Apartheid Pathos

June 16th. !976. SOWETO
Two hours before the outside world knew that over a hundred protesting school children had been gunned down and massacred by the police during a peace march, the first film rushes taken at the scene arrived in the editing rooms of the South African Broadcasting Corporation.

I happened to be passing through the Afrikaans News department when I noticed a group of reporters crowded around one of the editing tables watching the rushes. Though their bodies obscured the screen, I could still hear the sound effects recorded at the scene of the massacre. Over the speakers I could hear a car racing towards the camera position at high speed. Then came short burst of machinegun fire; followed by the squeal of tortured tires on tarmac and the heavy crash of metal slamming into a barrier. For a second or two there was silence. Then came the hoarse out-worldly cry of a young African male. “Kill me! Kill me!”

It was not the painful cry of a broken body begging for relief, or the defiant cry of a black revolutionary. It came from a beaten and broken spirit that had lost all its will to live. Within that ravaged tone I could hear and feel all the pathos of Africa’s writhing soul, trapped for generations in the twilight zone between two Ages of human evolution. It encompassed the paralysis of continent that had been rudely jerked out of the slow pace of a pastoral Bronze Age.

For two centuries and more, an entire race of eight hundred million souls had been forced to watch their sacred clan totems trampled on and defiled. They had to bear the shame of tribal customs ridiculed, see their people rounded up, chained, enslaved, beaten down, raped, frustrated, colonized, exploited and emasculated. The had been treated by their slave masters and colonizers more like beasts of burden than as members of the human family. All of this executed against them by the hardened initiates of an Iron Age culture that gave them no clear understanding of why such a mass upheaval was necessary. The gross inequities of a technologically more advanced culture against a lesser were clear. Paradoxically, neither the master, who thought of himself as fair and reasonable, nor the servant who thought the same of himself, really knew why they where behaving so unkindly towards each other.

After his final charge into the hail of police machinegun bullets that heartbroken call for death, echoing inside the editing room, was all that was left for that young man. Without knowledge of larger evolutionary purpose and the Gods apparently failing him, life had no meaning.
“Kill me! Kill me!”
I waited for the mercy shot that would end his anguish and bring oblivion to his lost soul. It never came. The terrible lament died down. In the awful silence that followed, my presence in the room was noticed for the first time.

A dozen pairs of accusatory eyes turned from the screen. Added to the emotional echo of the black man’s cry, was now the cultural antipathy of contrary colonials, forced by our own history of war and circumstance to share an unbalanced alliance in the same land. As a member of the minority English-speaking white group, there was no question of me exercising any of my broadcast authority as a producer, ordering the public exposure of that newsreel .A dozen staunch members of the Afrikaner race barred any further exposure to the news reels. Their bodies made a laager around the table. To them I was a rooinek, an interfering Engelesman, eavesdropping on a racial event of potentially devastating domestic and international consequences. It was not my business.

It did not matter that I was born and bred in South Africa just like them. Or that the Scottish side of my family had invested six generations helping to pioneer and develop the nation. As the bearer of a British surname, I was and always would be an uitlander, born and raised without a trustworthy appreciation of national values. Afrikaners were the only true patriots.

Behind those young newsmen loomed the unassailable might of the Nationalist Party Government with its two-thirds majority Parliamentary vote to determine the fate of all South Africans without reference to the hearts and minds of the other thirteen language groups that shared the land.

Democracy is a sham in a multi-lingual country with a history of ethnic dissension. In a climate where sentiment rules and rationalized argument takes second place, emotional cultural affiliations rather than logic governs the psyche of the electorate. A parliamentary majority of the largest ethnic group imposes a life sentence of political impotence on the minority language groups of every democratic country so divided. That reality had effectively quashed all opposition in South Africa since 1948. Their electoral victory in that year allowed a two million Afrikaners legal license to practice cultural totalitarianism over twenty million others. They had ruled the country with an iron hand since, for nearly two generations. The future of now thirty million souls was caught up in a representative trap that has made a mockery of the democratic revolutionary slogans that spawned it. Everything but Freedom/ Fraternity/Equality existed in South Africa’s Republic.

