The covenant - James A. Michener [567]
'There must be no confusion of thinking,' a cabinet minister said. 'Sophiatown counts as a black spot on our land.' He then explained that a black spot was a place where Bantu had acquired land ownership under old laws. Under apartheid, such offensive spots had to be rubbed out. Thirteen percent of the land, traditional sites for kraals, had been set aside, and there blacks could own land. 'At Sophiatown, and spots like it that we need, their temporary sojourn in our midst is over.'
'I can't believe they're going to knock it down,' Barney Patel said as the bulldozers revved tneir engines.
'The paper said they start today.'
'But all the people living there?'
'Out in the country. To the new settlements.'
'You mean they'll have to travel all those miles?'
'That's not the government's problem [he pronounced it gommint]. Out they go. Gommint says they shouldn't have been here in the first place.'
A bell started ringing in a Protestant church right in the middle of the slum area, and continued for some minutes until a policeman hurried through the crowd to silence it. 'They don't want any trouble,' Patel said. 'They've banned meetings of more than twelve people.'
'They won't have any trouble,' Desai said. 'Look at the police.'
To deal with the first one hundred and fifty families ordered to abandon the homes they owned, the government had brought in two thousand policemen armed with Sten guns and assegais, backed by troop carriers, signal units and squads of military police.
When the bulldozers were ready, two men to each machine, a Resettlement Board official gave the signal, and the powerful scrapers moved forward, their blades lowered, their snouts hungry.
'I just don't believe this,' Patel said, his throat suddenly dry.
'Look!' the older man said, and they watched as the monstrous machines ripped a path through a group of shacks. A single bulldozer would wipe out an entire house, but this was no great accomplishment, for that one had been cardboard and planks.
'Look over there!' Desai cried, and as he pointed, a bulldozer chewed its way into a substantial home of wood and brick.
'That house must have been worth ...' Patel did not finish his sentence, for the bulldozer, having attacked something it could not easily subdue, hung in the air for a moment, then slid sideways, endangering the driver but not upsetting. Angrily it backed up, sped its engine and tore back into the house, which collapsed in a cloud of dust.
'Look at the people!' Desai said softly, and the two Indians turned to the south where large groups of blacks gathered silently to watch the demolition, mindful of what was in store for them. They stood with anguish on their dark faces, their hands clenched, powerless to obstruct either the bulldozers or the officials who directed them. This black spot could not be tolerated by whites in neighboring Mayfair; it must be cleansed of its vermin and converted to higher purposes.
'There come the trucks,' Patel said as a line of vehicles moved in to carry away the residents, and while the 'dozers knocked down the unwanted houses, the trucks carted off the unwanted people, free of charge, as the letter had promised.
There were, of course, those few blacks who refused to quit their homes; these were routed out by the police but no harm was done them. From one house near where Patel and Desai stood, a team of soldiers carried away an old man who had stubbornly refused to budge. 'Come on, old grandpop, we're in a hurry!' the soldiers said in Afrikaans ('Kom, Oubaas, ons is haastig'). Almost gently they bore him to a waiting truck and sat him down among the others, and he was scarcely seated before a bulldozer eliminated the house in which his children and grandchildren had been born.
The two Indians remained on their prominence