1957–1960

A few small architectural commissions come my way, none of them enough to keep me fully occupied. My clients, mostly small businessmen or industrialists, are in no way political. They know my politics and that I am out on bail awaiting trial for treason, but never speak of it. They seem to have no qualms about employing me on small projects like extensions, alterations and renovations to their properties, something any architect in town could do competently without much effort.

I do not think of it as an act of charity. There is a radical streak among Johannesburg's white middle class. It thrives in this ugly, commercial town surrounded by white mine dumps whose sands whip across the city in the wind. Somehow within its brash materialism there is not only a wonderful climate but also a heart.

The middle classes are no different from other South Africans in their acceptance of black oppression and white supremacy but beneath it there is a libertarian sense, and a bias against the establishment. It does not manifest itself in partisan politics but in occasional acts of compassion or humanism.

It reveals itself in small ways – in offering work or jobs to the Treason Trial accused; in overtime work by the magistrates who process our bail applications. In part it is the last hangover of the frontier democracy and cosmopolitanism of the mining camp which spawned the city on this bleak and treeless hillside; in part a folk memory of past experience of racial persecution and resistance in the ghettos of Eastern Europe from which many of the people in this city came.

We who adhere to the cause of black liberation or of communism are, nevertheless, a freak minority. We are tolerated, generally accepted and sometimes even welcomed. Even at the height of anti-communist hysteria, we are not the untouchable pariahs which our counterparts became in the USA during the McCarthy era.