Swimming with Cobras (9 page)

At the end of 1981 Gill and I closed our nursery school. The Grahamstown schools were beginning to introduce their own pre-primary classes and in time our little school would be obsolete. It was a good time to shut our doors. But I was not long without a job. I was approached to become a social worker at GADRA, the Grahamstown Area Distress Relief Association, a non-governmental welfare organisation, and since it was a mornings-only position it suited my family commitments. Our children were all well into their school careers by now but still needed a great deal of fetching and carrying in the afternoons.

I was employed in the advice section, where I stayed for 12 years until 1994. In winter I shivered in my prefab office next to the beer hall in Fingo Village and in summer it was an oven. What a far cry from my neat little centrally heated office in an Oxford hospital! Working mornings only was a mercy, as I sometimes felt overwhelmed by the demands. Our clients were almost exclusively black and engaged in endless struggles with hunger, homelessness, overcrowding, unemployment, alcoholism, drug abuse, rape and domestic violence. We did not at that stage see Aids sufferers, nor children who had been raped – though perhaps in those days we were simply not recognising the symptoms of either. It was a kind of war we were waging, not just against callous government policy but most often also against an obstructive and vindictive bureaucracy. South African welfare services and benefits were heavily biased in favour of whites, leaving us with little professional backup.

GADRA received no state subsidy, depending entirely on donations. Over the years we tried to change and modernise the old-fashioned name but to no avail. The community we served, not to mention the donors, had always used the acronym GADRA and wanted it to stay. Two other agencies to which we were linked bore the old-fashioned names of the Cripple Care Society and the Civilian Blind. These and other aid societies were run by stalwarts in the white community. One of my young colleagues once remarked, “Everyone in welfare is so old!” They were indeed a dying breed.

GADRA was founded in 1959 in response to a mayoral appeal. It could have been a food, the ongoing drought, or perhaps simply the overwhelming miasma of poverty. Prior to this there had been ad hoc charitable activity in Grahamstown, carried out by the churches and the Good Samaritan Society. Early in the century there had been an Englishwoman who, according to legend, rode a large white horse through the townships dispensing medical advice and assistance. Later the wife of a law professor started soup kitchens and a school-feeding scheme when she learnt that children were fainting at school because they were inadequately fed. In the 1970s a bursary scheme was launched, modelled on the African Scholars' Fund in Cape Town. An ageing Jesuit priest administered the bursary fund from boxes stored under his bed. Humble beginnings, but in time GADRA became a very efficiently run outfit with a welfare number, a constitution, and a strong team effort uniting the three sections: Advice, School Feeding and Education.

Fresh to South African welfare work, I was at a distinct disadvantage when practising what is known in the jargon as cross-cultural social work. For one, I could not speak isiXhosa. Apart from the fiendishly difficult grammar, my limp English tongue could not master the clicks and glottal stops. I had to depend on interpreters who, I discovered, tended to supplement my advice to a client with sixpence worth of their own for good measure, which could muddy the waters somewhat. Fortunately my closest colleague, an experienced social worker, was fluent in isiXhosa. Adrienne Whisson also lectured at the university, was a member of the Black Sash and had a feisty, clear-sighted approach that was a great asset in our line of work.

I was also unfamiliar with many cultural nuances and had much to learn. Fortunately I was encouraged and aided by an ex-school principal who worked in the office. She was especially supportive when I found myself having to let go two of our colleagues, one after the other, the one for drunkenness and the other for theft. Mrs M, as we fondly called her, had many money-saving tips which she dished out to the clients, one of which was to use bicarbonate of soda instead of expensive deodorants. I wondered whether on a hot day one mightn't start to fizz!

