siblings to leave the farm to join Andrew. It was a journey into a political maelstrom.
Four years before, the Afrikaner-led National Party had won South Africa’s general election (in which only whites were allowed to vote). The party took power promoting white supremacy and black subservience; one of its campaign slogans was Die kaffir op sy plek – The nigger in his place. While a random array of racial laws and regulations had been in effect since white settlers arrived in the country about 300 years earlier, the Nationalists codified them in a brutally systematic manner. The new government quickly passed a series of repressive laws: the Population Registration Act, requiring the classification of people by race; the Group Areas Act, designating residential areas by race; the Immorality Amendment Act, making mixed marriages and sexual relations between whites and other races illegal; the Bantu Education Act, relegating blacks to inferior schools and curricula. These laws, among others, became the pillars of apartheid (literally: apartness), the Nationalist ideology that doomed blacks to lives of perpetual subordination.
Race now became the single criterion that determined the destiny of every South African. The Nationalists’ myriad enactments gave apartheid its legal foundations; the Dutch Reformed Church provided its religious justification. According to Church doctrine, the Afrikaners were God’s chosen people and the blacks a kind of subspecies. Enforcing apartheid was a moral imperative to guarantee the continued purity of Afrikaner society; this message the dominees, or pastors, thundered to the faithful every Sunday from their pulpits.
(The Afrikaners’ political victory secured their position not only over people of colour, but over the despised white descendants of English settlers as well. Afrikaners comprised a majority of South Africa’s whites; whites, in turn, made up about 15 per cent of the nation’s total population. Yet up until then the English, as they were called, had always ruled the country.)
The brunt of apartheid fell heaviest on the cities. Here the Nationalists meant to control the burgeoning number of blacks come to seek work, to keep whites from being ‘overwhelmed’. Under apartheid’s dizzying rules, a job was essential: with a job, a black person could obtain a pass that would allow him to stay in the city. In this, Joseph was fortunate. He found work almost immediately at Hillbrow Medical School, just north of the city centre, as a cleaner. His siblings were also lucky: Phillip got a job in a garage, while Joseph’s sisters, May and Betty, worked as maids.
Joseph washed floors, cleaned windows and polished furniture in the medical school from seven o’clock in the morning until five-thirty in the afternoon. Although it didn’t pay well, the job was far less demanding than what Joseph had experienced on the farm. And he ate better. His employers provided porridge, bread and tea for breakfast every morning; at lunch, they served meat. Still, Joseph hated his first months in Johannesburg. He missed the countryside: the tinkling of the cattle bells in the fields, the birdsong that awakened him at first light, the glorious green spaciousness. Joseph felt constricted in his tiny room at the medical school. His one consolation was Fly, whom he had brought to Johannesburg and who stayed with Phillip and his mother in Kliptown, a development to the south-west of the city.
Hillbrow and Kliptown were the only areas of Johannesburg that Joseph knew. He was afraid to venture downtown: so much traffic; so many tsotsis, pickpockets who beat you and took your money; so many tall, tall buildings; so many white people speaking English. (Joseph had mostly spoken Sotho with the farmer and knew hardly any English.) The pass system frightened him. Curfew was at 10 p.m.; if your pass said you were allowed to sleep in Hillbrow, you could not be in Berea, for instance, after ten o’clock. The few times Joseph found himself out after curfew, he had to slink along side streets, avoiding the illuminated thoroughfares that were well-patrolled, to get back to his part of town. The police showed little mercy to violators. One thousand blacks were arrested every day for pass law transgressions; that number would ultimately total eighteen million. Joseph’s dream of a better life in the city quickly dissolved.
* * *
By contrast, things went well for Nomkhitha in the beginning. She lived with her Aunt Letitia and Letitia’s daughter in Kliptown; Letitia rented two rooms in a large house from a black preacher. Nomkhitha spent her days filling out applications to different nursing schools. In this, Letitia was very helpful: discussing each question with Nomkhitha, checking the completed form, posting the letters for her. In return, Nomkhitha kept house for Letitia, who was working as a teacher. And when Letitia adopted a small boy, the child of a friend, Nomkhitha helped to care for him.
Nomkhitha relied on her aunt and cousin to instruct her in the ways of the city. Her cousin, who was two years older, had a fashionable wardrobe and liked to give Nomkhitha dresses to wear when they went out. Nomkhitha marvelled at Johannesburg: the smart shops, the beautifully dressed women, the city’s frenetic feel. When Letitia took her class on a field trip, she often invited Nomkhitha; the Johannesburg Zoo, with its astonishing array of animals, became Nomkhitha’s favourite outing. She felt no desire to make friends with other young women. The ones who visited her cousin seemed rather frivolous; Nomkhitha, by comparison, considered herself a serious person with plans and ambitions. She was content to stay within the orbit of her relatives and their rooms – and wait for her new life to start.
Then the rejections began. Nomkhitha was nervous every time a response from a nursing school arrived and could not bring herself to read it. Instead, she thrust it at Letitia who, after quickly scanning the letter, put her arm around Nomkhitha’s shoulders saying, ‘I’m sorry, they don’t want you.’ Years later, Nomkhitha would learn that she had, in fact, been accepted to some of the schools. But her aunt didn’t want to lose Nomkhitha’s help around the house. So she lied to Nomkhitha. And Nomkhitha, in her dependence on her more worldly relation, never questioned Letitia.
The months passed. Nomkhitha became increasingly frustrated: at this rate, her life would never amount to any more than dusting Letitia’s furniture, doing her laundry, washing her dishes, looking after her boy. She didn’t know what to do. Nomkhitha saw no future in going back to Bengu; everything there now seemed so primitive. But determination alone was not getting her an education. About one thing Nomkhitha was very clear: she didn’t want to end up a fast woman, a rusker, as they were called. She saw them everywhere, the girls who came to the cities with high hopes, and returned to the village, and great opprobrium, with a baby.
One day, Nomkhitha was outside sweeping the front stoep when a group of young men walked by on their way to the Presbyterian church next door. Joseph was among them. He had joined the church soon after arriving in Johannesburg and his work there had become his passion, the one thing in his life that made him feel like a human being. There were visits to the sick, prayer gatherings for the dead, leadership meetings, Saturday meetings, choir. His activities didn’t leave him much time for a social life. Joseph had often noticed Nomkhitha in his comings and goings: a slim young woman with beautiful legs and strong, chiselled features. On that particular morning, bolstered by his friends, he felt bold.
‘Hello,’ Joseph said, tipping his hat.
Nomkhitha stopped sweeping. A wiry youth with a receding hairline and rounded face was grinning at her; he was so light-skinned that Nomkhitha thought he was coloured, as apartheid nomenclature designated people of mixed race. She wanted nothing to do with such a man and went back to her sweeping.
But Joseph persisted. He made a point of arriving early at church on Sundays in the hope he would find Nomkhitha outside. They never exchanged more than a few pleasantries before Joseph hurried inside for services. Once he saw her at the greengrocer. ‘Hello again,’ he said, ‘may I talk to you?’ Nomkhitha gathered up her bags and ran all the way back to her aunt’s rooms; I don’t want a boyfriend, she repeated to herself, I want school. But one day she relented and spoke at length to Joseph. They began to go on short walks together: Joseph would escort Nomkhitha to the nearby shops and buy her some fruit or sweets. They talked in Xhosa; Nomkhitha didn’t know Sotho. Then Joseph would take her home.
After
