How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
But other men were not so lucky. They had no money, having paid it all out in bribes over the course of many arrests. They would be carted in vans and trucks to Number Four, a notorious prison for black people in Johannesburg. Repeat offenders and those whose passbook crimes were considered more serious would be processed to a maximum-security penitentiary called Moderbee, on the outskirts of Kempton Park. I would often hear the womenfolk say that Moderbee was a "hell which changed black men into brutes, no matter how tough and stubborn they may be." Almost every night before we went to bed, whenever my mother happened to have one of her premonitions, she would pray in earnest to our ancestral spirits that the day never would come when my father would be sent to Modderbee. (4.13)
It was one thing to be arrested for violating the pass laws, but getting sent to Moderbee for this "crime" is quite another and often turned men into violent brutes.
Quote #5
My father had been arrested that morning at the bus stop – for being unemployed. A man who had been with him as they waited for the bus to Johannesburg to apply for permits had brought my mother the grim news. The man's story was as follows: as he and my father waited fro the bus several police vans suddenly swooped upon the bus stop. People fled in all directions. My father was nabbed as he tried to leap a fence. His pass was scanned and found to contain an out-of-work stamp; he was taken in. His crime, unemployment, was one of the worst a black man could commit. (6.4)
It's hard to imagine a system where it's criminal to be unemployed. In apartheid South Africa, however, black men were required either to live on the reserves (where there was no way of making a living) or to be employed at all times. Both were extremely difficult, if not impossible to do.
Quote #6
At home, as we washed the ash off our faces, legs and arms, and off the items we had gathered for the day, I asked her for more details about how a dead black baby ended up in a garbage dump. She told me that some maids and nannies who worked for white people, because of fears of losing their jobs in the event of an accidental pregnancy, would often smother the baby and dump the corpse in garbage bins so they could continue working.
"Wouldn't the police arrest such people for murder?" I asked in shock.
"Police don't arrest black people for killing black people," my mother said. (7.68-70)
Though the police were systematic in their attempts to dominate blacks and to make them follow the laws of the state, they didn't care to regulate violence that occurred in the townships. The sole function of the police department was to make certain that blacks adhered to the pass laws. In other words, police officers had to make sure that blacks lived where the state said that they lived, were employed at jobs they were allowed to have, and didn't bring their wives and children from the reserves unless they had a permit to do so.