Editorial

Xuma arrives in a mining ghetto town and siding called Malay Camp looking for work in the mines. It is a ‘camp’ because it is a mining settlement – poor, desolate, drunken, and brawling. It is not a place for the weak. The men, miners all, live their lives in the belly of the earth and most times come up gasping for air, coughing and dying. It is of course apartheid era with the indigenous black South African banished to the prison of townships, plagued by a life of official regimentation, harassed, policed, over-taxed, deprived of all economic- or self-advancement through education, and, for amusement, abandoned to liver-eroding, illicit and groggy evenings in that devil’s watering hole called the shebeen. In that hole lives, like that of Daddy the drunk, dissolve in drink. That is the picture of the South African future, which Peter Abrahams seemed to have painted in Mine Boy in 1942. It is the future because the past, for example 1942, was constructed as the hell it was, in large part because of the gold deposits and ‘rush’ which, attracted the Boer and, protracted colonial activity. Mines still physically dot the landmass of the country, and seem to be a permanent feature of South Africa’s socio-economic and political landscape. The future is always a present.

That future is at no time more present than right now in contemporary South Africa – poverty, AIDS/HIV, unemployment, lack of proper housing, scavenging, violence, squalor, a gradual collapse of public infrastructure and, a resultant xenophobia, even against other black people from the continent – irrespective of their herculean external moral and financial supportive roles in bringing down apartheid as a system. In the Malay Camp black township ghetto, the evidence of a ‘normal’ and decent life is telegraphed to its wretched inhabitants only as a ‘hum’ from the ‘city’ – faint, distant but deep; a persistent and humiliating thrill in the head of the poor. It is a white only kind of noise inhabited by the powerful – those gods for whom blacks were only kaffirs and servants. Today that hum is peopled by a different hue – black. The black South African elite has taken over those habitation where whites where once gods. In other words, the current black ruling class has maintained the white class and social hierarchies, along with their artificial conditions, which were installed by apartheid. What has changed in South Africa is only the baton of power. Apartheid injustice, dispossession and brutalities persist on both sides. Initially power changed hands in 1994 to hope and promise, but the hand that now rules still carries the same clenched fist of the apartheid years.

Yes, there is a minority, both black and white, who enjoy the largess and goodies of freedom, but they are a very small minority indeed. South Africans – ‘the people,’ white, black, Indian or Jew, still exist under the sirens, the hard knuckles and jackboots of apartheid conditions. In this ironic and cruel social and economic stasis it is not only the people, the oppressed miners in this instance, who are ‘mine boys.’ It is not for nothing that Peter Abrahams’ rebellious and fighting mine boy, ‘Xuma,’ of 1942 has been transformed into ‘Zuma’ of 2012, president of the republic of South Africa. While he competes with the erstwhile colonial master in pomp, pageantry, pleasure and philandering within the colonial mansion, Zuma forgets his alter ego, Xuma, slaving thousands of miles under the earth in the mines of 1942; he forgets that his past and his future ought to find a political resolution in the present.

The multinational mining corporation, with all its rapacious digging, will eventually create a deep enough bottomless pit under the presidential mansion. And when the house eventually goes into a free fall, even before it hits a non-existent bottom, the ghost of Xuma, the activist, would have melted into ether, into a time past Zuma’s sudden harsh ‘deep’ reality; and a future beyond approach for Zuma, trapped as he would then be under a collapsed country. Jacob Zuma, symbol of all that is wrong with the ANC, is the original mine boy – that type that will go back into a collapsing mine if only just to please the master; he is furiously digging his way back into the earth, already burrowed deeper than a cricket.

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