Читать книгу Robert McBride: The Struggle Continues - Bryan Rostron - Страница 12

The more Robert McBride ventured into the wider world beyond Wentworth the more he came up against white intolerance. At Ansteys beach with his nephews he was chased off by an angry crowd of whites; going shopping with his mother to a supermarket in a white area on a Saturday he got into a fight with local white youths who jeered, ‘Get out – this isn’t your area!’ Even so, he was fascinated by his white ancestry and wanted to know everything about his European background. Robert began to pester his parents, particularly Doris, with questions about the white strands in their families.

Doris answered him with amused tolerance … her father was an Afrikaner called Van Niekerk who drove buses in the rural area of southern Natal, and he fell in love with one of his passengers, a Coloured nurse named Grace. They had to elope to Pietermaritzburg in order to marry, as Van Niekerk had been engaged to marry the daughter of the local magistrate. This was 1928, 21 years prior to the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act.

After having five children, the Van Niekerks came to Durban in search of better work, and Doris’s father got a job with the Corporation. Doris met Derrick when they were both teaching at Clarewood, a primary school for Coloureds. At first, she says, old man Van Niekerk didn’t like Derrick at all. ‘My father was a peculiar bird. He had his funny habits, and he was very old-fashioned, from the country, and he thought Derrick was this terrible city slicker from Johannesburg and he thought that Johannesburg was … you know … Sodom and Gomorrah.

‘Derrick was loud and quite argumentative and drank a lot. People in the country areas are inclined to keep quiet and accept things and Derrick was the absolute opposite of that! He was always rowdy and if he’d been playing rugby he’d come back with a swollen eye or something and my father would say, “This animal has been fighting.” He also didn’t trust him because he drank. Derrick drank a lot in those days.

‘My father watched me closely. It wasn’t because Derrick was dark. My mother’s mother was black and he adored her. A black person was fine with him. He didn’t really like Derrick because he had different ways and ideas. Derrick was hot-headed, always ready for a fight – the devil from Joburg!

‘We had a secret wedding. My mother knew but kept quiet. Actually, after the wedding we had the cheek to go back to my parents’ house. My cousins had been making little snacks while my father was asleep and I said to my mother, “You must tell father we are married.” But he just walked away. He sat on the back porch and got drunk with some other old men.

‘For some time my parents had been living in a white area, number 55 Berriedale Road, near Ridge Road. Nobody said anything to us, in fact the neighbours on both sides were quite friendly with my mother. They would see her going off in her nurse’s uniform and they would be pleasant and talk. It was a nice house, spacious and pretty, especially compared to what we had been living in before. It was white outside, my father painted all the doors black, and there was a lovely big brass letter-box on the front door. There was a comfortable, enclosed veranda and about half an acre of garden, with big shady trees, avocado and peach.

‘It was in 1963-64 when they really started dividing and moving people. They put them in trucks and moved them out. They were saying, “This is an Indian area or a white area and you cannot stay here anymore.” They appropriated the houses, just took everybody out and people simply lost their homes. That’s when Derrick and I were moved to Wentworth.

‘My parents continued to live in Berriedale Road till 1964, when my father died – as my father had been white, they’d been all right, but after that they just wanted my mother out of there. She went back to Harding.’

When Robert tried asking his father about his white antecedents, however, he met with an intemperate response. Derrick’s great-grandfather had been white, either Irish or Scottish. But he detested his white blood. He loathed the whites for what they had done in South Africa. He particularly hated the psychological distortions racial discrimination had visited upon its victims: indoctrinating some (who didn’t quite make the grade as white) to hate themselves and pathetically aspire to be accepted as white. Derrick himself was a victim of this perverse psychology.

Derrick McBride had hated his own mother. He was too black for her, and she never forgave him for it. He told Robert, ‘Anyone who practises discrimination in their own family is deserving of contempt. My mother discriminated against me. God, how I despised her! When I was born, someone told her she had a son, and someone else said, “But, Alice, he’s black.” She never let me forget that.’

