Out of South Africa
Hello and Goodbye by Athol Fugard
Theatr Clwyd, 1996
The White Underclass
As in any Third World country, South Africa’s economy is based on natural raw materials dragged from the earth by cheap labour. But while mining technology has developed exponentially, leading to the growth of the most sophisticated financial markets and systems in the world, the shanty towns around the industrious commercial centres show the downside. The economic boom, like any explosion, has resulted in casualties: those who, for whatever reason, couldn’t move quickly enough to keep up or were too slow to get out of the way. Townships and rural areas often display a poverty on a par with Calcutta or São Paolo, and not all their inhabitants are black.
The phrase ‘poor-white’ has a unique meaning in South Africa. In a country where 20% of the population owns a vastly disproportionate share of the national wealth, a tiny white minority find themselves in the anomalous position of having the skin colour of the ruling class, but the income and lifestyle of their poorest black neighbours. The sometimes violent struggle for black equality and representation has tended to focus on the racial issue, while in terms of society as a whole, many whites have suffered the same deprivation as blacks, and through similar circumstances: lack of education, a harsh home life, illness, accident, dissipation, or bad management.
Until the mid-1980s, skilled work was restricted to non-blacks in order to guarantee work to white voters. Although such restrictive practices have now been abolished, the effects are still being felt, and if there are relatively few blacks in white-collar jobs now, there are even fewer whites holding unskilled positions.
Those who do, however, often feel keenly the irony that in a society where whites have traditionally ruled the roost, they are looked down upon by their own kind for not having the nous to make the most of their natural advantages. Some, like the convicts transported to Australia in the last century, seek a perverse kind of comfort in looking down in their turn on the neighbouring blacks. Others, the majority of poor-whites, realise that this is missing the point. Poverty is poverty, and as they are all in it together, they may as well try and rub along as peaceably as they can. Black or white, few can spare the leisure to think about wider political issues when the mere struggle for existence is the first priority.
While the politics of apartheid may at last be on their way out, the problem of poverty may well take its place. A population growth-rate of over 2% per annum means there will be an estimated eight million jobs too few for the potential workforce by the year 2000, and for those at the bottom of the heap, training and education will be at a premium. Prospects will be low, optimism non-existent, and the familiar cycle of unemployment, housing shortages and malnutrition will continue.
Port Elizabeth
“Port Elizabeth is an almost featureless industrial port on the Indian Ocean. It is assaulted throughout the year by strong south-westerly and easterly winds. Close on half a million people live here – black, white, Indian, Chinese, and Coloured (mixed-race). It is also very representative of South Africa in the range of its social strata, from total affluence on the white side to extremest poverty on the non-white. I cannot conceive of myself as separate from it…”
Athol Fugard, Introduction to Three Port Elizabeth Plays, 1974
Conflict, whether racial, political, fiscal or inter-tribal, has always been a fact of life in Port Elizabeth. When the Dutch East India Company established a trading post at Cape Town in the mid-17th century, the influx of immigrants it attracted quickly outgrew the original settlement. The Europeans spread eastwards along the fertile coastline (now called the Garden Route), displacing as they went the indigenous population of yellow-skinned Khoisan natives. Those who weren’t chased off their land intermarried with the invader and it is their descendants who now make up the majority of the three million brown-skinned South Africans designated as Coloureds, many of whom live in and around Port Elizabeth.
But whereas the original Khoisans had been sheep and cattle herders, and therefore easily overcome, other natives proved a tougher prospect. By the early 1700s, white settlers had penetrated 400 miles east of Cape Town and now encountered black natives for the first time. To all intents and purposes still living in the Iron Age, these Xhosa-speaking Africans were warriors, and the running battle between them and the whites continued into the following century when British rule took over from the Dutch. In order to consolidate their hold on the Eastern Cape, the British brought in 5,000 immigrants from England who established a garrison town round a stone fort on Algoa Bay where the Portuguese explorer Diaz had landed over 200 years before. This new settlement came to be called Port Elizabeth.
The inland areas north of the town were owned by whites speaking the language of their 17th-centurty Dutch forebears. These were the Boers (literally ‘farmer’ in Dutch), who by the end of the 19th century had become Afrikaners, and fiercely resistant to British rule. Ranchers and slave owners whose wealth resided in their land (it was said that the sign of a proper Boer was that he had enough land so that he need never see the smoke from another man’s chimney), their sons were encouraged to claim vast tracts of acreage in their turn, throwing the natives off as they advanced into the wilderness. They did not intend to share with anyone. When the British abolished slavery throughout the Empire in 1833, the Boers were offered just £50 compensation per head, only collectable in London, 6,000 miles away. Such friction inevitably led to war in the closing years of the century, and the Eastern Cape around Port Elizabeth saw some of the bloodiest fighting.
With such a history of mutual distrust and resentment on so many sides, it is not surprising that Port Elizabeth today still seethes with tension and bitterness. The Eastern Cape has one of the most militantly unionised workforces in South Africa, and the reputation of possessing the harshest police force in the country. Steve Biko died in Port Elizabeth jail. It is the heartland of black militance. Robben Island off Cape Town is a penal colony which admits prisoners from all over the country, but the lingua franca of the inmates is the Xhosa language still spoken in the area around Port Elizabeth.
The coastline between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth may be known as the Garden Route for its lush beauty, and the Port’s beaches in the holiday season attract thousands of tourists – but for those who live around the town life is hard. The poor still forage for food in garbage dumps. There are no parks or swimming pools, but yellow police trucks (known as kwela-kwelas or mellow-yellows) patrol among the burnt-out buildings and derelict lots, the debris left over from years of social unrest.
