UNCLE TOM'S SCHOOLDAYS

Andrew Gimson on the crisis

of rising expectations which threatens to destroy South Africa

`DAMN sight nicer desks than the ones I had when I was at school,' the PR man said appreciatively. 'The desks at my school were straight out of Uncle Tom's School- days.'

We were visiting Lehlaka pre-primary school, which is for the children of workers at Rietspruit Colliery in the Eastern Trans- vaal. Thinking that there might be mention of Uncle Tom during our tour, I had read Harriet Beecher Stowe's great work, Uncle Tom's Cabin, before leaving England. It is said to have hastened the outbreak of the American Civil War.

I had not, however, anticipated that anyone in our party, prompted by the sight of young and docile blacks being educated, would be brilliant enough to conflate its title with Tom Brown's Schooldays. The latter work, which was published only five years later (1857), drew attention to the evils of school bullying. The former, of course, concerns the evils of slavery in the southern states of the USA, abolished as a result of the North's victory in the Civil War.

Chambers defines an Uncle Tom (`U.S. derog.') as a negro whose co-operative attitude to white people is thought to show disloyalty to the negro cause. In that sense, South Africa today is full of Uncle Toms. The usage is, however, extremely unjust to the original Uncle Tom, who was by no means always co-operative. When his wicked master, Legree, ordered him to flog a fellow slave, Tom refused. Legree, enraged, asks if he hasn't bought Tom `body and soul'.

`No, no, no! my soul an't yours, mas'r! You haven't bought it — ye can't buy it. It has been bought and sold by One that's able to keep it,' Tom replies. For this insubordination he is savagely whipped.

Later on, Tom has a chance to murder Legree, but rejects the promptings of another slave in these words: 'The dear, blessed Lord never shed no blood but his own, and that he poured out for us when we was enemies. Lord, help us to follow his steps and love our enemies.' One doubts whether many of South Africa's Uncle Toms would be so sublimely resistant to the temptation to kill a wicked master. I heard the joke while I was there about the white woman who said to her servant, `Surely you wouldn't murder me if there was a revolution?' No,' the servant re- plies, 'I'd murder the people next door.'

Not that Uncle Tom put a low value on freedom. At an earlier point in the book he has a benevolent master, St Clare, who offers to grant him his freedom. When Tom expresses his joy, St Clare remarks:

`Why, Tom, you couldn't possibly have earned, by your work, such clothes and such living as I have given you.'

`Knows all that, Mas'r St Clare; mas'r's been too good: but, mas'r, I'd rather have poor clothes, poor house, poor everything, and have 'em mine, than have the best, and have 'em any man's else! I had so, mas'r; I think it's natur, mas'r!'

At Rietspruit Colliery the managers were at pains to show what living they give their workers. They wanted to do this because Shell owns a half share in the mine, the other half belonging to the South African mining house Rand Mines. Shell is under great pressure from campaigners in the United States to `disinvese, on the grounds that the workers at Rietspruit are maltreated.

`Why don't you send some of your workers to the United States to explain that they aren't?' I asked.

`That's the trouble,' a manager ex- plained; 'some people from the National Union of Mineworkers went over there

'My God! A joggernaut!'

and said we employ slave labour.' Black trade unions have been legal in South Africa since 1979. The NUM is the largest. So far it has recruited about a fifth of the 550,000 black miners.

`But as a visitor to your mine,' I said, can't tell whether you employ slave labour unless I can talk to your workers.'

The manager hummed and hawed. `If we've put up a façade to bamboozle foreign visitors,' he said, 'it's a bloody expensive façade.'

So it is. The primary school was delight- ful. Little children played on the grass, scrambling over brightly coloured climbing frames and bowling rubber tyres along the ground. `How sweet, they're necklace training,' said the French journalist, in his magni- ficently Maurice Chevalier-like accent.

The new workers' housing was also very fine. The best houses for black workers have servants' quarters, which shocked the journalist in our party from a great liberal newspaper, though he was mollified to learn that these are sometimes used to house 'extended families' instead of staff.

