The flight. On the plane from London to Johannesburg there were no fewer than two relations of mine, neither of whom I had ever seen before. I was introduced in the departure lounge to one—a little boy going to spend a holiday with his grandparents—by the people who were seeing him off. The other I sat next to during the flight. He was full of curiosity about me; his questions began from the moment he was permitted to undo his seatbelt. Where did I live? Was I going to South Africa on vacation? Had I been there before? When had I left? Did I really prefer living in England? Finally he took the plunge and asked me my name; when I gave it to him, he immediately wanted to know exactly which Jacobson family I belonged to. The Jacobsons from Pretoria? Or the Henry Jacobsons? Or Jacobson the writer? I confessed that I was actually the last of these. He stared incredulously at me, and then turned to his wife, who had so far taken no part in the conversation. “Darling, we’re sitting next to your cousin the writer.”

At Nairobi my wife and I got out for a breath of air. My new-found cousins refused to leave the plane. “They treat South Africans like dirt here,” they explained. (In fact, the Kenyans could not have known who was or was not South African among the passengers, for they did not look at the passports of anyone going into the transit lounge.) Thus we missed the drama which took place on the plane during the layover. Apparently a passenger had had a stroke or seizure of some kind on the way to Nairobi, and a doctor and two nurses had been warned to stand by to receive him. When they came to take him off, however, he would not leave. The pilot refused to fly on with so sick a man on board. Eventually four policemen entered and carried him off bodily—shouting, kicking, and flailing his arms. The South Africans on the plane were convinced that he was resisting so violently because he had a South African passport and was terrified at the prospect of being left behind in a black country. Other passengers claimed that he did not know where he was or what he was doing, and that there was no political significance of any kind to his frenzy. All we saw of the incident when we returned to the plane was a closed ambulance and a nurse in earnest conversation with a policeman. Then on to Johannesburg.

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Arrival. The police were more in evidence at Jan Smuts airport than on previous landings, so far as I can recall, and more heavily armed: the submachine guns some of them sported were a novelty. For the rest, no change. It was very hot. Outside the terminal building, under a high African sky, rows of parked cars quivered in the January heat. Sun-fatigued blue-gum trees lined the way to a greenish Holiday Inn. Factory buildings on both sides of the main road all looked new, brash, desultory: somehow it seemed easy to imagine them not there. But the northern suburbs of the city were more woody, more leafy, more graceful, more embowered, than ever. Each house stood back, almost hidden from its neighbor. The lawns were immaculate. Over-ailed African house-servants stood on them, spraying flower beds from hissing hoses. Bougainvillea, hibiscus, and plumbago were in flower; the last of the jacaranda blooms were still on the trees. The avenues and gardens were also planted with oaks, planes, sycamores, hedges of honeysuckle; and it was the combination of the tropical and the temperate which for some reason was so moving and so restorative. The overwhelming impression was one of peace, spaciousness, and emptiness. People were few and far between.

The first words said to me by blacks, at the airport: By a woman, when I was looking for a lavatory, “This way, master.” By a man, as I was leaving the building, “Yes, baas.” No change there, either.

At a friend’s house, during our first meal, much of the talk was of the army call-up. One young man there had just received his papers; he would be in the army for the next two years, with the prospect of another year’s service in the reserves after his discharge. A second, who had already done his stint, had just been instructed to report for a three-months’ tour of duty in South West Africa (Namibia), on the Angolan border. Both young men were deeply depressed at the prospect. A third youngster present said that he was going to leave the country before his papers came. The one who had already been in the army described his last spell on the border: patrolling, laying ambushes, taking part in sweeps through the bush. His unit had made no contact with the guerrillas of the South West Africa Peoples Organization (SWAPO).¹ All they had seen one night were some flares from across the border (“like fireworks”). But his period there had been the best of his service: “At least we’d had something to do.”

The latest extension of the period of national service for new recruits means that the South African army is going to double in size over the next few months. Only whites, of course, are drafted.

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Some potted political history. When the Afrikaner Nationalists came to power in South Africa thirty years ago, they took over with two intentions. One was to insure the dominance of their language and culture vis-à-vis the English-speaking whites; the other was to see to it that the white man in general, and the Afrikaners in particular, would continue to keep in subjection the country’s blacks, Coloreds (mulattoes), and Indians. The slogans that were showed by Afrikaner crowds at meetings when I was a student had none of the refinements that were later to be enunciated by upholders of the policy of apartheid, especially when speaking to audiences abroad. (“Separate freedom,” “mutual respect,” etc.) In those days, the voters called for Wit man bô and Kaffer op sy plek (White man on top, Kaffir in his place); and that, pretty much, was what successive Nationalist administrations did their best to give them. With extraordinary thoroughness and zeal, they set about caging the races from one another: striking down whatever rights of representation the “non-whites” then had; turning the haphazard but entrenched practices of racial discrimination that already existed into a pattern of punitive legislation which governed everything from post-office entrances to areas of habitation for the different races, or from the kind of job you were permitted to take to the kind of person you were permitted to marry. All this was done on the basis of an avowedly racist ideology, which owed at least some of its inspiration to Nazi Germany, and which looked on any form of racial mixing as self-evidently dangerous and deplorable. In the course of setting up and putting into operation this apparatus of segregation, the government gave itself powers which effectively undermined many of the institutions inherited from the period of British rule, the judiciary not least among them.

It took the Nationalists almost thirty years, as I say, to do all this. (Other independent African states have of course dealt far more summarily with their judiciaries—and with their press and parliaments.) During those decades, liberal whites inside South Africa, and practically everybody outside South Africa, continually told the Afrikaners that what they were doing was wrong, wicked, wholly unacceptable in the eyes of all truly modern and enlightened people—and, above all else, self-destructive. I too, in my own way, added my voice to that chorus. For the most part, the blacks suffered what was being done to them in silence. And now?

I will make three points only here—not so much to get them out of the way as to let them serve as background to what follows.

1. The Afrikaner Nationalists, who prided themselves on their anti-British (and hence “anti-imperialist”) past, did not realize how much they depended upon the power of the white man elsewhere in Africa, and on that of the British and Portuguese in particular, for the maintenance of their own position.
2. Because this realization has sunk in, now that everybody else has gone home, the Nationalist leadership has abandoned what can be called the ideologically racist dimension of its policy: i.e., that aspect of it which regarded the presence of the black man, other than in strictly defined work roles, as nothing less than a form of pollution, a source of mystico-physical disgust. So far as I could see—and I read the Afrikaans press quite industriously while I was in the country—the leaders have turned around 180 degrees in this respect. (And, what is more, they have done it without a word of explanation to their followers.) They now speak with lofty disapproval of rassisme and geskeidenheid (discrimination), and announce with a curious mixture of pride and ill-disguised reluctance that they are taking this or that step to “normalize” (their word) this or that sporting event or public facility. (To an outsider, the changes that have taken place as a result may seem pitifully inconsequential; but anyone who remembers the South Africa of even five years ago will be startled to see black children swinging on swings in the public parks, or an Indian family eating a meal unhindered in an open-air restaurant.) However, the determination of the Afrikaners to keep effective political power in their hands, and the mass of the blacks at a great social distance, remains unaltered.
3. We were wrong in the prophecies of doom we made about the Afrikaners thirty and twenty and fifteen years ago. This is a fact that has been kept well hidden from the public outside South Africa, though it is hardly a secret to the Afrikaners themselves, or to the considerable numbers of English-speaking whites who for the first time supported the Nationalist party in the last election. Whatever the future may hold for South Africa—and it is certainly going to be very different from the past—the Nationalist party has in fact given its own people the best decades in their history. There can be no question of it. They have transformed themselves from a poor, rather backward, rural or semi-proletarian people, with no real source of economic strength outside agriculture, into the rulers of a prosperous, efficiently run, highly developed, and industrialized country. The “poor whites,” who abounded in my childhood, have wholly disappeared; even those Afrikaners who continue to fill the more lowly of “white” occupations (ticket collectors, petty civil servants, bus drivers) have become middle class in their habits and expectations. The Afrikaans universities and cultural institutions have grown enormously in size and influence; Afrikaners have for the first time taken high positions in the mining corporations, finance houses, and heavy and light industries. All this—and undivided political power too! All this—and their own flag, the severance they had always longed for from the British monarchy, and their language recognized as the prime language of government (if not yet of commerce). No wonder they have never wavered in their loyalty to that government no matter how much it may be reviled abroad. And no wonder they do not want to give up a single one of their gains. Indeed, another secret aspect of what has been going on in South Africa is that it is precisely the apartheid system, with its need for an elaborate bureaucracy and police, which has provided tens of thousands of Afrikaners with jobs, and has thus enabled them to rise rapidly in earning power and self-esteem.

So why should they believe us now, when we tell them yet again that they are disaster bound?

The funny thing is, they do.

