Electioneering in Natal
Richard West
Pietermaritzburg In the last, unfinished Wodehouse novel (Sunset at Blandings, Chatto and Windus, £3.95) Sir Galahad Threepwood excuses himself from a game of croquet by saying that in his youth, having fallen in love with a barmaid, he had been shipped off to South Africa where croquet was never played. It certainly is now; or at any rate it is in Pietermaritzburg, where this very week Scotland meets South Africa 'in a Croquet Test Match for the South African Championship Rigatta Gold Trophy'.
In spite of its Afrikaans name (it was founded by two of the voortrekkers) Pietermaritzburg, or Maritzburg for short, is.the most English town in Natal, the most English of South Africa's four provinces. Whereas in the whole country Afrikaners outnumber the English-speakers by sixtyforty, here the proportion is more than reversed so that the English make up at least two-thirds of the 48,000 whites, who in turn outnumber the blacks (46,000), Asians (44,000) and Coloureds (12,000).
Lord Blake, in his new book on Rhodesia, calls the Rhodesians 'pickled' Englishmen, because they live in a style that has vanished in England itself, but the phrase is still more apposite to the people of Maritzburg. Whereas most Rhodesians left England after the second world war and hark back to that period, the Maritzburg English are colonials, with a tradition that owes nothing to recent immigrants from the United Kingdom. There were many soldiers and civil servants who came here in 1947 from India, when it became independent, but even the English from Kenya, Zambia and Rhodesia are not welcome. 'They're bad medicine here,' said Richard Steyn, editor of the Daily Witness (founded 1846), the Oldest newspaper in South Africa. He meant that they had harsh racial attitudes but other Maritzburg people might say that they somehow, you know, did not quite fit The pride of the English community is the Victorian Club, where the Union Jack is raised each morning, almost across the road from the statue of that illustrious Queen. It is true that The Crown, an ancient pub, has has been bought by a Durban chain store and had to change its name by law, to the Liberty Liquor Hotel, but Republicanism receives yet another affront from the name of my own hotel, the Imperial, named after Prince Louis Napoleon, who was killed by the Zulus near here in 1879. Other guests beside the Prince have been Rhodes, Mark Twain, Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw and Trollope, who praised the courtyard where 'vine leaves trailed over a red brick wall and oranges hung within tempting distance.' The management of the Imperial would disdain such coarse, modern and transatlantic fads as 'women's lib' but patrons of the opposite sex can refresh themselves in the Emily Pankhurst Ladies' Bar.
In the maze of small streets known as The Lanes, where most of the lawyers have their offices, you can find just the kind of shop that, in England, has long since been squeezed out by the supermarkets and tax-man: 'County Fair Pine Furniture. . Lovely Caneware, Pickles. Chutney. Honey.' It is kept by a cheerful, county lady. At Boffins Paperback Sale and Exchange Shop, the equivalent of the old Boots lending library, the assistant sighed as she told rqe: 'It's bad enough choosing a book for oneself but even more difficult for someone else. It's for an old lady who likes these, you know, romantic novels. But the trouble is she's read so many of them. When she's finished, she marks it with an "S". You see! Here's another "S"!' The main Maritzburg bookshop, Shooter and Shuter, was used as the setting for one of South African TV's first and worst serials, called The Din gleys, an idiotic family who were shown as living over the store. I have suggested before that The Dingleys might be an Afrikaner plot to show up the English-speakers as idiots, but here in Maritzburg it was blamed on the old feud with Durban, the bigger but `ohso-vulgar' town on the coast. The old-fashioned Englishness of the Maritzburg people is sometimes put down to the larger number of boarding schools, or public schools, in the area, whose pupils and still more teachers set the tone of the town. Some of the slang used is, if not archaic, certainly old-fashioned: 'Do you mind if I take a squint at your. newspaper?' The accent is neither modern 'classless', TV British nor flat, clipped South African, as you can hear by the way they pronounce the word 'rand', the unit of currency. Elsewhere in South Africa, the Afrikaners and some Englishspeakers pronounce this to rhyme with lone; most English say 'rand' as in 'band'; but in Maritzburg I have heard it pronounced like 'darned', but with a drawl and the hint of an aitch, thus — `ratitind'.
On first arriving in Maritzburg, I was amazed and delighted to see how much had been left of the old colonial architecture, in contrast to most South African towns, or still ivorse Australian. Great, brown-brick public buildings, private houses with wrought-iron balcony and rust-red roof all look especially smart at this time of year when the jacaranda is flowering. Indeed, according to Harvey Campion, who wrote the captions for Pietermaritzburg and the Natal Midlands, Pen and Ink Drawings by Harold Bailey: 'The Standard Bank building on the corner of Bank Street in Pietermaritzburg . . . is considered as probably the best building in Natal from an architectural point of view'. A trim, neo-classical building by Philip Dudgeon, who went on to desiin Belfast Town Hall, it has also been described by Brian Kearney, an authority on Natal colonial architecture, as a 'rimsterpiece'.
And so it was no surprise to pick up The Witness one morning and read: 'Demolition of bank "a major tragedy", says Gordon Small, President of the Natal Provincial Institute of Architects', The report underneath said: 'Mr Small was commenting On the announcement by the Standard Bank's Group Public Relations Executive [his capital letters] Mr Roy Terry, that the building was to be demolished'. According to Mr Terry, the cracks had appeared in May 1977 and the architects and engineers who had been called in to inspect the premises `agreed that the old building had reached the end of its life'. English readers will, of course, have guessed the explanation of all this: they want to replace the modest old bank with a vast new building that looks, from the drawing I saw in, the newspaper, something like a concrete cinema organ. Even Mr Small, who is not given to rash allegations, found it 'strange that the dangerous condition reported coincides with a redevelopment plan for the property'.
