Interview with Brian Bartholomew, History 150 Spring 2020, Conducted by Hannah Trebour, [date that interview took place].
Mr. Bartholomew, the gentleman who kindly agreed to be interviewed, was my high school statistics teacher. We became close throughout my high school career and have stayed in touch. Mr. Bartholomew was born in South Africa in 1967 during the time of apartheid. He grew up in South Africa in a white, upper middle class family and was educated mostly in South Africa while also attending parts of his schooling in the United States. Additionally, he attended law school in South Africa right around the end of the apartheid. Mr. Bartholomew eventually immigrated to the United States and has lived here for over 20 years with his wife and three children.
Background Information:
Apartheid was a time of racial segregation in South Africa that lasted from 1948 to the early 1990’s. During this period, many laws were put in place in order to separate black and white South Africans through both education, living situations, work, and other aspects of society. For example, the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, passed in 1949, prevented those of different races from marrying (South African History Online). Mr. Bartholomew briefly mentions his experiences with this law after attending the wedding anniversary of an interracial couple.
Black citizens of South Africa represented the majority, yet what drove apartheid in part, was the intense fear many white South Africans held of losing political and economic power. After the end of apartheid in the early 1990’s, South Africa elected Nelson Mandela president (1994). The country began the healing process from a time of immense division.
Mr. Bartholomew describes this time as “incredibly euphoric.” Mandela, after being freed from imprisonment for his influential role in the opposition of the apartheid, headed up the African National Congress (ANC) and in 1994 was elected South Africa’s president.
During his time leading the country, Mandela instituted several programs aimed to smoothly transition South Africa into a new time of healing. One program in particular, called the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), investigated the human rights violations which took place during apartheid. Those who testified were granted amnesty for their crimes if they spoke honestly. Mr. Bartholomew recalls his experiences with this commission as a lawyer who was practicing in a building very close to where these trials were held.
Research Sources:
“The Nelson Mandela Presidency – 1994 to 1999.” South African History Online, 16 July 2015, www.sahistory.org.za/article/nelson-mandela-presidency-1994-1999.
“Truth Commission: South Africa.” United States Institute of Peace, 22 Oct. 2018, www.usip.org/publications/1995/12/truth-commission-south-africa.
South African History Online Editors . “A History of Apartheid in South Africa.” South African History Online, 6 May 2006, www.sahistory.org.za/article/history-apartheid-south-africa.
Transcript:
Interview with Brian Bartholomew, History 150 Spring 2020, Conducted by Hannah Trebour, Thursday March 5th, 2020.
[Hannah Trebour]: Okay, so hello, this is Hannah Trebour doing my history 150 interview project. Okay, so to start off, would you mind describing to me what it was like growing up in South Africa, at the time of the apartheid
[Brian Bartholomew]: Sure! My name is Brian Bartholomew, a former teacher of Hannah’s. So I was born in South Africa in 1967. And so, my, my youth in my young years, who has been, I guess everything after the age of 25, was under apartheid. And so growing up, every part of me growing up in South Africa was defined in some way by apartheid.
The hospital I was born in was segregated, so there was a white entrance and a black entrance, and so I was born on the white side, and, and small things like probably the doctor to patient ratio would have been a lot more in my favor as white person than it would for a black person. So right from the moment I was born and apartheid influenced my life. The neighborhood I grew up in was segregated, like all neighborhoods in South Africa were, so it was a white zone new neighborhood. And, and in our house, we had a domestic servant, which was common for and white families in South Africa. We were middle income white family, so it’s not relative to other white people who were in the middle relative to the rest of the country. We were probably in the top 5%, but I grew up with a domestic servant we had a gardener at our house and both people stayed on our property. The design of South African houses was such that it was kind of like an out boarding like a sort of little apartment. They did not stay in our house with us. So much of how we were was that for example, our domestic servant wouldn’t eat at the same table as us, would not have the same utensils as us. And at the time, none of that seems strange to me, or would I would have questioned that because that is how all of my friends lived. And, schooling was segregated. So even though our domestic servant had a son, who was just a little older than me, and I’d see him on vacations in the come to our house, our schooling was completely separate. And the spending per capita on each student of mine, I was at a state school was way higher than was at his school. We had incredible facilities. They did not. So everything was predestined for white people to succeed and for black people not to.
