Moves to Township : White Pastor Joins Black ‘Real Africa’

The moving van’s journey from the white, middle-class Pretoria suburb of Meyer’s Park to this black ghetto township on the outskirts of the South African capital was less than three miles and took only a few minutes.

But for the Rev. Nico Smith, it was like emigrating, leaving the country of his birth and entering another, stepping out of his own world to discover a strange one.

Smith, the pastor of Mamelodi’s Dutch Reformed Church, and his wife, Ellen, a child psychiatrist, had just become the first whites to move into an urban black township with official permission since the South African government formally segregated residential areas in 1950.

Leaving Ancestral Home

“It was a very strange emotional experience, wrenching but exhilarating,” Smith said recently. “You realize that you are moving out of your father’s house where you were born and bred and where you have lived for 57 years and are moving out of a culture to which you belong into Africa, the real Africa.

“There was uncertainty, there was excitement, there was anxiety as we realized we were entering a totally different world. . . . We had worked here for 4 1/2 years and thought we knew it well, but without living here we were just visitors, day-trippers almost, from another country. It’s only now, by moving here, that I feel I have said farewell to apartheid.”

For Smith, the different sounds of a black township--dogs barking but no birds singing, heavy traffic already at 5 a.m. but an almost eerie stillness after 9 p.m., cocks crowing before dawn--have been vivid reminders of what he calls “our emigration” from white South Africa.

Neighbors in Bed Early

Lying awake in bed the first night in his new home, Smith suddenly thought how quiet densely populated Mamelodi was, much quieter than his old white suburban neighborhood. And then he realized that Mamelodi’s 300,000 residents go to bed early because so many of them rise at dawn to be at work across town by 7 a.m.

Later, he awoke to crowing roosters instead of the singing birds he was used to--and realized “how few trees there are here in which birds can nest” and that many black families still keep poultry in their small yards because supermarket prices for eggs and chickens are beyond their small incomes.

Even more than before, Smith said, he realizes how separate are the worlds of South Africa’s 25 million blacks and its white minority of 5 million.

“We whites have built a Western world at the southern tip of Africa,” Smith said. “If all this were quietly cut off, towed away and attached to Europe, few people would notice the difference. We think we have become Africans, but we haven’t. We are pretending. Until whites stop pretending and truly become part of Africa, we will not resolve our problems. . . .

“The terrible thing is that apartheid has worked! It has divided this country so completely into separate worlds that uniting them again is a Herculean task even when it only takes, as it did for us, a drive down the road.”

After only a week in Mamelodi, Smith says he finds himself “moving away, more and more, from the white world.”

“The news on the radio sounds like it is from another country,” he remarked. “The news of white South Africa might be that of Switzerland or Sweden, a place I’ve visited but don’t live. A few days ago, when I listened to President P.W. Botha on the radio for the first time in the township, he sounded more aggressive than I remember him being, and I was really frightened, in fact, that he was going to come kill the people. . . .

“Our perspective obviously began changing years ago, but moving into Mamelodi seems to have accelerated the process and really made us feel part of the people.”

Permission Took 2 Years

Smith and his wife decided to move to Mamelodi to be closer, physically and spiritually, to his congregation of nearly 500 families, but getting government permission took two years, and building their new house nearly as long.

Although the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches frequently assign white priests to black parishes, their bishops do not, as a matter of principle, seek government permission for the white clergy to live in the townships. The government, rather than risk embarrassing clashes with the churches, ignores such apparent violations of the 1950 Group Areas Act and other laws enforcing racial segregation.

“We decided to try to do it legally, with government permission, because we wanted that official acknowledgment that we were members of this community and entitled to be so,” Smith said, sitting amid the disorder of half-unpacked boxes and furniture not yet in place.

As a pastor, Smith felt that he could not remain in Meyer’s Park but had to move across the railroad tracks into Mamelodi to be true to his Christian faith.

Notes Christ’s Origins

“Christ as the son of God through the incarnation became part of the human race,” he said, “but he did not become flesh among the rulers or the upper class but as the son of a carpenter in Nazareth. . . . I tell whites that if Christ came today, he would be born somewhere in Mamelodi.”

The Smiths’ home was designed so that it would not overwhelm the township’s small, four-room, red-brick “matchbox” houses, yet give them enough room to live and work comfortably.

About a fourth the size of their Meyer’s Park home, it has an open-plan downstairs, where the lounge leads to Smith’s “study corner” and then to the dining room, across from a modern kitchen, and a small guest bedroom. Upstairs, under a geodesic dome modeled on the design of the American architect Buckminster Fuller, there is a bedroom and a study for Smith’s wife. The backyard is surrounded by a brick wall to give a bit of privacy, and in front there is the start of a modest lawn, rare in black townships.

“We decided we needed to get out of the Western concept of a house, and I thought that the dome, though it is very unusual for South Africa, was in the image of the round top of an African hut,” Smith said. “Remembering that sometimes there are 25, 28 or 30 persons living in the little matchboxes down the street, we felt we had to have the maximum space in something not so big.”

Helped by L.A. Church

The house was largely financed by foreign donations. Members of the Bel-Air Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles donated $20,000, or three-quarters of its cost.

“Our congregation could not do it--they are too poor,” Smith said. “White congregations that might have helped wouldn’t because they thought I was mad. Thank God the Americans understood and helped.”

Construction was complicated by the unusual design, by the continuing civil unrest and, most of all, by the maze of laws and regulations that govern almost every aspect of life in South Africa’s black townships.

“What a struggle we had,” Smith said, recounting battles over conflicting construction codes, zoning regulations and other rules meant for blacks that now applied to him as well. “When I describe all the permits I had to obtain and the laws I had to get around and the regulations I had to comply with, blacks really enjoy it. They say, ‘Now you’re really becoming a black man--that’s what we go through from birth to death.’ ”

Since moving into the new house, they have received a warm welcome from Mamelodi residents, Smith said.

