In June of 1992, it was another dead body that drew me to Soweto’s Meadowlands Zone One suburb. But it was through covering the death of what was, at first, just another anonymous tragedy that I came to know a family that would symbolize ordinary black people’s struggle for liberation. I first met Sandy ‘Tarzan’ Rapoo, his wife, Maki, and his father, Boytjie, on the night of Johannes Rapoo’s death. They were in pyjamas in their kitchen when I cautiously entered their house on Bakwena Street. Tarzan was a powerfully built man with a shaven head and an eight-inch scar running up the side of his face and skull. That night, his dark eyes were unblinking and frightening. In the yellow light of the single bulb, I saw the family as hard, uncompromising and angry people. Tarzan’s nephew, Johannes, had been killed by police earlier that day, an unprovoked and pointless death that was symptomatic of the time.
Johannes and some neighbourhood friends had been pushing a wheelbarrow containing a car-engine when they were confronted by the police. They ran away. The police opened fire from inside their armoured vehicle. Johannes died on the way to hospital. The police claimed he was stealing the engine. Later, it was discovered that the engine was not stolen at all. Nobody knew why Johannes ran from the police, other than an all-too-common fear of arbitrary arrest or abuse.
I did not yet know the bitter memories that news of a death in that kitchen evoked. Nor did I yet know the easy laughter and generosity
that lay behind those masks of anger. As I returned to cover the funeral of Johannes and other incidents of violence in their conflict-wracked area, I would slowly develop a friendship with the Rapoo family.
Most relationships that I had with black people were either with those my own age that I could relate to, or with people that I met in a very limited, specific way - who could put me in a frame in their minds, and me them, so that any extraordinary behaviour could be ignored or accommodated. I met a lot of people as a journalist, most of them black, and got to know many beyond the usual superficial requirements of the work - but there was always a gulf that was difficult to cross. The cultural differences between a white boy from the suburbs and someone brought up in a township were massive. We shared no common linguistic shorthand - we even spoke different dialects of English. Key or code words they took for granted had to be spelled out to me. If they told me something, I was not sure that I understood the full context of it; and vice versa. But the Rapoos were patient of my ignorance, and with a lot of laughing and teasing they helped me to learn about what was important in their lives. Despite the success of apartheid’s social engineering, we were to become close friends.
More than a year after Johannes’s death, I was visiting his family. It was a quiet afternoon, people were out enjoying the sunshine, chatting with neighbours, children laughing and shrieking as they skipped rope and played tag with a plastic ball. A bearded black man wearing a blue cotton workman’s jacket appeared at the end of the street. He had a quick, uneven gait and his right arm swung stiffly as he moved. He made his way unnoticed into the middle of the street. The first loud bang sent people scurrying off the street. I pressed myself against a garden wall and looked up-I watched the man calmly fire a large revolver into the street where parents screamed for their children in the panic. More shots rang out, but no one was hit. Then the street’s self-defence unit boys began hurling rocks, bottles and curses at him. The bearded man turned and lurched swiftly down the street towards the open veld beyond the last houses. The boys, none older than 18, took off after him, armed with a pitiful assortment of weapons - an axe, a
knife and a kwash-a home-made zip-gun of metal pipes, pins and tightly pulled red rubber that could only fire one round at a time.
As we ran, the man kept turning and waiting, taunting the boys to come closer. They told me that he was a notorious Inkatha gunman from the neighbouring hostel, known as ‘Pegleg’ because of a disability that gave him the unusual gait, but he was deceptively fast and my chest was burning from the effort of keeping up with the chase.
The boys failed to catch Pegleg and we returned to a street disturbed and fearful after an incident that exposed the residents’ vulnerability to random violence. The area was protected by youths and ANC comrades who relied on a few shared guns to defend the neighbourhood, though on occasion well-armed self-defence units from other areas would come in to help launch attacks on the hostel. Later that day, I wanted to take pictures of the looted and burnt houses along the street that ran between the brown brick hostel buildings and the neighbourhood the Rapoos lived in. The street was the front-line between Zone One and the Meadowlands Hostel, one of the eight Soweto hostels that had become Inkatha fortresses. On seeing me preparing to drive down that eerie road in the dead zone, a neighbourhood man burst out laughing and leaned into my open car window: ‘If you take that road, you will never come back; it’s a shortcut to Heaven!’