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Johannesburg Suburban Sunday. A profusion of scents and light; Namaqua doves in the trees cooing long and short, in a sweet Morse code of their own invention. A drive through empty streets, all so luxuriantly befoliaged, yet all kept so neat by the African servants who now litter the place with their bodies, lying on the grassy pavements they themselves have mown: men in overalls, women in smart Sunday clothes. At the end of every northern vista, great thunderclouds are building up—purple and white, mauve and silver. But there is no wind. The sky glitters. From behind hedges and trees one hears the noise of much tennis playing (pluck-pluck-pluck-Ah Jesus!) and the splash of bodies plunging into swimming pools.

The cousin I have come to visit is out: away on vacation. In the drive in front of his house is a broken-down car, with two young men leaning over its engine. Inside the house a tall thin girl, with a mass of fair hair over her eyes and down her shoulders, is busy pouring orange juice into a jug. She wears a black bra and a pair of tiny white shorts, which show off to advantage the length of her legs. These people are all strangers to me; apparently they have been temporarily loaned the house by the people who are looking after the place. Of the two young men, one wears a black T-shirt and has his hair cut in sphinx-like shape; the other, despite his sandals and oily hands, is faintly professorial in appearance, having a goatee on his chin and glasses on his nose. It turns out that he is an American, from Chicago, who has worked his way down the African continent, from Egypt southward, by doing one-man street performances of Shakespeare with puppets of his own manufacture. Indeed, there is an item about him in one of the morning papers, together with a photograph of himself and his Lady Macbeth puppet. He shows this to me with some pride, but also with some disgust—he’s on the point of leaving for Cape Town, and only now do they write about him in the paper! However, he and his friend are more preoccupied by their car than by the question of publicity: most of the oil has leaked out of the oil pan and they don’t know what to do, as all garages and gas stations are closed on Saturdays and Sundays, as part of an energy-saving-and-prep-aration-for-sanctions campaign. After some telephoning, they manage to find someone who has a can of oil in his house, and they drive off to get it. The girl goes with them. By this time she has put a white shirt over her bra.

I am left with the newspaper given to me by the peripatetic puppeteer. On another page there is an item headed “Half-Naked Patient Scandal.” It describes how a Dr. Theo Fairly conducts examinations on female black “workseekers” on behalf of Edenvale municipality. (Dr. Fairly of Eden-vale: what names!) The women are completely stripped in one another’s presence during the examination. Dr. Fairly sees nothing wrong with this procedure. “Natives are more communal, and don’t mind,” he explains. The Sunday Times waxes very indignant over this utterance: doing good, exposing an abuse, and producing a salacious story, all at the same time.

(As a result of the report, Edenvale municipality announced a few days later that it was going to spend 800 rand² on providing curtains and cubicles in the room where the examinations take place.)

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The media. Contrary to what many people abroad imagine, the South African press does not at all resemble that of, say, the Soviet Union. The English-language press is hostile to the government’s internal policies and has strong reservations about its policies elsewhere in Africa, and it does not hesitate to say so vociferously. Even the Afrikaans press, which is essentially part of the government machine, occasionally expresses delicately phrased criticisms of aspects of current policy. The real paradox of the press in South Africa, which I have never seen anyone remark upon, is that the regulations governing publication appear to permit a greater freedom of comment than they do of the reporting of facts. A friend who holds a senior position on one of the Johannesburg dailies told me it was “a nightmare” trying to keep within the laws that lay down what could or could not be reported about incidents of interracial violence, or conditions in prison, or the activities of “banned” persons. The risks that journalists run are considerable, as has been shown by the number of black reporters who have been arrested; or by the cases of Donald Woods, formerly editor of the East London Daily Despatch, who is now in exile, and of Percy Qoboza, formerly editor of the black newspaper, World, now in jail.

By contrast, the official radio and television news services are completely subservient to government policy. The television service, while technically of high standard, is of interest for one reason only: as an illustration of the extraordinary insensitivity of the government in its dealings with the majority of the country’s inhabitants—or perhaps I should say of the extraordinary intensity with which it clings to its own unrealities. Though 80 per cent of the country’s population is black, you simply never see a black face on the television screen, outside of the occasional news program or documentary (from which they can’t be entirely excluded, because they do, after all, walk about in the streets). Blacks, or Coloreds, or Indians never appear on the variety shows, the panel games, the plays, the serials; their opinions are never canvased in programs on economic affairs or on the dangers of pollution. As far as the television service is concerned, they just do not exist.

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Johannesburg Sunday (Continued). The center of town was deserted; everything closed. The general impression was one that combined in curious fashion tawdriness and bleakness. No open spaces; no monuments of any consequence; no river; no striking natural features; only narrow streets with buildings crammed on too-small plots, and plastered with advertising signs. One is inevitably reminded of a medium-sized American city; indeed, all over South Africa one is reminded far more of the United States than of Europe. Yet what can be called the palette of colors, from sky to brickwork, is different; distinctively African. Here and there bits of old “colonial” Johannesburg still remain: some twiddly Victorian façades, some faintly Delhi-like buildings, with colonnades, and palm trees planted squarely in front of them. (Though the inevitable corrugated iron roof above rather spoils the effect.)

Driving beneath an overpass, through the old vegetable market—now being tarted up into theaters and artists’ studios, etc., like other old vegetable markets all over the world—we came into a battered but much more populous area. Only Africans were to be seen here. Evidently one of the black, separatist, “Zionist” churches had been holding an open-air meeting of some kind, and now the congregants were streaming toward the buses that would take them home. (These churches are universally called “Zionist,” by the blacks themselves, incidentally; despite the obloquy heaped on “Zionism” at the UN and elsewhere, this appellation remains unchanged.) The men wore khaki jackets, with metal stars and small ribbons on their lapels; the women were gorgeous in long white skirts and red or green blouses with mystic letters and symbols embroidered upon them. All of them were healthy looking and walked with a fine stride; some were singing. None of them so much as glanced at us. (This invisibility conferred on me by my white skin was something I was to become more familiar with later.) The only other interlopers among the blacks were occasional carloads of rather apprehensive-seeming Indians, family groups coming home from their Sunday drives. They certainly did stare curiously at us, in striking contrast to the Africans.

In an indescribably rundown area of disused railway lines, abandoned workshops, nameless sheds, potholed pavements, boarded-up shops, dead-end streets, and a few drunken blacks squatting motionless on street corners, my guide stopped his car. We had halted in front of a narrow, box-like structure two or three stories high. Some of the windows in front were broken; to the right there was an iron gate, with wheels along the top, that looked as if it hadn’t been rolled open for years. Down one side of the building, which was painted in an awful pale blue distemper, ran three-dimensional letters of yellow plaster, in artdeco style. They spelled out: THE CRYSTAL CREAMERY. It was the business my father had owned when I was born.

I have no recollections of ever having seen the place before; he had sold the business just before my fourth birthday, and then moved his family down to Kimberley. But I do have vivid memories of his recollections of that period—which he always spoke of as the very worst of his adult life. He had taken the business over at the depth of the Depression; credit was impossible to get; customers were few, and never paid their bills; the machinery constantly broke down; a child died.

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Pilgrimage. A few days later I visited yet another of the many places in which my father had lived and worked before I was born. This one, too, I had never seen previously. Driving across the Western Transvaal to the newly established Republic of BophutoTswana (of which more below), I stopped the car at a small railway station called Bodenstein. My father had kept a store there for a year or two, before World War I.

The place had obviously changed little since his day. Here was the small station building; here an abandoned, boarded-up shop, with a little stoop and an awning in front of it, which I assumed to have been his; there a couple of railwaymen’s cottages. There was a newer, larger, slightly smarter store farther down the dirt road—still the only shop, on the only road, of which Bodenstein could boast. There was also a giant grain elevator next to the railway line, which had certainly not been there in his day.

For miles we had been traveling through prosperous corn fields, each tall green row that stretched away from the road turning, with our passage, like the spoke of a wheel. My father had tried his hand at growing corn, too, in that district; he’d grown impatient with the shop and taken to farming instead. But drought had beaten him; then the war had broken out, and he had gone into the army.

Anyhow, all his vicissitudes had ended in the Kimberley Jewish cemetery, which I also visited later. It was very hot: as hot as only Kimberley in the summer, in January, can be. Tall cypresses scented the air, and threw black shadows straight ahead of them. The earth was parched. Tombstones all around bore names I could remember from my childhood: people I had seen in shul, or standing in front of their shops, or driving in their cars to visit their patients, or waiting for the show to begin in one of the town’s two movie houses, on a Saturday evening. All silent now. Harvested. When I had read about the “organic community” as a student, and had conscientiously bewailed its loss, it had never occured to me that these people, from whose company I had fled, constituted as much of a community as I was ever likely to know.

