Читать книгу Robert McBride: The Struggle Continues - Bryan Rostron - Страница 10

As a child, Robert idolised his father. Derrick spent hours playing with his young son and would take him everywhere. Derrick had given up drinking when Robert was born, but disappointment and frustration had driven him back to the bottle. At one point his closest drinking companion was a policeman and sometimes the two of them would patrol the ghetto looking for drinking dens and gambling parlours to raid. Derrick took his little boy along on some of these mischievous sorties, much to the fury of his wife, and Robert would come home beside himself with excitement, babbling incoherent tales of police chases and people fleeing.

Derrick was a maverick, and it was uncharacteristic for him to consort with a policeman. He was an adversary of all authority and particularly disliked the police, whom the McBrides called ‘The Weedkillers’. The local community knew Derrick as an uncompromising political firebrand; the police kept a close watch on him and caused Derrick McBride as much aggravation as they possibly could.

Derrick was well educated and widely read. The McBrides’ small living room was stacked with books on history and politics. Derrick was deeply embittered about the mean and restricted life that being a Coloured forced upon him. He found it particularly difficult to stomach the task of training a new generation of young Coloureds for a life of menial tasks, where they could never hope to be more than the underlings of white men.

He hated whites. He used to say, ‘There’s never been an honest white man in history.’

Derrick saw absolutely no point in continuing as a teacher in these grubby conditions. His outspoken views had blighted his teaching career. Branded as a trouble-maker, he was moved from school to school in Wentworth. He had become disillusioned at seeing even his brightest pupils going out into the world with very little prospect of employment, and with absolutely nothing for them to do in the ghetto where they were legally obliged to live. Most took up a life of petty crime and drunkenness, smoked a lot of dope and joined gangs like the Hime Street Fat Cats, the Drain Rats, F-Section and the Young Destroyers.

For long periods his bitterness, resentment and disillusion found expression in drinking; it anaesthetised his disgust at the hopelessly inadequate, racially segregated schools. In 1975 Derrick finally resigned his teaching post and became a welder.

Derrick McBride looked to his son Robert to redeem all his unfulfilled hopes and ambitions.

Doris also had strong aspirations for her son, so in 1976, when he was thirteen, the McBrides decided to send Robert to a high school 800 kilometres away in Kimberley in the northern Cape, where Derrick himself had gone to school. This was partly to remove him from the gangland atmosphere of Wentworth, and to instil a sense of independence in this quiet, self-effacing boy. Robert was enrolled at the Florianville High School and it was arranged that he stay with friends of the family in the Coloured quarter outside town.

This was a dramatic year for all black schoolchildren in South Africa. The compulsory use of Afrikaans as a medium of teaching in schools, a language which was seen by black pupils as an instrument of oppression, had sparked rioting initially in Soweto, outside Johannesburg. The police responded by opening fire on the children; this triggered a wave of anger which swept through African townships across the country. The protest swelled into a general outburst of fury against apartheid. By the end of the year over a thousand blacks had been killed, more than five hundred of them children.

In Kimberley the pupils of Florianville High decided to boycott their classes in solidarity with the students of Soweto. Robert joined in, not because he had thought about it much, but because everyone else was doing it. Their demonstration consisted of walking around the courtyard during their lunch-break, with placards demanding equal education. After they had been marching round aimlessly for a while, a troop of riot police appeared. Through a loud-hailer the students were ordered to go back into their classrooms. The students responded by chanting slogans.

Suddenly the police fired tear gas at them and charged. The children screamed and ran. Robert found himself choking and blinded by the gas, and a policeman was laying into him with a sjambok. Then it was all over, but for the first time Robert had experienced the brutal response to peaceful protest that his father had always insisted was the white man’s way.

His second encounter came only a few months later when the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team, touring South Africa, visited Kimberley. Robert and a group of friends from school went to the hotel where the team were staying in the hope of catching a glimpse of them and perhaps getting some autographs. There was quite a crush of fans outside the hotel, and when they pressed forward the police beat the young Coloured boys back with their batons, allowing the white schoolchildren through.

Derrick told him, ‘These Afrikaners only understand the language of the gun.’

