Our successive attitudes towards the Indians are another example of the disturbing shift in values that is likely to beset any child growing up in South Africa. The Indians are a minority group here, but even before their treatment became an issue at the United Nations, affecting the attitude of the rest of the world towards South Africa, they could not comfortably be ignored, because they belonged to the great mass of the Other Side — the coloureds. The Indians were imported into the country as indentured labour for the Natal sugar-cane fields in the mid-nineteenth century, and now, except for a considerable number of businessmen in Natal, a few traders in nearly every Transvaal town, and the considerable number who are employed in hotels and restaurants, they seem to be occupied chiefly as vendors of fruit, vegetables and flowers. In our East Rand mining town, the Indian traders were concentrated in a huddle of shops in one block, bought by them before the passage of what is known as the Ghetto Act of 1946, which, in effect, bars them from owning or leasing property in any but restricted, non-European areas. These were tailor shops, or they were ‘bazaars’ where cheap goods of all kinds were sold, and they were the object of dislike and enmity on the part of the white shopkeepers. In fact, a woman who was seen coming out of an Indian bazaar with a basket of groceries immediately earned herself a stigma: either she was low-class or, if her husband’s position as an official of one of the gold mines put the level of her class beyond question, she must be stingy. ‘She’s so mean she even goes to the Indians’ was the most convincing allegation of miserliness in our town. It was bad enough to be penny-pinching, but to stoop so low as to buy from an Indian trader in order to save!
For some reason I have never understood, it was quite respectable and conventional to buy your fruit and vegetables from the Indians who hawked from door to door with their big red or yellow lorries. Our household, like most others, had its own regular hawker, who called two or three times a week. Whatever a hawker’s name (and it was always painted in large, elaborate lettering, a kind of fancy compromise between Indian and English script, on his lorry), he was invariably known as Sammy. He even called himself Sammy, rapping at kitchen doors and announcing himself by this generic. There was a verse, parodying the hawkers’ broken English, that children used to chant around these lorries:
Sammy, Sammy, what you got?
Missus, Missus, apricot.
There were many more verses with the same rhyme scheme, becoming more and more daring in their inclusion of what struck the children as giggle-producing obscenities, such as ‘chamber pot’, and a few genuine old Anglo-Saxon shockers, which they pronounced quite calmly.
If you did not serenade the Indian with rude songs, and your mother was a good buyer and payer, he might hand you down a peach or a bunch of grapes from his lorry, but if you were an urchin without family backing, he would shout and shoo you away, lest your quick hand filch something while his back was turned. It is interesting to me now, too, to remember how yet again the bogy of uncleanliness came up immediately with the gift of the peach from Sammy; my mother, too polite to offend him by saying anything, pronounced such a warning with her eyes that I would not dare put my teeth to that peach until I had taken it inside to be washed. Sammy had ‘handled’ it. Sammy was an Indian. In fact, Sammy was Not White. Heaven knows, I don’t suppose the man was clean. But why did no one ever explain that the colour had nothing to do with cleanliness?
So my sister and I began by thinking of the Indian as dirty, and a pest; the vendors whom I have described as annoying us on the beach at Durban were the prototype. Then we thought of him as romantic; our wanderings in the Indian market in Durban were, I suppose, part of a common youthful longing for the exotic. And finally, when we were old enough and clearheaded enough and had read enough to have an abstract, objective notion of man, as well as a lot of jumbled personal emotions about him, the Indian became a person like ourselves.
I suppose it is a pity that as children we did not know what people like to talk of as ‘the real Africa’ — the Africa of proud black warriors and great jungle rivers and enormous silent nights, that anachronism of a country belonging to its own birds and beasts and savages which rouses such nostalgia in the citified, neighbour-jostled heart, and out of which a mystique has been created by writers and film directors. The fact of the matter is that this noble paradise of ‘the real Africa’ is, as far as the Union of South Africa is concerned, an anachronism. Bits of it continue to exist; if you live in Johannesburg, you can still go to the bushveld for solitude or shooting in a few hours. And bits of it have been carefully preserved, with as little of the taint of civilisation as is commensurate with the longing of the civilised for comfort, as in the Kruger Park. But the real South Africa was then, and is now, to be found in Johannesburg and in the brash, thriving towns of the Witwatersrand. Everything that is happening on the whole emergent continent can be found in microcosm here. Here are the Africans, in all the stages of an industrial and social revolution — the half-naked man fresh from the kraal, clutching his blanket as he stares gazelle-eyed at the traffic; the detribalised worker, living in a limbo between his discarded tribal mores and the mores of the white man’s world; the unhappy black intellectual with no outlet for his talents. And here, too, are the whites, in all the stages of understanding and misunderstanding of this inevitable historical process — some afraid and resentful, some pretending it is not happening, a few trying to help it along less painfully. A sad, confusing part of the world to grow up and live in. And yet exciting.
1954
Hassan in America
We have a friend in Cairo who is a prefabricator of mosques. I do not offer this as an item from Ripley, or as an insinuation that our friend belongs under any exhibitionist heading of Unusual Occupations, along with sword-swallowers and bearded ladies. On the contrary. He is a thin, wiry aesthete of great charm, member of a famous continental banking family by birth, Arab by inclination, and the beauty of his profession (for me, at any rate) is that there is nothing intrinsically outlandish or freakish about it; it is simply a combination of two perfectly ordinary occupations which happen to belong, in time and space, worlds apart. Mosques have been going up in the East since the seventh century, the technique of prefabrication can safely be dated round about the second world war of this century. All that Wally (which is not his name) has done is combine East with West, past with present. He has managed a synthesis which is also a compromise with the world in which he finds himself; and that, any psychiatrist will tell you, is about the best any of us can hope to do.
Wally is rather good at this sort of thing, it seems. He is all incompatibles. His blood is that much-punished mixture, half German Jew, half German Gentile. Within himself, there are no frontier incidents between the Jewish blood of his mother, and his affinity with Islam. He is a Jew who loves Arabs, a high-born Gentile German who is half Jew.
My husband lived with him for four years during the war, but I had not met him until we visited Cairo in the spring of last year. We met for the first time at lunch, in his Cairo flat. He looked like Humphrey Bogart (how he will smile that jutting-toothed smile when he reads this, because although he is a prefabricator, he is not so wholly of the twentieth century that he regards film stars as prototypes) and he loped stiffly from the little mezzanine bedroom down to the living room, from the living room to the kitchen and back, bringing us the small treasures he has to show — pieces of woven Coptic cloth, an ancient ring from a tomb, a tiny stone Anubis, the sacred dog of ancient Egypt.