Holding Up the Sky (7 page)

It seemed that the rest of the team had reached the same conclusion I had, though perhaps for different reasons, for when we all met back at the chapel it was agreed that we would still go.

Lawaaikamp was not like the urban townships I had seen before, nor was it like the rural community of Sweetwaters. Some of the homes were large brick dwellings and though they were in various stages of disrepair they had clearly been there for a long time. Others had old wooden planks for walls and rusted corrugated iron sheets for roofing. They were also larger than the average four-roomed township homes and appeared to have been built by the owners with extensions added over time. There were a few dirt roads that ran through the area but most homes were reached on foot through the long soft grass. The other difference was the trees; there was a whole forest on one side with many established gum trees scattered throughout. The presence of trees and grass reduced the ever-present dust that swirls around most townships, coating every surface as soon as it is cleaned.

Our days in Lawaaikamp were mostly spent visiting homes. A number of churches in the area had donated food, clothing and blankets and our job was to distribute this to families in need. Strangely, I don't recall meeting with any community leaders; we simply got to know the families who lived there. There was one family who lived in what appeared to be the largest and most established home in Lawaaikamp. While I wouldn't have called them community leaders, they certainly knew what was happening and who needed help. They directed us to one family compromised of a grandmother and two small boys, the mother having gone to Cape Town to work. They had not heard from her in weeks and things were very difficult for them, made worse by the grandmother's tuberculosis. Her illness was largely untreated as she had only been able to afford the taxi fare to the clinic once to get the first dose of tablets but had not been able to make her way back. The food and blankets were a blessing, she told us, as George was still in the grip of winter where temperatures would regularly drop below freezing. We also took the two grandsons with us when we visited other homes nearby, allowing their grandmother an opportunity to sleep.

Msizi and I visited another home where the grandmother was ill, though I was not sure with what. Her son showed us into a small annex that was her room, so we could sit and visit her. Hearing a noise, a cry, Msizi asked the old woman if there was a baby in the house. She said there was and pulled back the crusty blankets to reveal a tiny baby, just waking, in the crook of her arm. Apparently the mother of this household was also working as a maid for a white family in Cape Town, having returned to work as soon as the baby was born. Msizi and I exchanged glances and I took the baby from the old woman, wondering if it would catch whatever illness the grandmother was harbouring. Responding to the cries, the son reappeared with a bottle for the baby. It was as filthy as the blankets in which the old woman slept. Ignoring my urge to run and sterilise the bottle, I fed the squawking infant. We agreed to leave some blankets and clean clothes for the grandmother and promised to return.

As we walked away, Msizi told me that the family would not give the blankets and clothes to the old woman.

I turned on him, horrified. ‘Why not?'

‘They will reason that she doesn't need them the most, as she is old and dying', he explained.

Not believing that anyone could be so callous, I promised myself I would go back the next day.

The next morning I arrived alone. I knocked on the door and the son answered. We greeted each other and he asked me inside. I asked after his family's health and he told me they were all well. I then gave him the baby formula I had brought and asked if I could visit his mother. As I poked my head into the tiny annex, the old woman was awake and beckoned for me to enter. ‘Molo', I said, Hello, how are you? She assured me she was well, though she did not look it. She was wearing the same clothes as the previous day and her bedclothes smelled as if they were still soiled. I quickly scouted the room for the items we had left but they were nowhere to be seen. Reluctantly, I realised that Msizi had been right. I asked her, in a combination of gestures and English words as I spoke no Xhosa, whether she had eaten yet. As she had not, I went to the kitchen to see what I could find. Her son was sitting at the small metal kitchen table with a visiting neighbour. After yet more greetings, I was told there was no porridge, the common breakfast staple, but only leftover pap from the night before. He scraped the contents from the bottom of a pot into a plastic bowl and handed it to me. I thanked him and returned to the annex. Then, sitting next to the old woman, I helped her to eat what little food there was. While pap is quite a bland meal, it is preferred by many as it comfortably fills the stomach, chasing hunger away for many hours. I suspected it would be so with her as well. Before I left, I asked the son for the woollen stockings I had brought the day before, very aware that I was crossing a line with him. He disappeared into another room while I stood awkwardly in the kitchen with the neighbour. After a few minutes he returned with the stockings. I told him that his mother's legs were cold and that I was going to put the stockings on her before I left.

