I visited South Africa during Apartheid AMA

Post Reply New Topic

Yes, Mengele was careful never to practice medicine again, He took on menial jobs to hide his identity.

What do you mean?

He and I both still have missionaries in the family.

Sorry, bad NT joke

No.

Its just a "bad" joke.

"Neurotypical" has nothing to do with it.

I'll have an anecdote, or confession, regarding my brief stay in Argentina i.e. Buenos Aires, which relates to recent discussion.

OK, as I have other things to do, this will be brief.

First, having seen both Israel and canonical Apartheid, I could point out a great many differences between the two, therefore popular claims that Israel is an "Apartheid State" don't resonate with me.

Some things that I didn't expect to see in South Africa:

So many poor whites. I had an image of white South Africans living an upper-middle-class existence with a full staff of servants. Although fairly low-income whites did apparently employ servants as nannies or cleaning women, their living standard wasn't necessarily all that luxurious, otherwise. But I really mean white beggars, who would always address me in Afrikaans. Something else worth mentioning was that, being an American visitor, no white person seemed to recognize that I was foreign let alone American unless they interacted with me. Compare to Europe where it sometimes seemed people could instantly spot Americans at a glance. Of course, I had no direct experience of how the poorest blacks led their lives.

There seemed surprisingly few public spaces from which non-whites were actually barred. One exception was the white section of the Johannesburg rail station. I think public parks had been reserved for whites earlier, but by the time I got there that had ended. You may have seen photos of benches bearing the notice "Whites Only". That was no longer a thing, however at bus stops there were benches that said "bus passengers only" however you had to be white to use those buses. Although in Johannesburg it didn't really seem many whites actually used the buses, despite there being a fair number in service (my memory isn't too clear on this). Non-whites could even walk onto the beaches in Durban. They couldn't swim or sunbathe there, but their physical presence wasn't prohibited. There were also situations in which the rules weren't clear. While I was paying for admission to the Transvaal Museum in Pretoria, I saw a couple black children come in and ask if they could see the Museum, and were let in. Another situation was a mini-amusement park in Durban. I saw a couple of black kids ask to be allowed to go on rides, and they were let in. I don't know whether or not rules were being broken.

I had had the impression that "white areas" in South Africa were "sundown towns". Not true. I saw almost all black people in Central Johannesburg at night. It did seem taboo for a non-white to do anything to threaten a white, so I quickly learned that being the only white person walking down a street was safe. The only time I ever experienced any sort of apparent racial hostility from a non-white was while riding a train, when a black man riding a passing train gave me a hostile look. I guess he felt safe to do so in that situation.

There were very few casual places where you could just walk into an establishment, get food, and sit down to eat it; or order food from a waiter. There were "nice" sit-down restaurants where white people might go for a night out. I happened to eat at one once (I will elaborate in a later post). The simple problem was, that a casual or fast-food place could only serve white people, or allow white people to sit there and eat, but anyone could buy take-away. So there were just take-aways. The two biggest fast food chains seemed to be KFC and Wimpy (oddly Israel was the same that way) and they were ALL take-away.

There was, however, the concept of "International" that applied primarily to hotels. Small hotels were white-only, but some larger hotels were "international" which essentially meant all races. The last night I spent in SA (in Johannesburg) was at such a hotel near the rail station. It also had a restaurant on the top floor where anyone could eat. I mean in Jim Crow Alabama you wouldn't have seen such a thing. Apartheid was really quite different from Jim Crow in a number of ways.

You would see black people walking along the road, apparently far from any place they could reasonably have come from, and far from any apparent place they could be going. I wonder if one would see that nowadays. You also almost never saw a black driving their own car, although it would seem some blacks did have cars. However you often saw a black driving a white passenger, in which case, the white passenger would be sitting in the front seat next to the driver, rather than in back as you'd expect. Very strange relationship between whites and blacks.

The public buses in Cape Town weren't segregated. Although most of the passengers were Coloured rather than black. I won't try to say more about Coloureds in this post.

