A HOT TIN SHED

As the two black men loaded the gear in the back of the truck the boss gave me my first instructions. “Listen! It is their job to fetch and carry things for you. You must not not lift or carry anything. Nothing, eh. And don’t let them use a paintbrush; painting is white man’s work. His tone was matter-of-fact, as though talking of pay rates and holidays.
He closed the cab door and started the engine. Sweat trickled down my neck and back. I fidgeted on the scorching vinyl of the passenger seat, lifting the immigrant-white skin at the back of my thighs. I felt foolish in short pants but that’s what everyone was wearing. My tanned, middle-aged Afrikaner boss seemed unaffected by the heat and cooly turned the steering wheel with his strong brown hands.
As we were driving out of the depot, he put his head out and yelled instructions to the two men on the back of the truck, The language was foreign to me. I wondered if it was Afrikaans. I looked at him. “Fanagolo,” he explained, tossing a booklet of that name in my lap. “Sort of bastard language.” Almost as an afterthought, he went on, “Made up from Zulu, Basutu and all the others. Lots of different tribes work at the mine.” He jerked his thumb to the back of the truck. “These two don’t speak English. They’re from different tribes too, so I don’t think they know much of each other’s language either.” He reached over and prodded the booklet with a finger. “It’s mostly instructions. You’ll get used to it.”
I flicked through the incomprehensible pages of text while trying to appear unconcerned. There was much I wanted to ask but he seemed hurried and preoccupied, and I was unsure about his attitude to me. Britain had --most inconveniently as far as I was concerned --just cut defence ties with South Africa. Did he resent me because I was English? He didn’t seem very welcoming. Yet he didn’t seem deliberately unfriendly. I would learn when I got to know him better that his natural sense of hospitality had been eroded, not by his attitude to the British but by the relentless turnover of tradesmen. I came to think of him as a relatively fair man considering the distorted outlook of the average white South African.
I looked out of the window at the dry Transvaal landscape. They called it the veld, pronouncing the v as an f. It was flat except for the glaring white mountains of gold-mine tailings that were now falling behind us. I was really in Africa, I told myself. I could almost feel the throb of a million black feet drumming the hard brown earth.
The dusty unsealed road eventually led to two houses. Modest, single story, identical, divided by a wire fence. They were the only buildings in sight. Each had a glaring, unpainted tin shed at the back. The houses seemed to have been plonked down on the parched grassland and forgotten. No trees to shade and soften, no dark cultivated earth or green watered plants. Nothing to indicate fertility or pride of personal ownership. They were staff houses, rented for a modest sum to lure white workers from the cities. On closer inspection, the furthest of the two houses had washing on a line. But I would be concerned only with the first house, the empty one.
I followed the two black men crunching across brown grass and hundreds of noisy crickets, whose high pitched chorus, oddly enough, made this alien world seem deathly quiet. The men who were now my labourers, appeared to be middle-aged. I wished they would smile but instead they darted suspicious glances at me. I could understand their resentment. I had just turned twenty-three. I looked back at the trail of orange dust following the boss’s truck and felt abandoned.
I walked through the empty rooms of the house and decided to start on the living-room. The ceiling was full of holes, as though, out of boredom, frustration or malice, the last tenant had poked it repeatedly with a metal rod. I was glad to have something to start on and was about to do what I would normally have done; spread the dust-sheets on the floor, mix the plaster, bring in a stepladder and start work. But with the boss’s instructions fresh in my mind I turned hesitantly to the two black men. I was not used to giving orders and couldn’t help wondering what these two men would think of me; a foreigner just off the boat and half their age, telling them what to do. They were looking at me, faces in neutral, waiting for instructions. I pointed to the ceiling and made painting motions. Then I pointed to the floor and spread my hands. They raised their eyebrows and tried out single words on each other until some understanding was reached between them. Then they brought in the dust-sheets and laid them out. Encouraged, I opened the booklet, looking for the right group of words to tell them to bring in the stepladders and plank. Finally, taking a deep breath, I tried out the first foreign words I had ever uttered. “Hamba lapa lo stepladder,” I said, trying to sound masterful while feeling silly. They looked at me. I cleared my throat. “Lo stepladder, please.” A glimmer of understanding but no movement. I performed a sheepish ladder-climbing-ceiling-painting charade. This proved effective. They brought in two pair of steps and a plank and erected my scaffold. I mixed the plaster myself then hopped on the plank and tried to lose myself in the familiar task.
The year was 1963. The newspapers were full of Nelson Mandella’s trial. I had known this before leaving England. But all I had been interested in was a free passage and adventure, not unsettling reports of apartheid. Yet I considered myself a liberal. A critic of England’s unofficial colour bar. More than that, I was a socialist for goodness sake. My favourite book was The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. I was one of the exploited working class, not an oppressor, until now.
