Out of the Darkness (Part 1)

By Donald Knowler

Part 1 of Don Knowler’s memory of South Africa’s turbulent road to nationhood …

Tomorrow, Friday (June 16) marks the 30th anniversary of the Soweto Uprising, a bloody event that signalled the beginning of the end of apartheid minority-rule in South Africa. Donald Knowler, who covered the riots as a young reporter for The Star in Joahnnesburg, recalls a journey he took through the African townships after the smoke had cleared, a journey that convinced him he must leave the country he had grown to love.

AT around 5pm every Friday the Soweto kids lined the railway tracks at Kliptown. They gathered to see the dance of the staffriders which, for the kids of Soweto, was the greatest show on earth. The experienced, seasoned kwelastaff and the teenagers doing the dancing for the first time steeled themselves for a test of wits and daring at Orlando station, towards Johannesburg. They climbed out of the windows of the commuter trains and hauled themselves onto the roof. The riders pitched and swayed with the motion of the train, leaping over electric wires, snaking bodies under low bridges and signal gantries. The kids at the trackside strained their eyes to see the 4.40 local from Johannesburg approaching through a jungle of pylons and electric wires, rusted fencing and rows of matchbox houses whose perspective was lost in a mist of smoke.

The ground rumbled and the flashing train was soon upon the kids and the dancers were dancing on cue; waving their arms and trying to shout and sing above the roar of metal on metal, swirling dust and fluttering pieces of paper. All the time the riders fixed their eyes on looming cross-wires carrying 3000 volts of electricity and, as they jumped, their eyes darted to the next wire strand. First time out a rider could die – electrocuted or swept under the wheels of the train, but the show always went on, every Friday, every pay day.

Worlds apart at the Johannesburg Railway Station

An African boy of about nine, a white-teeth grin flashing across his face and a silver miner’s helmet on his head, darted across the main concourse of the Johannesburg railway station. The miner’s helmet was an old-style one, placed in the evolution of mining hats between an English bowler of compressed leather used in the gold rush days and the plastic, peaked hats the gold miners now wore, white for the mine manager and assorted bosses, yellow for those further down the chain of command.

The boy’s hat had a wide ridge down its centre and indentations fanning out to its brim and the boy wore it proudly as he rushed across the concourse of the station, past Angela’s homemade pie shop, the Christian bookshop and a giant cut-out of a South African white boy-soldier with a caption reading, “Sleep peacefully”.

The Johannesburg station was a modern one, built in the area of the plastic miner’s hat and its “white only” concourse was topped by a high copper-lined roof that held sound momentarily and then threw it back in an echo, so when the boy’s hat lifted from his head and fell to the ground, its loud ringing clatter ricocheted around the station, causing passengers to look about them urgently, nervously. The hat was into its third bounce before the boy could slide to a halt and grab it.

“Hey, get out of here, voetsak,” shouted the railway policeman and, without looking back, the boy ran for the nearest exit, to platform four. He cleared the steps in giant leaps, four at a time, and he headed towards the far end of the platform where another flight of steps led to a second, “blacks only” concourse of the biggest and most important station on the South African railway system.

Standing in a queue at the booking office for suburban services, I waited impatiently to buy a three rand ticket for the 4.40 local to Vereeniging, a small town to the south of Johannesburg. My backpack was at my feet and I wanted to get at my notebook, to record the boy and his hat, because on this journey I would record everything as I had not done before going through the South African black townships, to try to make sense of it all.

The official rush hour from five to six had not started yet but the station was crowded and by the time I bought my ticket I had only a few minutes to make the train. This I found on Platform 4 and I followed the route the boy had taken, trying to memorise the details of the helmet, speculating where the boy had found it – probably digging in the mine dumps someplace, the dumps of yellow sand that ran in a dividing line between the white and back areas of Johannesburg.

At the foot of the steps a woman was complaining to a ticket inspector that the black portion of the train had pulled level with the white platform steps, requiring her to walk the equivalent of five carriages to the white or “first class” section. It was hot down there in the stale underworld of the station and the woman, a giant Afrikaner vrou weighing maybe 100 kg, sweated profusely under a heavy woollen dress.

“Jammer”, said the ticket inspector, apologising in Afrikaans, as he explained the railways always had trouble with the Vereeniging local because it travelled through the black townships south of Johannesburg and there was more demand by black people for seats.

