Synopsis:  In this special feature Scott describes the absurdity of the color lines in apartheid South Africa, where "coloreds" (mixed raced people) are discriminated in an effort to uphold white supremacy to the nth degree. 

FREE VOTE DOOMED IN AFRICA

Segregated under the title "Coloured" are wide variety of types in South Africa. These four men are representative of coloureds in Cape Province battling Dr. Malan's Parliament ruling to put Coloreds on a separate voting list. They will probably vote for the last time in today's elections. 

Vancouver Sun, April 15, 1953

CAPE TOWN,  South Africa –Phillip Deans, a 43-year-old barber of Capetown, was among the couple of million South Africans who went to the polls this morning, but for Phillip it was no ordinary election and, in fact, it may be the last in which he'll participate. 

They will be counting the votes as you read this. Some of the results may already be known in the cities where the United Party of J.G. N. Strauss will move away to a quick lead. 

By tomorrow night most of the constituencies will be heard from and the massive rural strength of Dr. Daniel Malan's Nationalist Party, according to the best guesses here, will have doublers returned him to power. 

This is a moment between grimly important chapters of South Africa's history. 

It is a good moment to look at Phillip Deans and the men and women like him who dramatize the lunacy of a nation where pigment of skin, real or just imagined, is enough to condemn a man to a lifetime of poverty and soul-deep frustration. 

Almost Pure White

Deans is a "Coloured", one of more than a million classified by that arbitrary name. 

You must disassociate the word completely from the North American meaning of "coloured." If you saw Deans on a Granville Street bus going home from work this evening you might think he'd had a couple of days of lying on a beach. He is perhaps a tone darker than normal. But his figure and face are those of what we like to think of as "white." This is true of the vast majority. Many, in fact, are blue eyed and flaxen-haired. Others are "tanned", a tragic reminder, five or six generations late, of an enchanted evening between a Portuguese slave trader and a winsome Hottentot girl, an indiscretion such men as Deans and their mixed-blood children after them, are never allowed to forget. 

They are still paying for such forgotten affairs in the very real terms of low salaries, a shorter life expectancy and the perpetual misery of the slums. 

In Crowded District

I have spent most of the past three days in Capetown's teeming "District Six" where close to 50,000 "Coloreds" live in an unbelievably crowded square mile and where Phillip Deans, the barber who writes free verse plays as his after-hours interest, may cut only the hair of his kind. 

Here are some of the stories I picked up: 

A dark-skinned Colored girl, employed as a children's nurse  by a white family, was asked to take the infant daughter of the family to a seaside resort where the rest of the family would join them for the long Easter weekend. The girl could not make the trip. She was refused entry into the non-European section of the train because the baby was obviously white. She was refused entry into the European section because she, obviously, was not. 

A young Glasgow professor, here to write a thesis on the coloureds, joined a group in the bar of the Tafflelberg, Capetown's only non-European hotel. He was asked to leave by the manager, who explained the this license would be taken away if a European were found on the premises. 

The professor improved the story instantly that his great-great-grandmother had been a negro. He was permitted to stay. 

Brilliant Student's Fate

A brilliant young Colored student, in spite of all the odds against him, was able to graduate with first-class honours in science. He was called a genius by his teachers. Under the segregation laws he was unable to use research facilities and thus continue his studies. 

He took the only job open to him, teaching Colored children to spell "cat" and add two-and-one in the first grade. He was pointed out to me in the street. He was drunk. 

A Colored family had two daughters who were white in appearance, as many are. The father, also white in appearance, was able to get them into a white school, under false pretences. The third child, a boy, was of a darker complexion. He could not hope to attend the school and was compelled to attend one of the desperately over-crowded Colored schools. He grew up deeply conscious of the barrier between himself and his sisters. At the age of 11 he shot and killed himself. 

A Colored doctor, who is compelled, of course, to practice only with his own people, told me that in the course of his studies at the University of Capetown he was asked to turn his face to the wall of the surgery theatre when the bodies of white patients were bared for incision. 

