The Covenant Part 81

'Eight generations would mean that back in the 1694 period she would have had no fewer than two hundred and fifty-six potential ancestors in existence. And because two of them were Coloured'

'More,' Detleef interrupted. 'You're forgetting Rooi van Valck.'

I was just coming to Rooi. By the way, Van Valck, from which of his wives were you descended? Don't bother to answer. Whichever it was, Petra's your cousin.'

Leopold leaped from his chair, and would have a.s.saulted the dentist had not Van Doorn intervened. 'Gentlemen, sit down. We have a vote to take. The evidence against this girl is overwhelming. Do I hear a motion to declare her Coloured?'

I so move,' Van Valck said firmly. 'Do I hear a second?'

Dr. Adams stared at his fingernails, trying to guess how he would be evaluated a decade from now when this movement for racial purity became a mania and some ill-spirited neighbor denounced him.

'Dr. Adams, do I hear a second?'

'Not from me.'

'Please, we must conduct this meeting in orderly fas.h.i.+on.'

'Then I move that you two men vote to declare your cousin Petra Albertyn white, for I am certain that she's as white as any of the three of us.'

'I second the original motion,' Detleef said, his blood raging and his mind taking note of this man Adams. He would be dealt with later. The medical commission should look into that man's credentials.

'Moved and seconded that this commission finds the girl Petra Albertyn Coloured.'

'No!' Adams called in a loud voice.

'The vote was not called for,' Detleef said, trying to control his anger. 'Now I ask for the vote.'

'Ja,' Van Valck cried. Van Doorn did the same, then looked at Dr. Adams, who was again studying his fingernails. 'And you, Adams?'

'Record it that I was ashamed in the sight of G.o.d to vote upon such a motion. That I refused to condemn your cousin Petra.' He rose and started to leave the room, but Detleef intercepted him.

'Please! It's of major importance that we start this procedure correctly. You must be seen sitting with us when we deliver our decision.'

So, reluctantly, Dr. Adams resumed his chair and watched as the Albertyns and the spectators were brought back into the room. The family was ranged neatly along one wall, and little Petra, hands primly at her side, was again asked to stand facing her judges, who looked down upon her.

'Petra Albertyn, you are Coloured.'

She made no response, but did turn slightly to see what the noise was to her left. Her mother had fainted.

The fateful decision in Petra's case launched a time of terror for the Albertyns. She was immediately dismissed from school, and when her family appealed to the courts they were turned down: 'Clearly Coloured.' In a few months the board declared Henricus Albertyn Coloured, too, so he could no longer work at the garage, since his foreman position was cla.s.sified 'whites only.' Nor could he find work elsewhere; he was unemployed and would remain so for more than a year.

It was absolutely forbidden for the Albertyns to continue living where they had for the past forty years; as Coloureds they must move into some towns.h.i.+p reserved for their race, but no such group area existed in Venloo, so they decided to uproot their entire family and move down to Cape Town, where the vast majority of Coloureds lived. Because they were forced to sell their house under crisis conditions, they received 2,000 for a 4,500 investment.

When they reached Cape Town the only accommodation they could find was in a collection of three-story hovels originally designed as a transit camp for the military. It was now one of the shames of South Africa, with multiple families crammed into each flimsy-walled apartment.

When the shattered Albertyns moved into Orchard Flats they contemplated suicide. The cleanliness of Blinkfontein was gone, the neatness of their home, the warmth of their relations.h.i.+ps in the tiny communityall lost. In their place was filth, criminality and social hatred. That anyone should have to live in such surroundings was disgraceful, but that proven good citizens could be forced into them by a government acting in the name of G.o.d and racial purity was criminal.

Henricus Albertyn discovered how criminal one evening when he came home from his job as grease-monkey in a distant Cape Town garage. As he climbed the stairs to his third-floor room, a.s.sailed by the smell of cheap wine and urine, he racked his brain trying to devise some tactic whereby he could organize a decent life for Petra, for upon her he now fastened all his dreams.