“This is the South Africa they want to see--blacks and whites living together, getting to know and understand one another, helping each other--and perhaps we represent a bit of hope that it might be possible some day,” he added.

Renegades to Afrikaners

But the Smiths are regarded with considerable disdain, often disgust and sometimes suspicion by many South African whites, particularly other Afrikaners, who regard the couple as renegades.

“ ‘Aren’t you afraid?’ is the first question whites ask,” Smith said. “White fear is one of the great barriers to understanding and progress in this country, and the thought of living among blacks seems to arouse concern even with our liberal friends. . . .

“Fear of the unknown is always great, of course, and then the large number of blacks compared to whites is another factor. But over the past two years there has been an increasing realization by whites of the depth and the degree of black anger--some people are seeing they may well have reason to be afraid in the future. . . .”

Smith confessed that he was apprehensive the first day when he had to leave his wife at home alone until late in the evening while storing the rest of their furniture at a farmhouse outside Pretoria.

“I was very tense, thinking of my wife as the only white among 300,000 blacks,” he recalled, “but when I got home she was her normal relaxed self and I saw I had no need to worry.”

Lesson in Violence

A few days later, he got a lesson in township violence and crime.

“I had been visiting a neighbor and, coming out of his house, we saw two young men with long knives robbing a third right in front of us,” he said. “ ‘Let’s go help,’ I said, but my neighbor said, ‘Don’t go near those boys--they will kill you in an instant.’ Unfortunately, he was right, and I thought that, if only the police would deal with this sort of crime instead of driving up and down intimidating honest people, the community would be so grateful.”

The next question whites ask is simply, “Why?” Smith continued, “and the attitude behind it is, ‘Well, it is all right perhaps for a white clergyman to work among blacks and bring them the Gospel, but wanting to live among them is incomprehensible.’ The reason is that we whites don’t regard blacks as ‘our own people, our own kind.’ ”

When permission was granted for the Smiths to move to Mamelodi, it was doubly shocking because they are Afrikaners.

“I went from being an outcast to a traitor,” he said in an interview at the time. “To my people, what we wanted to do was unfathomable, and that it was a deliberate decision was unforgivable.”

Few Whites Know Town

While probably 75% of the white adults in Pretoria have been abroad, Smith said, “perhaps 1% have been to Mamelodi, and maybe 10% know where it is. And whites regard this as perfectly natural. That is what I mean when I say apartheid has succeeded in dividing us and making it seem normal.”

Most white South Africans, according to recent public opinion surveys, do regard their racially segregated “own residential areas” as essential, and oppose any reforms that would change present laws and bring integrated neighborhoods.

Addressing a recent meeting of his ruling National Party, President Botha reaffirmed his commitment to the basic principle of residential segregation while saying that the government might allow a few areas to become multiracial and permit wealthy blacks to move into upper-class white neighborhoods.

“You will have to get rid of me first before you get rid of this principle,” Botha said, describing segregated residential areas as a “cornerstone” of government policy.

To Smith, the repeal of the Group Areas Act and related laws is nearly as important as full political rights for blacks in ending apartheid and establishing “a just and democratic system” for the country.

Reforms Are ‘Real Changes’

“The changes up to now have not been real changes,” he said of Botha’s step-by-step reforms. “They are attempts to remove the abnormalities that the Nationalist government imposed in what it thought was a solution--a way to keep a tight grip on blacks. . . .

“When they removed the pass laws,” he said, referring to the repeal this year of legislation that required blacks to have government permits to enter urban areas, “I thought that was something, because they had caused so much misery to so many millions of people over the years.

“But then a black friend told me it was actually like a big bully grabbing your arm and twisting it behind your back and hurting you more and more until the pain seemed unbearable and then letting go and telling you to say, ‘Thank you, boss, thank you.’ ”

Such views have made Smith, a former missionary and theology professor, controversial for more than a decade, and he has become even more outspoken--some would say radical--as a result of the civil unrest of the last two years.

“If the government does not negotiate with the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress, there will be more and more trouble,” he warned. “The longer they wait, the more that human relationships will be damaged, and perhaps damaged to such an extent that it won’t be safe for a white person to live anywhere in South Africa.”

Black Frustration Growing

Smith, who is often the only white at the scene of confrontations with the police and army who is not in the security forces, says he has seen “frustration, anger and alienation” growing among blacks here and in the other ghetto townships around Pretoria, where political violence has frequently been intense over the last two years.

“Instead of developing the human relationships that we need to save us from a catastrophic conflict, we seem to be destroying them, almost deliberately,” he said.

Introduced at black funerals and political rallies as “Comrade Nico Smith,” the Calvinist minister has won the trust of even militant black youths, who have asked him to mediate with the police and government on occasion and who clearly regard him as part of “the struggle,” as they call their fight against apartheid.

But all this also brings intense police surveillance. Police and army patrols pass his house regularly. Daughters of a white colleague at the University of South Africa, where Smith is a part-time lecturer in theology, were picked up on a visit to Mamelodi and questioned for four hours about their relationship with him. A foreign television crew filming his move to Mamelodi was quickly told to leave. When Smith asked why, he was told, “Orders are orders.”

“You then understand the brutality and aggression that blacks experience day after day in this society,” he commented.

Smith hopes nevertheless that his house will become a “contact point” between blacks and whites.

“I hope my white friends, particularly the conservative ones, will come to visit and that they can meet my black friends here,” he said. “I want to be a bridge, if I can, and I hope I can, but many of the gulfs in this country appear to be getting wider and deeper.”