time immemorial, but once their land had been reorganized and repopulated by the white government—too many people condensed on too little land, with watering holes and streams overrun—it became impossible for most residents to produce enough food on which to survive.
Melvin left his family in search of a job elsewhere, like many able-bodied black men at the time. In addition to supporting his family, he owed the government taxes, despite receiving neither rights nor representation. Along with hundreds of thousands, Melvin headed north and got a job in the expanding mines. His pay was a pittance, especially compared to a white man’s doing the same work: in 1951, the white gold miner earned nearly fifteen times the wage of the black gold miner, and by 1970, white miners earned twenty-one times the wage of black miners. Because of the Mines and Works Act, Melvin could never rise above the lowest rung of the job hierarchy. He was housed in a hostel, a single-sex compound that often pressed ninety men into a single dormitory. When he left to visit his parents, Alice, and his children for three weeks a year, he was strip-searched in case he was smuggling gold.
Though the idea of unionizing was gaining traction, it was still a daunting task. In 1913 at an open-pit diamond mine in the middle of the country, a black worker offended a white foreman, who proceeded to kick him to death. When his black colleagues went on strike, white workers and cops banded together to kill eleven black miners and injure thirty-seven others. Fighting for one’s rights was lethal business.
Melvin desperately missed his family, his hometown, his community. He returned annually to slowly build a small traditional house with a clay floor and straw roof. On one of his short holidays home, he took a second wife, as per Xhosa custom. His longing for his children and his hatred of the sweltering, perilous mines grew. Between 1933 and 1966, nearly twenty thousand men had died in the mines, which did not have adequate safety measures. The vast majority of victims were black. Frightened, both of death and of leaving his family destitute, Melvin searched for another job.
By that time, the Mines and Works Act had been expanded, so that white citizens would get first dibs at employment in other burgeoning industries: the railways, civil service, iron, and steel. Despite this, Melvin managed to get a job laying track for the expanding railways. First, he was based in Lady Frere, but soon the railways moved him to Cape Town. While the second wife remained in Lady Frere, Alice and the children followed, living with thousands of migrants on the outskirts of the city, pitching shacks just miles from stately white-owned 1950s-era homes with all the trappings of Western comfort and modernity. Melvin and Alice held strong against the odds. Often, defeated by distance, lacking telephones, and overwhelmed by loneliness, black men began affairs in the cities, which fractured many families and resulted in scattered children. Despite their commitment to each other, however, the Nofemelas found city living prohibitively expensive; they kept their elder children with them and sent the babies to be raised by relatives in the country.
The government, noting the unending creep of women from the reserves to the city, wished to remove “surplus females” (i.e., women who didn’t serve white businesses or other white interests) and growing families from the locations. But Melvin had other plans. He was saving money with the dream of bringing all of his children back together, one by one.
Nineteen forty-eight was Melvin’s thirty-eighth year. His son Wowo had just been born, and would in two years be sent to live with his uncle. Across the ocean, World War II had come to a close—of the 5,500 South Africans killed while supporting the Allies, a forgotten 25 percent were black. The world was reeling from the Holocaust, and the Nazis were on the losing side of history. But one party in South Africa was taking its inspiration from Hitler. This was the National Party, led by D. F. Malan, a Dutch Reformed cleric who campaigned on the platform of apartheid, Afrikaans for “separateness.”
The central theory behind apartheid was that South Africa was not a single nation, but in fact a collection of separate nations, each populated by a certain ethnic group. Conflict in South Africa stemmed from the unreasonable attempts of these nations to meld into one, and such conflict could be eliminated if only each group existed in separate but equal spheres, free from the demands and traditions of other pesky cultures. As with all systems of segregation, however, the truth was that the founders of apartheid intended to create a society that was indeed separate, but was breathtakingly unequal. Then they could keep all the good stuff for themselves.
Malan’s challenger was the incumbent Jan Smuts, a lesser racist, all things being relative. (Smuts, though opposed to giving blacks political power, helped draft the constitution of the United Nations’ forerunner, the League of Nations, and met with Gandhi on the rights of Indians in South Africa.) Only coloreds in the Cape and whites could vote in the election. On May 26, 1948, Melvin watched from the sidelines as Malan took power. One of the Malan government’s first orders of business was to eliminate the voting rights of coloreds.
In 1950, the National Party passed the Group Areas Act, a law that Prime Minister Malan dubbed with great reverence “the very essence of apartheid.” For centuries, various colonial and white governments had been redistributing black land into white hands, so that less than 10 percent of the population owned more than 85 percent of the land. But after their victorious 1948 election, the Afrikaner nationalists running the country started putting in place what they called groot apartheid, or grand apartheid.
The act aimed to forcibly separate each of the four official South African racial classifications into their own living areas. In Cape Town, whites, for the most part, inherited the beautiful city center, the leafiest suburbs, and the ocean views; Indians were bestowed with two small neighborhoods; and colored people were placed in square government matchbox houses in bleak zones that neighbored Gugulethu. Although the records are poor, some studies estimate that between 1960 and 1982, over 3.5 million South Africans were forcibly relocated, ripped from their property, and taken to townships or newly created “homelands.” The apartheid dream was to eventually create a white nation free of black inhabitants.
The homelands would help realize this dream. Each homeland was intended to act as a pseudo-autonomous “nation” for a particular ethnic group, where all its members would live in peace. The homelands, which eventually numbered ten, were actually rural backwaters, where white investment was illegal. They were geographically fractured, separated by white farms, and overcrowded, set on just 13 percent of South African territory. In one central eastern homeland named QwaQwa, designated for the Sotho people, 777 people were expected to survive on the fruits of a single square mile; Easy’s mother, Kiki, had been born there.
There was neither sufficient healthcare nor sanitation in the homelands, which resulted in outbreaks of cholera, tuberculosis, polio, and even the bubonic plague—in the mid- and late twentieth century. In 1974, the infant mortality rate of black children was 110 per 1,000, and the primary cause of their death was malnutrition.
“There was too much witch in the Transkei,” Easy once told me, referring to the portion of today’s Eastern Cape province that included his family’s hometown of Lady Frere. “The women have many miscarriages.”
Melvin, once a citizen of South Africa, was considered by lawmakers a member of the “Xhosa nation,” and was to become a citizen of Transkei, where he was expected to settle permanently. He might work in the “European” cities or towns—and might, in the course of this work, father children in these white areas—but his family would always be temporary laborers in the greater South Africa. As the Department of Bantu Administration and Development stated in 1967: “As soon as [black workers] become, for one reason or another, no longer fit for work, or superfluous in the labour market, they are expected to return to their country of origin or the territory of the national unit where they fit ethnically if they were not born and bred in their homeland.” The state, still intent on marketing the homelands as decolonized areas, installed cooperative black chiefs linked to the apartheid leadership. In 1977, Parliament granted Transkei independence. This independence was recognized by no country in the world other than South Africa.
Melvin,