But when he reached his door he heard sobbing, not Petra's but his wife's, and he burst into the roomto find her quivering in a corner, with a pair of long scissors, covered with blood, in her hand. For one terrible moment he suspected that something beyond words had happened to his daughter, but when he looked about in frenzy, he saw Petra seated by the lone window, reading a book. Whatever foul thing had happened, she had remained untouched.

Quickly embracing her, he asked, 'What's happened?'

'Just the skollies,' Petra said, apparently unconcerned. 'Mama stabbed them, and they ran away.'

From her corner Mrs. Albertyn said softly, 'No skollies will rape my child. We'll never surrender to this dreadful place.'

And Petra, putting aside her book, showed her father the long knitting needle she had for some days kept secreted in her dress: I stabbed them too. Shamilah downstairs told me how to jab at their eyes.' And without any sign of agitation she returned to her homework.

She was in school again, at a much bigger inst.i.tution in nearby Athlone, staffed by a group of dedicated Coloured men and women. When her father attended a parent-teacher meeting, the chairman of the school committee, a prosperous builder named Simon Botha, sought him out: 'Albertyn, our teachers tell me that your little Petra is a near-genius. You must give thought to her future.'

'In this country what can a Coloured do?'

'You mustn't limit your horizon to this country. My daughter in Canada tells me the universities there have many bursaries. They're hungry for children like Petra. Australia, too, or even London.'

Such thoughts were beyond Albertyn's ken, but he realized that he must learn to grapple with them, for as Botha said, 'To leave a girl like Petra in this country is to commit her to death.'

Even though Venloo had been cleansed of the Albertyns, the Van Valcks could not feel victorious, for they were a.s.sailed by haunting questions. One night Leopold asked bluntly, 'Do you think that English atheist would dare to start rumors about us? I mean, about Rooi van Valck and his three dark wives?' Later he asked plaintively, 'Could I possibly be carrying contaminated blood?'

They spent much time inspecting the half-moons on his fingernails, and although these were inconclusive, Mrs. van Valck did find comfort in his many freckles. After convincing themselves that he was safely white, they relaxed and invited Princ.i.p.al Sterk to dinner and listened as he reported on the final outcome of their crusade to purify the community. When they heard of the area in which the Albertyns were forced to live, Mrs. van Valck said without rancor, and even with a sense of forgiving them for the trouble they had caused, 'It's only what they deserved, trying to be something better than they were.' Then she added brightly, 'Yesterday I had a letter from Pretoria. They sent me back my deposit.'

AT HOME.

February 8, 1955 Greetings, Further to my previous letter this is to advise you that my Board will provide transport free of charge for yourself, members of your household, and property belonging to you on February 9, 1955.Will you kindly pack your belongings and be ready to load by 6 a.m a.m. on that morning.Attached hereto is a letter which, please, hand to your employer. It explains why you cannot be at work on February 9, 1955.I. P. van Onselen Secretary to the Native Resettlement Board February 9 was the kind of crisp summer's day Johannesburg often provided, but this year it carried special significance, for the government had announced for the last time that the bulldozers were going to move; no further legal complaints would be tolerated. The first batch of blacks to be evicted from Sophiatown were to obey the secretary's letter to the last word.

Barney Patel, a clothing dealer aged forty-six, and his friend Woodrow Desai, aged fifty-nine, owner of a grocery store, had traveled from their shops in Pageview, an Indian trading and residential area in Johannesburg since the days of Paul Kruger. They were standing on a hill overlooking Sophiatown, where bulldozers were lined up, awaiting the signal. From their vantage point the two Indians were able to look down into the towns.h.i.+p which blacks had occupied for decades; fifty-seven thousand of them now lived here, some in ugly slums, many in fine houses which they owned. In a last-minute appeal that failed, an expert in housing had testified: 'Only one structure in eight is a slum that warrants complete demolition.'

It had to be admitted, however, that the slum area was an amazing collection of buildings divided into five easily recognized categories: at the bottom, cardboard walls acquired by flattening grocery boxes; next, tin walls made from hammering out paraffin cans; next, corrugated iron siding; next, actual wood to protect the walls; and finally, cinderblocks to replace everything that had served before. But whatever the building material, all the houses were jammed together along narrow streets or dark alleys, and from this a.s.sembly came not only the patient black workers of the area but also the incorrigible young tsotsis, the peddlers of dagga, as marijuana was called, the prost.i.tutes and the horde of petty criminals.