“Jammer, but got to get the whole train in the platform, my vrou. Can’t have half the train sticking out of the end of the stasie.” The woman was not listening. She had started to waddle to the three cars reserved for whites at the head of the train. The platform, like the station concourse, was packed, but here was a mingling of black and white passengers, the pressure of the evening rush hour breaking down the strict rules of segregation in the bowerls of the Johannesburg railway station.

It was controlled bedlam down there at track level. No sooner had a train pulled away, platform bells ringing and wheel-flanges screaming as the trains veered into the curves at the end of the platforms, than another train screeched in to take its place. Every minute trains were coming and going – to Germiston and Springs and Benoni to the east; Krugersdorp, Randfontein, Westonaria to the west. Most destinations were named after rugged, rock and thorn-tree littered farms that became gold mines, that became gold rush towns and then suburbia.

I moved ahead of the weighty woman, who was resting against a concrete pillar, and made for the front carriage where there were seats empty, taking a corner position by a window and hoping the woman would not sit next to me. Across from my seat, searching for a book in a shoulder bag, sat a girl of maybe 18 years, face flushed from the heat. When she found her book she fanned her face with it and smiled when she saw me looking at her.

“It’s the drought,” I said, “that’s why it’s so hot in the autumn,” and the girl smiled shyly and nodded to say she knew all about the drought because, next to township violence and what was loosely called the “situation”, the lack of rain had been the biggest topic of conversation for four years.

Suddenly there was a commotion in the carriage. The weighty woman burst through the sliding doors to find all the seats taken. “Ag sis,” she said, glancing about her. The males at the end of the carriage started to shuffle uneasily and look about them to determine who would be the gentleman and rise to give her his seat. Two men, on a seat designed for three, pushed close together and the woman made room for herself by wobbling her backside.

“Ag sis,” she repeated, addressing the girl sitting across from me a little further down the carriage. “And this is what we pays our fare for.”

I looked at my watch. It was 4.50 and the train should have left 10 minutes previously. The girl smiled, and I gathered the Vereeniging local always ran late. Finally, the platform bell rang and with a sudden jolt and a whine of electric motors, the Vereeniging train was on its way, gathering speed. It burst out of the station and the late afternoon sunlight stabbed through the windows, a sun that also etched deep shadows into the monotonous facades of countless skyscrapers crowding the city centre and the tracks.

It was a journey of memories of sorts, a brief trip through the townships and out into the platteland to determine whether South Africa should remain my home, or should I travel on, even possibly returning to my native Britain to build a career there.

I had come to South Africa 10 years previously on what I thought at the time would be a working holiday, primarily to see the country’s magnificent wildlife.

I had managed to obtain a reporter’s job on the biggest South African newspaper, The Star in Johannesburg, which catered largely for the more liberal English-speaking population of the Transvaal and opposed the government’s strict policy of segregation, or to give it its Afrikaans name, apartheid.

The train had merely travelled about 500 metres into the darkness of the Queen Elizabeth Bridge spanning its tracks.

In the semi-darkness under the bridge my first recollection of all those years spent in South Africa leapt out at me, like the blast of hot air forced into the carriage from the confined space between the tracks.

Singing in the face of violence

It was a sunny winter’s afternoon in June 1976 — late afternoon when the commuter trains were beginning to run with greater frequency to the outlying suburbs. I was running up Saucer Street which crosses the Queen Elizabeth Bridge. The Soweto uprising was at its height and The Star had received a tip-off that white students from the University of the Witwatersrand were marching on the central city, to the police headquarters at John Vorster Square, in support of the people of Soweto.

When I reached the bridge the police had formed a line across the road, and more were arriving by the truckload. One hundred metres up a rise into Braamfontein, on the other side of the tracks, the university students were marching, hundreds of them. As they moved onto the bridge, you could hear the singing, and in front of the kids were a number of Africans, dancing and waving, with more joining in off the pavement. The students came on, and I moved behind a police barrier. I had covered riots before and I knew how easy it was for a policeman with a truncheon to hit the first person who came into sight.

The marchers came on, and somewhere on the bridge in the late afternoon sun with the trains rumbling below on their way to the suburbs and townships, the students’ nerve gave out on seeing the lines of policemen with truncheons drawn, and side arms unzipped in holsters.

