Read Online Honorary White by E. R. Braithwaite - Free Book Online

Picnic grounds, a pleasantly green though unkempt oasis; a large football stadium where all the main outdoor social and athletic events, such as boxing matches, were held; a nursery school for children of working mothers; the empty Soweto High School. We pulled into the high school yard and I peeped into a classroom through a broken window. Row upon row of dusty wooden desks, the walls unrelieved by even a map. Gloomy.
    Our tour continued along roads now generally tar-surfaced and comfortably passable and we stopped at the only vocational school in Soweto. About two hundred youths annually, as many as the school can now accommodate, are selected out of more than a thousand who have passed a qualifying examination, and are taught the rudiments of electrical wiring, plumbing, bricklaying and masonry, and carpentry.
    The school’s principal was an Englishman long resident in South Africa, and, like most school principals, complained of the acute shortage of basic equipment, materials, and textbooks, in spite of which the youths were making extraordinary progress. I saw some of the models made by the students and some of their drawings, and they compared very favorably with work I’d seen by design students in well-equipped classrooms in London and New York. One student’s work was so outstanding that a visiting Swiss diplomat had given him a very expensive watch in encouragement.
    The Principal said that, given the opportunity and further training, the black students could excel in the building and other industries which are clamoring for skilled labor. Unfortunately, they are victimized by South Africa’s “job reservation” laws, by which all skilled and some semi-skilled jobs are reserved to Whites. A bricklayer, plasterer, or electrician must be white. The young black students, ambitious and enthusiastic while training, face a very frustrating future. They are likely to be employed as low-paid helpers to Whites less skilled than themselves and might even do the work without receiving the pay.
    The Principal told me that present building needs have forced some builders to let Blacks do skilled work, even at the risk of prosecution. Reflecting a booming economy, contractors are enjoying their busiest times and there is an acute shortage of skilled white labor. There are many Blacks on their payrolls fully capable of skilled work without supervision. To meet their pressing deadlines, the contractors put the Blacks on skilled jobs and keep legal representation readily available to deal with such prosecution and fines as are incurred. Legal fees and fines are prorated into each building estimate. The Principal hoped that, eventually, the job reservation laws would crumble under pressure from public need for housing and the industry’s need to expand.
    We now drove through the so-called elite section of the town. Most of the homes here were attractive bungalows surrounded by neatly trimmed lawns, with flowering shrubs and fruit trees. These were the homes of Soweto’s tiny “black bourgeois” community, the local doctor, dentist, grocer, gas-station operator, etc., all of whom had struggled and saved to rise above the depressing sameness. Each of them had begun by buying the government-built four-room square structure and added rooms to it as they could. They had had to install at their own expense running water, plumbing facilities, electricity, and whatever other household devices they could afford. All this on a flimsy lease which could be rescinded at the Government’s whim.
    Ironically, my guide spoke of the bungalows and their owners proudly, as if those people had been specially “allowed” to achieve that much, her voice crisp and objective as if she were speaking of cold, inanimate things, not insecure human beings who were forced to live in fear that one fine day the dreams they’d earned would be snatched away from them. I thought of myself, my own pride in