Over time, I learned of the Rapoo family history. Boytjie, the patriarch of the family, sitting in his customary place on a weathered log in the shade cast by a pair of gnarled peach trees, would watch the neighbourhood go about its business. There, under the fruit trees, he told me how the Rapoos had come to Soweto. Boytjie was born Tshoena Reginald Rapoo in 1920, but the white girls he used to play with called him ‘Boytjie’ and the name stuck. The young Boytjie, unlike his own children and grandchildren, played childhood games with whites because he lived in Johannesburg, then a young city that had areas that were racially mixed. But that was before the government trucks and bulldozers made Johannesburg white.
Boytjie’s father had moved to the city from the farm where his family had bred cattle and grown crops for generations. Johannesburg was a
new and rough city growing rapidly around the fabulously rich veins of gold that lay under the grassy veld. The mines were desperate for labour and taxes were imposed to force the largely self-sustaining black peasant farmers to enter the labour market. Black families had to send men to the mines in order to earn the cash needed to pay poll-, hut- and even dog-taxes. Boytjie had just begun his life as an adult, he had a job and had fallen in love with a girl called Johanna. He approached his parents, telling them he had met the girl he wanted to marry. They felt he was in too much of a hurry, that he should wait as he had only known her two weeks. But Boytjie was stubborn and took the 500-kilometre journey to Kimberley to visit Johanna’s parents: ‘I took a train all the way, but it was an easy job, thinking about Johanna.’
They soon married and their first child followed shortly. One day his mother’s friends came to visit and saw the infant lying naked on the bed - just a couple of months old. One of Johanna’s friends joked, ‘Oh, be careful, he is naked!’ and the other replied, ‘Don’t worry, that one is Tarzan.’ The name stuck. By the time Tarzan was named, the flood of hundreds of thousands of black men and women flocking to the cities had turned a labour deficit into a surplus. Boytjie had to register and be given a pass book - the tool by which the government effected laws that kept blacks out of the cities unless they were gainfully employed. ‘The old pass was just a piece of paper. It had no photo, so we could borrow someone else’s,’ Boytjie remembered, but the pass laws became more sophisticated and more difficult to evade: ‘The new book had a photo in it, the dompas, we had to carry it under our arm, because it was heavy and tore our pockets.’ The dompas was indeed a heavy burden. It was on the basis of his racial identity, indelibly fixed in the identity book known as the dompas, that Boytjie, his wife and his son, Tarzan, and thousands of other non-white residents of the Johannesburg suburbs of Newclare, Sophiatown and Crown Mines were identified for forced removal to Soweto in 1955.
When the order came for them to leave, they tried to defy the police; they stoned the government trucks that came for them, but the army was eventually brought in and the forced removals proceeded. ‘Once in
Meadowlands, they gave us a pint of milk and a loaf of bread for supper. The white official would ask: “How many children do you have?” If you answered “Six,” the reply was “Two loaves for you.” If you had no marriage certificate, they would push you off to the hostel. I had a friend at the council office so he and I went out to look for a better house than the one I had been allocated. There were trains and matchboxes. The trains are all in a line. The brown train. The corner house-a matchbox - had four rooms and the inside ones had three rooms.’ Meadowlands had little appeal for the city-loving Boytjie. ‘There were no fences, no streets, just a jungle with houses. People got lost.’ The little houses were poorly built, the roofs were untreated asbestos, without ceilings. ‘You could see through the bricks, watch people walk past outside. People would lean against an inside wall and it would just collapse. I did not plan to stay.’