First the black dancers and chanters in front slowed and dropped away, and then the students slowed, just slightly, and the policemen smelt the students’ fear. A sergeant shouted “Charge” and the line of police rushed forward. The students at the front of the march turned to run. Other marchers still pushing forward from behind, who had not seen the police with truncheons drawn, collided with them, and in seconds the police were wading into the crowd. A young woman, wearing a thick white jumper to ward off the winter chill in the air, did not try to run. She stood her ground, ignoring the melee of students falling behind her, and a big cop cracked her above her left eye with his truncheon, before the student could even raise her hands to protect herself. The student just stood there in disbelief, without rasing a hand to a gaping wound; she stood there in disbelief as rich and crimson blood gushed from her forehead, splashed on her cheek and percolated through the soft wool of her white jumper.

Beatings by the trackside

The weighty woman on the 4.40 pm to Vereeniging was asleep, just three minutes into the journey. She had a silly, contented grin on her face, and a grunt and an occasional snore rippled through her double chin. The girl across from me looked away, embarrassed, for this was the girl’s mother and it was apparent the teenager wanted to distance herself from the vrou after a shopping trip to town. The men sitting on the same seat as the woman glanced at each other painfully, hoping the snoring would not grow so loud to warrant one of them giving the woman a kick.

There was sunlight again, as the bridge slipped behind us and its grassy embankment spilled into a railway yard. Down this embankment some of the retreating Wits students had clambered to escape the police. They had run across the line, dodging the commuter trains, and railway workers had grabbed them, beaten them up between the comings and goings of the trains and then handed them over to the police for a further beating.

The sleeping woman gave out another grunt, and the teenage girl smiled and spoke for the first time without me first starting the conversation.

“She’s always like this, every time we travel,” the girl said.

“I’ve never seen you on the train before,” she went on, explaining that she and her mother went to town each month shopping and always caught the same train home.

“No,” I replied, thinking of how I would explain my reason for catching the Vereeniging local. Who would travel such a train except to commute to work?

“You have friends in Vereeniging, then?” asked the girl, plucking up courage to speak some more.

A bomb in the post

My final position on The Star had been that of roving correspondent in neighbouring black African states, to which I had been appointed on returning from New York where I had covered the United Nations for the newspaper.

Soweto was not now on my beat, unlike when I had first arrived in South Africa, and there was no journalistic reason to be travelling the 4.40 to Vereeniging. But I had told of my plans to view the township when I had been in the newspaper’s watering hole the previous evening, and the news editor of The Star had asked a favour. On the evening of my trip a strike by African workers was planned for Johannesburg, the first full-scale protest over apartheid by organised labour, and the news editor was recruiting reporters to travel commuter trains travelling through Soweto to gauge how many workers had joined the strike, empty black sections of trains indicating there had been an effective stay-away. He asked me to be part of the team for the night, and I agreed and said I would come into the office to file a report on my return.

The government was determined to put its own spin on the strike, selling the message that the black people of Johannesburg were not supporting it, and it was important to get an independent assessment of how many people actually had taken part.

By that time it had become too dangerous of white people to enter Soweto and The Star’s black reporters would be too thin on the ground to cover the whole vast area of Soweto to provide an accurate picture. The only way to do that was to ride the trains that dissected the township.

I didn’t want to tell the girl about the assignment, she might tell her mother and the mother might consider me a spy and alert the security police who no doubt would also be monitoring the townships.

The motive for travelling this particular train was innocent enough but I didn’t want the attentions of the security police all the same, and possibly be taken to some distant police station to have to explain my motives for travel.

My contact with the security police, in fact, had been minimal in all the years I had worked in South Africa, the agents of the Bureau of State Security, or Boss as the security service was called, generally leaving journalists alone, unless they had obvious contact with those considered subversive. The closest I came to the security police was when one giant of a man visited the newsroom of The Star to arrest a journalist who had interviewed the late black nationalist leader Robert Sobukwe.

Sobukwe was under a banning order and could not be quoted in South Africa but the journalist had intended to send a report of the interview to the Observer newspaper in London.

Boss, though, knew who I was and everyone else who worked at The Star. We all knew there was a Boss spy among us but we never speculated on it. We might have had our suspicions but never pointed a finger, because to do so would merely play into the hands of the government, who wanted to destabilise any united front against apartheid, in a newspaper or outside.