Once out the door, I went to look for Msizi, outraged. ‘How could he?' I demanded.

‘You don't understand', he replied.

I knew I didn't. I had no idea what it was like not to be able feed and clothe your family and to have to choose between them. I did not know how the son felt having his wife working so far from home, earning only a few rand, or dollars, a day, while he tried to hold it together. In the heat of the moment, my only reference point was myself and I knew I would never let my mother live like that. My moral compass was set too tight to even try to understand, but I was learning that there was no clean line between right and wrong, between victim and oppressor.

We had been in Lawaaikamp a week when the forced removals began. The government had been threatening to demolish homes for the past three months, with the first deadline of 31 May passing quietly. For those few who had given up fighting and agreed to go, a truck arrived to collect their belongings and move them off. The many who would not leave listened anxiously for sounds of bulldozers. They came at night, knocking down only one or two homes each time. Every morning, people would emerge from their homes and gather around each of the new wounds that were opening up in their community. Despite our presence and the protests of those who opposed the removals both locally and overseas, the demolitions continued night after night. One freezing morning we awoke to be told that one old man had refused to leave his house when the bulldozers came and they had demolished the house around him. His granddaughter, who had returned from hospital with her newborn twins a few days before, had spent the night with him in the rubble. Tragically, one of the twins did not survive the cold and died in the night. The community was outraged and I with them, yet somehow we all knew that what was now started could not be stopped.

Towards the end of our second week, Steve went missing. While he had not said he was going to town, we at first assumed that was what he must have done. As the hours went by we began to worry. I suspect we had all put the police out of our minds as there had been no major police presence in the area in that first week. Even when the removals began, the police came at night and we rarely saw them. When Steve had been gone for over five hours without a word we began to talk through what action we should take; clearly, going to the police was not an option. After much discussion we agreed that through Steve's family contacts we could most likely approach a lawyer who could help. Just as we were about to phone Steve's father-in-law, Steve returned. He told us that the police had picked him up on the edge of Lawaaikamp and taken him down to a remote beach road. They questioned him about our presence and the identity of each person in the team. While this was happening, he was running scenarios through his mind, most of them ending badly for him and his family. Finally, the police ended their off-road interrogation with threats of detention and general bodily harm. They then left him on the side of the road and he had spent the last few hours walking back. He was visibly shaken but we all felt he was lucky to get away so lightly.

After two weeks, we left Lawaaikamp, unsure whether we had made a difference to their situation, and made the fifteen-hour drive home. While we had been able to distribute much needed supplies, we knew this could have been done by the local churches themselves. We had taken a stand and thrown in our lot with the community but this had not made their plight any more public, nor stopped the forced removals. I think that sometimes all you can do is be present and say, ‘Yes, it happened, I saw it'. Feeling invisible and unnoticed during hard times is difficult enough but having the government, or anyone for that matter, say that it never happened makes the cut deeper still. Miraculously, the forced removals did eventually stop and Lawaaikamp held on until the end of apartheid and finally integrated into George on its own terms. After we returned to 'Maritzburg, we were in need of a few days off. One night, Msizi and Vusi convinced me to go to a shebeen. A shebeen is like a pub or a bar in someone's home. For decades, the only bars black people were allowed to go to were the government-run drinking houses. While the private manufacture and sale of alcohol was forbidden, a semi underground network of shebeens emerged, mostly run by black women, where traditional maize beer was brewed and sold, along with other store bought varieties. When the police felt inclined, they could sweep in and close down the shebeens but they were virtually impossible to stop, for as soon as the police shut one down, another would spring up somewhere else.

