After World War II, Neil Alcock started with some reluctance to farm on his own. He already hated the system, and he searched from the start for ways to alleviate its worst excesses. He started to grow and distribute vegetables, and he gave lectures in his flawless Zulu about the value of a balanced diet in preventing malnutrition and tuberculosis. He began to “turn my serfs into partners” by transferring livestock and lands to them. He spread his budding ideas on agricultural reform by helping to establish a national agency called Kupugani. Neil Alcock, like many people who work eJose to the land, has religious feelings. But he was finding himself increasingly in opposition to some representatives of organized religion. “Some of the priests and parsons were more concerned with saving souls than lives,” he said, with savage bewilderment. “One of those chaps said to me, ‘The way to heaven is through suffering—and you are trying to deprive the Africans of suffering!’ ” The Numzaan carried his renunciation further. He sold his family estate and started the Church Agricultural Project in the Dundee district in northern Natal. The project became a successful cattle cooperative. Alcock explained he was trying “to make serfs into individuals.” He went on, “I had learned you can’t lead from the house on the hill. You have to try to live as nearly identical to the others as possible.” He naturally found that the old ways of interacting did not disappear. “They have dependence snatched out from under them, and they find it hard to react sometimes,” he said. He insists the other people at Mdukatshani call him Numzaan, which means “householder,” rather than baas. They of course observe his request, but many of them infuse the new word with the same old mixture of awe, respect, and deference. In'the end, the Dundee agricultural project was doomed by its location. It was surrounded by “black spots”—scattered fragments of land owned by blacks outside the borders of the ten Bantustans. Enterprising black small farmers had purchased these areas, in some cases generations ago, but they were not consistent with the regime’s grand apartheid design. So the government gave itself the power to abrogate the property rights of the “black spot” residents and to move them, by force if necessary, into the Bantustans. This policy, under which three and one-half million people have been forced to move since 1960, is officially called resettlement—a word with a misleadingly pleasant ring to it. Neil Alcock’s oldest son is nicknamed “GG,” after the Government Garage vehicles that arrived around the time of his birth to obliterate the spots. Most of the people who had participated in the Dundee project faced deportation into the Kwa-Zulu Bantustan. The Numzaan encouraged his friend Cosmas Desmond, a brave Catholic priest, to travel through rural South Africa gathering material for The Discarded People, the first systematic expose of resettlement. Then Alcock and his fifty-member entourage searched for a new place to continue their agricultural program. By now, his chief lieutenant was a towering Swazi-speaking man called Robert, whom he had found in a village bound to a tree with barbed wire. “Robert’s neighbors feared his destructive outbreaks,” the Numzaan explained. “I discovered he was suffering from pellagra dementia. On a proper diet, he started to recover immediately.” The band chose the Msinga District partly because it was the worst agricultural region any of them had ever seen. They wanted to experiment, to see if they could develop a pilot project that could indicate how to start resuscitating the whole area. Also, the Numzaan probably wanted to carry his renunciation of privilege yet another step. Mdukatshani suited their purposes; it was sufficiently rundown, and it was just across the Tugela from the Bantustan. The cooperative tried to continue raising cattle, but the people in the area rustled nearly all the animals right away. Alcock explained: “They saw us arrive—a group of what were to them rich blacks and whites. They saw no harm in robbing us.” The experimenters then turned to large-scale gardening. They fashioned an ingenious mechanical water wheel from an old tractor tire, used it to lift water from the Tugela, and irrigated extensively. They devised a simple grinder to chop up the acacia thornbush into a nutritious feed fortheir remaining livestock. The Numzaan said approvingly, “A curse, the acacia, becomes a valuable resource.” They started using wastes to create methane gas, which they used as fuel in place of the rapidly dwindling supplies of wood. They disseminated their ideas by encouraging their neighbors to form similar cooperatives. Neil Alcock’s ultimate goal was neartotal self-sufficiency for Mdukatshani. It was an objective in keeping with his highly apocalyptic vision, his conviction that worldwide ecological catastrophe was very near. He believed the city was doomed, that mankind had to re-create the village, and he could be blunt, even cantankerous, with people who did not share his view. Whatever the accuracy of his prophecy on a planetary scale, it was clearly compelling in the Msinga District. There, the ravaged hillsides were evidence enough that ecological collapse was well