Apartheid prescribed the way one could be and who one could become in the world. In the narrow sense of ‘becoming’, my father qualified with a Junior Certificate (under the apartheid education system, a certificate issued two years before the completion of the matriculation examinations) and hoped to become a lawyer. He found work as a clerk in a lawyer’s office. For him, this job was a beginning. The combined effects of his interest in the law spurred by the loss of his father’s title deed to land in the Karoo town of Willowmore, of apartheid’s racial exclusions, and of the meagre assets of his rural parents meant that he eventually settled for joining the South African Police force. This was the closest he could come to being an officer of the law.
My father’s livelihood touched my youth in complex and painful ways. These were the 1970s and 1980s – the height of apartheid and of resistance to it. My early teenage years began in 1977, just after the 1976 Soweto uprisings. Some of my peers who perceived me as politically untrustworthy called me an impimpi – one who informs police of anti-apartheid sentiments and activity. This shaming prompted me to ask why my father had to be a policeman. I remember my mother’s response: ‘My child, if your father was not a policeman, you would have no food to eat, and no shoes on your feet.’
I was not aware that senior and influential members of the South African Police did not trust my father. One night – I was alone with my mother while he was on the night shift – police parked across the road and shone their vehicle lights into my parents’ bedroom window for a sustained time, waking my mother and me. In the 1970s and 1980s this was an especially mild act of intimidation in comparison to the routine torture, imprisonment and police brutality to which many South Africans were subjected. The narrative in my family was that my father’s loyalty to the South African Police was in doubt because, unlike most of his fellow officers, he refused to carry arms on his person, he refused to shoot and to order other officers to shoot at protestors during township rallies and unrest.
If one were uncritically to accept this narrative, perhaps this was a way in which my father held onto humaning in the midst of a job and a life that involved dehumanisation. I remember that he was never armed. However, as a young child, I knew that he had access to a firearm. One day I saw him retrieve it from the casing of our upright piano. Its shape could not be hidden by the wrappings of yellow dusting cloths. His facial expression showed that I was not meant to witness this act. I do not know why he retrieved it. Everything about my father’s job was either unspoken or mentioned in hushed tones. The family narrative about my father suggests his subtle defiance of the policing system. Yet, at Gelvandale Police Station, my father worked his way up the ranks from an officer ‘walking beat’ (on foot patrol) in his early twenties, to become captain and station commander of Bethelsdorp Police Station a few years before his retirement at fifty-five. This leaves me grappling with the ways in which he would have been complicit with the policing system. Few black men were promoted to such high office during apartheid.
Situated about twenty kilometres north-west of Port Elizabeth, Bethelsdorp was established as a mission station for Christianised KhoiKhoi in the early 1800s. It was one of the London Missionary Society’s oldest missions, which served as a reservoir of cheap labour for adjacent farms as well as a military base from which to crush ongoing anti-colonial resistance by independent KhoiKhoi and Xhosa-speaking communities (Majeke 1952). The police stations at Gelvandale and Bethelsdorp – where working class communities resided – were institutions for people classified Coloured and living in townships designated for Coloureds, as stipulated respectively in the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act No. 49 of 1953 and in the Group Areas Act No. 41 of 1950. In The Atlas of Apartheid, the geographer A.J. Christopher writes about the ways in which these Acts, their predecessors and accompanying apartheid laws racially demarcated life and space. He provides an alarming, yet experientially real, architectural plan of the post office in Steytlerville, a small Karoo town near Willowmore where my father was born and grew up. The plan shows racially separate public entrances, service counters and service staff (Christopher 1994: 143-44). These socio-political ramifications of the personal are localised expressions of the coloniality of apartheid power. The four tightly knit coordinates of this matrix of power are the regulation of labour, of the economy, of nature and of space; control over gender and sexuality; authority embodied in the state and the military; and control over inter-subjectivity and knowledge (Mignolo 2013: 3; Quijano 2000).
Port Elizabeth, the city of my birth, is inscribed with this power. In the fifteenth century the port was called Al Goa; it served as a refreshment station for Portuguese vessels travelling to the colony of Goa in India. Port Elizabeth was established in 1820 to accommodate British settlers. A combination of factors, including the abolition of slavery at the Cape in 1834 and the growth of the port, meant that black people (including the St Helenians about whom Daniel Yon writes) began to move to towns and cities. In line with colonial governance, this process inaugurated formal urban residential segregation for black people who were not housed by employers and for the few black property owners. In that same year, 1834, the London Missionary Society in Port Elizabeth established a black ‘location’ (township) in its name (London Missionary Society Location), setting a precedent for such locations at the periphery of white suburbs across South Africa over the next 150 years. In 1847, a century prior to apartheid’s Group Areas Act of 1950, the Cape colonial government formally regulated the establishment of racially separate residential areas, creating several black locations in the eastern Cape in the second half of the nineteenth century: the Native Strangers Location (1855), Cooper’s Kloof Location (1862), Gubb’s Location (1863), Reservoir Location (1889) and Race Course Location (1896). From 1950 new residential development in Port Elizabeth was restricted to ownership and occupation by a single racial group (Christopher 1994: 35-42). Port Elizabeth is also known for the interrogation and torture of Steve Biko by the security police before he was transported to Pretoria. It is known for the torture and deaths of the Cradock Four, and for the death in detention of George Botha, a teacher at Paterson High, the school that my siblings and I attended.4
The last-born of five siblings, I had the privilege of growing up in the new home in Korsten where my parents had moved before my birth, among Port Elizabeth’s residential areas restricted to Coloured ownership and occupation. Born in this neighbourhood in a hospital reserved for black people and named after the legendary Scottish missionary and doctor Sir David Livingstone, I arrived on the cusp of my parents’ movement from municipal rental housing in Walmer and Stuart Townships to home ownership. Before settling into our first and newly owned home my family had rented ‘servants’ quarters’ in Peddie Street, Korsten. Historically, these servants’ quarters housed domestic workers. Such structures remain part of properties in mainly middle class and wealthy suburbs across South Africa. A relic of our colonial history, these quarters are generally small, not well serviced and located in the back yard of the main house.
Korsten was the territory of a gang self-named The Forty Thieves. William, the gang leader, had one leg amputated at the knee. He hopped along on wooden crutches, their under-arm supports cushioned with