KAFFIRS ARE LIVELY Being some backstage impressions of the South African Democracy By: OLIVER WALKER “Kaffirs developed a firm trend on small local and some South African support, particularly for better-class dividend-payers.” —Any LONDON STOCK EXCHANGE report. “There are certain things about which all South Africans are agreed, all parties and all sections, except those who are quite mad. The first is that it is a fixed policy to maintain white supremacy in South Africa.” —GENERAL J. G. SMUTS , Prime Minister, speaking in the Union House of Assembly, Cape Town, March 13, 1945. To the Kafderboeties - Liberals and other Christian gentlemen of Africa in whose applied humanity lies the only hope for the peaceful progress of a great Continent. “Kafferboetie”: Afrikaans word meaning literally “Kaffir-brother”, a term of contempt for any white South African who acts as if Christianity meant something else to him besides going to church on Sundays. PREFACE IN 1944 I was offered the biggest assignment ever handed to a newspaperman in South Africa. It came from the headquarters of the Native Affairs Department in Pretoria, the administrative capital where at that time I was doing a war-time propaganda job for the State Bureau of Information. Briefly the Department wanted a journalist seconded to it to make a comprehensive survey of all its work, practical and administrative, in the Reserves, in the towns and on the farms for the purpose of compiling a series of booklets. These booklets were intended chiefly for America and England. Their aim was “to present Native policy in South Africa in a true perspective”. “We have been getting a bad Press over there,” I was told by the Department. “They are printing all sorts of rubbish and downright lies about how we treat our Natives. They reckon we keep the Native down with a sjambok, and tie him to the wagon-wheel and nonsense like that. In America they even think we’re all black here! It’s time we told them what we’re doing, and just how and why we’re doing it.” I said it was a tall order. They said it was, but everything would be organised, and it shouldn’t take more than six months. They had just appointed as publicity officer an agri- culturist from the Department, and his main job would be to chaperone me round the Reserves (where white men require official sanction to loiter) and the urban locations. The idea of getting in an outsider experienced in publicity was that he would be able to glamorise their good deeds. They could have tackled the job themselves, they said, but they were not too certain that their bluebook prose had the right iridescent lure. I said: “When do we start?” After a certain amount of dignified safari-like preparations I headed north for the “Bundu” of the Transvaal with my chaperone. Periodically during the next fifteen months we— that is, an official from the Department and myself—surfaced in Pretoria between spells spent submerged in the Reserves of the four Provinces or slumming in the larger cities of Johannesburg, Durban, Cape Town and Bloemfontein. With six months’ writing-time tagged on the end of the voyaging, the assignment took me twenty-one months. In that time I covered about 25,000 miles between the droughty, baobab-dotted veld beyond the Zoutpansberg in the north to the “sakidedorps” or shanty- towns of the Cape Flats in the extreme south, from the waterless, empty, sandy wastes of the Mafeking-Kuruman zone fringing the Kalahari Desert in the west to the lush, green, cattle-studded glens of Zululand on the east. I talked to magistrates, commissioners, agricultural officers and overseers, farmers, teachers, doctors, industrialists and churchmen. It was one of these last—a man I met in Umtata, the capital of the Transkeian Native Reserve—who gave me something to think about. As we parted at his gate his last words were: “If you’re going to write any books, please don’t make them so much more window-dressing. I know you journalists. I’m tired—we’re all tired—of such efforts, hiding the real tragedy below. Give the trudi—- just for once, please.” I gave some of the truth in the lengthy account I duly turned in to the Department of Native Affairs. And that was the last I heard of it, I do not think they published any of it. It is dangerous not only to see things, but to see through them. Officials of the Department assured me that as I travelled round I would gets lots of stuff for books. I did. Here is one of them. OLIVER WALKER Johannesburg, 1947. CONTENTS Preface Historical Prologue, 1652-1947 1. “Crucified on a Cross of Gold” 2. Not all Natives are Zulus 3. Recipe for a Rural Slum 4. More of the Recipe 5. Bushveld Idyll 6. All This and Five Morgen Too 7. The Three “Parliaments” 8. The Segregation Pipe-dream 9. Smuts the Schizophrenic 10. The Native—Is he Human? 