My colleagues were all helpful in interpreting the township world to me. The first time I was told that a client would not be appearing for his interview because he was “late”, my irritation proved quite inappropriate as it transpired that he was in fact deceased. I was baffled and amused by expressions like “sit-in lover” for a live-in lover and “chasing the century” for someone who was growing old. One passionate letter we received waxed biblical in its exhortations: “Yes, let us go on, my faithful learnards. Rome was not built in a day. For this God is our God forever and ever. He will be our guide even unto death. Diamonds can be picked up,” it concluded, “but faithful people are rare.” Another letter concluded with the Quaker phrase, “Let us hold this problem up to the light.”

One young graduate social worker was a South African Barbara Cartland in the making. Her flamboyant write-ups on her clients sometimes made me blush to remember my own purple prose, of which my supervisor at the Radcliffe had so disapproved. “From the client's history it would seem,” went one report, “that she is married to a quarrelsome, impoverished man and has been shut up in this small gloomy heap. Her nights pinned down by fear of what might happen and having to be indebted to her husband's changing moods she is now only imprisoned by the need to escape this brutal life.” Another report, describing a visit to a paraplegic, read, “A bright exotic home with the bulge of the client's body entrapped on the couch. Fragile face and jaw line is raised in a gallant obstinate determination. His fathomless eyes seem to mourn all the inexplicable cruelties and sorrows of time and the world.” This same girl once complained about our rather meagre salaries, telling me, “It is alright for you, you have a fat cushion to lie back on.”

I never ceased to be amazed by the variety and inventiveness of the strategies people devised to survive. They collected and sold old bottles, newspapers, coal, manure, pine cones, wood. Snacks and sweets were sold at school gates, catching children on their way in and out. Knitting, sewing, leatherwork, doing someone else's housework, looking after babies, “mudding” wattle-frame houses – the list was endless. Sadly of course it also included petty burglary and prostitution.

Many households were headed by women, who were generally acknowledged as the backbone of the township community. Lack of employment in Grahamstown, together with the migrant labour system, meant that men left home to seek opportunities in the mines and elsewhere. Some women's organisations taught simple skills to improve the standard of living and humanize the environment. During home visits I was struck by the cleanliness of so many houses. They were often cramped and inadequate, with leaking roofs or badly fitted doors, yet people scrubbed and cleaned even though water had to be fetched from a tap down the street. One of our clients had received financial compensation for the loss of a leg in an accident, enabling the family to put a new roof on their house. “When I look at the roof,” his mother said, “I see my son's leg.”

It was a revelation for me to learn about the broad-based system of African kinship and the density of social networks. Extended webs of interdependence meant that sometimes relatives of three generations lived in the same household, helping out with food and money and providing support in emergencies. Voluntary groups such as churches, mutual aid associations, women's groups and rotating credit clubs formed part of the supportive networks that helped relieve people's financial and emotional burdens. When the state casually disrupted or intervened in the lives of black people it was usually with no regard for the crucial role played by supportive social networks such as these.

A pressing concern in the Eastern Cape was the resettlement of people. The nationalists had a grandiose plan, not unlike that of King Canute, the Viking King of England, who infamously attempted to stop the tide from coming in. “Go back, you black food!" the ruling party seemed to cry as they set about removing black people from South Africa and relocating them to a series of ostensibly independent states. Here they would enjoy so-called autonomy, while in fact real power would remain entrenched in white South Africa. As early as 1917, even the great internationalist Jan Smuts had said in a speech delivered in London, “In South Africa you will have in the long run large areas cultivated by blacks and governed by blacks … while in suitable parts you will have your white communities, which will govern themselves separately.” This meant, of course, resettling people from where they had migrated to the cities and towns and dumping them far from any sources of livelihood and support. It was a cruel and deluded project that caused untold misery, witnessed, among many other things, in the appalling malnutrition figures of the next few decades.

