Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1950-2008

A South African Childhood: Allusions in a Landscape

Growing up in one part of a vast young country can be very different from growing up in another, and in South Africa this difference is not only a matter of geography. The division of the people into two great races — black and white — and the subdivision of the white into Afrikaans- and English-speaking groups provides a diversity of cultural heritage that can make two South African children seem almost as strange to each other as if they had come from different countries. The fact that their parents, if they are English-speaking, frequently have come from different countries complicates their backgrounds still further. My father came to South Africa from a village in Russia; my mother was born and grew up in London. I remember, when I was about eight years old, going with my sister and mother and father to spend a long weekend with a cousin of my father’s who lived in the Orange Free State. After miles and miles of sienna-red ploughed earth, after miles and miles of silk-fringed mealies standing as high as your eyes on either side of the road and ugly farmhouses where women in bunchy cotton dresses and sun-bonnets stared after the car as we passed (years later, when I saw Oklahoma! in a Johannesburg theatre, I recalled that scene), we reached the dorp where the cousin lived in a small white house with sides that were dust-stained in a wavering wash, like rust, for more than a foot above the ground. There we two little girls slept on beds of a smothering softness we had never felt before — feather beds brought from Eastern Europe — and drank tea drawn from a charming contraption, a samovar. There — to our and our mother’s horror — we were given smoked duck, flavoured with garlic, at breakfast. The two children of the house spoke only Afrikaans, like the Boer children who played in the yards of the mean little houses on either side, and my sister and I, queasy from the strange food and able to speak only English, watched their games with a mixture of hostility and wistfulness.

How different it all was from our visit to our mother’s sister, in Natal! There, with the ‘English’ side of the family, in the green, softly contoured hills and the gentle meadows of sweet grass near Balgowan, we might almost have been in England itself. There our cousins Roy and Humphrey rode like young lords about their father’s beautiful farm, and spoke the high, polite, ‘pure’ English learned in expensive Natal private schools that were staffed with masters imported from English universities. And how different were both visits from our life in one of the gold-mining towns of the Witwatersrand, near Johannesburg, in the Transvaal.

There are nine of these towns, spread over a distance of roughly a hundred and forty miles east and west of Johannesburg. The one in which we lived was on the east side — the East Rand, it is called — and it had many distinctions, as distinctions are measured in that part of the world. First of all, it was one of the oldest towns, having got itself a gold strike, a general store, a few tents and a name before 1890. In the pioneer days, my father had set himself up in a small, one-man business as a watchmaker and jeweller, and during the twenties and thirties, when the town became the most rapidly expanding on the Witwatersrand, he continued to live there with his family. In the richest gold-mining area in the world, it became the richest square mile or so. All around us, the shafts went down and the gold came up; our horizon was an Egyptian-looking frieze of man-made hills of cyanide sand, called ‘dumps’, because that is what they are — great mounds of waste matter dumped on the surface of the earth after the gold-bearing ore has been blasted below, hauled up, and pounded and washed into yielding its treasure. In the dusty month before spring — in August, that is — the sand from the dumps blew under the tightly shut doors of every house in the town and enveloped the heads of the dumps themselves in a swirling haze, lending them some of the dignity of cloud-capped mountains. It is characteristic of the Witwatersrand that any feature of the landscape that strikes the eye always does so because it is a reminder of something else; considered on its own merits, the landscape is utterly without interest — flat, dry, and barren.

In our part of the East Rand, the yellowish-white pattern of the cyanide dumps was broken here and there by the head of a black hill rising out of the veld. These hills were man-made, too, but they did not have the geometrical, pyramidal rigidity of the cyanide dumps, and they were so old that enough real earth had blown on to them to hold a growth of sparse grass and perhaps even a sinewy peppercorn or peach tree, sprung up, no doubt, out of garden refuse abandoned there by somebody from the nearby town. These hills were also dumps, but through their scanty natural covering a blackness clearly showed — even a little blueness, the way black hair shines — for they were coal dumps, made of coal dust.

The coal dumps assumed, both because of their appearance and because of the stories and warnings we heard about them, something of a diabolical nature. In our sedate little colonial tribe, with its ritual tea parties and tennis parties, the coal dump could be said to be our Evil Mountain; I use the singular here because when I think of these dumps, I think of one in particular — the biggest one, the one that stood fifty yards beyond the last row of houses in the town where we lived. I remember it especially well because on the other side of it, hidden by it, was the local nursing home, where, when my sister and I were young and the town was small, all the mothers went to have their babies and all the children went to have their tonsillectomies — where, in fact, almost everyone was born, endured an illness, or died. Our mother had several long stays in the place, over a period of two or three years, and during these stays our grandmother took us on a daily visit across the veld to see her. Immediately lunch was over, she would spend an hour dressing us, and then, brushed and beribboned and curled, we would set off. We took a path that skirted the coal dump, and there it was at our side most of the way — a dirty, scarred old mountain, collapsing into the fold of a small ravine here, supporting a twisted peach tree there, and showing bald and black through patchy grass. A fence consisting of two threads of barbed wire looped at intervals through low rusted-iron poles, which once had surrounded it completely, now remained only in places, conveying the idea of a taboo rather than providing an effectual means of isolation. The whole coal dump looked dead, forsaken, and harmless enough, but my sister and I walked softly and looked at it out of the corners of our eyes, half fascinated, half afraid, because we knew it was something else — inert. Not dead by any means, but inert. For we had seen. Coming back from the nursing home in the early-winter dusk, we had seen the strange glow in the bald patches the grass did not cover, and in the runnels made by the erosion of summer wind and rain we had seen the hot blue waver of flame. The coal dump was alive. Like a beast of prey, it woke to life in the dark.

The matter-of-fact truth was that these coal dumps, relics of the pre-gold-strike era when collieries operated in the district, were burning. Along with the abandoned mine workings underground, they had caught fire at some time or other in their years of disuse, and had continued to burn, night and day, ever since. Neither rain nor time could put the fires out, and in some places, even on the coldest winter days, we would be surprised to feel the veld warm beneath the soles of our shoes, and, if we cut out a clod, faintly steaming. That dump on the outskirts of the town where we lived is still burning today. I have asked people who have studied such things how long it may be expected to go on burning before it consumes itself. Nobody seems to know; it shares with the idea of Hades its heat and vague eternity.

But perhaps its fierce heart is being subdued gradually. Apparently, no one can even remember, these days, the nasty incidents connected with the dump, incidents that were fresh in memory during our childhood. Perhaps there is no need for anyone to remember, for the town now has more vicarious and less dangerous excitements to offer children than the thrill of running quickly across a pile of black dust that may at any moment cave in and plunge the adventurer into a bed of incandescent coals. In our time, we knew a girl to whom this had happened, and our mother remembered a small boy who had disappeared entirely under a sudden landslide of terrible glowing heat. Not even his bones had been recovered, but the girl we knew survived to become a kind of curiosity about the town. She had been playing on the dump with her friends, and all at once had found herself sunk thigh-deep in living coals and hot ashes. Her friends had managed to pull her out of this fiery quicksand, but she was horribly burned. When we saw her in the street, we used to be unable to keep our eyes from the tight-puckered skin of her calves, and the still tighter skin of her hands, which drew up her fingers like claws. Despite, or because of, these awful warnings, my sister and I longed to run quickly across the lower slopes of the dump for ourselves, and several times managed to elude surveillance long enough to do so. And once, in the unbearable terror and bliss of excitement, we clutched each other on the veld below while, legs pumping wildly, our cousin Roy, come from Natal to spend the holidays with us, rode a bicycle right to the top of the dump and down the other side, triumphant and unharmed.

In the part of South Africa where we lived, we had not only fire under our feet; we had, too, a complication of tunnels as intricate as one of those delicate chunks of worm cast you find on the seashore. All the towns along the Witwatersrand, and the older parts of Johannesburg itself, are undermined. Living there, you think about it as little as you think about the fact that, whatever your work and whatever your life, your reason for performing it where you do and living it where you do is the existence of the gold mines. Yet you are never allowed to forget entirely that the ground is not solid beneath you. In Johannesburg, sitting eight or ten storeys up, in the office of your stockbroker or in your dentist’s waiting room, you feel the strong shudder of an earth tremor; the vase of flowers skids towards the magazines on the table, the gossip of the tickertape machine is drowned. These tremors, never strong enough to do any serious damage, are commonplace. By ascribing them to the fact that the Witwatersrand is extensively undermined, I am inadvertently taking sides in a long, discreet controversy between the seismologists and the Chamber of Mines. The seismologists say that the tremors are not, geologically speaking, earth tremors at all but are caused by rocks falling from the ceilings of either working or abandoned mines. The Chamber of Mines insists that they are natural and not man-caused phenomena. And jerry-builders take advantage of the dispute, greeting the evidence of cracked walls in houses with a shrug of the shoulders that lets the responsibility fall on God or the Chamber of Mines, take your choice.

Our life in the mining town, in one of the ugliest parts of a generally beautiful continent, was narrow and neighbourly — a way of life that, while it commonly produces a violent reaction of rebelliousness in adolescence, suits young children very well. The town had sprung into existence because of the mines, had grown up around the mines. The shopkeepers had come — first with their tents, then with their shanties, and, at last, with their corner sites and neon signs — to fill and profit from the miners’ needs. At the start, the miners wanted only the necessities of life — stoves and workmen’s clothing and meat. Soon they wanted everything — cinemas and shiny wooden cocktail cabinets and tinned asparagus. My father’s little business was a good example of how trade grew into the full feather of provincial luxury from scrawny beginnings in utility. When he arrived in the town, just before the Boer War, he used to tramp from mine to mine carrying a cardboard suitcase full of pocket watches. The watches sold for less than a dollar each. They ticked as loudly as the crocodile who pursues Captain Hook in Peter Pan, and they were as strong as they sounded. They were a necessity for the mine-workers, who found that ordinary watches became rusted and ruined in no time by the damp and heat underground. So my father, a tiny, dapper, small-featured youth with feet no bigger than a woman’s, made his living by selling watches to, and repairing watches for, the great, hefty Afrikaners and the tough Scots and Irishmen who produced gold. He had a little wood-and-iron cottage, where he lived with a black retriever named Springbok, two German roller canaries, and his watchmaker’s worktable.

By the time my father married my mother, he was living in the newly built local hotel, owned a horse and trap, and had rented a glass-fronted shop, where he sold diamond engagement rings. By the time my sister and I were old enough to notice such things, his shop had showcases full of silver sports cups, walnut mantel clocks, stainless-steel cutlery, and costume jewellery from America and Czechoslovakia. A stone-deaf relative had been imported from Leningrad to do the watch repairing; he sat behind an engraved glass partition, out of sight of the customers, who were now townspeople — the families of other shopkeepers, municipal officials, civil servants — as well as white workers from the mines. The white miners wore the new Swiss water-and-shock-proof watches. The only potential customers for cheap pocket watches were now the tribal Africans — migrant labourers who were employed to do all the really hard work in the mines — and these bewildered men, still wearing earrings and dressed in ochre-dyed blankets, mostly made their purchases at government-concession stores on mine property and did not venture into a jeweller’s shop in the town.

The mine people and the townspeople did not by any means constitute a homogeneous population; they remained two well-defined groups. Socially, the mine people undoubtedly had the edge on the people of the town. Their social hierarchy had been set up first, and was the more rigid and powerful. There was a general manager before there was a mayor. But even when the town did create civic dignitaries for itself, even when we did get a country club, there were those among us who neither knew nor cared about the social scaffolding that was going up around them, whereas at each mine the G.M. was not only the leader of society but also the boss, and if one did not revere him as the first, one had to respect him as the second. The dignitaries on both sides — the G.M.s and their officials from the mines, and the city fathers, the presidents of clubs in the town, and so on — invited each other to dinners and receptions, and the teams of the sports clubs of mine and town competed with each other, but there was little mixing on the more intimate levels of sociability. The mine officials and their wives and families lived on ‘the property’; that is, the area of ground, sometimes very large, that belonged to each mine and that included, in addition to the shaft heads and the mine offices and the hospital, a sports ground, a swimming pool, a recreation club, and the houses of the officials — all built by the mine. The G.M. lived in the largest house, usually a spacious and very pleasant one, situated in a garden so big that one might almost have called it a park. The garden was kept in full bloom all year round, right through the sharp, dry Transvaal winter, by African labour diverted from the mines, and the liquor stock indoors was ample and lavishly dispensed. The assistant manager’s house was smaller, but decent enough; then came the underground manager’s, and then the compound manager’s (he was in charge of the four-sided barracks, with all its windows opening on a courtyard and only one gateway, always guarded, to the world without, in which the African labourers were fed and housed in celibacy, having left their families in distant kraals), and then the mine secretary’s, and so on down the salary and social scale, the houses getting smaller, the gardens getting less elaborate. Most of the mine families lived only a few miles out from the town, but their self-sufficiency surrounded them like a moat. Their offspring could go from the cradle to the grave without having anything to do with the town other than attending its high school, placing weekly orders with the butcher and the grocer, and paying three visits to church — one for christening, one for marrying, one for burying.

We, of course, were town people. All my childhood, we lived in the little house, in one of the town’s earliest suburbs, that my parents had bought before I was born. Other people moved to the newer suburbs of flat-roofed villas, pseudo-Tudor houses, and, later, houses inspired by American magazines, with picture windows looking out on the bare veld. But we stayed. Ours was a bungalow-type house with two bow windows and a corrugated-iron roof, like almost all the other houses that were built in the Witwatersrand gold-mining towns during the twenties and early thirties. It stood in a small garden, one of several similar houses on a street along whose sidewalk grew leathery-leaved trees, which in summer put out bunches of creamy, bell-shaped flowers. When my sister and I were little, we used to fit these flowers over our fingertips, like tiny hats; when we were old enough to own bicycles, we would ride up and down beneath the trees, feeling rather than hearing the swish of their leaves above our heads. The trees were kept clipped in the shape of bullets, in order that they might not interfere with the telephone wires, and so were not beautiful. There was, in fact, no beauty in the whole town. We children simply took it for granted that beauty — hills, trees, buildings of elegance — was not a thing to be expected of ordinary, everyday life.

