Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

“By the way, d’you think they’ll let us in?” Laurie asked.

“At the location? Oh, yes. They know me, I’ll fix it.” For a moment I had not realized what he meant; the strike had already taken on the character of an alarum that had never gone off, and the ban on the entry of Europeans to native townships which would certainly be included in police security methods seemed as nominal as had been the posters illustrating air-raid precautions in our country which had never known a raid. Yet the reminder gave a slight fillip to our little expedition. The fact that I felt Paul would consider Laurie’s urgency a piece of dramatics added to this something of the pleasurable illusion of adventure with which children invest some unnecessary action by pretending to believe it vitally important. We were quite gay, and passing the Criterion Bar, Laurie said: “When we’ve collected Paul we’ll come back and have a drink somewhere.”

As we shed the city, dusk was falling.

“At dusk, reports of bloodshed and violence followed in rapid succession. At Orlando, Sophiatown, Alexandra, Moroka, Jabavu, White City, Mariastad. … It was the start of a night of terror after twenty-four hours’ tension.”

This was how it was described in the papers next day. While we were driving through the dusk that thickened like pollen about the street lights, the trains were going home, some in the direction we took, some toward other townships, carrying workers who had defied the strike and who were being escorted from work by the police to assure their safety. The stones that were to be thrown and were to draw back bullets were lying ready to hand in the unmade streets and the vacant lots filled with rubbish. The men were already restless in the streets, the voices of the women shrill before the dark houses. That was what we understood when we read about it.

That night, rioters stoned a police squad at Alexandra. The police fired into the mob. A bus queue shelter was demolished, coffee stalls overturned, shops looted and gutted, and a cinema burned to the ground. A crowd attacked the bus depot, and another police squad, hurrying to the scene, met with a road block and was stoned. The police got out of their cars and fired. At Orlando trains were stoned. On the Reef, at Brakpan, a thousand demonstrated outside the location, screaming and shouting, and were dispersed by a baton charge of a hundred police. At Atherton location, a large crowd defied the ban on public meetings, refused to disperse, and were charged by the police with fixed bayonets. Then the police fired, and three people were killed on the spot. Everywhere in the townships there were “disturbances” of one sort or another; stones were thrown. Stones were thrown, and one way or another, drew blood. Later that week, one of the Native Representatives (there were three and they were all Europeans) moved the adjournment of the Parliamentary debate then in session, so that the May Day riots could be discussed in the House. The leader of the Opposition, General Smuts, did not support the motion. Letters were published condemning the brutality of the police, praising them for courage, accusing them of incitement; hailing the dead rioters as martyrs, expressing satisfaction at the dispatch of dangerous hooligans, urging black and white to make “this tragic and bitter clash” a basis for the return to Christian tolerance. There was a report of how, over the week end, when the ban on public gatherings in African townships was already in force, a wedding party had been broken up by the police; a group of mourners, sitting in the small yard of a bereaved house after a funeral, as is the custom with Africans, were intruded upon by the police and ordered to go home. An elderly African who had been one of the group said: “They treat us like wild animals. Perhaps after all we can get nothing by peaceable means.” Still later, a commission of inquiry set up to investigate the cause of the riots, said that the anti-police attitude of the Africans was due to liquor and pass raids on their homes in the early hours of the morning, and the treatment of native prisoners by young policemen. This attitude, the commission stated, was not racial — black and white policemen were equally hated, resulting in “a complete disregard of authority of any kind.”

On that night, eighteen natives were killed, thirty wounded. Two of the dead had suffocated in the burning cinema, sixteen were shot by the police.

When Laurie and I got to the township entrance, there was no official in sight. Laurie slowed the car, swaying to the side of the sandy road which had no curb. “Do we go straight through?”

