For one week during 1971 the small Free State town of Excelsior was crawling with reporters from all over the world. A sex ring had been uncovered in which local farmers and businessmen were engaged in steamy escapades with their black maids. Zakes Mda reports
I have recently become a frequent visitor to Excelsior, since I am writing a novel set in this Free State platteland town about 100km northeast of Bloemfontein. The people are friendly and always welcome strangers like myself with open arms.
It has not always been like that. In 1971 South African newspapers bewailed the fact that the residents of Excelsior had become withdrawn and hostile to strangers. A scandal had broken out, and both black and white townsfolk rallied around one another to keep their shame away from the glare of the world. Indeed the international media had descended upon the town. No less than 20 television masts had been erected at the post office. It was before South Africa had its own television service nogal.
“Go away,” a prominent resident is reported to have said to reporters. “Leave us alone in our trouble. Don’t interfere with us.”
What was this juicy scandal that was attracting so much attention and making the good volk of Excelsior retreat into silence?
Sex. Towards the end of the previous year a series of police raids had flushed out a sex ring in which the local farmers and businessmen – all pillars of the Afrikaner community – were engaged in steamy escapades with their black maids.
First to be arrested under the Immorality Act was Eliza Ramasedi, a 22-year-old beauty from the nearby black township of Mahlatswetsa. She confessed that she had had relations with Johannes Calitz, the town’s only butcher and member of the town council.
She, however, added that she had not been the only black woman who had done this. She mentioned a number of others. Soon the police exposed a syndicate of white males and black females who participated in continuous sessions of partner swapping. The men were leading lights in the local branch of the National Party and some were members of the town council. Apparently these shenanigans had been going on for many years.
“The police had to act because there were too many half-caste children walking the streets of Excelsior,” explained PC Pelser, the minister of justice. “Whites and non-whites had complained about this. Section 16 of the Immorality Act was actually a result of the abhorrence which the people of South Africa felt about miscegenation.”
There was indeed a lot of that miscegenation stuff in Excelsior. When 15 black women appeared in court, 10 of them had coloured babies strapped on their backs. The court heard that the police had gone searching around the district and “uncovered” 12 children who, they claimed, had mixed blood. A doctor from Bloemfontein was sent to Excelsior to take the blood tests of the light-skinned children.
The case promised to be a sensational affair. The circuit regional court in Excelsior was full of black and white spectators, including the cuckold husbands and lovers of some of the women, and the betrayed wives of the men. Six Afrikaner men were in the dock with 15 black women. Some of the men were charged with sleeping with up to three women. One farmer had six women all to himself, and they came from all the neighbouring farms.
Ramasedi, however, was charged alone. Calitz, the 51-year-old butcher alleged to be her lover, had fatally shot himself in the head after being released on bail.
The town had braced itself for a protracted trial that would drag out a lot of dirt. But minutes before the trial could begin Percy Yutar, the attorney general of the Orange Free State, issued an order for the withdrawal of all the charges against the accused. The women broke into an impromptu dance.
The sudden withdrawal of the case was greeted with surprise and puzzlement in some quarters. The matter was even raised in Parliament by the lone Progressive Party member, Helen Suzman, who was an advocate for the abolishment of the Immorality Act. Both Yutar and Pelser denied that the case had been withdrawn on the orders of the government.
“The witnesses were reluctant to give evidence,” claimed Yutar, as if that had ever stopped him before. “I have made my decision and it stands. There is nothing further to be done.”
The two men who appeared most relieved at Yutar’s decision were Andries Lombard, the NP mayor of Excelsior, and Louis van der Walt, the chair of the local branch of the NP. Both these men were the attorneys who represented the accused white men.
Lombard said: “Now we can go back to being just a little town, as we always have been.”
Today Excelsior is still a little town. But the scars of the past have remained, even though the wounds may have healed.