He gave Robert, aged thirteen, a book called Coloured: a Profile of Two Million South Africans, by Al J. Venter, which made a powerful impression on him. Venter, although a conservative white writer, claimed history had been rewritten to embellish an Afrikaner mythology. He maintained that many of the cardinal landmarks in this tradition, celebrated as quasi-religious rituals, were in fact as Coloured as they were white. For example, when the Zulu king Dingane killed the Boer leader Piet Retief – central to the Afrikaner sense of outrage and martyrdom – 30 of the 70 men who died with him were Coloured; while at the Boer victory over the Zulus at Blood River – the Day of the Covenant, venerated by Afrikaners as confirmation of their anointment as a chosen people – half of the ‘whites’ were in fact Coloured.

But what most affected Robert was the treatment by the early white settlers of the indigenous Khoikhoi and San peoples. The first commander of the Cape, Van Riebeeck, referred to the Khoi as ‘black stinking dogs’, while a few years later another settler wrote, ‘Although descended from our father Adam, they yet show so little humanity that truly they more resemble the unreasonable beasts than reasonable man.’ The settlers formed commandos to hunt them as if they were wild animals and they waged a war of extermination against the San.

Robert vividly remembers watching the then future president PW Botha giving a crudely belligerent display on television, stabbing his finger at the camera and denouncing his opponents in ferocious hyperbole, and Derrick saying, ‘You see, that is why we have to have the armed struggle – it’s the only language they understand.’

At the end of one year in Kimberley, Robert passed his Standard Six exam and returned to Wentworth to go to Fairvale High School. His Aunt Girly noticed a considerable change. He had lost weight and was pimply from a bad diet. Although he was very withdrawn for the first few days, she also felt Robby, as she called him, had matured remarkably.

Fairvale High was an old pre-fab school with up to 35 or more in a class. There was no playground, just a patch of open ground with a little grass and scattered bushes round the edge. For assembly, the thousand or so pupils would gather in the open on a concrete quad while the principal would stand on a makeshift wooden dais. Some of the classroom walls were so flimsy that chunks could simply be broken off and there were holes big enough for smaller pupils to crawl through. If it rained the walls would be damp for days and there were occasions when bits of ceiling caved in during the middle of a class. The school was infested with rats and cockroaches.

Robert was an excellent student, particularly at maths and science. He also began to shine at rugby, the South African national game, although the Wentworth teams had to play on makeshift and dusty grounds very dissimilar to the carefully tended green pitches available to their white counterparts. This discrepancy in sporting facilities incensed Robert, even if during his teenage years – despite his father’s influence – he was generally regarded as being fairly passive and apolitical.

Meanwhile, Wentworth had became a tougher, more unruly place. A whole generation had now grown up in the converted military barracks. Many of Robert’s contemporaries soon dropped out of school, having no hopes or expectations, and they joined the street packs. Some of the gang members were as young as ten years old. The gangs themselves had also become more vicious; territorial wars were fought with guns, knives, stones and broken bottles.

Every weekend there were murders. Funerals were held on Mondays and Tuesdays, when the solemn line of hearses would make its way to the cemetery on the other side of Quality Street. The cemetery is the largest expanse of green in Wentworth and it is littered with the graves of young men. Occasionally a knifing would take place in broad daylight; some had their stomachs slit open or organs sliced off, and late one afternoon in front of a large crowd the Woodstock Vultures burned a rival alive.

The Trucks and the Vultures were the biggest gangs and the most hostile rivals, the dividing line between them being Austerville Drive, the main road through Wentworth, and at the height of their feud it was known as the Cassandra Crossing. The Trucks controlled the Drake and Frobisher districts, the Heartbreakers ruled in Ogle Road, while between Alabama and Dromedaris Road – known as Dooms Island because of the drinking problems – the F-Section held sway. Nearby, on the other side of Fairvale High School and just along from the Mobil oil refinery, the 88s lorded it over the most dismal area in Wentworth – long squat rows of concrete coops with flat asbestos roofs, bluntly designated as blocks A, B, C and D, but known by everyone as Rainbow Chicken, after the battery company.

Sometimes alliances were formed, as when the Young Destroyers teamed up with the Weekend Spoilers against the Drain Rats and F-Section. But generally each gang held to its own turf, expecting all young men within it to join up and if necessary defend their domain to the death.

No one gang controlled Collingwood, where the McBrides lived, so there was lively competition among the gangs to recruit the youngsters in that area. There was tremendous pressure on all teenagers to join an ‘outfit’, and every day on his way home from school Robert faced a torrent of abuse and sarcasm from groups of loitering youths. Most of the time they just hung around in the street, bored, frustrated and angry, looking for something – anything – to happen. Robert was an easy target. He was different: light-skinned, soft-spoken, a quiet boy, known as a good student. Most of all, though, he was considered to be different because he refused to join a gang.

