These dehumanizing opinions of black people naturally boiled over into neglect and mistreatment by employers of their employees. And such mistreatment naturally caused the employees pain and humiliation, which, since they could not speak up to their employers, they often took out on their own families.
“The white person is very naughty,” Easy remembered. “Our mothers are domestic workers, raising other kids. Our fathers are garden boys. When they come home, your mother push children away. Your father come home and give you harsh punishment.”
Kiki was tired at the end of each long day, and she was not the hugging sort, but she still bandaged her babies’ cuts, gave them baths, cooked their dinners. The elders slaughtered a goat every time a new child was born.
As they grew older, the Nofemela boys became aware of apartheid and what it meant for them. There was a shining world, they learned, outside Gugulethu, but they were not allowed there. Their parents had seen such places, but only because they worked over the city borders.
“We been blocked from town,” Easy said.
In 1950, two years after the National Party took power, Parliament passed the Population Registration Act. This required all South African citizens to register as one of four racial classifications: white, Indian, colored, or black. To determine the race of ethnically ambiguous folks, the government implemented several highly scientific tests, such as the pencil test: If the pencil inserted into your hair fell out, congratulations! You’re not black. Once you had been officially deemed a member of one racial classification, you would have to live, learn, love, and work among other similarly categorized people. Interracial relationships were illegal.
Perhaps more problematic, from the early 1700s until 1986, a series of laws had been passed, bit by bit, to curtail the movement of black people and maintain white control of resources and jobs. By 1956, black men and women over the age of sixteen were required to carry “reference books,” or passbooks, everywhere they went. These books contained their photographs, employment records, fingerprints, ID numbers, tax details, and employment details, which had to be signed by a white employer. If a black person wished to enter a white area for any purpose other than labor, he was to request official written permission, which, if granted, would be noted in his passbook. The passbook was to be furnished to any policeman who demanded to inspect it; failure to produce the pass, or a pass that did not justify its bearer’s movement, was grounds for immediate arrest. In 1975, when Easy was four years old, nearly 400,000 people were arrested for offenses related to their passes.
Taking the kids to the city was not, therefore, an easy feat. At night, from the dark townships, you could make out the sparkling city center in the distance, an unreachable world eleven miles west. When Easy did make the rare twenty-five-minute expedition to Cape Town—say, to accompany his parents to a government office or to work—he returned to Gugulethu with stories: skyscrapers, abounding electricity, seaside boardwalks, white folks in bespoke suits carrying leather briefcases, markets full of figs and peaches and whole roast chickens on the spit, rings of fried cake called doughnuts, malls displaying fashionable clothes, mansions on oak-lined streets, pruned botanical gardens full of picnickers in pretty dresses. It was the 1980s.
“You see the beautiful lights far away, you visit the city,” Easy remembered. “You tell your friend, ‘Yho! I was in America.’”
But once Easy had made it to this makeshift America, his experience was limited to that of an observer, alternately enraged and admiring. Easy could not step foot into the gleaming stores except to buy something and get out; so that white businesses did not lose potential customers, black people were permitted to buy food but not sit down and eat it. Easy could not walk on the same beaches as white people or sit on the same park benches or use certain toilets. Taxis, buses, trains, elevators, hotels, churches, parks, movie theaters, and restaurants were segregated. The entrances to the nice areas were marked with large signs stating a simple regulation, spelled out in Afrikaans and English, and enforced by both civilians and police, viciously if they were in the mood:
BLANKES ALLEEN
WHITES ONLY
Easy and I started to see each other more often. He allowed me to ride along with him in the cranky Amy Biehl Foundation vans. I sat to his left as he drove kids from their schools in the townships to their various lessons in the ritzier parts of town: guitar, cello, singing, ballet. The van was always full of loaves of bread, which were to be ferried from the foundation to the after-school programs. Once, we stopped at a light where an old lady stood in the rain, holding up a sign asking for help. I motioned to the pile of white bread, encased in plastic, on the floor.
“We can’t give her some bread?” I asked Easy. He picked up two loaves from the floor and handed them out the window. “Is it against the rules?”
“You can see the condition,” Easy said as the light turned green. “You can break the rules.” Then he thought for a moment. “In fact, is not breaking the rules. You can teach.”
We also began to have regular lunches together. Our joints included the Darling Street KFC, the Shoprite KFC, the Sea Point KFC, or the lower level of the Hungry Lion fried chicken establishment at the downtown Cape Town mall. Chicken, barbecued or fried, with nary a fancy sauce, was guaranteed to please Easy. If he acquired a three-piece meal, he had a habit of tucking one piece away to later give to his mother, to his daughter, Aphiwe, or to a friend or colleague. But twice, for his birthday, when I presented him with what he referred to as a “birthday chicken,” an entire roasted bird, he ate it all by himself in under thirty minutes, very neatly. Years later, I emailed him a “Happy Birthday” message, and promised to maintain our tradition when I next came to Cape Town. I cant wait to have my birthday chicken when you are back in South Africa chickens are few now and thanks so much to remember my birthday chicken, he replied.
After some time in Cape Town, I had made a smattering of friends, a portion of them black. My black friends, for the most part, had been born into families of modest means in the homelands. One woman, an investment banker with an MBA, had attended school beneath a tree. One man, a successful quantity surveyor, had believed as a child that any newly purchased item “smelled white.” Another man, an international rugby coach, had grown up without electricity. But they had been blessed with raw intelligence, luck, and determined parents who, though they may never have attended college themselves, believed in education with the extreme reverence of those for whom proper schooling had never been a given. These parents labored and pushed and persevered, with remarkable fortitude, in the single-minded determination that their children would attend university—and then, if the dream were to be expanded upon, postgraduate studies.
These friends were “black diamonds,” as upwardly mobile black professionals in South Africa are called. They earned good money, invested, leased Audis, bought condos, built up designer shoe collections, and traveled to Dubai and Paris. When we socialized, I didn’t notice many strange looks. The black diamonds emitted a specific, if invisible, aura of success and sophistication that allowed onlookers to comfortably, if disapprovingly, make sense of me plus them. This is a brave new world: that person sort of matches that other person.
But when I was with Easy, people stared. He was branded by the township, with scars and ballpoint pen tattoos and all of the other markings of place: a McDonald’s promotional polo shirt, a heavy Xhosa accent, the barely perceptible jitters when milling around fancy stores. More than once in Easy’s life, he had stood in the vicinity of a pile of newspapers on a corner, only to have an elderly white woman approach and hand him a few rand in coins. Meanwhile, I bear the markings of a comfortable white upbringing, in particular that pervasive and inbuilt sense of entitlement that radiates from the privileged. To make matters more unusual for curious onlookers, I stand five-ten and Easy stands five-five.