Out of the Darkness (Part 2)

By Donald Knowler

Part 2 of Donald Knowler’s memory of South Africa’s turbulent road to nationhood …
I return after four years away

I arrived back in South Africa, after four years in the United States, in the early 1980s. The same day of my arrival, at about the same time my plane was touching down at Johannesburg’s Jan Smuts Airport, a three-month-old baby had been stoned to death by a mob in Sebokeng. The baby, Blair Gordon, died because a few days earlier 10-year-old Nicholas Mgudlwa had been cut down by police bullets as he chopped wood in his mother’s backyard. There had been unrest in the township, as the police had struggled for days to contain mobs of residents complaining about increases in rents. Blair Gordon’s mother had gone into the township with her black maid, not realising how tense the situation was. She had encountered a group of mourners returning from Nicholas Mgudlwa’s funeral and her car had been stoned. A brick crashed through the rear window and hit Blair, who was lying on the back seat.

“And you’re to blame, you know,” said the Afrikaner civil servant sharing a seat with me on the 4.40 that night, 20 minutes to go before Vereeniging, the train running half an hour late, and the night sky closing in.

The tall lights illuminating Evaton, Sebokeng and Sharpeville caught the underside of a storm cloud, so the purple-black swirling mass turned to a foaming orange for the brief moment it swept over the townships. As the train reached Vereeniging, the wind that heralds a Transvaal storm whipped up dust on the platform.

I had returned to South Africa optimistic that at last things might be turning around, and the powers that be might see the folly of racial policies rooted in colonial times, and take genuine steps to black advancement, and the formation of a truly multi-racial society.

Several black journalists I had worked with in the past had come through New York when I lived there on United States Government sponsored trips and had told me things were changing, if slowly. I remember showing an African reporter from The Star, Maud Motanwane, around the United Nations and then having a drink with her in the Delegates’ Bar, something I had not been able to do in South Africa where pubs and clubs, like everything else, were segregated.

“But things are improving, Don,” I remembered her saying, and there was a simple reply: “When we can drink together, like now, then that will be real change.’’

On my return to South Africa I had found that we still couldn’t have a drink together, indulging in the most basic of human contact.

Storm clouds were gathering over South Africa and although I had made a decision to return from New York the train journey out to Vereeniging made me doubt I would stay for the duration. The process of South Africa’s inevitable transition to majority rule, I believed at the time, would be too painful for me to bear. I had been associated too long with the country to bring a reporter’s objectivity and detachment to the unfolding story.

Soweto out of mind

When the train reached Vereeniging I went immediately to the booking office to buy my return ticket to Johannesburg, eager to return and put Soweto and the other townships out of my mind.

I had about an hour to kill so I walked into town to find a bar. Vereeniging was typical of small South African industrial towns. The town centre was grouped around one wide street, built in pioneer times with enough room for a span of oxen to turn. Now the street was lined with four-storey red-brick office blocks with screens on the widows to shield the harsh glare of the sun. The architecture dated from the boom times of the 1950s and 1960s when much business and subsequent prosperity had flowed from an overcrowded and expanding Johannesburg. To find traces of the old city you had to look for the back streets where buildings had a Victorian colonial air, with wooden balconies. In such a street I found a bar a block from the station.

The chirping of a cricket echoed across the street and big, fat blobs of rain were beginning to slap on the pavement as I headed for the red neon sign that spelled “Kroeg”, Afrikaans for a watering hole.

One hell of a storm had started. Lightning began to form from threatening clouds, and claps of thunder, a few seconds later, reverberated from building to building.

I had had much experience of South African bars, especially mining town bars: tough, austere, no-frills places, with nothing to distract the patron from, or get in the way of, the serious business of hard drinking. These bars looked like the interior of station lavatories, with white tiles going halfway up the walls. The walls themselves were painted a white that had become a dirty shade of yellow over the years, stained with tobacco and beer fumes and brandy-breath. Sometimes there were a few spots of dried blood, brown with age. I looked for the odd bullet hole in the plaster, but this bar did not have that embellishment. That was a good sign, and put me at ease.

“So the next year I chained the tin box to the counter,” the barman, heavily tattooed arms draped over the bar, was telling a customer. He ignored me.