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The mood. To say that most of the people I spoke to were apprehensive or pessimistic about the future is to put it moderately. In fact, some of the talk about imminent “revolution” I heard struck me as positively self-indulgent—especially when it came from people sitting in air-conditioned offices in smart executive suites, or dabbling their feet in their swimming pools, in the midst of green acres. It even occurred to me that some of those people would find the boredom and guilt of their lives intolerable if they weren’t sustained by the thought of the revolution ahead.

Of course I am speaking here about a particular class: wealthy, Englsh-speaking, Jewish in some part, professional, intellectual. Why they feel guilty perhaps needs no explanation at this stage. But the boredom? Well, their wealth, their tastes, their sense of what they are entitled to, their travels abroad, all make them hanker after something other than the banal, narrow, provincial culture available to them. That the culture can be described in these terms is due not only to the country’s geographical isolation, its colonial past, and the relative sparseness of its population, but also to the acts of a government which has deliberately tried to isolate people from what is happening abroad, and has done its best to prevent the emergence of any kind of artistic or intellectual creativity among the blacks.

So when you have swum in your swimming pool, and eaten the meal prepared for you and washed up by your servants, and spent five minutes over the newspaper or some rubbishy television program—what else can you do? Make your own flesh creep.

In fairness, I should add that more intellectual and professional whites are in fact leaving the country than ever before. Even the government press has acknowledged the seriousness of this loss of highly skilled manpower. They go to the United States, to Australia, to Israel, to Great Britain. But the favorite destination of today’s émigrés is Canada. (Hence the joke: How do South Africans pronounce Toronto? Answer: To-run-to.) A second, contradictory point is that I met several young white men and women of liberal or radical disposition who declared to me with a firmness I don’t recall encountering among people of my generation that they would never leave, come what may.

As for the mood of the blacks: here I noticed a change even greater than that among the whites. I was last in South Africa just two years ago—i.e., six months before the riots in Soweto (Johannesburg) and the other black townships outside the major cities, which were suppressed with such ferocity (600 or more dead). On that previous visit, as on earlier occasions, I had been repeatedly touched and surprised by how much genuine warmth and curiosity and openness there still was across the color line. (I am wily and experienced enough, I do believe, to distinguish warmth from the obsequiousness of habit or fear, which one still encounters.) But that warmth is all gone, certainly gone from one’s casual contacts, and even more strikingly from one’s contacts with people to whom one has been formally introduced. Those blacks who aren’t obsequious just don’t want to know, as the saying goes. They don’t see you. When they have to look at you, they do so with a wariness and sullenness that is quite new and unmistakable. I encountered it again and again; and people who live in the country confirmed the observation. For the very first time I felt in the atmosphere something resembling the hatred among many blacks that people outside the country imagine to have been there for decades.

It is difficult to guess what the mass of whites make of this, or whether they have even noticed it. They have certainly been buying guns on an unprecedented scale. With these guns they now shoot their mistresses, lovers, fathers, and business partners. The papers are full of such cases.

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Some prospects. Since the Soweto uprisings, the country has never wholly returned to the silence and calm of which the authorities used to be so proud. During the entire period of my visit, bus burnings and school burnings were going on in the black township outside Port Elizabeth. The secondary-school children of Soweto have simply refused to enroll for the new school year. There have been bomb blasts in Johannesburg and elsewhere. Some assassinations of police informers and collaborators have taken place. The guerrilla war on the Angolan border exacts a small but steady toll of casualties.

But does any of this, or all of this, or even more of it, amount to a revolution, or indicate a revolution to be imminent? Surely not. The police and army can contain the mobs easily enough (even without massacring them), especially since one consequence of the apartheid policy has been the isolation of the black residential areas miles away from the city centers. The attempts to launch a campaign of urban terror made so far have been rather ineffective, even compared, say, with the IRA’s assaults on London of a couple of years ago, let alone those which have been inflicted on Belfast. The blacks are divided tribally and linguistically, ill-educated, lacking experience in large-scale organization, and terrorized by the criminal elements in their midst. The political police (the Special Branch and the Bureau of State Security) are efficient and determined; and it has been clear since the death of some twenty-odd prisoners under interrogation, within the last year or so, that anything they do will be condoned by the authorities. And the bald, high plateau which occupies most of the interior is distinctly unpromising terrain for guerrilla warfare—whatever conditions may be like on the Angolan border, hundreds of miles from South African territory proper.

So why the anxieties spoken of above? Why the great increase in the size of the country’s army? Why the concomitant expenditures on submarines, strike aircraft, missiles, and the rest? There are many reasons, and they are quite good ones: almost as good as those I have given to suggest that the government can hold its position indefinitely. The new mood of the blacks, especially the young ones, is a fact as well as a mood. It acquires a much greater degree of significance than it might otherwise have because of what is happening beyond the country’s borders. Rhodesia and Namibia will soon “go black,” one way or another, probably within the coming year. The UN is hostile and the possibility of sanctions—of an oil embargo in particular—is taken very seriously. The Western powers, who have invested heavily in South Africa, and to whom South Africa would naturally turn for protection, have shown no inclination to come to its aid. Above all, the Russians—through their Cuban proxies in Angola, and in their own right elsewhere—have entered Southern Africa, and no one knows how important this move is to them, or how much they are prepared to risk on it. But everyone in South Africa does know that most of the blacks there would welcome the Russians, however misguidedly in the longer term, as liberators, and would do everything they could to help them.

My own opinion, for what it’s worth, is that a direct military assault on South Africa by Communist forces, or Communist-supported forces, is extremely unlikely. Distance, a paucity of communications, and some very uninviting deserts are in themselves deterrents, not to speak of the South African army or of the alarm that such a move would arouse in Europe and the United States. It seems more likely that the Russians at the moment want no more than to have sympathetic regimes installed in Namibia and Rhodesia—and then to see what might become possible later. Hence the support they are giving to SWAPO and to the Rhodesian Patriotic Front. However, I have heard from what is called a “reliable source” that the South African military planners are “obsessed” with the dangers from the north. Perhaps they have such an obsession because that is in the nature of military planners. Or perhaps it is because they are conscious of the resentment that is banked up behind them.

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Two archeological expeditions. The Sterkfontein caves, near Krugersdorp, are almost as famous in anthropological circles as the Olduvai Gorge in Kenya. “The region,” the Encyclopaedia Britannica tells us, “is one of dry, grassy hills, little changed from their condition one million years ago.” It was there that the skulls of Australopithecus (“gracile and manlike . . . found only in Africa”) as well as of the more widely distributed Paranthropus were discovered by scientists from Witwatersrand University. Unfortunately, on the afternoon we went there, only one group of caves was open for our inspection: steep, cool shafts which smelled of water and were utterly black within, except for one that glowed with a distant light. A proper cave for cavemen to live in. To get there we had traveled along one of the main routes parallel to the gold-bearing Reef: thirty miles of small stores, big discount houses, bicycle shops, mine dumps, mine headframes, bluegum plantations, public parks, “The Mona Lisa Fish and Chips,” garages, new housing tracts, and so forth. Australopithecus would have been impressed, I’m sure.

The other expedition was to an abandoned mine on the outskirts of Johannesburg. I was taken there by a girl who wanted to rent one of the cottages of corrugated iron (walls, roof, the lot) erected by the mining company for its white employees ninety years ago. Such cottages have now acquired period charm, it seems. For me, who grew up in Kimberley, another mining town, the sight of those cottages, and of everything around them, was like suddenly being immersed head first in my earliest memories; it was a return to my deepest notions of what the world is really supposed to look like. There should be huge mounds of sterile soil extracted from the earth, at the end of every vista; narrow-gauge rails running to no destination through groves of bluegums; pieces of heavy sheet metal put down as temporary bridges across culverts, and left there forever; a pipe of immense bore snaking for miles across the countryside, only to end gaping stupidly at the air, with an ignominious trickle of water hanging from its lower lip; random bits of masonry sticking out of the ground, some of them of an elaborate, quasi-Roman kind, with arches and buttresses; corrugated iron sheds rusting away quietly, each sheet a different color from its neighbor, as if on a patchwork bedspread.

Such sights, as I say, had once been familiar enough. But never before had I been free to wander about their source, at the mine-head, as I pleased. Now I could do so. Everything was still there: the Eiffel Tower-like headframe, from which hung the giant skip cars that had once brought up the ore; the wheels and motors which had wound them up; the shaft itself, covered with a concrete deck on which, as on a tombstone, were incised the words, No. 7 Vertical Shaft; the pump-house, with its great valves. There were buildings of brick, of wood, and of iron, all connected with one another by ladders and walkways, like the decks of a ship; on every wall there were warnings or instructions: In Case of Fire Underground Report Immediately to Nearest Surface Banksman. Lowering of Fuse: 9:30 A.M.