On the way from the airport, I was surprised to see settlements in which the signs were all in Portuguese (in fact at first glance I mistook it for Spanish). In fact the people living there were white refugees from Angola and Mozambique. These places bore a strong resemblance to what I've seen on TV of Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. In a later post, I will try to give some reasons for thinking that Zionism is actually very different from Apartheid.

Another thing I remember from the initial ride from the airport was that the housing estates where the poor whites lived were all called "<Something> Mansions" e.g. if you were white and told someone you lived in "Kensington Mansions" you were admitting to being poor. Probably no whites in those places anymore.

That's actually a similarity to the Jim Crow era South. Until the 1960's or so, the South was generally quite poor.


As you said here, "no longer." Apparently you arrived during an era when Apartheid was already being loosened up, at least to some extent? In that case, you witnessed only a watered-down form of Apartheid, not Apartheid at its worst?

That's a reasonable conclusion, but as I recall, reporting from SA in those days seemed to want to show well-to-do whites, possibly as a way to lessen sympathy. It's true that many whites immigrated there from Europe at that time, hoping for a materially better life. Also that all the desirable jobs were reserved for whites, so you would expect a white person to usually have a job that paid well. I'll just say that you didn't hear much about poor whites in South Africa(*).


"Watered down" may be going too far. TBH the very "worst" of Apartheid was already in the past. They used to require all blacks (but not Coloureds) to have a "passbook" with them at all times, to be presented to police, with "endorsements" that showed they were authorized to be in a white area because they were endorsed by an employer. That policy had been abandoned. I'd say that was the big thing, otherwise they had been dispensing with a lot of "petty Apartheid" stuff such as not letting blacks into public parks. But the basic principles weren't compromised and life for black people was probably about as hard as ever.

(*) In general, the popular media in the US wasn't sympathetic to South Africa, i.e. the reporting in general was typically negative. Despite the fact that the US basically treated South Africa as an ally because their government was staunchly anti-Communist and anti-Soviet Bloc. This stands in contrast to Israel, which almost exclusively got good press. Now granted you could make a comparison between the two favoring Israel (or at least Israel at that time) but I think most people nowadays would see irony in that. The fact remains however, that at least some "Arabs" in Israel proper and even the West Bank were relatively well off, and could live more or less as they chose (so long as they did nothing to attract unfriendly attention from the Israelis) whereas all but a very few fortunate blacks were living in third-world level poverty in South Africa then. Although the ultimate irony is that the way forward in SA was evident at the time and Apartheid did eventually end, whereas the situation in the Middle East has become increasingly intractable. And I could go on.

You do know that while Apartheid was largely borrowed from the US Jim Crow laws, the application was different in South Africa for many reasons that did not apply to the US.

Firstly black/"coloured" and asian people collectively represent a majority in South Africa. You are suggesting surprise seeing them in Joburg at night, but they formed the backbone of the non-professional (unskilled/semiskilled) workforce (although Indian and Chinese did hold some professional positions). My uncle told me that in the daytime it was mainly the "upmarket" retail areas and commercial offices of JoBurg where white South Africans predominated. This makes sense since shopping malls were too expensive for the salaries of black people and offices made up of professionals were almost exclusively white.

But one area that matched Jim Crow (and perhaps worse than the US) was that South African police could demand any black, coloured or Asian person show their papers. Non-whites had no business being in white areas if their paper work was not certified (they risked jail). As a traveller you wouldn't see that tension on a train where every non-white knew they has to seek permission based on their work papers to enter Joburg. The police naturally used that power to terrorise black people.

Where apartheid strictly enforced travel was in white residential areas. These areas were not unlike today, were heavily fenced off and only residents could enter. But even here "non whites" with papers employed as gardeners, maids or cleaners were permitted to enter.

^
Yes. Max doesnt seem to grasp how the demographics were different from the American south.

By 1990 Blacks BY THEMSELVES were 76 percent of the South African population, while Whites were only 13 percent. The other groups Like "Asians" and "Cape Coloreds" (a racially mixed group that included individuals who were themselves racially mixed) were the remaining eleven percent. It was the African continent after all.

