Blacks’ Story : S. Africa--Frail Hopes Turn to Rage

Sibido Molekane cannot remember when life was not hard--a “struggle,” as he says--but he can remember when he had hopes, ambitions, faith in the future.

“When I was at school 10 or 15 years ago, I used to put myself to sleep saying, ‘I’ll go to school, I’ll get a good job, I’ll make money, and our family will have a better life,’ ” Molekane, now 30, recalls.

“Oh, I had big, big ambitions. My life was going to be better, so much better than my father’s; and then I found out it wasn’t going to be, and couldn’t be, because of the system, because of apartheid.”

His father, Stephen, 64, smiles, sighs, shakes his head and sighs again, for he too has battled “the system,” as blacks call South Africa’s minority white government and its policy of apartheid--racial separation. The elder Molekane calculates that, over the years, he won a few victories, but in the end he found he could not beat the system.

“Seven children I’ve raised,” he says. “Each has had his hopes--one was to be a nurse, two were to be teachers, now one wants to be a social worker--but each has found how hard a struggle life is under this system and how little you can do, whatever your efforts.”

Gentleness, Good Humor

Still, Stephen Molekane, a milling machine operator in a Johannesburg furniture factory, is not a bitter man, though his sons say he has every right to be. Nor, as much as he wants to see apartheid ended and believes that blacks will have to fight to do so, is he a revolutionary. Even as he discusses a life of hardship and disappointment, his characteristic gentleness and good humor prevail.

‘Just a Father’

“I am just a father who has tried to give these children more than I had,” he said. “More than I had, but not as much as I wanted.”

The Molekane family is an ordinary one in Soweto, the sprawling black satellite city of almost 2 million people outside Johannesburg, and its struggle to survive is the story of the 14 million blacks who live in South Africa’s urban areas.

Frustration and Anger

“We have suffered a lot, but everyone suffers under apartheid,” said Stephen Molekane’s wife, Mary, 58, a strong and loving woman. “We have had great pain in this family because of the system, but probably not more than most. And among my children there is much frustration and anger, but today all young people seem determined to change this system, to overthrow it if necessary.”

With seven children and nine grandchildren, the Molekane family, an extended family in an African tradition that continues even as blacks move to urban areas, stretches across three generations now, and the experiences of its members sum up “the traps that all blacks find themselves in,” as Sibido Molekane put it.

“Look at us,” he said, “and you will see what our people want to be--and what happens to turn all those beautiful hopes and ambitions into the rage you see on the streets all around the country today.”

The oldest of the Molekane children is Johannes, 36, a truck driver, who is married to a schoolteacher and is the father of four. He dropped out of school after the eighth grade to help feed the family and finance his brothers’ and sisters’ education. Today, he fixes cars at night and reconditions scrapped auto parts to also support his mother-in-law, an invalid, and to put his wife’s two brothers through school.

Ellen, 32, fled the country “in anger and despair,” her mother says, after the 1976 uprising by black youths in Soweto and other urban ghettos to demand changes in the school system. She had finished high school, passing the difficult South African matriculation exam, and had become a medical clerk at Soweto’s Baragwanath Hospital, where she had hoped to study nursing. She has one child, her family has heard, but her whereabouts are uncertain and only rarely does word come from her by way of travelers.

Organizer for Union

Sibido, 30, who was christened Andries but prefers his African name, was in his final year of secondary school in 1976 but, because of the unrest, was not able to take the matriculation exam--the door to better-paying clerical and technical jobs, as well as to a university. He had wanted to be a teacher. Now an organizer for a small new retail employees union, he has worked as a photographic assistant, as a warehouse clerk, as an apprentice lithographer and in a laboratory making artificial stones for the saws used in mining. He has two children.

Ivy, 26, now married with two children, was going into her final year of high school when more unrest erupted and she was unable to finish and take the matriculation exam. She sells records at a branch of a large chain of bookstores.

