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

pass. That’s all the white man knows about Soweto. Busloads of white tourists drive through the township with somebody in the bus showing them how the Bantu live. Somebody white, from the Information Office. They say, ‘Look at the Bantu, how happy they are in Soweto. Look at them smile. Look at the happy children playing football. Look at the happy old men drinking Bantu beer.’ Guides!”
    He made the last word sound like an insult, speaking his mind, careless of any effect it might have on the now pale white woman. The Council Secretary nervously wet his lips from time to time as if preparing to intervene, but the old one seemed beyond caring, beyond fear. Perhaps, I thought, he has finally come to terms with himself, his life and his dignity, and has decided to make his stand.
    â€œYou want to see Soweto, come to us,” he told me. “Come as a brother.”
    I apologized for the impromptu visit, saying that my stay in Johannesburg was short and I’d taken advantage of the opportunity provided me to see his township. But he would not be pacified.
    â€œIf you want to know about us, make time. Don’t tell me you have too little time. You’re one of us, black like us. You do not need any White to tell you about us or show you how we live. We’ll make time to see you, talk with you. Let us know when you can come, but come. We need to meet our brothers from far away. You’ve come this far, don’t tell me you have no time.”
    I felt humbled and promised that I’d make the time to be with them. Somehow. He was good for me. I felt elated, and at the same time, reminded of my priorities.
    That was the end of my guided tour. On the way back to Johannesburg, my guide and I talked, but desultorily. She seemed to have lost much of her enthusiasm. At my hotel, there were telephone calls for me from a local newspaper, the Johannesburg Times, seeking an interview, and from a black poet I’d met. I returned the Times call and agreed to be interviewed, then called the poet and, in passing, mentioned that I’d just made a guided tour of Soweto. He laughed at the idea of the white guide and suggested that it was a deliberate ploy on the part of the Office of Information to keep me away from the inhabitants of Soweto. He himself offered to take me there or anywhere else so that I could really meet the people. I told him that I’d been warned not to go into a township without a permit, but he brushed that aside, asking who the hell would know the difference. I’d be a black man in a black township. “They say we all look alike, don’t they?” he laughed. I agreed to take the risk and go with him.
    * Cinemas.

Chapter      Four
    O N THE APPOINTED DAY, we met in front of the hotel and drove to Alexandra, six miles outside of the city in the opposite direction from Soweto. We drove through lovely suburbs of wide, clean streets and charming villas surrounded by neat lawns and carefully nurtured hedges and the ubiquitous blue-tinted swimming pool. All along the route were the separate bus stops for Blacks and Whites.
    My first impression of Alexandra was of a garbage dump. Everywhere the garbage was piled as if the inhabitants had long given up the struggle to remove it and just let it accumulate. Where Soweto had roads and drearily similar box-like houses, Alexandra had a jumble of narrow, garbage-clogged foot paths worn out of the naked earth by decades of footsteps, intersecting with shallow gullies which wound their way erratically here and there until they were lost in sudden overgrowths of weeds. What had once long ago been neat houses had deteriorated into dilapidated wrecks patched with tin, cardboard, or even strips of plastic, their squalor emphasized by the uglier little tin outhouses scattered around them. In the middle of all this, two buildings rose ten or twelve stories into the air, straight sided, red-bricked, and looking clinically