Bringing the Law Back in Essays in Land, Law, and Development Book

Bloke Modisane’s Blame Me On History is a memoir of a man born and raised in Sophiatown, South Africa. When he was 13, he saw his given name, William Modisane, inscribed mistakenly on his father’s coffin. His father had been murdered — bludgeoned to death by a neighbor with a brick and a vile temper. The men argued over some petty grievance. Thinking things had settled down, Joseph Modisane walked away. The next day, a kindly neighbor called the son to identify his father’s body. It was unrecognizable.

This is one of many searing stories recalled and dissected in this book. Anyone who has considered the oppression of Africans under apartheid rule in South Africa needs to read the tale of life in the townships as told by someone who lived it. Modisane's little sister died of “malnutrition.” In other words, she starved to death. He himself became a journalist. Ultimately, he made his way out of South Africa. His self-imposed exile was painful, but it was refuge from the oppressive minority rule that made his life a hell back home.

As a child, he grew inured to the sight of dead bodies on the street. He suffered the loss of countless friends, stabbed to death, or felled by the bullets of “hooligan policemen.” He watched his beloved Sophiatown razed by authorities who sent in bulldozers to “clean things up” by leveling homes and storefronts. He learned to accept humiliating postures, to address white people as “baas,” to be called “boy,” and to play all the ingratiating and demeaning games required in a society that sanctions racial hatred for the sake of white supremacy.

His stories drive home the horrors of apartheid. One can read Athol Fugard and Nadine Gordimer and many other celebrity writers who joined the anti-apartheid cause. But reading the words of a black South African puts things in bleak and razor-sharp perspective. The lives of Blacks under apartheid was closer to slavery than I imagined.

Modisane punctuates a litany of unjust laws with the refrain: “This is the law.”

• I cannot sell my labour to the highest bidder.
• I cannot live in the residential area of my choice.
• I may be detained for over sixty days without a charge brought up against me.
• I cannot worship in the church of my choice.
• I cannot mix or consort, in a peaceful manner or for a peaceful common purpose with the friends of my choice.
• I cannot object to all these restrictive laws, cannot cite the Declaration of the Rights of Man, that ‘all men are created equal, they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.'
This is the law.

Why did it take so long for the world to notice this injustice? Modisane explains:

"When everybody has blamed it on somebody else—and the more charitable have blamed it on history—the police would feel justified to launch the reprisal raids; hundreds of Africans would be rounded up on infringements of the Pass regulations and other minor technicalities. Of course the papers will explain that the raids are a new and vigorous police drive against illegal firearms and illicit brews; just routine raids aimed at protecting the Africans against the tsotsis [gangsters].

The routine raids are routine only in their consistency of vengeance and brutality, but the hooliganism of the police is something which never gets into the newspapers; except for the very enthusiastic and unfortunate police constable who occasionally finds himself in court facing an assault charge brought against him by an African."