But stay the Rapoos did, generation after generation, as apartheid tightened its grip. But it was also in that matchbox house that they had their first taste of liberation. On a summer day in 1990, Soweto spontaneously declared a public holiday and the streets were jammed with people singing, dancing and banging dustbins: the authorities that had kept Mandela incarcerated for 27 years had finally allowed him to walk free. The Rapooos were among millions of South Africans celebrating the release of Nelson Mandela, symbol of the struggle to be free from white minority rule. For decades, simply being in possession of a picture of Mandela tempted arrest, yet on 11 February 1990 the apartheid state dedicated hours of television time to cover the walk to freedom of the world’s most famous prisoner. The task of talking viewers through the historic event fell to an Afrikaans presenter; he made a valiant effort, but decades of demonization of the ANC and Mandela had left him illprepared to inform the nation about the legendary prisoner, especially as Mandela’s release was running hours late, live. In the years preceding his resignation in 1989, then State President P.W. Botha had kept a hotline through to the television studio in order to instantly kill any news piece he disliked. On more than one occasion a newscast had been abruptly cut and an offending item dropped. Those days were over, but
white South Africans, and the presenter, were not prepared for a Mandela who had the status of a demi-god.
But decades of strife and loss separated that happy time from the day in 1955 when Boytjie had fatefully chosen a house near the hostel. It was the student uprising of 1976 that laid the ground for the tragedies that would beset the Rapoos. On 16 June, thousands of schoolchildren took to the streets of Soweto to protest against the compulsory use of Afrikaans as a medium of education. Afrikaans was regarded as the language of the oppressor, the language of the Boers, used by police, magistrates and prison warders in the administration of apartheid. The enforced use of Afrikaans stuck in the craw of the teenagers who were coming of age under a system where their skin colour determined that they be regarded as perpetual children, members of an inferior race. Within the warped version of Christianity moulded and followed by the white Nationalist regime, Afrikaners were the chosen people spoken of in the Bible, and blacks were the Canaanites, hewers of wood and carriers of water. They were to have an education that befitted their caste - that of labourers and servants. While Boytjie had grown up speaking English in addition to his African home language, many of the children of ’76 were barely literate in English.
By 1976, Meadowlands was a well-established part of Soweto, now a massive dormitory township, a sprawling ghetto some 17 kilometres long by 11 kilometres wide. Soweto’s population was equal to, or greater than, most white South African cities, but it had been deliberately deprived of the necessary amenities and local political autonomy to be a city in its own right - it had to remain dependent on white cities. It has no industrial area, no central business district, no large stores. Like all townships, it was designed to be a place where black people who worked in neighbouring white areas slept. On the other hand, it did not share a common tax base with Johannesburg - as it logically should have, since its people generated wealth and taxes there - so it was entirely reliant on government hand-outs to survive. Not one of the large supermarket chains had a store in Soweto, and so its residents had to shop in white areas unless they wanted to pay the
inflated prices that small neighbourhood shops charged. Real money was not circulated in Soweto itself and Sowetans helped fund their own oppression through the various income and sales taxes they paid to the white regime.
As Tarzan approached Soweto on his way home from work in Johannesburg that June evening, he got his first glimpse of the unrest that would continue intermittently for the next two decades: ‘The whole place was full of smoke. On every corner you saw people running. They were demolishing everything that belonged to the government - the beer houses, the council buildings. Others were looting, I saw a fat lady running with three cases of beers. That was June the sixteenth.’ June 16th and 1976 became milestones in the Struggle, especially among schoolchildren, as they had initiated the uprising.
There were running battles in the streets, police guns facing stones. Dozens of children were killed, none more famously than Hector Petersen, the first to die. His death became an icon of the burgeoning revolution in South African newspaper photographer Sam Nzima’s wrenching photograph of Petersen’s young body being carried away by crying schoolchildren. The riots continued for six months, through to the end of the year. By 1977, the schoolchildren - now the blooded and initiated standard-bearers of the revolution - decided on a work stay-away in an attempt to export the township’s pain to white business and commerce. Gangs of militant, self-righteous children aligned with the ANC or the PAC (Pan-Africanist Congress) manned bus and train stations to ensure that people did not go to work.
Tarzan recalled that the rallying cry of the youth was ‘asigibeli, asigibeli,’ a call to not ride to the towns - to stay at home. The children enforced the stay-away. The Zulus in the hostels, however, refused to be dictated to by youths: ‘These comrades will not tell us what to do. They are just small children.’