do I have to show? Nothing. No house, no money, no clothes, no wife, no studio, no kiln!” The last words said in a sudden shout as he jumped up from his seat and walked over to stare outside through the sunlit window. The others looked over at him but made no move to go to him.
“Friend,” one said. “We came to talk with you as a fellow artist, not to burden you with our pain. We really came to talk to you about acting and writing prose and poetry, and painting pictures and carving wood. But here we are sharing our pain with you. We look at you, at how you live here, the confidence with which you speak and we envy you. You are an artist, independent. That’s why this government lets you come into this country, into this hotel. We want to be independent as artists. Independent of the white man, employing him only as we need him. We envy you. Look at me. Until coming into this room I’ve told myself I needed the white man, because he stood between me and the door. Every door. Now I feel I can promise the white man that I don’t really need him, have never needed him. I should have known it all the time.”
“Brother,” another said. “You see, we’re now talking for ourselves. Each one for his work. We’re actors because we need to eat. Each of us is something else. Something individual. Ben’s a sculptor and gets very little for the work he does, then later sees pictures of his pieces in glossy magazines. Not even his name to them. Same thing with Biki’s painting. Tom and me, we write. Some poetry, some prose. I would have liked to go on to the university to study literature, but that’s a dream. Me, when the frustration gets me, I drown myself in brandy. If I can afford it. Like my brothers here, I want a chance to exhibit, to expose myself to the world, to compete. But what can I do here. Vokol. Nothing.”
“Anything I can do?” I asked.
“You’re doing it, brother,” one said. “You invited us to come and talk with you. You listen. We heard about you but we needed to see and hear you for ourselves. We’ve seen Blacks from your country come here before. Bob Foster for one. He stayed here, hidden from us behind his managers and secretaries. We weren’t sure about you. Come see us in Jo’burg. Come to Mdali and meet some more of the brothers. Will you?”
I promised I would. I remembered my early suspicion and distrust. Now I felt humbled. I could think of nothing to say to reach and touch them, to convey my oneness with them and their plight, for anything I said would merely emphasize my own fortunate position.
I thought of suggesting that they flee the country and try their fortune in some more sympathetic society, but swallowed the words before they could leak out. These men were talking of developing themselves, proving themselves among their own people in their own land.
I poured coffee and drank to them. To the cast of Umabatha, to those isolated on Robben Island, to Mdali, to Blacks everywhere involved in the struggle for freedom and dignity.
“And you with us, brother,” they said.
Chapter
Nine
ON MY RETURN TO Johannesburg, I accepted an invitation to address the members of the Executive of the Young Women’s Christian Association in Soweto. Two members of the Executive, Mrs. Meteni and Mrs. Iowele, called for me at the hotel and visited for a few minutes. Both housewives, both married to men who worked in Johannesburg, they told me that their YWCA branch was all black, in keeping with the Government’s segregationist policies. Both had attended YWCA conferences outside South Africa and sat in the same room with delegates from the white South African branch.
“Did that cause you any difficulty?” I asked.
“Not us. We are not the ones who hold ourselves separate. Outside this country we meet as equals.”
“Do overseas organizations know that here in South Africa you are kept separate?”
“Of course they do, but they cannot interfere.”
On the way to their meeting room they took me through a part of Soweto I had not previously seen to show me, they said, the reasons why the YWCA served a useful purpose in the community. Women everywhere, many of them with very young children.
“Each day, except Sundays, Soweto becomes a community of women. The men are away at work, so most of us are left to clean house, tend the children, and watch the days slip away with little or nothing accomplished. We don’t get any satisfaction from recounting our common miseries. Whatever improvement is needed here must come from us. The Bantu Council meets and talks but nothing happens, because all money decisions must be made by Whites in Johannesburg. So we’ve begun. Out of money we raised ourselves, through dances and picnics and collections, we’ve built one meeting
hall. It’s a beginning.”
When we reached the meeting hall, I understood what she meant. It was a squat, L-shaped, solidly built red-brick structure, set on a small rise, the interstices between the bricks highlighted in white. Larger than any of its neighbors, it exuded an aura of elegance and permanence. The grass around it was neatly trimmed, and here and there recently transplanted trees stood like symbols of growth and hope.
