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if he failed to answer a question in Afrikaans. Alternatively, a policeman might ask that black man to say ‘Ag-en-tagtig klein sakkies aartappeltjies’, an Afrikaans phrase that simply meant ‘eighty-eight small bags of potatoes’, but had so many guttural sounds and inflections completely alien to the African tongue that few Xhosa people could pronounce it.

      Fortunately, many of the Xhosa people native to Knysna spoke fluent Afrikaans, having grown up among the coloured community. And so there were some of them who passed the language test and made it into Hornlee.

      Those who didn’t returned to the squatter camps.

      Whereas the Western Cape had no black population to speak of, it was a very different story in the neighbouring Eastern Cape.

      With no coloured labour preference and a border shared with the poverty-stricken Transkei homeland, the Eastern Cape was a popular destination for migrant Xhosa workers looking to feed their starving families. Once there, they worked in factories and on farms, in gardens and on building sites, anything they could get to be able to send some money back home.

      But the black workers far outnumbered the available jobs in the Eastern Cape. Desperate for money, many of them turned their attention to the Western Cape. And when they heard rumours of job opportunities in Knysna’s sawmills and furniture factories, one black man after another took his chances and moved there, work permit or not.

      From towns and cities like Umtata and East London, they hitchhiked to Knysna, a long and arduous journey often undertaken on the back of a Toyota or Isuzu bakkie, the pick-ups popular with South Africans and especially farmers.

      Those people with work permits were often put up in compounds on their employers’ premises. Those without permits, however, had no choice but to join the squatters in the hills, where they lived in fear of getting caught.

      The Bantu Administration van was a familiar and feared sight in the squatter camps. Raids were common, often at three, four in the morning in an effort to catch people while they were sleeping.

      But word spread quickly, and the ‘illegals’ were good at hiding.

       Chapter 9

       Jack and Piet

      As a white child in Knysna, I knew nothing of the Bantu Administration or its work. So it comes as news to me that one man who used to work for the Administration is someone I know.

      Piet van Eeden’s family went to the same church as mine, and his daughters were just a few years ahead of me at school.

      My parents tell me there’s another ex-employee of the Bantu Administration who’s still in Knysna. His identity is even more surprising than Piet’s, not because I know him – I don’t – but because he’s black.

      Neither of them is hard to track down. Piet van Eeden now manages a supermarket near my parents’ house, and his black ex-colleague Jack Matjolweni is working at the Department of Labour.

      I call Jack at work, introducing myself by my married name. At first he sounds guarded, but when I explain who my parents are, he’s more forthcoming.

      ‘Aaaah, I know your mother,’ he says. I can hear he’s smiling now. ‘And I know your father very well.’

      My father often deals with Jack to sort out benefits for Johnny, our gardener.

      Jack says he’ll come to my parents’ house after work.

      I’ve heard of Jack. In the last week I’ve had a few conversations with people from the townships and Jack’s name came up often – and never in a favourable light. It’s not surprising. A black man who worked for the apartheid government and raided his own people’s houses to catch women’s husbands and boyfriends and send them away couldn’t have been popular.

      One woman I spoke to put it down to the attitude with which Jack did his job. He was young and full of spirit, she said. He was just too keen.

      Jack is all smiles when my father opens the door. He’s tall, so tall he has to bend over slightly to get through the door between the kitchen and the dining room. He looks much younger than his fifty years in a leather jacket and khaki chinos that make him resemble a black Indiana Jones.

      Jack speaks Afrikaans to my father but switches to English when he speaks to me. It seems more natural that way, as we spoke English on the phone. His English is broken with a strong African accent and he throws in the odd Afrikaans word here and there.

      I offer Jack a coffee, tea, maybe a beer. Just hot water, he says. With sugar. I bring him his drink with a bowl of freshly baked rusks.

      Jack laughs when he remembers the past. He has a high-pitched giggle that doesn’t go with his face or his size, and I find myself warming to him. It’s not that he’s making light of history by laughing about it, rather that he can hardly believe his own stories of how things used to be.

      Jack tells me he was still at school when he started working for the Bantu Administration. He was seventeen.

      He was recruited by chance in 1976 while he was waiting in line in a Bantu Administration office. Born in Humansdorp in the Eastern Cape, he needed a stamp in his passbook for permission to go to school in a nearby town. While Jack’s papers were being processed, one of the white Bantu Administration officials came to him and offered him a job. ‘He came to me and said “Hey, I want someone like you,”’ says Jack.

      By ‘someone like you’, the man meant a black boy who could speak Xhosa, Afrikaans and English, and was still young enough to be trained and shaped into whatever the Bantu Administration wanted him to be.

      Jack says the fact that he was only seventeen and still at school didn’t seem to faze his prospective employer.

      ‘He said I could go to night school and finish my studies that way.’

      Jack accepted the job. It was just too attractive an offer to refuse. Being a Bantu Administration employee meant he no longer needed permits in his passbook. It also made it relatively easy to transfer to Knysna.

      As a Bantu Administration inspector, Jack had to check people’s passbooks and make sure they had the necessary permits to be in Knysna. Sometimes he would go from door to door in the squatter camps looking for ‘illegals’, other times he would get a call or an anonymous letter from someone blowing the whistle on a rival for a job or a girl.

      ‘What, black people would turn each other in?’ I ask him.

      ‘Ja!’ he says. Yes.

      Sometimes the letters and calls were from coloured workers who’d lost out on a job. Other times they came from white employers, maybe bitter about losing a worker to a competitor who was willing to pay more. But most often the letters and calls were from black people: jealous boyfriends in Knysna who wanted to get back at the men who took their women, or concerned wives in the Transkei who hadn’t heard from their husbands for months.

      Jack explains that most black workers left their wives and families behind in the homelands when they came to Knysna, promising to send money as often as they could. But a year was a long time for a man to be away from his wife, and many of the workers took girlfriends in Knysna. Jack remembers wives turning up from the Transkei and the Eastern Cape looking for their husbands. He tells me how those wives would cry when they saw their husbands with other women, often with new children.

      ‘If somebody came to me saying the husband has left and he’s got kids, then I was fighting for that,’ says Jack. ‘I was not worried about girlfriends and boyfriends. But I was always fighting for married people.’

      Not all of the illegals in Knysna were married, however, and some of them fell in love with the local girls. Those men found themselves in a different predicament. Even if they married their Knysna girl, they wouldn’t be allowed to stay without a permit. Should they try to find work without a permit,

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