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By Root 3678 0

the first. He listened quietly to each of Mrs. Ngqika's frantic requests, then leafed through his gray canvas notebook till he found the relevant law and quoted it. He never raised his voice, and spoke not in Afrikaans, which she might not understand, but in English. He merely leafed through his papers and produced the law. When she got home she felt weak, and now she had only three weeks before she must quit this place into which she had poured so much of herself.

She was not being evicted because Bloke had been careless with his money; he had even gone to Super to ask if he could buy their little home, but the law book was explicit: 'No non-white may own land in Soweto.' And since Johannesburg non-whites were forbidden to live anywhere but Soweto, home ownership was impossible. As Mr. Grobbelaar explained: 'Bloke, you are allowed to remain here only so long as you do meaningful work to help the whites. And your wife is welcome only so long as your pass remains valid.'

That evening a group of black ladies met in Miriam Ngqika's kitchen to console her and to bid her farewell, and there was an awesomeness about the gathering, for each of these women knew that when their husbands died,

they, too, would be exiled to some distant black spot which they had never seen and with which they had no affiliation whatever except by dictate of the new laws.

There was, however, in the group a schoolteacher who said, 'The Black Sash ladies have been asking us to find a case which they could fight. I think this is it.'

'I don't want to fight,' Miriam said quietly.

'But we got to fight,' the teacher said, and she warned the black women that it could become ugly and that reputations could be injured. 'Is there any scandal in your family?' the teacher asked, and the women stayed late at night, reviewing Miriam Ngqika's history, and it was blameless.

Early next morning the schoolteacher reported to the Black Sash society, and it happened that Mrs. Laura Saltwood was in attendance at a meeting of the national board, and when she heard the facts in the Ngqika case she exclaimed, 'Just what we've been waiting for!'

The committee agreed that Bloke Ngqika's fine record would be an asset in protesting this eviction, and the respectable manner in which he and his wife had lived would also help. Miriam Ngqika had an admirable reputation in the township, and it was assumed that Superintendent Grobbelaar would not be able to testify adversely against her.

He didn't. He listened carefully as Mrs. Saltwood made her plea, then in good English explained that the law . . . Here he turned the leaves to the applicable law: 'Mrs. Ngqika was always well behaved ...' He sounded like an elementary-school teacher reporting on some infant; in fact, he was saying that he approved of the conduct of a woman fifteen years older than himself: 'She was neat, didn't drink, and I had no occasion to reprimand her.'

'Then why can't she stay?'

'Because all the Bantu are temporary sojourners, in a sense. She has become a superfluous appendage and must go.'

For an hour Superintendent Grobbelaar patiently glossed the laws, patiently explained that when a non-white family ceased to be useful to the white community, it must get out.

'But she's never been to Soetgrond,' Mrs. Saltwood protested.

'That may be so, but the law says that we must begin to get those non-useful people back to their own homelands.'

'Johannesburg is now her homeland.'

'Not any more.'

Mrs. Saltwood became almost offensive in her pressure for a humane concession, but Grobbelaar never lost his temper. When Mrs. Saltwood cried in moral outrage, 'Can't you see, Mr. Grobbelaar, that this is a great human tragedy?' he replied gently and with no bitterness, 'Mrs. Saltwood, every decision I have to make, week after week, involves what to the people concerned seems a great human tragedy. But we're trying to get our society sorted out.'

'At what human cost!'

'The cost may seem excessive to you, now. But when we have everyone in his place, you'll see that this is going to be a splendid country.'

With