[HT]: So did you, like recognize these differences when you were growing up? Or was it not until later?
[BB]: It’s, you know, when do you become conscious of them when when something’s your normalcy, I don’t really know, but I do know, I can pinpoint certain things that were like, wow, that’s weird that happened to me. So I can remember being in 10th grade and having a conversation with a black man. And what was significant about the conversation, I can remember where I was, when it was, is that I’d never had an equal conversation with a black person before. So I lived in an area which was 80% black. And yet I had never had a equal conversation with a black person thats how sort of separated our our lives were and I just remember being struck by that. The other incident that I can remember vividly was in 1986, I came to the United States as an exchange student. And I lived in a house in upstate New York. And I remember one day going, going home and watching something, the news was on TV. And it was of rioting in South Africa, and it was actually in my city. And it was in a part of my city that was within two miles of our downtown. But I had never seen and I’d never been to and I look to these images, and the camera was not lying. That was where I was from but it was things that I had never seen and never experienced. So an incredible thing of that you can live in a place but there’s some neighborhoods or some areas you would never see and never go to. And so that that was for me growing up you know, where I went to school, where I played sports, the beach I went to, and home we’re kind of like the, the triangle that I moved in and where we had a sort of summer home on the on the coast and where the places I went and all of them were segregated. So you’d see a lot of black people, but you would not interact with them.
[HT]: Very interesting. What year in school were you when when you went on exchange to the United States?
[BB]: I finished high school in South Africa. And then I came to the states for one year to redo I guess just for an extra year of high school. It was also at a time that a lot of my classmates, probably about half of my graduating class would have gone into the military. So you could postpone your military service. It was two years compulsory, for as long as you were studying. And so I was fortunate enough to be able to come away for a year. And then I went to university, so I could always get a deferment. And by the time I finished studying, and was pretty much the last draft class, so I never, I never went to the army. And in the army you hit you did one of two things, you fought in a foreign country in a war that we should never have been involved in was one option, or the other option was to fight in the civil war in South Africa, but you effectively policing black people. So those were the two options, and fortunately, I got out of them, but a lot of my classmates did not.
[HT]: Yeah. Going off, I know you had talked a little bit about like, the different experiences you’d had and like the places that you went to, would you mind maybe describing or explaining some of the life changes you experienced while growing up in South Africa?
[BB]: So interesting things that I can remember is I can remember the first time black people went to a white beach in South Africa. So in my city, they were sort of the three main beaches that everybody spoke about. And I remember when New Year’s Day basically, the word must have sort of spread it was pre internet and cell phones sort of almost virally that we are going to go to this beach and on New Year’s Day, probably when I was in my teens, 50,000 people arrived at one beach and were like this beach no longer will there be apartheid on this beach. And there was this kind of shock of luck not quite knowing how to deal with that of like, what, what just happened? So I can remember instances like that and what was remarkable to me, I used to surf at that beach, and often I’d go surfing there and be like, there are only two of us on this huge beach. And yet other people were not allowed to go there. And I remember when the shock and outrage happened. I remember thinking, but did you ever go to the beach? What’s the loss? And so it was interesting to think of it in terms of owning a beach. So there were things like that. I can also remember my school was completely white, there were no black students. And I remember the first time seeing a black person in my school’s uniform was about four or five years after I left school and being like, Wow, look at this change. I can also remember clearly, April 27 1992, of voting in the election, and just the transformation on on that day. How, it was the beginning of a new South Africa. But so a lot of changes that I would have seen from, from my youth where everything was completely white, until sort of desegregation started to happen. So I remember visiting my dad in a hospital, and the hospital had become desegregated. And so that was a change. Whereas before it was a white Hospital in black hospital, now it was desegregated. So, yeah, so So seeing those changes.
[HT]: Very interesting. Um, so I know you talked a little bit about the maids that you had. Do you mind describing a little bit more about what your education was like?
[BB]: So my education was was really based in the British system. So it was it was uniforms, think of a British sort of private school, like you’d see in a movie, very strict uniforms, blazers, ties. Sports was a large part of is the school kind of environment. And, you know, world trained teachers who some of them, you know, a lot of them are career teachers who spent a long time at at one school. The exams were external, and everyone in the country took the same exams to end the year sort of like AP’s and ask who always did well, and so we were we were well prepared and a good education and well prepared for college. So that and never lacked any physical resources. The photocopier has always worked, we always got notes there were always text books, there were no shortages of any sort, and the education was really good and the high quality of speakers that the school brought in and extra education opportunities.