The town had already grown up and hardened, as it were, into permanent shape before its leaders became sophisticated enough to consider orthodox municipal planning, and so, although it kept expanding in all directions, it remained essentially a one-street affair. As is so often true in such cases, that street was too narrow, and the land on either side of it was too valuable to make widening feasible. The street had the authentic jostle and bustle of a thriving business centre, and we children loved to walk ‘downtown’ on Saturday mornings with our mother. This was as much a social as a shopping expedition. During our early years, the only places of refreshment in the town were two or three hotel bars (in South Africa, closed to women anyway) and the Greek cafés, where black-haired Minos or Mavrodatos sold cigarettes, sweets, polony and fruit, and where one could sit at a table with a flyblown cloth and be served terribly weak tea or coffee adulterated with chicory. But by the middle thirties there were one or two genteel teashops, where the local women met for mid-morning refreshment, and the Greeks had installed shiny soda fountains, which we children used to patronise heavily after Saturday matinées at the local cinema.

Most of the shops were family businesses, but with prosperity came Woolworth’s — from whose gramophone-record counter dated jazz swung out into the main street — and branches of various big department stores in Johannesburg. The owners of the family businesses became the city fathers, and their families became the ‘old families’ of the town. We were one of these ‘old families’ and were known to everyone in the town and even at the mines — there by sight rather than by association. My father took no part in civic affairs and remained what he had always been, a simple man and a shopkeeper, but my mother, a woman of considerable energy and not much scope, served on endless committees. Some years, she was president of several organisations at once, with a secretaryship or two thrown in as well. She baked cakes and she prepared reports; she was honorary cashier at charity concerts, and she taught first aid to children. Her position was a curious one. Unlike most of the other women, she did not confine herself to the particular section of the community to which she belonged. The fact was that she didn’t seem to belong to any particular section. Although my father kept up some sort of token allegiance to the Jewish community, contributing to the upkeep of the ugly little synagogue and even going to pray there once a year, on the Day of Atonement, my mother did not fit in very well with the ladies of the congregation. She got on much better with the Scots ladies of the town, and I remember her working (or, rather, baking) like a beaver for the annual cake-and-sweet sale in aid of the Presbyterian Church.

Our life was very much our mother’s life, and so our pleasures, into which we plunged with gusto, knowing no others, were charity bazaars, the local eisteddfods that were held in the town hall by members of the Welsh community, and dancing displays by the pupils of local teachers (my sister and I were often performers), along with — staple stimulation for the entire population — the cinema. In summer, we went to the municipal swimming baths. Walks or rambles about the outskirts of the town were unknown to us, except for those furtive excursions in the direction of the burning dump. There was nothing to see beyond the limits of the suburbs but ‘the location’ — an urban slum where the African industrial workers and servants were huddled in segregation from their white employers — and a dammed-up pond, created by waste water pumped from one of the mines, in which a yellow cyanide dump was reflected, its image broken by bulrushes and the occasional passage of a small wild duck.

There were junior and senior state schools in the town, where education for white children was free, but my sister and I were sent as day scholars to the local convent; the Dominican nuns had come, like everything else, with the town’s prosperity. Many of the townspeople, torn between the businessman’s natural suspicion of getting something for nothing and the fear that their children would be converted to Catholicism (the town was largely Protestant), resolved the issue by sending their children to neither the state school nor the convent but to boarding school in Johannesburg. My mother, a fearless nomad when it came to social and religious barriers, had no such misgivings. My sister and I spent our school life at the convent, and were taught English by a bun-faced nun with a thick German accent. At school, I showed some of my mother’s bland disregard for the sheeplike group consciousness of the town, and struck up a long and close friendship with the daughter of an official at one of the oldest and most important mines. So it was that I came to cross the tacit divide between the mines and the town, and to know the habitat, domestic life and protocol of ‘the mine people’.

Like middle-class children everywhere who live within reasonable reach of an ocean, we were taken to the sea every year. The hot months of December and January are the popular season for family holidays in South Africa, the Indian Ocean is the nearest ocean for Transvaalers, and Durban — 400 miles from Johannesburg — is the nearest city on the Indian Ocean coast. So almost every summer we spent our three weeks in Durban or in a village on the South Coast, not far from Durban. We could, of course, have gone to Lourenço Marques, the gay little port in Portuguese territory, which is about the same distance from Johannesburg, but we never did, because that was a place to which grown-ups went without their children (and preferably without their wives or husbands) and only in the winter season of July and August. When we were very small, we adored Durban, where we stayed in one of the solid, cool, high-ceilinged hotels along the Marine Parade and, leaning out of the steamy bathroom in the evening, after we had been sent off to bed, could see the coloured lights strung like beads on an abacus from lamp post to lamp post along the sea front while the trams thundered past, and a strange fading and rising cry — a mingling of laughter, squeals, and juke-box and hurdy-gurdy music — rose, between the roaring advance and hissing retreat of the sea, from the amusement park.

When we grew a little older and entered that dreamy, remote, soulful state that comes sometimes in early adolescence, we found the crowded beach, the sand lumpy with popcorn, and the vulgarly lit sea front, where all the wires and cables of an electrically contrived fairyland showed on the lamp posts in the light of day, utterly abhorrent. Nothing would have persuaded us to enter the amusement park, from which wonderful teddy bears and even a felt Mickey Mouse had once come, won by our mother by dint of Heaven knows how many tickets at the sideshows, and placed at the foot of our beds for discovery in the morning. Nothing would have bored us more than the slow, chugging trips around the bay on a pleasure launch named the Sarie Marais, which only a few years back had had all the solemn thrill of departure for a new continent. And most of all we revolted against the nagging of the Indian vendors on the beach, with their ‘Mangoes? Litchis? Banana? Very nice p-ruit? Grandailla parfait? Ice cream?’ Gesture one angrily away, and another, sweating, scowling, barefooted on the burning sand but dressed from head to foot in white drill embroidered with some unlikely name — Joe’s Place, or the Top Hat — came at you like a persistent blue-bottle. You must want something. ‘No, no, no, no!’ my sister would shout in rage, and the vendor would stare at her, waiting for her to change her mind.

What we wanted at this stage in our lives, and what we usually got, since, like many parents, ours acquired the tastes of their children, being formed rather than forming, was a holiday at a South Coast village beyond the reach of even the little single-track railway. In this village, the hotel was a collection of thatch-roofed rondavels, the water was free of refuse, and the beach — ah, the beach lay gleaming, silent, mile after mile, looping over flower-strewn rocks; there were, indeed, many beaches, and always one where for the whole day there would be no footprints in the sand but my sister’s and mine. In fine weather, the village was, I suppose, a paradise of sorts. In front of the little hotel was the warm, bright sea, and, curving around behind it, hill after hill covered with the improbable green sheen of sugar cane, which, moving in the breeze, softened every contour like some rich pile, or like that heavy bloom of pollen which makes hazy the inner convolutions of certain flowers. Streams oozed down from the hills and could be discovered by the ear only, since they were completely covered by low, umbrella-shaped trees (these are seen to better advantage on the hills around Durban, where their peculiarly Japanese beauty is unobstructed by undergrowth), latticed and knitted and strung together by a cat’s cradle of lianas and creepers. My sister and I would push and slither our way into these dim, secret places, glimpsing, for the instant in which we leaned over, the greenish, startling image of our faces in water that endlessly reflected back to the ferns the Narcissus image of their own fronds.

More cheerfully, in the bush along the road we would sometimes hear that incredibly light-hearted, gossipy chatter which means that monkeys are about. The little Natal coast monkeys are charming creatures, in appearance exactly the sort of monkey toy manufacturers choose; in fact, they are just what one would wish a monkey to be. They bound about in the treetops, nonchalant and excitable at the same time, and unless they are half tame, as they have become around some of the road-houses on the outskirts of Durban, they move off almost too quickly to be clearly seen; you find yourself left standing and gazing at the branches as they swing back into place and listening to the gaiety as it passes out of hearing, and the whole thing has the feeling of a party to which you have not been invited. If the monkeys, like distant relatives who wish to make it clear that there is no connection, ignored us, there were creatures who, because their movements were attuned to some other age of slime or rock, could not escape us. On the trailing plants near the rocks, sleepy chameleons stalked shakily, or clung swaying, their eyes closed and their claws, so like minute, cold human hands, holding on for dear life. If they saw you coming for them, they would go off nervously, high-stepping across the sand, but with a kind of hopelessness, as if they knew that all you had to do was lean over and pick them up. And then, unable to bite, scratch, sting, or even to make any protest other than to hiss faintly and hoarsely, they wrapped their little cold hands around your finger like a tired child and went as pale as they could — a lightly spotted creamy beige that was apparently their idea of approximating the colour of human skin. My sister was particularly fond of these resigned and melancholy creatures. Twice we took one home to the Transvaal with us on the train, and twice we watched and wept in anguish when, after two or three happy months on the house plant in my mother’s living room, the poor thing lost first his ability to change colour, fading instead to a more ghostly pallor each day, and then, literally, his grip, so that he kept falling to the floor. The Transvaal winter, even indoors, was too much for chameleons.

In the heavy green water of the lagoon at the South Coast village where we used to stay, there appeared to be no life at all, though some people said that under the rocks at the bottom there were giant crabs. When the weather was bad for a few days, and the combination of the sea’s rising and the lagoon’s flooding washed away the sandbanks between the lagoon and the sea, the dark river water in the lagoon poured in a deep channel down into the waves, and the waves mounted the river water, frothing over the swirl. Decaying palm leaves, the rotten ropes of broken lianas, and fallen vegetable-ivory fruit, as hard and round as cricket balls, were washed out of the stagnant bed of the lagoon and brushed you weirdly while you swam in the sea. Once, late one afternoon, my mother and I were lying on the sand watching a solitary swimmer who evidently did not mind the dirty sea. Suddenly we saw the rhythmic flaying of his arms against the water violently interrupted, and then he heaved clear up into the air, gripping or in the grip of a black shape as big as he was. My mother was convinced that he had been attacked by a shark, and went stumbling and flying over the sand to get help from the hotel. I went, with that instinct to seek human solidarity in the face of any sort of danger towards humankind, to stand with some excited children who had been playing with toy boats at the water’s edge. I was four or five years older than the eldest of them, and I kept holding them back from the water with the barrier of my outspread arms, like a policeman at a parade. What danger I thought there could be in two or three inches of water I cannot imagine, but the idea that there was a monster in the vicinity seemed to make even the touch of the water’s edge a touch of menace.

In minutes, the whole village was on the beach, and out there, but coming nearer with every wave, were the swimmer and the dark shape, now together, now apart, now lost, now discovered again. As the lifesaving rope was unreeled and the volunteer lifesavers plunged into the sea, supposition was shrill, but hastily silenced at the occasional cry of ‘Look, there he is!’ There was a feeling of special horror, oddly, because it was obvious that the creature was not a shark; with a shark, one knew exactly what it was one had to be afraid of. And then the cry went up: ‘It’s a crocodile! It’s a crocodile!’ Even the lifesavers heard it, and looked back towards the shore, confused. Before they could get to the swimmer, he was in water shallow enough for him to stand, and we could see him very clearly, his face grim and wild with water and effort, his hands locked around the long snout of a big reptile, which seemed to gather up the rest of its body in an attempt to kick him, rather than to thrash at him with its tail, as crocodiles are said to do. ‘A crocodile!’ the cry went up again. ‘Enormous!’ Men rushed into the shallow water with pocketknives and weapons of driftwood. Yet the man staggered up on to the beach with his monster alone. He was a short, stocky man, and it was true that the thing was as big as he was. It seemed stunned, and he kept hitting it across the snout with his fist, as if to say, ‘That will show you!’ Amid the screams and the squeals, and the confusion of lifesavers, rope, brandished driftwood, and Boy Scout knives, he beat it to death himself; it was plain that, exhausted though he was, he wanted the privilege of being the conqueror. Then he sat on the sand, sniffing deeply, his chest heaving, a flask of brandy trembling in his hand; I remember so well how he said, in an incredulous, rasping voice, ‘Crocodile that size could’ve torn one of those kids in half.’

The man was a great hero for half an hour. Then an old retired major who had lived in the district for many years and was a botanist and naturalist came over the sand, leaning on his little cane, and prodded at the monster lying there disfigured by blows and sand. ‘Leguan,’ the major said. ‘Old leguan — poor old lizard wouldn’t harm a fly. Must’ve been trying to get back to the lagoon.’ The major was quite right. The beast was not a crocodile but one of those giant lizards, the leguans, that are still fairly common all over South Africa but are careful to keep out of the way of man — as timid and, indeed, except for their frightening size and resemblance to the crocodile family, as defenceless as the chameleon. He would not have bitten the swimmer, and he was too stupid and clumsy even to use his weight to defend himself. The man had done battle with the most reluctant of dragons. So, with the wiliness of human beings, who hate to admit that they have been taken in and must turn their gullibility to advantage somehow, the people in the village and at the hotel were quick to make a kind of joke of the swimmer; where before his words ‘Could’ve torn one of those kids in half’ had made him seem the saviour of their children, now they saw something absurd in the dramatic way he had struggled to bring the creature in instead of making for the shore and his own safety. He went about the hotel for the rest of his holiday very much alone, and a little sullen perhaps.

By the time my sister and I were in our middle teens, we had lost our taste for solitude and the gentle wilderness. Our childhood love of Durban returned — for different reasons, of course — and I think that then we came to love the place for what it really is: in many ways a fascinating city, even if rather dull and smug intellectually. One of our chief delights at this time was our discovery of the Indian quarter of the town, and the Indian market. We enjoyed turning away from the pseudo-American and neo-Tudor architecture of the shopping centre and wandering down wide Grey Street, where the shops were small and crowded together and the balconies picked out in gaudy curlicues, and here and there a silver minaret or cupola shone. Among the more conventional stores, which sold men’s outfitting in fierce competition, were shops full of gauzy, tinselled lengths for saris, and Indian jewellers whose crammed windows seemed almost to tinkle with rows and rows of long gold earrings, and pendants strung upon thread. Those shops that were especially designed to entice European visitors like ourselves burned incense. Their dry, sweet odour was pleasant after the hot street, where splashes of chewed betel nut looked like blood on the pavement. In the Indian market there were piles of sweetmeats coloured violent pink and putrescent yellow, which smelled as revolting as they looked. We would return from these small expeditions with a particular type of sandal, thonged over the big toe, or a pair of earrings that looked as if they had been stamped out of thin gold tinfoil and that hung from the lobe to the shoulder. The sandals were called, if I remember rightly, chappals, and I know they were imported from India, but I do not remember ever seeing an Indian woman in Durban wear them. The earrings, without the folds of a sari to back them up, looked cheap and foolish in Western ears.

