The wild ones
Richard West
Johannesburg Some seven years ago in South Africa I met a north Johannesburg matron who told me about a marvellous film she had seen on holiday in Greece. It was such a good film, She said, and set such a fine example to Modern young people that really she hoped it Would soon be shown in South Africa. The Story, she said, was about two dreadful American dope fiends who ride across the United States on their motor bicycles, smoking dagga with other young people, tlintil at the end the police are obliged to anoot them.
The lady, I thought at the time, had missed the point of Easy Rider. Yet even then, though I could not sympathise with her vio1„ent hatred of marijuana, I disliked Easy 'der because of its glorification of motorcYcles, the noisiest and most strident form of internal combustion vehicle. And Johannesburg, seven years later, although still Se ve re against dagga-smokers, has perMined motor-cyclists to become one of the foulest plagues afflicting this city. The black messengers on their scooters drive with discretion. The offence to the Public comes from the young white mimics °f Hell's Angels who add a new dimension of terror to South Africa's ever more deadly hi terror and, worse, cause an uproar in residential streets where people's nerves are already frayed by fear of mugging and Murder. In the sleazy entertainment quarter °f Hillbrow, or `Hellbrow' as it should be 'tallied, I have seen a couple of motorcYchsts at one in the morning racing each °„ther along the pavements on either side of 'Re road. A friend swears he has seen 13,,toior-cyclists charge their machines up and 11,0‘vn the wide moving staircase joining two noors of a shopping centre. k,n LaSt week a young star reporter told from 's hospital bed of how he had been the v.tetim of brutal assault from leathertacketed motor cyclists who punched, Lle.ked and then shot him while their .7.1eaned girl-friends looked on. It seems ,.`n,at the motor-cyclists got him and his Tends to stop by punching one of the ear through the car window. Once the had stopped, the motor-cyclists set their occupants. As the reporter, `-t,asper Greeff, said in his paper: 'The fact Ilar you don't hit back, don't know why Yrou're being beaten up, means nothing. calley are excited, enjoying themselves, t n t stop • • . battered and bloodied I walk s°. the side of the road, where one of the Ong-arm boys sees me and ambles over — rrilla style. The punch that he unleashes rn°eks me off my feet. He draws his ev°1ver, waves it wildly around, and aims.
And as I crouch into a foetal position, he shoots me in the leg . . . ' Later, a spokesman of one Johannesburg motor-cycle movement stated: `I know for a fact that none of our guys was involved in this. Satan's Slaves do not carry firearms.'
Ironically both the victims and the aggressors had been on their way home from watching motor-cycle and car races to which South Africans remain addicted in spite of the petrol shortage. South Africa has not yet discovered oil. Her one constant supplier in an otherwise hostile world is the Shah of Persia, whose own position is not too sure. If that supply was cut off and other oil producers applied a boycott, South Africa might have to depend on the cumbersome manufacture of petrol from coal which, too, is finite.
Far from trying to save on petrol, South Africa has relaxed the rules against weekend driving. Motorists tell you con fidently that disused gold mines are filled with enough fuel to last twenty years, and at Kyalami race track each year South Africa plays host to the Formula One racing champions whose derring-do provides a spurious glamour for mptorists, and ever increasing sales for the ear, tyre and petrol industries. At the time of last year's races,
the Rand Daily Mail (which has some interest in promoting them) carried a front-page
colour picture of Gina Lollobrigida, who was sponsoring one of the cars, next to a lead story warning that South Africa might soon suffer an oil embargo.
South Africans are not only avid motorists but their cities depend on private cars. Public transport for whites in Johannesburg has been reduced to a few bus routes serving the inner suburbs. The blacks, except for that small proportion who own cars, must travel into Johannesburg from their distant townships on buses or trains that are crowded and often dangerous —the wife of one man I know was stabbed to death on her way from Soweto three weeks after their marriage.
In the immense, all-white northern sub urbs of Johannesburg there is virtually no public transport. The suburbs were estab lished on the principle that however far out one moved from the city, it would take only a half-hour to reach in one of the family cars, and even the style of the homes is wasteful of space. Sprawling bungalows, or at most two-storey houses, are surrounded by ample gardens, most of them with a swimming pool. From the top of a sky scraper in central Johannesburg one can look north and west on a clear day to see mile after mile of rolling veld, green with gardens and shrubs, and glinting with flashes of sun from the swimming pools. The people who live in these suburbs depend on their private motors to get to work, to shop, to take the children to school, perhaps to protect themselves. The riots in Soweto and other black townships that took place two years ago, brought home to the whites their vulnerability and isolation. One mob of blacks actually crossed from the Alexandra township over the racial boundary into a white suburb where they were halted just before Benny Goldberg's 'The World's Largest Liquor Supermarket' whose capture and looting would have been almost as spectacular as that of the Bastille. After those riots, thousands of whites bought pistols in fear, but they must know that if things got really bad they would need a car to escape with their wives and children. All countries whose life is geared to the motor car are now worried about the future price of oil, but none more worried than South Africa.
It also so happens that Africa is at the moment subject to a second scramble for power by outside countries anxious to get her minerals and above all her oil. As long ago as 1964, the French sent paratroops to Gabon to reverse a left-wing coup and to guarantee oil deposits which, as things turned out, have been well worth the effort. When South-East Nigeria seceded as Biafra, the French toyed with backing the separatists, partly in the hope of getting their oil, but Britain and Russia backed the Federal side, gaining it victory after two and a half years of war. The French, who are unsentimental, have always been ready to send troops to nominally independent states, like Chad and the Central African Empire, whose fatuous and corrupt regimes could not guarantee French interests, but the recent intervention in Zaire, a former Belgian colony, may have had such motivation: the hope of winning a new oil field.
At the outbreak of civil war in Angola, three years ago, the French took the side of the FNLA or northern guerrillas who were and still are backed by Mobutu's regime in Zaire. The French were not so much interested in Angola itself as in Cabinda, a small pocket of land divided from all the rest by Zaire territory and by the Congo river. The French, who knew Cabinda was rich in oil, hoped to wrest control of it with the help of Zaire and add its riches to that of Gabon. The ploy failed, and Cabinda's oil is now paradoxically guarded by Cubans on behalf of a US company — les voila encore, les Anglo-Saxons.
During the 1960s the French and South Africans joined, for different reasons, in forcing up the price of gold against the wishes of the United States, the world's greatest financial power. It could be that the two countries will once more combine not only against the Americans but the Russians, who are very recent starters in the second scramble for Africa. Would such an alliance with France supply South Africans with their petrol? Before waiting for an answer, they should at least get rid of their motor-cycles and take up push-bikes instead. Satan's Slaves would find it much more healthy.
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