I had also had a dear friend murdered by Boss agents. A prominent activist, Jeanette Curtis, had gone into exile in Angola with her husband and two children. One day a parcel had arrived containing a bomb and Jeanette Curtis and one of her children were blown to pieces.

Gateway to the past

“To be honest with you, I’ve heard about the staffriders who ride the trains and I wanted to see them,” I finally said to the teenage girl on the train.

“Oh they’re mad,” said the girl matter-of-factly, “One day one fell off and the train had to be stopped and we were delayed hours. My mum was cross.”

The first stop going south-west of Johannesbug was the busy suburban station of Braamfontein which, together with serving a cluster of office blocks close to the city centre, was also the gateway to a wonderful area of Johannesburg that still embodied its gold-rush past. The twin inner city locations of Vrededorp and Pageview were until shortly before my trip a patchwork of ethnic neighbourhoods — poor white, Indian, Chinese and Coloured mixed-race people living in close proximity rare for South Africa. The Indian neighbourhood, spanning both Pageview and Vrededorp, predominated. The streets resembled something from Bombay or Calcutta, cluttered with clothing stalls, the scent of species wafting over the railway station.

In the mid-seventies the South African government finally got around to moving the Indians. Both Pageview and Vrededorp were designated white areas and any family not of European classification had to move. A multi-million dollar shopping complex called the Oriental Plaza was built nearby for the Indians to continue trading — they were an important component of the Johannesburg economy — but the Indians were not allowed to live near there, only to rent shops and commute to and from areas set aside for Indians way out of the city.

The Indians protested, went to court, lay in front of bulldozers, but homes were razed and the Indian and Coloured populations smoked out. The Chinese fared better. Although carrying the “Asian” classification like Indians, they were largely able to go to ground in white areas because they could not be separated by appearance from the Japanese businessmen and their families increasingly visiting and staying in the country. The Japanese, with growing business ties to South Africa, had the status of “honorary white” and the Chinese could trade on this, slipping into wwhite areas with the Japanese, so long as the neighbours did not object.

Clear of Braamfontein station, I could see the neat rows of plaster-walled housing that had risen in place of little Bombay and Calcutta. These homes had been set aside for poor Akrikaner families, the backbone of support for the government.

We passed Langlaagte, and the train lurched from the main line that ran north to Mafekeng and Zimbabwe, turning due south and heading towards Soweto. It was here that gold was first discovered on the Witwatersrand – the 80 kilometre ridge on which Johannesburg and its neighbouring towns are built — and an old rock crushing plant stood as a silent monument to the days when the Johannesburg area had 20 operating mines. Now there were none in Johannesburg itself. The reef was exhausted and there were only relics: the occasional bar with a name like The Digger’s Arms or the Main Reef; spoked mine head-gear wheels, stopped and rusting; cross-stays and rivets peeling paint; the giant sand dumps, dusty in the rainless winter, menacing the city from the south.

Despite the gold running out in the city itself, all the mining houses were still located in Johannesburg, as were engineering and equipment firms supplying the paraphernalia of mining, the shovels and picks and cables and helmets. The glass towers of the mining firms’ headquarters, rising more splendid and higher than office blocks in any other South African city, said this was the country’s heart and that it was mining that made the heart beat. Not just mining for gold, but for diamonds and platinum and titanium and uranium, copper, manganese and chrome, and the “black gold” at that time — the new money-spinner of exported coal for the steel mills of Japan, Taiwan and West Germany. The mining men had a saying: “When God gave out the riches under the earth’s surface, South Africa stood at the head of the queue.”

A glimpse of the Johannesburg skyline, now 15 kilometres distant, revealed its tallest buildings, two slim communications towers, perched on the high ridge that ran parallel to the mine dumps. One of the towers overlooked a hilltop neighbourhood called Hillbrow, then Johannesburg’s avant-garde and trendy district, its Greenwich Village or Chelsea. Young dreamers attracted by the glitter of the gold city came to this area of high-rise apartment blocks with their low-rent studios and one-bedroom apartments. They found crime and fast-food restaurants that stayed open all night, street musicians and a suicide rate higher than anywhere else in Africa. In Hillbrow, a debate was raging, a debate which made me despair about whether South Africa was really changing, beyond the superficial changes that I suspected were mainly designed for overseas consumption. Young Coloured people had been moving into Hillbrow, attracted by the low rents and an apparent easing of attitudes toward the minority black group that largely identified with Afrikaans culture and carried Afrikaans names. The government was concerned about this mixing of the races, especially as it occurred in a place considered a den of iniquity by deeply religious, Calvinist Afrikaners. Suddenly money had been made available to ease the Coloured housing shortage by financing the construction of blocks of apartments in a Coloured area out of town. And 5000 Coloured youngsters living in Hillbrow were awaiting the order to move.

