Swimming with Cobras (6 page)

Years later we were driving to the wedding of a young friend in Port Alfred. Along the roadside the summer grasses had a pinkish tinge in the sun and the fences were smothered in blue plumbago. At one point, where the hills roll away from the road towards the sea, there was a vista of never-ending space. I was thrilled by the beauty and solace of all that space. “I love the bush and the light,” I said, looking across at Malvern – and found myself completely surprised by the simultaneous thought, “I love this land.”

Establishing an identity

Market Street has always been at the centre of a lot of activity. Across the road from our front door lay the square where wagonloads of merchandise were traded in the 19th century: horns, skins, pelts, feathers, pots, bracelets, beads – and piles of ivory. Once Grahamstown ceased to be a commercial hub the market traded mainly in local agricultural produce. In our early years in the town we bought fresh vegetables from the run-down sheds on the square, but as the decades passed we watched in dismay as supermarkets and fast food outlets began to arrive on our doorstep.

In typical settler style, our house fronted directly onto the street. Later suburban trends would set houses behind hedges and gates, making them less accessible to the passing traffic, but in the older parts of town there were constant knocks on doors as people from the townships walked from house to house seeking work. During my childhood in England the only strangers who had banged on the door were the occasional gypsy in a long skirt, often with a baby in her arms, selling pegs or white heather, or more likely, a salesman selling small sweeping brushes from a neat little suitcase.

A frequent caller in Market Street was a man by the name of Milton. Sporting a black beret and speaking an old fashioned but articulate English, he always seemed to me to be just popping by on his way to the Reading Room at the British Museum. Although his mind had known better days, his social and political comments could be very sharp. Word was that he had been an early member of the South African Liberal Party, which had long since been banned. Knowing that Malvern was associated with the Progressive Party (he'd joined in 1959 before leaving for Oxford), Milton enjoyed baiting us on certain flaws in the opposition's manifesto. Was it not discriminatory, he taunted, to advocate a qualified franchise based on minimum levels of education and income?

Of course, he also knew precisely how to win a girl's heart and invariably I would end up putting my hand in my pocket. One day he reassured me that he had not come for money but to find out what the German word for 'lemon' was. I later discovered that he had helped himself to a sack-full from our friend's tree and was bartering with our German neighbours! I was sorry when Milton died before the new South Africa had begun to dawn.

I soon learnt that giving beggars food or money created untenable dependencies and I realised that it solved few problems. But there was no getting away from the relentless stream of need. I had encountered poverty in England and had seen the effects of social inequality in my work there, but I had not been prepared for this vast gulf between rich and poor. By comparison to those coming to our door, even we seemed rich. We had no jobs for them and not much spare money, and yet our material circumstances were worlds better than theirs. With each knock I became more oppressed by helplessness and guilt. I felt compelled to seek some sort of action. But how did I ft in and what was I to do? I had begun helping out as a volunteer at the Black Sash advice office on Saturday mornings, but I thought that if I took a job – any job at this stage – I could perhaps find ways of alleviating some of the problems on our doorstep.

One of the few Afrikaners at Rhodes at this time was the sociologist HW van der Merwe. He was known by his Afrikaans initials, “HW”, which to English ears like mine sounded like “Harvey”. He was probably responsible for introducing Malvern to anti-apartheid ideas as a young man. The Contact Study Group at Stellenbosch University, founded under HW's influence, had helped to shape the political thought of young Afrikaners such as Malvern and Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, who would one day become the leader of the official opposition, the Progressive Federal Party. One of the stereotypes of the time was that all Afrikaners were nationalists and that English South Africans were generally more liberal. But I was surprised to discover in time that my fellow English-speakers were often very conservative. Many were overtly racist, while some Afrikaners were much more liberal than I was. This was indeed proving a strange society.