Like most South Africans, once I had been to Cape Town I wondered how I had ever thought Durban beautiful. Before I was quite grown up, I went alone with my father to Cape Town and we took a cable car to the top of Table Mountain. We stood there, on a clear, calm, perfect day, and, truly, for a little girl, that was god’s-eye look at the world. On such a day, you can see the whole Cape Peninsula, from Fishhoek on the one side, right around the ribs of mountain rising out of the sea, to Camps Bay on the other side. Some people even claim that you are looking at two oceans — the Atlantic on one side and the Indian on the other. But that is in dispute, for it is difficult to say where one ocean begins and the other ends. Anyway, the vast waters that lie before you are enough for two oceans. No peacock’s tail ever showed such blues and greens as the seas do from that height; all the gradations of depth are miraculously revealed, and, looking far, far down, where the colour crinkles and breaks into white near the shore, you see pale translucent areas in which the rocks show as boldly as if you were looking through the glass bottom of a boat directly above them.

It is something splendid, an almost superhuman experience, to see the tip of a continent, alive, at your feet. I know that I stumbled back to the cable station that day smiling constantly at my father but with the feeling of tears behind my eyes, in a confused state of exaltation that made it impossible for me to speak, and because I was so young, I immediately lost my exaltation in anger when I saw that many people who had come up with us on the cable car had been spending their half hour before the cable took us all down again writing postcards that would bear the postmark ‘Table Mountain’. These absorbed visitors scarcely glanced out of the windows at what they had come to see.

For some reason, our family did not visit the Kruger National Park until I was sixteen and in my last year at high school. Just how unusual this abstinence is, is difficult to explain to anyone who is not South African. For whatever else the South African in general, and the Transvaaler in particular, may or may not do for his family, he will manage somehow to get them to Kruger Park, the great wildlife preserve in the Transvaal. If he has no car, he will borrow one, and if he cannot do this, he will persuade a friend that two families can travel as uncomfortably as one, and beg a lift. The Park opens at the beginning of winter, in late April or early May, and by dawn on the opening day, cars and trucks loaded with camping equipment and tinned food are lined up in mile-long queues outside the various camps that serve as points of entry to the preserve.

I had heard so many tales and seen so many home movies about the Kruger Park (‘My dear, and then the lioness walked right up to the car and sniffed the tyres!’) that I almost dreaded going. I regarded listlessly the prospect of overcrowded camps, boerewors (a coarse, highly seasoned sausage held in sentimental regard by both Afrikaans- and English-speaking South Africans) cooked over an open fire, and long processions of cars crawling along the dusty roads in the stern rivalry of who would sight the most lions soonest. But when we went, it was very different from that. We went in October, during the last few days before the park closes for the summer rains and the calm that is granted the beasts for their breeding season. We stayed at a camp with a beautiful name — Shingwedsi — and we had the shade of its trees and the red blossoms of the cacti almost to ourselves. The peace of the bushveld was scarcely disturbed by the few cars on the roads.

The rainy season was a month off, but the first night we were at Shingwedsi the fantastic roar of a freak storm woke us at midnight and flooded the camp, marooning us for nearly twenty-four hours. During the next day, while we were shut in by drumming rain, my Uncle Robert, our mother’s younger brother, drank beer with and received the confidences of an engineer who lived and worked in the Park all the year round, watching over the boreholes that guarantee the animals’ water supply. At that period, I had just begun to read Hemingway, and it seemed to me that for the first time in my life something in fact had measured up to fiction. The engineer was just such a man as poor Francis Macomber might have chosen as an escort on a hunting trip. (And, on reflection, just such a man as Mrs Macomber might have wished him to choose.) He had a taciturn, world-weary air, and, in the cosy confinement of the rain, over the beer, he made Robert (since he was only ten years older than I, we girls did not call Robert ‘uncle’) feel that he, Robert, was the first person in years to whom he had been able to talk as he was talking, the first man whose sporting sense and sensitivity matched the engineer’s own, a man — at last! at last! — who instinctively would understand the boredom and tameness, for a man of spirit, of life in a sanctuary, with no one to talk to but gaping tourists. In fact, the engineer was one of those people who make others feel chosen. At five in the afternoon, when the rain had stopped, he stood up, flexed his tanned, muscular knees, and said, with a kind of stern, sardonic glee, ‘This is the time for elephant, if you want elephant. This water’ll keep the wardens out of my way for a day or so.’

Robert and I were agog, as we were meant to be. While Robert questioned him, unconsciously adopting the engineer’s terse manner as he tried to show that he ‘belonged’, I kept close by his side, determined not to be left out of this. The way to see elephants, to get right up close to them and just about feel them breathe on you as you photographed them, said the engineer, was to take a light truck and go after them fast, ignoring the strict twenty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit in force in the preserve, and then, when you sighted them, to get out and stalk them on foot, ignoring the still stricter rule that no visitor may leave his car. Robert and I grinned with excitement. ‘But you can only do it when those bastards are sitting with their feet in mustard water,’ said the engineer, referring to the wardens. Well, that was now.

Robert and I slipped away from the rest of the family — I was extremely anxious to have this adventure exclusive of my sister — and in half an hour the engineer had Robert, me, and Robert’s movie camera in his truck. While the wild passage of the truck through water and mud shook loose every nerve in our bodies, he told us that what we were going to do was perfectly safe, and then, almost in the same breath, that what we were going to do was terribly dangerous but that we need not worry, for he knew exactly how to do it and get away with it. I wanted to close my eves with the speed and exhilaration, but the leaps of a herd of impala deer that we had startled into a Nijinsky-like retreat of alarmed grace brought me out of my tense passivity almost as abruptly as the deer had been brought out of theirs. After about twenty minutes, we reached a river bed, and there, with their great columns of legs in the newly flowing water, stood three magnificent elephants.

The shattering life of the truck came to an abrupt halt. The engineer said ‘There you are!’, and sent Robert and me stalking on foot. It seemed as if our hush of intensity had brought home to the engineer his boredom with this sort of adventure; he looked around for a dry boulder where he could sit and smoke his pipe while he waited. The truck was, I suppose, about two hundred yards from the river. When Robert and I were very near indeed to the elephants, and the beetle-wing whir of the camera was sounding, one of the great beasts slowly swung his head erect and towards us. Then he walked out of the shallow water, trailing his huge feet like a clumsy child, and advanced to within thirty feet of the camera, Robert, and me. And there the elephant stood, slowly flapping those wide, palmetto-like ears that African elephants have. I don’t think he seemed real to us; we thought only of the camera, and saw the elephant as he would loom on the screen rather than as he was, a slack-skinned splendid hulk, standing there before us. Then, all in the same instant, I smelled liquorice tobacco and felt myself violently grasped by the arm. The same thing must have happened to Robert, for at once we were jerked furiously around, met the impatient and alarmed face of the engineer, and were running, pushed roughly along by him, for the truck. I suppose it was the beating of my own heart that I thought was the pounding of the elephant coming up behind us.

Driving back to Shingwedsi camp, the engineer grinned fascinatingly — it was difficult to say who was more under the spell of that grin, Robert or me — and remarked, ‘Those pictures will be quite good enough as it is. You don’t want to scare your friends, do you?’ And Robert and I laughed, to show that we, too, knew there hadn’t really been any danger. It was only next day, when our party had moved on to Pretorius Kop camp to see lions, that I suddenly remembered that the engineer hadn’t had to start the truck when we jumped in; he had left the engine running all the time. Some years later, I was told that there is reason to believe that when an elephant flaps his ears, he does it to fan the scent of his enemy more strongly towards his nostrils, in preparation for a charge.

In a country where people of a colour different from your own are neither in the majority nor the ruling class, you may avoid altogether certain complications that might otherwise arise in the formation of your sense of human values. If the Chinese, say, remain a small, exiled community in Chinatown, and the Red Indians are self-contained on their reservation, you can grow up to have a reasonable standard of personal ethics without taking consideration of their presence. The problem of how you would behave towards them if you met them can be almost purely academic; you need not meet them, if you don’t wish to. In South Africa, this is not possible. There are people who try it, who arrange their lives for it, but they never succeed, for it cannot be done. Even if you are the most diehard reactionary, you cannot get away with it in a country where there are three million white people and nine million black and coloured.

For me, one of the confusing things about growing up in South Africa was the strange shift — every year or two when I was small, and then weekly, daily almost, when I was adolescent — in my consciousness of, and attitude towards, the Africans around me. I became aware of them incredibly slowly, it now seems, as if with some faculty that should naturally, the way the ability to focus and to recognise voices comes to a baby in a matter of weeks after birth, have been part of my human equipment from the beginning. The experience of the warm black bosom of the mammy (in South Africa she would be known as the nanny) has been so sentimentalised that I must say I am glad it is one I missed, though not for the reason that I missed it. The reason was simply that my mother, like many good South African mothers from England and Europe, would not have dreamed of allowing any child of hers to nestle in the bosom of a dirty native girl. (That was exactly the phrase — a phrase of scornful reflection on those mothers who did.) And if, at the age of five or six, it had been suggested to my sister or me that we should go up and give our native servant a hug, we would have shrunk away. We accepted the fact that natives were not as clean as we were in the same way we accepted the fact that our spaniel had fleas. It was not until years later that it occurred to me that if our servants were not so well and frequently bathed as ourselves, the circumstance that no bathroom or shower was provided for them might have had a great deal to do with it. And it was later even than that when the final breaking down of this preconceived notion came about. I was a long time learning, and each stage of enlightenment brought its own impulse of guilt for the ignorance that had gone before.

Our successive attitudes towards the Indians are another example of the disturbing shift in values that is likely to beset any child growing up in South Africa. The Indians are a minority group here, but even before their treatment became an issue at the United Nations, affecting the attitude of the rest of the world towards South Africa, they could not comfortably be ignored, because they belonged to the great mass of the Other Side — the coloureds. The Indians were imported into the country as indentured labour for the Natal sugar-cane fields in the mid-nineteenth century, and now, except for a considerable number of businessmen in Natal, a few traders in nearly every Transvaal town, and the considerable number who are employed in hotels and restaurants, they seem to be occupied chiefly as vendors of fruit, vegetables and flowers. In our East Rand mining town, the Indian traders were concentrated in a huddle of shops in one block, bought by them before the passage of what is known as the Ghetto Act of 1946, which, in effect, bars them from owning or leasing property in any but restricted, non-European areas. These were tailor shops, or they were ‘bazaars’ where cheap goods of all kinds were sold, and they were the object of dislike and enmity on the part of the white shopkeepers. In fact, a woman who was seen coming out of an Indian bazaar with a basket of groceries immediately earned herself a stigma: either she was low-class or, if her husband’s position as an official of one of the gold mines put the level of her class beyond question, she must be stingy. ‘She’s so mean she even goes to the Indians’ was the most convincing allegation of miserliness in our town. It was bad enough to be penny-pinching, but to stoop so low as to buy from an Indian trader in order to save!

For some reason I have never understood, it was quite respectable and conventional to buy your fruit and vegetables from the Indians who hawked from door to door with their big red or yellow lorries. Our household, like most others, had its own regular hawker, who called two or three times a week. Whatever a hawker’s name (and it was always painted in large, elaborate lettering, a kind of fancy compromise between Indian and English script, on his lorry), he was invariably known as Sammy. He even called himself Sammy, rapping at kitchen doors and announcing himself by this generic. There was a verse, parodying the hawkers’ broken English, that children used to chant around these lorries:

Sammy, Sammy, what you got?

Missus, Missus, apricot.

There were many more verses with the same rhyme scheme, becoming more and more daring in their inclusion of what struck the children as giggle-producing obscenities, such as ‘chamber pot’, and a few genuine old Anglo-Saxon shockers, which they pronounced quite calmly.

If you did not serenade the Indian with rude songs, and your mother was a good buyer and payer, he might hand you down a peach or a bunch of grapes from his lorry, but if you were an urchin without family backing, he would shout and shoo you away, lest your quick hand filch something while his back was turned. It is interesting to me now, too, to remember how yet again the bogy of uncleanliness came up immediately with the gift of the peach from Sammy; my mother, too polite to offend him by saying anything, pronounced such a warning with her eyes that I would not dare put my teeth to that peach until I had taken it inside to be washed. Sammy had ‘handled’ it. Sammy was an Indian. In fact, Sammy was Not White. Heaven knows, I don’t suppose the man was clean. But why did no one ever explain that the colour had nothing to do with cleanliness?

So my sister and I began by thinking of the Indian as dirty, and a pest; the vendors whom I have described as annoying us on the beach at Durban were the prototype. Then we thought of him as romantic; our wanderings in the Indian market in Durban were, I suppose, part of a common youthful longing for the exotic. And finally, when we were old enough and clearheaded enough and had read enough to have an abstract, objective notion of man, as well as a lot of jumbled personal emotions about him, the Indian became a person like ourselves.

I suppose it is a pity that as children we did not know what people like to talk of as ‘the real Africa’ — the Africa of proud black warriors and great jungle rivers and enormous silent nights, that anachronism of a country belonging to its own birds and beasts and savages which rouses such nostalgia in the citified, neighbour-jostled heart, and out of which a mystique has been created by writers and film directors. The fact of the matter is that this noble paradise of ‘the real Africa’ is, as far as the Union of South Africa is concerned, an anachronism. Bits of it continue to exist; if you live in Johannesburg, you can still go to the bushveld for solitude or shooting in a few hours. And bits of it have been carefully preserved, with as little of the taint of civilisation as is commensurate with the longing of the civilised for comfort, as in the Kruger Park. But the real South Africa was then, and is now, to be found in Johannesburg and in the brash, thriving towns of the Witwatersrand. Everything that is happening on the whole emergent continent can be found in microcosm here. Here are the Africans, in all the stages of an industrial and social revolution — the half-naked man fresh from the kraal, clutching his blanket as he stares gazelle-eyed at the traffic; the detribalised worker, living in a limbo between his discarded tribal mores and the mores of the white man’s world; the unhappy black intellectual with no outlet for his talents. And here, too, are the whites, in all the stages of understanding and misunderstanding of this inevitable historical process — some afraid and resentful, some pretending it is not happening, a few trying to help it along less painfully. A sad, confusing part of the world to grow up and live in. And yet exciting.

