Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

In this Paul and I would probably have been much like the others; but our circumstances were different. Because of the nature of his work, Paul had always been as daily, hourly conscious as of his own aliveness of the silent condemnation of the Africans; that accusing condemnation which others were varyingly aware of, like a distant gaze on their backs. He lived in the midst of it. His life was a reversal of the life of the average Johannesburg person. They went about their own affairs, in a white world, vaguely intruded upon by the knowledge that beyond the city where they had their offices and the tree-hidden suburbs where they lived, there was a scattered outcast city from which the emissaries came — cleaned up to approximate to the white man’s standards of decency — and disappeared into again. He went about his affairs in a black world, in those townships (even the word was the white man’s generality for something he had not seen — some were the rows of houses the word comfortably suggests, others were huddles of tin and sacking, junk heaps animated by human beings) dumped outside the city, and for him it was the clean, prosperous, handsome white world that existed on the edge of consciousness. He never drove back to it without a sense of incredulity that this city — these girls in fancy shoes coming from offices, the men reversing into parking bays with hump-necked skill — could cut itself so pitilessly in two and close its eyes so completely to half its life. Sometimes he found himself looking with something almost as hot as hate at the white people in the streets, seeing even the most unknowing of them as despots in their very ignorance of what was wrong and terrible where they walked; but at other times he would tell me how he suddenly had the sense of Johannesburg as a beleaguered city, ringed about by all those smoking, wretched encampments which she herself had created. …

Paul began to say things like this now. He had never said them before, and now, although he still laughed and derided what he called the “Hysterical-Histrionical Friends of the Downtrodden African,” there were times when he seemed to struggle with a sense of drama? evil? that made him speak in spite of himself. At first I did not know what to make of it; I even felt half-amused, in a puzzled sort of way, at catching him out in the kind of highly colored fantasy of disgust from which he had so often brought me down to face the unpleasant facts at which my imagination had started up like a covey at the sound of a gun. But when I realized that these outbursts of his came not from the frightened shying away of a suddenly exacerbated sensibility, but out of a long working familiarity with the facing of ugly facts, I understood that something was changing in him.

The Africans had, of course, more to fear from the Nationalists than anybody. But they themselves felt that they had had so little to hope for under the Smuts Government that all the change had done was to substitute a negative despair for a positive one: lack of hope, for fear. The leaders said in the phrases leaders use, Now the velvet glove is off the iron hand, that’s all…; and the simple people who did not understand politics and could only understand the white animus against them if it was personified, as in their tribal days they had made power realizable in the carved image of an idol or a bunch of bones, shook their heads in apprehension of the “bad man” Malan. Paul told me how, in a way, the idea of Malan even became a comfort to them. If there was a shortage of meat: Malan doesn’t think we need to eat, they said. If there was no house for a man and his family: Malan wants us to live like animals on the veld, said the woman. Over all that had been wrong, and would continue to be wrong in their lives — This Malan …, they said.

But though in that first year of the Nationalist rule little changed for them materially, and the combination of shockingly sordid living conditions, poverty, and a kind of deeply felt inarticulate horror of their own subjection before everybody who was not a native, that resulted in curious, mad, apparently irrelevant bursts of rebellion, arose out of the years of benevolent United Party rule, the very fact that the Nationalists sat up there in authority humiliated the natives. In Parliament cabinet ministers spoke of them as “Kaffirs.” There was continual official talk about the preservation of the “purity of white races of South Africa” and the “sacred duty of the Afrikaner nation to keep itself unsullied.” The Africans had always been kept outcast; now they began to feel it, to feel themselves outcast in their very features and voices. In their bewildered or hostile or mocking eyes there was the self-search for the sores the white man saw upon them. Even the black children, aping the passing of a white woman in the street beneath our flat, expressed unconsciously in their skinny jeering bravado the attitude: Well what can you expect of me? I’m black, aren’t I?

Statutes and laws and pronouncements may pass over the heads of the people whom they concern, but shame does not need the medium of literacy. Humiliation goes dumbly home — a dog, a child too small to speak can sense it — and it sank right down through all the arid layers of African life in the city and entered the blood even of those who could not understand why they felt and acted as they did, or even knew that they felt or acted.

At this stage, when all that was done to implement the plans for apartheid — a carrying to the extremes of total segregation the division of the ordinary lives of white and black that had always existed, socially and economically — was little more than a tightening-up of discriminatory devices, it was often the way in which such things were done rather than the things themselves which was so offensive. When the Nationalists introduced the ban on mixed marriages and also made it punishable for white and black men and women to cohabit, there was something shameful in the manner in which the police hunted up their prosecutions, shining torches in upon the little room where an old colored woman lay asleep with the old white man with whom she had lived quietly for years; prying and spying upon what has always been the right of the poorest man to sleep in peace with his woman.

Other people read of these things in the newspaper, but Paul came face to face with such a happening. He had temporarily taken over Colored Poor Relief, which was administered separately from Native or Indian Poor Relief, when a couple was arrested in Vrededorp, a slum suburb of racial confusion. He knew the woman because it so happened that she had been to see him a few days previously about her brother, a slightly crazy old man for whom Paul was trying to get an old-age pension. The woman herself was one of those milky-eyed, still creatures, roused only to obedience and the cooking pot — more like a work-stunned old native woman than the shriller, more conscious colored. The man with whom she lived was very old, had never heard of the ban, and had lost touch many years before with the white race which he was defiling by lying in this creaking great bed of the poor with this bare-gummed creature whose slack skin had once been filled with a woman. — The people who lived in the room next door told Paul that when the police came she jumped out of the bed screaming and crawled beneath it. And when they tried to get her to come out, she kept screaming for her “Doek, my doek!” (the piece of cloth she wore round her head) and would not come out until someone had given it to her, and she had struggled to tie it on cramped under the sagging springs of the bed. The neighbors shrieked with laughter all over again at the telling of it.

“Can you imagine the two old things,” said Paul shortly, “a torch shining on their faces. Opening their eyes into it like those poor damn fool hares that get transfixed by the lights of your car on a dark road.”