HW came to my rescue. He was studying white elites in South Africa and offered me a part-time job as a research assistant administering a questionnaire door-to-door. What an opportunity, not just to
do
something, but also to get a glimpse of the people behind the doors of suburban Grahamstown. Barking dogs would often bar my way and although it was not yet the era of security gates and blade wire, one house I visited did sport a hand-painted sign declaring, “This house is protected by a shotgun.” Chilling messages aside, I was surprised at how many people invited me in and were willing to answer my questions. In England, where I had visited patients at their homes, I had found people much more private than these South Africans were proving.

From the poorest to the wealthiest home, the person who responded to my knock at the door was often a uniformed maid referred to as “the girl”. In Kipling-esque style, she referred to her employers as “madam” or “master”. In many instances she lived in, and was not the only domestic help. The smartest homes gleamed with a lustre that suggested entire teams were on hand – what a friend referred to as “servants running hot and cold". Later, in my advice office work, I would gain a very different perspective on the lives of these smiling maids who ushered me in for the interviews. Beneath the surface of most domestic arrangements there was a reality of exploitation that I was not yet able to discern.

My research formed a very small part of HW's work, but through it I learnt a great deal. I began to perceive the divisions between town and gown. For example I realised that membership of the Anglican cathedral gave one a certain patrician status; and I discerned that the legal fraternity saw themselves as a powerful elite. In all, I encountered some very colonial mentalities.

After working for HW I took a part-time job with a welfare scheme at the university, which began to give me some insight into the “other” side of Grahamstown. Some members of the white academic staff donated money each month that was made available for loans and bursaries for black service staff. My job was to assess the needs of applicants and manage the distribution of the money from a dark, poky office on campus. Always awaiting me at the door would be queues of cleaners and gardeners, each with an insoluble problem arising from the poverty trap that ensnared them all. My power to grant or withhold money, and the corresponding powerlessness of the applicants, made me feel like the feudal dispenser of old-world charity to the “deserving poor”.

I often felt that I was foundering. Not only was I overwhelmed by the extent of people's need but I was also ignorant of their language and culture and aghast at their circumstances. Unemployment was rife and wages appalling. Education was not free, and school fees, books and uniforms presented extra expenses. People got themselves into debt through hire-purchase, often to have their goods repossessed when their payments lapsed. It was a job with no end. Clearly the university needed to start a proper personnel department, and this did eventually happen, though long after I had moved on.

Interestingly, the nature of the work I did, and the association it gave me with black people, did not make me popular in some circles. One right-wing professor who was also a warden at one of the halls of residence described me, along with the then professor of anthropology and a woman who had started a feeding scheme for children, as the three most dangerous people in Grahamstown. This was rather startling. At that time I was not prominently involved in any political activity and was comparatively unknown – unlike my fellow accused. Perhaps I was achieving some identity after all.

Being young and idealistic, Malvern was creating a reputation of his own within the Progressive Party. In 1970 he was chosen as the party's parliamentary candidate for the Albany region and there followed a few months of intense party-political energy in our home.

We'd witnessed elections American-style when, living in Kansas we'd heard Hubert Humphrey speak at a razzmatazz event when he was running for the vice-presidency. There, politics seemed lightweight and glitzy. In South Africa, by contrast, elections were fought over deadly serious and deeply moral issues. The first post-war election of 1948 had astounded the world by giving DF Malan's Nationalist Party the victory over respected international statesman and Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, Jan Smuts. Malan had seemed bad enough, but far harsher Afrikaner nationalists were to succeed him.

The official opposition, led by Sir de Villiers Graaff, seemed merely to promote apartheid with a kinder face. In fact, the United Party seemed anachronistic to me. Many of its members harked back to a bygone age. The MPs I met with their cravats and moustaches all spoke in clipped tones, mostly about World War II.

