14. Richard Elphick and Robert Shell, “Intergroup Relations: Khoikhoi, Settlers, Slaves and Free Blacks, 1652–1795,” chap. 4 in The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840, ed. Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee, 2d ed. (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989).
15. Timothy Keegan, Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the Racial Order (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1996), 238. See also Robert Ross, “Missions, Respectability and Civil Rights: The Cape Colony, 1828–1854,” Journal of Southern African Studies 25 (September 1999): 333–45.
16. Pamela Scully, Liberating the Family? Gender and British Slave Emancipation in the Rural Western Cape, South Africa, 1823–1853 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1997), 116, 127–28.
17. As quoted in Scully, Liberating, 155–56.
18. Marais, Cape Coloured, 266.
19. Apartheid: The Facts (London: International Defense and Aid Fund, 1983), 16. The original default category “Coloured” also included “Indian,” “Chinese,” and “other Asiatic.”
20. Muriel Horrell, et al., comp., A Survey of Race Relations in South Africa 1971, vol. 25 (Johannesburg: Institute of Race Relations, 1972), 60.
21. W. A. de Klerk, The Puritans in Africa: A Story of Afrikanerdom (London: Rex Collings, 1975), 268–70. De Klerk, a maverick Cape Afrikaner writer, criticizes the apartheid regime and makes a major point of the case of Sandra Laing as one evidence of the absurdity of the system. A docudrama, The Search for Sandra Laing (video: 50 minutes, color, ATV production in affiliation with the African National Congress, 1978; distributed by IDERA, Canada), provides a searing reenactment of the story.
YOU CAN’T GET LOST IN CAPE TOWN
Origins trouble the voyager much, those roots
that have sipped the waters of another continent . . .
it is solitude that mutilates,
the night bulb that reveals ash on my sleeve.
ARTHUR NORTJE
Don’t travel beyond
Acton at noon in the intimate summer light of England
ARTHUR NORTJE
In writing the history of unfashionable families one is apt to fall into a tone of emphasis which is very far from being the tone of good society, where principles and beliefs are not only of an extremely moderate kind, but are always presupposed, no subjects being eligible but such as can be touched with a light and graceful irony.
GEORGE ELIOT, The Mill on the Floss
At first Mr Weedon came like any white man in a motor car, enquiring about sheep or goats or servants.
A vehicle swerving meteor-bright across the veld signalled a break in the school day as rows of children scuttled out to hide behind the corner, their fingers plugged into their nostrils with wonder and admiration. They examined the tracks of the car or craned their necks in turn to catch a glimpse of the visitor even though all white men looked exactly the same. Others exploited the break to find circuitous routes to the bank of squat ghanna bushes where they emptied their bowels and bladders. On such occasions they did not examine each other’s genitals. They peered through the scant foliage to admire the shiny vehicle from a safe distance. They brushed against the bushes, competing to see, so that the shrivelled little leaf-balls twisted and showered into dust. From this vantage point they would sit, pants down, for the entire visit while the visitor conducted his business from the magnificence of his car.
At an early age I discovered the advantage of curling up motionless in moments of confusion, a position which in further education I found to be foetal. On these topsy-turvy days I crept at great risk of being spotted to the kitchen which jutted out at a near ninety degrees of mud-brick wall from the school building. Under the narrow rectangular table I lay very still. The flutter inside subsided the instant I drew my knees up and became part of the arrangement of objects, shared in the solidity of the table and the cast-iron buckets full of water lined up on it. I could depend on Mamma being too absorbed by the event to notice me. Or if she did, she would not shout while the car squinted at the kitchen door.
So under the kitchen table I invariably found myself when vehicles arrived. And at first Mr Weedon arrived like any other white man enquiring about sheep or goats or servants.
As the time between sunrises and sunsets began to arrange itself into weeks and months and seasons, Mr Weedon’s arrivals became regular. Something to do with the tax year, at the end of March, Mamma explained. The children still ran out to whisper and admire from a distance, and I with a new knowledge of geography still crept under the kitchen table, but with the buckets of water was now swept along on the earth’s elliptical journey around the sun.
Mr Weedon spoke not one word of Afrikaans. For people who were born in England the g’s and r’s of the language were impossible, barbaric.
‘A gentleman, a true Englishman,’ Mamma said as she handed Father his best hat. For the Mercedes could be seen miles away, a shining disc spun in a cloud of dust. A week or so after the autumn equinox he arrived. He did not blow a horn like the uncouth Boers from the dorp. There was no horn in the back seat. Neither did he roll down a window to rest a forearm on the door. Perhaps the chrome was too hot even in autumn and he did not wish to scorch the blond hairs on his arm. With the help of the person who occupied the driver’s seat, Mr Weedon’s door was opened, and despite a light skirmish between the two men, he landed squarely on both feet. The cloud of dust produced by the car and the minor struggle subsided. So Mr Weedon puffed deeply on a thick cigar, producing a cloud of smoke. Mr Weedon loved clouds. Which may explain why his eyes roved about as he spoke, often to rest ponderously on a fleecy cloud above.
‘A true gentleman,’ Mamma whispered to herself from the kitchen window as he shook hands with Father, ‘these Boers could learn a few things from him.’
‘Well and how are you, how’s the wife?’ The English r’s slid along without the vibration of tongue against palate. Mamma’s asthma mentioned, he explained how his wife suffered with hers. And Cape Town so damp in winter she was forced to spend a hideous season in the Bahamas. Father tutted sympathetically. He would hate to spend several days away from home, let alone months.
‘Yes,’ said Mr Weedon, braiding his lapel with delicate fingers. How frail we all are . . . an uncertain world . . . even health cannot be bought . . . we must all march past as Death the Leveller makes his claim, and he looked up at a floating cloud in support of his theory of transience.
Father too held his chin slightly to the left, his goitre lifted as he scanned the sky. Possibly to avoid the cigar smoke, for he supported the school of thought that doubted whether God intended man to smoke; why else had he not provided him with a chimney?
Mr Weedon dropped his cigar and rubbed his palms together, which indicated that he was ready for the discussion held annually in the schoolroom. Father smiled, ‘Certainly,’ and tapped the black ledger already tucked under his arm. He rushed to open the door and another cloud of dust ensued as the man who opened doors tried to oust him. Everyone mercifully kept their balance and the man retreated sourly to lean against his Mercedes.
‘Good Heavens,’ whispered Mamma, ‘he’s picking his nose.’ Was she talking to me? Even in the topsy-turviness of the day I dared not say anything, ask who or where. Only the previous day I had been viciously dragged by the hair from under the table with threats of thrashings if ever I was found there again. It was not worth the risk. Fortunately