by Alan Paton
– Are you threatening us?
– No more than you are threatening me.
– I just don’t understand you, Johnson. People like the Bodasinghs came to South Africa as coolies. The men earned something like ten or fourteen shillings a month and a free hut and rations. Today this girl’s father is a rich man. This country gave him opportunities far greater than any he would find in India. In India he would still be a coolie. And yet his daughter has the impudence to complain of the laws of the country that made them rich. It makes me fume. Let me go before I really get angry. I still think that if this girl must be seen, you could send someone else to see her.
The Director rose as his superior left. If he had spoken his thoughts, Mainwaring would have been shocked, for the Director would have said, I won’t send anyone else because I want to go myself, I want to see this Indian girl, this child of a powerless race, who has challenged the majesty of the Government and the State. I want to see what kind of girl she could be.
The Durban prison is no thing of beauty. From its ramparts one does not see the blue expanse of the Indian Ocean or the stately indigenous trees of the Berea. One sees instead a waste piece of land bounded on one side by the prison itself, and on the other sides by nondescript commercial buildings. The waste land has to some extent been hallowed because on Sunday afternoons people have been gathering there to pray for the well-being of those who have been sentenced for sitting in white waiting-rooms or on white benches in the public parks and gardens, or as in the case of this girl Prem Bodasingh, for going to the white reference room of the Durban Library.
The Superintendent met Johnson with a deference due to a Director of Education and with an authority proper to the Superintendent of a prison, who has the responsibility for the health and safe custody of a few hundred souls who have broken the laws of the land but not very grievously, because in that case they would have been sent to prisons much more formidable than this unimposing building on a piece of waste land in Durban.
– I’ve bent the rules for you, Director, as I am entitled to do on occasions. You can see the prisoner in a private room, and your conversation will not be listened to.
– Thank you, Superintendent.
The Director followed the Superintendent down a passage smelling of disinfectant, and into a room where a young Indian girl was sitting under guard. As they entered, the wardress said in a sharp voice, Stand up, and she and the girl stood up.
– This, Director, is prisoner Prem Bodasingh, who is at present serving a three-week sentence for contravening municipal bye-laws. Prisoner Bodasingh, this is Dr. Johnson, the Director of Education for Natal. Wardress Smith, you will not remain, but will take up your duties outside the door. You will see that no unauthorised person enters this room. You may sit down if you wish. Director, will you kindly tell Wardress Smith when your visit is ended, and I shall come to escort you. I must ask you not to move from this room unescorted.
He left the room and shut the door, and Johnson said to the girl, Sit down, Prem.
Prem Bodasingh, even in the shapeless prison dress that she was wearing, appeared to him as a creature of grace. She was slender and not very tall, and her features were what one might call aristocratic, although she was in fact the descendant of labourers. These labourers had been brought to Natal in 1860 to work on the sugar plantations, and some of their descendants had become teachers, professors, manufacturers, lawyers, doctors. Others still belonged to the very poor, and now regarded with respect those whose ancestors had been labourers like their own. All of them had once been called coolies, a word which with the passage of time has become a term of contempt, and is no longer used in polite society.
Prem not only had these aristocratic features, but her hands were aristocratic too, with fine tapered fingers. Her eyes were luminous, more like those of a young gazelle than a young revolutionary. She met his scrutiny with composure, without either boldness or embarrassment.
– Miss Ramsay sends her best wishes to you. She wants very much to have you back at school. She says that the school is not easy to control without you.
The girl gave a smile of pleasure, but she quickly suppressed it.
– Prem, you heard who I am, and you know why I am here, don’t you?
Yes, I know, sir. You are here because I have broken the law, and because some people want me to be expelled.
– I am here also for quite a different reason. Do you know what in loco parentis means?
Yes, sir, I do.
– I have not come here to talk to you about breaking the law. I am not a policeman. I am a teacher, and I am filled with apprehension — you understand that? — I am filled with apprehension — that you may destroy your life.
She did not reply.
– You want to make the world better, and you are right to want that. But this particular world in which we live is not going to get better tomorrow. It may go on like this for ten, twenty, thirty years. Nobody knows. And you may have to live in it for those thirty years, doing what? Perhaps spending more and more of your life in prison, without matriculation, without university, without a career. You want to be a social worker, don’t you?
– Yes, sir.
– Well, Prem, at this rate you will never be a social worker, unless of course you go to some other country. But it would be difficult for you to do that now. You would regard it as running away, is that not so?
– Yes, sir.
– You have to ask yourself, which is better, to serve your country and your people for thirty years as a social worker, or to go in and out of jail for thirty years. Prem, I don’t want to stop you from breaking what you think is an unjust law. I want to stop you from damaging your whole life. Do you understand what I am saying?
– Yes, sir, I understand it.
– Do you understand that you may be damaging your whole life?
– I understand it.
– Are you willing to throw away education, knowledge, learning, for the sake of your cause?
She said to him in a low voice,
– Yes.
– But these are — what shall I say? — holy things.
She said with a spark of fire,
– The cause is holy too. And my promise. A promise is holy too.