[HT]: And then you had said in the pre-interview that you attended law school, correct?
[BB]:Yeah.
[HT]: Do you mind explaining a little bit what that was like?
[BB]: So I went to, I did my undergrad degree, and then I went to law school, and the interesting thing for me was, I went to law school, because I was sort of wanting justice I was wanting a better world and what I discovered, and law school is interesting in that it was, it was integrated in the sense of the ratio probably would have been, I would say, 70% white, 30% black and you’ll say, well, in a country, which is 80%, black and 20% white, that’s, that’s not an equitable, that’s not a sort of equal distribution, but that was at that time and place in South Africa, so the University I went to disobeyed the apartheid rules and lost government funding for it.
So it was the first time first in my undergrad of living with black people on dorm. And so apartheid wasn’t practiced there. I was clearly at advantage in terms of the preparation I had received, versus what a lot of students have received. So the hard dirt relative to a lot of students was better because of their advantages. So law school also exposed or being at university exposed me to seeing and hearing firsthand about the injustices other people were experiencing in apartheid. So I remember and this wasn’t in law school, it was prior to law school, making my first kind of equal friend that was black, and you’re in class, you have interactions where, in this case I’m like I like the way he asked questions, I like what he’s thinking and so I’m like I wanted to get to know him better and so I met this person, his name was Tepo one day and after clause we start a conversation, we end up going to the cafeteria. And it was one of those beginnings of a friendship, and then he disappeared. He wasn’t in class and I’m like, where is he? And I didn’t know him well enough. He wasn’t a friend yet to, to sort of, to to know. And after about a week, I asked one of his friends and he said, Oh, he was arrested. And it was during the time of in apartheid, you’d have detention without trial. So anyone who was a political activist could be arrested without ever appearing in court. And they were very famous cases of people who you never saw again. And so this is what happened to me. So it was this shock for me of like whatever happened to Tepo? And then fast forward probably about five years off to that, I was leaving South Africa to spend some time overseas, and I was in Johannesburg with a friend of mine and we went to the University of Witwatersrand and to see her brother and we were walking up the stairs and I looked up was a sort of big set of stairs and I looked up the stairs and coming down the stairs was someone and we made eye contact and he said to me, Brian? and I’m like Tepo? So he, and I didn’t have enough time to find out what had happened in the missing years, vut it was this immense sense of relief that that he had survived apartheid. He’d survived being detained without trial where people were notoriously tortured people died in detention. And so that was a pretty memorable moment. Didn’t really answer your question about law school, but no law school led me to a career where hoped I could find justice and became the solution because I found that law mostly favor to people with the most money, rather than the right or the wrong. So that that was my cynical view of the law.
[HT]: So around that time, like, what was your experience, like as apartheid was ending?
[BB]: Um, it was kind of interesting periods in South Africa from 1992 until about the first five years were incredibly euphoric. So 1992, Mandela was released, 1994 was the election until about 1998 was this sense of this rainbow nation was the sort of phrase we used to describe it. Our sports teams were welcomed back into international sport. There was kind of this this moment of this is all so magical, we’re part of the world, and then having Nelson Mandela as a leader certainly helped, just in terms of his yeah, as a person he is or was and the way he represented the country made everybody proud. And then in about 1998 there started to be like this level of pessimism. And that’s sort of continued until today. So it’s a country with a lot of problems right now, but from 1990, the first five years after the election, were just incredibly euphoric. It was was an exciting time.
[HT]: Do you mind like elaborating on what you mean by “the level of pessimism”?
[BB]: Um, people would see things like affirmative action, as sort of the lack of meritocracy and a worry that white people who’d be educated wouldn’t get certain government jobs. There was a view of skepticism as to whether the level of corruption within government. There was initially this desire to build, literally millions of houses, people who’d been homeless to have houses. And then that started off so well, and was was really exciting to see people get homes, but then to discover that, who was getting homes involve bribes being paid, and, and just a level of corruptness that started to get people worried. And then also underlying all of it in South Africa is crime. And white South Africans would not see the link to apartheid. If you, I mentioned earlier about I made some, having gone to school about the same time as he did not get a good education, I did. He never ended up with a job that was meaningful in any way, often spent periods unemployed. Any crime he committed would be need based, he would need the money. I always had the option of working. And so because of apartheid, you had people who couldn’t get jobs and would turn to crime. And that led to people in South Africa seeing it as a black and white issue. So what happened is, and also some of the levels of crime became pretty violent, so carjackings were extremely common in South Africa, just breaking into people’s homes and stealing things were just common crimes that existed, so that living with fear became part of the cynicism.