During the war years a Colored newspaper, patriotically reacting to the news that not enough blood plasma was being collected for the troops, volunteered to organize a donor campaign among the Coloreds. The offer was rejected. A pure European could not be transfused with the "tainted" blood, however life-giving, of a non-European. 

Each family in District Six has such a story. 

By any terms the word "Colored", except, perhaps as it applies to the Malayan population, is meaningless. The best legal minds of South Africa have been unable to produce a definition that means anything 

When I went to the office of the Commissioner for Colored Affairs to seek his definition I was handed a report in which the South African population was tortuously divided into five separate groups – European, Native, Asiatic, Colored and Cape Malay. 

It is pretty hard to tell who you are supposed to hate without a program. 

Gossip Runs Wild on Racial Taints

In these definitions the European was described as "a person of pure European descent or one who is accepted as such by the European community." The definition of Colored was, "A person other than a European, Native or Asiatic or one accepted as such, and of mixed descent, but excluding Asiatic descent." 

It is one of South Africa's indoor sports to decide which of your acquaintances is "that way." Gossip excludes no one, not even the first lady of the land. 

If you should see someone glance quickly at your fingernails they are applying the test, which doesn't always work, that a Coloureds nails are darker. 

One member of parliament–and what a charming fellow he must be!–has described how he makes a "positive identity." He has decided that the eyelids of Coloreds, unlike those of whites, are a different shade than their facial complexion. 

When he is undecided, he says, he manages to drop something on the floor while he carefully watches for the quick flash that will mean a job or unemployment for the man before him. 

A photographer here, whose nails are stained by his developing fluid, told me that he once had an urgent telegram to send off. There was a long queue at the "European" wicket (everything has its label, which means a costly duplication of services) and so the photographer stepped up to the non-european wicket, showed his nails with a shrug, and got quick service. 

The really important phrase in any definition is "one who is accepted as such." 

Vote for Enemy to Speed Change

Many Coloreds of fair complexions have "crossed over," as they put it, and gone into the happier world of the whites. 

Meanwhile, just to confuse the issue, many "natives–that is, the tribal African– are able to slip into the relatively higher echelons of the Coloureds because they, in turn, have lighter skin color than their brothers. 

In the Cape Town papers there are often advertisements for still another group known as "slightly Colored." This means that the advertiser wants someone coloured enough so that he will have to work at a low rate, but at the same time suitably pale for a job requiring a European. 

Phillip Dean voted this morning for the more moderate United Party, as most Coloreds did. Yet many put their mark perversely opposite that of the man they hate above all–the chilling figure of Dr. Malan. 

One of them explained it to me this way: 

"Dr. Malan is our only hope. On the non-white side we are hopelessly divided. Only Malan's extreme apartheid laws will get us together. A vote for the United Party merely means a vote to continue what we've got and what we've got isn't good enough." 

If Malan is returned it means that Dean and the million like him will be denied the right to vote for a member of Parliament who will represent them with any real voice, a privilege they now have only here in Cape Province (Coloreds in the other provinces do not vote at all). 

Separate Roll Plan for 'Coloreds'

Malan's intention is to put them on a "separate roll" like the natives so that they will then be represented by three white men, a lonely little monitory who can speak with no authority. 

You do not know what a vote means until you realize that, without it, the Coloreds will sink into that great mass of black Africans and Asiatics who are given no more consideration than the cows in the field. 

As it is, they hold the balance of power in at least six or eight seats. Without that, neither party will have to consider them and the record is all too plain that neither party will. Indeed, many Coloreds, Phillip Deans among them, will consider it not worth the effort to vote if Malan has this way in his next term of the office. 

This explains why Malan considered the "Cape Colored" issue, on which he was defeated by the courts, important enough to justify an election. With those votes nullified he will have the entire non-European population voiceless and presumably ready for any further adventures he may plan in "apartheid". 