underway. INZIboma Dladla is fourteen years old and the closest friend of the Numzaan’s two tow-headed youths. They roam through the scrubby brush together, trapping rabbits in snares, flicking berries at each other with switches, arguing whether a baboon or a monkey is supe “Penicillin is a mold that is found in things like cow dung. Those witchdoctors... their knowledge is so great in a certain sphere that we just don’t come near it.” rior in battle, playing makeshift guitars made from empty oil cans. Mboma, wearing his insouciant purple athletic jacket, agreed to guide me around the farm one morning after he had established that Iwas not an iBhunu, or Boer. “They take all the money, so we are poor,” he explained. He guided me down toward the river, where he introduced me to two old men who were chopping wood. He specified immediately I was not an iBhunu. Some words were exchanged in Zulu. “They say it is good you are not iBhunu," Mboma translated. “They say the maBhunu are horrible. They say the maBhunu carry guns everywhere, call them kaffirs, and make them work for a low pay.” Mboma showed me some of the large garden plots, which were scattered about on the steep cliffs overlooking the river. Carrots, cabbages, onions, lemon trees, and more were growing in neat terraces. Almost all the work was done by hand, including irrigating, fertilizing the fragile, weakened topsoil, and extending the terraces further into the forbidding bush. There was an almost Asian sense of bustling activity as women, children, and old men moved about. Mboma commented: “The maBhunu around here don’t like these gardens because we no more have to work for them.” He himself, in the time before Mdukatshani, had spent a year working at a nearby white orange grove. He had been ten years old. He lived the entire week in a barracks with other children, returning to his own home only on Sunday. A bell woke the children at six; they continued until six in the evening, stopping only for meals. He had earned twelve rand each month. The work was “horrible,” he said. The maBhunu had driven motorbikes up and down the orange grove, stiking out at the children if they slackened in their work. Mboma imitated hitting and kicking gestures. Back at home, Mboma herded cattle together with his disabled uncle. Both his parents were up in Joburg [Johannesburg] on migrant labor contracts; he has never been able to live with them. Even under normal circumstances, herding is not a particularly easy task for a small boy, who must know how to place thrown stones with the precision of an artillery commander to get the herd of beasts to move in the desired direction. In Msinga, though, stock thieves, armed with guns and driven by desperation, robbed Mboma and his helpless uncle repeatedly. The worsening conditions in Msinga District made their lives difficult in other ways. The white farmers no longer needed as many farmworkers, so they simply ordered the surplus people into the Kwa-Zulu Bantustan. The police came and burned down his family’s huts to force them to move across the river. At his new home he had to walk two hours each way to school-. But after a year he had to drop out. The increasing overcrowding in the Bantustan has contributed to the scourge of Msinga: bloody fighting between different clans over what are often initially trivial incidents. In one case, Mboma said a battle started when one clan member spat into the pot of beer of another clan member. Over the years, hundreds of people have died, including Mboma’s great-grandfather. Hunger in the district grew worse. Mboma and the other children took to swimming back across the Tugela, to steal food on the white side. They skulked about, on the lookout for the white farmers who were often armed, tied ears of maize to their arms and legs, and swam back. One farmer even shifted to cotton to end his theft problem. But the extra food was not enough. Mboma fell ill. His hair started to turn red, and he had sores on his ears. He spent a week in a Joburg hospital, under treatment for malnutrition. He said he didn't like the city; he was awed by the tall buildings and afraid he would encounter dreaded tsotsis [“thugs,” derived from “zoot-suiters”]. The arrival of the Numzaan and the rest of his entourage was close to a miracle for Mboma Dladla. He earned a small but secure income looking after,the project’s two horses; he was learning English; he was even collaborating in an effort to turn his “life story” into a short book for children (which indeed appeared later). On the last page, he said: “I was asked what I want to be when I am big. It is difficult to talk about the future. All I can say is that I want to be a MAN.” In official terms, Mboma Dladla’s manhood will begin on his sixteenth birthday. He will then be required to register for his pass. (In one indication of the quality of life in Msinga, one youth was initially refused his pass because the fringes on his fingertips were too worn to yield adequate prints.) Mboma’s pass will brand him, forever, as a resident of one of the Bantustans. He will never have the right to settle permanently in Johannesburg, Durban, or anywhere else in “white South Africa.” If he is lucky, he may be able during times of economic boom to