Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Tales of our divided society
From behind enemy lines in the First Boer War, to Dolly’s last innings
SOUTH African society – doubtless like every other – has always been a work in progress which, at its best, reveals a consciousness of our common humanity, despite the obduracy of ideological fixities or the habits of indifference.
Many thousands of words in the archives attest to the less credible impulses, but the following – necessarily random – selection from late January reports from the 1880s to the 1980s provide telling glimpses of the reinvention of society, and the search for different ways of getting on together.
In the First Boer War of 1881 (and only weeks before the British defeat at Majuba Hill) a Cape correspondent ventured into the “enemy” camp and found men he could admire.
He wrote, under the headline “A correspondent talks to the Boers”: “Amongst the Boers, as amongst every other nation ... there will be found cruel men who would not hesitate at the committing of any atrocity. But I say that taken man for man, I would prefer to fall into the hands of the Boers than into the hands of English soldiers, were I their enemy and of a different nationality.”
In the same newspaper, under the unassuming heading “Occasional Notes”, a footnote reveals a sentiment much of the history and the politics of the succeeding century would undermine or deny.
“Major (Ruscombe) Poole, who fell in the attack on Lange’s Nek, was for more than a year the custodian of Cetywayo (the Zulu king, Cetswayo), who was very much attached to him, and who is reported to have cried like a child when he heard of the death of the Englishman who had done so much to render his captivity tolerable.”
In like spirit, when the “next” Boer War, came along, black people in the Free State ( headline “Loyal natives”) reached out to the military governor, Major-General GT Pretyman, on January 1, 1901 in an address signed by some 5 000 “prominent natives, including several Basuto and Barolong chiefs” to pledge their loyalty “... because we know Her Majesty’s government well by repute as the only government to which a native can look with confidence for his common rights, justice and freedom.”
Well, not entirely, it would turn out. After the bitter warring, the Union constitution of 1910 – approved by Britain in the face of warnings from black and white liberals – was seen as the answer to the pressing “race problem” ( between English and Afrikaner), the “native problem” being regarded as something to be left for later.
It took about 80 years for the country to get round to it with any seriousness.
Just how heartlessly ordinary the status quo had become is evident from the January 24, 1961 report – “Ban may drive Papwa from golf ” – in which it emerged that “Sewsunker ( Papwa) Sewgolum, twice Dutch Open golf champion and holder of the South African n o n - European golf title, is thinking of giving up golf.” He is quoted as saying: “There does not seem to be any future for me here anymore.”
The day before the Sewgolum story, however, was evidence of an assertion of common rights. In 2017, the report “Test case over ‘sit-in’ at tearoom” seems comical, though it wouldn’t have been at the time. It concerned an “incident” the restaurant of an Adderley Street department store in which “two European men, three European women, three coloured men and four coloured women”, had – in the words of defence attorney TW Walters – “tried in an extremely decorous and responsible way to obtain the right to buy a cup of tea”. in
They were charged with the “illegal occupation of premises under the Group Areas Act” in a trial the prosecution regarded as “a test case”.
Testing times were to continue for a while yet.
Cricket legend Basil D’Oliveira was in the news again when his January 1972 farewell cricket match was played at Turfhall Park in Athlone, but “without former Springbok Owen Wynne because the invitation asking Wynne to play had been withdrawn”.
The invitation had been withdrawn over “legal complications”, which, in a nutshell, were that “the match would become a matter for the police if whites played”.
(For the record, “more than a thousand were disappointed when D’Oliveira failed with the bat in his farewell match”. A small consolation being the 42-run win by St. Augustines over Dolly’s side.)
Over the next nearly two decades, apartheid was very much a matter for the police.
By the 1980s, nobody doubted it was on the way out.
Even so, the bald introduction to the report – “All-race council plan” – of January 31, 1986 has a whiff of implausibility about it.
“President PW Botha,” it began, “said today the concept of apartheid was outdated.”
This was his preamble to announcing in parliament the formation of a “national statutory council to include blacks”, which would advise the government on “constitutional matters”.
Democracy lay beyond such matters, needless to say.
Four years later, on February 2, 1990, Botha’s successor, FW de Klerk’s bold initiatives made the tinkering of the 1980s seem trivial. Then, again, De Klerk himself was scrupulously effacing years later when he acknowledged that without Botha’s earlier steps along the reform road, however modest they may have been, he would not have been able to do what he did.