“You know, a big heavy chain which was soldered to the tin holding my Christmas tips. That will stop the fockers stealing it, I said to myself. And you know what the fockers did? Hell, man, I turned my back to serve a customer, and they had the box on the floor, because the chain was long, and you know what, theys were pissing in it. I telling you. My own customers. Pissed and laughing. The fockers pissed in it.

“I said to them ‘How can you build a nation?’ That year I left Johannesburg and all those miners’ pranks and nonsense. That’s no place for a barman.”

As I expected, there was no formal decoration in the bar, save for an adverisement for Castle lager, a glass of beer pictured next to a bloody steak, and a cartoon which had been photostatted and pinned to the wall. The cartoon depicted a stereotype from the platteland, a character called Van der Merwe. In the United States, Van der Merwe would be a “hillbilly”, in England a country bumpkin or the village idiot. So it was with English-speakers’ view of Van der Merwe, and he was depicted in anti-Afrikaner jokes as a buffoon but to Afrikaners, Van der Merwe was a folk hero.

The Van der Merwe in the cartoon was wearing a “safari suit” — tunic and shorts in matching material — with long socks, an urban uniform of sorts for Afrikaners that replaced the need for a suit. A giant plastic comb was tucked in one of his socks. Suede bush boots and a floppy hat completed the picture, but one of the boots was missing, and tied to a big toe sticking out of a hole in Van der Merwe’s sock was a piece of string. Van der Merwe lay on his back reading a newspaper, and the string was looped over a series of wooden wheels, struts and pulleys, leading finally to Van der Merwe’s penis. The caption to the cartoon read in English: “Van der Merwe’s wanking machine.”

“Ja, meneer,” the barman asked finally, impatiently, after finishing his story.

I asked for a beer.

I could understand what I call “bar Afrikaans,” working men’s talk, so long as I knew the subject being discussed. A knowledge of Afrikaans was important in South Africa because more than half the white population of five million was of Afrikaner stock. The handful of men in the bar, however, were talking quickly and I had difficulty understanding the conversation. It was something about a bus and some “kaffirs”. I suspected blacks had stoned a bus that day, buses being a common targets during unrest because they were an obvious symbol of a policy in which Africans had to live outside the cities and commute long distances to work.

“You just come from Jobbing, then?” the barman asked after a time.

“How’s the troubles up there? We hear the caffirs are striking, a stayaway or something. Burning busses like you’ve never seen.”

I took a slow sip of my Castle lager, contemplating a measured response because I didn’t want to betray any sympathy for the strikers in that environment.

“Train was pretty full. Blacks in the streets of Joburg. I don’t think the stayaway is working.”

“Scoundrels”, interjected another man, sitting on a stool alongside me. “Scoundrels, I say.”

“Hell, man,” said the barman., addressing me again. “I’d shoot the lot of them. Police too good to them. What you says Billy?”

The barman gestured to the patron he had been talking to when I entered the bar. Billy was drunk. His face was flushed and this gave a glow to a bronzed suntan. He looked into a tumbler of Coke and cheap South African brandy and did not say a word.

“So what you say, meneer, what’s your ’pinion?” The barman had a flat, fat face scarred around the eyebrows, the scar tissues indicating he might have been a boxer in his younger days. He wore a dazzling white shirt open to a hairy stomach. The sleeves of the shirt were neatly rolled up to the elbows and I strained to read the inscription on the tattoos of assorted African wild animals, mainly lions and springboks, but there might have been a giraffe tucked under the white shirt. The barman looked me sternly in the eye.

“So what’s your ’pinion?”

Political opinions could be dangerous things to hold in South Africa at that time, or at least spoken openly in a Vereeniging bar , especially if these views went against the general opinion of the patrons. As a South African friend at the time explained when I first went to the country, a political discussion in South Africa was one only the dentists and the lawyers could win.

“Well, my opinion is that the blacks can’t organise themselves,” I started hesitantly, again being careful not to say anything that could be construed as support for the strikers. “But when they do organise themselves, then they will get somewhere.”

Air of tension in the newsroom

On the first day of the Soweto uprising I did not see any action, did not see a mob of rioting African schoolchildren, did not see one shot fired or one classroom burned to the ground. I had been on other duties in the newsroom, a rewrite or something, and paid little attention to an air of tension and drama that morning among the typewriters. Every day tension was in the air in the Joahnnesburg of the 1970s and I didn’t give it a second thought until the news editor dashed over and told me to get to the hospital serving Soweto because there had been reports that people had been shot by the police and he wanted confirmation of bodies arriving.

