First ColumnAuthor(s): NTUSource: Africa Today, Vol. 13, No. 5 (May, 1966), p. 2Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4184713 .

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first columnns.

CAPE TOWN's western suburbs stretch thinly out between fast-falling moun- tains and a rock-ribbed coast occasionally indented by a small white beach. Onto the land the cold Atlantic sends skidding great breaking waves of fearful force. Still, the bathers come, pink and well-fed, from the Karoo, from Rho- desia, from the Transvaal, filling the hotels and turning brown in the long summer sun. The local boys make canoes from corrugated iron sheets, once roofs blown from their anchorings by the winter southwesters. From these frail shells they drop bait among the rocks and carefully net the nibbling crayfish.

At least, that's how we remember it. And those associated memories: Great piles of seaweeds washed up after a storm, the clean smell of young girls, the sun bouncing crazy in all directions off the sea and sand, the Rob- ben Island mirage in Table Bay, suspended slightly above and to the side of the real island, an abandoned leper colony covered with weeds and rotting buildings.

Leprosy: a chronic, mildly communicable disease. Treatment-isolation, good medical care, adequate caloric and high vitamin diet.

On Robben Island, the buildings are once again filled. One thousand black men and women deemed by the State to be a maximum menace to the bathers are there enclosed - . . Mandela, Sobukwe and all those ohers whose names we don't know. The new lepers. And would you believe it: One day, the prison warder dragged out Robert Sobukwe for the newspaper photog- raphers. "See how fat and well-fed he is. See the chubby revolutionary, the happy native." And the well-bred English-speaking editorial writers echoed ". . 'appy 'ative. ..."

-Today from the beaches bathers still look out and see the mirage.

We recall another outcast: Kelly, the school rebel, awkward, thin and always alone, his acne shielded from the sun, even on the beach, by the enor- mous visor of his schoolboy cap. He'd go to District Six to hear the Colored boys play Paper Doll on a broken guitar and two soup spoons for castanets. OK, so he fraternized . . . but he was insolent about it. And in South African history class (a dull, ill-connected fairy tale), he'd ask embarrassing questions. Even the history master, a Cape liberal whose deity lay somewhere between Quaker meetings and the pages of his enormous collection of Penguin Books, would get annoyed and subtly urged us to ridicule Kelly.

Our school uniform was black and on the left pocket a gold crest. But none was as dark as Kelly's black and none as grim as his gold.

In the mid-fifties he served a three-month sentence for possession of "Communist" literature and left for England. When he arrived at Victoria Station, still awkward and bumbling, his suitcase packed with anti-apartheid tracts burst open and scattered the pigeons pecking the buns.

Though Kelly like most exiles went to England, how soggy we thought the British, how exotic the Americans. . . . Blake might have laid claim to the new Jerusalem but the Yankee Mormons showed us film strips of Zion, built there in the Salt Flat. Incredible! Others, less temperate, got roaring drunk on Cape brandy and seemed to shout, mes freres, mes semblables, brothers uAder our skin, our white skin. They had come expecting lions in the streets and discovered Charleston with funny accents.

Today they come expecting fear and surliness, a living decalogue of horror stories, but find only the outward calm of a beach and tea-time culture. So they conclude that blacks are children, business is all-wise, and time will heal all wounds.

They return home, their Advertised in Life suitcases packed with pro- apartheid literature. Later they echo, ". . . children . . . all-wise . . . wounds."

NTU

AFRIA

May 1966--Vol. XIII, No. 5

Editor: Collin Gonze

Assistant Editor: Catharine Raymond

Contributing Editors: Robert Browne, Mark Cohen, Stanley Diamond, Elizabeth Lan- dis, Sheldon Weeks, Peter Weiss.

Dakar: An African Rendez-Vous .......... 4 John Povey

West African Literature. The Second Decade ......... 7

Martin Tucker

Freedom and Famine in Botswana .... 10 Thomas Land

BOOKS The Reconstruction of African

History . 11 Robert Weisbord

She Held Her Head High ................13 Winifred F. Courtney

Why Do They Go to School? ... .... 15 T. David Williams

LETTERS ............. 16 Joseph H. Greenberg, New York Publisher

This month's cover is by Sylvia Roth

Published monthly except July and August by the American Committee on Africa, Inc. Subscriptions: One year, $5.00; two years, $9.50; three years, $13.50. Students: one year $2.00. Foreign (except Canada and Pan Amer- ica) add $1.00 per year. Sterling zone checks accepted. Advertising: Rates on request. Change of Address: Notify four weeks in advance, advising old and new address. Un- solicited manuscripts will not be returned un- less requested and accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. Copyright ?) 1966 by American Committee on Africa, Inc., 211 East 43rd Street, New York 17, N.Y. TN7-8733

a AFRICA TODAY

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