South From the Limpopo , livre ebook

S OUTH FROM THE L IMPOPO
‘What we are witnessing in South Africa now are the problems that the whole world is going to face increasingly in the twenty-first century. We are witnessing a rich white enclave having to deal with the fact that it is actually part of a wide world and it has to share with that world or die. We are at the forefront of a profound global transition.’ Francis Wilson, Professor of Economics at the University of Cape Town
Other books by the author
FULL TILT *
TIBETAN FOOTHOLD
THE WAITING LAND *
IN ETHIOPIA WITH A MULE
ON A SHOESTRING TO COORG *
WHERE THE INDUS IS YOUNG
RACE TO THE FINISH?
A PLACE APART
EIGHT FEET IN THE ANDES *
WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS
MUDDLING THROUGH IN MADAGASCAR *
TALES FROM TWO CITIES
CAMEROON WITH EGBERT *
TRANSYLVANIA AND BEYOND *
THE UKIMWI ROAD *
VISITING RWANDA
ONE FOOT IN LAOS *
Copyright
First published in paperback in the United States in 2001 by The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc. New York
New York:
386 West Broadway
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
Copyright © 1997 by Dervla Murphy
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-46830-581-4
For Rose, who did a lot to delay the completion of this book, and for Rachel and Andrew who collaborated in her production
Contents
South from the Limpopo
Other Books by the Author
Copyright
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Map
Author’s Note
Foreword
Prologue: Return to Africa
P ART I Pre-election: March to August 1993
Chapter 1. In at the Deep End
Chapter 2. Convalescent in Lebowa
Chapter 3. A Time to Mourn
Chapter 4. The Platteland Volk
Chapter 5. From the Centre to the Sea
Chapter 6. A Worried Mother
Chapter 7. One Corner of Khayelitsha
Chapter 8. Back to Mother
Chapter 9. The Klein Karoo
Chapter 10. Surplus People
P ART II Elections: April to May 1994
Chapter 11. States of Emergency
Chapter 12. The Miracle
Chapter 13. What Next?
I NTERLUDE
Ireland – Mozambique: June to September 1994
P ART III Post-elections: September 1994 to January 1995
Chapter 14. Post-euphoria
Chapter 15. The Problem Province
Chapter 16. Below the Drakensberg
B RIEF I NTERLUDE Happenings behind my back
Chapter 17. To Griqualand East
Chapter 18. Where Chaos Rules OK
Chapter 19. What’s Wrong with Bloemfontein?
Chapter 20. Christmas in Khayelitsha
Glossary of Acronyms and South African Words
Select Bibliography
Index
Illustrations
between pages 208 and 209
1. A late-nineteenth-century homestead in western Transvaal
2. The author and friend beside a traditional Boer open-air bread-oven
3. Koppies in the Great Karoo
4. Lear in Griqualand West
5. Sunday braai in Vosburg
6. Lear in the middle of a dry river-bed in the Klein Karoo
7. Weaver-birds’ nest on telephone pole
8. A corner of Khayelitsha
9. A Khayelitsha track flooded with sewage
10. The author with a Khayelitsha Xhosa friend
11. A Khayelitsha shoemaker
12. A Khayelitsha shack – upmarket
13. A Tswana helper in Kimberley
14. A Boer family graveyard in Western Cape
15. Lear with a young Boer admirer
16. Local enterprise in Khayelitsha
17. Khayelitsha crossroads
18. The end of an era, 16 December 1994: the last Day of the Vow
19. Lear in the Great Karoo
20. Chris in the Transkei
21. Gable-end in Umtata, December 1994
22. A bar attendant in Eastern Transvaal
23. Chris on the battlefield
24. A Zulu kraal between Melmoth and the coast
25. Isandlwana
26. A friend in her family graveyard
27. A church serving the Anglican community in Griqualand East
28. Khayelitsha in midsummer
29. Waiting for a taxi on Christmas Eve
Acknowledgements
Special thanks must go to Margaret Fogarty; without her practical help and unflagging encouragement I might never have finished this book. Her mother Daphne tolerated my erratic arrivals at and departures from their home with limitless patience. And her friend Jennifer Alt became my most valuable South African mentor.
On the Cape Peninsula, Ray and Wally in Retreat and Wendy Woodward and Chris Wildman in Observatory provided me with ‘homes from home’. Jane and David Rosenthal would have done likewise but time ran out …
Elsewhere, numerous new friends of all colours offered generous hospitality and precious insights into the new South Africa. However, not everyone would want to be directly associated with this book and some names have been changed in the text.
On the last lap, John Murray VII, Hugh Lewin, Justin Cartwright and a Capetonian friend who wishes to remain anonymous gave shrewd editorial advice. And, as always, Diana Murray saw at a glance what was wrong with the first draft and inspired me – as only she can – to try harder.