Ten years ago, I spent a morning down a Zambian copper mine. It had taken my back and thigh muscles a week to recover from the experience; longer still for my memory to get over the shock of the depth, the heat, the darkness, the claustrophobia, the unbelievable noise of giant drills cutting into the rock face at the end of stony black slits or pouches you had to crawl to get into. At a mile and more beneath the ground we were now standing on, such activity had gone on day after day, for almost a century. Without it, and without the same activity in scores of similar places, there would be no Johannesburg, no Soweto, no factories, no highways, no chain of Reef towns running east and west for fifty miles. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say there would be no country remotely resembling, socially and politically, the one that exists today.

Now birds sang nonstop from trees. Tall spears of grass grew over roadways. We had the place to ourselves. Until, that is, we turned and found ourselves surrounded by policemen, who had emerged from nowhere. Two were in ordinary uniform, one in camouflage. Later I saw that they had parked their vehicle a long way off, and expertly crept up on foot upon us. They were polite but very firm. We were told to clear off at once. We obeyed.

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Dinner party. The meal was delicious. The wine had a characteristic Cape mildness. Knives and forks winked in the candlelight. Our hollow-cheeked, vivacious hostess served up our portions with the help of a silent, swaying, uniformed maid. During dinner we talked of books, and of the career someone was making for himself in New Haven, Connecticut. Everything was comme il faut, absolutely. After dinner we retired to the sitting room for coffee, brandy, chocolates. Then, from the front door, came knocks, rings, and loud African voices, one male and one female, raised in dispute. Our host and hostess departed to investigate. The male voice rose louder than before. “I see dis gel in de room. Who she? What she?” To this, the female voice replied with a fierce storm of Zulu. Then, both at once. Our host and hostess’s voices joined in, pacifyingly. The noise was suddenly cut off by slamming doors. Our hostess returned, distraught. “The horror of it! The humiliation! Everything in this country turns into a torment!”

The story, it appeared, was that her maid had a friend illegally staying in her room, and the night watchman of the apartment building had found this out. (The servants lived in little rooms on the top of the building.) Now he was demanding that the stranger be kicked out at once, or he would inform the police. The maid, in turn, was accusing him of being so officious only because he had twice tried unsuccessfully to rape her. Both maid and watchman were drunk, according to our hosts.

Thereafter the conversation became exclusively political. Or sociological. Goodbye literature. Goodbye the West End theater. Even gossip, goodbye.

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The grand theory of apartheid according to its proponents (Current Version). For historical reasons it has clearly become impossible to regard the black man, as he was once universally seen to be, as the white man’s ward and inferior. The blacks in South Africa are now as fully entitled to govern themselves as any other group in the continent. But so are the whites! The evidence of all history shows that attempts at power-sharing between groups so dissimilar, culturally and racially, as the blacks and whites in South Africa are bound to fail. Therefore, the country must be divided or unscrambled, politically and territorially. A number of black “Bantustans” or “homelands” must be established, on ethnic or linguistic lines, and given their complete independence.

This great work of reconstruction has already begun, with the grant of independence to the Republic of the Transkei in 1976, and to the Republic of BophutoTswana in December 1977. So far, South Africa is the only country in the world that has recognized the independence of these two republics; everyone else has regarded them as being quite without political substance. But one day they will become universally accepted. Eventually, all the blacks in Southern Africa will be citizens of one or another of such republics. Those who continue to work in what remains of “white” South Africa will have the same status as do Gastarbeiter (“guest workers”) in Western Europe, and will have no more claim on political rights in South Africa than a Turk, say, who works in Amsterdam has in Holland. The efforts that have already been made in “white” South Africa to desegregate facilities that have long been segregated, like five-star hotels, park benches, railway stations, and so forth, are aspects of the process of the normalization of relations among all the separate national communities which are now coming into existence.

Admittedly, there are difficulties in bringing this policy to fruition. It does perhaps seem unfair that even after the great plan has been fully put into effect, four million whites will be left with 87 per cent of the country’s present area, including its agriculturally richest land and almost all its mineral wealth, while eighteen million blacks will be left with the rest. But that’s how history has divided the place up. It also may seem unfair that because of the pattern of white landowning, only one or two of the new black republics will possess or consist of a consolidated piece of land of any size. BophutoTswana, for example, is made up of no less than six small islands of territory, scattered in random fashion across many hundreds of miles of the provinces of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Indeed, if the Republic of BophutoTswana were to try to exercise control over entrance to and egress from its sovereign territory, a large part of its population would have to be engaged in customs and border control.

These problems are relatively minor, however, compared with the fact that millions of the blacks who live and work in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, and the rest have been born there, have never seen their “homelands,” and have no intention of ever going to live in them, if they can possibly help it. Moreover, Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban would simply cease to exist, economically, without their labor. (One can imagine Amsterdam without its Turks, not Johannesburg without its blacks.) Also to be considered is the fact that though five-star hotels may have been desegregated, the government has not the slightest intention of doing away with the Group Areas Act, say, which determines exactly where these Gastarbeiter must live; there is the fact that the blacks are wholly unwilling to accept the “passports” issued by the new republics as a sign of their new citizenship, and that severe sanctions have to be used to compel them to do so; there is the problem of what to do with the two million Cape Coloreds and the million Indians, for whom even more elaborate constitutional provisions are now being devised.

But what can you do? The world is an imperfect place. The white man in South Africa is not a “colonial” who can go elsewhere. (The Dutch-speaking ancestors of the Afrikaners arrived in the Cape three hundred years ago.) The whites are entitled to make sure of their survival. They have a right to exercise sole control over their own destiny. Give them time. Have faith in their good intentions. Look at what is happening in the rest of Africa.

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Mmbatho, Capital of the Republic of Bophutotswana. It is quite simple to get to Mmbatho from Johannesburg. You drive about two hundred miles straight westward, until you reach Mafeking. During the Anglo-Boer war, Mafeking was besieged by the Boers; on the night the siege was lifted, London enjoyed one of the wildest nights of revelry in its history. It seems hard to imagine why, when you see the place: it is dry, hot, dusty, isolated, quite without charm, even by the standards of the average South African dorp. Anyway, once in Mafeking, you ask the nearest African on a street corner how to get to the new capital city. He answers: “Go to the next robot (i.e., traffic light), and turn right. Then turn left at the Total Garage.”

Following his instructions, you soon leave Mafeking behind and travel for about a mile and a half across the bare, blistered Northern Cape veld, which stretches absolutely flat and uncultivated to the horizon, in a great arc around you. There are some thornbushes on its surface, some ant hills, a little dry grass. The sun bakes down, as it does the whole summer through. On the right, in the distance, you can see a few huts: the usual mud-walled affairs with the usual strips of corrugated iron on top, weighed down by boulders. On the left, rising improbably out of the wilderness, is a structure composed wholly of scaffolding, in the shape of a stadium. Then you come to a crossroads. On one side of it is a Shell gas station. On the other, the Mmbatho Sun Hotel. Nothing else. And when I say nothing else, I am not using a figure of speech. I mean, nothing else.

Inevitably, you park your car in the hotel parking lot. A garden is being laid out: so far it consists of bare earth, several prickly pears, a few aloes, and many empty beer cans. The hotel itself is a white stucco creation, with black tiles above: Mexico-Tswanan in style. A plaque under the portico informs you that it was opened 9.12.1977 by Lucas M. Mangope, Moporositente (President) wa Repuboleki BaphutoTswana Ka. Inside the hotel, the sun is banished; the blessing of air conditioning receives you. Behind the reception desk stand any number of excited Tswana girls, dressed up in smart yellow uniforms. To the right is a bar and a shop; directly in front of you, a small, thickly carpeted, brightly lit depression, containing row upon row of one-armed bandits. It is crammed with white South Africans, in sports shirts and sleeveless blouses, excitedly pulling the levers.

They are quite as thrilled with themselves as the black girls behind the counter. Gambling is forbidden within the Republic of South Africa; but now they are “abroad.” What with the piped music, the bells ringing every time a handle is pulled down, and the occasional clatter of coins being disgorged, the noise is unendurable. On the far side of this hole, there is an airless gaming room, complete with traditional green, baize-covered tables and heavily shaded lights. Some blackjack and roulette is going on listlessly: it is now 2 P.M., and even the most newly-arrived Johannes-burger, agog to play, is feeling the effect of the food and drink he had for lunch.

This place, flung down in the middle of nowhere, is one of the most bizarre I have ever seen in my life. The capital of the Republic of Bophuto-Tswanal When one thinks of Soweto and its million or more inhabitants, living in those endless lines of identical little brick and asbestos houses that march for mile upon mile across the veld to the south of Johannesburg, the closest analogy one can make is this: it is as if a quarter or a third of the blacks of New York have been told that a single hotel in Las Vegas is henceforth to be their capital city, the focus of their patriotism, and the place in which all their civic and political ambitions are to be realized.

What makes it even more bizarre is that all the people taking advantage of these wonderful facilities are white: with only one exception. A large black man is feeding money into one of the machines, watched by a small, admiring claque of locals, who are too poor to gamble themselves, and too timid to stand and gape at the whites. So they cluster around him, while he performs—and loses.

