For much of the 20th century, the Chinese in South Africa inhabited a twilight zone on the color palette and political spectrum between White and Non-white. We were too small a demographic to form a voting bloc, too insignificant for the government to consider seriously, as a threat or as an ally. We stayed in the shadows because as the smallest, weakest kid on the playground, we survived by being everyone’s friend and not drawing attention to ourselves.
In 1948, the National Party came into power in South Africa and embarked on a single-minded journey towards racial purity. Pretoria was its administrative capital, and the epicenter of apartheid. As you travelled north-west beyond the city center, past the sewage treatment plant and the rubbish dump, the neighborhoods grew poorer and more run down until you reached the last outposts of whiteness. Beyond the blue-collar Afrikaner areas of Booysens and Daspoort lay the last blight on the city fathers’ master plan – and my first home – the mixed-race area known as Lady Selborne. After crossing the bridge over the Apies River, the streetlights ended abruptly, and the tarred roads became deeply furrowed dirt tracks.
I was born there in 1959, as the government of Hendrik Verwoerd was hitting its stride. It was a time when the Apartheid juggernaut was consolidating its power and ensuring White supremacy by enacting and enforcing a plethora of laws aimed at keeping the races separate. The Population Registration Act divided people up into a sliding scale of privilege with Europeans (white) at the top, Natives (black) at the bottom and Asiatics (Indian, Chinese) and Coloureds (mixed race) in between. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act ensured the purity of the White people, and the Immorality Act even banned sex between the races. The very idea of miscegenation was so abhorrent that even dancing between two people of different races—whether White with Black, or Indian with Coloured—was outlawed, since it would involve actually touching the skin of someone not of your own race. The ultimate expression and principal instrument of separate development was the Group Areas Act which put each race into its own little geographic box. The minister of sperate development declared that “Mixed suburbs are the deathbed of Europeans, so Blacks must move out.”
Of course, the white boxes were prettier than the black boxes and closer to cities and transportation routes. And the white boxes had basics necessities, like electricity and running water and flush toilets.
Inconveniently, for the White government, and tragically for everyone else, there were mixed areas where Blacks, Coloureds, Indians, Chinese and even a few Whites had lived together for generations. So, the state apparatus came with bulldozers, escorted by armed police, and razed the houses and shacks to create pristine, ethnically cleansed neighborhoods where everyone could live in perfect harmony – so long as it wasn’t with each other. The last and most famous of these inner-city shanty towns, or locations, as they were called, were District Six in Cape Town, Sophiatown in Johannesburg, and Lady Selborne in Pretoria.
Lady Selborne, named after Lady Beatrix Selborne, wife of a former British High Commissioner and Governor of the Transvaal, was an anomaly in the all-White capital city – a mixed race enclave housing 50 000 with a growing cluster of poor white Afrikaner neighborhoods on one side of it, and the Magaliesburg Mountains on the other. It was also a blight standing in the way of Pretoria’s western expansion.
My family lived at the north end of Lady Selborne, on the corner of La Fleur and Steven Street. The living area was a rambling warren of rooms behind the general store that my parents leased from a Black woman called Nooi (sister), across from the Indian achaar merchant, Abramjee, and next to the Coloured Malatji’s funeral parlor. In a truly Kafkaesque legal twist, Black people could hold title to property but were prohibited from trading. Chinese and Indians could obtain trading permits but were not allowed to own property. My father had moved here from Sophiatown after that location had been demolished, declared a White area and renamed Triomf (Triumph).
The roof over our store/house was made of corrugated zinc which leaked in new places every time it rained, which, in the summertime, was almost about every day. We would try to catch the water with a collection of buckets and containers, creating an obstacle course of brightly colored enamel pots that plinked and plunked in syncopation with the drumming on the roof. Even mild afternoon showers sounded like thunderstorms as fat raindrops crashed onto the roof and echoed throughout the house, especially in the storeroom which had no ceiling.
We shared the house with my grandmother, my aunt’s family and an unnamed dog. It was a mongrel of indeterminate breeding and the meanest, ugliest dog I have ever known, permanently tethered outside. It was blind in one eye, had chewed off most of the fur from its own tail and barked and snarled at the slightest provocation, even the change of wind. I never knew if it was mean because it was chained up all day, or if it was chained up all day because it would kill us if it ever got loose.
