SOUTH AFRICA: FORGING A NATION : SOUTH AFRICA: A TALE OF SIX FAMILIES : CHAPTER ONE / What Was Apartheid?

“Apartheid crushes you, it squeezes the life out of you, it leaves you broken before the end of your years,” Shirley Mofokeng said with a sigh that shook her whole body. “Simply to live under apartheid has been a day-by-day, even hour-by-hour, struggle for us all.”

A hush quickly fell over the Mofokengs’ small living room in Soweto, the huge black city outside Johannesburg, for Shirley Mofokeng was talking about the death of her husband, Abner, six years ago at the age of 51 from what she simply called “a weakened heart.”

“Apartheid killed my father,” her son, Tebogo Mofokeng, 28, a high school science teacher, agreed. “He wasn’t shot down in the street as so many were, he wasn’t starved to death in one of those (rural, tribal) homelands, but he was worked to death and worried to death and hated to death by this system.”

For South Africa’s black majority, apartheid meant much more than racial separation, more even than the entrenchment of minority white rule over the country and its economy. Since its imposition by the Afrikaner-led National Party in 1948, apartheid systematically stripped millions of people of their human dignity, treating them as cheap labor and banishing them from wherever they were not needed.

Every South African black has an experience with apartheid horrors--being driven from home, deprived of an education, humiliated by segregationist rules and discriminated against at every turn, jailed for trying to find a better-paying city job, burying a child killed by police--but for most, the daily dehumanization exacted the highest toll.

“Apartheid was felt every day,” Tebogo Mofokeng said. “It tore at us emotionally, psychologically and physically. A mother goes to work and comes home angry after being pushed around by whites all day. Her children feel that anger. A father is worked to death in the only job the regime will let him have, and his family is left to cope however it can. Children are dumped out of school uneducated and stupid. . . .

“The traumas from which most societies, including white South Africa, try to protect its members,” he added, “apartheid methodically, even deliberately, inflicted upon us.”

The Mofokengs’ struggle to survive as a family is the story of South Africa’s 35.8 million blacks, mixed-race Coloreds and Asians whose rights and very humanity apartheid had denied.

That struggle, multiplied across a rich and varied land and intensified from one generation to the next, finally brought an end to what the oppressed had damned as “The System”--the almost absolute control that the 5.2 million whites, particularly the politically dominant Afrikaners, had built over the centuries.

Sitting in the front room of their matchbox house in Soweto’s Meadowlands neighborhood, their home for nearly 20 years, the Mofokengs--Shirley, Tebogo, Audrey, Nathaniel and Patience--were equally philosophical and political as they discussed the end of apartheid and more humorous than bitter as they recalled their own experiences.

“We had two toilets where I was working--one for the white baas , the other for the black workers,” Shirley Mofokeng said, recalling her years as a seamstress and shop steward in clothing factories. “With so many of us on the shop floor, this was a problem, and so one day I said, ‘You know, you won’t get painted black sitting where I sat.’ He got the point. . . .

“People with power don’t want to share--maybe that’s a rule of life for some--and these whites, particularly the Afrikaners, were quite happy dictating to the rest of us. ‘Live here, work there, do this, don’t do that.’ Well, it didn’t last, and it couldn’t last.”

After the death of her husband, a supervisor at the bus company that ferried black workers back and forth to their jobs in Johannesburg, Shirley Mofokeng, 51, struggled to keep her children in school, working long hours as a seamstress at clothing factories before becoming a factory supervisor.

“As the second-eldest of seven children, I had to drop out (in the 10th grade) to help out my parents, but I didn’t want that to happen to my children,” she said. “With just one salary, it was very tough. I was lucky that I had kids who understood that dinner some nights would be just tea and bread without butter.

“You get paid on Friday, and after the rent, the electricity, medicine, school fees, the phone and clothes, you’re lucky if there’s enough money for food. These kids know what it’s like not just to go to bed hungry but go off to school hungry too.”

