The covenant - James A. Michener [570]
'But if you put all of us in this so-called Lenasia so far out into the country . . .'
'That's for your protection. All the Indians in one spot.'
'But so far out. We'll waste hours and rand every day.'
'My dear friends,' the official, a Natal-born Englishman, said with warmth but also with a certain stiffness, 'our country has no finer citizens than you Indians. We wouldn't dream of doing anything to your disadvantage. But we must bring order into our lives. Pageview is intended for whites. Look at the map!' And he showed them how where they lived and traded intruded into areas that could better be used for whites.
'And you can have nice new shops out there,' he assured them, waving his hand in some vague direction. 'You'll like it better when it happens.' He paused. 'We're doing this for your own good,' he said. And before they could reply they were out on the street.
'I wish Mohandas Gandhi were here again,' Patel growled. 'He'd know how to stop this.'
AT WORK
The Golden Reef Mines southwest of Johannesburg needed a constant supply of black workers to man the deepest shafts where blasting of the face rock occurred. From all over southern Africa planes and trains and buses brought almost illiterate black men to the compounds within which they would live for the six to eighteen months of their contract. Critics of the labor system likened these compounds to harsh prisons in which the blacks were incarcerated; management spoke of them as well-run dormitories in which the laborers lived infinitely better than they did at home.
There was one clue to the truth of these contrasting claims: black men in the bush of Mozambique, Malawi, Rhodesia, Lesotho and Vwarda fought for a chance to work at the Golden Reef, and for good reason. Though the wage was trivial, it was much more than they could get in their home villages; the food was better; there was more of it; beds were covered with good blankets; and doctors provided health care. Black nationalists in surrounding countries would publicly inveigh against South Africa but privately see to it that planes which came flying into their airstrips were loaded with workers, for only in this way could some of the economies be kept afloat. Black families also encouraged their men to fly to the Golden Reef for the sensible reason that a good percentage of a man's wages was paid only when he returned home, and his wife and children could temporarily escape their poverty.
When blacks from thirty or forty different tribes, speaking radically different languages and dialects, had to work together, it was necessary to construct some simple language they could all understand. Fanakalo was the ingenious solution. The word came from pidgin Zulu and meant roughly 'do it like this,' and the lingua franca it represented was a marvelous melange of Bantu, English, Afrikaans and Portuguese. It consisted mostly of nouns, with a few essential verbs, some profanity for adjectival emphasis and a great many gestures. One linguist who tried to analyze it said, 'You don't speak Fanakalo. You dance it while shouting.'
Few things in the world worked better, for a tribesman could master simple instructions in three days: 'This here wrench, fanakalo.' (You do it like this.) And once learned, it served as a magical passkey to all the levels of the mine, so that a man from Malawi speaking a unique dialect could work deep in the shaft beside one from Vwarda speaking his. One white supervisor asked an associate what the workers on his shift meant when they referred to 'Idonki ngo football jersey,' and the second man said, 'Simple. They mean zebra.'
A miner could renew his contract again and again, but it was found better to have him return home after a long stint in the mines, see his family back in his home village, and return rested up. These returnees usually spoke well of the Golden Reef, especially the food. Once when Vwarda's representative