Thirty years have taken their toll on Van der Walt. He has greyed a bit, and walks with a limp. But his law practice is still going strong. The forbidding flag of the old South Africa on the wall just above the reception desk belies the friendliness of the staff: a white-haired school-marmish Afrikaner who acts as a clerk and a young black receptionist. A young Afrikaner woman in blue jeans enters and greets me in the polite sing- song tone of Basotho women: “Dumelang.”
Everyone has a ready smile. After 30 years Excelsior has outgrown its hostility towards strangers and is prepared to talk about the past.
Van der Walt looks back at 1971 as an exciting, albeit misguided, time.
“Excelsior was the best-known town that week,” he says nostalgically. “The whole place was crawling with reporters. I even appeared on television in England. When [prime minister] John Vorster saw all this he got scared. The image of the country was at stake. He instructed Percy Yutar to withdraw the case. I know all this because not only was I the lawyer defending the white men, I was also the National Party chair of the district. We talked about these things. But I tell you, even if the case had not been withdrawn we would have won it. Immorality Act and all those apartheid laws should never have been the law in this country.”
This contradicts the sentiments of his old client, Adam Bezuidenhout, who was the local secretary of the NP and one of the accused in the aborted trial. After the charges had been withdrawn against him and his 40-year-old alleged lover, Sanna Chacka, he declared that he still believed very strongly in the Immorality Act.
“After the trial we all picked up the pieces,” says Van der Walt. “Life went on. Bezuidenhout is a prosperous farmer. He is my biggest client.”
But people like Ramasedi and Chacka, now quite elderly, have found it impossible to pick up the pieces. They have never been able to find work since the trial. None of the female accused has been employed in the past 30 years, fulfilling the fears that they expressed soon after the trial.
“We’ll never find jobs in Excelsior,” Chacka had said. “What white woman would employ us? They will think we are after their husbands. We fear that even in Johannesburg people will see us as the bad women of Excelsior.”
And without a job life can be difficult in Excelsior. Most adults in the township of Mahlatswetsa are unemployed. Many families depend on the old-age pension the senior citizens receive from the government every month. The more fortunate families have family members who are disabled, for they receive a disability grant. Payday generates a buzz of excitement throughout the district. The town comes alive with pensioners and their hangers-on. Even small children know when it’s payday.
Joyce Nkopane, a 64-year-old contemporary of Ramasedi and Chacka, blames the dire poverty of Excelsior on the big scandal that left the scars on their town.
“Often when things like these happen women take all the blame,” she says. “But the underlying truth may be that the man has neglected his family.
“Our men used to go to Johannesburg to work for many months without coming home. There they fell in love with other women. Some men didn’t send money home. Excelsior is a very poor town. There is starvation here. The white men seduced the black women with money. It was easy to be tempted. In any case, white men have always loved us. They said that we were more beautiful than their own women.”
Nkopane is a town councillor and a member of the National Party. She worked for Van der Walt as a clerk for many years, and she displays similar contradictions in the decor of her house. On her wall is a big picture of Nelson Mandela in a golden frame.
“Yes, I like Mandela even though I am NP,” she declares. “I love him very much. He was our first black president. He and FW de Klerk sat down to solve the problems of this country. As a result we can never have a situation like Zimbabwe here. Mandela has brought blacks and whites together.”
And according to Nkopane race relations have never been better in Excelsior. Even in the shops black people get good, friendly service. In the town council relations are good, although some councillors tend to put party politics above local politics.
“Those Afrikaner councillors who were messing around with black women 30 years ago never thought that one day we would be sitting together in the town council,” says Nkopane.
“But I would be lying if I said the whites in the council are prejudiced against blacks. We were ignorant about procedure, but the town clerk, Angela Borman, was very helpful. Even when the black members said that the agenda and the minutes should no longer be in Afrikaans but in English they agreed. The strange thing is that no one knows English here since we all – both black and white – speak Afrikaans and Sesotho. It was the [African National Congress] people, who are Afrikaans speakers themselves, who pushed that we must use only English in the council chambers.”
Senkey Mokhethi, a 37-year-old ANC town councillor, agrees that relations among the councillors of various parties and racial groups are very cosy, although he believes that in the town generally there is still racial tension. Many whites, he says, do not accept that blacks can rule them. He claims that the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging is also quite active, especially among young Afrikaners.