An internationally accepted system of human management allowed the Afrikaners to keep all the other ethnic groups locked behind political lines of demarcation from which there was no legitimate escape. It unfairly and effectively silenced the voice of one million opposing European voters who, since Roman times, had also struggled for eighty generations for freedom of expression and the ability to exercise their own free will. Republican ideology and its governing system of party politics simply works against itself in bilingual countries. English-speakers could protest against Apartheid in South Africa’s Parliament all we liked, our objections were simply out-voted and the Afrikaner policy of legalized group separation remained unchanged. The Laws of Apartheid ruled over all of us, black and white, via ethnic-division. The net result was that I was personally and culturally as helpless in the larger decisions of the country as any disenfranchised black, and could not order that damning newsreel to go on the airways.

As far as Afrikaners were concerned, their absolute rule was poetic justice. This was the way God meant it to be. It was they who had pioneered and civilized the country. They had trekked and struggled and suffered with Africa’s harsh climate, deadly diseases, wild animals and savage tribes more than all others. They had fought and won the Kaffir Wars. The treacherous massacre of Retief and his party by Dingaan’s army when the trekkers peacefully petitioned him for settler-ship in Zululand, gave them in their minds both the moral right and the military might to take the whole country by force. When the British annexed their Boer Republics, they had fought the Anglo/Boer War. Forty thousand farmers on horseback armed only with rifles, were the first to invent commando raids, guerilla tactics and trench warfare. Those new tactics confounded and bogged down a traditional British army of two hundred thousand professional soldiers equipped with heavy artillery. Though unbeaten, the Boers were eventually forced to surrendered in the field; but only after Kitchener’s “Scorched Earth” policy burnt down their farms and incarcerated their women and children in concentrations camps where they died of dysentery and typhoid by the tens of thousands in unsanitary conditions.

The Boers survived to fight again less than a decade later, at the ballot box for the independent Union of South Africa. They won back full Afrikaner control in 1948. As far as the mind-state of the twelve young men standing in front of me, they represented a victorious volk who had made an ancestral Covenant with Almighty God to settle in their promised land and to retain Afrikaner rule in South Africa for ever. From their perspective, I could not possibly understand or appreciate why the Afrikaner culture had to stand strong against the liberal English and hold back the black tide of Africa and the encroachment of the world beyond.

That history of dislike hung heavy in the atmosphere between us. Defiance was reflected in their eyes and on their faces. There was an element of shame present as well. Underlying our cultural confrontation, remained the awful and potentially explosive event on the newsreel. Political rule, ordained by God or not, could not drown out the resounding echoes of machinegun fire and the terrible pathos of a fellow human being crying out for the finality of death rather than the continuation of a hopeless life. That cry echoed beyond political debate, ethnic confrontations and racial division. It came from a broken human heart that had lost its faith in humankind. If allowed broadcast on television it would undoubtedly pierce the soul of all who heard it. There was no defense or excuse that could negate such a desolate tone. It damned the inequities of Apartheid in a manner beyond all artificial argument.

Nobody spoke a word. The was no need to. All of our shared history was present in that editing room at the fateful moment. We all knew full well that not a frame of that film would ever be made public. Such stark reality was not for public consumption. The dosen editors remained in a semi-circle barring me from the editing table; a laager of determined young Boers, hardening their hearts; protecting their volk.

The public communicator in me should have been outraged by their censorship. That lone voice crying in the streets of Soweto, pleading for death rather than life, could have reached the heart of all South Africans. It could have given all of us pause - Afrikaner, English, Bantu. Had not a single snap shot of a naked little Vietnamese girl, with her napalmed skin hanging from her body, changed the course of an international war? I knew that I could leave the room and verbally spread the news in the English Department of the SABC as well as the English Press that such emotive footage existed. But I could not find it in me to do that. I was gripped instead by a deep sense of melancholy.

The irony of the situation was that I had more ancestral rights than any present in that room to view the news footage and decide what to do with it. I had English, Afrikaner as well as Bantu blood in my veins. My paternal grandfather, a Scottish descendent of the 1820 English Settlers, had dared, in the midst of the Boer War seventy years earlier, to cross the cultural line that separated English and Afrikaner colonials, and married the grand-daughter of a Boer Voortrekker. Both sides of my family had fought against each other in the war. Some of these newsmen were undoubtedly distant cousins. A quarter of me shared the same pioneering blood that had forged an Afrikaner culture in the African veldt. On top of that, was even an older claim to the land. My maternal Grandfather was a Jew who had fled from a Russian pogram in Lithuania, and ended up in Pondoland, married to a local maid of mixed Irish and Xhosa blood.