1954

Hassan in America

We have a friend in Cairo who is a prefabricator of mosques. I do not offer this as an item from Ripley, or as an insinuation that our friend belongs under any exhibitionist heading of Unusual Occupations, along with sword-swallowers and bearded ladies. On the contrary. He is a thin, wiry aesthete of great charm, member of a famous continental banking family by birth, Arab by inclination, and the beauty of his profession (for me, at any rate) is that there is nothing intrinsically outlandish or freakish about it; it is simply a combination of two perfectly ordinary occupations which happen to belong, in time and space, worlds apart. Mosques have been going up in the East since the seventh century, the technique of prefabrication can safely be dated round about the second world war of this century. All that Wally (which is not his name) has done is combine East with West, past with present. He has managed a synthesis which is also a compromise with the world in which he finds himself; and that, any psychiatrist will tell you, is about the best any of us can hope to do.

Wally is rather good at this sort of thing, it seems. He is all incompatibles. His blood is that much-punished mixture, half German Jew, half German Gentile. Within himself, there are no frontier incidents between the Jewish blood of his mother, and his affinity with Islam. He is a Jew who loves Arabs, a high-born Gentile German who is half Jew.

My husband lived with him for four years during the war, but I had not met him until we visited Cairo in the spring of last year. We met for the first time at lunch, in his Cairo flat. He looked like Humphrey Bogart (how he will smile that jutting-toothed smile when he reads this, because although he is a prefabricator, he is not so wholly of the twentieth century that he regards film stars as prototypes) and he loped stiffly from the little mezzanine bedroom down to the living room, from the living room to the kitchen and back, bringing us the small treasures he has to show — pieces of woven Coptic cloth, an ancient ring from a tomb, a tiny stone Anubis, the sacred dog of ancient Egypt.

After lunch he slipped away, with my husband, and it was not until they returned that the rest of us, myself and Wally’s wife and the other guests, noticed that they had been absent. When his wife asked where he had dragged my husband off to before they’d even had their coffee, he answered vaguely, something about ‘showing him round’. But Wally was to drive us back to our hotel at four o’clock, and the door of the flat had scarcely closed behind us when he smiled that smile at me and whispered, ‘Now I’ll show you something.’ Squeezed into his 1928 two-seater. Dodge convertible, we retraced the small journey he had made earlier, alone with my husband, through the suburb of Bab al-Louq, to a wide street of what once had been handsome Arab houses. The car clattered to a standstill before a house that was being demolished. Two moustached Arabs wearing woollen caps grinned at us from the scaffolding like pirates from a mast. They were taking down the pinkish stone façade of the house, block by block. As each segment was freed, they hoicked it on to a donkey eart that stood by. Wally peered upwards beneath the tattered hood of his car, rapt, his tongue making a little click expressive of shrewdness. ‘What d’you think of it, Nadine?’ he murmured, in the tone of a man offering a privilege.

‘What, the house?’

‘My façade,’ said Wally.

‘He’s bought it,’ said my husband, proudly.

I looked from one to the other.

‘Really,’ said my husband.

‘But what on earth for?’ I asked, ‘What’s he going to do with it?’

It was then that Wally told me about what he called his prefabricated mosques.

Wally has a reverent love for old Cairo. He has lived there, precariously, stateless, without papers or passport, since he landed at Port Said in a yacht twenty-five years ago. He was an adventurous boy, mad about sailing, and the despair of his parents in Hamburg. This was a pleasure cruise from which he never returned to Europe, for while he was away, Hitler’s persecution partly destroyed and entirely scattered his family. He lost his birthright of money, possessions and European culture.

Wally has lived in Cairo twenty-five years in this life, does not belong to Egypt, yet perhaps once lived there before. When you catch a glimpse of him, turning down one of the cluttered Cairo streets on some mysterious errand of his own, looking up out of his deep preoccupation to shout suddenly, as Arabs do, at someone who has run across his path, you see something that cannot be only twenty-five years old. He may have been out of Cairo for a century or two, but he was there before and now he is back. He not only sees but feels in his bones that Cairo is one of the most marvellous cities in the world, and that it is crumbling away before him. He looks mutely at the shoddy white sugar-cube blocks going up where the palaces were left to become rubble beneath the feet of men and the hooves of goats; he catches his breath at the sight of a beautiful keyhole doorway, still standing, a little house with a cool courtyard, that might yet be saved. He wants to buy them all. Driving with him through the lanes of the old town, I saw that his black eyes were not on the yelling dawdling traffic — there was no hooter in his car, and, dangling one hand out of the window, he beat on the bodywork to give warning of his approach — but looked all the time at windows, doors, balconies and gateways, mosques fallen away like cliffs, houses like broken honeycomb. He wants to buy them all, to save what can never be built again. He is not appalled by dirt, by poverty, by the degeneration of the humans who shelter and breed in pace with this decay. That is Allah’s affair. He wants only to hold together a little longer the beauty that has held out so long.

It was this passion of his that led him to quick fatalistic anger when he heard that someone whom he knew was building an ‘Arab style’ house, with modern steel doors beneath a traditionally shaped portal. He knew where he could find a magnificent carved door dating from the eighteenth century. He could buy it for five — no, less — three pounds. It was there for the taking, almost. All it needed was sandpapering, and a new piece of wood where the bolt was fitted. And he knew someone who could do that properly, too.

He was even more despairing when he saw a ‘modern’ mosque going up with a mimbar, or pulpit, made of lacquered plywood instead of the carved and inlaid panelling and meshrebiya work — a delicate, hand-made wooden lattice — which is traditional. He told the people who had perpetrated this offence that even if the microphone had replaced the muezzin, there was no need for the mimbar to be a vulgar travesty. He could have got them a mimbar made of centuries-old ivory and wood, and restored by the last man in Cairo who truly understood the technique of the work …

They were not only chastened, but interested. Some short time later he received a call from two gentlemen from out of town.

Would he contract to supply, ready-made, a traditional mimbar for a new mosque under construction in Alexandria?

He was in the prefabricated mosque business.

When we were in Egypt in March last year, the work for the mosque in Alexandria was completed. Wally had taken a little trip there, to see his contract honoured, his beautiful mimbar delivered and set up against the wall to the right of the niche — the mihrab — which indicates the direction of Mecca. ‘But now I’m on something big, something much bigger,’ he murmured, when we congratulated him on the success of this first venture. His black eyes, mournful and gay at the same time, invited questions. But he couldn’t wait to be asked. He went on: ‘A mosque, oh yes. But not here. Far away You’ll laugh … A mosque in Washington.’

‘Wally, we’re going to Washington,’ warned my husband.

‘No, it’s true. You can go and see it. I want you to go and see it for me.’

I was not so sceptical as my husband. I had never travelled before. If Cairo existed at one end of a continent on which Johannesburg, where I live, is at the other. I was ready to believe that I might find a mosque as well as a White House in Washington.

‘I am making — at least my man Hassan is making — a mimbar for a mosque that’s going up in Washington. Tomorrow I’ll take you to see the work he’s doing. It’s beautiful.’ English is a little-used fourth language for Wally, whose real fluency belongs to French, German and Arabic, and in his mouth the adjective is still an incomparable superlative.

We pestered him with questions, in which he wasn’t really interested. Who was building a mosque in Washington! And what for? Who would worship there! His answers were vague. Diplomatic personnel, he supposed. What did it matter, anyway? The important thing was that this mosque, whether in Washington or Timbuctoo, would have a beautiful mimbar, made by Hassan in exactly the same way as it had been made for centuries. Old Hassan and his son were, so far as he knew, the last men in Cairo who still practised this ancient craft. We would see for ourselves tomorrow how perfect the mimbar was going to be.

Wally came to our hotel to fetch us after a late breakfast next morning. It was a week of riot and crisis in Egypt, when Nasser deposed Neguib and then Neguib deposed Nasser, and we got into the old Dodge under the eyes of a bored Egyptian soldier who crouched, half hidden by dusty shrubs, over one of the Bren guns that pointed at the steel from the Ezbekieh Gardens. We went, I suppose, the long way round to the workshop of Hassan the carpenter, because, as I quickly discovered, Wally never could resist making detours to take in places he loved, or another look at some old house with windows that he admired and hoped to buy or borrow. On this day he drove us via the site of the summer villa, on the Nile bank opposite the Nilometer, where my husband had lived while he worked for British Intelligence during the war. I had seen this little house on many photographs, knew exactly the disposition of its rooms, and its relation to the three great palm trees in the courtyard. Now only the three palm trees remained, on a piece of cleared sand overlooking the river. Wally had built that little house himself — without permission, on a piece of land belonging to someone else.

My husband paced out the familiar steps from one palm to another, looking lost. But Wally did not seem to mind the disappearance of the little house, its confiscation and demolition. ‘It’s a pity, isn’t it?’ he said cheerfully. ‘I’ve got a place in mind,’ his voice had dropped to its confidential low, ‘further along the Nile, out of town entirely. I’ll show you, soon. That façade I showed you on Sunday, you liked it? If I don’t need it for one of my prefabrication jobs, I want to use it for myself.’

Before we reached Hassan’s workshop we made another stop, this time at the Ibn Tulun mosque. Wally would not let us go into the famous mosque at the Citadel, nearby. ‘Rubbish,’ he said. ‘Impure style. This,’ ushering us into the Ibn Tulun, ‘this is, I think, my favourite mosque. Twelfth century.’ Inside the great mosque, in the sunlit square open to the sky, we did not talk at all. We crossed it and then walked slowly round all four sides beneath the repetitive vista of the colonnades, falling away behind us with the beautiful monotony of ripples in water. It was dark under the high roof, after the bright sun: the dark was repeated, out in the sun of the square, in the dark bodies of the kites which, when we looked out, passed between our eyes and the light like those proverbial clouds no bigger than a man’s hand. The mosque was deserted except for two old men who slept peacefully on straw mats.

Once we had left the mosque, the old car plunged and bucked into streets scarcely wide enough for a loaded donkey. We reinforced Wally’s thumping of the bodywork with yells and cries. Bare-bottomed brats pressed out of our way against filthy walls. At last we left the car and walked up a steep, humped and winding street, stale with age, strong with poverty. The children had their life in public, coming out the way rats emerge to play quietly next to their refuse heap. The girls especially did not look much like children; with their painted eyes, they were more like frail women, shrunken through long illness. One was beautiful, under the grotesquerie of kohl, an actress who had forgotten to take off her make-up — until you saw that only her head looked young and alive; the rest of her was shrivelled before it had grown, like an anemone plant I once transplanted when it was already in bud. This child was being nursemaid to the baby of the family, one of those appalling Egyptian babies which made me shudder, and then feel ashamed of my horror. When they are six or eight months old they are no bigger than a newborn, but their pocket-watch-sized heads, covered with straight black hair, are veteran with survival of the dirt in which they feebly lie, and which would have killed the fat, pink-cheeked kind within days of birth. Past the baby, the street ended at the entrance to a kind of courtyard. Once, I suppose, it had been a garden. Now grass or flowers or paving were replaced by a surface of rubble from the crumbling building to which the courtyard belonged. In the middle stood a well-used grey Peugeot car.

Wally was smiling. ‘Come,’ he said, and took my arm, ‘This is Hassan’s place. He is here.’

* * *

There was no door. We stepped, in the calm sunlight — the courtyard preserved still its old function of creating a space of quiet between the dwelling and the street — over fallen stone and wood. A stairway led nowhere; it seemed terribly light inside; a fat, pleasant-faced, middle-aged Arab in shirt and trousers called out a greeting to Wally and came over to us. We were introduced to Hassan, and I saw one or two fine feathers of wood-shaving, curled on his clothes and hair. Slightly awkwardly, with an air, if no words of apology (he spoke little English) he drew Wally away to consult with him in Arabic. They argued, considered, explained in the manner of men who are in business together. My husband and I saw that we were in a great, floorless room — perhaps two or three rooms from which the intervening walls had been taken or had fallen down. Planks of new wood rested crazily against the old walls, sawdust was mixed with rubble underfoot, and, at the far end, there was a workman’s bench, a lathe and other carpenter’s tools. The walls were very high. Higher still, there was the sky. There was no roof.

Picking my way, I went through a beautiful arched doorway and found myself in another room. Where the floor had been there were piles of what at first glance appeared to be litter and rubbish, but which, when I looked again, I guessed must be Wally’s stores. Four broken Greco-Roman columns were stacked next to a porcelain toilet pan bearing the name of a firm of English plumbers. A huge carved door, half-destroyed by dry rot, lay on its side. A neat pile of pinkish stone blocks, numbered in chalk, stood near where I had entered. While I looked, there was a stir behind the columns, and a white duck came flatly towards me, blinking her quick eyes and shaking at a piece of rotting vegetable peel that she held in her beak.

This shell was a place of elegant proportion; even now, with the strange assortment of objects, and the duck, scavenger of the mud, in possession, it was the sort of place in which you must stand still a moment, as you enter, and feel how pleasingly you are enclosed. Half the ceiling remained intact above the ruin; the walls curved in to meet it, and this curved cornice and the ceiling itself were painted in a close, delicate, formal design of red and blue and gold. The colours were still perfectly clear but the ceiling ended jaggedly, halfway across the span of the room. In the gaping space of sky, kites wheeled slowly, as they did over the Ibn Tulun mosque. It was splendid.

Wally came in behind me, saying ‘shoo’ to the duck, who knew him and took no notice.

‘What was this?’ I said. My face must have shown my astonishment, awe, almost, the strain of the impact of a world that had flourished and rotted before I had come, alien and impudent as the duck, to look upon it.

‘Early eighteenth-century palace. Must have belonged to some prince. This was the salon.’ He stood with his hands on his skinny hips, admiring the ceiling.

‘But to whom does it belong?’

‘Nobody.’

‘How nobody?’

‘These palaces were family seats. Passed from father to son. But they lost power, money. Years ago, the descendants got too poor to keep up such places. Three or four or five families lived in them together. They fell to bits. Nobody ever restores anything, here. Everything decays, is lost. In the end the inheritance is divided among so many, nobody owns it. Nobody can live in it, nobody can afford to keep it — what is the word — habitable. But come on, you haven’t seen what I brought you here for. Don’t you want to see the mimbar for Washington?’

The duck ran once or twice before us like someone hurrying against the stream on a crowded sidewalk. ‘Get,’ said Wally, or maybe it was some Arabic word that sounded the same. The duck dived out of the way.

When Wally and I came back through the arched doorway, Hassan and my husband were talking in French beside the carpenter’s bench. Hassan wiped some small object in his hand with the palm of the other, and smiled at me with his head wrinkling his fat neck to one side, like one of those pictures of foreign children one is tempted to take on quaysides, recording an attitude at once shy and yet amusedly tolerant. Wally called out something to him in Arabic, and he disappeared for a moment behind a pile of planks and carved timber. From the wood powder that covered the bench I picked up the spool-shaped piece of wood, about an inch and a half long, that he had dropped there. I turned it over and saw that there was a slot cut across the back of it. My husband leaned over my shoulder and put into my hand a thin slat of wood, a little longer than the spool. It fitted smoothly into place.