“What do you think?” Mrs. Iowele asked, proudly.
“Very impressive,” I replied.
“It’s been eleven years in getting to this stage,” Mrs. Meteni said. “When we can, we hope to add wings on either side of the main hall. Might take another eleven years, but we’ll do it.”
We went in and I was introduced to the other members. We sat down and they quickly and professionally attended to their business, reviewing their work among the young people, housewives and pre-school children of Soweto. From time to time their comments clearly indicated their separateness from the Whites, especially when they referred to invitations received to attend overseas conferences. They spoke of several fund-raising projects planned for the months ahead.
Their agenda completed, they invited me to address them. At this moment, two other women joined us, one of them white. Someone sitting next to me explained that she was a graduate student from an American university who was examining the social conditions in Soweto as a basis for a doctoral thesis. I spoke briefly, of the reason for my visit to South Africa and what I had so far seen as I traveled about the country.
Afterward, they spoke about Soweto and about the very few options open to black women. A few were teachers, some were nurses, or helpers at the local nursery schools, and many were domestics. All were frustrated by the narrowness of their lives.
“We read the YWCA publications sent to us from overseas,” one said. “We read of the things women do, are allowed to do, in other countries, in other parts of Africa and here we are, forced to confine our interests and ambitions to Soweto, and, even so, what we do here depends on what the white man lets us do.”
Suddenly one of the group, a graying, buxom woman stood up, interrupting the others with, “Sisters, we are wasting time, our own and that of our visitor. Let’s not talk about the stupid irritations like where we can or cannot go. He didn’t come all the way from America to hear that. Let’s tell him about what’s really important to us. Let’s tell him about the thing which frightens us and keeps us helpless. Let’s tell him about our Fear.”
She seemed to capitalize the word, giving it a dimension of immediate threat, bringing it into the room with us. Looking directly at me she said, “My brother, we women live in Fear, every moment of every day of our lives. So do our men, but they, most of them, go off to work each morning and can temporarily forget their Fear in doing their jobs. But we think of them at those jobs and we fear for them. I have a man, sir, a lovely man, a good man who looks after me and our children. He’s a very intelligent man. I know, because I live with him. I love to hear him talk with me and the children or with our friends when they come to visit. I’m very proud of him.” She paused and looked around at the others, all with their eyes focused on her.
“My man works as an ordinary clerk in the city, a job any boy could do, but he has no way of seeking or getting promotion. Young white boys order him about, calling him ‘boy’ sometimes. My man. My proud man. It’s eating away at him inside.”
One of the women who had come to my hotel looked questioningly at me, as if wondering whether I wanted to hear what her colleague was saying. I nodded affirmatively.
“I watch my man go off at five each morning, and I wonder whether today will be the day when the dam will break, when somebody will say the final word to him, when some Whitey will heap on his head the final indignity and my man will lose control.” Some of the others were nodding their heads as she spoke, their faces grave, living with her in her pain.
“It will happen one day,” she went on. “I can feel it in my bones, because I know my man. One day they will say something or do something to him and he will blow up. Do you know what will happen then to him, to us? They will call the police and take my man to jail, and I won’t know anything about it. I will wait for him and when night comes and he is not here, I’ll know. And the children will know. And tomorrow I must go search for him.
“Do you think the police will come to tell me my man is in jail? Never. I must search for him. One by one I must visit the police stations and ask for him. Always I must wait. I must swallow my anxiety and wait while they look at me, hating me because my husband is a man, laughing at me because I am black and helpless. I must wait until they check their lists. Sometimes they spell his name or pronounce his name their way and do not recognize the name I give them, so they say ‘Go. We do not have your man.’”
The room was quiet yet vibrant with the spell of the woman’s pain. It seemed as if it was there with us, happening before our eyes.