“No, we might get stopped farther on, and I want to be able to say we’ve got permission to be here.” I knew the native policemen who did duty at the entrance; I might not know those whom we were likely to meet inside. Laurie hooted, a serene, smoothly accented bleat that was what one would have expected to come from a car like his, and the familiar, fat, light-colored police boy came out of the administrative building with a sort of slow-motion skipping movement, exaggerating his concern at being found absent from his post. He greeted me, grinning with excitement. “We’re a bit out of order here today,” he said, proud of his English. “May we go in?” I said. His eyes took up the reflection of the car lights, which, with the smokiness of the location atmosphere added to the gathering darkness, Laurie had suddenly found it necessary to switch on. “Well — you’re from the Welfare, isn’t it? Mr. Clark, he’s nearly a resident here!”—he was delighted with his own humor. “Of course, we’ve got instructions, no Europeans, and so on. … But for you it’s all right.” “We’re going straight to the Center, Mr. Clark’s there waiting for us,” I agreed, and he saluted us on.

It is always surprising to find how much darker an African township is at night; far darker than anywhere else where there are houses, and people are living. In a European quarter, even if there is a street where the lamps are sparse and most of the houses happen to be in darkness, there is a general lightening diffusion from all the other lights in the city, so that you forget how thick darkness really is. Already that thick dark was curling up and wrapping about the small low houses; lighted windows showed irregularly on either side like cigarette tips glowing. The first street we drove along seemed quieter than was usual at this hour, but when we turned left again into another street as dim and quiet, I noticed a paraffin-tin fire outside one of the houses. The cooking pot on it was boiling over and over, bubbling and streaming down into the coals. The house was closed and quite dark; a fan of red light from the fire wavered over it. Farther on there was a strange pale low light that seemed to breathe rather than burn. When we drew level, it was a candle alight behind a rag of curtain in another dark closed house. As I looked at it with a momentary pleasure — the light of a candle was something else one didn’t really know — a corner of the rag was looped back by a very small black hand and the faces of two African children watched us go past.

When we came to the Apostolic Faith church, we seemed to have reached the normal evening location clamor, the rising, muffled blare of shouts, talk, yells and laughter which was faded and far off above the streets we had left.

And then we were in the heart of it. That is the only way I can describe it, the way I shall always remember it. Shocking, splitting, like the explosion of maniacal loudness that assaults you when you turn a radio volume full on by mistake. The awful heart of that endless shout which rises from the throat of a location at night.

Not thirty yards away a crowd was bellowing round a telephone booth, the only telephone booth in the whole township. They butted and screamed, the whole solid wall of their bodies — solid and writhing as a bank of fish in a net — caving forward. Seconds before I saw, before I understood, at the instant at which that sound smashed on our heads, I snatched at Laurie’s arm with such clawing horror that the car swerved to the side and stalled. He turned on me, astonished. My roughness seemed to have startled him more than what was happening. “What are you doing, what are you doing?” he shouted, but his voice was faint against the din. Above the mass of the crowd things were waving, poles or bars, I shall never know, but heavy things that were being held upright with difficulty, drunkenly, and that fisted down on the little conical tin roof of the booth so that it tore and fell in like a piece of silver paper. The crowd seized on the booth as if it could be shaken into speech. A high-pitched yell sent them back; something that might have been a railway sleeper heaved into the air and then bricks and plaster gave way and fell into the bellowing. The telephone box with the receiver swinging flew out over heads. Part of the door — some of the glass panes must still have been unbroken because in the instant of its passage through the air, I saw a watery zigzag — broke up as it hit the wall of a house. And then a short man in big white shoes (I can see those shoes now, I could almost describe the shape, the rather pointed toes, though I know it seems impossible that I really could have seen them so clearly) shot out of the crowd and picked up the telephone. Yelling, he held it aloft like a head on a pike and he raced over to the small municipal building — it was the depot where milk was sold at special rates — and smashed it against the wall. An accolade of stones followed his action in horrible applause. The windows of the place smashed, the door was kicked in. At the same time one of the stones missed its mark and pricked the bubble of the only street light.