'Coloreds' Look Down on Others

The coloured is an interesting, individualistic person who lives in a so-close-yet-so-far world. He thinks of himself as being "just like the white man" and far from feeling any contempt for the race that makes his life an empty one he is honoured to have a "white man" share his company. 

They, too, like everyone in South Africa, have their prejudices. Very few Coloreds ever considered joining the now outlawed Communist Party because the Communists promised absolute equality of races. The Colored man could not see himself sharing his status with the more primitive native, or in their insulting nomenclature, the "Kaffir." 

In religion, outlook and their way of life, as in their appearance, the Coloreds make a poignant attempt to live as much as possible like the whites. It is impossible, of course, under the iron heel of Dr. Malan's apartheid laws. 

This may explain why, outwardly, they are a casual and contented crowd whose philosophy, in the Afrikaans phrase, is "Ek Fannie worry?" or "Why be bothered?"

Many have carried that to such an extreme that they are "boycotting" this election on the dangerous theory that since neither party offers them what they want most–equal rights and an equal voice–"Ek Fannie worry?" 

Frustration Grows Deep Bitterness 

Underneath this facade lies a deep bitterness and frustration. The reasons for it are all too obvious. 

Their children, often barefoot, go to the schools so ramshackle and so crowded that the vast majority drop by the wayside before they are of high school age (there is no compulsory education for the coloured child, as there is for the white). 

They have the highest birthrate and the highest infant mortality rate in South Africa, if not the world. 

The life expectancy of the male colored is 23 years less than that of the white. 

In the poorer slums they live in hovels so flimsy that they cannot keep out the lashing rains of the Cape Town winter. 

Large families live for weeks at a time in a quagmire. Since there is no hospitalization for tuberculosis cases the rate (currently at 900 for every 100,000 persons) is rising steadily. 

To such altered and intelligent men as Phillip Deans, and there are a surprising number of them in the upper levels of a society that includes illiterate, half-starved people at its base and scholars at its pinnacle, all this is like living in a prison. Yet very often the reaction seems only one of petulance or an inability to grasp what's happening. 

'District Six' Held Dangerous Area

"Even when you've lived with it all your life you can't believe it," Deans told me. "Why should one of our people, a doctor, say, who reads Shakespear and Gide in his spare time, be refused admittance to the bioscope (moving picture theatre) when a drunken bus driver will be admitted merely because he's white?"

I met, too, a coloured reporter on the Cape Times, whose editors had courageously broken the rules by hiring him. 

He is an outstanding journalist, but there is an invisible barrier beyond which he may never go for his assignment must be limited to those in which he will not brush too closely against the whites. To talk to him is to realize what it means to have your horizon drawn in until it encircles you like a moat. 

I had been warned by many white people not to venture into District Six after dark and although I went there with a guide and interpreter they were astonished that I'd come out without a bashed head. 

The area has this reputation, I'm convinced, lately because so far of the white residents of Capetown have ever been inside it. Yet this is not surprising. How many Vancouerites have been down by the flats of False Creek to see how our Negroes live in their segregated area? 

'Enchanting Place' On Autumn Night

District Six is no more than a 10-minute walk from Adderley Street, Capetown's brand and cosmopolitan main artery. 

By nighttime it seems an enchanting place. When I was there last night the warm south-easterly wind blew through the narrow streets with the smell of the sea in from the Cape of Good Hope. The full autumn moon and the Southern Cross were bright in the night sky and the strange bulk of Table  Mountain loomed overhead in silhouette like a great anvil. 

Parts of the district remind you of the old French quarter of New Orleans, parts of them are the mysterious East with the minareted mosques of the Cape Malays, descendants of the East Indian slaves and exiles. 

It is pretty by day. There are rows of ugly tenements, all of them owned by Capetown's wealthy whites, in which people live intolerable lives. 

In one three-storey house, relic of an age when this was a fashionable district for whites, there were 60 men, women and children. 

