First sip: 1986 by William Dicey

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Like a good beverage, a good book holds promise from the first sip. This extract is used with the permission of Penguin Random House South Africa.


About the author

Photograph: PRH

William Dicey is author of the critically acclaimed Borderline (2004). He has worked as a mathematics lecturer, a book designer and a farmer. He divides his time between Ceres and Cape Town.


About the book

Title1986
Author: William Dicey
Imprint: Umuzi
ISBN: 9781415210529
Date: January 2021

1986 was a pivotal year in South African history. It was the year of the vigilante, the year of the necklace – but also the year the talking began.

Drawing on newspaper articles, memoirs, and little-known histories, William Dicey presents a compelling diary of a very bad year.

He focuses on ordinary people, showing what life was actually like under an authoritarian regime – from the six hours a day that black workers in KwaNdebele spent on buses to the rebel sporting tours that provided a distraction for white South Africans.

Some stories foreshadow the miracle of 1990 – for instance, the deputy commander of Pollsmoor Prison takes Nelson Mandela on a scenic drive around Cape Town, years before his eventual release. Other stories shine a light on our current conflicts.

Written in crisp prose, 1986  is a model of historical excavation, deftly evoking the spirit of the times.


Extract

On 1 January 1986, in the early hours of the morning, a band of vigilantes invaded Moutse, a rural district adjacent to the self-governing homeland of KwaNdebele. Wielding axes and guns, they abducted several hundred men and boys from their villages and took them to a community hall in Siyabuswa, the capital of KwaNdebele. The floor of the hall was awash with soapy water and cooking oil. The vigilantes forced the villagers to strip naked and to exercise until they dropped from exhaustion. The vigilantes then flogged their captives with quirts and sjamboks as they flailed about in the slippery grime.

The torture lasted a full day and was personally overseen by Simon Skosana, the chief minister of KwaNdebele, and Piet Ntuli, the minister of the interior. The pair had recently formed the vigilante group, naming it Mbokodo, or ‘the grindstone’. Its mandate was to take action against ‘troublemakers’. Twenty people died on New Year’s Day, and many were later treated for injuries at a nearby hospital. When Skosana was asked by a reporter whether he and Ntuli had been involved in the abduction and torture, he replied, ‘That is a secret of the government.’

The raid was a direct result of a decision by Pretoria to incorporate Moutse into KwaNdebele. Pretoria wished to enlarge the homeland and so make it viable for independence. Moutse’s 120 000 inhabitants, who stood to lose their South African citizenship, opposed the move. This angered the vigilantes. ‘Why do you hate us?’ they demanded of the villagers as they tortured them. ‘Why don’t you follow our leaders?’

By the mid-Eighties, forced removals had become politically costly for Pretoria, and it had opted instead to redraw homeland boundaries. Still, its plans for Moutse and KwaNdebele made little sense. They ran contrary to Verwoerdian theory, which sought to group people by ethnicity (the inhabitants of Moutse were Sotho, while the homeland in which they now found themselves was Ndebele). And they contradicted President
PW Botha’s reformist rhetoric, in particular his recent promise that homelands that did not want independence would be permitted to remain part of South Africa (the vast majority of KwaNdebele’s inhabitants opposed independence).

Witnesses reported that South African security forces were present at the raid and did nothing to stop it. Some even reported that army trucks had transported the vigilantes to Moutse. ‘Wherever Mbokodo is,’ said one resident, ‘you will always see the Casspir behind them, you will always see the van behind them.’

KwaNdebele had become the country’s tenth and final home­­land in 1974. The state had purchased nineteen white-owned cattle farms and had installed a government, thereby trans­forming a tract of veld into a self-governing territory. In reality, Kwa­­Ndebele was a dumping ground for the unwanted: evicted farmworkers; people forcibly removed from ‘black spots’; non-Tswanas expelled from Bophuthatswana; and refugees from overcrowded townships. Almost all of them landed up in ‘closer settlements’, Pretoria’s terminology for vast rural shanty towns. When the American journalist Joseph Lelyveld visited Kwaggafontein in 1981 (many parts of KwaNdebele still bore the names of the original Afrikaans farms), he encountered ‘a rash of closer settle­ments spotted over open veld’. On a return visit two years later, the area had become ‘part of a nearly continuous resettlement belt’. A hillside he recalled from his first visit ‘no longer looked like a hillside. What it had become was a slight swell in a sea of shanties.’

