South Africa’s Agony Is Personal, as Is Its Hope

For many years of my childhood, I harbored a virulent hatred of white people. At one point it nearly destroyed me. How I overcame it has led me to believe that despite how long black South Africans have suffered under the detestable yoke of white supremacy, if the Pretoria regime speedily dismantled apartheid and began genuine negotiations with legitimate black leaders over the future of South Africa, the deep wounds of enmity between blacks and whites could be healed.

I was born and raised in Alexandra, a one-square-mile ghetto north of Johannesburg, which was home for more than 100,000 people. Our shack was 15 by 15 feet, without running water or electricity. For much of my childhood I slept, along with my siblings, on cardboard under the kitchen table, for on the only twin bed in the house slept my mother, father and the latest infant sibling. The family shared a face cloth. Often we had no food and had to scavenge for white people’s leftovers at the garbage dump to stay alive.

Like countless other black children savagely robbed of their childhood and innocence by the realities of ghetto life--hunger, suffering, violence and death--I learned at a very early age to regard as mortal enemies and to hate those who were responsible for the laws that daily trampled my humanity into the dust: white people.

The nature of white people to a black child growing up in South Africa is narrowly and cruelly defined. Whites, under the Groups Areas Act, one of the cornerstones of apartheid, live in ivory towers away from the ghettos, and more than 90% of them go through a lifetime without seeing firsthand the inhuman conditions under which blacks must survive. So I formed my conception of the race from repeated and brutal encounters with those whites who enforced apartheid: the police, the authorities, the soldiers.

Throughout my childhood the mere sight of these enforcers of white prerogatives and whims filled me with terror and hate. They represented a sinister force capable of crushing me at will; of making my parents flee in the dead of night to escape arrest, or marching them naked out of bed because they did not have a permit allowing them to live as husband and wife under the same roof.

My father was denied the right to earn a living in his self-taught trade as a carpenter, forcing him to take occasional menial jobs. He was repeatedly arrested for the crime of being unemployed. His treatment by whites turned him into such a bitter man that, as he fiercely but vainly resisted the emasculation, his sense of humanity became twisted, and he began hurting people he loved the most. He abused his wife and children, he gambled to augment his $10-a-week pittance, and he drank heavily to forget the losses he had suffered and to drown the pain he always felt over his shameful deeds. Yet despite the unimaginable pain of his life, he never abandoned his family. His tormented life fueled my fear and hatred of white people to almost phobic proportions.

The movies shown at the one theater in the township justified and solidified this image of white terror and power. Their lurid descriptions of white violence were to me, in childhood, the reality of a world I was forbidden to enter without a permit. I saw them derail many black children, for whom education is inferior and not compulsory, into the dead-end life of violence and crime and prostitution. It was purely by accident that I did not end up a tsotsi (thug, mugger, gangster).

Until the age of 10 I refused to set foot in the white world. The turning point came when one day in my 11th year I accompanied my grandmother to her gardening job and met a white family that did not fit the stereotypes I had grown up with. Most blacks, exposed daily to virulent racism and dehumanized and embittered by it, do not believe that such whites exist. From this family I started receiving “illegal books” like “Treasure Island” and “David Copperfield.” These books were considered illegal because the government had stipulated that the education of a black child had to be tribal, and that such books only frustrated and embittered him by “showing him the green pastures of European society in which he was not allowed to graze.” At best, the government creators of Bantu Education argued, such books created “imitation whites.” But I persisted in reading these “illegal books,” for they gave me hope in a hopeless world, they showed me a different reality which strengthened my revolt against Bantu Education’s attempts to proscribe the limits of my aspirations and determine my place in South African life.

In 1973, at age 13, I stumbled across tennis, a sport so “white” most blacks thought me mad for believing that I could excel in it, for sports segregation was strictly enforced at the time, and the level of tennis and the facilities in the ghettos were pathetic. Desperate to improve my game, I dared the law and sought out white players who were open-minded enough to accept me as a human being and an equal. I found a few and we became steadfast friends.

Through tennis I gradually learned the important lesson that South Africa’s 5 million whites are not all racist. As I grew older and got to understand whites more--their fears, longings, hopes, ignorance and mistaken beliefs--and they mine--this lesson became the conviction that whites are in some ways victims of apartheid, too, and that it is the system, not they, that has to be destroyed.

When I first heard of Arthur Ashe in 1973, I immediately adopted him as a role model. As a successful tennis player, a denouncer of apartheid and, most important, as a black man who had triumphed against all odds, Ashe became a powerful inspiration; and his example challenged me to rise above my own suffering, pain, hatred and bitterness, to believe in myself and in my own capacity to succeed if I worked hard and never stopped trying, and to never, never allow a racist society to define my worth and the terms of my humanity.

Such an attitude enabled me to survive the nightmare into which my life was plunged by the Soweto rebellion of 1976. A tennis scholarship to an American college, arranged by the professional tennis player, Stan Smith, in 1978, became my passport to freedom.

During my sojourn in America I have learned, for the first time in my life, what it truly feels like to be a human being. I have had the precious opportunity to acquire an education, a formidable weapon with which to fight for my place in the sun; most important, America has taught me how to be a freedom fighter--with the written and spoken word.