The covenant - James A. Michener [606]
'Are you game to see where they're going?' Nxumalo asked, as if he could read Philip's mind.
'It's forbidden, isn't it?'
'Yes, it's against the law for whites, but it can be done.'
It was the kind of challenge a peripatetic geologist often faced: Strangers are not allowed in that temple, it's sacred to Shiva. Or, You're not permitted in that corner of Afghanistan, too close to the Russian border.
But always the daring ones went, and now Philip Saltwood was on his way to a clandestine visit to Soweto, a nonexistent city of at least one and a half million black people. South Western Townships was its official title, the first two letters of each word having been taken to form the acronym.
As they drove the twelve miles to it, with trains rushing past in orderly procession, each laden with workers, some clinging to the doors, Nxumalo said, 'It's the same problem as the little one we saw at Venloo. The Afrikaners honestly believe that no black people live in their all-white cities. They believe that we work there briefly during daylight hours, then vanish. Soweto up ahead does not exist officially. The million and a half people who live there, fifty percent of them illegally, are not really there. They're supposed to sleep there temporarily while they work in the city, but if they lose their jobs, they're obligated to move back to their Bantustans, which most of them have never seen.'
When Philip started to respond to this macabre fairy tale of the city twice as large as Boston that did not exist, Nxumalo grinned and jabbed him in the arm. 'I'll wager you didn't notice the most important fact about that exodus at the railway station.'
'As a matter of fact, I did. I saw that the crush contained all kinds of workers, from street sweepers to college professors.'
Nxumalo laughed. 'You failed your examination. The significant fact was that almost everyone carried a package of some kind. You see, because Soweto doesn't exist, and because it's seen as only temporary, ephemeral . . . Well, what's logical? It has no stores. No real ones, that is. They're not allowed, because they don't fit into the white man's plan. Everything except a few minor commodities must be purchased from white-owned stores in Johannesburg. Soweto is not a city. It's a dormitory.'
Saltwood's first impression was arbitrary and in a sense preposterous: 'Christ! Look at all those churches. I never heard of one of them before.' At frequent spots in areas that contained nothing but row upon row of uniformly dismal blockhouses, a flagstaff would display a torn ensign indicating that this building was the Church of Zion, or the Church of the Holy Will, or the Xangu Church, or simply the home of a holy man who had direct contact with God.
'After the beer hall,' Nxumalo explained, 'it's the best racket in Soweto. Maybe four thousand different churches preaching God-knows-what.' But now they were opposite a huge wire-enclosed shed, devoid of any charm whatever, where hundreds of workingmen sat at long bare tables guzzling weak Kaffir beer. That word was officially outlawed now, and if a white man called a black a Kaffir he could be charged with common assault, but the name for the beer persisted. It was a pernicious drink, strong enough to be expensive, weak enough to prevent a man from becoming dangerously drunk.
'The beer hall is the greatest anti-revolutionary instrument in Africa,' Nxumalo said, but even as he spoke, a force of much different character swept past, a gang of tsotsis running to some rendezvous that could involve theft, or rape, or one of the thousand murders each year, fifty percent unsolved because the victims were black.
Out of the vast miasma of this forsaken city, this purgatory that was not hell, for the houses were livable, nor heaven,