Letter from South Africa
Richard West
Johannesburg On this stay in Johannesburg, I chose a downtown hotel instead of one in the suburb of Hillbrow, so that I now risk getting mugged by blacks rather than whites. The building is close to the railway and bus stations, where thousands of people arrive each day from the African townships such as Soweto. The muggers normally work in sMall groups: one man points a knife in your back while accomplices quickly remove Your wallet, watch, handbag, revolver and any other valuables. Then they all fade away into the throng. A few months ago, an Argentine tourist was stopped immediately outside the hotel doors, and robbed of Rand 4,000 (more than £2,000) which he had just been fool enough to change. The news got around of this South American sucker, and since then the hotel has been under constant attention from all the best thieves in town. °fle of the hotel staff, an English girl, told me: 'It's not fair on the customers. We ought to warn them in the advertisements of the risk they take in coming here'. The British hotel management knows better. This street in Johannesburg was well ,k 'town for its brothels even before the Boer war. President Kruger of the Transvaal was shocked by what went on here. In those ciaYs the ladies were white; and still were When I first came to Johannesburg fifteen Yhears ago. Now, at the 'international °tels', meaning those that accept guests of _all races, some of the girls plying their business are black, and very attractive too. I:hose white customers who insist on a white gtrl now have to resort to the poor white districts like Mayfair, where there are no 'international hotels' but many bars, clubs and massage parlours run by the gangs. For some mysterious reason, in this ever mysterious country, the police are inclined to crack down more on the white than the non-white prostitutes. In particular they have persecuted the girls who work in the many spurious massage parlours. It is only rarely now that police invoke the Immorality Act that prohibits sexual intercourse between people of different races; even homosexuals, so one hears, can break these laws if they show discretion. Of course this very puritanical country has laws that carry the direst penalties for what we should consider trivial offences, or not offences at all. By contrast, in our permissive England, many police forces waste much time and energy trying to catch out homosexuals and others for violating our very liberal laws.
A nearby hotel has a lunchtime show involving some girls who prance around in the semi-nude. The barmaid insists that it is not pornographic, and yet, she complains, 'very often you get some of these Afrikaners who stare at the show for a long time and then go and report us to the police'. The police enjoy raiding such places and putting the girls to interrogation.
Everyone in Johannesburg is forever complaining about the police. It is one of the countless oddities of South Africa that what is in some respects a police state should pay its policemen very low wages — as litle as £25 a week, with few of the fringe benefits enjoyed by police in England. Understandably, the South African force tends to recruit the dimmer Afrikaners and Africans, who could not survive the compet ition in other forms of employment. Under standably tliey are tempted to augment their wagesiby putting the squeeze on the general public, especially the black public, who seldom' dare to complain; hence the widespread system of bribing policemen not to prosecute for offences against the infamous pass laws. Ordinary whites are not subjected to this kind of squeeze but the police do get a big rake-off in bribes from whites engaged in prostitkition, drug traffic and gambling — the favourite vice of Johannesburg.
Much of the gambling is run by Lebanese, who are Maronites of the community always referred to in British newspapers as `right-wing Christians'. (I once heard a solemn BBC radio broadcaster say that 'early this morning in North Beirut, the right-wing Christian suburb came under heavy artillery fire from the Syrian peace-keeping forces.') Even Johannesburg must be preferable to the civil war back in the Lebanon. Yet nobody seems to know quite how these Lebanese got here. They are different in character from the West African Lebanese who are overwhelmingly Muslim and wellbehaved – although they too have a penchant for gambling.
Johannesburg's most notorious Lebanese is Xavier Leicher, who has now spent two years in Death Row since he was sentenced for killing a drug-pusher and two alleged prostitutes. His crimes managed to shock even this city accustomed to violence, where for instance a newspaper carried a down-page story last week headlined: 'Millionaire chased wife with axe, court told'. When Leisher was standing trial in 1977, his family and the Lebanese community spent so much money on lawyers' fees that an American prizefighter who had been brought over to meet the local champ was kept hanging around for weeks because there was no available prize money: the Lebanese run almost all boxing here.
A Roman Catholic priest, Father Clayton Jackson, told the press last week that Leisher is now a reformed man, who reads serious books and only waits for the chance to pay back his family for the lawyers' fees. While not doubting the truth of this, I do remember that Father Jackson once told me that yet another Johannesburg criminal was a reformed man because he had carved a crucifix on his rifle butt. If Leisher is hanged, he will be one of only a dozen whites to have died in this way since 1970. During the same period, there have been 700 hangings of non-whites, including a record 132 last year. One does find here in South Africa something of the unnatural cruelty that flourished in Germany during the War and has flourished since in countries like Russia and China. Johannesburg, for that matter, is one of the last resorts of the bad Germans. 'Europe', said one young Viennese whom I met last week, 'is even more yiddified than before the war. They bombed Danzig. They destroyed our Christian i religious buildings. But one thing s certain: they never will catch Martin Borman'.
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