Sophiatown was a tightly knit community, and for every tsotsi who prowled the streets, there were a dozen good youngsters; for every father who staggered home drunk to a tin shack, there were a dozen others who cared for their families and supported the churches and schools and traders. But this black towns.h.i.+p had had the poor foresight to situate itself in the heart of what would become a predominantly Afrikaner white suburb. It must now be bulldozed off the face of the earth not for the sake of honest, if somewhat overzealous, urban renewal, as might have happened in many other countries, but because it stood in the path of white aspirations.

'There must be no confusion of thinking,' a cabinet minister said. 'Sophiatown counts as a black spot on our land.' He then explained that a black spot was a place where Bantu had acquired land owners.h.i.+p under old laws. Under apartheid, such offensive spots had to be rubbed out. Thirteen percent of the land, traditional sites for kraals, had been set aside, and there blacks could own land. 'At Sophiatown, and spots like it that we need, their temporary sojourn in our midst is over.'

'I can't believe they're going to knock it down,' Barney Patel said as the bulldozers revved tneir engines.

'The paper said they start today.'

'But all the people living there?'

'Out in the country. To the new settlements.'

'You mean they'll have to travel all those miles?'

'That's not the government's problem [he p.r.o.nounced it gommint]. Out they go. Gommint says they shouldn't have been here in the first place.'

A bell started ringing in a Protestant church right in the middle of the slum area, and continued for some minutes until a policeman hurried through the crowd to silence it. 'They don't want any trouble,' Patel said. 'They've banned meetings of more than twelve people.'

'They won't have any trouble,' Desai said. 'Look at the police.'

To deal with the first one hundred and fifty families ordered to abandon the homes they owned, the government had brought in two thousand policemen armed with Sten guns and a.s.segais, backed by troop carriers, signal units and squads of military police.

When the bulldozers were ready, two men to each machine, a Resettlement Board official gave the signal, and the powerful sc.r.a.pers moved forward, their blades lowered, their snouts hungry.

'I just don't believe this,' Patel said, his throat suddenly dry.

'Look!' the older man said, and they watched as the monstrous machines ripped a path through a group of shacks. A single bulldozer would wipe out an entire house, but this was no great accomplishment, for that one had been cardboard and planks.

'Look over there!' Desai cried, and as he pointed, a bulldozer chewed its way into a substantial home of wood and brick.

'That house must have been worth ...' Patel did not finish his sentence, for the bulldozer, having attacked something it could not easily subdue, hung in the air for a moment, then slid sideways, endangering the driver but not upsetting. Angrily it backed up, sped its engine and tore back into the house, which collapsed in a cloud of dust.

'Look at the people!' Desai said softly, and the two Indians turned to the south where large groups of blacks gathered silently to watch the demolition, mindful of what was in store for them. They stood with anguish on their dark faces, their hands clenched, powerless to obstruct either the bulldozers or the officials who directed them. This black spot could not be tolerated by whites in neighboring Mayfair; it must be cleansed of its vermin and converted to higher purposes.

'There come the trucks,' Patel said as a line of vehicles moved in to carry away the residents, and while the 'dozers knocked down the unwanted houses, the trucks carted off the unwanted people, free of charge, as the letter had promised.

There were, of course, those few blacks who refused to quit their homes; these were routed out by the police but no harm was done them. From one house near where Patel and Desai stood, a team of soldiers carried away an old man who had stubbornly refused to budge. 'Come on, old grandpop, we're in a hurry!' the soldiers said in Afrikaans ('Kom, Oubaas, ons is haastig'). Almost gently they bore him to a waiting truck and sat him down among the others, and he was scarcely seated before a bulldozer eliminated the house in which his children and grandchildren had been born.

The two Indians remained on their prominence most of the morning, gripped by the drama of this vast removal and weighing the possibility that they might be next. 'Do you think they'll really knock down our houses?' Patel asked as the bulldozers ate into Sophiatown.