– A promise to whom? To Congress?
– No. To God and myself.
– What was your promise, Prem?
She did not answer. He could see that his questions were painful to her. But having been brought up in the ways of obedience, she could hardly refuse to answer this great personage, this great white personage who was filled with apprehension that she might destroy her life.
He said to her gently,
– My child, what was your promise?
She bowed her head and said in a voice so low that he could barely hear her words,
– To the death.
– Who asked you for that?
– Nobody.
– Who heard your promise?
– Dr. Monty heard it.
– Dr. Monty Naicker?
– Yes.
– What did he say? Did he say you mustn’t do that?
– No.
– What did he do?
She was silent again, till he said to her,
– Prem.
– He took out his handkerchief.
– And blew his nose?
He laughed, and the girl laughed too, the laugh transforming her face so that he thought her suddenly beautiful.
– There’s one last question. What do your parents say?
– They want me to stop.
– And you are held back by your promise?
– Yes, sir.
– Well, you must think it all over carefully. I also would try to keep a promise. But I think it is possible to make too much of the sanctity of a promise. Is one entitled to hurt others? Is one even entitled to hurt oneself? Your life doesn’t belong to you, Prem. It belongs to your parents and your school and your friends, an
d even to the country of what you call the unjust laws. I shall do everything I can to save you from total expulsion. But you must remember that I am only a servant of the Provincial Council. The final power is theirs. Goodbye, Prem.
She stood up and made him a kind of curtsey.
– If my parents were here they would thank you for your kindness.
William Johnson walked up the broad path that led to Dr. Monty’s house and observed the garden with an appreciative eye. The house too was worth looking at, cool and wide-verandahed, and was situated in one of the beautiful residential streets of Durban. Dr. Monty’s action in legally buying this house was known as ‘penetration’, and the majority of the white citizens objected strongly to the infiltration by Indians of what they regarded as their own areas. Their first attempts to stop this kind of thing had been unsuccessful, but now the Group Areas Act of the new Nationalist Government promised relief. Dr. Monty would no longer be able to live in a white group area, but would have to take himself and his family to an Indian group area, where they could speak their own language and cherish their own culture and pursue their own social, political, religious, and economic goals in peace, unhampered by the proximity of alien races. The Group Areas Act was indeed one of the cornerstones of the great edifice of separate coexistence, and it was welcomed by the white citizens of Durban, of whom it was cynically said that they voted United Party and thanked God for the Nationalists.
Coming down the path to meet Johnson was Dr. Monty himself, a well-built man of middle height, his white teeth shining in a broad smile of welcome. Johnson had seen him on the platform, humourless and uncompromising and somewhat frightening, but the man coming to meet him was friendly and benign.
– Dr. Johnson.
– I didn’t think you’d see me, doctor.
– Why is that?
– Because the Department has forbidden its teachers to take part in the Defiance Campaign.
Dr. Monty gave his famous chuckle, an endearing sound which gave his hearers the assurance that he was human, an impression they might not have got if they had heard him on a public platform.
– The reason why I see you, Director, is because of what you have done for our schools. The moment you rang, I had no hesitation in deciding to see you. We are not fanatics, Director. Come this way. We are going to have tea on the verandah.
– It’s a pleasant house, doctor.
No sooner had Johnson said this than he wished that he could have recalled his words. Dr. Monty saw his embarrassment and smiled at it.
– It is a pleasant house. It’s an oasis in the desert, but as you know, it’s to the desert we must go. While we are here, we intend to enjoy it.
– And your neighbours?
Many don’t want us to go, and they come to tell us so. It’s handy to have a doctor next door. It has benefited them more than once. But you didn’t come here to talk to me about the Group Areas Act.
– No, I didn’t. I came to talk to you about Prem.
– You think I ought to stop her.
– I came to tell you that she weighs heavily on my mind, and on my conscience too. You may have heard that she may be debarred from all schools. I don’t think that is likely. The Natal Executive Committee would have to find a new director, and I don’t think they would be willing to go as far as that. That’s not what worries me, doctor. It’s the possibility that the Defiance Campaign may go on for many years. Prem has promised — to God and herself — that she will go on to the death. I am afraid that she may destroy her whole life. You know, don’t you, that she won’t allow any other girl in the school to join the campaign?
– Yes, I know that. I may tell you, Director, that I had nothing to do with persuading Prem to join the campaign. I did not even know her. And I certainly never expected that one of M.K. Bodasingh’s family would join us. Now when a young girl like that, clever and beautiful, decides that this is what she wants to do, that this is the right thing for her to do, who am I to stop her?
– I see that. But you have a wisdom and a knowledge that are denied to her. She is serving an ideal of universal justice, and I am proud that our schools have produced such a girl. But she also owes a duty to herself. Did you know she wanted to be a social worker?
– Yes, I knew.
– And you know that if the campaign goes on for many years, and if she believes herself to be bound by this overwhelming promise made at the age of seventeen or eighteen, she will never become a social worker?
– Yes, I know that too.
– Don’t you also stand to her in loco parentis? Her own parents are powerless, as you know. But you have a great influence over her. Do you believe that she is serving the cause better now than she possibly could in later years? Have you any reason to believe that?
