The End of Innocence

Where Was I on June 16th 1976? The End of Innocence.

On that fateful day in 1976 I was living in the Northern suburbs of Johannesburg and working as a medical rep in the Jeppe St area, calling on all the specialists up and down the street. I had been living in Johannesburg since 1968, when I arrived on holiday from UK and simply never went home! In fact South Africa was such a wonderful place in those days that the thoughts of going back to the dreariness of suburban England with its memories of Harold Wilson creeping onto our television screens like some ante-deluvian mollusc and delivering a speech through his nose were too awful to contemplate.

Although my generation, who had never been further than the boundaries of their own towns, decried South Africa as a police state and were all consummately knowledgeable about our every misdemeanour, often refused even to discuss this country with me, and although we lived here in the shadow of Apartheid, South Africa was a wonderful place to be. I can hear the murmurs off-stage of ‘only if you were white’ and the echoes of today’s trades unionists warbling about ‘The Struggle’ and about how dreadfully the blacks suffered at the time, but let me tell you: unemployment was much lower than it is today and relatively few people ever went to bed hungry.

Anyway, the purpose of this article is not to raise the issue of the unfairness of the system or the behind-the-scenes brutality of the Bureau of State Security (the head of which was an erstwhile client of mine); it is perhaps to debunk some of the outpouring of white guilt that we have seen in the last ten years, and to give the lie to those who mistakenly equate Apartheid with the Holocaust. We were not afraid to speak our minds (although only those of us who courted disaster on a regular basis would have shot off our mouths too loudly or too publicly) nor were we afraid to live our lives as we thought best.

Coming from a relatively liberal background, I had always seen and treated people as people and not judged them purely by the colour of their skins; for the first couple of years in this country we even had maids – until we became tired of being constantly ripped off by them and their families. I personally had many friends who were ‘not the right colour’ and was a frequent illegal visitor to Soweto where I enjoyed a freedom of spirit and a generosity which was certainly lacking in the white areas. The same people often came to my house unhindered, joined in our merrymaking, and were free to come and go as they chose.

However, all that came to an end from June 16th 1976 onward. By the end of that day my house had become more of a refugee centre than a home as cousins and siblings of friends arrived begging for asylum from the madness which had gripped Soweto. They were not politicos; they were simply children who ran away from what was beginning to look more and more like a war-zone; they were running to somewhere where they would be safe.

Perhaps June 16th 1976 was really the end of innocence for so many of us; almost overnight everything became politicised, from the language you spoke at home to the colour of your skin. Although the Apartheid system had imposed a whole raft of legislation about where you could and could not go, depending on what colour you were, we had always been relatively free to go where we chose and associate with whom we chose – provided, of course, we didn’t fornicate with them in the streets! I soon learned that public fornication was limited to the pillars of society of the day who would run across the border to Swaziland every few weeks to assuage their wicked desires! Let any visitor to Mantenga Falls show me a car with a registration number that did not belong in Randfontein, Pretoria, Krugersdorp, or Ventersdorp, and I would truly be surprised.

My decision to leave Johannesburg permanently (and never to this day to go back) was made first thing in the morning on June 17th 1976 when I had to duck into several doorways to avoid volleys of rifle fire in the central city. I made up my mind there and then that nowhere was worth that kind of sacrifice and so, very shortly afterward, I flung a few things in the car and left permanently for Cape Town. It was the civilised thing to do.

Since that time, despite whatever has happened over the years, we as a society have become more and more politicised; we have grown further and further apart; we have been divided into ‘us’ and ‘them’. Yes, for the sake of peace and the future of this country, those of us with any sense voted ‘yes’ in the referendum of 1992, and peace reigned, but it turned out to be a peace which allowed a small group to rise and become super-rich while their compatriots (they would say ‘comrades’) continued to suffer; it was a peace which heralded the dreaded ‘affirmative action’ whereby those with the knowledge and experience were forced into early retirement or exile whilst those without either of the former rose to prominence in our country; it was a peace which paved the way for crime to blossom and corruption to flourish, a peace which turned our South African world on its ear; the age of innocence ended for all of us on June 16th 1976 and that is why the day should be remembered with sadness – nostalgia for values which have now become lost and totally forgotten.

Freedom was certainly anything but free.