Synopsis: In this piece Scott humanizes the families from both sizes of the tragic race divide. While politics defines larger context, it can't change the fact that both  families are simply concerned with their dishes to do after dinner and children who are outgrowing their shoes. It is through these personal details of human lives that Scott is able to communicate how people are more alike than different behind closed doors -- simply human -- and how he seeks to amplify and humanize the injustice of apartheid. 

Capetown, South Africa.–I have been looking back this morning on the series of pieces I wrote last week about South Africa's election. They seem now to have a hollow ring. 

It is easy to be caught up in a story like this, to be swept along by the feeling of raw history being made before your eyes, as it surely is here, that you may end up with only the Big Picture and neglect to write about the human beings who make it. 

This moment of introspection comes from the coincidence that for the past two nights I have been invited to dinner by South African families, one on the white side, one on the dark, the Elsingas and the Manuels. 

When the doors of such homes close they shut out the relentless tide of history and you find yourself in that international, ever-familiar world of people trying to get the most out of life. 

South Africa is in a torment of hatred, of powerful forces locked at each other's throats, but in the home of Jaap and Margaret Elsinga tonight they are listening and tapping their feet to their collection of Count Basie records or giving their airdales, Marsha and Minka, a bath; and in the home of George and Mary Manuel a small son is making a fretwork replica of Dagwood, and George, who is a Colored, is finishing "The Caine Mutiny." 

History is here–if I can get this thought across to you–but the people seem somehow removed from it, and they are more concerned with the drudgery of washing dishes or answering an alarm clock in the  morning or worrying about tomorrow's visit to the dentist, or making the important decision about the oak tree in the Elsigna's front yard, which looks dead, but might possibly return to life next spring. 

If you are reading your newspaper in a snug suburb of Vancouver and you come across an item about George Manuel, Colored, of Capetown, it might seem beyond your comprehension to picture him as you would picture George Jones, of Burnaby. 

But both Georges are the same in their own home. 

This George, for example, is a newspaperman, the only Colored journalist on a white South African newspaper, and like newspapermen everywhere he worries about his work and how his last story was cut by the butchers on the city desk (or the "copy-tasters", as they call them here) and, like fathers everywhere in the world, he is stunned by the speed  with which  two daughters and a son outgrow their shoes. 

Over on the other side of the city Jaap (which is pronounced "Yap") Elsinga, a tall, thing and very serious Hollander, brings home his accountancy headaches, as men do everywhere, and keeps putting off the day when he'll take in his 1947 Chevrolet for the overhaul it sorely needs and debates with his wife whether they will see "The Snows of Klimanjarao" (her choice) or "Bawana Devil" (his). 

Each home has a photograph album filled with happy little out-of-focus scenes of the past and pictures of very distant relatives. Each has a book in which a budget is kept (the Manuels, working closer to the line, keep theirs by the week, the Elsingas by the month). 

It is important to go into such homes and to discover how such people live, not as units to be counted in a vote, but as people. Only then can you really feel the great tragedy of South Africa. 

No one who visits here from happier countries can escape a reaction of anger at the greed that explains everything in South Africa, the greed for profits of the gold mines whose all-powerful British-dominated Chamber pulls the reins on the United Party; the greed for power of the secret society knows as the Broederbond, which is the dark, fanatic Afrikaanser group behind Malan and his Nationalists. 

But that anger only becomes a burning thing when you meet such people as the Manuels of the Elsingas, decent, earnest, ordinary people who want so little for happiness and a sense of purpose in their lives. 

The Elsingas, who are among the many who abhor the cynicism and cruelty of race against race, are swept along with the cynicism.  The Manuels, who suffer under it and who, looking at the busy hands of their son at his bandsaw, must reflect that those hands will never be allowed to express the full talent that's in them–they, too, are chips in the tide. And the tide now is clearly beyond the control of such humble people.

And I wonder if perhaps I should have gone to fewer meetings and more dinners.