– You don’t understand, Director, that this is going to be our life from now on. Some of us have to be destroyed now so that freedom can come to others later. We have come to realise this only in the past few years. I am talking about Indians especially. We made big speeches about freedom, but we didn’t suffer. Now many of us are ready to suffer, just as Prem is ready.
– But she is only a child.
– We were all children once. What am I to say to her, Director? Shall I say to her, You must go on living a normal life but in ten years’ time I shall call on you to suffer? Couldn’t we all do that? Couldn’t I finish building my new clinic first, and then go out and suffer? Couldn’t Lutuli first get his shop on its feet and then go out and suffer? Wouldn’t it be easier for me to suffer if I could leave my partners to run a new clinic while I join the struggle? Couldn’t Lutuli suffer better if his shop were giving security to his wife and family? And couldn’t the girl Prem suffer better if she first qualified as a social worker? You don’t change the world that way, Director.
Johnson knew that he was looking at a world different from his own, a world that he would never enter. He would proceed honourably to his pension, and would receive many praises. He and his wife would retire, in Pietermaritzburg or on the South Coast, where if he wished he could play golf for another ten years, and perhaps after that play bowls for another ten. He could read his newspapers and all the books that he had never had the time to read. He could sit on his verandah and look at the blue waters of the Indian Ocean, and the ships on their way to Australia and the Far East, and read about the protest marches of the Lutulis and the Montys. But destiny, or history, or something else, had made it a world which he could not enter.
– The Suppression of Communism Act has left only one way open to us, Director. If you resist the laws, long enough, militantly enough, you will be silenced, you will be shut off from the world of people, of pleasure, of travel, even of education. That will happen to Lutuli soon, and it will happen to me.
The smiling Dr. Monty was gone, the other Monty was speaking, and it was evident to Johnson that under the even tenor of the words there was an almost ungovernable passion, here in the quietness of this residential street.
– The girl is beautiful, Director, and I hear she is clever too. But she has something more than beauty and cleverness, she has the courage to oppose injustice, and she has the courage to oppose the unjust laws that can silence the brave and take away the houses and the shops of decent law-abiding people, because of an accident of birth over which they had no control. But the girl is destined to suffer, Director, unless she betrays the cause that she believes in. When she came to see me I could have wept to see her courage, and her beauty. But stop her? There are some things that can’t be done.
Johnson stood up.
– I did my best. I wanted to save the girl.
– It does you credit, Director. That’s why we respect you and are thankful that you are in charge of our schools.
He chuckled. The benign Dr. Monty was back again.
– Politics is not the only thing in our world. There are other things too, pride in our schools and our children. And in our houses and gardens. But in the last resort, p
olitics is the most important of them all. That sounds terrible, Director, but it isn’t, because for us politics means justice.
. . . I think, my dear aunt, that you are overestimating the importance of the Defiance Campaign. I can tell you in the strictest confidence that the Government is considering steps which will bring it to a decisive end. The unnatural alliance between Chief Lutuli of the African Congress and Dr. Naicker of the Indian Congress will be ended too. It is certain that Lutuli will be ordered to choose between his chieftainship and his presidency of the Congress. Whichever he chooses it will be the end of him.
I can also tell you that the Cabinet is angry about Africans and Indians ‘cooperating’ in the campaign. You will remember that only a few years ago, in 1949 to be exact, the Zulus went after the Indians because of some trouble between a Zulu boy and an Indian shopkeeper. More than 140 people lost their lives, more than half of them being Zulus, most of them killed by the police to stop them killing Indians. There was a malicious slander that the Government was encouraging the riots; on the contrary the whole intention of apartheid is to prevent them by the policy of peaceful coexistence. It is a well-known scientific fact that racial mixing leads inevitably to racial conflict. Therefore no good can come out of this ‘cooperation’.
The determination of the Government has been increased by the news that Patrick Duncan has resigned his post as judicial commissioner in the British Colonial Service in Basutoland in order to join the campaign. You will remember that Duncan’s father, when he was Governor-General, refused in 1939 to grant General Hertzog’s request to dissolve Parliament after he had been defeated by thirteen votes on the decision to declare war on Germany. Instead Duncan asked Smuts to form a new government, and that is why the name of Duncan is held in low esteem by all true Afrikaners. My Minister has ordered the head of Security to give him a full report on Duncan. The young man will pay heavily for his treachery.
My Minister finds one feature of the campaign extremely insolent. These Indians who have been to prison have taken to wearing the white Gandhi cap, a ridiculous headgear that perches on the top of the head like those paper hats that people wear at Christmas. Most of the Indians wearing them would now be sleeping on the pavements of Calcutta had their forefathers not come to South Africa as labourers last century. Our Durban Nationalists find this insolence quite intolerable, and have sent a deputation to the Minister asking him to consider a twelve-months’ sentence for the wearing of such a cap. He was willing, but Dr. Malan said he would not make himself ridiculous by punishing people for wearing a particular kind of cap. I can tell you that the Minister was deeply offended by this remark.