Robert knew he was regarded as an alien. To defend himself, Derrick taught Robert jujitsu and sent him to karate lessons. Under his father’s guidance, Robert began to see this violence as a political fact: Derrick argued that these young men were victims of a political system that denied them any room for hope or improvement. Instead, trapped in their own ghetto, they turned their hopelessness and anger upon themselves and their own people.

Derrick gave his teenage son books on politics and history. He tried to give Robert a perspective which would save him from the cycle of self-destruction that condemned most of the inhabitants of Wentworth. Derrick talked about politics endlessly. Robert’s friends used to relish these discussions with the quixotic Mr McBride, but Robert often got bored with his father’s obsessions. Derrick’s theme was always the same: ‘Don’t trust whites. There’s never been an honest white man in history.’

Elsewhere in South Africa, others were beginning to strike back. In 1978 the chief of the Security Police, Brigadier Zietsman, estimated that four thousand black South Africans had gone abroad to Angola, Zambia and Tanzania for guerrilla training. Many of these had been the young Soweto schoolboys who had fled into exile after the mass uprising of 1976. Brigadier Zietsman warned the public they could be expected to return soon – equipped with arms and explosives.

In March 1978, two bombs went off in the coastal city of Port Elizabeth, leaving two dead and three injured. In October, two guerrillas were shot dead by a police patrol near the Botswana border. In November, a guerrilla band entered the northern Transvaal from Botswana, and in an ambush on a remote farm in the Louis Trichardt district a policeman was wounded. But underground resistance was sporadic and often haphazard. The security police, with its huge network of paid informers in the townships, always appeared to be one step ahead. Hundreds of activists were arrested and held without trial. Nevertheless there continued to be isolated outbreaks of urban violence. In November 1979 a bomb exploded in the Cape Town Supreme Court without any casualties. These incidents were beginning to mount up and the whites were having to take notice; some on the extreme right were getting so rattled they decided to take the law into their own hands, and vigilante attacks on blacks began to increase. The whites were becoming uneasy.

The standard of living among white South Africans, which had always been among the highest in the world, flourished and prospered. The earnings from gold rose enormously, investment poured into the country and there was an unprecedented property boom. Consumer spending had never been so high.

By now the McBrides’ home was too small. In 1979 they’d had another daughter, Gwyneth, and at sixteen Robert felt he was too big to share a room with his two sisters, and was unable to get much schoolwork done at home. Doris applied for a larger house and was told to walk around Wentworth in search of a vacancy. Eventually she found a family who were moving out of Hardy Place.

This was another area with no street names or lighting. The McBrides’ new home, 29a, was a small, square brick block with a tin roof, surrounded by a three-metre-wide grass yard and cordoned off from the uneven dirt road by a slatted wooden fence, an exact replica of all the other houses in the vicinity except for the lordly avocado tree outside the front door. In the days of the military camp, 29a had been a laundry.

It had three cramped bedrooms, a tiny bathroom and kitchen. The gloomy living room had dark cream, pitted walls and a threadbare brown matting carpet curling at the edges. The McBrides regarded 29a as a temporary address; they always hoped they might be allowed to own their own home.

For the next seven years, Derrick wrote constantly to the department of Community Development and Doris badgered them with visits. In their aspirations to better themselves, the McBrides were essentially middle-class people trapped in a slum. Doris was never happy with Hardy Place, and some of the neighbours used to say to her, ‘Who do you think you are?’ The McBrides were forced to remain as tenants in 29a (a consequence, they believed, of Derrick’s belligerent opinions) yet they did not relinquish their efforts to escape to a better neighbourhood. As a result, they never bothered much with decorating. The furnishings remained sparse and there were few embellishments. In the shadowy living room there was a calendar with a picture of an angelically blond Jesus and a copper clock in the shape of hands at prayer, while on a dark brown sideboard was a small plastic replica of Michelangelo’s David with the head missing.

Robert’s bedroom was painted a pale lilac colour in an unsuccessful attempt to gloss over the uneven red-brick walls, and the smudgy outcome was cruelly highlighted by the single bare light hanging from the middle of the white hardboard ceiling, decorated with limply dangling remnants of brown fly-paper. Through a hole in the corner a naked electric cable ran down to the floor, which was covered in a mahogany brown linoleum. There were no curtains at the window, only flimsy white netting. Robert’s sense of a lack of privacy resonated from the graffiti he’d scrawled over the wall opposite his narrow bed: THE LOVABLE QUALITY OF A NOSE IS NOT ITS LENGTH, BUT ITS ABILITY TO KEEP OUT OF OTHER PEOPLE’S BUSINESS.

