MY Uncle Hiskia Kondombolo lived in the old Location in Windhoek where he was the so-called Advisory Board-man, appointed in accordance with the old South African apartheid system.
I started working as an office sweeper with the South African Railways (SAR) in Windhoek, immediately after getting my working pass from the Native Commissioner in March 1949. With a starting salary of £5 per month (about N$50), I continued to support my parents, and brothers and sisters who were at school. They still lived outside the ‘cash economy’, and for them money was very hard to obtain although they had enough food throughout the year, such as millet, sorghum, beans and groundnuts. Our family lived a happy life and had adequate food at home.
From Windhoek, the SAR catered not only for South West Africa but administratively also for South African districts such as Upington, Springbok and Prieska in the Northern Cape Province. The System Manager was always appointed from Pretoria. I began to learn about the racial discrimination that existed in an extreme form on the railways where Afrikaners predominantly occupied supervisory positions. Posts of many kinds were reserved for whites only, even for those who lacked any education. The drivers of motorcars used by railway officials, for example, were all white and it was forbidden for a black person to be a driver. Even while cleaning a vehicle, blacks were not allowed to touch the steering wheel. That was taken as a threat to the job of a white man, and a cleaner could be fired with immediate effect for such an offence.
Painting was equally for white men: the blacks could climb up the ladder to clean the old paint but a white person would come and do the painting. Such demeaning practices had existed before the National Party came to power, but the situation became more serious when the National Party won the general election in South Africa in 1948, under Daniel Malan, with Hendrik Verwoerd as his Minister of Native Affairs from 1951. Verwoerd later introduced innumerable repressive laws to govern the lives of blacks. He even instructed that trousers worn by blacks should have one leg shorter than the other so that blacks would be seen to be different from whites, even in their clothing. Similar discrimination was also applied to cemeteries and residential areas.
We saw how the Boers, now that they had their own government, looked after their own people – at the expense of blacks. Hundreds of Boers came from as far as south of De Aar to work on the railways. Some of them were very poor, even bare-footed, and all were given jobs superior to the highest paid black railway employees, who were considered inferior. This reflected the superior position the Boers considered themselves to have in relation to the English and other whites in South Africa.
In my job at the railways, I became an office cleaner at the System Manager’s offices, and when Mr C.S. Middlewick was the System Manager and travelled by private coach I went along to serve him. He was quite a good person and I was a hard worker, so we got along very well. When he was transferred back to South Africa we went to Pretoria in a private coach (later used by the Administrator) to fetch his successor, J.P. Hugo, a Boer. I served as a waiter and somebody else was a cook.
The Boers liked everything shining, and when the new man and his wife came on board they found that everything satisfied their high expectations. They were extremely happy with the food we served them, though I was amused at the way the new man and and his wife ate: They finished everything and left nothing for us workers who could not normally eat before our ‘bosses’.
My co-worker, the cook, spoke Afrikaans, which pleased the System Manager. On his birthday he and his wife entertained the Administrator, the South African Chief Executive Officer in South West Africa, to dinner.
The System Manager often invited me to serve his guests, which I did, so we again got on well together, in our two different worlds. To me, he was a reasonable human being, but nevertheless, in general the Boers working on the railways were very oppressive.
Windhoek railway station was a good example of apartheid in practice: whites bought their travelling tickets inside the station, coloureds (mixed race) outside but under the cover of some shade, and blacks out in the open where they had to purchase their tickets from behind a wooden screen so that they could not see the white ticket clerk.
This was insulting, but trivial compared to the treatment of contract workers on the railways. I saw much of this myself, as I could volunteer for overtime to boost my earnings, doing work on the line, especially after the railway lines were washed away in the south.
Contract workers were brought in to work in the goods shed and on the construction of the railway itself, where we could work side by side in my overtime. In the event of an accident, causing a man to have a leg amputated or lose an arm, SAR would simply send him back to the north through SWANLA, and recruit a new worker. No compensation whatsoever was paid. It was from seeing this happen that I learned – more so than from anything else – that we had to do something in order to change the situation.