White Boy Running by Christopher Hope

Author:Christopher Hope
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

Reform was a word frequently heard in Pretoria when I lived in the hostel. In those days it carried most unfortunate connotations. Reformatory was the place to which boys were sent who were too young for prison and too bad to be kept in the confines of a normal school. Many of my contemporaries fitted that description and were sent away to be ‘reformed’: it was notable that most boys on returning to the neighbourhood after a spell in the reformatory seemed far worse than they had been before they were sent away.

In South Africa, the men who actually run the country are also ‘sent away’ for six months in every year. They go down to Cape Town where the legislative assembly sits and where the much vaunted modifications to the apartheid system are to be most clearly observed. Cape Town might thus be called the Reformatory of South African politics.

Cape Town is the mother city, the Fairest Cape, the Tavern of the Seas, founded in 1652 by a Dutchman named Jan van Riebeeck, who led a party of the first White men to settle on the beautiful green peninsula, under the brooding, magnificent Table Mountain. At one end of town is a castle which the early settlers built to replace their fort. The fort was the first thing they built, and is indicative of the state of their thinking about the indigenous inhabitants of the Cape. At the top of the town is the parliament building, an elegant neo-classical edifice set in a garden. The legislators who run this country make great play of their attachment to parliamentary institutions. But the fact of the matter is that their hearts really lie in the castle down the road.

Cape Town a quarter of a century ago was striking, not only in its natural beauty, but for the manner in which the inhabitants of the city, Whites and Coloureds (which is to say the mixed race descendants of earlier settlers), met and mingled. To a Transvaler reared in the Black and White stringencies of the Highveld, this dilution of the usual racial severities, the relaxed jumble of White and Coloured neighbourhoods, the integration one saw on the buses, the camaraderie of the streets, all came as a revelation. At that time, many residential areas of the city were, to all intents and purposes, integrated, and in the centre of Cape Town was the historic settlement of District Six, with its mosques and painted houses where Coloureds had lived for centuries.

After my initial training, I spent most of my military service at Simonstown, the former British naval base at the end of the Peninsula. Of my impressions of that time in the Navy, one in particular is worth recalling. It came in one of those rare moments of frankness which arrive so suddenly and unexpectedly that for a moment you are not sure whether you can trust your ears. It happened one afternoon on the deck of a frigate tied up in Simonstown

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.