Johannesburg, when I lived there for periods in the 1970s and early 1980s, still considered itself a young city, not yet 100 years of age. It had an air of transience, an impermanence that even the glassy office towers, the fake majesty of the Johannesburg railway station, and the two communications towers which, on a clear day, could be seen for 40 kilometres in all directions, could not dispel. Early on summer mornings, when dew-mist rose from the veld, the whole city vanished and driving on the elevated M1 motorway from the wealthy white suburbs in the north, you could believe for a second Johannesburg was a mirage, always there in silhoette but never coming closer so it could be touched.

When I worked as a reporter on The Star I had interviewed the last two Bushmen — the oldest of all Africa’s peoples — living in the Transvaal and from that time I had been fascinated by the history of man’s development in the African sub-continent and the great migrations of humankind that had occurred there. The bushmen, introducing their tongue-clicking sounds to the Zulu and Xhosa languages, had long gone but representatives of the next wave of human migration from the north, the Sotho peoples, remained and in parts of the Transvaal they still drove cattle across the plains in search of water, as they had done for millennia before the arrival of the first Europeans from Holland, the descendants of the Afrikaner. If the Africans thought the face of the dry highveld had been changed by the arrival of the Akrikaners, who shot the wild animals and cleared the native vegetation to create gazing land for sheep and cattle, the indigenous Sotho and the Afrikaners themselves could not have foreseen the changes the mining men would bring.

White fortune-seekers from every continent arrived, with their Chinese and Indian coolies. When the Chinese and Indians moved on to better things — trading store ownership and other small businesses – Africans from all over southern Africa were imported to provide the labour. The status of these black people as migrant labourers — a status that persisted when I lived in Johannesburg, even for people born of parents living in Soweto who never worked in the mines — gave Johannesburg its modern-day sense of impermanence.

Covered police trucks, with wire mesh on the windows, prowled the streets of the white suburbs in a hunt for “illegals”, people without a stamp in their passbooks that gave them permission to work in the city. People without the pass, obtained by showing proof of employment, were shipped out of the South African cities to “native” areas that corresponded with the tribe they were from.

The “dompass” and the yellow-painted trucks, with black policemen riding on a tailboard specially designed so they could jump off and surprise miscreants; these perpetuated the air of impermanence.

Then there were the people who forever appeared to be carrying suitcases, the women balancing them on their heads in what I used to call the “city of the suitcase”, the city of impermanence. When I lived in Johannesburg there were just over a third of a million white people resident in the Johannesburg urban area. Most of them criticised the city and said that they were there only because the professions were there, and big business was there; to make a successful career in South Africa, of any kind, you had to go to Johannesburg. Most Johannesburg people dreamed of making it rich and getting out — retiring prosperous to the coast, or to a game farm, or to a trout hatchery in the Drakensburg mountains in the east. No one said they wanted to retire in Johannesburg. A city with people reluctant to retire in it was a city without permanence.

Soweto, the shadow city of Johannesburg, had an official population of 800,000 but the unofficial figure was probably twice that number because no one could reliably count the Tswana, the Zulus, the Sotho and the Xhosas, the Vendas and the Shangaans, who had come to “Egoli”, the city of gold. The Ndebeles from Zimbabwe, one of the countless tribes from beyond South Africa’s borders to seek work in Johannesburg, called the city on the hill “Bambazonke” (“grab everything”), and the Sothos, who every summer had driven cattle across the ridge in search of fresh grazing , had another name for Johannesburg. They called it “Haye”, or home.

My last glimpse of the city as I travelled south was of a mine dump, sliced through on one side because even the mine dumps were on the move. They were being fed through the gold extraction process once more, now that more sophisticated methods of extraction could remove any last trace of gold missed the first time around. The mining men were picking the earth to the bone, like vultures, and the sand was being pumped way out of town to form another dump somewhere else. You did not have a carry a pass, or be a victim of the Group Areas Act like the Indian and Coloured people of Pageview, to sense the restlessness, the impermanence, although the people with the passes were the most impermanent of all.