Two of the new homelands were located on our doorstep. When the Ciskei became “independent”, a new capital was built at Bisho (now Bhisho). A series of heavy buildings, a cross between Star Wars and the Weimar Republic, rose like bunkers in the veld. Among the finishing touches were parking spaces marked for VIPs, and others for VVIPs. But like the fictional Toy Town of my childhood, with its cardboard houses and strutting, opinionated characters, this façade had no substance. For many of us it was a symbolic moment when, in the midst of the so-called Independence Day parade, the towering flagpole with the new Ciskei fag fell down like a toy.

One of my first visits to a resettlement area was in the early 1980s when I went with two other Black Sash members to Kammaskraal, beyond Peddie to the east of Grahamstown. People had been moved there from the coastal areas of Kenton and Alexandria. A general invitation had been issued to the white churches of Grahamstown to participate in a communion service with the people of the area. We travelled in a small cavalcade of cars, up and down rutted dirt roads on a beautiful spring day. The countryside was greening and the hills rolled towards the distant coast. It seemed a lovely pastoral scene, but of course it was completely undeveloped – except for the rash of government-issue lavatories that greeted us like upended tin coffins as we neared the settlement. Clearly, a further influx of people was anticipated. Such houses as had been erected were made out of packing cases and tomato boxes. Astonishingly, some had flourishing gardens helped by water from a nearby dam.

The multilingual ecumenical service took place beside the road on a hilltop. There was a preponderance of women and children. Some wore their special church uniforms of starched white hats, scarlet jackets and black skirts, some were in frilly dresses and smart hats, some in tattered clothing. When the peace was given, the entire gathering leapt up and danced. Then the communion wine came, in chalices and broken cups, and we all lined up at the side of the dusty road. As we left there were knots of people wandering off over the hills, shouting, singing, dancing, in an air of medieval festivity. It reminded me of a day early in our marriage when Malvern and I participated in a Ban the Bomb march to the nuclear power station at Aldermarston in Berkshire, England. A huge cross section of people, from Christians to anarchists, hippies to housewives, sang and danced their way down country lanes, banners held aloft. Among the high hedges it was impossible to see where the crowd began and ended. Such expressions of the human spirit, with their combination of grit and joy, have always had the power to stir me and on that day at Kammaskraal I was again amazed by the resilience the people displayed. Transplanted far from the lives they had known, in makeshift dwellings exposed to the extremes of Eastern Cape weather, yet they participated joyously in a church service with visiting strangers.

Resettled, repatriated, removed; dumped, displaced, forgotten – these words were all used to describe the many millions of South Africans who were forcibly removed in pursuit of the policy of separate development. In the Eastern Cape their need added significantly to the strain on the already heavily burdened and under-resourced region, and our advice offices and welfare organisations felt the impact too.

One of our long-term goals at GADRA was to change the mindset of those receiving aid, from passive dependency to a more proactive engagement. My predecessor had started asking recipients of food parcels, euphemistically called “rations”, to offer some small token in return. They could work in the allotment behind the offices where spinach was grown for distribution with the food parcels, or cut up stockings to fill cushions for energy-saving wonder boxes -a home-made device used to keep saucepans warm.

In a further effort to impart self-help skills we introduced a development component to our work and gave it the isiXhosa name Masakhane – let us support each other. A volunteer introduced us to the deep-trench method of gardening and encouraged people to make water tanks and erect wire netting. This style of gardening suited the Grahamstown area, where water was a scarce resource. With plenty of mulch and compost, the method required less land, labour and water, and had the further advantage of recycling biodegradable rubbish. From small beginnings our gardens expanded and in time people started seeking help with their own gardens. When Betty Davenport, another staunch Black Sash member and a very able craftswoman, joined our staff we diversified our development work to include sewing groups and other practical activities.

Our school-feeding scheme was managed by an indefatigable and courageous stalwart. Margaret Barker was the wife of the Anglican Dean and also a Sash member. She delivered food to a number of township schools daily in her kombi, continuing even through the late-1980s, when school buildings were being burnt down in protest against the education system. Most of the time she had to contend with heavy army and police presences in the townships.