Hassan came back with a handful of such slats and little carved wooden shapes — some were spools, like the one I held, but most of them looked like segments cut from a narrow picture frame. Some were of black wood, some nut-coloured, some rosy mahogany. There were two or three very small diamond-shaped pieces which were made of yellowed ivory. Not quickly, but with the calm rhythm of fingers that are doing work to which they have long been accustomed, Hassan fitted together shapes, slats and ivory. The picture frame segments formed diamonds, the ivory diamond shapes fitted within the black wooden ones, and a spool united each of the four angles of each wooden diamond to an angle of another. Grooves in the pieces themselves, and the thin wooden slats that slid in behind, held the whole pattern rigidly and sweetly in place without a single nail. Later Wally was to show me huge screens made this way, and the balconies which, in old Arab houses, cover the windows and have a tiny peep-hole window out of which the veiled women are allowed to observe the street, and, most beautiful of all, a centuries-old mimbar in an ancient Cairo mosque, from which not the smallest fragment of wood had worked loose. Hassan went away again and brought back with him a cardboard box in which his wooden confetti lay thick.

‘So!’ he said, assembling another pattern.

‘That’s partly very old stuff.’ Wally interpreted for the carpenter, ‘I brought him a screen — beautiful, very fine work,’ he picked up a tiny triangle, ‘but in bad repair, half destroyed. Now he’s making new pieces to replace those which have been lost.’

The jagged square mosaic Hassan handed to me had a uniform patina. ‘How is it that you can’t tell the old from the new?’ I asked.

‘He cleans and emery-papers the old pieces, and his replacements are identical with them,’ said Wally.

‘Patient work!’ I said.

Wally shrugged. ‘He is the last,’ he said, ‘it’s a dying art. Even in Egypt, there is no time, any more.’

Hassan went off with his easy, shambling walk and came back carrying a large section of wooden mosaic. He laid it before us on the bench, clearing a space for it with his forearm. It was part of the mimbar, the pulpit for the mosque in Washington.

‘There you are!’ said Wally.

Hassan pulled a few segments free, fitted them on to the pattern again. He pressed two pieces into my hand, motioned me to try. It was harder than I thought, because the pieces were made to fit so snugly. Hassan watched me proudly, as if I were a pupil.

‘He’s making every piece for the Washington pulpit here, himself?’ I asked Wally.

‘His son helps,’ said Wally.

I looked round at the ruined palace, open to the sky. ‘And when it’s finished,’ I said. ‘When it goes from here to — there. Will it be shipped complete? It’ll be such a huge thing.’

‘We’ll probably take it all to pieces for shipping,’ said Wally. ‘Hassan may go along to Washington to assemble it again, piece by piece. That’s prefabricating.’

‘Hassan in America,’ I said.

Hassan heard the two names, guessed of what we were speaking and smiled, his plump man’s breasts lifting against his old shirt with a shrug. I noticed that the carpenter doodled, though leisurely, not nervously, with his little bits of wood: making and pulling apart patterns he did not even look at.

From here to there.

Hassan walked with us, respectfully, out into the courtyard. He and Wally joked together in Arabic, conspiratorially. Hassan giggled deep in his chest. ‘Is that his car?’ my husband asked Wally, looking at the grey Peugeot. Hassan put an arm on it, leaning upon it as on an old wife. ‘How do you get it in here, for heaven’s sake?’ my husband said to him in English. I do not know whether or not the carpenter understood; he raised his big curved brows, laughing, in a kind of pantomime of one of Wally’s favourite answers: ‘We have our methods.’ As we left, waving to Hassan, I looked up round the courtyard once more, and noticed a shirt fluttering at a window. In what perhaps had once been the servants’ quarters of the palace, on the street side of the courtyard, a room was still standing, a room with a roof. Whatever inner communication to it there had been was no longer there; it was reached by a wooden ladder. It was in that room that Hassan lived, perhaps with his whole family. But he had his Peugeot. He merely camped out in the eighteenth century.

I wonder if we ever really believed in the mosque in Washington.

We were in New York in April and decided to spend the Easter weekend in Washington. ‘Ah, the cherry blossom,’ friends said, knowingly. ‘Well, the National Gallery, actually,’ said my husband. ‘And we must remember to ask about the mosque,’ I murmured, but nobody heard me.

It was only late on our last afternoon in the capital that we remembered, or rather that we didn’t think of something else we must see, instead. We had been to the White House and the Lincoln Memorial, and out along the smooth parkway to Mount Vernon. I had had my picture taken against the wisteria in front of the National Gallery, and again before an espaliered pear tree in Washington’s delightful kitchen garden. (The cherry blossom had been out, it appeared, the week before, and was as bedraggled and stained as an old ball dress.) A gentle rain steamed the grass and trees of the public gardens and boulevards all day, and over all the lovely city there was the wan, soft atmosphere of a hothouse, the smell of warmth and water. We had to take a friend home to his house in a fairly distant suburb, and by the time we set out to find the mosque, it was near twilight.

‘I think we should get on straight back to New York,’ said my husband.

‘No, I’m going to see that mosque.’

We found it, of course, on Massachusetts Avenue, along the wide way lined with foreign embassies. It is part of the new Islamic Centre, built by the countries belonging to the Arab League, and is contiguous with lecture and other public rooms. When we saw it, it was near completion, though the builder’s and architect’s boards were still up. We sat and looked at it, from the car on the other side of the road. Close to the sidewalk, five pillared archways lead to the courtyard of the mosque, flanked by arched keyhole windows repeating the pattern in the secular rooms to left and right. The building, of pale stone, is two storeys high and ends in a silhouetted balustrade of a delicate design, almost exactly like that of the Doge’s Palace in Venice. Tiered above this, there is a broad square tower, with the same decoration, and from the front wall of the broad tower rises a slender square tower culminating in a kind of balcony from which the minaret points. Near its peak, the minaret has its own round balcony, above which it is nipped into a slender waist; from this the graceful onion-shaped peak curves out and then in again. The crescent of Islam balances on its tip. There in the misty twilight, with the street lights superimposing, like scratches on a picture, the trees and buds of spring on an American sidewalk, was Wally’s mosque.

We scrambled out of the car and scuttled recklessly across the avenue over the shivering lanes of light from the great eyes of American cars. The earth between the sidewalk and the entrance to the Islamic Centre was uneven with rubble; new rubble, builder’s rubble, this time, adulterating the spring smell of wet soil with the cold odour of cement. We went through one of the five pillared archways into the courtyard. But it was not yet paved, and we had to skirt wide pools of rainwater in order to cross it. It was in the process of being decorated in a bright, light blue. The way into the mosque was barred with builder’s boards. We could not even see in.

We came out of the courtyard and walked all round the Islamic Centre. All doors were locked. ‘Look,’ said my husband. He had noticed that the elaborate keyhole windows were filled in with modern steel, glass-paned frames. The steel was painted blue. Inside, I could picture lecture rooms, planned for acoustic perfection, washrooms with clean tiles and a machine that dries your hands with a stream of hygienic, warmed and disinfected air. We came out on the other side of the building and found ourselves at the right-hand entrance to the courtyard. I stepped into it once more, for a last look. Here, the builders must have settled themselves for their lunch — empty beer cans lay at the foot of one of the arches. ‘The beer that made Milwaukee famous,’ I read, kicking over one of the cans.

As we drove away, I screwed my neck round to have a last look at the brand-new mosque to which Wally’s prefabricated pulpit was coming. In a few moments all I could see of it was the Islamic crescent, caught in the treetops of Washington like the moon itself.

1955

Egypt Revisited

The friend who had come to meet me at the airport said with satisfaction, ‘It’s worse than ever here, it’s lovely.’ He was a foreigner, expressing in seven words a viewpoint doubly foreign: no citizen of the United Arab Republic would admit that graft is thriving in Egypt more rankly than ever, and no other member of the remnant of the foreign community whom I met would agree that life there is lovely. Yet the eccentric viewpoint given by my friend, who has spent the whole middle thirty years of his life in Egypt, is less than half a joke. Perhaps you have to come, as I do, from Africa and not from Europe, to pick the truth from the laugh. All over the Afro-Asian world there must be isolated Europeans who secretly rejoice in the bitterness of their own banishment, because they love the life and temperament of the country of their adoption so much and so tolerantly that they luxuriate even in the intensification of national failings that so often seems to follow on independence of foreign domination.

I was last in Cairo nearly five years ago, in March 1954, during the week when Nasser deposed Neguib. There were machine guns snouting at you through the dusty leaves of the shrubs in the Ezbekieh Gardens, then, and military trucks delivered their loads of soldiers at the street corners every morning, where they sipped coffee on the alert, all day. Now the impromptu, trigger-happy atmosphere has gone. Suez hangs in the air, a confidence that inflates even the meanest street-urchin chest. Nasser has had the good sense and the imagination to do one or two things that show: a beautiful corniche has swept away the jumble of little villas that used to obscure the town bank of the Nile, there are new bridges, and new wide roads, and white blocks of newly built workers’ flats that, spaced on their cleared ground, look as much like institutions as all workers’ flats seem to everywhere in the world. One of the new roads, which leads up to the Mokattam hills, cuts a wide tarred swathe through the Dead City, and in another part of the city the great dunes of rubble that are ancient Cairo, crumbled to dust, are being bitten into and smoothed to a new level for the dwelling places of the latest wave of civilisation. (Watching the cranes and bulldozers, you can see an archaeological discovery of the future in the actual making.) All this, along with the colossus that has been raised from the sands of Memphis and put up outside the main railway station, and the boyishly-grinning pictures of Nasser that cover the faded squares where once Farouk’s picture hung on the walls of shops, is the maquillage on an old face that has known so many. But it’s an impressive job, and one which encourages one to believe that there’s been some bone-surgery too, some improvement of the structure beneath the paint.

I soon discovered that there are two almost completely different versions of the range and effect of this surgery, and that while I should have full opportunity to hear one, I should have to gather the other, and most important, one chiefly by sharpening my own eyes and ears and the shiver of receptivity on my skin. As a white visitor without any Arabic, I naturally found myself socially stranded among the remnants of the European ‘foreign’ community; I could not expect to cross the very few old and personal bridges between European society and Egyptian society that have survived, successfully, the Palestine War, the Officers’ Revolution and Suez, and I could not expect, without a word of their language, to reach a confession of the hopes, fears and prides of the people of the streets. While I was in Cairo I did not let myself forget that the voice in my ear — a measured, intelligent and mostly unembittered voice — was not the voice of the people; that coarse and muffled note I should have to pick up for myself.

Cairo as seen by the few members of the old community who still manage to live there is a depressing place; an intimate whose sight is going and from whose mind the mobility of memory is fading. This is not entirely blimpish nostalgia for good old days. The ancient city that only a few years ago was one of the elegant centres of the modern world has forgotten its sophistication. Lack of foreign currency has emptied the Kasr-el-Nil shops of nearly everything imported; they are filled with decent cloth of uninspired design made in Egyptian textile mills, and unbeautiful shoes fairly well made by Egyptian factories. Even Groppi’s famous delicatessen exposition has shrunk; there are one or two delicacies you cannot buy there, now. In those smart restaurants which are still open, the head chef has gone (banished to that ‘home’ in France from which he came perhaps two generations ago?) and the second-in-command is following the recipes, but not the flair. The great artists and musicians of the world no longer come to Egypt, and there are few who come to hear them if they do. The only evidence I saw of the cultural life of the year in Cairo was the peeling remains of tremendous posters advertising a Soviet ballet and theatre company (a third-rate one, I was told) that had come and gone. The luxe of Europe has been banished, but what is left, of course, is the pandemic inanity of Hollywood. The entertainment life of Cairo has become that of a complex of villages, each with its ten-foot-high paper face of Marilyn Monroe.

In the eloquent silence of a departed presence that Europe has left behind in Cairo — a silence that you are aware of beneath the unchanged racket and tinkle of the street — a sound forms. The hoarse scraping of the palms of deserted gardens in Maadi is the nervous clearing of the throat; the faint stir of air in the peacock’s tail of fallen leaves before the door of the British Embassy is the taking of a preparatory breath — and there, it is out. ‘Sequestrated’. Sibilant and fateful, this is the last word on the destiny of nearly every European you meet and every second shop or bank you pass. It is the excuse, the explanation and the apotheosis of city life.

With the immediate past of the city under sequestration, the present seems to be passing into the hands of the army officers and their wives. They are the new elite; the officers’ wives are the women who spend hours and money at the beauty parlours, now, and (it is said with a touch of malice) picnic on the Gezirah Club golf course because they haven’t yet got so far as learning the game itself. There is a splendid new officers’ club, too, where the officers take the ease of top men. No doubt these are the people for whom the new suburb, dubbed Mokattam City, is intended. The development has the authentic, sad, nouveau riche stamp; bold, cocky, unsure in taste but sure of right — in this case the right to plan ugly villas on the moon-landscape of the Mokattam hills. This certainly is one of the most beautiful places in the world to live, if you feel you could stand the unearthliness of it. Withdrawn from the softening presence of the Nile, these austere heights have no geological memory of green or root or growth; as some mountains are above the tree belt, so these are, so to speak, above the life belt. They drop sheerly from level to level, the higher ones carved into deep escarpments of rock and sand, and the lower ones pitted and cragged by the quarrying that has built Cairo for years. From the foot you see a landslide of hardened Demerara sugar, sliced here, scooped out there, gouged and layered. From the top, with the strange, coarse crumbs of a substance that does not seem to be the surface of the earth underfoot, you look, far below, on the peace of the Dead City, a place from which at this height only the soundtrack seems missing; and beyond it to the whole marvellous city, from the medieval minarets and domes to the cubist shapes of light and shade made by modern blocks; and, at last, to the desert itself. I went into a Fatimid tomb that has stood alone, up there, through the centuries; and I had lunch at the new casino, a vast grand piano of a building whose ‘free lines’ have begun to peel before it is quite completed.