The train picked up speed en route to Soweto, the pylons supporting the electric overhead wires flashing by, making a whirring, rhythmic sound though the open window of the carriage. A breeze tossed and ruffled the fair hair of the teenager sitting across from me. The girl wore a white polyester dress, which hung by two thin straps from the shoulders that had been covered and protected from the sun all summer, the dress dropping well below the knee. The train lurched and shuddered as the brakes were applied for Orlando, the first stop in Soweto. Now the tracks were lined by tiny houses, and wisps of black coal-smoke rose from every chimney because electricity had not yet come to much of Soweto. Specks of soot landed on the girl’s dress and she brushed them off irritably, without looking through the window for their source. The lazy end-of-day chatter, the casual look out of the window, had ended for the passengers at my end of the carriage. They now buried their heads in books and newspapers, and I suspected no one wanted to look out the window at Soweto, and no one wanted to see. It frightened some people, but most merely pretended that it did not exist. It was out of sight, out of mind. A glance out of the window would reveal its poverty and misery and hopelessness, and its rage.

Soweto at the time of the uprising was one of the most frightening places on earth. It certainly had the world’s highest crime rate, with about 20 murders each weekend, more in a week than “white” Johannesburg might get in a year. Police were understaffed in the sprawling township and people generally relied on protection from ethnic gangs, the tsotsis, in the same way as the Mafia controls the streets of ethnic Italian neighbourhoods in American cities.

Anyone would tell you, white or black, that in Soweto the seeds were being sown for a violent future for South Africa. Because parents were forced to live apart – the wives often working as domestic servants in the white suburbs where they stayed in servants’ quarters with their children — husbands were free to go from shabeen to shabeen at night, to gamble, to frequent brothels. Without a father figure, many children who remained in the townships with grandparents ran wild, skipping school and ultimately joining young gangs of thieves, leg-men for drug-running tsotsis and tsotsis in the making.

A bureaucrat thought up Soweto. It did not grow naturally like most other human settlements, around a river or a port or a railhead or even a mine. It appeared to the eye as if it was laid out one night, drawn across the veld by a draughtsman; straight lines if brick and tar, cross-lines of red-dust paths.

Soweto, in fact, comprised a series of townships built a safe distance from Johannesburg, to hold a reservoir of labour for the mines and other industry. Even the name had a bureaucrat’s ring about it. Soweto is an acronym for South Western Townships. It should have been named Dust Town, because red dust, and the soot, permeated everything. The motor cars, taxis and buses that took people into “white” Johannesburg each day had a red hue to them in winter, a maroon coating of mud when the rains came at the start of summer.

South of Orlando station the soil was black, a coal black where thousands of tons of the black gold was kept, the black gold that provided heat for cooking and heat for the body. The black earth signalled the start of the staffriders’ dance, a ritual performed along about eight kilomotres of track to Kliptown, the next station down the line.

I wanted to see the staffriders’ dance again. A decade previously a friend had brought me to the trackside to witness a phenomenon that belonged to Soweto and nowhere else, but I didn’t fully appreciate it then — I was distracted by Soweto itself. Now I wanted to witness the dance again, to make sense of it all.

Just out of Orlando, where the earth was jet black and coal trucks flashed by, I poked my head out of the window to obtain a clear view of the tail end of the train. The line was straight and I would need curves to get a good view of the roof from my sitting position, so I stood, pushing my torso out into the rushing air. I could see the teenage girl, pretending to look at her book, looking at me.

The lower train, where nine carriages made up the black section, was crowded — so packed that passengers were wedged between the carriages themselves, some hanging from the sides of the train. A glint of silver caught my eye, and I noticed the boy from the Johannesburg railway station, the boy wearing the miner’s hat. One hand held a metal safety rail at the end of the carriage, and the other hand held his prized hat, because the train was moving fast and there was a rush of wind sucking and pulling at the carriages.