Derrick McBride’s father was dark, but Alice’s mother had been white and Alice was inordinately proud of her own fair complexion and straight brown hair. Her first two children inherited this colouring, but Derrick was born with a dark complexion – a constant reproof to her white aspirations. She punished him by withholding her affections and making him work harder than the other children.

They lived in Johannesburg, and Alice used to send the young Derrick into the neighbouring white suburb to hawk her home-baked cakes from door to door. He was often set upon by bigger white boys and robbed of his wares, and when he returned home empty-handed, Alice would beat him. He had three brothers and a sister, but Derrick was the only one Alice selected for these unpleasant errands.

Although she was discriminated against herself for not being white, it was Alice’s dearest wish to be part of the world that rejected her. She would even refuse to take tea with people darker than herself, whom she would refer to as ‘the bushman type’. When people came to visit she would explain Derrick away by saying, ‘I have five children and this is my dark one.’

Alice made Derrick do much of the housework, including scrubbing the floors, and in a desperate attempt to earn his mother’s affection the little boy worked frantically hard. One day Derrick overheard a relative remark, in Afrikaans, ‘Hy werk homself wit,’ (He’s working himself white). Derrick says, ‘I grew up with a deep hatred of whites. I made up my mind to get even, no matter how long it took.’

Religion, he felt, had also been appropriated by the whites. He believed the church encouraged whites to feel superior and taught blacks subservience. As a child, Derrick had been a devout altar boy, but had resented the fact that Coloureds had to sit in a separate section from whites, while blacks were barred altogether. When being prepared for his confirmation he was asked if there was anything he disliked about the church, and Derrick replied, ‘The colour bar.’ Only when he recanted this heresy was he confirmed, but thereafter he lost his confidence in the church.

In the years immediately after the Second World War, when he was at school in Kimberley, Derrick associated with a group of young communists, but he wasn’t really anti-capitalist – he was anti-white. In 1948, following the coming into power of the Afrikaner Nationalist government, he and some teenage friends made home-made bombs which they placed on minedumps around Johannesburg.

With a group of other young Coloured intellectuals, Derrick formed an association called the Inner Circle. They debated the options of joining other organisations dedicated to the overthrow of apartheid. The regulations implementing racial segregation had been stepped up considerably since the National Party had come to power, and every single aspect of their lives was fenced in by rigid race laws. In 1955 Derrick attended the historic meeting of the Congress of the People in Kliptown that drew up the Freedom Charter. But by then Derrick and the rest of the Inner Circle had come to the conclusion that talking and passive resistance campaigns had got the opponents of apartheid absolutely nowhere. They believed only armed insurrection would bring about change.

Totally isolated and unwilling to join other more widely based movements, the Inner Circle collapsed as its disillusioned members retreated into passivity. They withdrew from politics and devoted themselves to individual pursuits. One became a doctor, another went into exile in Zambia, becoming a wealthy businessman. Derrick became an alcoholic.

He had been drinking heavily for several years. Doris says it was his mother who really drove him to it. ‘He applied to the medical school at Wits University in Johannesburg to study as a doctor. In those years it was almost unheard of for a Coloured to go there, and Derrick was one of the two Coloured students accepted. He had a really good pass and was so happy. His father was also thrilled, but Derrick had to pay for the entrance fee … his father, Bobo, had actually put some money aside for Derrick to go to university.

‘Derrick completed all the forms and asked his father for the money. Alice asked, “What does he need the money for?” His father replied, “To go to university.”

‘Well, Alice said, “What does he want to be a doctor for? I need the money for Spuddy’s wedding!” At the same time, in December, his eldest brother was getting married, you see. His nickname was Spuddy, like in potatoes. It was a toss-up between Spuddy’s wedding and Derrick’s education. Spuddy won – Spuddy being the favourite with fair hair, green eyes, all those sorts of things.

‘That incident did a lot to influence Derrick’s way of thinking in later life. Oh, Derrick talked about that a lot. He left home because of it and was very angry. He cut himself off from all his family and never wanted to go back again. I think that was the point that made him drink, you know.