The final bizarre touch, for me at any rate, is that in the midst of this activity I am introduced to an elderly woman by the name of Shirley Frisch (let’s say), who is wearing a sun-suit that displays much of her freckled bosom and all of her freckled arms. “My late husband Harry often talked of you,” she tells me; shouts at me, rather, above the chiming bells and machine-gun disgorgements of coins. Harry Frisch? From nowhere I remember a small, round boy in gray shorts, a couple of classes below me at school; for some reason I recall particularly the silver buckle of the belt that held up those shorts. Now he has been transmogrified into the late husband of this lady. What can I say? “I’m very sorry.” It hardly seems adequate.

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Having Fun at the Mmbatho Sun. That is the legend printed on the T-shirts you can buy in the hotel shop; above the lettering is a picture of some men and women in old-fashioned evening dress standing at a roulette table. You can also have a drink at the bar, which is decorated (rather strangely, considering the fate of so many Tswana migrant laborers in Johannesburg) with mining helmets, picks, and safety lamps. You can swim in the swimming pool, in the middle of a sun-dazzled courtyard, which has a convenience quite new to me: all around the pool, embedded in the ground like tombstones in a cemetery, are white, upright, plastic headrests for the sunbathers, with a foam-rubber mattress stretched out in front of each. (Perhaps this is standard equipment in the Bahamas nowadays; I can’t tell.) You can “Dine With the Stars” (“Ben E. King, Direct from the U.S.A.!”) for an extra 15 rand. You can speak to “Brian” about tennis and swimming lessons.

But eventually the pleasures of the hotel pall, and you plunge back into the heat and barrenness outside. This time you return to Mafeking not by the direct route you took before, but by the other of the two roads outside. This one is called the Lucas Mangope highway. A great bronze plaque by the roadside tells you so. Nothing is built up alongside it. It too runs away into the emptiness. Crows sit on top of telegraph poles. A barefoot girl drags away a dried thornbush for firewood. Some donkeys stand in the middle of the highway, declining to move. Eventually you reach the railway line: it runs straight north to Botswana, Rhodesia, Zambia. On the other side of the line, the road curves toward that skeletal grandstand, where the independence celebrations took place a few weeks before. Now it is deserted. Being made of builders’ scaffolding, it could be dismantled in a night. (Probably it will be, soon; and reassembled elsewhere, for the celebration of the independence of the next Bantustan.)

Beyond it, some construction work is going on behind a tall security fence of mesh and barbed wire. They are building elaborate houses there for President Mangope and his entourage: cabinet ministers and the white “advisers” sent out by the South African government. (All of them paid for by South Africa.) They are also building a parliament for President Mangope: a red and yellow structure of glass and steel girders which clearly owes something in its design, so help me, to the Pompidou Arts Center in Paris. We are allowed to glimpse it only from afar, for the one gate we can find in the outer fence is securely locked, and there is no one in sight.

Beyond all this, in turn, is the Mafeking “location” or black township: Mafeking’s own little Soweto. It is the usual mess of homemade mud huts, or tiny municipal boxes of brick or concrete; unpaved roads; attempts at gardens in the dust; junked cars; naked black infants; older children fetching water in paraffin tins; tumbledown trading stores; crowds of people walking to or from the town itself. It goes on and on, until you arrive at Mafeking railway station. At that point, as you cross the railway bridge, you have left the Republic of BophutoTswana and reentered the Republic of South Africa. There is no frontier or border post to tell you this. (Nor was there one to mark the frontier on the other road.) When you look behind, you can see the flag of the new republic hanging down limply above a cluster of hospital buildings. It is blue, with an orange stripe, and a cheetah’s head in one corner.

Whether any system can ever be devised to enable all of South Africa’s peoples to live together in a reasonable degree of dignity and amity is doubtful indeed; it is even more doubtful that such a system would ever be put into effect. But to imagine a place like this to be the answer! It is just a joke in rather bad taste. Or, as a newly enfranchised citizen of the republic—with a broom in his hand and a pair of overalls on his back—had said to me in his halting English, before my visit: “It is just to crook the people.”

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The Land of Goshen. One curious fact about the part of the country around Mafeking is that it actually has a history of tin-pot republics having been declared there. BophutoTswana is not the first such entity it has seen. A hundred years ago, two tiny, independent Boer republics were proclaimed in the area. One was called Stellaland (after its capital, Stella, a dorp even smaller than Mafeking, and about fifty miles south of it); the other, Goshen, after the place in the wilderness where the Children of Israel had once sojourned. Neither republic lasted long; neither was ever recognized by anyone else—not even by the founders’ fellow Boers.

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Lichtenburg and Vryburg. Lichtenburg, which I passed through on the way to Mmbatho, was wholly new to me; Vryburg I had visited during my last year at school, with a rugby team that had played a game there. I mention these two undistinguished places because in their different ways they both represent what the Afrikaners still like to think of as their heartland, even though most Afrikaners now live in the big cities. Lichtenburg is set in the prosperous corn belt; Vryburg in harsher, dryer, cattle-ranching country. Both have branches of the Standard Bank, the OK Bazaars, the local agricultural cooperative, and garages selling Volkswagens and Toyotas; both have brand new Dutch Reformed churches, with very thin steeples; in both there are expensive, new municipal buildings, and rather parched but beautifully maintained public gardens, with monuments scattered about in them. They also have several Portuguese-owned fish-and-chips shops, which sell fruit, canned goods, cigarettes, candies, and copies of Popular Mechanics and True Confessions. The houses are almost all low, whitewashed cottages with iron roofs; each invariably stands in the middle of a wire-fenced garden, where a few fruit trees (peaches, figs) and flowering shrubs do their best.

At all times, inside these dorps, one is conscious of the spaces around them, and of the even bigger spaces above—at night, too, when great bands of stars hang directly overhead, African fashion. Both are quiet, orderly, neat in appearance, allowing for some straggle. By day they are fairly busy, mostly because of the blacks who come in from the surrounding district to get their provisions. By night, the only blacks you see are the waiters who stand idly on the stoops of the small, two-storied hotels, with trays in their hands.

What is more poignant about such places—their forlornness, or their attempt at spruceness? The social, cultural, and aesthetic thinness that is somehow revealed in every line; or the pertinacity with which those lines have been drawn?

In Lichtenburg there were no less than three monuments to the Boers who had fought in the Anglo-Boer war. One of them was to General de la Rey, a great hero and campaigner, shown more than life-size on his horse, with a fierce whip in his hand. (Not a riding crop, a whip.) There was also a monument to the Afrikaans language: the only monument I have ever come across erected to their language by the people who speak it. It is in the shape of a globe, made of silver mosaic tiles: out of the top of the globe appears a pair of hands clutching a book in prayer-like manner. Around the globe is an inscription in metal letters, which explains the monument’s shape and color: ‘n Pêrel van Groot Waarde-AFRIKAANS (A Pearl of Great Worth—AFRIKAANS). At some distance from these there is another monument, erected not by grateful townsfolk, but by the family of those it commemorates. It is in memory of David and Rosa Rothschild: “Pioneers of Lichtenburg.”

The monuments I remember best from Vryburg are outside the town. As you approach it from the north, you pass a big roadside sign with an arrow pointing to the right: Bantoe Woongebied (Black Living Area). Then another sign with an arrow to the left: Colored Living Area. Then a third notice: Asiatic Living Area. Then, and only then, does a fourth sign appear. It says: Welcome To Vryburg.

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The Jews. One distinctive feature of the history of the South African Jewish community is that the immigrants who arrived at the turn of the century scattered across the length and breadth of country. Not the tiniest place but had at least one and often several Jewish shopkeepers and traders. Hence David and Rosa Rothschild, pioneers of Lichtenburg. Hence “The Simon Lillienthal Guildhall” in Vryburg.

Those days are now gone. The community has concentrated itself in the cities—Johannesburg, from its very foundation, having always been the main center of attraction. Though its numbers are tiny by American standards (about 130,000 people) and are not growing, the community is wealthy, well-organized, and disproportionately prominent in the commercial, professional, and intellectual life of the country. (Just the other day, the London Times, in an article about white emigration from South Africa, spoke of Jews “dominating” its medical profession—which is an exaggeration, but not a great exaggeration.)

Relations between the Jews and the Nationalist government have always been correct, if more than a little strained on occasion. Quite apart from any other grounds for mutual misgiving, the Jews have not forgotten the support the Nationalists got from, and gave to, Nazi Germany forty years ago; the Afrikaners have not forgiven the Jews for their wealth, their proneness to liberal attitudes toward the blacks, and the disproportionate number of them to be found in the banned radical and underground organizations. These strains are both complicated and relieved by the ups and downs of the relations between South Africa and the state of Israel—these have had an “up” phase recently—as well as by the admiration the Afrikaners feel for the Israelis. Precisely as their pious, trekking, Boer forebears saw themselves as the wandering Israelites in search of the Promised Land, so the Afrikaners today like to see themselves as the Israelis of Africa: alone in a hostile continent, and determined to maintain themselves there against all odds. This sense of admiration or identification is so strong that one sometimes gets the impression that the Afrikaners don’t really mind if Jewish doctors and engineers who despair of South Africa’s future pack up and leave for Israel. It’s the ones who head for New Haven, Connecticut, who really get their goat.