When I arrived at the hospital, my African driver dropping me off at the entrance gates before heading back into town, I could see preparations being made for a mass arrival of injured and possibly dying. A senior hospital official, however, flatly denied there was an alert of any kind.

I went to the main casualty section to await the possible arrival of ambulances but a security guard arrived to escort me off the hospital grounds.

Standing out on the street in the heart of Soweto, I suddenly realised that if there was a riot in progress on the scale suggested I was in dangerous territory as a lone white person. Ambulances were coming and going but I could not see into the casualy arrival area to determine if they were delivering victims.

I tried once again to get into the hospital but was promptly escorted to the entrance, and I could see the official who had denied there was an alert watching me from an upstairs window, and I cursed him for putting me in so much danger out on the streets.

Just then my black driver arrived. He had returned to check on my safety.

Back at the office, my mission a failure, a picture of the full extent of the uprising had emerged, and I spent the night writing a detailed account of the day’s unfolding events for the next day’s newspaper.

Later I did see action, travelling the township with African colleagues from The Star who ensured my safety until the heavily armed police barred all whites. Thousands of riot police were out in force in armoured vehicles, and there was sporadic firing.

Within a few days Soweto was largely under control but then violence flared in other townships, one close to the exclusive white northern suburbs of Johannesburg, the township largely supplying “garden boys” and house maids for the rich.

The police were reporting casualties in Soweto had been minimal, and were even suggesting deaths might have been caused by Africans themselves, as were the stoning and stabbing deaths of three white people in Soweto on the first day of the riots.

In the township of Alexander, however, there could be no doubt about who was doing the killing. I witnessed people being shot, and later doing a body count, I compared notes with black photographer Peter Mgabane and we arrived at a figure of eight deaths, when police were saying only two people had been killed.

The uprising — claiming hundreds of lives — had been sparked by schoolchildren objecting to a government decree that some subjects in the African education syllabus had to be taught in Afrikaans, when English was the predominant language in the township.

What started as a protest march by schoolchildren became a riot, became an uprising and it would be the children of Soweto, on June 16th, 1976, who would ensure that the political lanscape of South Africa would never be the same again. For white rule, it was the beginning of the end.

So, what’s your business?

“Could’t organise a piss-up in a brewery, these kaffirs,” said the drunk in the kroeg drinking the Coke and cheap brandewyn. He was not as drunk as I had thought he had been.

The man sitting alongside me, a soft-spoken man who, I noticed, had not indicated any enmity or malice towards Africans, only a kind of condescension when he used the word “scoundrels” during the discussion on the strike, offered me a drink.

“Just a beer,” I said, and the quiet man attracted the barman’s attention without saying a word. He pointed to our respective glasses to indicate the same again.

“My name’s van Tonder,” said the quiet man. “So what’s your business here in Vereeniging?”

“Oh, I’m just travelling around. I’m leaving South Africa and I just want to do a final train trip to see some of my favourite places.”

The old man looked at me suspiciously, sensing an ulterior motive and I had thoughts of the security police again, although the old man seemed friendly enough.

“So who comes to Vereeniging on a grand tour?” the old man said with a laugh.

“Well, to be honest, I wanted one last look at Soweto. It’s a part of South Africa and it holds the future, whatever way you look at it.”

I felt bolder and I had opinions to express, even if they were from the point of view of an observer.

“You English then?” asked Meneer van Tonder.

“Originally,” I explained. “South Africa’s sort of become my adopted home.”

“I see they got their troubles with blacks over there,” said Van Tonder, taking a big gulp of the brandy he had ordered for himself. “And in America. It’s the same the world over.”

For the first time I noticed a small television set on a shelf behind the bar, flashing pictures. It was 7.30 and the programs in English were winding up ready for the switch-over to broadcasts in Afrikaans, starting with the news at 8pm. I wanted to see the news, even if it was in Afrikaans, and hoped the barman would turn up the sound.

I wanted to see what had been happening in the townships.

Die Nuss. I can’t remember the first two items but they were not devoted to the main story of the day, the township stay-away.

