Honorary White by E. R. Braithwaite

Author:E. R. Braithwaite
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-12-09T16:00:00+00:00

The meeting with the Bantu Council had been arranged for eight o’clock that evening in the home of one of the members. I would have preferred to meet them in the Council building where I could see them against their working background but naturally I was obliged to follow their arrangements.

One of them called for me promptly at seven o’clock. On the way to Soweto, I told him of my earlier visit with the white guide and the old man’s outburst which had led to this meeting. He seemed preoccupied, glancing in the rear-view mirror more often than I thought necessary, and I was surprised when he suddenly asked, “Is anyone following you?”

I didn’t know how to respond to that. “Why?” I asked.

“Just trying to make sure,” he replied, and said no more about it. On arrival at his home, his wife greeted us with the news that two members of the Security Police, one black and one white, had been there asking about me and the meeting, claiming that they wanted to make sure I would be quite safe. She replied that I would be under their roof, as safe as they were, as protected as they were, if any protection was necessary. They replied that it was their duty to prevent an international incident and merely wanted assurance that all would be well.

“I gave them short shrift,” she said, smiling.

This was my first experience of the Security Police actually monitoring my movements. It was no longer a joke, an offshoot of my friend’s paranoia, but undeniable proof of the Big Brother interest in my movements. My hosts seemed to take it all in stride. They told me that police spying was merely another fact of daily life; it pervaded every area of living to the point where no one fully trusted his neighbor or associates or friends. This was equally true of the Council: although they were all black, each one was afraid that another might report something said or done in the hope of receiving some minuscule concession from the Security Police.

“That way they keep us distrustful of each other, suspicious, so we’re unwilling to come together in any real way to help each other. If I have a new idea, I don’t know where to start. I can discuss it with my wife, but who else? Sometimes people come to me with ideas. I’ve got to listen very carefully. If their ideas have the slightest hint of opposition to Government policy, my first reaction is that they’re trying to trap me. Oh, yes, that’s part of the technique. They come to you with an idea and the next thing you know they claim it was your idea in the first place and you have the Security Police on your back. All the time the police hold over your head the threat of sending you off to one of the Homelands. They could come here tomorrow and claim I’d been instigating something and deport me out of here.

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