Sidney, 24, who is known as Rapu, is a final-year student at the Soweto College of Education, preparing to become a teacher, but he was detained without charge at the end of July under the state of emergency proclaimed to curb the continuing unrest and remains in detention. He is president of the Soweto Youth Congress and was detained a year ago, also without charge, for more than three months.

Joseph, 21, a warehouseman at Baragwanath Hospital, hopes to become a truck driver, one of the best-paying jobs that blacks can get. He dropped out of school after the ninth grade.

Dreams of College

And Miriam, 18, a 10th-grade student, wants to go to college and become a social worker. However, she sees the continuing unrest, particularly among students, as threatening her chances to complete high school, pass the matriculation exam and gain admission to college.

“A person wants to do things for himself, for his family, his children, the whole community,” Sibido Molekane said, “but reality prevails over dreams. That’s true for everyone, everywhere. But our reality is so harsh, man, so harsh that dreams turn into nightmares.”

Neither Sibido nor Johannes has his own place to live. Sibido is separated from his wife, and he and his children live with the elder Molekanes. Johannes and his wife lodge with an elderly woman a mile and a half away, but their four children spend most of their time at the elder Molekanes’ home, where Johannes parks his car at night because the other neighborhood is too rough.

Squeezed in a Matchbox

At night, there are usually 12 or 13 people squeezed into the four-room, “matchbox” home, giving each person about two and a half square yards of space.

“We have bodies everywhere,” Mary Molekane said, laughing as she set about restoring order early one morning. “Some are on the floor, a few are curled up in the corners, a couple may even be in the kitchen. Real privilege in this house is sleeping in a proper bed.”

The long wait for government housing, and the cramped living conditions that result, constitute a major black grievance on which action is only starting.

Housing Costs Soar

“A house of your own--it can take a lifetime,” Johannes said.

“My firstborn is now 11,” he went on, “and we applied for a house two months after she was born. Of course, if you have 80,000 rand (about $32,000) you can build your own house now, but where does a truck driver get that kind of money?”

By Soweto standards, Johannes is not badly paid, taking home about $76 a week, but that and his wife’s small salary as a teacher must feed nine people. Sibido makes about $35 a week, Joseph $17 and their father, Stephen, who has worked for the same company for nearly 40 years, earns about $40 a week, including overtime.

The University of Port Elizabeth calculated in September that the subsistence level for a family of six in Soweto, the minimum on which they could survive, was $36.50 a week.

Inflation Climbing

The money goes quickly--food, rent, utilities, bus fares, gasoline for Johannes’ car, school fees, clothing for the children--and pay increases do not make up for inflation, now estimated at almost 20% a year.

“Hand to mouth, hand to mouth,” Johannes said. “A family budget is useless. It all goes the day I’m paid. I must kill myself to make a living that no one can call decent.”

With more brothers working, there is more money in the house--not a lot, but enough so they can joke about the times that were really hard for the family.

“When we were little, we used to sleep on burlap sacking on the floor,” Johannes recalled, “and in the winter it was so cold that we would wake up in the middle of the night and steal one another’s blanket. There was only one apiece.”

Cornmeal and Water

And Mary Molekane recalls the years when, for weeks on end, the family had only cornmeal and salt to eat and water to drink--and nothing but water on Thursday, the day before her husband was paid.

The only luxury the Molekanes allow themselves even now is the family lunch on Sunday afternoon when there is chicken, rice instead of cornmeal and half a dozen vegetables and salads that are missing from the table most of the week.

However, when Joseph turned 21 last month, he threw a big party that took a year of savings.

“I wanted to do it for Mama,” he said. “I wanted there to be once when the house was full of people with a lot to eat and drink. We had never had a big occasion like this at home. That’s how I wanted to celebrate my 21st birthday. It was for the family, not for me.”