And then the stayaway came up on the screen and Meneer van Tonder shouted to the barman to turn up the sound. The news said something about the people wanting to go to work and intimidators stopping them. Pictures of black workers riding the trains, of black faces on the streets of central Johannesburg. Then the unsmiling face of violence; crowds of kids hurling bricks at the police, teargas, falling policemen, kids running and regrouping. A bus on fire, a beerhall ransacked.

“Scoundrels,” said Mr van Tonder quietly. “Scoundrels.”

“Shoot the kaffirs,” screamed the barman. “Shoot them all, the fockers.”

“Bliksom,” said another man.

And then the news of the stayaway was over and a weatherman was talking about signs of the drought being broken.

The rain lashed against the windows of the bar so loudly that it drowned out the words of the weatherman. Rain splashed through a partly open window and the barman shouted for the “boy” who washed the glasses in a room behind the bar to go and close it. A frail African of about 50 appeared, wearing a cotton “boy’s suit’’ — the two piece suit with baggy short trousers and sleeves cut off at the elbows that is the uniform of house and office cleaners in South Africa. He came round the side of the bar and did not ask a man blocking his way to move.

“Well shut the window, man,” said the barman, and the customer moved to one side to let the African pass.

“Jesus,” said Van Tonder, realising the news had finished. “I got to make my train.”

I hurried after him and we ran along the street, sheltering under the eaves of shops, until we reached the station platform Number 1 where the train from Johannesburg was due to arrive before heading back north again. Streams of water ran between the tracks, and Van Tonder peered along the line to see if he could make out the train through the rain.

“What you says in England, meneer — it never rains but it pours. That is wot we got here, ” said Van Tonder, smiling under a felt hat he had put on, a hat with an imitation leopard-skin hat-band.

Van Tonder and I stood there for 20 minutes. No trains were coming or going. Finally Van Tonder went off to the station master’s office to establish what had happened to our train. He came hurrying back, dodging pools of water which had seeped through the tin canopy of the platform. He was shouting to make himself heard above the din.

Streaks of lightning lit up his face under the hat. It made him look white and ghostly, but he smiled a pained smile of reassurance.

“Well, the station master, he says the train has stopped somewheres towards Joeys. Water on the tracks, or somethings. The station master, he says we can go to the bar and when the train comes he’ll get the driver to give us two blasts on his horn which we’ll hear from there.’’

We sank three brandewyns, Van Tonder and I before the barman closed up. Van Tonder said not to worry, he had a bottle of brandewyn in a small cloth travelling bag he was holding, and I bought a second from barman. I anticipated it was going to be a long night, with or without the train.

The red neon kroeg sign that had cast splinters of bright crimson light across the puddles in the street was now turned off, and Van Tonder and I sat on a bench on the platform, silently looking up the track for our train and gazing into the rain splashing into pools of water between the tracks. The flashes of lightning turned the rain to diagonal brush strokes of yellow and white. Every now and then Van Tonder would ask, “How’s about another, meneer?” and take one of the two plastic cups the barman had given us and splash a half finger of brandewyn into them.

“Well, all I can says is the crops need it,” Van Tonder said after a time. “I know because I’m a farmer. Nothing grand, if you know what I mean. Not like those mealie [corn] farmers, Western Transvaal. No Mercedes or anything like that. Holidays in America — fancy places like Dallas, you know, like you see on the televisie. Meneer, just a smallholding, but it keeps me and my wife Marika in brandewyn.”

There is a South African writer, a late writer, who had been my introduction to Afrikaners and their culture.

His name is Herman Charles Bosman, and he is famous in South Africa for a series of short stories about platteland life. Bosman was an Afrikaner but he wrote in English and transferred the essence of Afrikaner culture to the English language like no other South African writer.

Bosman’s most popular character is a poor and embattled farmer called Oom Schalk Lourens, who relates stories about everyday life in a corner of the Western Transvaal bordering the dry country of Botswana.

In this hard corner of the country were hard men, brought up on the Bible – men who fought the drought most years, and who fought the local African tribesmen over land; men who had fought the mightiest empire and army the world had known, that of Britain, in the Boer War.

These farming folk of the Marico Valley maintained a quiet dignity and humanity through it all, and after their defeat by the British they even welcomed “Engelsmen” to come and farm in their valley, so long as the English were God-fearing and bought rounds of drinks in the bars from Groot Marico to Mafekeng.