Tebogo recalls doing his homework by candlelight when there was no electricity at home, bundling against the cold winter winds when broken windows were not replaced in his classroom and organizing study groups in his senior year of high school when there were no science teachers.

“I wanted to become a doctor, and I had the marks,” he said. “But all the quotas were full. ‘No, boy, we have enough black doctors,’ they said, and that was that. So I became a teacher, though I have not lost my ambition to become a doctor.”

*

Pushing her children all the way was Shirley Mofokeng, who retains the energy and zest that made her a regional tennis champion in her youth.

“The schools might have been closed, but my kids still studied,” she recalled. “I drew up a plan, and every day they would bring their notebooks to show me what they did that day. And, just like I learned in management courses, I followed up. Oh, I was strict, but I didn’t want them to stop where I had to.”

Tebogo, who was christened Churchill but now uses his African name, finished his science degree at the University of the North, a college for blacks at Turfloop, and teaches science, mathematics and English in Soweto, giving students extra classes for additional income.

Patience Mofokeng, 30, the eldest of the four Mofokeng children, became an organizer for a retail clerks union and lives in the heavily industrialized East Rand outside Johannesburg.

Audrey, 21, is preparing to enroll in a marketing course later this year at a technical college.

Nathaniel, 17, the youngest, is in high school with ambitions for university, though civil unrest and repeated school closures have cost him a couple of years.

And there are now three grandchildren on whom Shirley Mofokeng dotes.

“Our mother is a real ‘township mama,’ and these township mamas are tough, tough, tough,” Audrey said, gently teasing her mother. “They are what hold our families together and what hold our communities together. . . . The real resistance to apartheid, I think, came from families, even before it came from organizations like the African National Congress.”

Shirley Mofokeng agreed. “The struggle against apartheid began with the struggle to live,” she said. “At work, I’d see the white baas sitting in his office all day, doing little but drinking coffee, working short hours and getting a nice salary while we worked hard down on the factory floor. You ask yourself why, and the answer is that he is a white man.

“And then there were the things outside work. The nastiness at the (white-owned) cafes, the insults from officials and policemen that make you sick, the worry about your kids, the I-don’t-care attitude of doctors when your husband is dying, the terrible lack of basic services in Soweto.”

A trade union shop steward for 10 years, Shirley Mofokeng became active in community affairs in recent years. She works in the Soweto Civic Assn.’s housing and health care committees and, as its education officer in Meadowlands, organizing seminars to explain the political changes.

“Every night, it’s a meeting,” she said. “But I had to get involved for the simple reason that I don’t keep quiet if there is something that is not right. That is the only way we are going to fix things.

“We are talking now to these guys who have been running things in Soweto their way for years, and they are hearing about what they have been doing to us. They are afraid, I tell you they are afraid, but fortunate for them we are not vengeful.”

Even as it disappears, however, apartheid leaves a legacy certain to mark South Africans for many years, Tebogo said, explaining how he was sending his son, Setjhaba, 4, to a racially integrated nursery school to prepare him for the “new South Africa.”

“Although black people are becoming aware of themselves as human beings, it will take time to change our psychology and even longer to change that of the whites,” he said. “We had this system for years, and it will take years to get rid of it. Even now when I see a white, I see someone who is thinking how stupid I am, how insignificant I am. This affects me. But our children will be different, and their children will be truly free.”

*

There is probably no greater indictment of apartheid and its preservation of power and privileges for whites--and no clearer explanation of the decades of tough black resistance--than what it did, routinely and brutally, to black families, ordinary black families such as the Mofokengs. White prosperity and well-being were ensured through black poverty and deprivation.

Different from the segregation and discrimination suffered by U.S. blacks, apartheid was intended to enhance the political and economic power of South Africa’s white minority, particularly the 3 million Afrikaners, whose Dutch, German and French Huguenot forebears first settled here in the 17th Century, and its instruments were totalitarian rule and open oppression.