Just how correct the government tries to be in its dealings with the Jews is evidenced by a curious document which I have in front of me. Headed, “Kosher Facilities in the South African Defense Forces,” it advises Jewish boys drafted into the army that they can apply to be posted to certain units in which kosher kitchens have been made available. Obviously this facility is promised to them only in their training camps, not on the Angolan border.

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Realpolitik, Realism, and Morals. While Angola and Mozambique were still within the Portuguese empire, South Africa clearly followed a “forward” policy toward its neighbors: it hoped to maintain a cordon sanitaire of white-ruled states around it. To this end, it had troops (militarized police units) taking part in the slaughterous guerrilla war in Rhodesia. Once the Portuguese empire collapsed, after the coup in metropolitan Portugal, this policy seems to have been abandoned. South Africa then apparently concluded that its interests lay in the establishment of moderate, friendly, black states on its borders, preferably in cooperation with whatever allies it could find elsewhere in Africa, and with the Western powers. Troops were withdrawn from Rhodesia, and Ian Smith’s white government there was urged to accept the prospect of majority (black) rule. Plans to set up an apartheid-type state in Namibia, complete with self-governing, ethnic “homelands,” and other such familiar ingenuities, were abandoned. Even the unhappy venture in Angola, when South African troops were betrayed (as the white South Africans see it) by the United States, after they had gone in to defeat the Cuban-backed MPLA, was a part of this policy: the South Africans were fighting to put into power a black, anti-Communist government which would be well-disposed to them. In fighting off SWAPO, they are now attempting to do the same thing in Namibia; and they are hoping that Ian Smith will find black successors to himself who will keep the Russian-supported Patriotic Front out of power in Rhodesia.

All this, the white South Africans are convinced, is to the advantage both of South Africa and of the Western powers. So why are these powers not actively assisting South Africa? Why are Britain and the United States so anxious to placate SWAPO, and to woo the Rhodesian Patriotic Front? Rhodesia is a rich prize; Namibia an even richer one, potentially at least; of South Africa itself one can say not only that it supplies the world with most of its gold, platinum, and diamonds, and has almost immeasurable resources of uranium, manganese, chrome, iron, and coal, but also that there is hardly a major European or American manufacturing corporation which does not have a plant in the republic. So why is South Africa execrated, shunned, denied the arms it needs, left to shoulder alone the burden of combating Communism in the southern half of the continent?

Because of apartheid? Because the blacks of Soweto, many of whom have only just emerged from a semi-tribal state, are denied social and political privileges which the whites of Johannesburg enjoy? Are these adequate reasons, in a world torn by great-power rivalries, to deny friendship and assistance to the most powerful and highly developed state on the continent, with resources of trained manpower and technological skills that none of the others has even begun to approach; with a government that is only too eager to encourage and reward foreign investment; with a record of stability on the highest levels that few other African countries can emulate—no coups, no cabinet ministers found floating in rivers, no judges beaten to death with hammers?

The argument can be carried further; or put in other terms. Even if one agrees that the latest developments in the policy of apartheid are fraudulent, and that the “separate freedoms” granted to BophutoTswana and the rest are a hoax; even if one takes it for granted that the intention of the whites of South Africa is simply to hang on for dear life to everything they’ve got—wherein, in that respect, are they different from anybody else? What easily identifiable group would willingly yield its power and privileges to a majority which is alien in appearance, languages, and manners; which is far less educated than the minority; and which is manifestly less well-equipped to run the country? What minority in such circumstances would not fear for its very existence if power were transferred, rapidly or slowly, to the majority? (Especially when there is so long-standing a history of conflict between them?) And if the indefinite retention of power involves fraud, brutality, cynicism, discrimination, dictatorial methods, torture in prison, occasional bloodshed in the streets—well, does anyone imagine that the process of securing a transfer of power will not produce all these too, and worse? And who can seriously hope that those who eventually take over will be lovers of liberty and friends of the powerless? The world abounds with regimes as repressive or more repressive than that of South Africa; why should South Africa be singled out for universal condemnation?

All the questions just asked above are impossible to answer in a confidently reassuring manner. But the answer one must give to the last does affect one’s response to the others. South Africa is singular in that its citizens’ race and color—and these alone—determine by law what their civil and juridical rights will be, forever. For that very reason, arguments from Realpolitik do not necessarily work as much in South Africa’s favor as some people inside and outside the country like to imagine. For even if we ignore what is happening elsewhere in Africa, the demographic facts within South Africa itself make it clear that the present disposition of power is inherently unstable, and going to become more so as the black population continues to grow in size relative to the whites. And why should outsiders choose to support a minority, however well entrenched it now may be, when the majority is becoming more and more convinced of the possibility or inevitability of radical change?

The irony of the argument is, in fact, that a minority in such a situation is worth backing only when it expresses or embodies moral and political values which other states feel they cannot, for their own sake, allow to go under. Now, however much one may wish to sympathize with the white South Africans in the dilemma which ultimately faces them, who would claim that they, or the policies they have followed for the last thirty years, embody and express such values?

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Languages. The struggle of the Afrikaners to have Afrikaans recognized as a real language, and not regarded merely as a debased jargon of Dutch, was central to their rise as a nation. National sentiment cohered quite as much around their language as it did around the Dutch Reformed Church, or the memory of two 19th-century Boer republics in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, which were dismantled by the British after their victory in the Anglo-Boer war. When the Nationalists came into power in 1948, it must have seemed to them that the linguistic struggle, at least, had been truly won. By then they had already overtaken the English-speaking whites numerically; today they outnumber them by almost two to one.

Yet the extraordinary fact is that today English (of a kind) appears to be more widely spoken in South Africa than ever before. The reason for this is not just that most immigrants from Europe during the past quarter-century, and most of the Portuguese refugees from Angola and Mozambique during the last few years, have opted for English. What really counts is that the blacks have universally repudiated Afrikaans, which they regard quite simply as the language of their chief oppressors. The 1976 riots in Soweto, which changed everyone’s mood and expectations so dramatically, broke out when the government attempted to make the use of Afrikaans compulsory in black schools. (The demand has since been dropped.) In places like Kimberley or Vryburg, where I would have assumed that any African would speak to any white man in Afrikaans, in the first instance, I was addressed in English. Several blacks, including one who was extremely circumspect in every other regard, spoke to me of Afrikaans with undisguised loathing. If they talk or read a white man’s language, they will choose English every time it is possible for them to do so.

For liberal Afrikaners—and there are such people—and they have and need great courage, given the degree of isolation from which they suffer, within the isolation of Afrikanerdom generally—this is just another aspect of the tragedy they are living through. For other Afrikaners, it is a source of rage. However, in one minor respect all of them have become liberals linguistically; and that development, too, is a tribute to the power of English. When I lived in South Africa, the battle within Afrikaans against Anglicisms was unceasing. Now it has been abandoned. Thus one finds the Afrikaans press to be full of preposterous words—for which there are perfectly good equivalents of Dutch origin—like kulminasie (culmination) and konflik and empaaier (which I shall not translate).

I cannot speak about the health of various African tongues, for I know none of them. (The sound of murmuring or shouting but always uncomprehended voices from the kitchen or backyard or street was as much a part of my childhood as the presence of my parents or the look of the rooms we lived in.) Though it may seem fanciful to say so, my impression is that the possession of these languages, when they have been dispossessed of so much else, is a source of great strength to the blacks.

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Crossing The Kei River. If you jeer inwardly at the Republic of Bophuto-Tswana for being without border posts and frontier guards—indeed, owing to its extraordinary geography, for being without any prospect of ever enjoying these attributes of statehood—you will be duly chastised when you cross the Kei River to enter the Republic of the Transkei. That was my experience, anyway. It took forty-five minutes for my wife and me to get across this frontier—which is recognized by nobody in the world other than the two parties on either side of it.³

It was our United Kingdom passports which undid us. The whites and blacks ahead of us, bearers of South African or brand new Transkeian passports, were waved through with relatively little fuss. But when our documents were produced at the border posts—and a fine, dramatic border it is too, with the road winding down for miles through unpeopled hills before it arrives at the river—we gave everybody work to do. Work they enjoyed doing. The South Africans, one of whom had his wife and flaxen-haired toddler in the office with him, were very dapper and very polite, and gave us an elaborate form to fill out, asking when we had come to South Africa, why we had come to South Africa, where we were going now that we were leaving South Africa, and so forth. Then they permitted us to cross the narrow bridge. (A new bridge is under construction.) There the Transkeians were waiting for us. They were less dapper, less polite, and much, much less efficient.

