Zulus on The Rand

Extract

Recently I was standing on a bridge crossing the main approach to the new railway station in Johannesburg: below, the last touches were being given to the fifteen new platforms, while gangs of natives were busy with pneumatic drills, cranes and trucks, already demolishing the old station, and singing shanties as they worked. In the skyscraper flats all round thousands more natives were busy cooking their masters’ dinners on electric stoves: others were handling goods in the warehouses, working as pump-boys at filling stations, setting up linotype for tomorrow’s edition of The Bantu World, or, several thousand feet underground, were manning mechanical plant, and lashing the reef rock from a gold mine.

In all outward appearances, South Africa is as modem, progressive, and industrialised as any country in Europe or America. But it is also a country of contrasts and seeming contradictions, of bright lights, hard outlines, cruelty, and laughter. As soon as the observer says Chicago has nothing on Johannesburg, he must immediately ask himself, is this not in truth darkest Africa? To ignore that question would be almost as foolish as to ignore the question, whether Paris could have a culture which was independent of neon fighting.

For the thousands of Africans who are riding bicycles, delivering refrigerators and patent medicines, who, in a word, are caught up in the techniques and efficiency of our mass-producing age, have roots in an older culture whose coherence and whose hold on them are only just crumbling. The good old days of law and order and of values they could understand are still there in the reserves, even if clouds presage the approach of night.