Like other township locations, plumbing was rudimentary and running water was limited to a cold-water tap. My grandmother would boil kettles of water on her coal stove and pour them into a galvanized zinc tub in the center of her bedroom to bathe me. The rest of the family would ching-chong-cha (Rock, paper scissors) to determine the order of the bath after the kids. The loser went last and had to wash in the grey soapy dregs. The houses in Lady Selborne had no indoor toilets, so we all had to use the outhouse during the day and chamber pots at night. For reasons which were never clear to me, the mad dog was chained up right next to the outhouse. The wall behind it abutting the street, was lined with shards from shattered bottles to discourage burglars. Whoever broke into our yard would have to literally crawl across broken glass, then face down a malevolent demon hound. The dog was clearly demented, driven insane I imagined, by the chain and the smell and the constant buzzing of flies. When we needed to go, we had to either sneak past when it was sleeping in its kennel, or else we had to give it a wide berth, shuffling to the crapper with our backs against the wall barely out of its reach, while the dog would bark itself into a frenzy, spinning and lunging against the chain and flinging spittle into the air. I suppose it was possible he was only excited to see us, but I never had the inclination to find out.
The toilet was an unlit room, the size of a narrow wardrobe. Inside it was a wooden bench with a hole in it, and a big bucket underneath accessible to the street for collection. In my worst nightmares, I would slip in the dark and tumble backwards into a barrel of shit. The stench was eye watering at the best of times and even worse in the summer.
Every trip to the john was like running an obstacle course — Take a deep breath. Hold. Run in and do your business – as fast as you can. No time for constipation, or even two wipes. Then burst out the door, leaving it banging violently, and letting your breath out with an explosive “Paah!” and setting the dog off all over again. Browsing comics while I did #2 was a luxury I only experienced once we moved to a house with flush toilets.
Every second or third night, usually after 10 pm, the collection truck came by, and sanitation workers covered in burlap sacks with holes cut out for their arms, would jump off, collect the metal drums with iron hooks, and empty them in the back. We called these workers Masamboengaan (township slang for Shit collector), but never to their faces. In fact, if you were out on the street when they came around you were not even supposed to look at them – not because we were too good for them, but to spare the feelings of the workers themselves who did not need reminding that they had the worst jobs in the world. My maternal grandfather, whose store was two blocks away next to Bakara, the Indian butcher, once made the mistake of calling out the masamboengan for being a day late. The next morning, he found that they had “accidentally” spilled a full bucket of shit right by his front door.
Local legend had it that one memorable night, the driver took a corner too quickly and the truck tipped over on its side, sending a full load of ripe sewage into the street. The location woke up the next day to a river of putrid sludge that took several days to clean up, and the stores all around the spill took a severe hit in business. The stench remained for weeks until the next heavy rains. The stain however, never quite faded.
Eventually, the Verwoerd Government came calling. Lady Selborne was annexed by the neighboring municipality of Hercules. The bulldozers arrived soon after, to evict landowners and tenants. They were accompanied by police and army units to make sure no one tried to stay behind. There was some initial resistance, including failed attempts at litigation, pleas for help, and even representations to the UN, which fell on deaf ears. Ultimately, there were no defiant protests as there were in Sophiatown, no singing of hymns or chanting of slogans, just sullen resignation as the last inhabitants were escorted from their homes and transported in repurposed waste- removal trucks to a dumping ground that they had neither heard of nor cared for. They moved the Indians to Laudium, the Coloureds to Eesterus, and the Black populace to randomly scattered areas such as Mamelodi, Vlakfontein, and Ga-Rankuwa; all of them as far from the city center as possible. Some of the ‘fortunate’ were moved into cramped one room cinder block houses, but many were simply given sheets of corrugated iron and left to build their own shacks on desolate plains with no streets or services. By 1973, the destruction of Lady Selborne was complete. They christened the newly White suburb Suiderberg and renamed the streets for Afrikaner victories in the Anglo-Boer war.
As for the Chinese, there were too few of us to put into our own Group Areas box, so they left us to our own devices. During the long eviction process, Lady Selborne became a ghost town and the business withered away as the former residents were forcibly removed. My parents found jobs in the city and left my grandmother to serve diehard remainders from behind a steel gate. Eventually though, even those stragglers disappeared, and the shopkeepers finally shuttered their stores. Most of the Chinese families moved into an adjacent suburb called Claremont, into houses from which Indians and Coloureds themselves had been evicted .
And there we remained, hidden in plain sight for the next few decades, as South Africa was transformed around us.