With the demise of the Liberal Party, the Progressives, born in a split from the UP, had become the only legal opposition worth supporting. It was not exactly radical. It did not believe in One Man, One Vote, but in a qualified franchise; a policy which seemed archaic and patronising, but for many whites at that time it was a revolutionary and dangerous idea. At least the Progressive Party was unequivocally opposed to separate development. Helen Suzman served as this party's sole representative in parliament for thirteen years, where she was vilified by MPs of other parties for the tenacity of her opposition. She was especially known for relentlessly ferreting out failures and sins with which to confront the ruling party. This indomitable woman showed a completely different side to her character when she stayed at our home. She charmed the whole family by behaving like a beloved grandmother, allowing the children to clamber all over her bed and gleefully distributing the jelly beans she had brought.

Malvern was inexperienced in politics and not greatly accomplished as a public speaker. He especially lacked the stabbing witticisms and quick repartee of most politicians, besides which he tended to be trusting of people, which would surely make him a poor politician. But he made a brave stand and I was proud of him. I supported his campaign as well as I could with three small children in tow and a fourth on the way, but one day, heavily pregnant and carrying trays of food up steep stairs to feed the party workers, I overheard someone say, “She can work as hard as she likes, but if she can't vote it's not much good.” It was a slap in the face, but true.

I was still very ambivalent about identifying myself as a South African and clung to my British passport. I had already taken on so much that was alien to my Englishness that this document seemed like my last hope, my umbilical link to a country that in honesty, I still regarded as superior. I did become a permanent resident, but it was going to be a giant leap for me to become a citizen and voter.

The Progressive campaign was run from a rather seedy room in a long-ago hotel that had fallen on hard times. The curtains smelled of stale cigarette smoke and the threadbare carpet was stained. The records of the branch were kept in cardboard boxes in the wardrobe. There was no such thing as exposure on television – this marvel would only reach South Africa in 1976 – and very little on radio. The party manifesto proclaimed that a vote for Malvern was “a choice, not an echo”, and one advert proclaimed, “In your heart you know he's right.” Stirring stuff, but one supporter went a little too far and probably lost the party some votes when he distributed a pamphlet declaring, “If Jesus Christ were alive today he would vote for Van Wyk Smith.”

We knew that Malvern had slim chance of getting into parliament, yet the Progressive Party was considered a threat. Once, while we were registering voters at a table in High Street, special branch officers were observed with their binoculars trained on the tables, no doubt noting the names of supporters. Sometimes the atmosphere in the town was distinctly hostile. People would cross the road rather than greet us and for a while we were plagued at home by anonymous phone calls. Progressive Party posters were defaced and torn down and the local undertaker refused a canvassing visit from Malvern because “it would be bad for business”.

Malvern became used to addressing half-empty halls and responding to hecklers. But because the party was so small and beleaguered, a special bond grew among the supporters. Once they decided, on the inspiration of Tony Giffard, a lecturer in the new journalism department at Rhodes, to undertake a whistle stop tour by train through the constituency, to take the campaign to the people. So on a Saturday morning a group of supporters packed the Kowie Express and made the 60-kilometre journey down to the coast. “Express” was a misnomer. The chugging steam train wove its way through pineapple fields, stopping at numerous small stations better described as halts. Advance publicity had gone out to all farmers, but at every stop Malvern stepped out onto a deserted platform. No one came to hear him. Nevertheless it was a festive expedition and the supporting entourage cheered and waved placards and had their photographs taken. Malvern's professor, Guy Butler, went disguised as a pineapple farmer and at each deserted stop he pretended to heckle, “What about the pineapples, Boet?”

Although Malvern had clearance from the university vice chancellor to run for parliament, he had to take unpaid leave for six weeks. In the early hours of a wet morning, weary in my pregnant state, I stood on the balcony of the magistrate's court and watched the candidates emerge after the counting of the votes. When I saw Malvern's drawn face I knew we had lost badly. The Progressives had captured 1 002 votes while the United Party retained their seat with 5 950 and the Nationalists received 3 259. For our friends in the Progs it was devastating. Nevertheless, the next day they enveloped us in true South African kindness, arriving at the house with flowers, food and lots of sympathy.