"What are you trying to prove?" asked the inebriated visitor as he peered at our tents and tarpaulin-covered furniture on the narrow pavement in front of 28 Park Drive, Mayfair, in Johannesburg, South Africa.
"That the Group Areas Act came out of hell," I impulsively answered. The people restricted to Group Areas because of their darker skin color know this fact all too well. How to get the South African government to see it that way is the problem.
Before the Indian Naidu family camped on the pavement in protest, people officially classified as Indian, Colored, or Black had simply crept away from Group Areas enforcements. Johannesburg's ghettos for these groups are overflowing because of the influx to the city for jobs. The cabinet minister responsible for "Community Development" as well as for "Indian and Colored Affairs," Mr. Marais Steyn, has said they must double up as did his Afrikaner forebears when they were poor and oppressed by the British. But many Indian and Colored families are already trebled up. Garages and rickety sheds serve those who can't fit in with relatives in normal housing.
So thousands of people have moved into nearby "white areas," quietly, anonymously, like mice in fear of cats. When reported by members of the right-wing National Front or otherwise discovered by the Group Areas police, they are prosecuted and given notice to vacate.
Three evasive actions are then open to them. They can attempt to bribe officials to let them stay. Bribery has never been proved, but some illegal residents have shown surprising staying power. Second, they can move in with long-suffering relatives or friends. Third, they can try to inhabit another illegal place with a willing landlord or use a white stand-in who will be either sympathetic to their plight or well paid. The bribes and the fines can get expensive but are cheaper than daily traveling the 35 kilometers from the nearest area where Indian and Colored families can live legally.
But a while back, the Naidu family decided not to evade prosecution. After a year's notice to vacate their apartment expired and their attempts to get a further permit failed, eviction took the Naidus onto the pavement on January 29, 1979. That afternoon a thunderstorm drenched them. Note the date. It might mark the beginning of the end of the Group Areas Act.
I live in Mayfair too, and my church looks out on Pageview, a fast disappearing community of Indian and Colored people who are being dispossessed of their homes to make way for whites. I was introduced to Raghu and Dhana Naidu a few days after their eviction. I recognized that they were not political activists; they were just a homeless family with plenty of guts. The Naidus welcomed my request to join them, and helped pitch my pup tent with nails driven into cracks in the asphalt.
This Indian couple had the courage to show the government what suffering the Group Areas Act causes, and I had to support them. I began to help them look after their furniture, to minister to them in times of stress, and to let them know that some white South Africans are distressed at what is done in our name.
Of course we were "breaking the law." In addition to the Naidus still being in the wrong group area, we also were obstructing the pavement and "squatting illegally." But now the lawbreaking was being done openly and on behalf of the basic human right to have somewhere to live.
It was an interesting six weeks on the pavement. We slept in our clothes, anticipating an attack on the tents, but all was peace and good will. The police were polite and kept their distance. The only animosity we experienced took the form of occasional insults shouted from passing cars.
Park Drive is on a main bus route, and traffic starts before dawn and runs late. When one is asleep six feet away, a speeding car is like a bullet in the head.
The late talks with visitors every evening were very tiring. But they gave us an opportunity to discuss nonviolence and its power and to help angry people see that the Naidus' simple endurance of inhumane treatment was helping to humanize their oppressors and liberate us all. Sometimes the day ended with a prayer.
On March 8 our tents were dismantled and the Naidus' furniture removed on orders from the Secretary for Community Development. A dozen uniformed police with dogs and two riot squad vans in reserve protected the removers. I sensed that their action was illegal and was dragged away several times for trying to prevent the removal of the furniture. Lawyers later confirmed that the Prevention of Illegal Squatting Act permits the removal of structures and their contents but does not cover the removal of the furniture which was not in the tents and had been put on the pavement not by the squatters but by the Department of Community Development itself.
That night I read Luke 22:47-53 and 23:32-48 to the late-night talkers, and after a prayer for forgiveness and peace, we slept under the stars. But a family cannot go on living like that. On March 11 we moved back into the Naidus' old house, which I had rented. Within a few days we were charged with taking up unlawful occupation.
Meanwhile a snowball had started to roll. While we were still on the pavement, concerned citizens had formed an organization to stop evictions called ACTSTOP. When the next Park Drive family was faced with eviction, a crowd of "act-stoppers" inside their home as well as the presence of international TV crews dissuaded officials from their unpleasant task. After a few weeks of tension, they solved their problem by bending regulations and offering the family a new house ahead of 3,500 other Indian families on a waiting list.
Under pressure, the Secretary for Community Development promised to stop evictions until alternative housing was made available. But prosecutions for Group Areas violations continued, and some landlords continued to evict people on their own.
With scores of Group Areas cases coming to court, 20 or 30 lawyers offered their services. Before, 40 fines had been imposed in one morning; now each case took a day. The prosecutors had to make a deal to try two test cases and postpone the remainder. About 500 cases were postponed, allowing those "illegals" to continue living where they were. The two test cases went on appeal, and one of them precipitated the resignation of a Supreme Court judge who was distressed at having to enforce the Group Areas Act. The appeals were heard in September, 1980, and both failed. But meanwhile "Lawyers for Human Rights" was born, and now 140 lawyers, including six prominent Afrikaners, have volunteered to defend all 500 cases free of charge.
The right-wing secret organization Wit Kommando (White Commandos), committed to "keeping South Africa white," threatened to bomb the homes of the "illegals" one by one if the government did not begin evicting them by February 15, 1981. But the arrest of seven Wit Kommando suspects was all that happened.
Later this month, trial dates are supposed to be set for the hundreds of cases that have accumulated.
And the Naidu family still lives at 28 Park Drive.
What does it all add up to? There's been no change in the law, just some setbacks to its administration. The apartheid system goes on moving and separating people at the expense of the weaker and poorer groups. But the Group Areas Act could become unenforceable if enough people don't submit to it. As Cassim Saloojee, Director of the Johannesburg Indian Social Welfare Association, said while challenging Cabinet Minister Marais Steyn on television, "Indian people have regained their self-respect." For a while even the apathetic white South African public became aware.
The pavement episode was not planned intellectually as an exercise in nonviolence. It arose out of a basic human need as nonviolent action should.
We felt some bitterness in the tents and some antagonism toward the authorities, which is a kind of violence too. But out of doing the peaceful action there arose an ability to keep smiling, to greet the police and officials in a friendly way, and even to forgive.
This taught me that even one person who slightly understands the power and technique of nonviolence can introduce a new dimension of love, justice, and reconciliation into what might otherwise be ugly and unproductive strife. We learned the power of individual action which can grow to widespread non-cooperation. Bigger snowballs would be impossible to stop, but each snowball must have a beginning.
Robert Robertson worked for the Commission on Violence and Nonviolence of the South African Council of Churches when this article appeared.
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