Since we were not allowed to meet any of the workers who inhabit this wonderful village, resembling a high-quality holiday development in Marbella, Uncle Tom must speak for them: 'I'd rather have poor clothes, poor house, poor everything, and have 'em mine.' Aspirations such as these cannot be satisfied by economic well- being. Indeed, it is arguable that the better off a black is economically, the more he is likely to feel his want of civil and political liberties. As the problems of poverty, disease and ignorance recede, so the de- mand for Western luxury goods such as universal suffrage grows. Never mind the preposterous arrogance of the Western preachers who continue to declare, in the face of all discouragement, and safe fronl all risk to their own skins, that the new religion of democracy is the latest blessing European civilisation must confer on Afri- ca. The desire for political freedom now exists, and peace will probably not return until it has been satisfied, even if satisfac- tion should be followed by a regime which makes the Afrikaner tyranny seem benevo- lent.

Mr Viljoen, the education minister, an intelligent man who is mentioned as a possible successor to Mr P. W. Botha, observed when I met him that the 1984 riots began in an area, the Vaal triangle,' `of relatively high educational attainment Uncle Tom has been learning the wrong lessons. A personnel manager confirtne", that the most contented black workers tend to be those with the lowest expectations. It is the mining house which is inclined to paY its workers most, and which does the most to encourage black unionisation, namely the Anglo-American Corporation, which at present suffers the most labour disrup- tion. Expectations, once encouraged, out" strip the ability to satisfy them. So some mining houses take care not to encourage expectations: earlier this year the Afrikan- er group Gencor sacked 23,000 workers at one of its subsidiaries, Impala Platinum.

But the tide flows all the other way. Political change is afoot because it is no longer regarded as a practical policy mere- ly to try to keep black expectations low. A twofold monopoly game has been played, but the winners, the monopolists, find that their overwhelming victory cannot for long be enjoyed, because the losers won't be good losers. The white, more particularly the Afrikaner political monopoly, is there- fore being diluted, in a desperate attempt to preserve the greater part of it. Indians and coloureds have been given a constitu- tional role to play. Not surprisingly, this concession has failed to satisfy the blacks, and the Indians and coloureds have not accepted it enthusiastically. The question facing the Afrikaners is how to find a way of further diluting their monopoly, by conceding the vote to blacks, while pro- tecting 'minority rights'. 'Minority rights' rather than 'white supremacy' is now the cry. There is much anxious talk by whites about how to protect the minority rights of Zulus and Griquas and the other black tribes, who are, as whites never tire of reminding visitors, more than a dozen in number, and often on bad terms with one another. But if the liberal Afrikaner pro- fessor from Stellenbosch who told me that `in Africa the veto means nothing' is right, then this problem is insoluble.

The second monopoly to be threatened is that of the great mining houses, half a dozen of which own four-fifths of the Johannesburg stock exchange. So far as those who take the most enlightened view of their own interests are concerned, the white/Afrikaner political monopoly, and its concomitant racially based legislation, should be dissolved as quickly as possible. To them, the vital struggle is not the racial one. Capital is colour-blind: the capitalists tried in 1922 to extend the range of skilled jobs open to blacks in the mines because blacks were cheaper to employ. Dr de Beer, a director of the Anglo-American Corporation, said in London last Monday: `We dare not allow the baby of free enterprise to be thrown out with the bath water of apartheid.'

The capitalists do not, of course, want civil war, but the National Party seems less and less able to prevent one. Better a deal with whatever opposition forces will com- mit themselves at least to a mixed eco- nomy. After all, the present government interferes atrociously with industry, through a force of half-witted Afrikaner civil servants whose numbers have in- creased by 40 per cent in the last ten years, allegedly because Afrikaners can't find other jobs.

But whether the capitalists, or Chief Buthelezi, or Nelson Mandela, or the turbulent Bishop Tutu, let alone the Emi- nent Persons from the Commonwealth, will be able to construct a stable new political system in South Africa from the extraordinarily fissiparous materials avail- able, must be doubtful. No wonder many Afrikaners, and not only the stupid ones, conclude that in defence of their nation only a policy of vicious repression, coupled with deafness to the pratings of foreign and domestic moralists, has any chance of success. In the short term, this school of thought is likely to grow in strength. If worse trouble breaks out on 16 June, tenth anniversary of the start of the Soweto riots, many South Africans of relatively progres- sive views may decide that the immediate restoration of order, by whatever means, Is more important to them than speculative efforts to devise, as the only long-term solution, a just political settlement. For there comes a sorry point in the course of most attempted revolutions when the liber- als take fright, and decide that it is better to be black, in the sense of reactionary, than dead.