Both my grandmothers had suffered life-times of estrangement from their relatives. No one on the Afrikaans side of her family had ever spoken to my father’s mother her after her marriage. And no one ever once mentioned my mother’s black blood. That mix of South African bloods and the conflicts it brought to the surface was too involved, too painful, too complex. I saw no point right then in revealing my more wide-ranging ancestral rights. All I felt was this depressing melancholy. I felt sad, for them: for my family; for the helpless blacks; for our country; and especially for the estrangement I felt within myself and the lack of passion I had for any of the values they were all willing to fight and die for.

I knew then, in that moment, for the first time in my life that I was a complete outsider. I was not a true South African, I did not share any of the values of any of the groups in my country. None of the Afrikaner, English or African, cultural, political or economic aspirations resonated with me. I knew exactly where all of them were coming from and what each hoped to achieve and agreed with none of it. I stood apart from the fray. I could see that all of us who were caught up in an artificial political mind-set that made human beings lose sight of our common evolutionary destiny.

Was the murderous parable of Cain and Abel an endless brotherhood tragedy? Could we all never live together as equals? Was the ejection from Eden an eternal damnation of the human spirit? Was the Christ call of love for our neighbor as an expression of our larger self never to be answered?
“Kill me! Kill me!”
How many more millions of souls had to still die in despair, with their minds and hearts torn apart by the disgrace of mans inhumanity to man?

But mostly my sadness was for these young descendants of a tiny cultural colony of lowland Dutch farmers that had been deposited thirteen generations ago in the wilderness of the southern tip of Africa, as part of a business venture by the Dutch East India Company. They were trying to hold back an evolutionary tide of human development that was infinitely larger then them. All they could see was their own small history. Their culture formed their only reality; their group consensus their only base of sanity. The world beyond and its anti-Apartheid sanctions and boycotts had to be withstood; like their Dutch forebears, the dykes keeping back the floods of the ocean had to hold strong.

But beyond all that was the greater irony of a common evolutionary thread that has been entirely lost in the world of superficial political, religious and economic arguments that has thrust the human tide back and forth across the oceans of emotion since the middle of the Bronze Age.

Not ten miles from were we stood inside that editing room, in the dark recesses of a dolomite cave at Sterkfontein, the remains of a hominid, mankind’s earliest ancestor had been discovered. Since then, science, via the examination of Mitachondrial DNA, had traced the origins of every man and woman alive on the planet, back to South Africa. Here after a million and more years of gradual migration up through central and northern Africa, across to the Middle East, then Europe and Asia and on to the Americas, experiencing development through long Ages of Stone and Bronze and Iron and Steel, was the Nuclear Age son of our original parents, a hundred thousand generations removed, returned to his Motherland.

Here, at the very same spot where he had experienced the first dim glimmerings of a separate self - where an ape-man and become a hu-man, a descendent of Adam was now vehemently disclaiming the fact that the black-skinned man who had remained in Africa, was his blood brother. This small archaic Calvinistic culture, speaking a quaint Walloon patois’, clinging to Old Testament values, was fighting against a huge evolutionary tide which, via colonialism, was affecting a mass reunification of human brotherhood - a force of Nature that would eventually and inexorably sweep over their Afrikanerdom and absorb everything they ever stood for.

At that moment, in that room, staring at my compatriots and their protection of what they believed to be best for the country, I had a sudden epiphany. I knew that thirteen generations of white power had come to an end. That all our ancestors hopes and dreams where in the process of being crushed. Like colonials elsewhere, we did not belong in South Africa, that Europe was no longer welcome in Africa itself. I did not belong. No matter how personally I might be sympathetic to the black man’s cause - I was one of the white elite - a colonial oppressor. A slaver and exploiter, seeking profit and private gain on a Black continent that no longer wanted my expertise.