The bank's future is not, unfortunately, one of the issues in the campaign for next Wednesday's general election, which has aroused excitement even here, far from the violence of Johannesburg. The two Maritzburg seats had for long been the exclusive preserve of the old United Party — conservative Royalist English-speaking and hostile to Afrikaners, even though its hero, Field-Marshal Smuts, had once been a Boer military leader, The rise to power of the National Party, a power reinforced by Afrikanerdom's higher birth-rate, left the United Party to rot in almost thirty years of opposition. It split this year, some members joining the liberal Progressives, others more right-wing groups, scarcely distinguishable from the NP, while the majority formed themselves into the New Republic Party. One has to spell out the full title, for nobody can remember what the initials stand for.
The `Nats' and the 'Progs' both insist that the NRP is irrelevant. The choice, they say, is between 'multi-nationalism', dividing the races, or 'multi-racialism', in which whites, Asians, Coloured and blacks will all have a say in running the country, subject to a franchise qualification by education or income. (Few liberal whites go so far as to call for 'one man, one vote'.) However, the NRP in Natal is toying with the idea of a 'federal' solution, in which, so it seems to me, is contained the idea of separatism. Most of the blacks in this province belong to the fivemillion strong Zulu nation who, although beaten in war, remain disciplined, proud and loyal to their chief Buthelezi and to his Inkatha political movement.
A much-respected Provincial Councillor, Frank Martin of NRP, was one of the many politicians who thanked Buthelezi for keeping the peace in Natal after the recent Soweto riots. 'When the Zulus were reproached for this by other Africans', Mr Martin went on, 'they simply replied 'We don't have to prove anything'.' He tells many touching stories of how well the Zulus get on with white Natalians; of how, coming back to a car park in far-off Transvaal, he found that a Zulu attendant had cleaned his car, but none of the others, because of its Maritzburg n umberpIate. Many white Natalians speak some Zulu. The whites in Johannesburg, for example, where there are at least four major African languages, end up by studying none.
The Natal NRP, or at least Mr Martin, talk of a `Turnhalle Plan' after the consitutional conference held in a Windhoek drill-hall to bring independence to SouthWest Africa. wrote to Mr Vorster,' he said 'and they're interested. They haven't turned it down. They're coming round to some kind of federal solution'. He was contemptuous of the `Progs' for taking up the same idea: 'Now Colin Eglin [the PFP leader] is calling for a Turnhalle type conference, but how can he do that if he favours a national solution?'
The 'Progs' in turn, are bitter against the NRP, whom they accuse of splitting the opposition and of using 'the black peril' to discredit themselves, The name 'Prog' sounds much like prig and I must report that in Maritzburg and elsewhere, most representatives of this party do not endear themselves to the wandering journalist. They usually manage to sound self righteous, bossy and rather snobbish, especially about the Afrikaners. A 'Prog' lady at Maritzburg told me: 'We get our support from fifty-year-olds downwards. Over that age we have to fight for the votes, they're the kind of people who talk about how they , knew Jan Smuts. The NRP are using .swartgefaar, you won't know what that means' — I did, as a matter of fact — 'the black danger, which terrifies the old ladies'. Oddly enough the 'Nat' candidate, Senator Jacobus Jordaan, also accused by the NRP of usingswartgefaar, although having instantly seen that I knew what it meant, did not stop for a translation. The youngest Senator in South Africa at thirty-nine Jordaan had only recently chosen to run for the lower house. 'Until six weeks ago', he told me, was a lecturer in geography at the University of Zululand when the Prime Minister approached me and asked me if I'd like to go into politics.' Before his present post at a black university, he had worked five years in Zambia at a Dutch Reformed Church Mission School. 'Now you'll very likely ask me,' he went on, 'how can a man who has been working with blacks be involved in National Party politics.' Not at all,' I replied. What I really wanted to ask was how could a believer in the Dutch Reformed Church, which at any rate used to teach that the world was flat, be a lecturer in geography?
The British comedian Max Bygraves complained in Durban the other day that 'South African politicians who were interviewed for British television appeared fierce and even brutal. Nobody ever smiled.' He would have approved of Senator Jordaan who never stopped smiling unless to laugh. He is sincere, I am sure, if his belief in multi-nationalism,, that each ot the national groups within South Africa should preserve its separate identity. 'A system of qualified franchise,' he said, 'would alienate the prosperous blacks from their own people. It will make them whites with black skins. If I look at the history of my own people, the Afrikaners, in the depression of the 'thirties. I remember how some of the richer Afrikaners used their money to help the poorer ones, to draw them up. It is the responsibility of the more affluent blacks to put something back.' But what of the great industrial centres, I asked, like Johannesburg, where many. blacks are detribalised, denationalised, It you like. How can you have a nation except in a nation-state, with its own boundaries? may be idealistic,' Senator Jordaan replied, 'but if you're not idealistic, you lose everything.'
And so even Maritzburg has become caught up in white South Africa's argument over her destiny, with the idealistic, impossible schemes to allow all these diverse, mutually unfriendly races and nations and tribes to live together in harmony. Yet something of old, untroubled South African life lives on here, and one still could expect to find Sir Galahad Threepwood sighing after his barmaid, at the Victoria Club.
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