11. “Ten Strokes with a Light Cane” 12. Education for What? 13. “The Little Glass of Death” 14. “For Europeans Only” 15. As Black Sees White 16. White Supremacy or — HISTORICAL PROLOGUE, 1652-1947 “Xa sikhangela emva kwel ‘a xesha afita ngalo uMlungu wokuqala elunxwemeni Iwelilizwe siphaula okokuba lingekatshoni ilanga ngalomini wase ukho umcimbi wokuphathwa komntu ontsundu.” —XHOSA -SPEAKING SOUTH AFRICAN NATIVE COUNCILLOR , 1945. “South Africa is a land of black men—and not of white men. It has been so; it is so; and it will be so .”—ANTHONY TROLLOPE , 1877. IN THE year 1652, when Oliver Cromwell was proclaiming his creed of “liberty of conscience” and the Maryland ancestors of George Washington were pushing cautiously across the Potomac in search of new lands, a band of some thirty white colonists, under Jan van Riebeeck, employees of the powerful Dutch East India Company, came ashore below the 4,000-foot shadow of Table Mountain to establish the Gape Colony at the southernmost tip of the horn of Africa. Their first encounters with the aborigines were with cattle-owning, yellow-skinned Hottentots and squat, Stone Age bow-and-arrow Bushmen. The Hottentots they enslaved or deprived of their cattle. The Bushmen they hunted like game. Outposts of the tiny settlement of De Kaap, as it was then known, took on the habits of the aborigines. They were called “Boers” or fanners. They acquired herds of cattle. They became nomadic, land-hungry white Africans, mighty hunters and laws unto themselves. The settlement grew with infusions of slaves from the East, from Mozambique, from Angola and with small intrusions from the religion-persecuted Huguenots of France. A new race was born of the mixed marriages countenanced, and even encouraged, by the Dutch East India Company. They were the forefathers of the Cape Coloured, who to- day number 900,000. The real dynamics of the white-black struggle in South Africa did not reveal themselves until after the occupation of the Gape by the British in 1795. By that time the white frontiersmen had pushed their authority north-eastwards and were in contact with the downward-pressing Bantu tribes—”Kaffirs” or “unbelievers”, as they were called—the naked, brown, spear-throwing men of Palo, Galeika, Rarabe and lesser chiefs of the great Xhosa-sp caking nation. British occupation early in the nineteenth century brought about the abolition of slavery. And it preluded the arrival of many missionaries of different sects and lands, eager to carry the torch of Christianity through heathen Africa. There came, too, another infusion of white stock—a mere 5,000 settlers from Britain, who were dumped mostly on the east coast, in the region of that “Kamrland” which was already in process of becoming a familiar battle-ground between Boers and Bantu. British rule—the rule of law—and the humanities preached by the missionaries were repugnant to the Boers. The Africa they demanded was an eternity of grazing, a land of Canaan with ample supplies of sons of Ham who, if they could not be enslaved, could be reduced to serfdom by land-squeezing, the power of weapons and the lash. The Boers trekked away from the Cape. Their tented wagons stole into the great, game-gay uplands of the central High Veld. They creaked down the narrow passes of the spinal Drakensburg Mountains into the lush, semi-tropic emptiness of Natal. But they could not escape the twin ghosts of Bantu and British. At Port Natal, later to become Durban, a little party of English hunters and traders had settled in the 1820’s. And they were on friendly terms with Tchaka, the mightiest of African chiefs, whose Zulu hordes of fighting men were a matter of trembling and flight among tribes from the Limpopo River in the north to the Kei River in “Kaffirland”. The Boers fought the British in Natal. They fought the Zulus and beat them in revenge for the massacre of one of their leaders, Piet Retief, and sixty followers. They trekked away again, many of them, up on to the High Veld, with a hymn on their lips and hate in their hearts, to found the Dutch or Afrikaans-speaking Republics of the Orange River and the Transvaal. All this time the coastal belt was opening up to the world beyond the seas. Ports were growing. A handful of cities were taking on a semblance of maturity. The white stock was being built up, but slowly—too slowly —for the Bantu that remained within the orbit of Christian influence were yielding to the new teachings of civilisation.