Today, two-thirds of the country’s blacks continue to survive on less than what government and independent economists consider a basic subsistence income, and more than a quarter of them are “completely destitute.” The average white family has an income six times that of an African family; despite widespread unionization in industry, whites still earn about 3.6 times what blacks do on factory floors.

Decades-old policies, moreover, promoted structural unemployment to ensure large pools of cheap black labor. Out of a total labor pool of 14 million, South Africa has about 5.4 million unemployed--the vast majority of them blacks. Only 3% to 4% of new job seekers find employment, according to labor economists, and the number of those without work grows at more than 400,000 a year.

Generations of black youth were deprived of an adequate education. Of the 2% of African students who finish all 12 years of schooling today, only 41% pass their matriculation exams, compared to 96% of whites.

Student-teacher ratios at African schools remain more than 40 to 1, compared to 16 to 1 at the previously whites-only schools; white teachers, moreover, are better qualified than those in black schools, most of whom emerged from the same educational system and lack university degrees and professional training.

*

Although virtually any measure illustrates the advantages enjoyed by whites through their determined hold on political and economic power, comparative statistics on health are particularly telling. Whites have a life expectancy of 73 years, blacks 61--and in rural areas 48. Black African infant mortality, another key health indicator, is 65 per 1,000 live births, more than seven times that among white babies. Tuberculosis, a disease typical among the impoverished, has risen 41% in the last five years among blacks. Overall, the TB rate is one of the highest in Africa.

For years, the government spent four or five times as much on health care for whites as for blacks so that, before the hospitals were desegregated two years ago, there were four hospital beds for every 1,000 blacks, most of them at 110% occupancy, while for whites there were more than eight beds per 1,000, with occupancy little more than 50%.

Despite the country’s political transformation, little has changed since the Second Carnegie Inquiry into Poverty and Development in Southern Africa wrote in a landmark study in 1989:

“Thousands of South African babies are dying of malnutrition and associated diseases. Two million children are growing up stunted for lack of sufficient calories in one of the few countries in the world that exports food. Tens of thousands of men are spending their entire working years as ‘labor units’ in single-sex hostels whilst their wives and children live generally in great poverty in the overcrowded (rural, tribal) reserves.”

Amid the grinding daily tragedy of apartheid there was also the absurdity of social engineering gone mad as the government tried to divide the black population into 10 separate African nations, of which the 8.5 million Zulus were the largest; seven classifications of mixed-race Coloreds, ranging from “Cape Malay” to “Colored-other,” and Asians descended from immigrant Indian workers.

*

Manu Desai, wanting to escape the rigid racial segregation of Durban, moved about 25 years ago to Cape Town, a city where different races had historically mixed more easily and where authorities were more relaxed in enforcing the rules of apartheid.

“That made me a criminal,” Desai said, recalling old laws prohibiting Indians from leaving Natal province. “There was nothing for me in Durban; I wanted to start a business but I couldn’t. The government barred Indians from most fields, and whites had monopolies we couldn’t challenge.

“It was not that we couldn’t better ourselves, but that we were not allowed to. Only 200 Indians were accepted a year for (high school graduation) at that time, and if you didn’t make it, then your life was on the factory floor or behind the shop counter. . . .

“We were all locked in our own ‘population groups,’ and breaking free was very difficult. Indians lived with Indians, whites with whites, Coloreds with Coloreds, Africans with Africans. We went to different schools, we played on different sports fields, we shopped in different stores, we traveled in different buses, we ate in different restaurants. In my father’s day, it was even worse; he could not walk on the pavement if a white was there.”

Desai, who is 54, established a small printing business in the Woodstock area of Cape Town, and today, working from two shops across the road from one another, he prints everything from guarantee cards for electronics products to posters for boxing matches to educational materials on AIDS.

“Some weeks, we are here every day, and some days we work 16 or 18 hours,” he said as he checked the quality of some freshly printed election flyers. “I can’t say that business is bad--we’re doing quite OK.”