'Gommint policy,' Desai said. 'All Indians to get out of Johannesburg.'

'You think they'll move us miles out in the country, like they say?'

'Look, Barney. Mukerjee told me yesterday the surveyors were out there, laying out streets.'

'Who can believe Mukerjee?'

'Well, he kept warning us that one day Sophiatown would be knocked down. Then I laughed. Today I believe.'

'But blacks are different from Indians. There are so many of them. So few of us.'

'Numbers mean nothing to apartheid. It's only interested in color. Today it hates this black spot. Tomorrow it'll be a brown spot, and off we go-'

'But Kruger's gommint gave us the land we have. I own my land.'

'Yes, they put us there for what they called "sanitary" reasons. Today their grandsons will kick us out for economic reasons. Believe me, Barney, the bulldozers will come down our streets, too.'

They stood in silence, watching the destruction, marking the exodus of black families, and as they knew themselves to be powerless to protest this brutal maneuver, they thought back upon their own curious history in this fertile land.

Woodrow Desai's grandfather had been one of the three Desai brothers s.h.i.+pped to the sugar fields by Sir Richard Saltwood. When their contracts had been worked out, they had stayed on and were soon joined by 'pa.s.senger Indians' like the Patels, who had paid their own way to serve the rapidly growing community as shopkeepers and traders.

The Indian immigrants settled mostly in Natal, near the port of Durban, and there they proliferated: Patels, Desais, Mukerjees, Bannarjees. Unlike the Dutch before them and the Chinese, the Indian men would have nothing to do with black women, or white either, for that matter. They remained strictly aloof, and in the first forty years of their work in mine and field, few Indians married persons of another race. Woodrow's father and others moved to the Transvaal, and in the smallest towns they opened shops to which all customers were invited, but in their homes they kept to themselves, with their dishes of ghee and lamb and rice and curry. They were clean, usually law-abiding, and the other people of South Africa hated them.

'Without the little one,' Patel reflected, 'Indians would have been in even worse shape.'

The little one was a skinny lawyer with a high whining voice who emigrated to Durban in 1893. His name was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, intelligent enough to have made a good life for himself in South Africa had he been free to operate there. Indeed, when he arrived at age twenty-four he intended to remain, but the disadvantages which Indians suffered so irritated him that he found himself constantly at war with the authorities.

'He was a fighter,' Desai mumbled, recalling this contentious man who had defied the entire white establishment.

'And clever too,' Patel said admiringly. 'When the Boer War was at its worst, what does he do? Organizes an Indian ambulance corps. Helps the English, even though they've been harrying him. Very brave, you know.' He chuckled to think of little Gandhi issuing orders to the white government.

'My father knew him well,' Desai said. 'But Father was much like me. Never wanted trouble. So when Gandhi started sending letters to General s.m.u.ts, like he was head of an Indian gommint, my father warned him: "You watch out, Mohandas. Gommint's going to throw you in jail." That was when he invented Satyagraha, right here in South Africa.'

'If he were watching this disgrace now, he'd do the same for the blacks as he did for us. Peaceful resistance. Just lie down in front of the bulldozers.' 'The bulldozers in India were British. They stopped. These are Afrikaner bulldozers and I don't think they'd stop. Not even for Gandhi.'

I love him,' Patel said. 'Not for what he did in India. For what he did here.' He paused and shook his head. 'I often wonder what might have happened if he'd stayed in Durban. To help our people.'

'He'd have been shot. I don't think Afrikaners understand Satyagraha.'

The mention of shooting saddened the two Indians, for the Desai and Patel families back in Natal had suffered grievously when the Zulu, infuriated by government laws restricting them, had taken vengeance not on the whites who had pa.s.sed the laws but on the Indians with whom they traded daily. For three days the tall Zulu had chased little Indians through the streets, slas.h.i.+ng and killing, while some whites even looked on with approval, shouting at times, 'Kill 'em, Zulu!' More than fifty Indians were slain; more than seven hundred required medical attention. It was a different South Africa after that, with many whites muttering that it would have been better if the Zulu had been allowed a free hand to settle the Indian Question once and for all.