On another day I drove past deserted Mena House — open, I believe, but listless — and went to eat tahina and kebab at another new restaurant, this time at the foot, or rather under the nose, of the Sphinx. This one is called ‘Sahara City’ and it is run by a Sudanese who looks like Uncle Tom and as a small boy was a page at the court of Franz Joseph of Austria. Both the casino restaurant and ‘Sahara City’ were empty; ‘Nobody goes anywhere,’ said my friends. But that night, at a restaurant I had remembered from my last visit, the tables were full and people stood ten deep around the bar — avaricious-looking women, men who watched everyone who came in.

‘Then who are these?’ I asked.

‘The local representatives of international crooks,’ said my companion boredly.

The cosmopolitan city of Cairo is dead as the Dead City itself. But does it matter? Does it really count? When I sat in the train, waiting to leave for Upper Egypt, I had a sense of release from involvement with a prevalent emotional atmosphere that had little or nothing to do with me; my emphatic identification with the dispossessed foreign community left me, and I very properly took up my own role again, which was that of a stranger in a strange land. The train took a long time to get started; a boy with rings of sesame-studded bread braceleting his arms from armpit to wrist ran up and down the platform; trolleys full of fowls in cane cages were wheeled past; the crowd, predominantly male, as usual, took an elaborate farewell of the passengers. I had plenty of time to think, and look. The scene on the platform was just as it would have been, five years ago. The streets of Cairo, too, with the exception of the ‘foreign’ streets, were just as before. At sunset that afternoon, I had stood on the balcony of the flat where I was staying, and had watched the people below, never ant-like as in big cities of the West, but leisured, in full cry, pushing carts, selling peanuts and roasted maize cobs, balancing coffee cups, zigzagging the hazard across hooting cars and the little red petrol tanks (from which householders buy the spirit for their stoves) drawn by jingling, brass-cluttered donkeys. As I had come out of the building to make for the station, I had passed the caretaker, sitting resting his back against the blast-wall that was put on during the War and has never been taken down; he was eating his bean soup supper preparatory to his night’s work, which consists of climbing into the bed that is pushed into the foyer every evening, and falling asleep under his yellow coverlet.

Here, among the real population, the people themselves, not enough seemed to have changed. Nasser’s infant industrial plans are not yet sufficiently under way to thin out the ranks of the thousands who exist on half-jobs, waiting for a share of a half-job, or simply waiting for the opportunity to turn some absurd and unwelcome service into a job — the urban manifestation of an over-populated country that is increasing its count of souls by the disastrous number of a million every two years. And while the military caste is raising its standard of living hand over fist along with its social position, the civil servants are struggling to keep up decent appearances on salary scales that would have been adequate before the last war. Many people told me that these totally unrealistic salaries were largely responsible for corruption; families could not hope to make ends meet without the ‘little extra’ brought in by bribes.

Yet though these facts were disappointing — they were at least negative — by and large, they had not been brought about by the new regime; the new regime had failed, as yet, to change them.

One of the things I had liked about Cairo, five years after the revolution, I decided, was what I cautiously call national confidence — something that I don’t believe has anything to do with the braggart ‘Voice of Cairo’ or Pan-Arabism, or, indeed, anything more ambitious or aggressive than an inner assurance that each man is a man measured against his own people, and not a cipher found wanting against the standards of those who are born of other countries and to other opportunities. All of a piece with this was my satisfaction when I saw what good care the new government is taking to preserve many of those great hunks of the past which jut out here and there, all over Cairo — walls and city gates as well as more obvious and spectacular monuments. When I went to the Cairo Museum, that very morning of my last day in Cairo, I was not surprised to see that although the tourists were reduced to myself, two whispering Indian girls and an American couple sitting exhaustedly in a window embrasure, the museum was full of parties of Egyptian schoolboys and girls; it seemed to me natural that a young and poor nation should be eager to teach its children that it is not so young or so poor, after all.

But what was a horrifying surprise was the state of the museum. It was dusty and dingy as a second-hand dealer’s; many exhibits had lost their labels, and those of others were almost indecipherable. Vaguely military-looking attendants lounged about, their sticky tea-glasses stowed away in dark corners. Even in the Tutankhamen rooms the jewellery is falling to pieces and the gold is flaking off the incomparable splendour of the shrine. Such neglect of the exquisite work of human hands that has survived time almost long enough to have achieved immortality gives you a feeling of real distress; I had hastened back into town to find someone who could explain to me why this was being allowed to happen. And then I heard about another side of national pride, a foolish, childish side, that will see its wonderful artistic heritage rot rather than let the foreigner — any foreigner — bring the expert help and knowledge that is needed to preserve it.

The train finally did go, and I woke up next morning in an Egypt that is not Cairo. For the next few days I followed the life of the Nile. Where in the world do you get a statement of the human condition as simple and complete as this? Look out of the train or car window and the entire context of the people’s lives is there — the river, the mud, the green of crop and palm it nurtures, the desert. There is no existence outside the beneficence of the river, the scope of the mud, the discipline of the desert. This pure statement comes like peace, after the complexity and fragmentariness of life as we know it.

The land looks as it has always looked — ‘always’ is an impudent five years, for me, out of many thousands. Although the big estates have been broken up under a fairly vigorous and, most people agree, fairly successful agrarian reform, they are worked by the same people in the same way. I was struck again by the unfair picture of these people that soldiers who had been in Egypt during the War gave to their Western countries. I know that South Africans built up for me a caricature of a squinting, cringing, night-shirted Egypt — ‘those old Gyppos’. The fact is that many of the peasants, who went on with their work in dogged dignity, as we walked past, are good-looking, while the youths, especially the Nubians round Aswan, are as beautiful as the lovely faces in tomb carvings. This is extraordinary when you remind yourself that these people have been underfed and debilitated by bilharzia and malaria for many generations, and that ever since year-round irrigation was achieved, they have been overworked as well.

Strung along the Nile, their villages appear as single units — no straggler houses, and a shelter of palms drawn in around them, fortressed against the sun. In the distance they seem to be those very oases that appear in the deserts of fairy tales. The beauty of this poverty has to be shaken off. Then you see that these people are breathtakingly poor, even by the standards of African poverty that I know in South Africa. How, you ask yourself, mentally groping down to confine comparisons only to those things which seem reasonably essential to life — how can they live, so possessionless, so stripped? Apart from a more equitable distribution of land — no one is allowed to own more than 300 feddans (315 acres) and fifty feddans for each of his first two children, and the vast absentee-owned estates have been distributed among the landless — the regime has brought one obvious enrichment to village life. Nearly every village now has a fine modern school, just outside its confines, and it was good, in the mornings, to see the children running out of the dark, close mud walls across to the spanking new white buildings with big windows. Oddly enough, contemporary architecture does not look out of place beside mud brick and tea-cup domes; I wondered about this until I remembered the model of an ancient Egyptian villa that I had seen in a dusty case in the Cairo Museum — it made use of the same juxtaposition of simple rectangles as one sees in contemporary buildings.

At last, I stood at Aswan on the barrage and felt the power of the Nile water thudding up through the concrete under my hands as it forced through the sluices. ‘Aswan’ has become a place-name of immense overtones to anyone who reads a newspaper; since 1956 its pronouncement as a colossal barrage of the Nile to be created there has stirred feelings — loyalties, resentments, fears, satisfactions, guilts — rather than conjured up the imaginative picture of a town. It was quite a surprise — it was as if I had forgotten — to find that Aswan was a place where people lived; a lively Arab town, a view of the Nile flowing in great hanks of calm water round islands of granite behind which the feluccas appeared and disappeared in scythes of white. A few miles from the town, standing on the barrage itself, it is difficult not to indulge in the dramatic feeling that you have all the life of Egypt piled up there behind you in the great dam, and in the still greater dam whose plan lies, bandied about in the abstractions of international politics and finance, but marked out clearly on the landscape, not many miles behind it. I walked along the barrage to the hydro-electric power station which is under construction, cutting into the west shore. The clumsy steel giants of Europe were busy there; great turbines and cables and cranes from Switzerland, Germany and Austria. A workman waved me back; and laughed like a boy with a firecracker when I jumped at the hollow boom of an explosion. We leaned together over the steel rail and watched the granite dust settle, far down in the immense rock basin that has been blasted out.

I am not a watcher at the peep-holes so considerately provided by builders when they are at work; the sight of men swarming about their jobs on some project that will swallow the work in their hands anonymously in its immensity is more likely to depress than thrill me. But I found myself watching the Egyptian workmen labouring below on their power station, and I felt I could go on watching for a long time. There was something hopeful and even exciting about the sight of these men with their energies caught up by the demands of a huge imaginative task — not the labour of the cotton and the bean field whose fruits are used up each day by the day’s existence, and nothing more to show for it. When the power station is completed, it will be theirs to use; it does not merely feed them now, but will change their lives. Surely these people need so badly not merely to be fed better and to live better, but also, after so many centuries of humbleness, to achieve, as other people do? I hope that Nasser will not forget them in dreams of world power, as all their rulers in the past have forgotten them or sold them out, for one reason or another. People who ‘know Egypt’ and deplore the Nasser regime tell me that ‘kings and governments come and go, but it makes no difference to the fellah’. How tragic is the smug comfort of this remark if, this time again, it should prove to be true.

1959

Chief Luthuli

There are three million white people and more than nine million black people in the Union of South Africa. Only a handful of the whites have ever met Albert John Luthuli. He has never been invited to speak over the radio, and his picture rarely appears in the white daily press in South Africa. Yet this government-deposed African chief — who, far from losing his honourable title since he was officially deprived of it, is generally known simply as ‘Chief’ — is the only man to whom the nine million Africans (‘African’ is becoming the accepted term for a South African black) give any sort of wide allegiance as a popular leader. He is a man in black politics in South Africa whose personality is a symbol of human dignity which Africans as a whole, no matter what their individual or political affiliations are and no matter what state of enlightenment or ignorance they may be in, recognise as their dignity.

Luthuli is a sixty-year-old Zulu and an African aristocrat. His mother was a Gumede — one of the most honoured of Zulu clans — and his grandmother was given, as was the custom with the daughter of a prominent tribal chief, to the court of the famous paramount chief of unconquered Zululand in the 1870s, Cetshwayo. Luthuli has a number of those physical characteristics which are regarded as typical of the warrior Zulu and to which even the most ardent supporter of apartheid would pay grudging admiration. His head is large and set majestically back on a strong neck; he has a deep, soft voice; and although he is not a tall man he seems always to look as big as anyone else in the room.

Among his less obvious characteristics is a sense of repose; sometimes a monumental quiet. If more white South Africans could meet him, or even hear him speak on a public platform, they would be astonished (and perhaps even a little ashamed — he makes that sort of impression) to measure the real man against the bloodthirsty demagogue that is the African leader as they imagine him. Apart from anything else, he speaks English with a distinct American intonation, acquired along with his education at schools run by American missionaries.

Luthuli’s ancestral home is Groutville Mission, in the Umvoti Mission Reserve on the coast of Natal, near Durban, and his personality stands sturdily upon this little corner of Africa. He has never, even as a child, lived in the collection of thatched mud huts in which tribal Africans usually live because Reverend Grout, an American missionary who came to South Africa in 1835, had planned his mission village on the European pattern, with houses; and if as a child the young Luthuli did his share of herding cattle, he did it after school hours, because Grout had seen to it that there was fenced common that would free the children to attend school. As the Umvoti Reserve is a mission and not a tribal reserve, the chiefs are elected, and there is no dynasty in the hereditary sense. Yet ability has tended to create a dynasty of its own; a number of the elected chiefs have been members of the Luthuli family. When Luthuli was a child, his uncle was chief, but after 1921 the chieftainship went out of the hands of the family until 1936, when Luthuli himself, then a teacher at Adams College (one of the most respected of mission educational establishments for Africans) was elected.

Luthuli was educated at various mission schools and at Adams College, and in 1921 he qualified as an instructor in the teachers’ training course and joined the staff of Adams. He could look back on a gentle, almost sheltered childhood in the protective shadow of his uncle’s house and the mission at Groutville. The one had given him the confidence that comes to children who belong to an honoured family; the other, which provided his first contact with the world of whites, did not impose the harsh impact of the colour bar too early on his young mind. Perhaps as a result of this, even today, when the white government of South Africa has deposed him as chief of his people, several times banned him from free movement about the country, and arrested him — as President-General of the African National Congress and a leader of the liberation movement of Africans in South Africa — on a charge of treason that kept him in court through almost a year of inquiry, he has no hate in him. He has never been anti-white and believes he never will be. He started off his life by seeing human beings, not colours. It is a very different matter today for the urban African child who is born and grows up in the slum areas of big cities in South Africa, cheek by jowl with the whites in the paradox of the colour bar; he is made aware, from the start, that his blackness is a shroud, cutting him off, preparing him to be — as the Africans often describe themselves as feeling — ‘half a man’.

Luthuli seems to have come to politics through an ideal of service fostered by religion rather than by way of any strong ambition. As early as his primary school days, what he calls the ‘Christian ideal’ of service captured his faith and his imagination. Many politically minded Africans deplore the influence the missions — which brought education to Africa and which have continued, because of government neglect of its obligation, to dominate African education — have had among their people in the past. The cry is that the missions have used their influence to reconcile the people to white domination rather than to encourage them to demand their birthright as free human beings. But Luthuli’s experience has been that mission teaching gave him a sense of the dignity of man, in the sight of God, that he wants to see made a reality for all colours and creeds.

The truth probably lies somewhere in the fact that for those, like Luthuli, who had eyes for it, there was a glimpse of freedom in the gospel of humble submission to a discipline greater than man-devised. Out of that glimpse, more than any reasoning of politics and experience, a man may come to say, as Luthuli did when he gave up his chieftainship under government pressure in 1952, ‘Laws and conditions that tend to debase human personality — a God-given force — be they brought about by the State or any other individuals, must be relentlessly opposed in the spirit of defiance shown by Saint Peter when he said to the rulers of his day, “Shall we obey God or man?”’

Luthuli’s consciousness of the disabilities of the African people awoke as soon as he began to teach. ‘Before that,’ he explains,

when men like myself were children at school and college students, we didn’t have much chance to compare our lot with that of white people. Living in a reserve and going to a mission school or college, far away from the big white cities, our only real contact with white people was with the school principal and the missionary, and so if we suffered in any way from discriminatory treatment by white men, we tended to confuse our resentment with the natural resentment of the schoolboy towards those in authority who abuse him.

But the moment he was adult and a teacher, the normal disabilities of being a black man in South Africa, plus the disabilities of being a black teacher, plus the special sensitivity to both that comes about through being an educated and enlightened person, hit home. Through church work and the activities of the teachers’ association, he busied himself with trying to improve the world of his people within the existing framework that the white world imposed upon it; he was too young and, in a sense, too ignorant to understand then, as he came to later, that the desire and the context in which it existed were contradictory.