Intense Bidding for Jobs

The work is hard, and competition for jobs has rarely been more intense, with urban black unemployment estimated at 20% to 35% in various parts of the country and with still more black men wanting to leave South Africa’s impoverished rural areas to earn whatever they can in the cities.

For his $40 a week, Stephen Molekane leaves at 5:20 each morning to catch the bus for Johannesburg, 10 miles away; he returns about 7 p.m. All day he mills pieces of wood for household furniture in an atmosphere that Sibido, who worked at the furniture factory for three weeks, describes as “worse than anything you have seen in the Industrial Revolution in Europe.”

“It’s unsafe, unhealthy, noisy, with the supervisor all the time demanding, ‘Work harder, work faster, work more,’ ” declared Sibido, now a fervent union man. “And if you say, ‘No, boss, no way,’ they just pay you off and bring in another poor black from a rural area who is desperate for a job and will work for a third of your wages. There may be some progressive companies in South Africa but, to most employers, black workers are disposable people. The bosses use them until they break, and then they get another off the street.”

Postwar Industry Boom

Stephen Molekane, a slightly built man with graying hair, came to Johannesburg in 1946 during the postwar industrial boom in the city from Bloemfontein, 250 miles to the southwest in the Orange Free State, where he had been working as a domestic gardener.

“The jobs were here, the money was here,” he said, recalling how he had quadrupled his pay from about $4 a month to $4 a week. “Men were coming into the cities by the thousands from all the rural areas in search of work; we had so little land and so many people. And with all the factories opening in Johannesburg, the best jobs were here if you could get one.”

Although he has been in Johannesburg nearly 40 years, working for the same company all that time and living in Soweto, Molekane is still not regarded by the government as a true resident here. As a Tswana, one of the largest of South Africa’s 10 black ethnic groups, he is considered to be a citizen of Bophuthatswana, a nominally independent tribal homeland that the Pretoria government created as part of the apartheid dream that all blacks could in time be resettled outside a totally white South Africa.

Government’s Funny Ideas

“Half the people in this house are considered to be Bophuthatswanans--I can’t even pronounce the word--and half of us are South Africans,” Sibido Molekane said. “And even those of us who are South Africans don’t necessarily have the right to live in Soweto, although we were born here and have never lived anywhere else. . . . You see, this government has the funny idea that we don’t belong here and some day we will go back where we belong.

“This is an insult that truly angers us. Not only do the Boers (Afrikaners descended from Dutch, French and German colonists) take our land from us and exploit us terribly and oppress us without mercy, but then they say we shouldn’t even be here--we should be in some funny place called Bophuthatswana.”

Four years after coming to Johannesburg, Stephen Molekane married Mary, whom he had met while she was working as a nanny for a white family in Bloemfontein, and in 1951 he brought her to Johannesburg. Working as a domestic servant in the homes of whites, she earned the equivalent of about $20 a month.

“I couldn’t work steadily because I kept having babies,” she said, “and my husband was very strict about not doing heavy work when I was pregnant. . . . Altogether, I had nine children--six boys and three girls, but two of the boys died when they were babies. What a family! What a family! Each child brings different joys, different problems. I love them all.”

A Place for a Stranger

As if their house were not full enough, the Molekanes recently took in a young man from Mary Molekane’s hometown of Thaba Nchu, near Bloemfontein. A friend of a friend, Mtupi Tsediso, turned up on the Molekanes’ doorstep with no place to stay and counting on traditional African hospitality. An organizer for the National Union of Mineworkers, the country’s biggest black labor union, Tsediso is also known in the neighborhood as “the Rasta” because of his membership in the Rastafarian cult.

“He’s just like one of my kids now,” Mary Molekane said. “I feed him and do his laundry and worry about him when the police come and get him in the middle of the night.”