Anti-colonialism - that was the essence of the pathos that I could hear in that young black voice - the frustration of a black man unable to stand tall on his own continent, knowing that the white over-lord with his superior technology would not go and that there was no way of removing him without violence. I knew then, in that moment, that I would leave Africa soon and find a more hospitable home elsewhere on the planet…

{to be continued}

The newsmen in that room knew I would want the footage of that lone blackman begging for death broadcast to the world at large. What they did not appreciate and stubbornly never would, was why I wanted transparency on such damning action. They believed that strong police action was the only language Africans understood and that they world beyond had grasp of the difficulties in Africa. To them a step out of a mud hut onto a concrete floor, no matter how stark the new might be, was step up the evolutionary ladder which black Africa, owed to the whiteman and had to be eternally grateful for. Not only Afrikaners, but white South Africans in general had no internal grasp of the depth of black consciousness. Few whites spoke a Bantu tongue. Even fewer read black literature. The cultural divide was one-sided. They lived and worked on our properties, spoke our languages reared our children; heard our conversations; listened to our music; saw our movies and television programs. They knew us intimately and we did not know them at all. We had no genuine feeling for the pathos of a third generation of African children who aspired to move out of their cramped locations, own a piece of the pie themselves and could find no way to do that short of rebellion. After a century of serfdom; laboring in the gold mines; sweeping streets; carrying shit buckets; washing clothes; scrubbing floors and nursing our children for almost no pay; blocked from economic advancement by job-reservation; forced to carry passbooks; continuously hassled by the police; all the while helping to build up South Africa’s modern infrastructure, they were now seeking a stronger form of representation in the country’s government than they had at present.

The government could not or would not accept that the urban blacks were a detribalized society of self-determined individuals who had moved away from the security of their tribal customs and deliberately sought a life in the white man’s world. They had seen the survival advantages of superior technology and wanted their children to learn how to master them. They desired to move forward in time - not be relocated back in the tribal homelands. In response, the Afrikaner psyche remained fixed on the conflicts of the past - focused on their historical fears of numbers. The black/white ratio inside the country was six to one. Another six hundred millions loomed beyond our borders, ready to pounce on any sign of weakness. Die Swart Gevaar. Keep the blackman down. “Give a kaffir a finger and he will take the whole hand”

Every white born in Africa was fully conscious of the racial divide. Very few, myself included, wanted majority rule by blacks. Most were blind to the reality that it was inevitable. I had lived and worked elsewhere in Africa and knew that the winds of change would not an could die out on the Limpopo. Africa was for Africans. I accepted that. But to me, black rule remained generations too premature. They were not ready to run highly industrialized nations. We needed to keep our focus on improving the quality of their technological education, not be politically afraid of their electoral numbers. The entire international out-cry against Apartheid was centered on the demand for democracy. The demand was naïve in the extreme. If after eighty generations of civilized development in Europe, two white cultures in South Africa could not find it within themselves to transcend their own language and custom barriers and vote along purely ideological lines, how in the world where thirteen inimical tribal cultures in South Africa supposed to accomplish that feat? The international demand for democratic rule throughout tribal Africa was so utterly pseudo-intellectually out of touch with reality it made me question whether there was anyone outside of Africa left with any base of common sense.

The practical reality that had to be faced on the ground was that the vast majority of blacks inside South Africa were still only semi-educated. Only a primary school education was compulsory. This was not a deliberate educational policy of racial subjugation. The general education level of the country was poor for both races. There was simply not enough teachers and classroom in the country to do more than what was already being done. White students were crowded forty or more to the classroom. Most entered the trades at age sixteen. Less then 10% of them made it to university. As it stood, the industrial know-how of less then four million Europeans was not only educating the primary education of thirty million blacks, it also formed the bread-basket for a hundred million Africans surrounding South Africa’s borders. A collapse of the white government had enormous ramifications, all of them potentially disastrous.

