The diary of Maria Tholo - Introducing by Carol Hermer

From the book: The Diary of Maria Tholo by Carol Hermer

The riots broke out in Soweto on June 16, 1976 when police fired on a group of school children demonstrating against the use of Afrikaans as a teaching medium in the schools. Within a short while the disturbances had spread over most of the country but Cape Town remained comparatively

During the two months that the Cape remained isolated from the violence, which showed no sign of abating, Maria Tholo's biggest concern was her father. He had suffered a stroke and with much difficulty she had persuaded him to hand over his house to her younger brother, Isaac, a Nyanga shopkeeper, and come and live with her and her family in Gugulethu, where she could care for him. Maria was in her forties, a housewife and mother of two daughters. She was not originally from the Cape but her teacher parents had moved there forty years earlier. Her father was a self-made man. His family were labourers, country people, but considerable effort he had scraped to a young adult.

One of his first teachers was Maria's mother. Her background was very different. Her family were well-educated. Her brothers were all teachers. It was expected that she would become a teacher or a nurse.

Similarly when Maria and her brothers and sisters were growing up there were high expectations of them and Maria did begin training as a nurse. But as it happened she fell in love - with a highly unsuitable, football-playing man-about - town, Gus Tholo.

In order to make her parents consent to the marriage she fell pregnant and that was, temporarily, the end of her education. She took a job as a domestic servant. It was the only way that husband and wife could find lodging together at that time.

It turned out that Gus settled down with the birth of his two daughters. He became a respected supervisor in a retail chain, earned excellent salary and like all the family became a staunch churchgoer. The change in Gus made Maria think again about improving herself. She joined a programme that would train her in working with pre-school children, and at the same time studied at a church high school towards her Matric. With that behind her she opened a small creche for the children of working mothers in a Gugulethu house near NY 108 where she was teaching at the time of the troubles.

Like Maria's parents, the Tholos stressed the importance of education to their children. Shelley, the elder daughter, who helped her mother in the creche, had her Matric and Nomsa, aged 12, was a pupil in Standard 4.

Midday in Adderley Street, Cape Town's central thoroughfare, is a polyglot mixture of faces and colours. At night when the streets are deserted the mixture has been sifted, filtered, centrifuged, each element into its own designated area according to racial group. The whites live in the suburbs fringing the mountain ranges, while the 'coloureds' - people of mixed racial origin - live in the sandy flatlands known as the Cape Flats. They are separated from one another by a highway, a railway or an open area. An Asian area is in the middle of 'coloured' land, and furthest away from the city centre are the three townships for Cape Town's black residents.

The three townships occupy about 1000 hectares. Langa, 'The Sun', was the first to be built. It was intended for the thousands of contract workers who spend 11 months out of every year as 'temporary' workers in the industries of the Cape, but it does contain accommodation for 1100 families in a separate area. Nyanga, 'The Moon', is technically outside Cape Town in a Divisional Council area, and provides accommodation for single me and for families, but in adjoining areas. It is more spread out than the other two developments and some houses are unattached. Gugulethu, 'Our Pride', is the newest of the townships and the most densely populated. This is where Maria Tholo lives.

Her house, like all the others, is part of an attached row, each one identical, or a mirror image of its neighbour, with a front garden.

The front door opens into a small room with three u rooms leading off it. The back door opens onto a yard, at the back of which is a flush toilet. The houses, which were designed in the fifties and never updated, are built without internal doors or ceilings. The floors are concrete and there is no electricity. All alterations and additions are made at the expense of the lessee who, in the Western Cape, may never own his or her house.

There is no provision in Cape Town for blacks who wish to own homes, nor is there any intention at present for introducing this. Those who earn higher wages than their neighbours remodel their rented houses with Spanish facades or modern ones, but have no more security than the family in the unchanged next door.

Streets are demarcated by number from NY 1 up to hundreds. There is street lighting and streets were originally tarred or concreted, but though teams of workmen are constantly busy, the potholes grow more numerous daily, even on the main NY 1 and NY 108.

When Guguletu was started in 1958 it was planned for 7 800 family dwellings and 2 750 single men, by far the highest proportion of family housing in Cape Town.

It was divided into three sections, each with administrations buildings and adjoining public facilities such as beerhalls, libraries and shopping centres. The administrative section contained the post office and rent office as well as an office to issue permits without which no non-black person could enter the township.

By 1970 the population was already 50 000. No new housing units had been built since 1966 and from 1970 to 1976 the population doubled ¹on doubled. 1 Even government departments, such as railways, were employing 300 per cent more black workers than in 1966. As a result all housing was hopelessly inadequate as were transport facilities, the less than ten public telephones, and such social facilities as there were, except perhaps the churches which were built by private funds.