In 1936, after some deliberation and misgiving, for he loved to teach, Luthuli left Adams College and teaching for ever and went home to Groutville as chief. The duties and responsibilities of chieftainship were in his blood and his family tradition, so from one point of view the change was not a dramatic one. But from another aspect the change was to be total and drastic. His thirty-eight years as a non-political man were over; he found himself, as he puts it, ‘plunged right into South African politics — and by the South African government itself’.

The year of the Hertzog Bills was 1936. They were two: the Representation of Natives Bill and the Native Trust and Land Bill. The Representation of Natives Bill took away from all non-whites in South Africa the hope of an eventual universal franchise that they had been told since 1853 they would someday attain. It offered Africans in the Cape Province representation through the election, on a separate voters’ roll, of three white members of Parliament. It offered Africans in the rest of the Union the opportunity to elect — not by individual vote but by means of chiefs, local councils and advisory boards, all acting as electoral colleges — four white senators. Finally, a Natives’ Representative Council was to be instituted, to consist of twelve elected African representatives, four government-nominated African representatives, and five white officials, with the Secretary for Native Affairs as chairman. Its function was to be purely advisory, to keep the government acquainted with the wants and views of the African people.

The Native Trust and Land Bill tightened once and for all the Natives’ Land Act of 1913, whereby Africans were prohibited from owning land except in reserves. The new bill provided 7.25 million morgen of land to be made available for African occupation and a trust fund to finance land purchase. (Twenty-two years later, this provision has not yet been completely fulfilled.)

Once the bills were law, Luthuli had vested in his authority as chief of the Umvoti Mission Reserve the collective vote of his five thousand people. White men and black canvassed him eagerly. He, who had scarcely talked politics at all, found himself talking scarcely anything else. For him, the reserve and its troubles had come into focus with the whole South African political scene. At the same time, he took up his traditional duties as chief — that combination of administrator, lawgiver, father-confessor, and figurehead. He found his chief’s court or ibandla, held under a shady tree, ‘a fine exercise in logical thinking’, and the cases on which he gave judgement, according to a nice balance of tribal lore and the official Code of Native Law, varied from boundary disputes to wrangles over the payment of lobolo (bride price). He could not make the land go around among his people — not even the uneconomic five-acre units without freehold which were all that Groutville, a better reserve than most, had to offer — but he tried to help them make the best of what they had: he even formed a black cane growers’ association to protect those among his tribesmen who were small growers of sugar. ‘The real meaning of our poverty was brought home to me,’ he says. ‘I could see that the African people had no means of making a living according to civilised standards, even if they belonged, as we did in Groutville, to a civilised Christian community, so far as African communities go.’

From 1945 until 1948, Luthuli himself sat on the Natives’ Representative Council. The Council proved to be a ‘toy telephone’ (in the phrase most tellingly used at the time) and no one regretted its passing when the Nationalist government of Dr Malan abolished it when it came into power in 1948. No one was much surprised, either, when it was not replaced by something more effective, for this was the first government actually dedicated to apartheid instead of merely committed to the bogus paternalism of Smuts. What the Africans got in place of the Council was yet another act — the Bantu Authorities Act, which, like many others affecting his people, Luthuli knows almost by heart and can reel off clause by clause. ‘It was a velvet-glove act,’ he says, ‘designed to give Africans in the reserves some feeling of autonomy, of a direct hand in their own affairs, while in fact using the decoy of their own chiefs to attract them to accept whatever the apartheid government decided was good for them. Under the Act, the chief becomes a sort of civil servant and must cooperate with the government in selling the government’s wishes to the people.’

In the late forties, Luthuli went to the United States at the invitation of the American Missionary Board to lecture on Christian missions in Africa. (The church had provided him with a chance to get to know other countries and peoples once before, when in 1938 he had gone to Madras as the Christian Council delegate to an International Missionary Council meeting.) He spent nine months in the United States, and he enjoyed his visit tremendously despite one or two incidents, those moments — a door closed in one’s face, a restaurant where a cup of coffee has been refused — that jolt the black man back to the realisation that, almost everywhere he travels, race prejudice will not let him be at home in the world.

The same year in which Luthuli took up his seat on the Natives’ Representative Council, he had joined an organisation to which, in time, no government was to be able to turn a deaf ear. This was the African National Congress. The Congress Movement began in 1912, just after the Act of Union that made the four provinces of South Africa into one country, when the Africans realised that the union’s motto, ‘Unity is Strength’, was to refer strictly to the whites. ‘When the ANC started,’ Luthuli says, ‘it had no idea of fighting for a change in fundamentals. It was concerned with the African’s immediate disabilities — passes, not issues. The question of the fight for political rights may have been implied, but was not on the platform at all.’

Other Africans would not agree with him about this. Be that as it may — the history of Congress, a movement shrinking and spawning, according to the times, over the years, is not very well documented except perhaps in the secret files of the Special Branch of the South African Police — the first meeting of Congress laid down at least one principle that has characterised the movement to this day: it was to be ‘a greater political and national body, uniting all small bodies and the different tribes in South Africa’. It has since pledged itself to the goal of a multi-racial society in South Africa with equal rights for all colours. ‘But it was only after 1936,’ says Luthuli, ‘when the Hertzog Bills acted as a terrific spur, that Congress began to show signs of becoming a movement that aimed at getting the government to bring about changes in policy that would give equal rights to non-whites in all fields.’ At the same time, Luthuli’s new responsibility as chief was proving to him the futility of any attempt to secure human rights without political rights; experience was shaping him for Congress, as it was shaping Congress for its historic role to come.

When he joined Congress in 1945, he was elected to the executive of the Natal Branch at once, and he remained on it continuously for the six years during which the movement felt its way to effectiveness, leaving behind the old methods — deputations, petitions, conferences that enabled the government to ‘keep in touch with the people’ without having to take their views into account — that had failed to achieve anything for the Africans. Finally, in 1949 Congress drafted a Programme of Action that was based on the premise that in South Africa freedom can come to the non-white only through extra-parliamentary methods. A year later, when Luthuli had just been elected Provincial President of Natal, Congress decided to launch a full-scale passive resistance campaign in defiance of unjust colour-bar laws. ‘This decision,’ he comments, ‘had my full approval.’

The official-sounding, platitudinous remark covers what was the result of considerable heart-searching on Luthuli’s part. Luthuli sees it and, for himself, used it as Gandhi conceived it — not only as a technique but as a soul force, Satyagraha.

In 1952 the African National Congress, the South African Indian Congress, and other related associations organised defiance groups all over the country. Thousands of Africans and, in lesser numbers, Indians, and even some whites, defied the colour-bar laws and invited arrest. Africans and Indians entered libraries reserved for white people, sat on railway benches reserved for white people, used post office counters reserved for white people, and camped out in open ground in the middle of the white city of Durban. Black and white, they went to prison. Luthuli was everywhere in Natal, addressing meetings, encouraging individuals, carrying with him in the most delicate situations, under the nose of government ire and police hostility, an extraordinary core of confidence and warmth. All his natural abilities of leadership came up simply and strongly.

The Defiance Campaign went on successfully for some months before it was crushed by the heavy sentences imposed upon defiers under new legislation specially devised by the government, which fixed the high penalties (up to three years’ imprisonment or a fine of £300) that may be applied to anyone protesting against any of the racial laws or inciting others to do so.

Luthuli had gone into the Campaign a country chief; he came out a public figure. In September 1952, while Defiance was still on, he was given an ultimatum by the Native Affairs Department: he must resign from Congress and the Defiance Campaign or give up his chieftainship. ‘I don’t see the contradiction between my office as chief and my work in Congress,’ he answered, courteously but bluntly. ‘In the one I work in the interests of my people within tribal limits, and in the other I work for them on a national level, that’s all. I will not resign from either.’

On Wednesday 12 November 1952, the Native Commissioner announced that Chief A. J. Luthuli was dismissed by the government from his position as chief of the Umvoti Mission Reserve. In reply to this, the African National Congress issued a statement by Luthuli under the title ‘Our Chief Speaks’. It is a statement that has been much quoted, in and out of South Africa, both in support of those who believe that right is on the side of the Africans in their struggle against racial discrimination and in support of those who regard the black man’s claim to equality of opportunity with the white man as a fearful black nationalism that aims — to quote, in turn, one of the favourite bogies of white South Africa — ‘to drive the white man into the sea’.

The lengthy statement is written in the formal, rather Victorian English, laced with biblical cadence and officialese, that Luthuli uses — the English of a man to whom it is a foreign or at best a second language, but impressive, for all that. ‘In these past thirty years or so,’ he said,

I have striven with tremendous zeal and patience to work for the progress and welfare of my people and for their harmonious relations with other sections of our multi-racial society in the Union of South Africa. In this effort I have always pursued what liberal-minded people rightly regarded as the path of moderation …

In so far as gaining citizenship rights and opportunities for the unfettered development of the African people, who will deny that thirty years of my life have been spent knocking in vain, patiently, moderately, and modestly at a closed and barred door?

… Has there been any reciprocal tolerance or moderation from the Government, be it Nationalist or United Party? No! On the contrary, the past thirty years have seen the greatest number of Laws restricting our rights and progress until today we have reached a stage where we have almost no rights at all: no adequate land for our occupation, our only asset — cattle — dwindling, no security of homes, no decent and remunerative employment, more restrictions to freedom of movement through passes, curfew regulations, influx control measures; in short we have witnessed in these years an intensification of our subjection to ensure and protect white supremacy.

It is with this background and with a full sense of responsibility that … I have joined my people in … the spirit that revolts openly and boldly against injustice and expresses itself in a determined and non-violent manner … Viewing Non-Violent Passive Resistance as a non-revolutionary and, therefore, a most legitimate and humane political pressure technique for a people denied all effective forms of constitutional striving, I saw no real conflict in my dual leadership of my people.

A month after his deposition as chief, Luthuli was elected President-General of the African National Congress and became leader of the entire Congress movement in South Africa. Wherever he went, he was greeted by cheering crowds of Africans; at last they had a leader who had shown himself a leader in places less comfortable and closer to their lives than conferences and conventions.

The government found that ex-Chief Luthuli seemed to be more of a chief than ever. A ban was served on him under one of those new powers that had been legislated to deal with the Defiance Campaign, a ban which debarred him for a year from all the important cities and towns in South Africa. The day it expired, Luthuli opened the South African Indian Congress in Durban and, guessing that his time was short, left at once by air for Johannesburg to attend a protest meeting about Sophiatown removals. It was his first visit to Johannesburg since he had become President-General, and the people of Sophiatown, under arbitrary orders to quit their homes and move to a settlement farther away from the white city, were heartened at the idea of having him among them as champion of their protest.

As he stepped off the plane at Johannesburg, the Special Branch police served him with a second ban. And what a ban! This time he was to be confined for two years to a radius of about twenty miles around his home in Groutville village. During the long period of confinement he suffered a slight stroke, and while he lay ill in his house in Groutville, his wife had to beg permission from the police to let him be taken to a hospital in Durban, sixty miles away. Permission was granted, and he was rushed to Durban. There he spent two months in the hospital, and from the second day Special Branch men hung about his ward in constant attendance. Despite these unwelcome presences, who, he says, day after day used to inquire sheepishly after his health, Chief made a complete recovery except for a barely perceptible droop that shows itself in his left eyelid when he is tired.

His ban expired in July 1956. He was free to move about the country again; but not for long. About four in the morning of 5 December, there was a loud knocking at the door of the Luthulis’ house in Groutville. The Luthulis struggled out of sleep. Four white Special Branch men were at the door; they had come to arrest Chief on a charge of treason. He was flown to Johannesburg and taken straight to prison at the Johannesburg Fort. And there he found himself accused of treason with 155 others. Some were his respected colleagues over many years; some represented ideologies that were largely or partly distasteful to him; some he had never heard of before.

The preliminary hearing of the Treason Trial (the first in the history of peacetime South Africa) began in January 1957, and the trial has been in progress, in one form and another — nine months of preliminary hearing, several sessions of the trial itself, with a number of adjournments — for two years. ‘Treason’ is a word with ugly associations. They have become uglier still during the years since the war, now that the word has become part of the vocabulary of the witch hunters of the world. Like ‘Communist’, ‘treason’ may be used, in certain countries and circumstances, to blot out the name of anyone who puts up any sort of opposition to race discrimination and the denial of freedom of movement, opportunity and education.

Among the 156 of the original accused, there was a sprinkling of ex-Communists and fellow travellers — almost exclusively among the twenty-three whites — but the great majority were simply people who abhor the injustice and misery of apartheid and want all races in South Africa to share freely in the life of the country. At various stages in the trial, the number of accused has been reduced, and the government has not yet succeeded in formulating a satisfactory statement of the charge against them; but the trial drags on and, at the time of writing, the Attorney General has just made a statement that he intends to draw up a fresh indictment against the remaining accused.

The first list of those against whom charges had been withdrawn was announced in December 1957, when the preliminary inquiry was in recess. Among the names was that of Chief A. J. Luthuli, President-General of the African National Congress. Chief was at home in Groutville after the nine-month ordeal in court, preparing for the wedding of his medical-student daughter, when the news came, followed by a paper storm of congratulatory telegrams. His feelings were mixed: he could not see why he should be freed while his colleagues in the liberation movement were held; on the other hand, he was glad to be able to get on with Congress work outside the Drill Hall. A few weeks later, charges were withdrawn against some more accused, bringing down to ninety-one the number of those who were committed for trial for high treason in January 1958.

The particulars of the ‘hostile acts’ which were read under the charge of high treason included ‘the hampering or hindering of the said Government [of the Union of South Africa] in its lawful administration by organising or taking part in campaigns against existing laws’. The laws named included the Natives Resettlement Act and the Group Areas Act, which involve the uprooting of African, Indian and coloured communities in order to move them out of white areas; the Bantu Education Act, which has lowered the standard of education available to African children; and the Bantu Authorities Act.

The defence applied for the discharge of the ninety-one, saying that the Crown, by the way it had formulated the charges, had established ‘nothing other than a desire to put an end to any form of effective opposition to the Government of this country — a desire to outlaw free expression of thought and ideas which people in all democratic countries of the West assert the right to hold and utter’. The application for discharge was refused. In the public gallery of the Drill Hall (divided down the middle by a token barrier of low chains and posts to ensure that whites sat on one side and blacks on the other) Luthuli heard the magistrate’s decision. Why he was not still among the accused in the dock was as much of a mystery to him as to anyone else. Whatever the reason, Chief sat in the Drill Hall as a spectator and a free man that day, and many heads, black and white, turned to look at him. When the court adjourned, he walked out among the free men, too; free to travel about the country and address meetings and attend gatherings where he pleased. For how long, of course, he could not guess.