I was one of the few English-speakers to realize that the Apartheid master plan of creating thirteen separate self-governing Bantustans within the traditional tribal homelands was the only logical social and spiritual developmental policy to pursue. Leap-froging from a Bronze Age of agricultural traditions and tribal lore into a sophisticated Steel Age of high technology, without experiencing an Iron Age of basic industrial craftsmanship and orthodox religious observances, would leave a black-ruled nation in a confused evolutionary time warp. One simply cannot go from primary school to university. This hard fact of life was already apparent in the chaos of the rest of black-ruled post-colonial Africa. If, say, something as simple as a windowpane gets broken in the middle of Africa today, it cannot be replaced without an import from Europe six thousand miles away. The entire infrastructures of post-colonial Africa is on its last legs and nobody is repairing it. In 1976 the genocide in Ruanda, the Congo, Sudan, Somalia and Dafar had yet to erupt. But the signs of Africa’s post-colonial degeneration into her own medieval Dark Age were already clearly apparent.

The whole notion of Uhuru in Africa was a pseudo-intellectual pipe dream smoked up by lawyers with no practical training in civil management and as such was clearly premature. The European powers who abandoned their colonies in Africa, did so mainly because of the immense drain of maintaining existing infrastructures. Their Imperial ambitions in Africa had turned out to be a net loss, state burdens that they were only too happy to relinquish. For the new leaders of black Africa, the governing reality was that none of them - to a man - were equipped to realize and come to grips with, was that at least a generation or two of conscientious craftsmanship was needed throughout the continent in order to establish a large enough base of technical training able to manage and maintain industrialized infrastructures. This same fact of live was relevant in South Africa, the most advanced of all the colonial nations on the continent. That same anti-colonial notion that the thirteen dispirit tribal groups in South Africa could govern the country democratically and run its nuclear powered national infrastructure as efficiently as the whites was patently preposterous

The major problem facing the creation of viable self-governing Bantustans inside South Africa was in finding ways and means to create sustainable economic systems in each of them. Without the ability to gainfully employ their own populations and train them to bridge the transition period until they were capable of running the machinery of an industrialized nation, the Bantustan program was untenable. To this end, the Apartheid master plan encouraged, via tax incentives, for large international corporations like General Motors and Ford to establish their manufacturing plants on the borders of the Bantustans. This economic stimulus may well have worked if the rest of the investing world had joined in to support it. But the pseudo-intellectual cries of the anti-Apartheid movement drowned out and quashed the practical applications of the Bantustan master plan. Nelson Mandella remained the revolutionary hero locked up in prison and the Apartheid government the evil Empire.

In any event, the Bantustan policy did nothing to address the growing problem of three generations of detribalized people crammed into the urban locations and ghettos that surrounded every town and city in the country. The reality the government could not face and did not know how to deal with, other than mass relocation, was that some six million of South Africa’s black population were no longer culturally connected to or interested in being sent back to their tribal lands. The urban blacks and the generations of sophisticated cultural reorientation that they had undergone needed to hear and experience their own voice travel beyond the jazz of location music and protest slogans. Exactly how far and how loud their political voice could be heard, needed to be urgently negotiated. The growing pressure of millions of school graduates seeking something more than just sweating in the mines, sweeping the streets and washing colonial clothes had to be met with a realistic policy of gradated economic and political advancement. Persecuting and jailing their leaders and enforcing petty Apartheid laws only emphasized and exacerbated the emotions of racial discrimination.

On the other hand the arguments of their black leaders like Nelson Mandella, trained to be lawyers and not civil engineers, crying against injustice were one-sided in the extreme. Zero credit was being given to the advances in black consciousness already achieved and how difficult it had been to do so. As far as I was concerned the resentment against white privileges needed to be addressed more holistically and nobody was doing that effectively. Blacks and the anti-apartheid movement in general needed to be reminded that Europeans had served for eighty long generations as unpaid serfs and minions in Europe, living in hovels beneath the castle-walls of our overlords. They had sweated blood and tears and suffered torture on the rack for our privileged position. No pain, no gain. All cultures and races had to serve a degree of allotted time. Certainly not for another two thousand years like Europe did, but at least one or two more generations.

To me the conflict between the races was a matter of semantics. If, instead, the current attitude of master/servant, could be changed to a mutual dialogue between teacher/student, that more realistic approach would encourage a kinder, more enlightened domestic atmosphere. Pressure would be relieved if every black child believed in a future of graduated advance, of hope and promise - not one of stagnancy, of perpetual servitude, of military confrontation and hopeless pleas for on honorable death rather than a disgraceful life. This mass change had to be initiated in improved technical educational and job opportunities, not at the polls. Freedom to vote, without the skill to be gainfully employed was a Christmas wrapping without a present inside.