At 29a, Robert had even more trouble from the local adolescent mob; at first simply because he was a new face, and then because he wouldn’t join their troupe. The faction that controlled Hardy were the Drain Rats. They took their names from the open storm drains by the side of the road where they had played as children, and as young men often simply sat with their friends, feet in the drains, because they had nowhere else to go.

The Rats used to kick him or throw things, and he was hurt badly when a brick hit him on the head. At one time the pressure on Robert was so intense that he was sent away for a while to stay with his godmother. Mostly, however, he kept his eyes down and hurried past, trying not to respond to the taunts, but sometimes a confrontation was unavoidable. Robert had many fights with these street corner gangsters. He was stabbed twice.

In 1980 there was once again a formidable boycott campaign in ‘non-white’ schools throughout South Africa. These protests were milder than those of four years previously; they were peaceful and concentrated on demanding a better standard of education and an end to the massive discrepancy between what the government spent on white and ‘non-white’ pupils.

Robert helped organise the demonstrations at Fairvale High. He hated his inferior schooling, and was particularly angered by the history syllabus which he felt glorified white victories over Africans. He could not respect his teachers either, for he believed they were academically inadequate, some of them knowing even less than himself, and – unlike his own father – prepared to co-operate with a system which was expressly designed to perpetuate their subordinate status. Most school principals were no better than government stooges, Robert argued, bribed by the whites to control their own people to the extent that not only did many co-operate with the police, but some were actually police reservists.

The Fairvale High students boycotted their classes and went on a number of protest marches. They carried banners proclaiming ALL STUDENTS ARE EQUAL and EQUAL EDUCATION FOR ALL.

One day they arranged to have a joint meeting with Wentworth High, the only other senior school in Wentworth. Both groups were due to meet at Fairvale, but as they were marching towards the school grounds the police ordered them to stop and turn back.

Before anyone could react the police fired tear gas. The students immediately took cover where they could. One group, including Robert, ran into a nearby clinic. The police chased after them and fired tear gas into the clinic, killing a three-week-old baby.

Robert was appalled. He was deeply upset and angered about the police response and the death of the baby, but still he did not know where to channel his fury.

His father’s anger, on the other hand, had always maintained a precisely articulated focus. Derrick despised whites. He made this quite clear to his son, and repeated over and over as if it were a litany, ‘Never trust a white man. I have never come across an honest white man in my life.’

By this time Derrick had opened his own welding business and he expected Robert to devote all his spare time after school to helping him in the workshop. Derrick was obsessive as always, and now that he devoted his manic energy to his work he required Robert to show the same dedication. Prevented from exercising authority in the wider world, Derrick imposed himself dogmatically at home.

At first, Robert adored being involved in all his father’s projects. They were often seen as they drove around the potholed streets of Wentworth to make deliveries. Robert’s Aunt Girly remembers, ‘Even when Robby was a boy his father used to discuss work with him like an adult.’

Father and son had always spent a lot of time together. On Sundays they invariably rose at five a.m. and drove down to the nearby Treasure Beach to run with the family’s three dogs, Fonzie, Striker and Chunky, before going to collect the Sunday newspapers. They also enjoyed playing chess.

Robert admired his father’s intransigence. He remembers going with his father to cost a job for a British immigrant called Campbell, who called Derrick ‘boy’. Derrick told the man that he must not call him that as he was old enough to be his father.

‘What do you expect me to call you?’ asked Campbell. ‘Sir?’

‘Just call me Mister,’ said Derrick, knowing he would inevitably lose the contract.

He impressed upon the quiet boy his own stark philosophy: ‘You have enemies and friends, nothing in between. Most are friends, but those that aren’t are enemies. If you can’t avoid them, then hit back at them hard. Go right in and … whap!’

Robert had always been considered a fairly passive character but gradually he became more confident and assertive. At school he took up boxing. Aged seventeen he was tall, quite bulky, and extremely fit. As a boxer he was a junior heavyweight, but among his contemporaries they couldn’t find anyone big or strong enough for him to fight, so instead he trained on a punchbag, pounding the inanimate adversary for hours with a solitary intensity.