Each family has one single room and the children crowded out onto the dark landings as their "playgrounds." There was one single lavatory for the entire population. 

In one room I saw a gasoline tin being used as a stove. Washing hung on a line across the room. The haggard mother of a family of six children showed me how impossible it is to keep the dust from coming up through the sprung floors and I marvelled at the cleanliness of everything, a task that has made this woman ancient in middle age. 

Vice Runs Rampant in District Dives

Seamen of the world know District Six as a lively and dangerous place to spend a wicket night. 

There are "shebeens" (bootleg joints featuring a throat burning red wine) and, between police raids, there are brothels. There are gangs of "lollies," the equivalent of our zoot-suit gangs. (In the native section they're called "tootsies.") There is a daily, illegal lottery call Fah Fee. 

Before eight o'clock, when they close, you will see heavy, rapid drinking in the 16 coloured bars where wine is served and you may see the native, who has no bar, sidling up to the back entrance to pay five shillings for a two-shilling bottle of the poison. 

There is a drunkenness to be served and behind colsed doors there will be the smoking of the marijuana cigarette they call "kartjies." Occasionally, as I did last night, you will see parties of "Europeans," dressed in their evening togs, apprehensively looking for a thrill. 

This is the District Six that the white man fears and that he thinks is unique to Capetown, forgetting that every seaport in the world–and particularly those with color restrictions–has these same problems. 

Ignorance, Fear Hold Them Back

The real District Six is a place where the vast majority of citizens are desperately trying to live decent purposeful lives against the handicap of brown, black or off-white skins surrounded by the barriers of ignorance and fear and –South Africa's greatest natural resource–hate. 

Here is a typical better-class coloured home, a three -room cottage in what is known as the Jewish section. The head of the household is an accountant's assistant who, typically enough, begs you to keep his name secret so that there will be no recriminations if he speaks his mind. 

It is nearly nine o'clock. The two young daughters are in a single bed together with their dolls between them, like girls everywhere in the wide world. They are extremely attractive, polite little girls. Their skin is the pale brown color of the first week of a summer tan. 

The son, who is 10, is repairing the kite he has been flying all evening in the strong night breeze. 

He has been asking you endless questions about the snow in Canada. 

Tests Deprive 'Colored' of Vote

Two neighbours, who happen to be Malayans, have dropped in for a chat. The man wears a small red fez, as so many do. The woman is beautiful. Your host's wife, like her husband, so "white" that you cannot believe they are of "mixed blood," has made coffee and you sit and listen to them talk politics. 

"As it is," you host is saying, "the coloreds are already largely deprived of the vote. Unlike the whites they must pass a test. They must apply to a policeman above the rank of sergeant or a magistrate for registration and satisfy the authorities that they can write their name, address and occupation and pass certain tests as to the property the occupy. Many feel this is too degrading and simply do not register." 

You notice that this man although he normally speaks Afrikaans, a sort of phonetic Dutch, speaks English with a broad, almost Oxford, accent.

"We are becoming a lonely breed," the Malayan says in his soft voice. "We are the in-betweens. WE are being attacked by serpents from above and below. The natives are more and more moving in, taking away our jobs because they are stronger in body and will work for almost nothing. The whites, above, are rapidly taking away our rights–or, as they know them, our privileges." 

The women sit quietly for here it is the man who is master in his hom. 

Need for a Leader Felt by People 

"Sometimes," says your host, "I feel that we are not aggressive enough. Coloreds have played almost no part in the so-called disobedience campaigns. We have tried to win by developing economically and educationally, but it does not work that way. As we steadily develop, so they steadily cut us down." 

The Malayan: Yes, Our only hope now lies in joining forces with the others. We persons of Color must accept the fact that we are no longer as different as we flattered ourselves. Ah if we only had a leader who would come up, a man of vitality and inspiration!" 

"It will come," says your host grimly and then he laughs and apologizes to you for being "bad company." 

"Coffee?" asks your hostess. "Black or white?"

And everyone laughs.