Amagama Enkululeko! Words for Freedom

AMAGAMA ENKULULEKO!

WORDS FOR FREEDOM: WRITING LIFE UNDER APARTHEID

Text © the contributors

Collection © Equal Education

All rights reserved. You may not reproduce or transmit any part of this publication in any form without written permission from Equal Education (equaleducation.org.za).

Published by Cover2Cover

85 Main Road, Muizenberg, 7945, South Africa

ISBN (print edition): 978-1-928346-35-7

Cover Photograph: ‘Migrant Worker, Dalton Road Hostel, Durban, 1986.’ by Omar Badsha

Foreword: Zakes Mda

Project managed and edited by Joshua Maserow and Daniel Sher

Digital production: Fire and Lion

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION

1COLONIALISM AND RACIAL CAPITALISM

2THE MAKING OF APARTHEID

3‘BLACK SPOTS’ AND FORCED REMOVALS

4REPRESSION AND POLITICAL QUIET

5BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE SOWETO UPRISING

6EMERGENCY AND REVOLT

COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks are due to everyone involved in creating this book. Firstly, the Equal Education Gauteng reading group of 2014 – Freddie Mathekga, Kholwane Simelane, Tracey Malawana, Charity Sebopela, Tshepo Motsepe, Lerato Mohlabi, Doron Isaacs, Adam Bradlow, Lerato Morotolo, Sfiso Molo, Daniel Sher, Nombulelo Nyathela and Joshua Maserow – gave the editors a glimpse of how fictional works could be used to inspire political and historical debate and education.

The potential value of this project was re-affirmed by equalisers and facilitators who attended EE’s 2014 end of year camp. Equalisers read and debated some of the selections that found their way into the book for many hours, often running beyond the allocated time. It was this passion for textual analysis and discussion that vindicated the decision to create this book.

For advice on the title – AMAGAMA ENKULULEKO! WORDS FOR FREEDOM: WRITING LIFE UNDER APARTHEID – thanks go to Oscar Masinyana, Yoliswa Dwane, Tracey Malawana, Raphael Chaskalson, Dumisa Mbuwa, Doron Isaacs and Alison Sher.

Vital suggestions on content were provided by Kylie Thomas, Meg Samuelson, Brad Brockman, Hedley Twidle and Kelwyn Sole.

Lamisa Naushin, Maryke Sher-Lun and Joey Hasson assisted with digitising and transcribing some of the literature from its source texts. Daniel Linde and Chandre Stuurman, of the Equal Education Law Centre (EELC), generously assisted with the legal side of the project. Whitney Cele, Gabriel Nahmias, Bhavya Dore, Doron Isaacs, Lyndal Pottier, Kim Tichmann, Kyle Bailey and Carla Goldstein and Neroli Price spent time fastidiously proof reading drafts. Arthur Attwell, of Electric Book Works, lent a steadying hand and sensitive vision to the design and layout of the book with his technical know-how and insider knowledge of the publishing industry.

Dorothy Dyer made useful criticisms, adding nuance and relevance to the questions accompanying the texts.

Patricia Rademeyer, Thabiso Mahlape and Alexander Matthews provided key information, publishing tips and connections.

We are very proud to have Zakes Mda and Omar Badsha lend their inimitable talents to this book. They were massively generous in writing a foreword and contributing the cover photograph, respectively.

The editors, Joshua Maserow and Daniel Sher devoted much time, energy, thought and passion to researching, writing, discussing, selecting, and editing this book into existence.

Leanne Jansen-Thomas

Head of Policy & Training at Equal Education

FOREWORD

Today’s equalisers are heirs to generations of resistance. Some of the voices of South Africa’s struggle for freedom from colonial and Apartheid rule are captured in this book. It is a rich collection with works ranging from a 1929, poignant story by RRR Dhlomo, to a 1964 Nat Nakasa non-fiction piece, to the poetry of Oswald Mtshali that gained popularity after the publication of his anthology in 1971, to the musings of the contemporary cultural commentator Eric Miyeni. These works speak eloquently of our past, but they also speak of our present, for indeed the past is a strong presence in our present.