In 1976 there were twenty churches, thirteen schools, two swimming pools, three community centres, sports fields, a civic open, two clinics and a day in Gugulethu. There were open spaces marked for future development, but even when private money was available, an endless bureaucratic maze had to be circumnavigated before anything could be done. The townships were expected to be self-supporting, mainly through the sale of liquor. The Administration Board operated beerhalls selling 'jabulani' or 'bantu beer' mainly to migrants. The Board also owned the only liquor stores selling 'European' beer, wines and spirits. The average monthly turnover from the eight bottle stores was R600 000. There were also three bar lounges and six beerhalls. The total profit from the beerhalls, said Mr. F. van Eeden who was in charge of liquor sales, went towards the building cf houses for blacks in the townships. Eighty percent of profit from the bottle stores and the bar lounges went to the BAAB for the development of sporting and other recreational facilities and for housing. The other twenty percent was used for homeland development. So far this had been used for hospital services. ²

Of the 31 schools in all three townships, catering for 32 875 pupils, there were four high schools, ten higher primary schools fourteen lower primary schools and three combined primary schools. There were 307 teachers for the 30936 pupils in primary schools and 60 for the 1939 pupils in high schools. ³A white child in the Cape had R496 spent on his education by the government per year; for a black child the figure was R28, 56. ('Coloured' R199, Asian - R141.) ⁴

The average age of black school children was much higher than that of white ones because they could only start school at eight and the schooling was one year longer. The earliest age at which they could matriculate was 20 or 21. Because of the lack of high school facilities in the Cape, many black children had to go to the homelands for their education. If they wished to further their education beyond Matric it could not be done in the Western Cape at all. And there were no government facilities to pay for the trans­port and boarding costs involved. The only government bursaries available stipulated that the child, after graduation, must work in the homeland for an equivalent number of years. Because the students were afraid that such a long absence from Cape Town might mean losing their rights to residence there, by 1976 not one bursary had been taken up. ⁵

The two major official - and social - groups in the townships were the townsmen, who qualified under Section 10 (1) of the Urban Bantu Laws to be permanent residents of Cape Town, and the migrant labourers who had permanently temporary status. The Tholo family were qualified residents. Migrant labourers could work in Cape Town on a yearly contract but had to return to the homeland between each contract. In practice, many firms paid for the same labourers to return on the next train in order to build up some kind of permanent labour force.

No new black labour could be employed without the permission from the Labour Department. Permission was only given employer could prove that no 'coloured' labour was avails-do the job. Unqualified blacks could be deported from the urban area if they were unemployed and not seeking work. A person could only become qualified if he or she had been born in Cape Town and to parents who both qualified under Section 10 (1) themselves, or if prior to 1966 he or she had been employed in the area for 25 years, or ten years with one employer. Permanent residence in Cape Town was a very precious thing, but even this did not offer complete security. All blacks living in the city had also to be registered as members of one or other homeland - the Tholos 'belonged' to the Ciskei - and on independence of that homeland they automatically lost their South African citizenship which, of course, they had never possessed in any full sense and became citizens of the new state.

Both migrants and residents could be stopped at will police and asked to produce evidence of legal presence in Cape Town. The document, known as a pass, contained details of employment, family, etc. and the necessary permission to be in the Cape. Failure to produce a pass when requested was a punishable offence. Failure to show legal residence meant arrest, a fine and the next train back to whatever homeland the person was assigned to or had come from.

Blacks brought up in town saw the new immigrant uncouth country cousins and very little social intercourse took place between them until the country men acquired township manners. Langa by Monica Wilson and Archie Mafeje describes the situation fully. Migrant workers were not allowed to have their wives and families with them, so the presence of a large number of so-called bachelors living in communal barracks within a family environment inevitably led to a great deal of tension. The residents associated the barracks with drinking and prostitution. The migrants, on their side, regarded the residents as undisciplined and lacking in traditional values such as recognition of age and family ties. The tension was particularly serious in Nyanga where bachelor and resident quarters were intermingled. Many migrants were the same age as the high school pupils, but traditional blacks of that age would have been married and working to support their families for some years.

These then were some of the conditions of life for blacks in the Western Cape when the school children started marching in Soweto. It should not have come as a surprise. As early as March 1976 Maria had described a new attitude in the schools, especially towards history. She had been talking to one of her school teacher friends, who had been trying to start a business venture that required white finance and had had difficulties in getting the support he needed.

'You know,' he had said, 'when somebody says to you, "You are black," you feel insulted and sort of inferior and you cower away. But then you say to yourself, "I am black," and you can see for yourself that it doesn't hurt and that it doesn't stop you thinking. The children know it too. When it comes to writing exams they get very angry and it's difficult to stop them intro­ducing their personal opinions into their papers. We try to tell them, just stick to your syllabus and keep away from being personal. The external examiner is not going to pass you on that.

