TOM HOPKINSON - QUOTATION

Not many days afterwards I drove out one Sunday afternoon to Sophiatown, for a meeting organized by the African National Congress to hear its leader, Chief Luthuli. Luthuli lives some hundreds of miles away near the Natal Coast , and, enjoying at r the time a short interval between successive sentences of banishment, was paying one of his rare visits to the Reef. Inch by inch, foot by foot, Sophiatown was being demolished in order to be turned into a white area. Whole streets were already in ruins, and as fast as the families could be got out of any house, it would be bulldozed down, leaving the neighbors on either side to wait their turn. On the central patch of waste ground, known as “ Freedom Square ”, a crowd of some hundreds had collected. It was not a static mass of listeners; people drifted up and moved away. On the outskirts little groups of men and girls were jiving to a mouth-organ. Men selling peanuts or copies of the Communist weekly, the New Age , pushed in and out. Occasionally a procession of Zionists would go by, dressed in their blue and white robes, on their way to hold a religious meeting that would last till nightfall. From time to time a straggle of youths would march past singing, following a leader who had nailed a piece of cloth on to a stick as a flag. Once a fight started, but was quickly hushed. The Chief spoke from a wagon into a microphone. Behind him in a row sat half-a-dozen supporters and organizers, including one white. From the descriptions white politicians regularlt gave of the A. N. C. as a violent and militant organization---a number of its leaders were at this time being accused in the Treason Trial of plotting y to overthrow the South African government by force---I had expected an excited, rabble-rousing exhortation. What the listeners got was just the opposite. The Chief spoke in English, slowly, humorously, discursively; not arguing to a brief, but seeming to draw up what he wanted to say out of his mind as he went along. He ridiculed the position of the black man in this white-run country. He condemned the whites for their greed and ruthlessness, and for failing to take seriously the noble religion which they preached. But he insisted that the white man was to be distinguished from white policies.