*

Desai’s escape from apartheid, however, was only partial. He married a woman, Minnie, now his wife of 21 years, who was classified as a “Cape Colored,” a person of mixed race by government definition. And that trapped them in a maze of apartheid regulations that, while repealed, still bind them in strange ways.

Desai quickly found that he and his wife had to live in an area designated for Indians, although housing there was scarce and expensive and they preferred to live in a Colored area because of better amenities. So they divorced--on paper.

“As an Indian, I couldn’t own a house in a Colored area, and as a married woman, Minnie couldn’t own a house anywhere,” Desai said. “Technically, legally, we had to divorce in order to live together where we wanted.

“I dropped Minnie off at the lawyer’s office one day to do the divorce, I called on a couple of customers and I picked her up half an hour later. I considered that we had bought a piece of paper called a ‘divorce decree,’ and that was all. Minnie bought the house, I became her ‘lodger,’ and we carried on with our lives.”

The Desais, who now have three daughters--Leila and Pravina, 19, twins who are studying business administration, and Sarita, 6--continued to exploit the loopholes of apartheid as the system sagged under the absurdity of its own regulations.

Four years ago, when the Desais wanted to move to East Rondebosch, a suburb of middle-class whites north of Cape Town, they formed a company with a white friend as the nominal owner that then bought the comfortable, three-bedroom house and “assigned” Manu and Minnie Desai to reside there as company employees.

*

East Rondebosch is now fully integrated, and Minnie Desai describes most of her neighbors as “warm and welcoming, very kind people, not at all racist.”

“Because we make a decent living, we could find ways around many apartheid regulations, but it cost us thousands,” Manu Desai said. Although a businessman more focused on profits than politics, he became caught up in the popular struggle against apartheid in the 1980s.

“We didn’t carry guns, but we helped force this change,” he said. “The business community gave financial support, and I printed a lot of stuff the regime could have hanged me for. Whew, some of the manifestos were so hot that just holding them burned my hands!

“There were raids one after another in those days, and often we printed through the night while the police slept. Thank God, I wasn’t caught--it would have been the end of the business, the end for my family, maybe even the end of my life.”

Sobered by that recollection, Desai continued: “Under apartheid, there were no two kinds of black. Black was black, and we all suffered terrible injustices. . . . Still, one must ask, ‘What about those who could not buy their way out of petty apartheid--not that we really succeeded--for they numbered in the tens of millions?’

“For me, there is another question: What about the waste all this entailed? Sixty percent of government funds have been wasted on apartheid over the past 45 years, on checking to see who was marrying whom and preserving the racial purity of the Afrikaner people, on putting everyone else in tight little cages and on building up the military and the security apparatus to protect a system of privileges for the whites.

“What waste, what waste!” Desai exclaimed, shaking his head as much over the folly of apartheid as the pain it inflicted. “Soon we will be out of this mess, I hope.”

Desai, whose heavy eyelids hide a very quick mind, counts himself among the country’s optimists, believing that opening the economy fully to blacks, the massive development program planned by the ANC and further measures, such as the distribution of unfarmed land, will create the jobs that will in turn bring social stability.

“When a family has a roof over its head and food on the table, its whole perspective changes,” he said.

“The other element is schooling. From one generation to the next, it will be education that improves the quality of life. Look, I have enough work to take on several more people, but there aren’t qualified guys because many apprenticeships were closed to blacks.”

*

The Desais’ two elder daughters, Leila and Pravina, virtually luxuriate in the challenge of their business administration courses at the University of the Western Cape, ignoring the campus’s intense leftist politics to concentrate on their studies.

“Five years ago, everything was politics, and the politics were radical,” Leila Desai said. “Today, there are many of us who go to school to learn and learn all we can; the struggle has basically been won, and it is up to us to take full advantage of the opportunities we have as a result of that struggle.”