32 Years of Freedom

Today marks 32 years of freedom -- 32 years ago South Africa held its first democratic election. I described that quite fully in a blog post 12 years ago -- click here to see it.

This time I fell to wondering what I was doing 32 years before that. I was working as a bus conductor in Johannesburg, and having just reached the age of 21 years, I was eligible to be trained as a driver as well. And this is what I wrote in my diary for that day, Friday 27 April 1962: 

I did one Highlands North for scab and then went to the driving school and got a lot of instructions on how to get a learner's licence and then came home. I got 5c pay, which I spent on a cup of coffee. For bird's sake!

On my shift I read "Out of the silent planet" by C.S. Lewis, and then slept all the way home on the caboose.

My shift that day, which had been mine since the previous January, was four trips to Bellevue East in the evening rush hour in an old AEC Regent Mark III diesel bus, "Non-Europeans" only -- "Non-Europeans" got all the rattly old buses, the new shiny ones were reserved for white people. They were heavy work, because the trip was quite short, the buses were full, and so a lot of fares had to be collected in a short time. 

Steve Hayes as a bus conductor in 1962

Then there was a break, followed by 7 trips, in the same kind of bus, alternately to Crown Mines and Mayfair, for "Asiatics and Coloureds" only. There were usually only 5-10 passengers on the outward trip, and 1-3 going back to town, so once I had collected the fares, which I had usually done before the bus had travelled a block, there was plenty of time to read a book. Why did Johannesburg municipality run a bus service for so few passengers? Probably because, in those days of apartheid, the working-class white residents of Mayfair and Homestead Park did not like "Asiatics and Coloureds" riding on "their" buses, and the city councillors, elected only by white voters, took such things seriously, lest they not be reelected.

When not reading, I would stand on the rear platform on the bus and look at the passing scene. First Fordsburg, home of a lot of old buildings, with balconies and iron railings. home of Indian businesses, mostly "general agents" with names like Dhirubhai C. Desai and Dhadubhai P. Naik. Past the trolleybus garage in the dip, and up the other side, where, at that time of night, the only shops open were corner cafes or "tea rooms" (convenience stores), and most of them had closed by 9:00 pm. I finished work after the last bus that could have taken me home had gone, so went home on the caboose, a staff bus, which dropped me about a mile from home, and I walked the rest of the way, getting home about 1:30 am. 

In case anyone was wondering about why my pay was only 5c, that was the week in which deductions for the pension fund and the thrift fund were made. The savings in the "thrift fund" were so I could go to university the following year.

What else happened in 1962?

Balthazar Johannes Vorster, who had become Minister of Justice the previous year, presented a General Laws Amendment Bill in parliament, nicknamed by the media the "Sabotage Bill" because it provided for much heavier penalties for malicious damage to property if it could be shown to have been done with a political purpose. But it had lots of other provisions for administrative action against opponents of the government's apartheid policy, including house arrest. The first person to be put under house arrest was Helen  Joseph, who lived quite close to me, and though I did not know her personally, the fact that she lived nearby made the encroaching police state feel very real, and the freedom achieved on 27 April 1994 was, and is, very real also.