'But I can understand them. We have to teach South African history as if it started in 1652 when Van Riebeeck arrived. Do you mean to tell me that Africa was lying dormant all that time? It's time we people started collecting our own kind of history. No body can know you better than yourself. Even in the development of this country nothing is said of the black hands that built these towering buildings and all that.

When you start reading those history books your blood curdles - to think of all the things that the Voortrekkers did to get the land they wanted. They had the guns and our people just h. assegais. The worst was in the Eastern Cape. If two people meet, both of whom are farmers, there are bound to be clashes. Yet all we read is how our people kept stealing the white man's cattle. What I'd like to know is how could those people have had all those cattle if they'd been on the move for years? Where did they get them from? That's the question that always comes up in class. And that's when you just start scrubbing off the blackboard.'

Also in March Maria had spoken of black consciousness for the first time. She described a speech she had absorbed that weekend at a meeting. 'His topic was black creativity as a means of liberation. Liberation did not have to be political only. It should be physical as well, creative and internal. He started speaking about this black consciousness that people are talking about. He said he the pleasure of watching the cow that he was going to arriving. It was on a truck and very restless. It gave the quite a struggle to get it off the truck and tied to a pole. Eventually they managed to tie it down but each time it tried to break loose.

'Now he was standing directly in the line of this cow. And he had thought to himself, "If that cow breaks loose it is going to come straight for me." But then he thought again, wants is to be free. It's not even looking at me. Why should I be afraid? When it breaks loose it is going to charge for freedom and have nothing to do with me - but if I am in its way, it is going to knock me down even if it has nothing against me.

"And this is the same thing with black consciousness. When people start saying 'I'm black', those who are standing in the way start feeling afraid that if this breaks loose it is going to knock down everybody. But it's not like that. The people just want to break loose from the thing that's holding them to the pole are not aiming at hurting anybody.

"Yet sometimes when a cow gets loose, it becomes very violent and starts to take it out even on innocent people who didn't mean any harm. So perhaps it is better to be given freedom than to break loose."

'After that speech I got really worried. I haven't been to meetings in a long time and I no longer know what people are thinking and feeling. When you hear such things even about school children - that people are beginning to wake up and don't' care who hears what they say, this is something very new. Before, no one dared.

From June 16 protest in the Cape centred around the University of the Western Cape, a 'coloured' university, although immediately after Soweto began to blaze there were two arson attempts on schools in Nyanga.

On June 26 the Post Office in Langa was the object of an abortive arson attack; there were odd incidents of stonethrowing along Sealers Way, and the rioting at Fort Hare University brought the local students home by the middle of July.

Concerted protest at U.W.C. started at the end students were becoming embarrassed at being the only black university not to actively show solidarity, so on July 29 they decided on a week-long boycott of classes scheduled to start August 2. Rector van der Ross, much to the disgust of the stu­dents, suspended classes to avoid trouble, and the white mem­bers of the faculty denounced the boycott.

On August 3 a U.W.C. student, Ben Louw, was detained by security police. Though police said it was not connected with the boycott, this was the trigger the students had been waiting for. 800 demonstrating students confronted a phalanx of riot vans on August 4. The vans had entered the campus without permission. Some students were arrested.

The following day petrol bombs destroyed the law and admini­stration buildings at U.W.C. and a pamphlet entitled 'U.W.C.-Soweto' was distributed, committing the students to the 'liberation of ourselves and our people.' On August 8 they were again demon­strating, this time outside the university gates along Modderdam Road.

This coincided with week-long disturbances throughout the country. On the Witwatersrand there were marches and stayaways. Confrontations with police led to a further six dead and 30 wounded. Two more people died in Alexandra township on August 9 and in Cape Town the riot squad showed up once again at U.W.C.

On the morning of August 11 the Cape Times published a toll of death and destruction that had occurred throughout the country since June 16. So far 184 people had been killed, 1195 injured and 1091 arrested; 67 bottlestores and beerhalls had been destroyed as well as 87 offices, 103 schools and more than 270 vehicles. By that evening the list would have to be completely rewritten with Cape Town itself as the center of the storm.

Throughout the nearly two months of relative calm in the Cape Maria had been preoccupied with her father and his illness. She was also worried about her older brother, Dan, a teacher at a Soweto school. Nothing had been heard of him since June 16 and rumours of teachers being beaten up by students and/or police were spreading. (He finally surfaced unharmed three years later.)

Like all her neighbours, as long as the troubles remained centred 1 000 miles away, Maria was inwardly thrilled by the action taken by the pupils. It meant things were happening that might be beneficial to all South African blacks in the long run. Visitors from Johannesburg were full of stories of students' daring and police violence. On the one hand Maria was grateful to be living in peace but on the other, she and all her friends were wondering at the lack of initiative of the students of Cape Town.

They needn't have worried. We join Maria on August 13, two days after the bubble burst.