The boy was doing a sort of jig and I thought that perhaps he might climb to the roof and dance, but he would lose his precious hat up there, and that he clearly did not want to do. Three or four bodies dangled from the side of the train, but no one made a move to climb up and dance. Suddenly the train started to brake for Kliptown, at the end of the dancers’ eight kilometre stretch, and the hundreds of kids lining the track to see the dance of the staffriders were to be disappointed, along with me.

Later I learned a rumour had swept Soweto that police were deploying sharp-shooters to put an end to the staff-riders once and for all, a rumour probably spread by police agents to ensure that the trains ran on time.

My train arrived at Kliptown and it was goodbye to Soweto and Johannesburg and the boy in the silver miner’s hat. I saw him rushing down the platform, weaving among the passengers. He had one hand holding down his hat and, at a safe distance, he looked back to the white ticket inspector, who was leaning from an open door of the train, shouting at the kid because he hadn’t paid the fare. I waited for a gesture — a single finger raised in the air or a clenched-fist salute — but the kid just grinned a grin of triumph and, before the train began to move, he ran to the far end of the platform and vanished across the tracks.

The platteland, or countryside, now penetrated the Johannesburg conurbation and suburbs grew more scattered, They crowded around railway stations, competing with farm and veld. Neatly ploughed fields of turned red earth came into view, and paddocks enclosed by low walls of roughhewn stone where dairy cows lay in red mud. The farmhouses were ugly, functional buildings, with plastered single-storey white walls topped by silver corrugated tin roofs. A cluster of gum trees acted as a wind break, and drives were lined with poplars . The only native vegetation — hunched thorn trees — was confined to stony grazing land on inclines, unsuitable for cultivation. At the corner of virtually every field were the farm labourers’ shacks – mud or plaster boxes, with tiny windows boarded with planking in winter and left open in summer.

Rusty sheets of corrugated tin rested on the walls to make a roof that was held down by bricks at the edges. Outside every open door, there were barefoot kids playing, or sitting, or running after the passing trains, accompanied by skinny, rib-poking-through-skin dogs you found around farm labourers’ shacks, the mutts the white farmers called “kaffir dogs”.

“Well, nice to meet you, meneer, here comes my stop,” said the girl. The station of Residensia approached, and a sign on a shop reading “slaghuis”, or butcher, said Residensia was an Afrikaner suburb. The girl stood before the train stopped, popping her book into her shoulder bag and making for the door.

The weighty woman, who had woken automatically as the train started to brake, quickly followed her and on the platform she shouted to the girl in Afrikaans, “And Stephanie, don’t you go talking to strangers on the train again. That’s no way to behave.”

Fifty minutes out of Johannesburg the black townships started again. It was Evaton this time, the township serving the steelmaking and agricultural centre of Vereeniging. Evaton formed a conurbation with the townships of Sharpeville and Sebokeng, and this area had been a centre of township unrest for years — unrest being a South African understatement, a euphemism for bloodshed. Sharpeville had been the scene of the biggest and bloodiest riot to date, 69 Africans being shot dead there in 1960 during a demonstration over the pass laws.

It was getting dark. The sun had been down half an hour and Evaton brooded under giant floodlights on 50-metre poles, typical street lighting across most of South Africa’s townships. The lights gave the rooftops, huddled in perspective, a moon-white pallor, and most nights the smoke emerging from thousands of coal fires formed a dome in the still Transvaal air, a dome that was illuminated by the glow of the floodlights, creating a strange, inverted bowl of light that would not dissipate until the moment the sun broke over the Johannesburg hills to the north-west next morning, or the dome of coalsmoke was disturbed by a rare storm.

Approaching Evaton, another passenger started up a conversation. He was a civil servant who had lowered his Afrikaans-language evening newspaper to glaze at the passing township. I remarked that usually passengers didn’t survey the townships, they buried their heads in their newspaper.

“Unbelievable what is happening over there,” he said. “Like it’s some foreign country when you see it on the news.”

I said I didn’t see much of what was happening on the news; because the news on the state-run television service did not cover it. I told the passenger that I was a journalist on The Star, confident he would be interested in my opinion, because he was interested in the townships.

“A baby died out there last month, and you are to blame,” said the civil servant. “Not you personally, of course, but you know what I mean. You blame the television, but it’s the papers, also. All the media. You are not telling us what’s going on. You are keeping it from us, because you are frightened that it might cost you readers, or whatever. And you are frightened of the government closing you down.’’

Continued in the separate article below this, on the home page …