[HT]: So kind of going back to the like, as you were talking about the five years of like euphoria, do you mind explaining we talked a little bit about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission? Would you mind explaining like your experience with that? And what it is a little bit?
[BB]: Sure. So the the Truth and Reconciliation commissions was really interesting for me because I was practicing law, and where they had the first hearings was literally next door to where my law offices were. And so it was like, what’s happening next door? The TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission) became this, and I mentioned Tepo, and Tepo was was arrested and detained without ever appearing in court. And many people died under those circumstances. So it became, what happened to those people who died? What happened to their families, they never knew the truth. And so, living with that uncertainty is, I’d imagine is the hardest part. You can come to terms with a death of a person if you know that they’re dead and you kind of know how they died. And so part of the settlement in South Africa and the move towards a democracy was that, not to have people be prosecuted for war crimes effectively. Crimes they committed in the name of apartheid.
And so the TRC was set up, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu was the first, was the commissioner, was the head of the TRC. And that year was this, it operated kind of like a court of law, but you didn’t have a lawyer, you had a speak yourself, and as long as you spoke the truth and asked for forgiveness effectively, you would not be charged with a crime. But the opposite was true, if you didn’t come to the TRC, and didn’t offer up your story, you would be able to be charged years later for things that you might have done. So it became in your interests to go and say this is what I did. And so it was an extremely powerful moment, every night on TV. they would have sort of, I don’t want to say highlights, but a summary of what had happened, and you’d see a level of evidence of what had happened how depraved apartheid was, what people had done in the name of apartheid, and then there was just this moment of just of yeah, with the truth being told, that the nation could move on, rather than kind of pretend it never happened. So, it was a real cleansing moment. The there was one time I remember it, were Archbishop Desmond Tutu just became so overwhelmed. The evidence, and he just heard one story too many of just brutality, and he started crying. And, it’s just this powerful scene of this sort of pious old man with just with his head bent, weeping, and that kind of affected all of us as a country.
[HT]: Wow. Where were you when you saw that, was that on TV?
[BB]: That was on TV. So every night sort of, and South Africa, during the time of apartheid only had one TV station, because it was government owned, so they could control the propaganda. So there was only one evening news service, and so everyone tuned to the same news. And so that that was kind of the footage that was shot. While I was speaking, I remembered something from law school that I thought would be an interesting story, one day, one of my classmates invited me to dinner at his place, and I was like, great, that’ll be awesome! So I went and when I got there, I realized that other people were bringing gifts, and I was like oh, awkward. So then discovered that it was his wedding anniversary, and he and so, it was their fourth wedding anniversary, and the child was about six or seven years old. And so, you didn’t have to be a genius to work out that the child was born before the marriage, and also that they were of mixed race. And so, and being at a wedding anniversary, of course leads the question, tell me how you met? And they, what was significant about the wedding anniversary was that it was the they got married the first opportunity that they were legally able to. So I think that year would have been about 1987. So, it was illegal to marry someone of a different race to you. They admit that fallen in love. He had a business, she was a bank teller every day, there was this interaction where he would go and bank his money, they’d have a conversation. So they told the story of how they met and they told the story of how the police arrest them. In the early days of their relationship of the child being born, and they were not able to get married and so until about two or three years of their relationship started. And that is what was so important about the wedding anniversary, that they were actually able to get married. So I just remember thinking, wow, this is a part of history um, and an I can’t even says its domestic bliss, because you got a little children running around and it’s a crazy meal at our house and I didn’t have children at the time. And it was just like this, so this is what a normal family is like. And so that that was a really powerful moment of seeing and just hearing how they met, and hearing the love story, and realizing that it was illegal, was quite an eye-opening moment for me.
[HT]: Kind of switching gears a little bit. Um, I know you talked your experiences with Nelson Mandela and hearing him talking Do you mind elaborating on that a little bit, or describing that experience?
