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“I am a third-generation South African”
- Michigan State University Press
- Chapter
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Sandy Bishop "I am a third-generation South African" SANDY BISHOP IS ONE OF the many South African women who own and operate their own beauty salons. Hers is located in a posh suburb of Port Elizabeth, just across the road from a long open sandy beach, where the occasional whale pops up to dominate the otherwise stark landscape of the Indian Ocean. Port Elizabeth is the third-largest port in South Africa. The white suburbs feature the typical South African stretch of houses hiding behind tall fences that surround them. The lawns look to be manicured much like the silky hands ofthe white women who come to Sandy's shop. Rising between the stretch of houses, many with signs conveying "Neighborhood Watch," are small shopping centers where guns and ammunition are on sale. These items are not for blacks, however. The only Africans to be seen in these neighborhoods are the maids and gardeners. Suburban Port Elizabeth is a startling contrast to the slum areas that house numbers of poor whites, and even more so to the inevitable townships where the poorest of the poor-thousands of squatters-live in tumbledown corrugated iron shacks covered with cardboard roofs. In Sandy's Port Elizabeth, painted white shops glisten. Her salon is tastefully decorated-reflecting her own trim good looks. There is something unique about the white beauty parlor culture in South Mrica, whether the owners are Afrikaners or English speakers. As might be expected, blacks do all the menial tasks, including washing customers' hair. It is the presence of spouses, however, that strikes an odd note to the outsider. Husbands man the till while their wives run the shops. Many husbands have no occupations beyond sitting endless hours at the front of the shops. Few bother (or are allowed) to make appointments. Fewer still have trained as beauticians. Their function is primarily to protect the shop, in case of need, and to watch the cash as it rolls in over the course of the day. 187 SANDY BISHOP Dress and decor differ, too, in various parts of the country-and within urban areas. In one shop, all the beauticians wore high-heeled, Western-style boots, tight pants, and low-cut blouses. The effect was similar to entering a 1970s go-go bar. This shop featured English-speaking women who were all originally from Scotland. In the slums of Hill Brow, a fat frowzy Afrikaner woman presided over her establishment. The hierarchy in this particular shop was established along language lines: she deigned to set the hair of the Afrikaans speakers, while she delegated the other customers to an equally tubby import from southern England. Sandy's handsome husband was a less obvious presence than elsewhere: some stretched and preened, while others sleepily yawned over the cash register. Through her earnings, Sandy and her family acquired a small farm outside Port Elizabeth where they live in relative comfort, if not in the luxury associated with the white professional classes in South Africa. Of medium height, Sandy tastefully bleaches her hair to match her flawless pale skin. In her late thirties Sandy unexpectedly became a grandmother-but there is nothing "grandmotherish" about this South African beauty. "I am a third-generation white South African. I was born in Port Elizabeth and went to school here-a girls-only school. I only went to high school for three years Iinstead of five J, as I wanted to become a hairdresser. At that stage, that was beginning of 1968. I was only fifteen, which was younger than allowed for dropping out.... In those days you could not go straight to beauty school, you had to go into a salon and be apprenticed and you went to night school. There you studied cosmetology.... "So for three years I went to night school, working as an apprentice every day, earning four rand twenty cents a week. ... "I was the eldest of four children and I was very homey, very quiet. If somebody was nasty to me I never had an answer back. I tend to be one of those people that latch on to one guy-and I met my husband when I was fourteen. Never went out with anyone else and we married when I was eighteen in 1969. Then, when I was twenty I had my daughter, and two years later my son. He was about six months old when I realized that to go working for somebody at one hundred twenty lor so...