“So, day after day I must search, living with my Fear, living with my children who will draw upon my Fear and be frightened. Maybe in three or four days I’ll find him, thrown into a stinking cell with many others, stinking with his shit and his Fear, as frightened as I am. The police will say ‘Bring forty Rand to pay your husband’s fine.’ Forty Rand! It’s as easy to tell me go steal a star from the sky. Without forty Rand my husband may be deported somewhere up North. Somehow I must get that money. So it is, my brother. We busy ourselves with this place, and whatever we can do here, to distract us from our Fear, for our men, for our children and for ourselves.”
Her voice broke but her eyes were dry, though I knew she was weeping behind her eyes. The looks on the other faces told me they were with her on every frightening step she took.
“There’s something else,” she went on. “We also live in fear of each other. Look at us. All black. All poor. And yet, even among us, sisters you might say, there may be one or more who will later report to the Security Police about what has been said here, by you and by us, but especially by us. So, while we fear for each other, we go in fear of each other, selling each other for the puny privilege of a pass, a permit for a relative, or, worst of all, a few Rand. I read some of your books, my brother. You are a teacher. Tell us how to trust each other. That’s what we need to know. Talk to us about trusting each other, because when we can trust each other, we can together be strong against the white man’s tyranny.”
I was about to reply, thinking that she was finished, but she lifted a hand to bid me wait.
“The white man wants to keep us afraid. Do you know how he does it? Ask anyone here. The Security Police raid our homes. Everyone’s homes. It’s to see if anyone’s living there illegally, without a pass. They always come late at night or very early in the morning when we are dazed by sleep. They pound on our doors to frighten us, and if we’re not quick to open them, they break them in. They love to see us huddled in our beds, cowering against their flashlights and their guns. And their dogs. They love to pull the bedclothes off us and look at our nakedness. So we live, my brother. In spite of all that we’ve come together and built this place. Now tell us how we can build ourselves, that we might be stronger than our fear.”
Abruptly she sat down, leaving me weakly unequal to the challenge of responding to her, to them.
“My sisters,” I said, letting the moment and the feeling dictate whatever I’d say to them, “you’ve opened doors to a world I’d never known existed. I’ve lived in countries where Blacks must fight for everything they get and have, and in my own struggle I had imagined myself confronted with formidable difficulties. In the face of what I’ve heard today, I feel humble. I believe that people who suffer as you do and survive as you do, can discover in yourselves reasons to trust each other. It must have taken great courage for our sister to speak the way she did, and I would like to believe that we all respect that courage. Perhaps, at times, our personal, private needs
seem greater than the collective good and I can only be sympathetic with those who must make choices under these terrible conditions. Be patient with each other.”
Before leaving I talked informally with them, especially the matron who had spoken so eloquently and moved me so deeply. I loved her, the dignity and majesty limned in her smooth black face and I knew that the spirit of freedom glowed strongly in her and could ignite the feebler ones. I felt encouraged and strengthened.
Back at the hotel I was overcome by restlessness. I missed the casual ease of consorting with my friends in the U.S.A. and the challenge of my work. Here and now I was surrounded by hate and anger and menace and people engulfed in suffering. From my window I could see groups of young men scattered about the park and suddenly decided to go down among them.
I chose a group at random and sat on the grass nearby, within easy earshot, looking at them, evidently taking an interest. They were conversing in an African language, very animatedly, waving arms, sometimes jumping up the better to emphasize a point. I was fascinated by it all, and by the realization of being so much the outsider, not understanding a word of what went on.
Suddenly one of them noticed me and said something. I shook my head, smiling, and explained that I was a visitor from overseas, staying across the street at the Landdrost Hotel. They looked at me in surprise, then at the hotel and suddenly gathered around me, bombarding me with questions, in English. Suddenly one of them remembered reading something about me in one of the newspapers and asked if I was the author of Reluctant Neighbors. He had not read it but knew someone who had, and remembered some of the things discussed in it. For a while, we talked about me and my books, but gradually they got back to what they had been talking about before. It was the letter-bomb murder of Abraham Tiro in Gabarone, Botswana.
Mr. Tiro, self-exiled in Botswana, had formerly been the leader of one student organization, and was, at the time of his death, president of another. In a recent letter Mr. Tiro had affirmed their joint solidarity and had concluded with the enigmatic line, “No struggle can come to an end without casualties.”