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For The People. Anelia Schutte
Читать онлайн.Название For The People
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781472090980
Автор произведения Anelia Schutte
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство HarperCollins
The course is held at a home for the aged in Hornlee where we have a large, cold room to ourselves. There are fifteen people taking part, most of them employees at Epilepsy South Africa, plus a handful from other charitable organisations in neighbouring towns.
The course-leader, a man called Ismaiyili from somewhere in North Africa, divides us into groups, deliberately mixing white, black, coloured, English, Afrikaans, Xhosa, young, old, male and female. I’m separated from my mother and end up in a group with a black man, two black women and two coloured women.
From the start, xenophobia features high on the agenda – as high as the first page of the handbook we’re given, where it says that a recent report on migration in South Africa showed that ‘the practice of xenophobia by South Africans is amongst the highest in the world’.
Ismaiyili asks us to discuss, in our groups, whether foreigners should be allowed to set up a business or get a job in South Africa.
Within our group, there’s a barrier to our communication: the older of the coloured women speaks only Afrikaans. And the younger of the black men refuses to speak anything other than English. I end up translating for the coloured woman’s benefit.
When I was growing up, it was mandatory for white children to study both English and Afrikaans at school.
Having established in our group that by ‘foreigners’ we mean Zimbabweans, Nigerians, Somalis and Mozambicans, my three black team-mates insist that those foreigners shouldn’t be allowed to work in South Africa at all.
‘They come here and they take our jobs,’ says one.
‘And they’re cheap labour,’ says another. ‘We can’t compete.’
I try to be impartial and tell them how the same could be said of me going to London and working there.
They don’t seem convinced, but eventually my black team-mates concede that it’s OK for foreigners to start businesses in South Africa, but only if they give South Africans jobs. The coloured people agree.
The rest of the day deals with more general diversity in the workplace. Some of the most surprising moments come when the older black and coloured delegates share their stories of apartheid and how they were treated ‘back in the day’.
The most junior delegates, about ten, twelve years younger than me, are amazed and amused at the stories of a world that seems foreign to them. And yet they fail to see the parallels with their own attitudes towards their Zimbabwean, Nigerian, Somali and Mozambican neighbours.
The next day, I take my research to the library and the Internet, where I scour news reports, articles and readers’ letters on the subject.
Unemployment seems to be one of the main reasons behind the xenophobia. Black South African workers are more aware of their rights than ever, and unions are quick to stage walkouts over pay. The illegal immigrants, on the other hand, work cheaply. And they work hard.
Housing is another issue. For years, the government has been building identical simple brick houses in townships across South Africa as part of its Reconstruction and Development Programme, or RDP. The houses are meant solely for South Africans, but some foreign nationals from neighbouring countries have found their way into them, usually by renting them off cash-strapped South Africans who are willing to go back to living in a shack in their own back yard if it means earning some extra money.
I’ve heard that some RDP homeowners have even ‘sold’ their houses in unofficial transactions for as little as a month’s wages. I wonder whether they realise they’ve blown their one chance to get a house from the government.
The black families who are still waiting for their houses in Knysna’s townships after fifteen years of promises from the ANC government are understandably angry when they see the Zimbabweans and Nigerians moving in.
It’s hard to believe that, less than forty years ago, there were hardly any black people here.
Owéna hadn’t come across many black people in her life. Growing up in the Western Cape, the non-white people she encountered were mostly coloured. That was because the government had declared the entire region a ‘coloured labour preference area’, meaning that, by law, manual and semi-skilled jobs were to go to coloured people over black.
If a black person wanted to try their luck getting a job in the Western Cape, or indeed anywhere in South Africa, they also had the pass laws to contend with.
The pass laws were part of the apartheid government’s plan to restrict the influx of black people into ‘white’ South Africa from the African homelands. Created by the National Party government in the 1950s, the homelands were ten regions within South Africa’s borders where the different black tribes were meant to live, develop and work among their own. Despite black South Africans outnumbering white by around eight to one, the ten homelands together made up just thirteen per cent of the country’s land.
Encouraged by the government, several of the homelands became self-governing, quasi-independent states in 1959.
In 1970, a law was passed that made all black South Africans citizens of their homelands and no longer of South Africa, removing their right to vote and making white people the new majority.
If any black person wanted to travel outside the borders of their homeland, they had to carry a passbook at all times. And if they wanted to live and work in a South African town or city, they needed one of two things in their passbook: either a so-called ‘section 10’ stamp, or a temporary work permit.
The section 10 stamp gave the bearer of the passbook permission to live somewhere permanently, usually because they were born there. To live and work anywhere else, they needed a work permit that had to be renewed every year. An employer had to apply for that permit on behalf of a worker, so that no black person could move between towns and cities without having a guaranteed job at their destination. The work permit usually covered only the worker, not his wife or children, who had to stay behind. Anyone caught without the necessary paperwork was evicted and sent back to where they came from – a job that fell to the Bantu Affairs Administration Board.
Formed in 1972, Bantu Administration, as most people called it even after its name changed a number of times, was the government department responsible for the ‘development and administration’ of South Africa’s black population. As an enforcer of apartheid, the Administration was despised by the black people and in this context, the word ‘bantu’ – Zulu for ‘people’ – became offensive by association.
The government’s influx control meant Knysna, like the rest of the Western Cape, didn’t have much of a black population in 1972.
The few black people in Knysna – those who had been born and raised in the area and so had the necessary section 10 stamp to stay there – lived among the coloured people in places like Salt River until they were evicted along with their coloured neighbours.
But the black people couldn’t go to Hornlee with its schools and its churches and its community centres and sports fields. Because, under the Group Areas Act, black and coloured couldn’t mix.
With no township of their own to go to, they ended up squatting in shacks in the hills around town, on land that was undeclared for any particular colour.
In a desperate attempt to give their families a better life, many black people attempted to get into Bigai by pretending to be coloured, even changing their surnames to sound less African.
The authorities had various tests and techniques to catch out those imposters. One was to check whether the person could speak Afrikaans, as most coloured people spoke it as their first language. A black man from the Transkei, the