When they first came to Johannesburg, the Molekanes lived in a small shack of tin, wood and burlap sacking in a Soweto shantytown. They were allocated their house, then just two rooms with unfinished brick walls, a dirt floor, metal doors and corrugated asbestos roofing, in 1955, when they had three children. A few years later, the other two rooms were added, and Molekane finished the house, plastering and painting the inside and cementing the outside with his children’s help. The toilet is in an outhouse in the backyard and the only water comes from a spigot there.

The four small rooms are crowded with furniture--chairs and tables, beds and wardrobes, a large coal-burning stove in the kitchen--with religious pictures, African scenes and a paper company’s calendar on the walls. The Molekanes’ wedding portrait, he in a dark suit and she in bridal white, stands on a buffet in the living room. A brown-and-green vase, a gift from Ellen, is on the table in the center of the room.

No TV, Refrigerator

Several years ago, the family bought a small stereo, but most of the music comes from a large radio-tape recorder. There is no refrigerator, no television.

“We have very little, almost nothing,” Stephen Molekane said, “and we will never have much more.”

Nonetheless, his steadfast devotion to his family has earned Molekane the deep respect as well as the love of his children.

“Unlike other families where the father has deserted when the going has been tough,” Sibido said, “he has always been here. And today they are still standing by us. For all this, we are grateful.”

House Was Firebombed

Because of the current civil strife, the Molekanes put long sheets of metal roofing in front of each window every evening to deflect tear-gas canisters and firebombs. Earlier this year, the house was attacked with firebombs made from gasoline-filled bottles with lighted wicks; no damage was done, but the family learned to take precautions. Asked who they believe was responsible for the attack, they replied, “The system.”

The attack was one of a series of such arson attempts on the homes of political activists in Soweto. Other families in the area complain that policemen and soldiers have been firing tear-gas grenades into houses randomly during the night.

“These times are bad,” Stephen Molekane said, remarking on the civil unrest of the past 15 months in which more than 850 people, most of them blacks, have been killed, largely by the police and army but about a third by other blacks. “There have been bad times before, but these are the worst.”

Twice Considered Leaving

Twice, the Molekanes considered leaving the turmoil of Soweto and returning to Bloemfontein, a quieter place, or even to the rural areas around Thaba Nchu. The first time was during the “Defiance Campaign” mounted in the early 1950s against laws restricting the migration of blacks to urban areas and requiring them to carry permits authorizing them to be there. The second time was in the midst of the 1976-77 Soweto uprising.

“We tried to think what would be best for the children, where could they get the best education,” Mary Molekane said. “Both times we decided to stay in Soweto, . . . but I wonder still whether we were right.”

For the Molekanes, the key to that elusive “better life” and to the changes they would like to see in South Africa has always been education.

Stephen Molekane started school at the age of 18 after he moved to Bloemfontein from the village where he grew up and worked as a herdsman.

“Fifty years ago, there were no schools for blacks in rural areas in the Orange Free State,” he said, “and there still aren’t too many now.”

Despite the late start, he finished eighth grade, a respectable level for blacks then. “I would have liked to have become a teacher, but there was no money for that.”

Sons Stay in School

Even when times have been hardest for the family and the temptation greatest to have his sons quit school and go to work, he has insisted that his children remain in school as long as possible.

“The problem is this Bantu (black) education system teaches children how to be stupid,” he said. “They teach them very little, they teach that badly, and when the kids fail, they throw them out. If this country is going to solve its problems, it must start with education.”

Ivy, who despite hours of additional study failed to win a place in the crowded matriculation class for what would have been her final year of high school, shares this same strong feeling about the importance of education.

“We are trying to give our kids a better future, just like our parents did for us,” she said. “We want them to have more than we have, and not just more materially but a better, fuller, happier life. We don’t want our kids to grow up the way we did. For all this, the children must get a good education.”

Problems Fundamental

The trouble is, as Sibido Molekane argues, “Education is not going to solve problems that are, fundamentally, economic and political; that is to say, a better education for us is not, of itself, going to bring apartheid to an end.”