Author’s Note
Definition of ‘black’, ‘white’, ‘Coloured’, ‘Indian’ and other groups as used in the text
In 1993 South Africa’s population was guestimated to be 41 million, of whom 76 per cent were black, 13 per cent white, 8.5 per cent Coloured and 2.5 per cent Indian.
It is politically correct to describe as ‘black’ all South Africans who are not white. This usage is understandable, in reaction to the Population Registration Act and all that went with it, yet for the sake of clarity I have eschewed it. South Africa’s Indian citizens are South Africans as the white citizens are South Africans. But they are not blacks. Nor are the Cape Coloureds, to whom I refer as ‘Coloureds’. Their ancestry is no more than one-third African, the other components being Asian and European. The Griquas are also mixed, the result of Boer/San or Boer/Khoikhoi interbreeding in centuries past. The copper-skinned San (or Bushmen) and Khoikhoi (or Hottentots) were the original inhabitants of the southern regions of Africa, and the only inhabitants of the Cape and its hinterland when the first Dutch settlers arrived in 1652.
In general, South Africa’s whites are either Afrikaners (formerly known as Boers) or English-speakers. Afrikaners are descended from the earliest European settlers: Dutch, French Huguenot, German. Most English-speakers are descended from the British who settled in the Cape Colony and Natal in the nineteenth century. However, this category by now includes Jews from Russia and Central Europe, southern Europeans who were encouraged to migrate – to increase the white population – during the 1950s, and some 150,000 Portuguese ‘refugees’ from Angola and Mozambique who were welcomed by the apartheid state when their degenerate ‘empire’ abruptly collapsed in 1974.
I have revived the obsolete term ‘Boer’ to describe Afrikaner farmers, a dwindling breed for many of whom I developed – much to my surprise – a great affection. The urbanized Afrikaners are very different from their rural cousins; the use of ‘Boer’ (which simply means ‘farmer’) is my way of emphasizing the difference.
Another difference in need of emphasizing is that between South Africa’s so-called Communists and all other Communists. The apartheid regime, set up at the start of the Cold War, immediately jumped on the West’s anti-Communist bandwagon. For the next forty-five years many opponents of apartheid, however impeccable their Christian/liberal/capitalist credentials, were defined as ‘Communists’ and treated as criminals.
Glossary
Acronyms are usually spelled out in full on first mention. All are listed in the Glossary, as are Afrikaans and other local words.
Foreword
By 1952 I had begun to collect books about South Africa and to realize that apartheid was not in fact a new anti-black weapon forged by the Afrikaners. Since the 1870s British observers – including Anthony Trollope, J. A. Froude, Lord Bryce, Joseph Chamberlain, Lord Milner – had been warning the Colonial Office about the danger of extending the franchise to ‘natives’. In 1901 Lionel Curtis – fresh from New College, Oxford, one of Lord Milner’s infamous ‘kindergarten’ of youthful colonial officers – wrote: ‘It would be a blessed thing if the negro, like the Red Indian, tended to die out before us.’ Two years later John Buchan, Lord Milner’s Private Secretary, produced a blueprint for the country’s future ‘native policy’ and noted that:

Mentally the black man is as crude and naive as a child, with a child’s curiosity and ingenuity … His instability of character and intellectual childishness make him politically far more impossible than even the lowest class of Europeans.
Lord Milner then appointed a Commission which recommended segregation policies that shocked his more civilized compatriots. When the South Africa Act was passed in 1909 Keir Hardie protested that MPS ‘should not assent to the setting up of the doctrine that because of a man’s misfortune in having been born with a coloured skin he is to be barred the possibility of ever rising to a position of trust.’ But Lord Balfour argued, ‘You cannot give them equal rights without threatening the whole fabric of civilization. The Red Indians are gradually dying out. The Australian Aborigines are even more clearly predestined to early extinction. But with the black races of Africa, for the first time we have the problem of races as vigorous in constitution, as capable of increasing in number, in contact with white civilization.’ Not only Afrikaners feared the swart gevaar . ‘the black peril’.
It is no coincidence that several of the designers of Grand Apartheid studied at German universities during the 1930s. Many English-speakers were at first appalled by the Afrikaners’ creation of a totalitarian state, yet there is no escaping the fact that apartheid was