Why do you keep harping on about the past? The past is gone, done and buried. Why can’t you just forget it and move on? You said you forgave the past, so why can’t you forget it as well?

These are questions we often hear whenever a project that explores the past, such as this one, is initiated. Some of us tend to think that forgiving and forgetting are either the same thing or should, of necessity, go together.

To forget the past is not only to have amnesia about where we come from but about who we are. Like all members of the human race we are who we are today because of who we were yesterday. We have been shaped by our past for better or for worse. Our very identities are tied in with our individual and collective memory. We are often reminded of the saying: you will not know where you are going unless you know where you come from.

Forgetting the past would be forgetting the legacy the writers in this collection have bequeathed us, and indeed all other legacies that have shaped our humanity.

However, we must not remember the past selectively. We often hear that history is actually the story of the victor. We only hear of the events in which those who triumphed and became the ruling elite participated, to the exclusion of all others who also played a crucial role in our struggle, and made those victories possible. We hear this history only from the perspective of the ruling elite, valorising themselves and toasting their heroic exploits with expensive champagne, while the masses look on and have only their saliva to swallow. The stories and poems such as we have in this collection remind us that the ordinary people who bore the brunt of colonial and Apartheid oppression are the true makers of history. We forget that at our peril.

The most important thing about remembering the past is not just to honour and celebrate those who fought for liberation, it is to reflect on the inhumanity of what was done to us, so that when we have attained some power we do not do the same to others. Alas, our memories are short and the arrogance of power knows no bounds. That is why quite often yesterday’s victim and survivor become today’s perpetrator and persecutor.

We must remember the past, yes, but we must not be steeped in it and live only for it. In that instance we become immobilized by perpetual victimhood. The heroism of yesteryear does not feed your stomach today. We do not want to be like a stuck car whose tyres keep spinning in the mire, unable to move forward. We move on, we act, we achieve, we hold those in power accountable as equalisers do every day. For we are working for the future. One way of working for that future is to keep a record – even if it is just a journal – of the present, of how things are and what you did to make them better for you and those who will come after you. Hopefully after reading the stories and poems in this collection you’ll be inspired to write your own. There is a writer, or at least a storyteller, in all of us.

Zakes Mda

INTRODUCTION

This book places storytelling in historical perspective. AMAGAMA ENKULULEKO! WORDS FOR FREEDOM: WRITING LIFE UNDER APARTHEID is an anthology of short fiction, poetry, narrative journalism and extracts from novels and memoirs which frames these texts as lenses through which to engage South Africa’s past.

The energy for AMAGAMA ENKULULEKO! comes from Equal Education’s camps and ‘Youth Group’ meetings. Youth Group is where over three thousand equalisers – EE’s school-going members – come together each week, in branches across the country. It is the foundation of Equal Education’s organising and campaigning: it is where the core of EE’s mass membership of high school students assembles to build their political consciousness and imagination. They do this by engaging with history and politics in dynamic and collaborative ways, clearing a path to collective action. Those facilitating the meetings are former equalisers. AMAGAMA ENKULULEKO! speaks directly to this intellectual project by opening a door to the past, to traditions of struggle and everyday life, which are a vital part of the moral arsenal of those taking forward the liberation project in the present. The literary works of Black South African writers of the 20th century – who wielded their pens against the oppression of the Apartheid State in the name of a just and equal society – are indispensable to taking freedom forward into the future.

The pages of this book turn from writers who resolutely chronicled our past to celebrated artists of years gone by, many absent from, and forgotten by, the mainstream publishing industry. Their work speaks with urgency to our present, to post-Apartheid South Africa. RRR Dhlomo’s The Death of Masaba reflects on the abuse of black bodies by the Apartheid migrant labour system, an injustice which remains today, made worse by the violence against black miners asserting their right to a fair wage. Nontsizi Mgqwetho’s poem They’re Stealing our Cattle on Misty Plains!, written in the early 20th century, channels the anger and despair of land dispossession we see in the ongoing struggles of shack dwellers and landless people today. All of the texts recall what happened during the brutal years of Apartheid while showing us some of the ways everyday life and the forces of history met and shaped each other through the lived experiences of ordinary people. They also confirm the ugly truth that many of those made invisible by State power and Capital in the past remain excluded from the count of who is human in the present.