First of all they gave my wife and me two long forms apiece to fill out. When we had done this, and handed them back across the counter, together with our passports, three policemen proceeded laboriously, with much mutual consultation in Xhosa and English, to fill out every other form they had on their desks. The smallest of the three was evidently their leader: at any rate, his word carried most weight in their consultations. He had a curious way of writing—vertically, as it were, away from himself. On one of the forms, I noticed, he had entered me as “Mr. Margaret Dunipace.” When I objected, he pointed to “Dunipace” and asked, reasonably enough, “What’s this?” I explained that it was my wife’s middle name. Whereupon, after prolonged thought, he wrote “Jacob-son” above it. More thought followed; then he added the words, “And other one.” Finally, I paid 4 rand for our visas, all the forms and our passports were heavily stamped, and we were told we could now go through. Examining the papers on the way back to the car, I noticed that one of them, stamped and signed like all the rest, was headed “Notice of Prohibition.” It announced solemnly and unequivocally: “Item One: As you are a prohibited person as defined in Section 40 (1) (c) of Act 59 of 1972, you are refused permission to enter or remain within the Republic of Transkei.”

Which of the policemen was responsible for that one? All three of them watched us blandly and impassively, like men who had done everything that could be expected of them, as we drove through.

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The Republic of the Transkei. TO be fair, this homeland does not make anything like so farcical an impression, once you are inside it, as the Republic of BophutoTswana. It has the plausibility of occupying a large and beautiful territory—not large, perhaps, in relation to the rest of the Cape Province, of which it used to be part, let alone in relation to South Africa as a whole, but nevertheless unfragmented and recognizable. It is inhabited by people who speak a common tongue (Xhosa) and recognize a certain kinship with one another, despite tribal divisions among them. It has a capital by the name of Umtata, which is hardly larger than Lichtenburg, and is much poorer, but which is graced by a tiny parliament building with columns in front and a dome above, a Holiday Inn, and a new university, of which “Phase One” is being constructed. It has an unspoiled coast line of astonishing intricacy and splendor, and hence has a small tourist industry catering to white South African vacationers. It has the K. D. Matanzima airport, named inevitably enough after its prime minister. It also has the advantage of having done away with all apartheid regulations, which comes as a relief after a couple of weeks within the rest of South Africa.

But it is bone poor. So poor that most of its adult males have to spend their working lives in the cities and farms across the frontier, where, for all the dignity supposedly conferred on them by their new passports, they are treated like any other blacks. So poor that the government is almost as dependent on South African handouts as that of BophutoTswana. The wide, fenceless spaces of the country, profusely dotted about with traditional round huts of mud and thatch, give an impression of serenity and changelessness. In fact, the place is overpopulated, overgrazed, eroded, and disease-ridden.

The people we met were on the whole no friendlier in their demeanor than the blacks of South Africa. But some of them spoke frankly to us: from the young man who despised Matanzima and his government, and said of the “independence” of the country, “It is like cutting off a man’s arm—and then telling the arm that it is independent!” to the waiter in a beat-up hotel in Umtata, who earnestly steered me away from the public bar with the words, “I never let you go in there—too cowboy in that place, too rough.” The combination everywhere of modernity with what seems to be a still relatively rooted tribal life was fascinating. One saw hooded, white-daubed, white-blanketed youths with staves plodding by the roadside; they were undergoing the initiation rite of circumcision in “schools” in the bush. One met sophisticated girls who complained of the politics of the London Daily Telegraph, and fiercely defended the rites their male contemporaries had to go through. (“They are healed with Xhosa herbs. . . . Everyone will laugh at them if they have it done in a hospital.”) The little clay models offered to passersby by half-naked children were not of animals or birds, as they used to be, but of “Mar-cades” trucks and buses. (The word spelled thus, incised into the clay.) An advertisement on the front page of the Transkei Business Directory read, simply enough: “Laura’s Fashion Boutique: Tribal Wear and Unisex.”

One carries away from the place an impression of incongruities of a more sinister kind, too. A lot of corruption is going on there: indeed, there is a sense in which corruption is not incidental to it, but can be thought of as the very purpose for which the Transkei Republic has been brought into existence. By this I don’t mean merely that despite the general level of poverty, there seemed to be a fair number of men who were sufficiently prosperous to dine with their exquisitely dressed girls in the Holiday Inn—leaving their black “Marcades” parked in front of the hotel entrance, right on the No Parking signs painted on the pavement. Nor do I mean only that Prime Minister Kaiser D. Matanzima does not permit much opposition to be expressed publicly in his splendid little parliament building, or outside it, and has been governing the country ever since independence under a wide-ranging State of Emergency—a proclamation which gives him and his brother George, who is minister of justice, the powers they need to keep things as they wish them to be.⁴ (In this task they are known, incidentally, to receive the professional help of the South African Special Branch.)

No, what really distinguishes the Transkei Republic from any other corrupt African regime is this: the beneficiaries of the system are in effect being used by the South Africans to make more palatable and acceptable to the white South Africans themselves— and perhaps to a credulous world—everything that goes on in South Africa, including the employment under apartheid conditions of hundreds of thousands of people who are supposedly Transkei citizens. In the Transkei, a possibility I had glimpsed only from a great distance in BophutoTswana became clearer to me: the possibility that the South African government is waking up to the fact that there is more than one way of skinning a cat. For the first time it seemed to have dawned on them that buying planes, tanks, armored cars, etc. is just one method of spending money on self-defense. You can also buy people. Black people. They come relatively cheap: an honorific title, a Mercedes car, access to a Holiday Inn, a palatial house on a hilltop. (Cabinet ministers’ houses were going up in expensive rows on both sides of Umtata. As in BophutoTswana: first things first.) Once there, you can rely on them to try to remain there. And you and they can thereafter enjoy with a clear conscience your “separate freedoms.”

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Port St. Johns. Still, in many respects I think I would rather be a black man in the Transkei—provided I could make a living there—than elsewhere in South Africa. Take the beach at Port St. Johns. It is one of the loveliest I have ever seen: secluded between two wild, green hillsides, and some distance from a broad estuary. On the day we were there, the beach was packed with people, almost all of them black. They sat under parasols, and played games with balls, and built sandcastles, as people do on any beach. There were girls dressed in snappy bikinis, and old ladies who mirthfully prostrated themselves on the water’s edge in bras and nylon bloomers. There were girls who walked about topless because they were so sophisticated; and others who did the same thing because they were so primitive. (The difference between the two kinds of girls was quite evident, funnily enough.) When we got back to our hotel after swimming, I found a postcard on a rack in the foyer which showed the same beach just a few years before. It was crowded then, too. But everyone on it, without exception, was white. In those days, as it still is elsewhere in South Africa, it would have been a criminal offense for any of the blacks we had seen to have appeared on the beach. (A number of cases of police harassment of Colored families on beaches in the Cape Peninsula were actually reported in the press while I was there.)

The hotel itself remained a wholly white enclave. It was the only place in the Transkei where I heard the word “baas” being used by the black staff. The guests were conventional, respectable English-speaking South Africans, with peeling noses, and with fishing rods strapped to the roofs of their cars. But there were some oddities among them: a party of four homosexual Afrikaner men, flamboyantly dressed and beautifully barbered, who went in for much play with the 20’s-style cigarette holders with which they had equipped themselves; and an unappealing family from England (also oddly 1920-ish, somehow), consisting of old-soldier father, pretty son, ugly daughter, and mother who dominated the others completely. She had the knack of speaking from the back of her throat, barely moving her lips, while emitting a louder sound than anyone else in the dining room. Outside, in its beautiful setting, Port St. Johns seemed to be slowly falling into a state of neglect and disrepair: its toy bank, toy town hall, and toy post office were all sadly in need of paint; there were broken windows in the hotel at the main intersection; black vacationers leaned over balconies upstairs and shouted at others who were sitting on the cracked pavement, or were busy getting drunk from their own half-bottles in a “tea garden and patio” nearby.

None of this would have been the case when Port St. Johns was still run by whites—neither the blacks taking advantage of its facilities, nor the air of disorder and slovenliness they had brought in with them. (The hotels and shops were all still white-owned, incidentally, like those in Umtata and elsewhere in the territory.) It puzzled me then, and puzzles me now, why the thousands of huts in their little clusters which we passed in the countryside should have looked so neat, inside and out; why the towns were all beginning to look so messy and rundown.

Then we drove the sixty miles back to Umtata: a spectacular drive, particularly near the coast, where the sides of the deep defiles were covered with trees and creepers that grew up or hung down from every fragment of soil. On the way, we picked up a bespectacled, track-suited hitchhiker, who turned out to be a clerk in the Transkei Development Corporation, and a fervent admirer of Kaiser Matanzima and “the modern situation”—which was his way of referring to the country’s independence. Notwithstanding his track suit he said, “I am very proud of that attire” when we passed some women wearing traditional long dresses and two-horned turbans. When I asked him what he did in the Development Corporation, he answered laconically, as if it were the most obvious and self-explanatory thing in the world: “Registering people.”