His incoherent anger made him increasingly aggressive. He stopped avoiding confrontations, and sometimes even deliberately picked routes where he knew he would have to deal with a hostile group.

One afternoon he accompanied his sister Bronwyn, who ran for her school, to a track meeting. ‘As we went down,’ he said, ‘there was a big group of guys. I was walking behind Bonny, one guy grabbed her and began pawing her. He was big, and much older, about twenty-eight. They were laughing at me because I was so much younger, but they let us pass to the Ogle Road sports ground.

‘There, I took one of the stakes out of the ground to go back with. Instead of picking another path home, I deliberately went back the same way and that guy was still there with his friends. He came straight for me and threw a punch. I ducked away and struck him with the stake – it broke and I began stabbing him. I yelled at Bonny to run, and when she was clear I ran after her and we got clean away. But it paid off, hitting back. Later, that gang leader came and apologised to me. It made me lots more self-assured.’

Robert increasingly resented Derrick’s demands on his time. There was considerable tension between them and frequent rows, but Robert still did not dare to defy his father openly. Derrick expected him to put in a spell at the workshop every day although Robert was studying for his final school exams. Robert was exhausted, and when swotting he often stood on a chair to keep himself awake. It particularly riled him that he often had to sacrifice playing in rugby matches on Saturdays because Derrick insisted he help out at the workshop.

When Robert finally tried to confront his father with these feelings, Derrick immediately offered to pay him for his work. This only exacerbated Robert’s indignation. He regarded this as a bribe, and privately he began to blame his father for robbing him of his childhood.

‘The difficulties between us were mostly about me not having enough time for myself,’ said Robert. ‘Father was obsessed with making money and becoming a successful businessman. His rationale was that he wanted us all to succeed. But he was not successful – he tried too many things and didn’t concentrate his energies. And he’d battled so hard to get those premises and set himself up.’

Robert’s youthful rivalry with his father was agitated by the fact that they both recognised a singular affinity in character and outlook. Robert admired his father intensely, and although this respect was reciprocated, he was not yet sufficiently mature to break away and assert his independence.

Even so, they could act in complete harmony. Once, standing in the yard at home they witnessed two policemen, Swarts and Tiflin, arrest a well-known gangster, but the next moment the gangster had wrested the guns from both policemen. Without a word, Derrick and Robert vaulted over their fence and disarmed him.

Another time, just after midnight, there was a fire at the Manuels’ house at the end of the road. Quite a crowd had collected outside by the time Derrick and Robert arrived, and rafters were already collapsing. Somebody shouted, ‘There are people in there.’

All the doors were locked and windows securely bolted. Derrick kicked in the burglar guard and Robert slithered through to open the front door from inside. They couldn’t see much for the smoke and the heat was ferocious. Eventually Robert came across the unconscious bodies of Mr Manuel and his two-year-old son, while in another room Derrick located the asphyxiated Mrs Manuel, and together they carried the three of them out.

Father and son were also regularly forced to defend themselves against Wentworth’s marauding street gangs. Then Derrick was especially pugnacious and sometimes even delighted in hitting back. One evening when Robert was a teenager, he came home flustered and told his father that a large local gang had been hassling him.

Derrick jumped up and said, ‘Right, let’s go and get them.’ They picked up sticks and went out. At the end of the lampless street they saw a large group coming towards them. As the gang emerged from the shadows, Derrick saw there were at least a dozen hoodlums.

He whispered, ‘Don’t run, that will be the end of us.’ As the gang approached, Derrick said loudly, ‘We are looking for some sailors who insulted our sister.’ As the group parted, and before they could resist, Derrick and Robert laid about them with their sticks and then ran off as fast as they could.

Robert, however, was left in no doubt as to who was the real enemy. Derrick drummed it home again and again: it was the white man.

There were many similarities between the two male McBrides, but Derrick was an unforgiving taskmaster. He was determined that his son should succeed where he had been foiled.

As Robert grew older, Doris saw how strongly he resented his father’s obsessive demands upon him, and she frequently wondered if Robert would ever stand up to his father and assert himself.

Then, when the son finally rebelled, it seemed like the most insidiously contrived rejection. Robert put aside all his father’s edicts about never trusting a white man.

The world of the whites, so different from the ghetto life of Wentworth, not smelling of the oil refinery, beckoned over the horizon, like the Golden Mile seafront.

Robert decided to try the other side.