Lelyveld observes that ‘such sights can be seen in other countries, usually as a result of famines or wars. I don’t know where else they have been achieved as a result of planning.’ The plan, of course, was to rid South Africa of its black citizens. When this proved impractical, principally due to the labour requirements of a growing economy, the government sought instead to limit the number of blacks who stayed within the country’s borders overnight. Apartheid regulations created a commuter class, people who worked in South Africa by day and returned to the homelands at night. In essence, the closer settlements of KwaNdebele were labour dormitories. Bus stops appeared before taps or toilets.

Early one morning in 1983, Joseph Lelyveld and photographer David Goldblatt made their way to Wolwekraal depot, a fenced-off clearing in the bush in which fifty-odd Putco buses were parked. The first bus of the day had departed at 1 a.m. to fetch drivers. The next bus was scheduled to depart at 2.45, arriving at Marabastad terminal in Pretoria three hours later. ‘At that place and that hour,’ remarks Lelyveld, ‘the sight of a couple of whites on the bus was as much to be expected as that of a couple of commuting walruses.’

Lelyveld’s account of the journey appears in his book Move Your Shadow. He sets the scene with some background information. The bus company Putco started servicing the route between Pretoria and KwaNdebele in 1979, with two buses a day. Putco had to draw its own maps, as its buses ‘came in right behind the bulldozers’. A year later, it was running 60 buses a day, and by 1984 over 250. The cost of this service was far beyond what menial labourers could afford to pay, and so a crucial aspect of Putco’s business – more important even than diesel or
maintenance – was negotiating subsidies. By 1984, the bus subsidy was Pretoria’s largest single expenditure on KwaNdebele. It was larger than the homeland’s GDP.

Lelyveld interviewed a number of passengers. They had common woes. Even with the subsidy, the bus fares ate up a quarter of their wages. They got back home long after dark, and still had to wash, eat, see that their children had food to take to school the next day. Many worked six days a week. Only on Sundays did they get to see their families in daylight. Lelyveld calculates that 23 000 people made the KwaNdebele–Pretoria run each day and that many of them travelled further each year than a circumnavigation of the globe. All this on hard wooden seats designed for short hauls.

Goldblatt’s photographs appear in The Transported of Kwa­Ndebele. His grainy black-and-white images reveal a journey at once mundane (to those who made it every day) and yet remarkable (to those seeing it for the first time). The opening photograph features five men caught in the light of Goldblatt’s flash. They are standing on the verge of a dirt road, surrounded by inky blackness. The caption explains that it is 2.40 in the morning and that these men spend up to eight hours a day on buses. Goldblatt shows passengers boarding, yawning, wrapping themselves in blankets. By 3.15, the seating is full and new passengers have to stand. By 3.30, the standing passengers have all slumped to the floor. Everyone is asleep. Some passen­gers are using their bags or bits of foam to cushion their heads against the windows or against the seats in front of them. It’s as if this one bus trip – the boredom, the hardship, the endurance – comes to represent all of apartheid. Goldblatt would later say: ‘I wasn’t on the scene at the riots and the focal points of political life … events themselves were for me much less interesting than the conditions that lead to events. I was looking obliquely at things.’

The Transported of KwaNdebele features an essay titled ‘The Bus Stop Republic’ as well as the oral testimony of a number of commuters:

With us people, we get up at two o’clock in the night. You must wash yourself, you are a woman, you are a man, you must wash yourself, you must straighten yourself out. The first bus is at three o’clock. … Sometimes you still miss the bus. You lose it. It is gone, or maybe it is too full. The next bus is at half past three and then again at four … It takes about twenty minutes to that bus stop. And you must walk. You can’t walk slowly. It is thirty minutes to get there if you take it easy. If the seats are full, we must stand in the aisle, so tightly packed. You sleep, you stand, you sleep. You fall on the one in front of you, and he falls on the next one, and we fall, we fall, we fall.

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