Page 85 - Monocle Quarterly Journal Vol 1 Issue 1 Q4

The JSE Today: Tobacco, Beer and Chinese Texting
BY DAVID BUCKHAM
If one were to conjure up a perennial image of apartheid South Africa, it would have to be one of the grainy photographs taken in Soweto on the 16th of June 1976. ere are the shots of the South African
Defence Force armoured vehicles in a stand-o with the baying scholars who had formed a roughshod group on the outskirts of Soweto, and there are shots of the crowd in panic after the rst bullets had been red. And then there are the photos of Hector Pieterson.
ese are the images that are conjured, that have been nurtured by the process of history into permanence, that are now indistinguishable from the concept of apartheid itself.
I grew up in apartheid South Africa, and these were not the images that I had in my head at the time. e images I had were of large, loosely- fenced properties, of dull brown and grey landscapes in winter, of single- story houses, and of pastel-coloured cars, of Saturday barbecues with neighbours’ children, and of swimming, endlessly, throughout summer.
ere were of course some small anxieties of things to come. ere was the moment when I was told that we should not go to school because it was ‘kill-a-white day’. It would only be many years later that I would come to realise that this day was the anniversary of the Soweto massacre.
But they were only ripples. Like any totalitarian regime, there was a bubble that was carefully maintained around us. We had little real notion of the world in which we lived. Our main convictions of ourselves were that we were somewhat politically behind, that the international community was repulsed by us, that we would spend two years in the army, and that we were pretty good at rugby.
On Saturday afternoons, having been excluded from international sport, we would watch the Currie Cup games. My father and his friends would drink South African Breweries-made beer, and smoke British American
“Like any totalitarian regime, there was a bubble that was carefully maintained around us. We had little real notion of the world in which we lived.”
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