The Bang-Bang Club Read Online Free PDF Page A

were controlled by a series of laws enacted from the 1920s onwards. Hostels were for single men. This is not to say that the men who lived there were necessarily unmarried, but simply that they were not allowed to bring their wives or families to live with them. The laws of apartheid allowed them to stay in urban areas only as long as they were gainfully employed. When their labour was no longer needed, they had to return to their homelands. Under the pass laws more than 17 million black people were prosecuted from 1916 to 1981. The apartheid dream was to force most blacks, 80 per cent of the population, to be legal citizens of the nominally independent ethnic homelands squashed into 13 per cent of the nation’s territory, so that the rest of South Africa’s vast, rich lands could be enjoyed by a white minority that conveniently employed blacks from the captive labour pool in the homelands.
    The hostels were austere structures, neglected by the municipality and by tenants alike. Their architecture imposed a claustrophobic proximity within, and isolation and distance without.
    They were basically dormitory quadrangles with contiguous single-storey concrete-block lodgings forming the outer perimeter. Enter a typical one, and the dirt and neglect assaulted your senses. Raw sewage from blocked and broken pipes spilled on to the ground. Uncollected garbage and dead dogs rotted unattended.
    The communal ablution blocks were not maintained and broken toilets rose from reeking pools in stalls that had never had doors. The cold-water showers had no doors either, so that those shitting could pass the time by watching those washing. There was no heating, even though temperatures dropped below freezing in winter. In summer, the poorly ventilated rooms were stifling and the stench unbearable.
    Each hostel had only one entrance that led to the dormitories. Few windows had glass panes and many were covered with plastic,
cardboard or corrugated iron. To each side, a door led into an openplan sleeping-room meant to be shared by four men, but often as many as 16 were crammed in. Each person had perhaps 1.8 by 1.5 metres of space in which to sleep, but even that was often shared as the beds were occupied in turns by shift-workers. Clothing hung from a length of wire strung above the beds; grey steel lockers stored food, pots and a few smaller items. There were no ceilings, just the underside of a corrugated iron or untreated asbestos roof, often in disrepair. When the fighting forced the township Zulus who were loyal to Inkatha to seek refuge in the hostels, entire families crowded in, worsening the hostels’ already unhygienic conditions.
    No provision was made for entertainment, unless you counted the ubiquitous beer hall run by the municipality. Enterprising residents usually set up a rough stall to sell parts of an animal slaughtered somewhere in the hostel, while others tried to make a living by converting their rooms into shebeens - informal, often illegal, taverns - where clear beer in quart bottles and sorghum beer in paper cartons was sold and consumed. Drunkenness was commonplace, and the Inkatha men that I was sitting with inside the hostel were getting drunk.
    Suddenly, a piercing, excited whistling echoed from somewhere deep in the massive hostel complex. Everyone jumped up and many began running towards the noise. ‘What’s happening?’ I asked.
    ‘Nothing, it’s nothing,’ a man answered, as he ran towards the sound, carrying sharpened iron rods and a cardboard shield. I followed another man carrying a piece of steel piping, white paint scuffed and peeling off in places. He paused now and then to blow into the pipe, emitting a thin trumpet-like sound. Was this a call to battle, I wondered? We came to a halt outside an undistinguished dormitory, where a score of men armed with sticks, assegais (spears), sharpened rods and pangas gathered before a white-painted steel door. Some tried to peer cautiously through the windows,