Apartheid’s key points to ponder

TRAGIC and sinister they certainly were, yet many of the laws passed by apartheid’s rulers were, on reflection, so brazenly absurd, they sound almost laughable today.

Imagine a law that says you can’t have sex with, let alone marry, the woman of your desire because she happens to carry a different ID card. Or another piece of legislation which reduces you to second class status because you’re dark or your hair’s too curly. What about the law that put those in prison for daring to believe that all people were equal.

The National Key Points Act allowed the apartheid minister of defence the authority to declare any place or building in the country a national key point, ostensibly to protect them from attacks by those “blerrie communists”.

Trouble is, that minister was under no obligation to disclose what those key points were. You could easily have taken an innocent photograph of a prominent landmark or tourist attraction and found yourself on the wrong side of the law. It was almost akin to walking through an open field contaminated by unmarked landmines.

So reviled was the law that in 1990, the ANC’s chief representative in the US, Lindiwe Mabuza, condemned the apartheid government for using it to “put down black demonstrators”.

The painful irony is that 20 years into our democracy, that very law is still in our statutes and is often used by some ANC politicians to undermine transparency in the government. It was recently invoked to justify the controversial spending of millions for upgrades to President Jacob Zuma’s Nkandla homestead.

I was sickened by these double standards, and couldn’t help recalling an incident some years ago when Ian Wyllie was my editor on the Sunday Tribune. The newspaper had run a supplement on the opening of Richards Bay harbour, which carried a front page aerial shot of the harbour supplied by the publicity association.

Wyllie was surprised then when he received a call from Natal Command advising him that the government was taking action because the harbour was a national key point and his newspaper had broken the law. “He read me the section. He was just purring,” said Wyllie. “As I put the phone down, in walked my secretary, with a telephone directory for the North Coast. It had a beautiful front cover of exactly the same picture.”

Wyllie rang Natal Command. “You will be interested to know I have the telephone directory for the North Coast and I am happy to say that I shall be comfortable sharing the dock with Louis Rive, the Postmaster General. It has the same picture.”

There was a pregnant pause before the officer at Natal Command uttered: “Ah, Christ!” and put down the phone. There must be a moral somewhere in that delightful story.

dennis.pather@telkomsa.net