Gerald Seymour - A song in the morning

The day porter had made the telephone call, placed the hooking. The Rand Development Board tour was back on schedule, he said, because Soweto had been quiet for a week.

"You can see with your own eyes that this is a community into which a great deal of government money has been placed, millions of rand have been spent on making the living conditions of our Black people more acceptable. Most of Soweto now has electricity, most of it has running water.

All of the main roads now have tarmac, and later you will see that we have started to build shops, the supermarket type of shops. The amount of money that we are spending is a very great drain on the country's resources, but we are spending it…"

The second reason for Jack to have made the journey into Soweto was vaguer. He felt that he had joined a war, that he had become a part of the armed struggle of the people who lived in this and other vagabond townships. He wondered how many of the one or two millions who eked out an existence in Soweto acknowledged the legitimacy of the tactic of bombs and bullets to change the conditions of their existence, how many of them knew the name of Jacob Thiroko. Not one of them would have heard of Duggie Arkwright. He thought of his journey into Soweto in part as a tribute to Duggie. He had thought that he might learn something of the people in whose cause Duggie had laboured. Driving past the stunning repetition of the homes of one million, or two million, people gave him not an iota of an idea of what their notion of a political future might be.

"Why are there high lights in the middle of open ground, illuminating nothing?"

The German man waved airily in the direction of hugely tall arc light stands that were dispersed over an open area of rubbish and building debris and raw earth. The German woman looked at her husband sheepishly as if she thought it impolite to ask a question.

The ready answer. "They are there to make it safer for the residents. Unfortunately, Soweto is a very lawless place.

On average, every weekend, there are thirty murders in the township boundaries. The gangsters prey on the wage earners, rob them and kill them when they are coming back from the beer halls. We call the gangsters tsotsis, they are just hoodlums, sometimes they are ordinary criminals, sometimes they are agitators trying to intimidate the peace loving people… "

"I was told," the German said, "that they put the electricity in so that the Africans would buy televisions and radios and all the electrical appliances that are sold in the White owned shops. I was told it was just to expand the market that they put the electricity in."

"Whoever told you that was lying." The guide withered the German.

She had a fixed smile when she was talking to the tourists.

But in the front seat beside the driver her smile dropped.

When the tourists were muttering amongst themselves or trying to photograph from the moving bus, then Jack saw the reality of her face. He saw the frowns on her neat forehead as she talked with the driver, discussed where it was safe to go. The driver would pause at each cross roads, and the White guide and the Black driver would stare and hesitate. Jack couldn't help but see the reasons for the hesitation. Slogans aerosol-ed on walls.

KILL ALL WHITES. Be Kind to Animals, Adopt a Policeman. Death to Traitors and Informers and Collaborators. Children of the African Heroes Do Not be Afraid of Whites.

Jack thought it was lunatic to be running a scenic drive round friendly Soweto. The Germans and the Americans didn't seem concerned. The Germans were preoccupied with their focal lengths. The Americans were so busy in a denunciation of their own media, and Edward Kennedy and all the liberal East Coasters who gave them the picture of South Africa in flames, that Jack wondered if they had even seen the armoured personnel carriers parked at the side of the petrol station, and the second group that were parked close to the big school complex. He wondered if the Black polite were local, what it was like for them to be on law enforcement in their own community. He kept his peace.

Jack thought the rows of small brick homes, match boxes, and the pitted streets and the piled rubbish and the pitifully few shops were pathetic. He couldn't understand how the authorities could put a bus on, with a pretty girl as guide to boast about how much had been achieved, and drive tourists round so that they could see with their own eyes how bloody awful the place was.

"The impression you get back home, back in the State of Washington, is that the whole place is aflame. Looks pretty peaceful to me."

"What I reckon is that all these folks want is work and to be left in peace."

The bus jerked to the right. Jack saw the guide pointing to a group of young Blacks standing on waste ground a hundred yards ahead. The driver had turned down a holed track. They went fast past a fire-blackened house. He saw the driver's face when he turned to the guide for instructions.

There was a sweat sheen on the driver's skin. Jack wondered how it would be to go back to the township each night when your job was driving White tourists round your backyard by day. They came back onto a main road. There was no commentary from the guide. He could sense the mood between the driver and the guide, that they had been around too long. There were school children streaming along the sides of the road.

An American woman said that the kids looked cute in their white shirts and black trousers or skirts. The German woman was complaining that the minibus was going too fast for her to take photographs through the window. They went along two streets where the houses were larger. Black middle class homes. The guide started to talk about the owner of a taxi fleet, and the owner of a Black football team. Jack thought the houses belonged to White clones, because there were leaping German Shepherds in the front gardens. There was smoke rising ahead.

The German man was tapping the guide's back, then pointing to a bungalow that was larger than the others, once the queen of the street. A smoke charred bungalow, with fire scorched beams littering a front lawn.

"What happened there?"

The guide turned to speak to the German, wasn't looking ahead, hadn't seen the smoke rising from tyres in the road.

"That was the home of the Mayor of Soweto. That is the work of the agitators. His home was burned down. It was an attempt by the agitators to intimidate those who are trying to better the life of the Blacks in Soweto… "

The driver was slowing, but he was Black. He couldn't tell the guide to shut her mouth and concentrate on what was going on in front of them and tell him what the hell to do. Over the guide's shoulder, Jack saw the schoolchildren, cute, running forward from the tyre barricade towards the bus.

"It would be quite wrong to think that the majority of Blacks are hostile to the reforms that we are making, only a very few try to sabotage the sincere efforts that the State President is making to involve Blacks in local government… "

Cut off in her speech the guide looked irritably at the driver. The bus was stopped. He was wrenching through his gears, looking for reverse and panicking, spinning his wheel. She was about to snap her impatience at the driver, when she saw the sprinting children.

Jack saw the fury on their faces.

The faces were blurred in the dust-dirty windows of the bus, but the rage was unmistakable. Ecstatic loathing. Arms raised, stones held up. Boys and girls running together, shouting together.

The bus was across the road, the engine racing.

The guide was shouting high-pitched at the driver, and covering her face with her arm. She shouldn't have screamed at him, she should have let him get on with taking them clear.

He stalled the engine.