We know from the voices in this book that writing can do more than raise awareness. Their words are testament to the places and people who resisted the crude impositions of Apartheid. Their work was, and remains, radical. In their context, to write was an act of resistance: it preserved the memory of experiences the government tried to destroy and gave insight into what South Africa was, and could become. Writing about Sophiatown or District Six has survived long after the bulldozers did their work on those areas. In this way, and in many others, the short fictions, poems, memoirs and narrative journalism in this book are an archive of people battling Apartheid, exposing its moral bankruptcy. While not all the narratives are strictly factual, they stand as a living record of black people and black communities’ experiences struggling for freedom against the evil of racial prejudice and economic exploitation. They all reflect what it was like to suffer, live, love, and strive for freedom and dignity under Colonialism and Apartheid.

AMAGAMA ENKULULEKO! has six chapters – each one unfolds with a short historical introduction: beginning in the early twentieth century, as racial capitalism cemented its control over the people and land in the region that became South Africa, and ending in the early 1990s with Apartheid on the retreat. These histories are followed by the fiction, poetry and other texts, in which black writers, and their characters, respond to the political, social and economic conditions of their time. In AMAGAMA ENKULULEKO! we acknowledge that to critically examine and know our past is a task vital to writing a just future for the youth of South Africa and the world.

Tshepo Motsepe

General Secretary of Equal Education

1 COLONIALISM AND RACIAL CAPITALISM

CONTEXT

In order to understand Apartheid we need to view it in the context of the history of colonialism

and land dispossession

in South Africa. It was these processes which set up the structures of oppression on which Apartheid would later be based. However, before we can do this, we need to establish some ideas around how to think about colonialism, and South Africa’s longer history. South Africa’s history did not begin in 1652 when Jan Van Riebeeck stepped off his ship. Indigenous African societies have rich histories which stretch back long before any Europeans arrived in Africa. In fact, even after the Dutch settled at the Cape, the colony there was only one of many societies in Southern Africa. For a long time it was smaller and weaker than some of these other societies too. This was also true of the Boer Republics, which came later.

colonialism One country controlling another country, territory, or people.

dispossession To take away.

Colonists were not all powerful, and their power was unevenly spread across the land. This led to many more kinds of interactions than simply white settlers as the oppressors and Africans as the oppressed. People traded, intermarried and depended on each other in ways that go against ideas of white supremacy. It is also true that people fought. Colonists did eventually defeat Africans and strip them of their land and their independence. But the last strong, independent African societies were only conquered in the 1870s and 1880s, more than 200 years after Europeans first started to live in Southern Africa. In view of this, it is not correct to look at colonisation as one inevitable step after another. Rather, it was resisted strongly, and experienced setbacks.

When the Dutch arrived at the Cape, they did not plan to have a large colony. The settlement was intended as a small trading and refreshment station for passing ships. But as more settlers arrived from Europe, and farming proved to be successful, the colony spread. The settlers fought wars against the Khoi, and later the San – in some cases even hunting them – to get animals, as well as land to farm and build settlements on. With the land went their livelihoods – farming for the Khoi, and hunting and gathering for the San – and both Khoi and San were forced either to retreat inland, or to look for employment on the farmlands of white colonial settlers. They also resisted, raiding settlers for cattle and attacking farmlands. This resistance was only broken by settlers raiding for cattle themselves, and forming armed ‘commandos’. The majority of Khoi and San populations were wiped out, killed by new diseases and settlers.

After the British took the Cape Colony from the Dutch in 1806, land dispossession increased as European settlers moved even further into the interior of the country. The Dutch had been too weak to challenge the Xhosa in the East, but over the course of the next 50 years the British fought a number of brutal wars against them, involving tactics like burning farmland and slaughtering livestock to starve out resistance. New British immigrants settled on the land taken in this process. By the late 1850s Xhosa independence had been crushed, and many Xhosas were forced to look for work as labourers in the Cape Colony.