So far — a year later — he has not been served with a ban again, though he has not minced words, whether addressing the small white Liberal Party or Congress. At a meeting before a white audience he was beaten up by white hooligans. At angry meetings of the Transvaal Branch of Congress in Johannesburg Africanists attempted to oust Chief and his kind from leadership and commit the African National Congress to what he calls ‘a dangerously narrow African nationalism’. In April 1959 this group broke away to form the Pan-Africanist Congress.

But that day at the beginning of 1958, when he walked out of the Drill Hall, the sudden release of his freedom was fresh upon him, lightheaded, like a weakness, though the weight of the ordeal of trial to which his colleagues were committed oppressed him, and he even looked a little lonely. And such are the paradoxes of human behaviour that, as Luthuli crossed the street, two of the white police officers who had become familiar figures on duty in the Drill Hall all through the preparatory examination came around the corner and called out, forgetful, across the barrier of apartheid that seeks to legislate against all human contact between black and white and across the barrier of hate that the pass and the baton have built between the police and the black man in South Africa, ‘Well, hullo! You look fine! What are you doing around here? Can’t you keep away from the old Drill Hall, after all?’ And rather gingerly, Chief was amiable in reply.

1959

Postscript: Chief Albert Luthuli received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1960. He died in 1967.

Apartheid

Men are not born brothers; they have to discover each other, and it is this discovery that apartheid seeks to prevent … What is apartheid?

It depends who’s answering. If you ask a member of the South African government, he will tell you that it is separate and parallel development of white and black — that is the official, legal definition. If you ask an ordinary white man who supports the policy, he will tell you that it is the means of keeping South Africa white. If you ask a black man, he may give you any one of a dozen answers, arising out of whatever aspect of apartheid he has been brought up short against that day, for to him it is neither an ideological concept nor a policy, but a context in which his whole life, learning, working, loving, is rigidly enclosed.

He could give you a list of the laws that restrict him from aspiring to most of the aims of any civilised person, or enjoying the pleasures that every white person takes for granted. But it is unlikely that he will. What may be on his mind at the moment is the problem of how to save his child from the watered-down ‘Bantu Education’ which is now standard in schools for black children — inferior schooling based on a reduced syllabus that insists the black child cannot attain the same standard of education as the white child, and places emphasis on practical and menial skills. Or perhaps you’ve merely caught him on the morning after he’s spent a night in the police cells because he was out after curfew hours without a piece of paper bearing a white man’s signature permitting him to be so. Perhaps (if he’s a man who cares for such things) he’s feeling resentful because there’s a concert in town he would not be permitted to attend, or (if he’s that kind of man, and who isn’t?) he’s irked at having to pay a black-market price for the bottle of brandy he is debarred from buying legitimately. That’s apartheid, to him. All these things, big and little, and many more.

If you want to know how Africans — black men — live in South Africa, you will get in return for your curiosity an exposition of apartheid in action, for in all of a black man’s life — all his life — rejection by the white man has the last word. With this word of rejection apartheid began, long before it hardened into laws and legislation, long before it became a theory of racial selectiveness and the policy of a government. The Afrikaner Nationalists (an Afrikaner is a white person of Dutch descent whose mother tongue is Afrikaans; a Nationalist is a member or supporter of the National Party, at present in power) did not invent it, they merely developed it, and the impulse of Cain from which they worked lives in many white South Africans today, English-speaking as well as Afrikaner.

Shall I forget that when I was a child I was taught that I must never use a cup from which our black servant had drunk?

I live in the white city of Johannesburg, the largest city in South Africa. Around the white city, particularly to the west and north, is another city, black Johannesburg. This clear picture of black and white is blurred only a little at the edges by the presence of small coloured — mixed blood — and Indian communities, also segregated, both from each other and from the rest. You will see Africans in every house in the white city, of course, for servants live in, and every house has its servants’ quarters, in a building separate from the white house. Sophisticated Africans call this back-yard life ‘living dogs-meat’ — closer to the kennel and the outhouses than to the humans in the house.

But no black man has his home in the white city; neither wealth nor honour nor distinction of any kind could entitle him to move into a house in the street where I or any other white person lives. So it easily happens that thousands of white people live their whole lives without ever exchanging a word with a black man who is on their own social and cultural level; and for them, the whole African people is composed of servants and the great army of ‘boys’ who cart away or deliver things — the butcher’s boy, the grocer’s boy, the milk boy, the dust boy. On the basis of this experience, you will see that it is simple for white men and women to deduce that black men and women are an inferior race. Out of this experience all the platitudes of apartheid sound endlessly, like the bogus sea from the convolutions of a big shell: they’re like children … they don’t think the way we do … they’re not ready.

Black men do all the physical labour in our country, because no white man wants to dig a road or load a truck. But in every kind of work a white man wants to do, there are sanctions and job reservations to shut the black man out. In the building trade, and in industry, the Africans are the unskilled and semi-skilled workers, and they cannot, by law, become anything else. They cannot serve behind the counters in the shops, and cannot be employed alongside white clerks. Wherever they work, they cannot share the washrooms or the canteens of the white workers. But they may buy in the shops. Oh yes, once the counter is between the black customer and the white shopkeeper, the hollow murmur of the apartheid shell is silenced — they are, ready, indeed, to provide a splendid market, they do think enough like white people to want most of the things that white people want, from LP recordings to no-iron shirts.

The real life of any community — restaurants, bars, hotels, clubs and coffee bars — has no place for the African man or woman. They serve in all these, but they cannot come in and sit down. Art galleries, cinemas, theatres, golf courses and sports clubs, even the libraries are closed to them. In the post offices and all other government offices, they are served at segregated counters. They have no vote.

What it means to live like this, from the day you are born until the day you die, I cannot tell you. No white person can. I think I know the lives of my African friends, but time and again I find that I have assumed — since it was so ordinary a part of the average white person’s life — that they had knowledge of some commonplace experience that, in fact, they could never have had. How am I to remember that Danny, who is writing his PhD thesis on industrial psychology, has never seen the inside of a museum? How am I to remember that John, who is a journalist on a lively newspaper, can never hope to see the film I am urging him not to miss, since the township cinemas are censored and do not show what one might call adult films? How am I to remember that Alice’s charming children, playing with my child’s toy elephant, will never be able to ride on the elephant in the Johannesburg Zoo?

The humblest labourer will find his life the meaner for being black. If he were a white man, at least there would be no ceiling to his children’s ambitions. But it is in the educated man that want and need stand highest on the wrong side of the colour bar. Whatever he achieves as a man of learning, as a man he still has as little say in the community as a child or a lunatic. Outside the gates of the university (soon he may not be able to enter them at all; the two ‘open’ universities are threatened by legislation that will close them to all who are not white), white men will hail him as ‘boy’. When the first African advocate was called to the Johannesburg bar, back in 1956, government officials raised objections to his robing and disrobing in the same chamber as the white advocates. His colleagues accepted him as a man of the law; but the laws of apartheid saw him only as a black man. Neither by genius nor cunning, by sainthood or thuggery, is there a way in which a black man can earn the right to be regarded as any other man.

Of course, the Africans have made some sort of life of their own. It’s a slum life, a make-do life, because, although I speak of black cities outside white cities, these black cities — known as ‘the townships’ — are no Harlems. They are bleak rectangular patterns of glum municipal housing, or great smoky proliferations of crazy, chipped brick and tin huts, with few street lights, few shops. The life there is robust, ribald and candid. All human exchange of the extrovert sort flourishes; standing in a wretched alley, you feel the exciting blast of a great vitality. Here and there, in small rooms where a candle makes big shadows, there is good talk. It is attractive, especially if you are white; but it is also sad, bleak and terrible. It may not be a bad thing to be a township Villon; but it is tragic if you can never be anything else. The penny whistle is a charming piece of musical ingenuity; but it should not always be necessary for a man to make his music out of nothing.

Some Africans are born, into their segregated townships, light enough to pass as coloured. They play coloured for the few privileges — better jobs, better housing, more freedom of movement — that this brings, for the nearer you can get to being white, the less restricted your life is. Some coloureds are born, into their segregated townships, light enough to pass as white. A fair skin is the equivalent of a golden spoon in the child’s mouth; in other countries coloured people may be tempted to play white for social reasons, but in South Africa a pale face and straight hair can gain the basic things — a good school, acceptance instead of rejection all the way along the line.

It is the ambition of many coloured parents to have a child light enough to cross the colour bar and live the precarious lie of pretending to be white; their only fear is that the imposture will be discovered. But the other night I was made aware of a different sort of fear and a new twist to the old game of play-white. An Indian acquaintance confessed to me that he was uneasy because his thirteen-year-old son has turned out to have the sort of face and complexion that could pass for white. ‘He’s only got to slip into a white cinema or somewhere, just once, for the fun of it. The next thing my wife and I know, he’ll be starting to play white. Once they’ve tried what it’s like to be a white man, how are you to stop them? Then it’s lies, and not wanting to know their own families, and misery all round. That’s one of the reasons why I want to leave South Africa, so my kids won’t want to grow up to be something they’re not.’

I’ve talked about the wrong side of the colour bar, but the truth is that both are wrong sides. Do not think that we, on the white side of privilege, are the people we might be in a society that has no sides at all. We do not suffer, but we are coarsened. Even to continue to live here is to acquiesce in some measure to apartheid — to a sealing off of responses, the cauterisation of the human heart. Our children grow up accepting as natural the fact that they are well clothed and well fed, while black children are ragged and skinny. It cannot occur to the white child that the black one has any rights outside of charity; you must explain to your child, if you have the mind to, that men have decided this, that the white shall have and the black shall have not, and it is not an immutable law, like the rising of the sun in the morning. Even then it is not possible entirely to counter with facts an emotional climate of privilege. We have the better part of everything, and it is difficult for us not to feel, somewhere secretly, that we are better.

Hundreds of thousands of white South Africans are concerned only with holding on to white privilege. They believe that they would rather die holding on to it than give up the smallest part of it; and I believe they would. They cannot imagine a life that would be neither their life nor the black man’s life, but another life altogether. How can they imagine freedom, who for years have been so vigilant to keep it only to themselves?

No one of us, black or white, can promise them that black domination will not be the alternative to white domination, and black revenge the long if not the last answer to all that the whites have done to the blacks. For — such is the impact of apartheid — there are many blacks, as well as many whites, who cannot imagine a life that would be neither a black man’s life nor a white man’s life.

Those white South Africans who want to let go — leave hold — are either afraid of having held on too long, or are disgusted and ashamed to go on living as we do. These last have become colourblind, perhaps by one of those freaks by which desperate nature hits upon a new species. They want another life altogether in South Africa. They want people of all colours to use the same doors, share the same learning, and give and take the same respect from each other. They don’t care if the government that guarantees these things is white or black. A very few of these people go so far as to go to prison, in the name of one political cause or another, in attempts that they believe will help to bring about this new sort of life. The rest make, in one degree or another, an effort to live, within an apartheid community, the decent life that apartheid prohibits.

Of course, I know that no African attaches much importance to what apartheid does to the white man, and no one could blame him for this. What does it signify to him that your sense of justice is outraged, your conscience is troubled, and your friendships are restricted by the colour bar? All this lies heavily, mostly unspoken, between black and white friends. My own friends among Africans are people I happen to like, my kind of people, whose friendship I am not prepared to forgo because of some racial theory I find meaningless and absurd. Like that of many others, my opposition to apartheid is compounded not only out of a sense of justice but also out of a personal, selfish and extreme distaste for having the choice of my friends dictated to me, and the range of human intercourse proscribed for me.

I am aware that, because of this, I sometimes expect African friends to take lightly, in the ordinary course of friendship, risks that simply are not worth it, to them, who have so many more basic things to risk themselves for.

I remember a day last year when some African friends and I went to the airport to see off a close friend of ours. I had brought a picnic lunch with me, and so had Alice, my friend, for we knew that we shouldn’t be able to lunch together in the airport restaurant. What we hadn’t realised was that there was no place where we could eat together. I wanted to brazen it out, sit somewhere until we were ordered off into segregation; it was easy for me, I am white and not sensitised by daily humiliation. But Alice, who has to find words to explain to her children why they cannot ride the elephant at the zoo, did not want to seek the sort of rebuff that comes to her all the time, unsought.

Black and white get to know each other in spite of and under the strain of a dozen illegalities. We can never meet in town, for there is nowhere we can sit and talk. The legal position about receiving African guests in a white house is unclear; we do have our friends in our houses, of course, but there is always the risk that a neighbour may trump up a complaint, to which the police would always be sympathetic. When you offer an African guest a drink, you break the law unequivocally; the exchange of a beer between your hand and his could land you both in the police court on a serious charge.

Officially, you are not supposed to enter an African ‘location’ without a permit, and when we go to visit friends in a black township we take the chance of being stopped by the police, who are looking for gangsters or caches of liquor but will do their duty to apartheid on the side.

Towards the end of last year I was one of a small group of white guests who had to get up and leave the table at the wedding reception of an African medical student; a white official of the gold-mining company for whom the bride’s father worked, and on whose property his house was, drove up to inform us that our invitations to the wedding were not sufficient to authorise our presence in African living quarters.

No friendship between black and white is free of these things. It is hard to keep any relationship both clandestine and natural. No matter how warm the pleasure in each other’s company, how deep and comfortable the understanding, there are moments of failure created by resentment of white privilege, on the one side, and guilt about white privilege, on the other.

Another life altogether.

Put the shell to your ear and hear the old warning: do you want to be overrun by blacks?

I bump an African’s scooter while parking, and before he and I have a chance to apologise or accuse, there’s a white man at my side ready to swear that I’m in the right, and there are three black men at his side ready to swear that he is in the right.

Another life altogether.

Put the shell to your ear and hear the old warning: are you prepared to see white standards destroyed?

A friend of mine, a dignified and responsible African politician and an old man, is beaten up by white intruders while addressing a meeting of white people.

Living apart, black and white are destroying themselves morally in the effort. Living together, it is just possible that we might survive white domination, black domination, and all the other guises that hide us from each other, and discover ourselves to be identically human.

1959