So, to justify joining the master race I parroted the South African government’s refrain, which was that outsiders did not understand and until they had lived in South Africa they should not criticise. That seemed fair enough to me. That’s what I told myself and anyone willing to listen. But in my heart I knew I was a hypocrite.
I worked on the ceiling with excessive care, flicking the thin, springy steel of the broad knife across the indentations, leaving no excess plaster on the surface. It felt good, better than facing the communication challenge that would accompany the next stage of the job. My two labourers, seeing I had no use for them, had drifted off, leaving me to my artistic sweeps with the broad-knife. But my reverie was shattered when they rushed back inside gesticulating, eyes wide, alarmed. “Master!” one of them said, which was apparently the only English word he knew. They both began speaking, telling me of their concern but of course I could not understand them. They were pointing urgently. They wanted me to go outside with them. I hesitated, unwilling to leave the security of my ceiling. One of them reached up gently taking my wrist and pulled me after him.
They drew me to the glaring unpainted tin shed then stopped, pointing at the door, urging me to open it. By now I was scared. What was in there, a big snake? Some other dangerous wild animal? Why did I have to open the door? Maybe this is what they meant by the white man’s burden. Stiff with fear, I reached out for the doorknob and gingerly pushed the door open. Heat enveloped me as though from an oven. Then I saw the two children. They were maybe three and four years old. I think the older one may have been a girl. The were most beautiful children I had ever seen, clutching each other, staring at me with big, round eyes, trembling with terror. I had only ever seen a rabbit tremble like that. I moved closer to reassure them that I was not going to hurt them. They cringed. I backed off, painfully aware of my threatening white face. Had they been abandoned? I backed out of the shed. What should I do? I was the boss. The two black men were looking to me for answers. I returned to the house in a daze, walking from room to room.
After a few minutes I heard voices. A woman hurried into the house. An attractive black woman aged about twenty-five. A smile was fixed to the underlying panic in her face. As she approached me she began talking rapidly, hands reaching out, palms upraised, beseeching. I shook my head. Told her I could not understand her. Then to my relief she began speaking in English.
The children were hers, she said. She left home early in the morning and worked in the house next door cleaning, cooking and washing clothes from six in the morning until six in the evening. There was no one at home she could leave the children with but was not allowed to have them at work. Yet she needed the job to feed the children. She hesitated. We looked at each other. I began to imagine how she must have warned the children to be quiet, and they, knowing her desperation, obeyed. What had she told them would happen if the white people discovered them? I could not get their trembling out of my mind, or the fact that it was me they were terrified of. And they were still out there, imprisoned in that hot tin shed until the long day was over. Perhaps what I was thinking was reflected in my eyes, for the woman quickly assured me that she climbed the fence to see the children whenever she could, to give them something to eat and drink.
“Please, please, baas, don’t tell the missus. She’ll send me away and I have no other work.” I did’nt not know what to say. She stepped closer, her face frantic. “I’ll do anything for you.” I did not look any further into this invitation but I cannot say I would never have done so. Yes, I was appalled but there was also a part of me that was aroused, not only by her body but the exciting new aphrodisiac of absolute power. My first lesson in the reality of apartheid
Later, I would learn the dilemma faced by this young mother was commonplace for black women in South Africa. I also learned how easily the commonplace became acceptable to most immigrants. For working class Englishmen it was invigorating to suddenly move up a class. And in a country where millions of people were by law beneath you, this was a heady elevation. And despite seeing much in South Africa that sickened me, I learned to understand the addiction of privilege.
It would be comforting to think my decision to leave South Africa more than a year later was based entirely on my loathing of apartheid. And tempting for me to feel morally superior to the thousands of immigrants who adopted apartheid as though born to it. But that was not entirely true. For while the opportunity to employ desperate, poorly paid servants may have been a betrayal of my principles, it was also thrillingly decadent.
Because I happened to be white, I enjoyed a comfortable living in a perfect climate, walking freely under the avenues of Jacarandas in springtime. I was deferred to by a multitude of black people, it all added up to the irresistible appeal of exclusive entitlement.
When it came, my decision to leave was tied up with thoughts of my future, which included having children. I had visions of my own little bronzed South Africans growing up in the sunshine with accents like their friends, neighbours and teachers. That didn’t seem such a bad thing. What bothered me was that, unless they were exceptionally sensitive and strong-minded, they would also share the attitudes of their friends, neighbours and teachers. They would not understand how a white man could be deeply affected at finding two black children in a hot tin shed.

End.