FROM its inception in 1910, through a “rebellie”, two world wars, a worldwide economic crisis and the Swinging Sixties, tiny Excelsior in the then Orange Free State was always regarded as a one-horse town.
Located just over 105km from Bloemfontein and 70km from Brandfort, to which Winnie Mandela was exiled in 1977, Excelsior covered just 13 square kilometres, with the most prominent entry on a map of the town being its post office.
But then, towards Christmas 1970, everything changed.
Excelsior became world-renowned throughout the Western world: it got caught up in a sex-scandal.
Not any old scandal, but a sex across the colour line scandal.
A scandal involving townsfolk who were enthusiastic supporters of the party of apartheid and the architects of a new, improved Immorality Act, the National Party (NP).
When the NP won the whites-only election of 1948 there already was an Immorality Act on the statutes, promulgated in 1927 by the Pact government led by Barry Hertzog.
However, the NP had a problem with it: it didn’t go far enough. It banned only sex between white women and African men.
The NP wanted a ban on sex between all whites and all blacks, and so, to bring the law in line with its thinking, it passed an amendment to the original Act in 1950.
But then, their over-zealousness came back to bite them big 20 years later on December 2, 1970 – seven white Afrikaners and 14 black women were arrested and charged with breaking the Immorality Act.
The white accused included some of the most upstanding men in the town.
One was a town councillor. Another was a butcher.
All of them were extremely wealthy.
Their arrest caused a media frenzy, with journalists from all over the country and the world descending on the town.
One of the accused, 51-year-old Johannes Calitz, couldn’t take the pressure.
While out on bail, he shot himself.
There were “gasps of shock” when the women, aged between 18 and 40, appeared in court.
Seven of them carried light-skinned babies on their backs. Some of the charges they faced under the act dated back five years.
Mr LO van der Walt, a lawyer representing three of the men, told the magistrate he had paid the bail for the women who had been charged with his clients.
He explained later: “I arranged for their bail because I did not think it was fair that they should remain in custody because they did not have the money, while my clients were free because they could afford bail.”
“If an atom bomb had been dropped on our town, it could not have had a greater impact,” an elderly farmer said.
Asked to describe Excelsior and its 700 white residents, he answered: “Well, let me put it this way, this is an Afrikaner town. There are no foreigners here. We had two Greeks, but they have left.”
When the NP came to power in 1948, they had made no secret of their intention to institute strict policies of segregation.
The laws they drew up, beginning with the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act in 1949, were described as “straightforward and even crude”. Its aim, according to one observer, was to enforce separation in every sphere of life, “from buses to bed”.
NP functionaries, who were strangely sensitive in explaining their policies, especially to outsiders, described their main aim somewhat differently.
“We want to eliminate points of friction between the races” was how they put it.
In an interview with David Harrison, author of The White Tribe of Africa, dominee Koot Vorster, the brother of John Vorster, the NP’s fourth prime minister, insisted that laws such as the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, the Immorality Act, the Group Areas Act and the Population Registration Act were fundamental in maintaining Afrikaner identity.
Vorster, a member of the fascist Ossewabrandwag during the Second World War, said all these pieces of legislation helped immensely to protect Afrikaner identity by keeping people to their own grounds.
Recalling his early days as a dominee in Cape Town, he recalled coming across a young Afrikaner woman living in a chicken hokkie “owned by an Indian”. “We even had poor white women selling their bodies to non-whites.”
Like many Afrikaner supporters of apartheid, Vorster believed that the laws being promulgated by the NP was as necessary for black people as they were for Afrikaners.
He said the preservation of identity was a “God-given right that every man has, the black man, the coloured and the white”.
To ensure the preservation of this identity, a law such as the Group Areas Act was key.
Passed in 1950, the purpose of the act was to “unscramble the multiracial omelette”.
The government tackled this task with vigour.
But it came at a tremendous cost to those affected, particularly the coloured and Indian communities.
The intention of the act was to restrict each group to their own residential and trading areas.
But the greatest cost in human suffering was inflicted via the Mixed Marriages and Immorality Acts.
The most outspoken opposition to the Mixed Marriages Act came in Parliament from a lone communist, Natives’ Representative Sam Kahn, who described it as “the immoral offspring of an illicit union between local racial superstition and biological ignorance.
He added that there was nothing biologically disharmonious, inferior or evil about the offspring of “mixed marriages, but that the evil lay in the social pattern that doomed them to an inferior status and deprived them of privileges that should be the inherent right of every citizen.
But the NP soldiered on with this act and the Immorality Act.
Inevitably, one of the first to fall foul of the act was a dominee of the Dutch Reformed Church.
At Barkly East in the Cape, a minister was caught in the act in his garage built by his parishioners next to his house.
Although he was given only a suspended sentence, his irate parishioners bulldozed the offending garage to the ground.
Over the next few decades, thousands of people were charged under the act, after being caught by police who seemed to spend inordinate parts of their working day hiding in trees with binoculars trained on bedroom windows of suspects, and testing sheets for evidence that two people were sharing a bed.
At the University of Natal, a member of staff composed a poem, poking fun at the dominee who was first to be caught in breach of the act.
In Barkly East as I heard tell
A dominee chanced to dwell.
Black was his suit and black his vest,
Black was the colour that he liked best,
And ‘neath the black of his clerical breeches,
Dwelt some black uncontrollable itches
Early one morn he chanced to spy
Eggy Mpele passing by,
He paused, transfixed, quite taken aback
At such an intriguing shade of black.
Hers was the beauty that never fades
For she was as black as the Ace of Spades.
A wink, a nod, a hurried question,
And Eggy ok’d his suggestion.
Into the garage slipped the pair
Opinions differ as to what happened there.
Whether or not it was copulation
Appears a matter for speculation.
I swear it’s true, you can have it in writing,
The Judge said: “No, he was just inciting,
And since he truly shows repentence,
He only gets a suspended sentence.”
For justice may be harsh or lenient,
Whichever is the most convenient.