He perhaps does not go as far as many militant black youths do now when they chant, “Liberation now, education later!” to justify their continuing school boycotts. However, he says, “It is a real problem--what you can do with your education, particularly Bantu education that teaches us to be good little blacks and little else.

“What kind of job can a black matric (graduate) get?” he said. “Jobs are hard to get, and so many positions are still closed to us--that is, reserved for whites--and advancement beyond entry level is so slow. I worked at companies where there were whites who were directors and general managers after 25 years, while the blacks they joined with were doing night security to avoid being pensioned off.

Salaries Unbalanced

“Will the black matric get the same pay as a white matric, half as much even? I used to get raises that were not even 10 cents an hour and saw the whites I worked with get increases that were nearly as large as my whole salary. And what can he (the black graduate) buy with the money he does get? Not a house in one of the northern suburbs (of Johannesburg, where wealthy whites live), not a lot of things that still are the privileges of whites only in this country.”

As he moved from job to job, weathering several long periods of unemployment over the last decade, Sibido Molekane became convinced that unionization was the only way that black workers would advance.

“I don’t subscribe to a particular ideology--I look at practical problems,” he said. “My experience is that either you become a union member and fight or you become an impimpi (collaborator) and sell out.”

‘Logic of Experience’

Such “logic of experience,” as Rapu Molekane put it during a discussion with several foreign journalists earlier this year after he was released from another period of detention without trial, “makes activists out of ordinary men.”

“The conviction is widespread among blacks now that apartheid cannot be tolerated any longer, that this system must be brought to an end,” he said, as fellow activists from the Soweto Youth Congress nodded in agreement.

“The day has passed when we could more or less shrug things off because we believed that our lives were going to get better. We recognize they have not improved very much--we think they are getting worse, in fact--and can never improve very much under this system.”

Concerns for Family

Stephen Molekane does not disagree with those sentiments, but the militancy of his three activist children--Sibido the union organizer, Rapu the youth leader and Ellen the exile--concerns him, “worries him sick,” as his wife put it, and “makes him scared for the whole family.”

Her family is “not really so political,” said Mary Molekane, “just average, like any Soweto family. But I think that they have seen they couldn’t change the little things, so they decided to change the big ones. They grew up struggling, trying to make ends meet, going hungry, doing without so many things, and now they want to make sure that their kids have it better. They all feel that way.

“However, these two, Ellen and Rapu, they were my best kids. These were the kids I trusted the most, they are the two who learned the most, these were the ones I had the most hope in,” she said, her voice cracking with emotion and tears rolling down her cheeks.

“Oh, I loved Ellen so much, my first daughter, and she loved me. And Rapu, always so generous. He never cared about money--if he had sixpence he would come and share it. And they have both done the same thing. . . . Now where do I put my hopes? All I can do is ask God to be with my children wherever they are and keep them safe.”

Lawsuit Dismissed

Rapu Molekane can be held indefinitely without charge and in solitary confinement under the emergency regulations. A lawsuit brought against the government by the Molekanes, the families of other detainees and former political prisoners to prevent the police from torturing those currently held was dismissed recently by a judge who saw no need for urgent court action.

Little is known of Ellen, gone more than eight years now. She reportedly works with women’s groups affiliated with the outlawed African National Congress in Zambia or Tanzania, and some of the South African delegates to the recent international women’s congress met her in Nairobi, Kenya.

“One child has left, one is in prison, and this makes one feel terrible,” Stephen Molekane said. “Mama and I grieve each day, every day. . . . But I tried to raise them to live honestly and without fear.

“It is the situation, their lives, that makes them so angry,” he continued. “They want change, and they want to hurry it up. I don’t blame them, but I don’t know if they will succeed.

“We will never have liberation given to us. The whites own so much they will never give any of it up. We won’t get the smallest piece given to us willingly. We will have to fight for everything, and I am afraid there will be bloodshed that neither we nor the whites want. As a father, that grieves me. It truly grieves me.”