Oom Schalk Lourens spends his time in Bosman’s stories sitting under a thorn tree, watching his cattle so they come to no harm. He could pay a “native” to do the job, but it is work Oom Schalk Laurens says he is ideally suited to.

Bosman never described Oom Schalk Laurens’ physical appearance, but I think he would have looked a bit like Van Tonder, sitting there under the shelter of the tin roof of Platform 1. Van Tonder was a slightly-built man; his physique contradicted the stereotype of the tough, macho Afrikaner farmer. A small pot belly under his belt, which pushed through the brown raincoat he was wearing, suggested he liked to creep into the local bar when the sun had set and the day was done on his smallholding. He had a grey beard that looked white in the lightning flashes, and it came to a neat point under his chin. His face was beautifully tanned, and crow’s feet radiated from piercing blue eyes. This full round face was marred by a long, scared nose which had been broken in the past, and this was set above a narrow and neat mouth which didn’t appear to move when he talked.

English-speaking South Africans might blame the Afrikaner for the country’s political troubles but there was a school of thought among some liberals that perhaps the Afrikaner held the key to its salvation. They were, after all, a tribe of Africa, if a white one, which had been on the continent from about the time the Pilgrim Fathers had arrived in America, and a hundred years before the first settlers set foot on Australian soil.

“They’re pragmatists, Afrikaners,” I remember a friend telling me in a Johannesburg bar. He was Jewish, from a Jewish liberal tradition in South Africa at odds with Afrikaner apartheid philosphy and his view was an interesting one.

“Africans know where they stand with Afrikaners, there’s no bullshit like with so many trendy liberals,’’ he said, “and they will be able to talk. They’ll be an accommodation of sorts. But the Afrikaners will have to talk from a position of power: Africans respect that. Shaka the great Zulu warrior always fought from a position of power.”

The long night

“How’s your drink, meneer?” Van Tonder said again, after a time. “I think we’s here a long night.”

The rain started to ease now but a stronger wind whipped up. It was cold out there on the platform, so Van Tonder and I moved into the station waiting room. The old Afrikaner tried to stretch out on a long wooden bench, but he suddenly leapt to his feet when the red-and-oyster coaches of a mainline passenger train swept into the station from the north.

Van Tonder went to talk to two young soldiers leaning from the widow of the bar car. Then he started off towards the two electric locomotives at the head of the train, but changed his mind and turned to walk in the opposite direction, towards the guard’s van.

The train was the twice-weekly to Mossel Bay, travelling 2000 kilometres to the Indian Ocean fishing port, crossing the grasslands of the Orange Free State, a province with distant flat-topped mountains. The two-day journey would take Train 0670 around the foothills of the landlocked and mountainous country of Lesotho and into the Karoo, a semi-desert scrubland that sprawls over the bottom third of South Africa. It was a different world to the South Africa of the townships and I had an urge to jump aboard. The train would take me past the Swartberg and Outeniqua mountains; the snaking carriages winding their way to the coast, taking their time, sluggish like a python in winter, and at a country town called George they would hit the coast and spend the last 60 kilometres of the journey being washed by sand and spray from the ocean, while terns and seagulls called overhead.

“Well, meneer, I got baie goed nuus. Our train is coming. The water has not come over the tracks,” Van Tonder said after returning from the guard’s van of the Mossel Bay passenger.

Two porters were busily carrying off two cardboard crates of live chicks that had been off-loaded from the Mossel Bay express, when our train rolled into Platform 1. We made our way to the whites only carriages, and within minutes we were off.

But the train only travelled about half a kilometre, before shuddering to a halt, and causing van Tonder to spill the brandy he was pouring.

“Jesus,” he said, “What now?”

We waited five minutes. I stuck my head out of the window. A car park at the rear of a shopping complex lay alongside the railway embankment and it was covered by about a metre of floodwater, the water coming up to the windows of abandoned motor vehicles.

Van Tonder craned his head out of the window, looking to the head of the train.

“Meneer, the Kwagga River has burst its banks. Jesus, the embankment is being washed away.”