“In the council chambers things move smoothly. Rarely do we vote on issues. There is always a consensus. The members from the National Party and the Freedom Front – three of them white and one black – always compromise in favour of the six black ANC members.”
It was one of these compromises that put Mokhethi and his 36-year-old friend, Mothobi Kalake, in trouble with their party. Kalake was then the mayor of Excelsior. When some residents apportioned themselves land and established a squatter camp just outside the township, Kalake, with the support of his council, issued an eviction order. When the squatters defied the order the council engaged the services of an independent company to bulldoze the shelters.
Although the ANC councillors were behind this move, the general members of the party blamed Kalake and Mokhethi. They also claimed that these two had become too big for their boots and were no longer reporting back to the membership. They demanded their resignation. Kalake resigned both as mayor and councillor. Mokhethi refused to resign even after they had toyi-toyied outside his house and petrol bombed it twice. He is still a member of the town council today. The best that the party could do was to withhold his membership card since it no longer regarded him as a member.
“As far as I am concerned I am still a member of the ANC,” insists Mokhethi. “Kalake and I worked for the ANC even before it was unbanned. As early as 1988 we established an underground cell in this town and recruited more members. We organised mass action and consumer boycotts.
“In 1992 we were demonstrating with Winkie Direko, then Free State provincial chair of the ANC [now Free State premier], in this town when the local Boers opened fire on us, injuring many. And then blocking ambulances from taking the injured to hospital. No, I am still ANC even though they refuse to give us our membership cards. I cannot join another party.”
The result of this power struggle was that Noelene van der Walt, wife of Louis van der Walt, was elected mayor even though the majority of the council members were ANC. Some of the ANC members, including Mokhethi, voted for Noelene, a National Party member who was nevertheless elected to the council as an independent.
Louis, himself a former mayor of Excelsior for 16 years in succession, is happy with the way events have turned out.
“Noelene has the right experience to be the mayor,” he says. “This is the only town in the Free State, except for Reddersburg, which does not operate on an overdraft. Affirmative action is the only thing that will destroy this town. My idea is that the blacks in the town council should undergo training for four or five years, then they will be ready. Angela Borman, our town clerk, is dedicated to training the new black councillors.”
He says he has no problem with the concept of the new non-racial South Africa. After all, as a youngster he played with black kids at the farm. He ate pap and morogo cooked by the black aunties in their huts. Even his children have Sesotho names: Thabo is a medical doctor in Queenstown and Pulane a beautician in Bloemfontein. His only problem with the new South Africa is the mismanagement and corruption that is prevalent in the civil service.
‘My other concern with this new dispensation is that [Thabo] Mbeki and Mandela say that we should Africanise,” he says. “How can the Afrikaner Africanise? He is already an African. Unlike the English South African the Afrikaner does not look to England or any European country as the mother country. He does not see South Africa as a colonial outpost. He is deeply rooted in the soil of South Africa. Of course the Afrikaner has been misguided in the past, especially with such stupid apartheid laws as the Immorality Act. All that is in the past now.”
But that past has not left Mokhethi and Kalake untouched. Kalake is married to the “coloured” woman who is alleged to have been Calitz’s daughter. Mokhethi’s younger sister is also a “coloured” woman. His mother came home pregnant with the child of a young Afrikaner man whose father ran the local mill. The young man promptly killed himself when this “miscegenation” was discovered. And this was eight years after the big scandal of 1971.
“These things have been happening ever since,” explains Mokhethi. “They did not stop with that Immorality Act case. They continue to happen even today. I am just grateful that from the big mistake that my mother made I got such a beautiful sister. Even though Calitz killed himself, Kalake must just be grateful that from that scandal he gained a beautiful wife.”
The last time I saw Mokhethi he was limping into Van der Walt’s office. Whenever he is bored he visits Van der Walt, and they talk for hours on end.
“Louis van der Walt is a nice guy,” says Mokhethi, “although a white man will always be a white man.”