In the townships the houses are generally jerry-built, dirt-floored shacks. Cows or goats roam freely, there are trash piles in the streets – few rubbish collections are ever made – and stand pipes in the middle of the road may serve as many as fifty houses. In the township of New Brighton less than 20% of homes have electricity.
There are six townships around Port Elizabeth, all separated from the white area by buffer zones of factories and wasteland. This physical segregation makes it easier to contain any black revolt, while simultaneously it helps the whites forget about their black neighbours.
It is among these mean streets and alleys that Fugard sets his dramas, and he ties them quite specifically to areas of the town in which he has spent so much of his life. The trilogy, or ‘Family’, of plays he wrote in the sixties – The Blood Knot, Hello and Goodbye and Boesman and Lena – are all Port Elizabeth plays. The first takes place in Korsten, a non-white slum close to one of the factory areas. The Valley Road of Hello and Goodbye is a poor-white area close to the centre of the city. The mudflats referred to in the third can be found seven miles along the coast, while the shanty towns Kleinskool, Veeplaas and Missionvale crouch on the outskirts.
Characters spring directly from this bleak background: Johnnie Smit in Hello and Goodbye was inspired by a shabby derelict the playwrights used to see “at night standing motionless against the wall on the corner of Jetty and Main Streets”.
The fictional persona that grew out of this image became linked inextricably with actual places: “I see and feel him in terms of Jetty Street, the Valley South End and his tireless vigil on the Union Castle Corner at night, and beside Queen Victoria’s statue during the day.” Once the idea of a sister entered the picture, “the germinal situation of a play” formed quickly: “Johnnie living with his father in a two-room shack in Valley Road. The father is blind and a cripple… victim of a blasting accident when he worked for the South African Railways… One night, after ten or fifteen years’ absence, his sister arrives back unexpectedly at the little house…”
Steam Over the Veldt
“They are the most beautiful things in the world! Black, and hot, hissing, and the red glow of their furnaces, their whistles blowing out like ribbons in the wind! And the engine driver, grade one, and his stoker up there, leaning out of the cab, watching the world like kings!”
Johnnie Smit, Hello and Goodbye
The first steam locomotive to appear on African soil was called Blackie. Her parts were ferried ashore at Cape Town in September 1859 by the British contractor Edward Pickering who laid the first mainline section over the 44 miles (72 km) between Cape Town and Wellington. It was broad gauge – 4’8½” (1.43 m) – but in just a few years the discovery of diamonds required that a narrower one be used to make transportation easier over difficult terrain, and also to keep costs down, as the way ran through vast areas of unpopulated land which had no potential for economic return. The 3’6” (1.07 m) gauge was introduced and soon became known as the ‘Cape Gauge’.
The railways enjoyed a boom through the final quarter of the last century as the diamond fields of Kimberley and the gold strikes of the Witwatersrand region became linked to the ports of East London, Port Elizabeth and Durban. By 1900 the colony could boast 4,500 miles of track.
But construction was always difficult. South Africa itself, the only area on the Continent with a rail system comparable to that of Europe, comprises a series of high plateaux separated by deep river valleys. Gradients can be steep – Johannesburg, for instance, is 900 kilometres away from Port Elizabeth and 1,800 metres above it. Disease, dense jungle and the provision of adequate fuel supplies have also been major problems: on some stretches ten men would die for each mile of track laid. The elements can be obstructive too – thunderstorms wash away lines, sand storms can bury tracks up to several metres deep, and in the rainy season landslides can destroy bridges. Man further provides his own difficulties in the form of politics, and many routes have had to cross more rivers and dynamite their way through more mountain ranges than would have been necessary if only neighbouring countries were friendlier.
From the outset steam was king in fuel-rich South Africa, although the occasional drought meant that by 1925 they were already experimenting with electric engines. These days, with greater loads to haul than ever before, the system is almost exclusively worked by diesels. At first most engines were imported from Britain, but it quickly became apparent these were not always up to the arduous conditions. So from the mid-1920s onwards American engines of a hardier build were imported, followed by articulated engines which proved more efficient over lightly-laid or sharply curving track.
South African Railways, or the SAR, was established in 1910, taking over three existing systems – the Cape Government, the Natal Government, and the Central South African Railways. By this time there were 1,400 locomotives in service, but since then the development of the rail network as a whole has not kept up with the country’s economic growth. Although there is now four times the traffic there was fifty years ago, the length of track available has stayed virtually the same. Africa represents nearly 20% of the earth’s land surface, yet it has never contained more than 5% of the world’s total length of railway track.
In the post-war boom years, Port Elizabeth was one of the key points linking the interior with the outside world. Minerals, copper and iron ore flooded out in ever-increasing quantities while much-needed commodities like heavy machinery and materials were ferried up-country. The town was served by two main depots: Humewood Road dealt with the domestic traffic on two-foot (0.6 m) gauge track, while the larger Sydenham depot serviced the standard rigid 4-8-2 configuration engines.
Port Elizabeth is linked to Cape Town via Klipplaat, Oudtshoorn, Worcester and Paarl going west, while the line north through the townships of New Brighton, Swartkops and Aloes will bring you to Kirkwood, Alexandria and Grahamstown. Grahamstown is a sub-shed of Sydenham to the northeast of Port Elizabeth, linking with Port Alfred on the coast and Alicedale further north on the main line into the interior. The grades there are frequently so steep that doubling- or even tripling-up of engines is a common expedient.