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Prickly Pears. NO problems arose when we crossed the border of the Republic of Transkei back into the Republic of South Africa. However, an incident I observed at the frontier post—on the South African side, this time—has stuck in my mind as somehow symboliç of the painful solemnity and absurdity of the charade that is now being played out on both sides of the Kei River.

I have already mentioned that the lofty hills surrounding the gorge through which the river runs appeared to be absolutely empty. Driving back, I again saw no one on those dry, stony, scrub-covered slopes. But there must have been habitations out there. I know this because when I was returning to my car, after having been inspected and approved by the South African border officials, I saw a party of three people walking on foot across the bridge, from the Transkei: a woman and her two barefoot children. She was carrying on her head, in traditional fashion, a large tin bowl; the children, about ten and eight years old, had smaller bowls in their arms.

No one else was about. No cars were waiting at either end. They had the bridge to themselves. I watched them make their way slowly, in the great heat, across the river. Just before they stepped off the bridge, an aged African office boy of some kind, in a tattered jacket and black peaked cap (to indicate that he, too, had official status), was sent to meet them by one of the white border guards, who had flicked a finger in their direction. The messenger éonversed with them for a few moments, then turned and led them to the waiting whites. When they were about ten yards away, he held up his hand like a traffic policeman holding up a great surge of traffic, and the woman and her two children halted behind him. Pause. Then another flick of the finger from the white official. Now they could come forward: they had been formally admitted onto South African soil. They approached the officials. The woman lifted the bowl from her head with both hands. She unfolded the cloth that covered it, and proffered its contents to them.

It contained cactus fruits. Prickly pears. So did the smaller, flatter plates carried by the children, who extended theirs too, with great timidity. None of them said a word. Nor did the black intermediary, in his important peaked cap. The white officials inspected this offering. In the distinctive voice in which Afrikaners speak to blacks—and there is such a voice; and whether its intention is kindly or angry, it is always rough—one of them said, “Oh, hell no, they’re much too green!” Another took out a pocket knife, opened it carefully, and sliced open one of the prickly pears, revealing the pink flesh and pips within the tough, warty skin. “Look at that!” he complained. “A man can’t eat that. . . . You bring them back when they’re ripe.” Then, apparently out of a feeling of compunction, he groped in his pocket and took out a copper coin, a one- or two-cent piece, and threw-it in the bowl.

The woman picked up the coin, covered the prickly pears with the cloth, the children shifted their plates from one arm to the other, and the party turned silently and began the trek back.

To where? How far had they walked in the hope of making a sale? How long would it take before these international traders disappeared once again into the hillsides burning in the sunlight on the other side of the river?

Later we flew from East London back to Johannesburg. It was the evening before one of the army’s semi-annual call-up days, and there were many draftees on the plane. Their families were excited and tearful, seeing them off; the young men, of whom there must have been about a dozen, merely looked depressed—even more depressed than those I had spoken to during that first meal after my arrival.

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Prospects (Again) and Conclusions. That the strains and stresses within the South African system are going to be felt more and more acutely by all who are directly involved, and that some difficult decisions are going to confront other states with interests in the area, can hardly be in doubt. This does not mean that decisive or irreversible developments are bound to take place in the near future. The running crisis which already exists will have its moments of drama and its spells of quiescence; none of the protagonists or elements that make it up is going to go away. My own guess is that whatever changes do take place, for good or ill, are more likely to be the result of a process of unceasing attrition-physical, political, economic, moral, psychological, even cultural—than of some single, overwhelming or cataclysmic event.

One thing that is clearer to me than before my visit is that the whites in South Africa are almost as conscious as the blacks of the possibility of radical change. The prospect fills them with fear (and how can they be blamed for it?); but it also makes them more vulnerable than before to suasion from outside. For all the defiant utterances of cabinet ministers and others about the resistance they will offer to “outside interference,” I was surprised at the sensitivity of both the media and the politicians to moral and other forms of pressure from abroad—and from the West in particular. Perhaps they respond in this way to pressures from the United States and Europe because they know that outside interference from other, even less welcome, sources is not going to diminish in the years ahead.

The Afrikaners’ isolation weighs on them heavily. President Carter and other Western leaders are abused or accused almost daily in the Afrikaans press: it is said that they don’t know where their true interests lie, they are Communist stooges, “sickly liberalists,” hypocrites. But such bluster does not really cheer up the people responsible for it. Where can they turn to, for capital, technology, military help, and—quite as important—for respect, if not to these hypocrites and stooges? When the Canadian government, for example, made the purely symbolic gesture during my visit of withdrawing its trade consuls, the event aroused great concern. One can only guess what effect real, material sanctions—an oil embargo, to give again the favorite example—would have on the economy. There can be no doubt, however, of the profound effect such sanctions would have on the morale of both blacks and whites.

Whether the United States and other Western countries will ever combine with the Byelorussian Republic and Uganda—among others—to impose sanctions, and in what circumstances they may feel impelled to do so, are topics it seems pointless to speculate about. (Though a great deal of speculation about it, and some far-reaching preparations for it, have already taken place in South Africa.) But it is worth emphasizing in this context that the process of attrition referred to above is not merely that of the different racial groups rubbing abrasively against one another, with or without the support of contending forces abroad. Another form of attrition exerted indiscriminately on all South Africans is that of the industrial and commercial system they have brought into being, and from which none of them can, or now wish to, extricate themselves. That is what seems to have begun slowly rubbing away from the Afrikaner something of his conviction that the whiteness of his skin must unquestioningly be put above all other values; that is what makes the black hesitate to risk whatever possessions he has managed to get together—a little house in Soweto, a smart suit, perhaps a third-hand or fourth-hand Dodge or Toyota. In the confusion of races and languages and styles which make up the society, all of them having the air of having been sundered from themselves, let alone from one another, material possessions remain the only common culture they seem to have. Only in the pursuit of possessions do they begin to seem ready to acknowledge their fundamental likeness to one another; only there do they reveal a measure of shared understanding.

The possibility of compromise, so far as it exists at all, might thus in some ways spring from that which would seem to exclude compromise: a greed for the goods which the land has begun to make available so profusely. This paradox should not surprise us too greatly. A faint possibility of compromise may also be said to spring from the fate or fact of history which makes the Afrikaners apparently so unyielding: the fact that they have nowhere else to go.

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Afrikanerstan. If the Afrikaners put their survival as a people above all other considerations, as they so vociferously claim to do, it is surprising that one does not hear voices among them seriously suggesting that instead of creating “Bantustans” or “homelands” for the blacks, they should instead be trying to create an “Afrikanerstan” for themselves. That is, an area of South Africa in which they will really be a majority; in which they will do all their own work, living there like every other nation that does not have helots of a different race perpetually at its command.

But no one, so far as I know, proposes such a thing. The people who attack Prime Minister Vorster from the Right—and he is attacked from that direction, however surprising this may seem to outsiders—do not upbraid him for failing to carve out of South Africa’s wide spaces a distinctive national territory for the Afrikaners. They complain that he lets black men sit on park benches, or play on football teams with white players. In other words, even these guardians of Afrikaner purity want the lot: all the wealth which is produced by black labor, and all the privacies and exclusions and superiorities they have always been accustomed to. Then they solemnly join in with Vorster in assuring you that history shows all attempts at power-sharing between different communities to have ended in failure.

The Afrikaners could not create for themselves a territorial entity of the kind I have just suggested without a great deal of self-sacrifice, and without inflicting sacrifices on others. But if they were to do it, they would then really resemble the Israelis: certainly all those Israelis who have no wish to incorporate into their country a million unwilling Arabs. Would they then be allowed to live in peace? Would the qualities of tenacity and cohesiveness which they undoubtedly have as a people then really come into flower? Might they not find that, so far from having lost privileges in ceasing to oppress and exploit millions of others, they have actually thrown off a great burden?

But now I have begun writing science ficton, not reportage.

¹ South Africa has ruled over Namibia since the territory was wrested from the Germans during World War I. Negotiations about its independence are now going on with various interested parties—including the United States, which has been trying to mediate between the South Africans and the militant SWAPO. South Africa wants to make sure its troops will have the right to remain there after independence; SWAPO, unlike some of the other black organizations in the territory, refuses to accede to this demand.

² One rand=$1.15.

³ Correction: it has been pointed out to me that the Republic of the Transkei is also recognized by the Republic of BophutoTswana.

⁴ In his autobiography, Independence My Way, which is not so much an autobiography as a random collection of apologetics, speeches, old press clippings, and so forth, Prime Minister Matanzima tells us that he and his brother, having been born during World War I, were named by their ambitious father after the heads of the warring British and German empires.