So of course the cities were full of Blacks at night. That was, and is, the bulk of the population.

in the Eighties that lopsided ratio (more than five to one) between Blacks and Whites prompted comic Robin Williams to quip "ever heard of Custer?"

Though that is interesting that there were poor Whites there even during Apartheid. You hear about Whites sinking into poverty today in the New SA. Not because they descriminated against but because they are no longer descriminated in favor of.

The South African, army, police force and special forces in the 1980s were one of the best trained and armed forces in the world behind Israel. They also had an alliance with the Zulu Inkhata Freedom Party. Despite the lopsided numbers, all Black south africans knew it was impossible to rise up without massive carnage.

The "poor whites" here are predominately from the Dutch/Boer speaking Afrikaans community. Many are forced to live in black townships where (remarkably) nobody bothers them. Interestingly they form their own collectives in these townships where there is a pseudo-defacto apartheid within the township itself.

Williams was addressing the South Africans...about the unsustainability of their situation ergo making fun of their folly. Not expressing worry FOR them.

My point was that you were right, but not right. Right that there was non white majority. But understated it. And didnt seem to grasp that Blacks by themselves (not Blacks and other nonwhites in aggragate) outnumbered White five to one.

"Here"?????

Do you live in South Africa?

I thought that you lived in Australia.

I mean't "here" as in the context of the discussion (not "geographically here")

At the time, I understood the demographics quite well. As an aside, though, after reading this, I tried to find out via Google what the white population of Johannesburg would have been at that time. This was one of those occasions on which Google failed to yield the exact data point I sought. If you happen to know, please share. Anyway, I would guess from what I saw at the time that there were probably several hundred thousand whites there.

The real issue was how I understood the Apartheid system to work, and I am reporting what I observed when I first got there, so I had no direct experience. But as I understand it, under Apartheid, blacks could only legally reside in a designated area, such as Soweto, or "homelands". Even to be in Soweto, they needed to have verifiable employment in a "white area" which was basically anywhere outside a homeland. At that time, South African cities didn't have "black neighborhoods". The designated areas were quite removed from Johannesburg. Soweto is almost 25 km away. To my understanding, almost any black one saw there lived in such a place. Some domestic servants probably lived with their employers. So at night (I don't really recall just when this was but probably no earlier than 21h00) there was no obvious reason for them to be there. They weren't working or shopping. They were basically just hanging around. They could have been awaiting transportation back to designated areas. There were buses that connected to the townships, although I saw no evidence they were waiting for buses (there were none in the area at the time). As this was probably not too far from the rail station, it's possible they were in the habit of hanging out there before boarding trains home (Soweto had regular rail service to Johannesburg then as now, in fact I think that was the primarily mode of public transportation for getting to and from, assuming passengers could afford the fare). That didn't occur to me at the time, but it's possible. It's also possible that, not being able to afford public transport, they just dossed most nights. That actually makes a lot of sense.

So when I mentioned the concept of a Sunset Town, not knowing how common that actually was in the pre-Civil Rights US South, I didn't mean that blacks literally had to run for the city limits at sundown, however it seemed likely that police might detain black men found in a white city at night with no obvious need to be there (from the white POV). So it surprised me to see them for that reason. It's possible that there was such a policy (to detain blacks in that situation) but that police just didn't put much effort into it.

Beginning in the 80s, blacks and other non-whites did start illicitly settling in white cities. I don't think that process had really begun when I was there, but it could have easily been happening without my knowing.

I don't see very much parallel between South Africa at that time, and the US South. In fact, there is a huge degree of difference. Living patterns in the South were very different. Blacks and whites lived in adjoining neighborhoods and sometimes were actual neighbors. In rural areas, blacks often farmed, either their own land or as sharecroppers. Their daily life was closely entwined with that of whites despite the strict segregation. A great deal of literature has been inspired by this situation, and it's my impression that if you didn't grow up under that system, you'll never fully understand the experience people had. Southern US society developed over generations. It wasn't a result of government policy like Apartheid, which was imposed from above by a small group of politicians. It wasn't really ingrained in the culture like Jim Crow, which is why it could fall apart so quickly in the 90s.