As a television producer directly involved with modern mass communication, I believed that only through transparency, admission of mistakes on both sides, could we achieve racial understanding, prolong benevolent white administration and make South Africa strong for all its people. But I also knew that all of my hopes were seen by others as too naïve - too idealistic, that given the opportunity, black power leaders would not wait another generation - that it could and would be even more ruthless, more savage than white power. The political chaos and acts of genocide in rest of independent Africa bore witness to that. With the fall of colonial rule, as with the fall of Rome, Africa was entering her own Dark Ages and would remain there for centuries.

The weight of all I have mentioned above, bore down on all of the public communicators caught in the time-warp inside that editing room. There was no question that they would suppress the news. There was nothing I could do about it. I knew then that would leave Africa soon and find a more hospitable home elsewhere on the planet. But I wanted confirmation that I was doing the right thing. I needed to know exactly what had happened in Soweto that morning. I owed that young black man, begging hopelessly for death, at least that.

I left the editing room, went down to my car and drove six miles out of town to the giant location. I had a fully loaded 16mm movie camera lying on the seat beside me. I wanted to investigate and report on what had happened for myself. The road out to the location was strangely deserted. I had been going into Soweto every morning for the past three months, documenting urban shamanism. Over a thousand witchdoctors, mostly women, still found enough customers in the shadow of the giant Baragwanath hospital, to practice the ancient Bronze Age art of psychic healing.

The focus of the documentary was; who in black society became a witchdoctor? What made anyone decide to become one? How were they trained? Via public television I hoped to dispel among white South African viewers the prevalent superstition, fostered initially by the Christian Church, that witchcraft was the Devil’s work. During the months spent documenting the forty shamans (sangomas) who participated in the program. I could not help but be impressed, not only by the uncanny nature of their psychic powers, but also by their down-to-earth grasp of basic human psychology. Instead of just mystical hocus-pocus, I found myself among forty of the most intelligent and analytically insightful Africans I had ever met. The finished documentary revealed to some extent the subtle nature of the spiritual empathy that exists between psychic healers and their patients. I saw that African witchdoctors were duplicates of the ancient alchemists of Europe, the forerunners of modern science. The spiritual message I got was that the true art of human kindness is to empathize so deeply with the spirit of another pilgrim in life, as to actually feel the pains of fellow human being. It made me realize that if sensitive mediums were able. with a little training, to care enough to feel the pain of another and could reach out a healing hand, mankind in general had the capacity for the same degree of empathy and compassion. Potentially we had the internal power to heal our nations of all our ailments.

During the final days of filming one of the female shamans I was working with warned me that she sensed danger ahead and that I should stay out of Soweto. A few days later, Credo Mutwa, a Zulu witchdoctor made famous by the well-received publication of a book on African mythology: Indaba My Children had told me that he had a dream about blood flowing in the streets. In genuine distress he had naively asked me to warn the government that some awful disaster lay ahead.

In the weeks after, while editing the film inside the huge broadcasting complex, knowing that I had the power to talk to the whole nation, I wrestled with his plea. How was I to transmit psychic premonitions through a modern news medium and get a white audience who viewed African superstitions with general disgust, to take the warnings seriously? Without denigrating my source, I cautiously tried to warn top administration officials within the SABC that I had been given information about violence brewing in Soweto. My reluctance to provide the source of my information was taken the wrong way.

A previous documentary of mine, which featured the early life of Mohandes Ghandi in South Africa and his fight against race discrimination, had included anti-Apartheid interviews with Dr Alan Paton and Professor Fatima Meer. It had been banned from public broadcast. This, among other attempts of mine to bring black consciousness to the fore, had placed me on the lists of BOSS, the Bureau of State Security, as a potential anti-Apartheid activist. So my warning that something was brewing inside Soweto was interpreted that I had some form of contact with the banned ANC movement and had inside information on an up-coming subversive demonstration. When I eventually confessed that my source was the intuition of witchdoctors, one can imagine the derisive response.