This night, we went with Klaus and Al, two other black volunteers from the centre. Klaus was from a township called Mamelodi outside Pretoria and Al, or Big Al, as we called him, was from Cape Town. While we sat around chatting about our varying school experiences, with a bit of sport and politics thrown in for good measure, Vusi had gone to a friend's house to get a stereo so that we could have some music. He told us he would be ten minutes as the friend was only a few blocks away. We had become so engrossed in our conversation that it was an hour before we began to wonder what was taking him so long. No one was particularly concerned. I was learning that things rarely got done in a straight line around here. There was often an unavoidable detour between intention and action that meant things took two or three times as long as was first imagined. After an hour and a half Vusi walked in with a big smile on his face, carrying the stereo. The police, seeing a black man walking along at night, stereo in hand, had assumed it was stolen and arrested him. It had taken over an hour for him to prove that the stereo was legitimately on loan before they let him go. After a few drinks, this seemed incredibly funny to us so we teased Vusi for being stupid enough to get arrested, put the music on and let the dancing begin.

Having grown up in Australia and not having been in Africa long, my wall of inhibitions when it came to dancing was still quite robust. In the case of my African-born friends, no such inhibitions existed. Msizi eventually convinced me to dance with him and soon everyone was on their feet. I even danced alone to the compulsive rhythms of African jazz. As the night wore on, Msizi pulled me close, still dancing, and whispered to me that he loved me and that I was always his first choice, no matter what happened. There was just a week left before I had to return to Canada and we were both starting to feel the pull of it.

The centre was unusually quiet in my last week, leaving us plenty of time to be together. I was finding it increasingly hard to deal with what was coming next. We would both be finishing our studies at the end of the year. Msizi would return to Grahamstown to look for work and I would return to Australia for Christmas with my family and to plan my next steps. The centre had been a shelter for our relationship but we were aware that once one or both of us left, it would be virtually impossible for us to be together. An Act of Parliament had only recently changed the law that banned mixed marriages. However, the Group Areas Act was still in place, meaning it was not yet legal for mixed race couples to live together: each racial group could live only in the areas designated for it. A number of people got around this by living in so-called ‘grey areas' that were either industrial or low income areas–meaning the police received few complaints and did not often enforce the law.

So we began to discuss possible scenarios. At that stage, I was keen to return to South Africa but had no firm arrangements. Msizi had a potential job with the South African Council of Churches in Grahamstown. But it was not these logistical issues that were front of mind; it was the question of finding a community where we could both feel at home. Given how incredibly divided the country was, and in many ways still is, we would be very visible as a couple no matter where we chose to live. There were so few mixed marriages at that stage that they almost took on the status of urban legend. The more we discussed it, the more discouraged he became. I, the eternal optimist, believed that where there was a will there was a way. But Msizi was thinking more long-term than I and couldn't see how we could make it work. We discussed whether we should simply stay together as long as we could, even if it was only for another year or two, until a decision to part needed to be made. To an idealistic twenty-three-year-old, this sounded very romantic and lent an edge of intensity to the situation that it may not have deserved. We still had not reached a conclusion when it came time for me to go. The only thing we could agree on was no more tears.

While leaving South Africa again was a wrench, I was more certain this time that I had a future here, in one form or other. Steve was considering setting up a separate youth organisation in 'Maritzburg, one that was focused more on community development and less on missions and evangelism. After all I had experienced that year, I knew the faith I had brought with me was not the same as the one I was taking away. I needed a more integrated faith that spoke to God's presence in a world of suffering, rather than sermons on how to make time for regular bible study and prayer or how to love a noisy neighbour. I wanted to know where God was when a baby was dying of cold in the rubble of a bulldozed house. Even if the clergy had no answer, I needed them at least to ask the question. I saw that in South Africa there were many people who asked the hard questions, worked in unwinnable situations and yet still had a deep faith. I imagined that working in the organisation Steve was thinking of building would give me a chance to find an expression for my changing faith. I suspected that trying to do that at the centre might put me on the edge of the community there, as it seemed to have done with Steve. What I did not know at the time was that there were factors other than his activism that may have distanced him from the centre leadership.