The government, noting the unending creep of women from the reserves to the city, wished to remove “surplus females” (i.e., women who didn’t serve white businesses or other white interests) and growing families from the locations. But Melvin had other plans. He was saving money with the dream of bringing all of his children back together, one by one.
Nineteen forty-eight was Melvin’s thirty-eighth year. His son Wowo had just been born, and would in two years be sent to live with his uncle. Across the ocean, World War II had come to a close—of the 5,500 South Africans killed while supporting the Allies, a forgotten 25 percent were black. The world was reeling from the Holocaust, and the Nazis were on the losing side of history. But one party in South Africa was taking its inspiration from Hitler. This was the National Party, led by D. F. Malan, a Dutch Reformed cleric who campaigned on the platform of apartheid, Afrikaans for “separateness.”
The central theory behind apartheid was that South Africa was not a single nation, but in fact a collection of separate nations, each populated by a certain ethnic group. Conflict in South Africa stemmed from the unreasonable attempts of these nations to meld into one, and such conflict could be eliminated if only each group existed in separate but equal spheres, free from the demands and traditions of other pesky cultures. As with all systems of segregation, however, the truth was that the founders of apartheid intended to create a society that was indeed separate, but was breathtakingly unequal. Then they could keep all the good stuff for themselves.
Malan’s challenger was the incumbent Jan Smuts, a lesser racist, all things being relative. (Smuts, though opposed to giving blacks political power, helped draft the constitution of the United Nations’ forerunner, the League of Nations, and met with Gandhi on the rights of Indians in South Africa.) Only coloreds in the Cape and whites could vote in the election. On May 26, 1948, Melvin watched from the sidelines as Malan took power. One of the Malan government’s first orders of business was to eliminate the voting rights of coloreds.
In 1950, the National Party passed the Group Areas Act, a law that Prime Minister Malan dubbed with great reverence “the very essence of apartheid.” For centuries, various colonial and white governments had been redistributing black land into white hands, so that less than 10 percent of the population owned more than 85 percent of the land. But after their victorious 1948 election, the Afrikaner nationalists running the country started putting in place what they called groot apartheid, or grand apartheid.
The act aimed to forcibly separate each of the four official South African racial classifications into their own living areas. In Cape Town, whites, for the most part, inherited the beautiful city center, the leafiest suburbs, and the ocean views; Indians were bestowed with two small neighborhoods; and colored people were placed in square government matchbox houses in bleak zones that neighbored Gugulethu. Although the records are poor, some studies estimate that between 1960 and 1982, over 3.5 million South Africans were forcibly relocated, ripped from their property, and taken to townships or newly created “homelands.” The apartheid dream was to eventually create a white nation free of black inhabitants.
The homelands would help realize this dream. Each homeland was intended to act as a pseudo-autonomous “nation” for a particular ethnic group, where all its members would live in peace. The homelands, which eventually numbered ten, were actually rural backwaters, where white investment was illegal. They were geographically fractured, separated by white farms, and overcrowded, set on just 13 percent of South African territory. In one central eastern homeland named QwaQwa, designated for the Sotho people, 777 people were expected to survive on the fruits of a single square mile; Easy’s mother, Kiki, had been born there.
There was neither sufficient healthcare nor sanitation in the homelands, which resulted in outbreaks of cholera, tuberculosis, polio, and even the bubonic plague—in the mid- and late twentieth century. In 1974, the infant mortality rate of black children was 110 per 1,000, and the primary cause of their death was malnutrition.
“There was too much witch in the Transkei,” Easy once told me, referring to the portion of today’s Eastern Cape province that included his family’s hometown of Lady Frere. “The women have many miscarriages.”
Melvin, once a citizen of South Africa, was considered by lawmakers a member of the “Xhosa nation,” and was to become a citizen of Transkei, where he was expected to settle permanently. He might work in the “European” cities or towns—and might, in the course of this work, father children in these white areas—but his family would always be temporary laborers in the greater South Africa. As the Department of Bantu Administration and Development stated in 1967: “As soon as [black workers] become, for one reason or another, no longer fit for work, or superfluous in the labour market, they are expected to return to their country of origin or the territory of the national unit where they fit ethnically if they were not born and bred in their homeland.” The state, still intent on marketing the homelands as decolonized areas, installed cooperative black chiefs linked to the apartheid leadership. In 1977, Parliament granted Transkei independence. This independence was recognized by no country in the world other than South Africa.
Melvin, like many black South Africans, defied official attempts at confinement. By the late 1950s, Melvin and Alice had succeeded in bringing all of their twelve children back to Cape Town. They lived in a cramped, makeshift shack in an area called Elsie’s River, on the outskirts of the city. But then, as per the Group Areas Act, Elsie’s River was declared a colored area. Colored people, who had been forced from their homes—many lovely houses near the sea were handed over to whites—were relocated to crime-ridden apartment blocks or shoddy little houses on the Cape Flats. In 1960, Melvin and his family, including thirteen-year-old Wowo, were loaded onto an open truck and driven five miles south, where they were unceremoniously dumped, with their belongings, on a vast field on the border of the preexisting township of Nyanga.
For two weeks, as they built a new shack by hand, they sheltered under a table and washed and drank from a single tap installed a mile away. Nearby sat rows of houses constructed for “bachelor” men, whose purpose was to provide labor to white industry. Those dumped on the field took to calling their new neighborhood “Elsie’s,” since they had all been rounded up there. But soon groups of removals came from elsewhere, and the government dubbed the area Nyanga West.
In 1962, the government saw that Nyanga West was growing, teeming with new arrivals rounded up throughout Cape Town, as well as the regular migrants from the Eastern Cape. They renamed the area “Gugulethu Emergency Camp,” and it would soon become the city’s third official township. Gugulethu means “our pride.”
“What did you do?” I once asked Wowo, as he recalled his displacement.
“You can’t complain. You keep quiet.”
“What did you think?”
“You can’t think nothing if you want to stay alive.”
The white Cape government favored coloreds, likely because Afrikaners and coloreds share a common ancestry, a language, and, often, a disdain for blacks. White people could not be expected to perform much of the menial work needed for the growing economy, and so the government’s plan was to eventually expel blacks from the Western Cape and use coloreds as their cheap labor. But the endeavor proved difficult. First, the colored workforce was not big enough to meet the demand for workers; second, blacks kept illegally sneaking in across the homeland borders, squatting in the bush, and begging for work in the cities. The government soon decided it would have to build more township houses to contain