As he spoke, the guard, who had walked to the front of the train to speak to the driver, came running down the line before climbing back into his compartment. The guard then came back down the train, walking along the corridors of each carriage to explain to the passengers that the driver had decided it was too dangerous to continue, and we would have to wait until morning when civil engineers could look at the embankment and the track. I found it impossible to sleep in the comp[artment. This suited van Tonder. He wanted someone to talk to. This time I produced the brandewyn and the guard came to sit with us.

Van Tonder said he was on his way to visit his son Frikkie in Johannesburg, who was ill with tick-bite fever.

“It’s been two weeks, meneer, and I worry about him. He won’t see a doctor, so I said to Chris, his wife, I’d come. Gives me a chance to see my grandchildren, you know. Take them out somewheres, maybe to the zoo. You know what they calls the zebra? They say it’s the horses with pyjamas on. Magic, meneer. ”
We talked about van Tonder’s grandchildren and then we talked about the “situation”, the generic term for politics in South Africa. Although South Africans might discuss a dichotomy within Afikanerdom, or rivalries between parties representing English-speaking and Afrikaner interests, the “situation” was literally drawn in black and white.

Having had half a bottle of brandewyn, I couldn’t remember the finer details of the conversation when I compiled by diary next day. But we spoke about the stayaway and the current township violence at length. The conductor contributed to the conversation with, `We should never have educated the kaffirs. I telling you, a little education is a dangerous thing.”

Only one phrase stands out all these years later. One sentence which I can still see van Tonder mouthing in the frail light of the carriage, a yellow light provided by the lamps on the station platform.

“It’s not my son I worry about, meneer, or Chris. It’s my grandchildren. What’s going to happen to them.”

I was shivering by first light. Van Tonder offered me his raincoat, but I declined, saying I would get warm by strolling the platform. Olive thrushes sang from gardens bordering the tracks, a melodious, liquid song. The sky was turning from the purple-black of the storm to opal, and I could see the last of the night’s storm receding to the south.

Behind a clump of gum trees to the east a golden sun stirred. The air was rain-fresh and in adjoining platforms the night’s rail traffic from the south and north had piled up. Three passengers trains slept in the station. I found a railway employee speaking to the driver of one of them. He told me that buses were being laid on to take passengers by road to Johannesburg.

I returned to tell von Tonder but he was asleep, buried under his raincoat, his felt hat with the mock leopard-skin band on the floor. I tossed it on an empty seat alongside him.

I left him there sleeping until the buses arrived.

The flood receded as quickly as it had come. From the bus back to Johannesburg I could make out the meandering shape of the Kwagga running through lakes of mud. Piles of debris, including cars, were littered across the fields whose grass had been flattened by millions of litres of water. The sun was up and a mist hung above the wet fields, thickening in the indentations of a mostly-flat countryside.

In sheltered places were was also a coating of hail, sparkling in the sunlight and looking like snow. The hail was piled in drifts against brick walls and the sides of barns, and it lay in white streaks in the grooves of corrugated tin roofs.

On a gum tree which had been largely stripped of leaves in the hail-battering of the storm, I saw a Cape vulture, a rare bird south of Johannesburg, its big hunched shape silhouetted against the sun. The vulture raised its head and looked about it, and I remembered a Sotho friend telling me the sight of a single, perched vulture was an ill omen.

The stayaway was scheduled as the front page lead of the Johannesburg star. By 9 am, the deadline for the evening newspaper’s first edition for the country districts, there was an even bigger story. The Vereeniging storm and flood had taken seven lives. The swirling river van Tonder and I had seen eating away at the railway embankment had swept a motor car carrying a white family, the Koens, from a low bridge. The olive thrushes had been singing their dawn chorus of optimism at the start of a new day when police found the body of 23-year-old Deborah Koen and her nine-month-old baby daughter on a golf course downstream. Shaun Koen, who had last seen his wife being washed away by the current, the baby in her arms, had spent the night at the Vereeniging police station waiting for news. Lying near the bodies had been the corpse of an African.

The Kwagga, bursting from a strait-jacket of culverts and dykes, had not discriminated by race in its rage.

It was a slow bus journey back to Johannesburg, the bus taking detours to avoid floods. Parts of the journey came close to the townships and I thought of the staff-riders over in Soweto, and thought that I was a kind of staff-rider myself, riding a lumbering, lurching, dangerous train to an uncertain future.

It was time to get off.

Journalist Don Knowler is best known in Tasmania as On The Wing columnist in The Saturday Mercury