Dear John

It’s nearly 31 years since you and I had a “conversation” outside the Southern Cross Hotel in Dunedin – you possibly don’t remember me though as I was just one of the thousands of New Zealanders who talked to you in 1981 during the Springbok Tour, and 99% of us probably weren’t very complimentary. Now, all these years later, it’s time to put this right. If it’s good enough for South Africa to acknowledge the errors of its ways during the rather nasty Apartheid Era, then it’s good enough for me. You see, back in 1981 all I wanted was for the All Blacks and the provincial sides to be able to play rugby against the touring Springboks, without a bunch of lunatic weirdos (yourself included) interfering at every turn. Yes, sure, we had an idea that there were a few black people who didn’t get treated that well back home in South Africa, but the Boks were here to play sport man, and that was the key thing. And I’d been to South Africa the previous year (at the time, you’d never been) so I was right and you were wrong!

But in the last week or so, I’ve been back in South Africa, and what a transformation there has been in three decades. That’s the first thing – the country is completely different, and the difference is for the better overall. For the most part that is – there are some exceptions which I’ll explain shortly. The second thing is this: the South Africans have faced their country’s evil past and, with the clear assistance of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission, have been able to move forward in a positive, equal and generally inclusive way. In fact, New Zealanders no longer have any grounds to look sideways at South Africans when it comes to race relations because in many cases, we have some way to go yet.

And apart from the obvious manifestations of the change – for example no more “Whites/Non-Whites” toilets, beaches, public transport, footpaths, entrances to sportsgrounds; the previously unthinkable sight of black and white couples together in public places; poor white people/rich black people; to name just a few – we have had the opportunity in this last week to visit some places where the message was well and truly rammed home….the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, the Hector Pieterson Museum in Soweto, and Soweto itself. Soweto – “South West Township” – is no longer a township, it is a large city in its own right, with over 4 million inhabitants!

Within Soweto is one of the first exceptions – when we first drove in we travelled along very modern streets, with Audis and BMWs parked in the driveways of lovely homes surrounded by ‘normal South African’ security fencing amidst green manicured lawns….surely we had taken a wrong turn because this wasn’t the Soweto that we were expecting. But that’s because most of the city’s residents DO live in similar surroundings – for them, life since the 70s has improved a million fold. But within minutes, we had left the nicer part of town and were in more expected territory – the informal housing (read: “corrugated iron shacks, one tap per street, dusty alleyways, barbed wire fences”) which is still home to thousands upon thousands of black people who are on the list for a real house. Essentially illegal housing but a situation that is tolerated by the authorities because they have no magic wand to wave in order to solve the problem, not any time soon any way. So not everyone has made it yet….but in their own way, their shack is their home and they are very house proud, with as clean and tidy an environment as they can possible manage under the circumstances. And make it, eventually, they will – the government is building homes (with co-operation from the likes of the Nelson Mandela Foundation) as fast as possible, and when the people get to the top of the list they get their house free – no purchase price, no rent – as long as the house stays within the tenant’s family and is never sold. Even if the original tenant dies, the house remains free to the family.

While we are on exceptions, another thing that still needs improvement is the crime rate….overall I don’t think the problem is as drastic as it was in the bad old days but maybe that’s only partly because the need for crime to survive has lessened and maybe it’s partly because almost everyone now has full-on security at their homes in the form of alarms, electric gates, security fences, infra-red sensors, armed response call outs etc. But despite that, on our first night with Remo and Angeline at their fantastic home and stables on a lifestyle block halfway between Johannesburg and Pretoria, the power was cut at 2.30am because thieves stole about 3m of the copper wire from the power pole on the road outside the house (at no small risk to their own lives of course); and then two days later, Remo had his laptop stolen from the back seat of his car either whilst he was at traffic lights on his way to pick us up or shortly afterwards whilst we were in a shop (always physically check your remote locking has worked, because enterprising thieves in South Africa have worked out that to hold a button down on an ordinary TV-type remote while a car owner locks their car, cancels the “lock” command and actually leaves the car free to loot). And then, today, we discovered that some light fingered South African Airways baggage handler at either Victoria Falls or Johannesburg airports had helped themselves to two iPad/iPhone chargers from our bag when we flew back from Zimbabwe yesterday! The funny thing is that both plugs are NZ ones so now they need to nick an adapter as well – serves them right! But no wonder there’s still some paranoia about security!

Back to the main point though – visits to the two Museums certainly were sobering experiences. Firstly the Apartheid Museum in Jo’burg along with its current special exhibition “Mandela” was quite disturbing. In a nutshell, apartheid just was plain wrong and so unfair – it was something happening on another planet as far as most Kiwis were concerned, and we should have been more concerned. For people like me who hadn’t developed any kind of meaningful social conscience by 1981, we didn’t listen hard enough to you John and for that, I apologise. The way in which non-whites were treated was just appalling and should never have been allowed, not just from 1948 onwards when apartheid became official government policy, but neither from 1902 when the government then began its policies of segregation which is just apartheid by another name.

The list of injustices is way too long to detail here but why, in 1955, did the ANC and its allies feel it necessary to draw up a Freedom Charter (commemorated today in Freedom Square in the suburb of Kliptown in Soweto) with demands such as “All people shall be equal before the law”, “Living wages and shorter hours of work”, “Free and compulsory education, irrespective of colour, race or nationality”, “All national groups shall have equal rights” and so on. The driving force wasn’t so much to give blacks and coloureds better rights specifically, but in actual fact to give ALL South Africans EQUAL rights, regardless of colour. The irony is that the government of the day signed the charter in a patronising display of dishonesty and then of course promptly ignored every single clause, but some 40 years later, with the ANC in power and Nelson Mandela as President, many of the original Freedom Charter demands formed the basic clauses of the new South African constitution. How the wheels turn….

Lastly in this long winded epistle, a few words on Hector Pieterson who, when I met you in 1981 John, I must admit I’d never heard of. But whilst I guess we’d all heard of the 1976 Soweto Uprising (where school students at the time peacefully protested about a Government edict that all significant subjects would henceforth be taught in the relatively unfamiliar – and disliked in black circles – Afrikaans language rather than the English they were used to), I don’t think I recall having any great concern at the time that over 200 of the students and other innocent hangers-on, some as young as 7 years old, were killed by police gunfire on or shortly after 16 June 1976. Nor do I recall knowing that the killing of Hector, only 13 years old, became the symbol of the uprising which in its own right became the turning point of the anti-apartheid struggle (a point from which the white government’s hold on the people became less and less secure, leading eventually to the abandonment of apartheid some 15 or so years later). But Hector Pieterson DID make that difference, and his unwitting posthumous contribution to change in South Africa is now very appropriately commemorated in ‘his’ museum in Soweto, just a block down the street from where he was shot. It’s a place that we’re glad we’ve been to, although it could hardly be called a pleasant place, it’s a place where we learned an awful lot, and it’s a place that all pro-Tour people back in 1981 should now visit.

So, that’s it John Minto….31 years down the track I’m big enough to realise that I got it wrong way back then…..hopefully you’re big enough to accept my apology!

Cheers

Andrew Moffat

P.S. there’s a few photos of South Africa to be found here, as always, more to be added later