join the stream of migrant laborers. He will live, like his father before him, in a hostel. He will return home only at Christmas. HEROES UNDERGROUND T hree billion years ago, a vast in- JL land sea surrounded by rugged mountains covered parts of the Transvaal and the Free State. Over the eons, storms lashed at the landscape, breaking flakes of gold loose. Streams and rivers carried the particles down to the edge of the sea, where they sank to the bottom. The world’s most valuable goldfields follow a three-hundred-mile arc along the rim of the ancient, long-dead sea, from Evander on the East Rand, up through Johannesburg, then curving down toward Welkom and Virginia. The yellow metal built South Africa, and remains the backbone of its economy. Gold sales still account for roughly one-third of export earnings, even more when the world price is high. There are fifty or so working mines, controlled by seven gigantic mining houses. The gold industry is South Africa’s major employer, with 575,000 workers, all but 40,000 of whom are black. Each year, South Africa mines about half of the world’s gold. Klerksdorp is a small town in the western Transvaal that is situated on the edge of the prehistoric sea. Outside the town is the Hartebeestfontein gold mine, known simply as Harties. Aboveground, it seems insignificant: a small group of shedlike structures surrounded by heaps of whitish debris, and two towers, each less than one hundred feet high. There is nothing to suggest that the green wheels atop the towers lower elevator cages more than one and one-half miles down into the earth, into a vast underground city that employs twenty thousand people and uses 1,600 large scraper units, 225 small locomotives, 109 mechanical loaders, 1,800 hoppers, and 1,487 deafening rock drills. The Chamber of Mines, the coordinating body for the industry, sponsors guided tours of certain mines—partly to respond to public curiosity and partly to present its controversial labor policies in the best possible light. At Harties, we began the tour with a trip underground. The visitors—all of us were white—donned protective clothing, hard hats, and lamps. Elevator cages, clanking in the rush of air, relayed us down through the darkness to one of the working levels. The descent only took a few minutes. A series of guides, all of them white mining officials, directed us through the dimly lit tunnels to one of the “work-places,” where the “reef,” or gold ore, was barely visible as a thin, jagged line, faintly brownish. The Chamber’s publicists have produced a vivid and often quoted description: “Imagine a solid mass of rock tilted . . . like a fat, 1,200-page dictionary, lying at an angle. The gold-bearing reef would be thinner than a single page, and the amount of gold contained therein would hardly cover a couple of commas in the entire book. . . . The ‘page’ has been twisted and torn by nature’s forces, and pieces of ’it may have been thrust between other leaves of the book.” The miners, working miles underground, have to trace the elusive reef and remove it with close to surgical precision. Our guide indicated a workplace where several black miners were drilling deep holes next to the reef, following markings in red paint. The workplace was low, which forced the miners to lie flat on their backs, aiming the drill slightly upward. They were impassive despite the ferocious noise. The guide reassured us that the drill was not particularly taxing to operate. The guide explained that later a white miner, who had a “blasting ticket,” a certificate that only whites are allowed to earn, would fill the holes with explosive charges. The mine would be cleared, and blasting would start at the deepest working level and continue upward. Then, more black miners would shovel the bro- ken-up reef into a linked network of mechanical scrapers and narrow-gauge railroad hoppers. It would then be transported to one of the elevator shafts to be hoisted to the extraction plant on the surface. The gold content is surprisingly low; one metric ton of ore yields only eleven to twelve grams, or just over four tenths of an ounce. As the supervisor guided us through the network of tunnels, groups of black miners, wearing hard hats with headlamps, white overalls, and heavy boots, glanced sideways impassively. Their faces glistened in the faint light from the naked bulbs. The supervisor arrived at two pressure doors, which were part of the ventilation system that keeps air circulating through the mine. “Vula," he grunted at the black doorkeeper, speaking in Fanakalo, the pidgin language of mining. “Open.” The door hissed slowly, emitting a strong gust of wind. Our touring party passed through. “ Vala." It started to close. The doorkeeper turned, revealing that he had stencilled across the back of his white overalls: “Vula- Vaia.” Back on the surface, we visited the training school, which was under the aegis of de Villiers, a middle-aged man who talked almost as rapidly as an auctioneer. “First, I teach all the new men Fanakalo,” he said. “They come from all over southern Africa. They are Mozam- biques, Rhodesians, there are all the ethnic groups of our own Republic people. 26 Clinton St. Quarterly
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