I had learned to take the premonitions of the shamans seriously. So I took a different tack. I held meetings with my fellow producers in the English documentary department, arguing that our programs should concentrate on the variety of unnecessary hardships blacks were experiencing inside Soweto. I pointed out that any genuine act of concern shown by the whites, especially if broadcast nation-wide, would go a long way towards ameliorating the growing sense of resentment inside the townships. Violent demonstrations in one form or another could be avoided if we worked together to appeal to public sympathy. My colleague’s response was disheartening. That were convinced that I as over-reacting. They did not feel that even if they wanted to, a mass change of race relations in the country was not at all possible. The under-lying reality was that the government controlled the SABC and they did not want their careers jeopardized as black sympathizers. These thoughts were in my mind as I drove out of town to investigate for myself and find out why and how Credo’s dream had come true.

There was a heavily armed police road block at the entrance into Soweto. The police were backed by army troops. They would not let me through. So I drove around the perimeter of the vast location, looking for another way in. It took me a while to realized that there was only one road leading in and out of that vast township. One throughway for a population of over one million! The strategic reason was now obvious. When the government bulldozed down Sophiatown the vast unsanitary shanty town that once crowded Johannesburg’s city center, and built the huge location of Soweto (an acronym for South Western Area Township) six miles further out of Johannesburg, and then and relocated a million black workers inside it. they had made sure that any future mass unrest within it could be fully contained. With the road block in place, no one but the police could get in or out.

After an hour of circling the location and finding no other road in, I was about to turn around and go back to the station, when a young African man stepped out of some bushes on the road-side and waved me down. He was in obvious distress. Tears streamed down his face. I pulled over and picked him up, hoping for information. At that time I still had no idea that several hundred children had just been massacred. The man beside me smelled of kaffir beer. He continued for some time to sob beside me. Finally he spoke: “I left her there! My girl-friend! She was facing the police guns! She was brave. She would not leave! Children were dying right in front of me. I was frightened, so I ran!” We rode on in silence. After a while he stopped crying and spoke soberly. “You know Baas, Dingaan made a big mistake.” His historical observation should not have surprised me. Africans in general have a vast oral tradition of their history and tribal lore. Most knew the names of tribal chiefs going back ten to fifteen generations. Dingaan, who had assassinated his step brother Shaka, the founder of the Zulu nation, was paramount chief in 1830’s. He had invited seventy Boer pioneers seeking his permission to settle in Zululand, for a conference at his palace. The Boer leaders had entered his compound unarmed. At a signal from Dingaan, they were surrounded and butchered. A Zulu impi of five thousand warriors was dispatched to kill the four hundred voortrekkers waiting to hear if their petition had been granted. Luckily they were warned in time by the daughter of missionary and managed to defeat Zulu regiment. The Battle of Blood River that followed was a turning pint in Black/white relations. The Afrikaners decided that the whole country had to be taken over and held by force. It was that single act of Dingaan’s treachery, determining the future course of black/white relations a century and a half earlier, that the young man beside me had put his finger on.

I sighed. There was nothing more to be said, by him or me. I gave him some money and let him off in Randsburg.

There was no way of suppressing the news of the massacre. Four hundred school children staging a peaceful protest march for their right to be taught in English rather than Afrikaans, had been ruthlessly gunned down by the police. The entire world was out-raged and the anti-Apartheid pressures of boycotts and sanctions against South Africa was tightened. I was left with three options. Do nothing, like the rest of my English-speaking compatriots. Keep having my work banned and possibly end up under house-arrest. Or leave the country and find a more welcome home some where else in the world. It was clear to me that Apartheid would eventually collapse and the country go under black rule. To me that was the worse of two evils. Much as it outraged the basic human right to a fair political system of government, white rule remained the only viable economic rationale. It was only a matter of time before thirteen generations of pioneering effort came to an end. I could do nothing about stopping it. Three months latter I sold my house and car, packed up, bought a round the world air ticket, and left the land of my birth for good.

My maternal grandfather was a Jew. My first stop would be Israel. I had some claim there. Maybe they would give me sanctuary. I had no idea that I would be stepping out of an Apartheid frying pan into an Apartheid fire.

To be continued…