Political tensions between Dutch settlers and British rulers, and the ending of slavery in the Cape (which many Dutch opposed) led to groups of relatively poor Dutch farmers, later called Voortrekkers, leaving the Cape Colony in the 1830s and moving into other parts of the country. Along the way they fought against African communities and took some of their land, often through allying themselves with rival local groups. In some regions, though, they struggled to get land from African farmers, and were forced to survive by hunting ivory to trade. By the 1850s the Boers had formed governments in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. These were still very weak: they had not managed to completely defeat the African kingdoms around them and in fact also depended on them for trade and labour. The Boers were not powerful enough to control all of the territory they claimed, and some of it was under the control of Pedi and Sotho farmers. However, colonists and settlers slowly extended their control over the land. In addition to the two Boer Republics, the British now ruled the Cape Colony and Natal.

The discovery of gold and diamonds in South Africa in the late 1800s (known as the Mineral Revolution) gave the white governments further reason to force black farmers into low-wage jobs, this time on the mines. Colonial expansion increased too. Britain moved to take over control of the mines, and conquered other areas of Southern Africa to ensure a steady supply of labour to them. This began when diamonds were discovered, at what became the town of Kimberley, in 1867. Soon afterwards, Britain conquered this area. In 1879 the Zulu and Pedi armies were finally defeated by the British, and the last remaining independent African societies fell under direct colonial control by the 1890s.

Gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand, in the Transvaal, in 1886. At first, the gold strengthened the Boer Governments. They managed to push back neighbouring African societies, such as the Ndebele, Tswana and Venda, and extended their control over the Transvaal. But the British wanted to control the gold mines, and waged war on the Boers. This began in 1899. By 1902, despite a long guerilla resistance, the British triumphed. In 1910 the conquered British territories were united into South Africa as we know it today. This moment was a huge disappointment for black people, thousands of whom had participated in the South African War (on both sides) in the hope of winning greater freedom. Instead, the British gave white South Africans (including Afrikaans and English speakers) self-government and freedom to decide their own affairs, while black South Africans were denied political and land rights.

As well as providing a reason for colonial expansion, the labour needs and costs of the mines themselves also shaped South Africa. To get to the diamonds deep in the ground under Kimberley, diggers needed machinery, a lot of money, and many, many labourers. This capital

was unavailable to ordinary diggers, and the diamond mines were quickly taken over by the mining capitalists – big businesses who could afford these big costs.

capital Money or goods which are invested into a business to make a profit.

The discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand triggered a gold rush. People from all over the world flocked there in search of wealth, and a new town – Johannesburg – sprung up almost overnight. The gold on the surface of the land was quickly extracted

and the mines went deeper. As mining became more difficult and more costly, a similar pattern to Kimberley arose – small diggers were bought out by large corporations who could afford the costs of machinery and the many labourers needed to process the Rand’s low-quality ore

into gold. Creating a cheap, reliable supply of labour at Kimberley and on the Rand became one of the main goals of the big mining businesses and the white governments. The mine owners had to think very carefully about where they would get labour from and how they would keep it cheap.

extracted Taken out.

ore The rocks in which gold is found.

One part of this issue was labour supply – who would do such hard work for low wages? There was no ready-made supply of workers who they could recruit to work on the mines. While Africans did come to Kimberley and Johannesburg, many miners only worked for a season or two, until they had enough money for a specific thing – enough for a gun, or for lobola – and then went back to the rural areas. Most African farmers were not interested in working in the mines permanently while they could still make a living working the land. Because supply was less than demand, wages were relatively good at first.

Early migrant labour suited rural African societies (because migrants would return and settle in the rural areas), but after the British extended their control they pushed many more people into the migrant labour system, and for much longer than a year or two. This was achieved by imposing taxes on their African ‘subjects

’. They made new laws that demanded taxes be paid in cash and not in cattle. Unless you were very wealthy, this meant you would have to find work so you could pay the taxes. Every year, African men had to pay a hut tax for every hut they had (which was often linked to how many