Julian reflects on unchosen racial complicity and how moments of moral courage in the face of oppressive power can reveal one’s true colors. He traces the history of Apartheid as it intersects with the stories of his youth in South Africa.
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When the Dutch first landed, as was often the case with colonialism, they decimated the first tribes they came into contact with, who were called they decimated the first tribes they came into contact with, who were called the Koi Koi
The Portuguese had already started the job, but between unfamiliar diseases, displacement battles over land, forced labor, and loss of their way of life, these tribes were all but destroyed by the invading Europeans.
But, as is also usually the case, some interbreeding occurred, no doubt mostly in the form of settler men forcing themselves upon indigenous women.
The descendants of these violent unions lived on, designated as coloreds, in a society where sexual relations between the races was still illegal until the early 1990s.
It is their origin in the coastal Cape Town where the majority of Cullards, often referred to as Cape Cullards, still lived that earned them this backhanded reputation as being good fishermen.
One particularly atrocious historical chapter involved a residential area in Cape Town called District 6, which was deemed too nice for the majority colored population.
This was during the period of establishing the Bantustans, that were called homelands in English.
A concept somewhat similar to American Indian reservations, but probably worse.
The apartheid government took it upon themselves to designate certain areas as the rightful dwelling places of people belonging to different tribes.
Regardless of where people had been living and working for generations, they would be rounded up and bussed to their homeland to start anew.
The Bantustans were an elaborate pantomime of independence designed to both strengthen white presence where it was wanted and to pretend to the rest of the world that some kind of power sharing and equality was being put in place.
They were given their own borders and citizenships with the right to vote for their own elected officials within those confines.
And those officials, of course, were controlled by the South African government and had no real say in national politics.
These faux-independent countries were all surrounded on every side by South African land.
This ruse worked for a while and a savvy South African entrepreneur named Sol Kersner, a white guy of course, realized he could get around South Africa's puritanical legal system and the rest of the world's sanctions at the time which banned athletes competing or musicians performing inside the pariah apartheid regime.
In a set of maneuvers no doubt involving plenty of wheel greasing, Kirzner established the notorious Sun City Resort in the homeland called Boputatswana, comprised of six small and discontinuous pieces of land floating in the sea of South Africa proper.
Opened in 1979 for a time, Sun City was home to the Million Dollar Golf Challenge, which was the richest prize in golf at the time.
It hosted one high-profile world title boxing match and had stadium concerts from superstars like Kenny Rogers, Lanny Ritchell, the Beach Boys, Paul Anka, Frank Sinatra, Cher, Liza Minnelli, Status Quo, Elton John, and Rod Stewart in its first few years.
In 1985 though, Springsteen's sideman and soprano's actor Little Steven played a role in raising international backlash against Sun City with his Artists Against Apartheid project that included the song, I Ain't Gonna Play Sun City.
In addition to being a luxury resort with marquee entertainment and sports, it also offered gambling and risqué semi-naked cabaret acts.
Both vices were completely illegal within South Africa, which was really a kind of white Christian nationalist ethnostate.
Tight restrictions existed on nudity in all media, alcohol sales were prohibited after 12 noon on Saturdays, men only allowed in public bars, and all businesses were closed on Sundays, including sporting facilities.
This, of course, meant that all the repressed white folks with money to burn made the drive a few hours to the sinful Mecca of Sun City in droves.
In any event, this was the opportunistic venture perhaps inadvertently ushered in by the establishment of these tribal homelands, but back to District 6, this was an especially appealing residential area inhabited mostly by Cape Coloureds, but also by Blacks, English-speaking Whites, and Indians.
It was, until 1966, unusually cosmopolitan and cultured with inside of the docks and the famous Table Mountain, so named because of the blanket of clouds that draped over its flat surface.
And District 6 was close to the city center.
The government decided to aggressively implement the Group Areas Act legislation of 1950 that required races to not live in the same neighborhoods as this was believed to create conflict.
They bulldozed the entire area and forcibly removed 60,000 people in order to start a new whites-only part of town.
The Cullards were bussed to townships in Cape Flats, which, as you may imagine from the name, was not prime real estate.
It was sort of a dumping ground.
This authoritarian-style segregation was still in effect.
When my family and I lived in Johannesburg, which was my entire 20 years in South Africa from 1970 to 1990, with the exception of those two years in small town Middleburg.
To be completely clear, I spent the first few years of my life in Zimbabwe, where I was born, and then, I think after four years, moved to South Africa and stayed there until 1990.
Each house in the White's Only Suburbs was built with servants' quarters in the backyard.
This was a very small dwelling with cold concrete floors split into a bedroom and a toilet, high small windows, no overhead light, no tiling or framing anywhere.
African women would knock on our front door every day, just as they knocked on all the front doors in every white neighborhood, to see if anyone had work for them.
They had no union, no rights, no vacation days, no benefits, no education, and could be hired and fired at the drop of a hat.
Still, They were lining up to get to live in a jail cell-like hovel behind someone's house and do backbreaking housework usually five or six days a week for a pittance.
To live on the property of white people, these servants were required to have papers showing they had your consent.
And needless to say, children, spouses, lovers, and friends were not included on that paperwork.
It was called a passbook, and it could be demanded of any black person on the street in a white area by the police.
On more than one occasion I would find myself strolling home from school or to a friend's house on a late Friday afternoon when around the corner would come running a group of young black men dressed to the nines on their way to no doubt sneak their girlfriends out for a night on the town or sneak themselves into their servants' quarters.
As they scattered apart at breakneck speed, clutching their hats, the yellow police van that patrolled to arrest any black folks without the proper passbook would come screeching around the corner in hot pursuit.