[BB]: Sure. I exaggerate to make it sound like “I met Nelson Mandela”. So he was released in February 1992, and it’s one of those where I can remember where I was, when it was, who I was with when I heard he was being released. And I remember, I was with my friend Gail, we were in London. Gail called her husband about something, and he told her over the phone, she told me, I said I didn’t believe it. She said she too didn’t believe it. We made her husband repeate it, because it was such a shock to us. We’re like, we never saw this coming. So, I would have heard that in January 92. In February 92, I was back in South Africa and Nelson Mandela was released. And I just remember what a big day that was. Um, and then, probably about, less than a month later, I’m guessing Three weeks later, we got news that he was going to be speaking in a township, probably about an hour, hour and a half from my university. So some students got together and like rented this, I can’t even say a bus, because you’ve got visions of a charter bus, it was I’ve never seen anything as, it was like the worst you’d expect from Africa. And that’s what they rented at a pretty good deal. We all had to pay some money, and we went down to this township to watch Nelson Mandela speak. And, um it was just, it was fascinating. The estimates were 300,000 to 500,000 people. And if you think of, say the biggest football stadium times three or five, that was a mass of humanity. And so yeah, so that was the mass of humanity. That was there and I remember being conscious of the fact that I was white, only the group of 20 people that I came If were the only white people there, and then what else happened? Yeah, they were there was an elderly man next to me, and most of Nelson Mandela’s talk was in English, even though everyone was nkosi speaking. except for the 20 of us. And then I remember one old man next to me, turning to me and saying, “I have seen Mandela, I can die.” And he made that, in a literal sense is that the purpose of his life, that liberation had been achieved, and that his life had been well lived because of that. And so that was just a powerful moment for me to to hear someone sort of say that. We’re kind of like, it’s almost like Martin Luther King of the, you know, I’ve been to the mountain top, I’ve seen the glory that’s coming. It was a statement like that. So Nelson Mandela was, I don’t know how many hundred yards away from me and looked about a quarter of an inch tallt but, having this man say that to me ,and just the the other thing was the warmth with which I was which I was received at that was incredible for me. I remember, the bus was coming to pick us up at like five o’clock and it finished at two, and we’ve got three hours what do we do and a person standing next to us was like “you come to my house”, and and just being treated like celebrities was was pretty was pretty bad. It was pretty. Yeah. meaningful in a profound way. So, that and I remember about two weeks after that, Nelson Mandela spoke at Yankee Stadium in New York City, and my brother in law went to that and say that the person next to him had turned to him as a white person and said, “What are you doing here?” And it was just an interesting for me, juxtaposition of the reception as a white person in the two different places. So so that that was pretty profound. So, never got closer than that Nelson Mandela, my friend Heidi did meet him and described a charisma and a charm that was pretty meaningful to her.
[HT]: Wow. Well, I think we can go ahead and start wrapping up. Are there is there anything else you’d like to add before I finish up?
[BB]: Um, I’m just looking through the topics that I’m covered with you. I think the the one thing is, is to speak about South Africa today, and that is this legacy of apartheid, that’s going to be with South Africa, probably forever. And I always find it interesting to like, look at a map of my hometown, and I can zoom in on one neighborhood, and what you’ll see is, and actually, it’s interesting when you fly to South Africa, you have the same experience. You fly in and as you quite away where you fly over these neighborhoods that are incredible with swimming pools and tennis courts and in huge backyards. And then as you get close to the airport, it’s land that was you know, nobody builds close to the airport because of the noise. So, squatters, homeless people, bought homes on the sort of land that that existed there. As you’re getting close to touching down in South Africa, you just fly over and it happens in every big city. Just tons and tons of shanty homes. And so South Africa to me is is still those two places, its where you are five minutes before the airport, and what you’re looking at, and what you are like 30 seconds before you land, and what you’re looking at and which of those two places you born into determines what kind of school you go to. So it’s not so much a question of the color of your skin anymore, although having said that, it’s rare to have white people in poverty, it’s very common for black people, but they a lot of black people affluent as well. But, where you’re born determines the trajectory of your life. And you could say that’s the same for a lot of countries. In South Africa, more pronounced than than probably be anyway.
[HT]: Wow very interesting. Well thank you so much. Again this is Mr. Bartholomew interview on his experiences in South Africa during the apartheid.