Desai, who had lost an uncle in the riots, smiled sardonically. 'Well, we had a chance to get out. Remember when gommint provided boat fare and leaving funds so that every Indian could go back to India? I think three old men accepted. Wanted to be buried in their native villages. The rest . . .'

'My father told me,' Patel said, 'that any Indian who left South Africa for India could be certified insane. This was so much better than what he had known . . .'

As the sun approached its zenith, and the blacks' houses crumbled to dust, the two Indians went soberly home to Pageview, where they stood at an intersection and stared at the rows of houses and shops occupied by their compatriots; Indians always preferred living in tight communities for mutual protection. 'Do you think they'd dare knock all this down?' Patel asked nervously. 'Five thousand people. Homes, businesses. Insurance told me ten million pounds, at least.'

Before he could answer, Ca.s.sem Mukerjee came running. He was a small nervous man, much like Gandhi in appearance, and he spoke with that agitated enthusiasm some men display when circulating bad news: 'My cousin Morarji saw the papers at his office. They're going to bulldoze this place, too. All our houses are to go. And they'll take our shops too.'

Barney Patel did not like Mukerjee, and now he shook him. 'You stop that rumoring! Your cousin knows nothing.'

'He knew they were going to bulldoze Sophiatown,' the little man said, almost gleefully. 'Are the houses gone?'

'It'll take years,' Patel snorted, but Desai wanted to know about the supposed papers: 'Did Morarji actually see anything?'

'The orders have been drafted. All Indians to be cleaned out of Johannesburg.'

'My G.o.d!' Desai said, and he leaned against the wall of a solidly built brick house, and as he stood there, sick in the sunlight, he could see the dust of the future, and thought: They will move the bulldozers here, and these houses of warmth and love will go down. The stone ones like mine and Barney's, they won't destroy them, but we'll be forced to sell at government price twenty cents in the rand. The school where my children went will be razed, and all the little houses where the old people expected to live until they died. Our stores on Fourteenth Street . . . My G.o.d, I worked so hard.

And we'll be moved far out into the country. Miles, miles from all our friends, all our customers. There'll be new houses at prices people can't afford, and new stores with no customers, and hours on the train each day, and all our money wasted on transportation we don't really need. And we'll be off to one side where no one can see us, and the streets we once knew will have vanishedand for what great purpose?

Woodrow Desai decided that night to form a committee to visit Pretoria for a serious talk with the government official whose office was responsible for planning the future of the Indian community. He took Barney Patel with him, but not Morarji Mukerjee, who was something of an alarmist. Patiently they explained the folly of such an evacuation, pointing out that it would accomplish not one single economic advantage, but the official a.s.signed the task of dealing with them cut them off: 'We aren't really talking about economics, are we? We're talking about instilling some order in the community. Each group secure in its own place.'

'But if you put all of us in this so-called Lenasia so far out into the country . . .'

'That's for your protection. All the Indians in one spot.'

'But so far out. We'll waste hours and rand every day.'

'My dear friends,' the official, a Natal-born Englishman, said with warmth but also with a certain stiffness, 'our country has no finer citizens than you Indians. We wouldn't dream of doing anything to your disadvantage. But we must bring order into our lives. Pageview is intended for whites. Look at the map!' And he showed them how where they lived and traded intruded into areas that could better be used for whites.

'And you can have nice new shops out there,' he a.s.sured them, waving his hand in some vague direction. 'You'll like it better when it happens.' He paused. 'We're doing this for your own good,' he said. And before they could reply they were out on the street.

'I wish Mohandas Gandhi were here again,' Patel growled. 'He'd know how to stop this.'

AT WORK.

The Golden Reef Mines southwest of Johannesburg needed a constant supply of black workers to man the deepest shafts where blasting of the face rock occurred. From all over southern Africa planes and trains and buses brought almost illiterate black men to the compounds within which they would live for the six to eighteen months of their contract. Critics of the labor system likened these compounds to harsh prisons in which the blacks were incarcerated; management spoke of them as well-run dormitories in which the laborers lived infinitely better than they did at home.