‘He was frustrated and disillusioned, but above all he wanted his mother’s affection. Yet there was nothing he could do to change the colour he was.’

Not being white, Derrick could see no point in getting a regular job; he would only have to travel long distances every day for very low pay. Instead, he became a street-corner hawker. He sold anything, particularly spare auto parts, but gradually he found it more profitable to deal in stolen property, and this degenerated into running a gambling school and then a shebeen, one of the thousands of illicit drinking dens that flourished in the vigorous underworld of Johannesburg’s dispossessed and rootless black population.

Eventually he enrolled in a teacher’s training course, but the facilities for Coloureds were so inferior that Derrick made himself highly unpopular with the authorities for constantly denouncing the system as unjust, comparing it with the excellent facilities provided for white student teachers. Having completed the course, Derrick gave up teaching almost immediately.

He took a job as a clerk in the Labour department. By now he was drinking brandy heavily: ‘I felt I had nothing to live for – life seemed worthless. I felt excluded, so I drank.’

After finishing work one afternoon, Derrick went for a few drinks with a colleague, Desmond Stoltenkamp, who was also a qualified teacher and, like Derrick, a prodigious drinker. Desmond told Derrick he’d heard there were so many vacancies for teachers in Durban that agents would actually be waiting on the railway platform to offer qualified people jobs on the spot. They decided to leave for Natal that evening. They did not even go home for a change of clothes but simply headed straight to the station and caught the first train to Durban.

There were no eager recruiting agents to greet them on the platform; in fact there were no teaching jobs at all. Desmond, having sobered up, renounced drinking the very next day and thereafter never touched a drop. He remained in Durban, though. Derrick continued drinking, and the pair of them sustained a succession of jobs: on a motor assembly line, as carpenters and chimney sweeps, before they finally found teaching posts. And Derrick met Doris van Niekerk.

Meanwhile Spuddy had prospered. He had performed the South African miracle, the apartheid equivalent of passing through the eye of a needle. He now passed for white.

All over South Africa there were people who lived in a twilight zone of racial identity, always terrified the police would catch them out. In slum areas of Cape Town, not yet embraced by the Group Areas Act, there were wives and daughters who went in through the front door because they looked white, and husbands and sons who entered furtively by the back because they didn’t. There were Coloured prostitutes who had freckle-faced blond children; they would hire white prostitutes to play ‘mother’ for the white school sports day.

For others, who had always assumed they were white, reclassification could come like a celestial revelation. Men came home after work to find officials waiting on their doorstep with papers that proved they were not white after all. People were summoned daily to be questioned and scrutinised. In Cape Town those under suspicion reported to Room 33, where sittings were held in camera.

Among those deliberately ‘trying for white’, the lucky ones managed to procure documentation to back up their assumed white status. Spuddy not only passed for white, he now had papers to prove it.

Spuddy had acquired his nickname when his mother worked in a fish and chip shop and he had gorged himself on potatoes. He was tall and sallow and people assumed he was white. As a teenager he’d got a job as a scaffolder because the foreman thought he was white. It was not a job open to Coloureds, and after Spuddy had completed some official forms the foreman called him into his office and closed the door. The foreman tore up the forms, handed him a new set and told him to fill them in again. In the section marked ‘race’ Spuddy had put Coloured. The foreman told him to put down that he was white and never, ever mention that he was Coloured again. Spuddy did as he was told. He got his first set of papers. He was officially white.

Derrick made his contempt for Spuddy extravagantly plain. He maintained his brother had reneged on his background and associates in return for privileges from people who were persecuting his own family. Derrick used to say to Robert, ‘My brother is an idiot, but he’s got the vote and I haven’t!’

Derrick vented all his pent-up resentment in denunciations of Spuddy. ‘He’s selfish and stupid. We’ve never been to visit him in his white area. He told another brother that he didn’t want him to visit – he’d done all right and he didn’t want to be compromised.’

Spuddy had accrued all the trappings of a white man. He lived in a white area of Johannesburg. He had worked himself into a better job as a French polisher and spray painter. He was a respected member of the community. Spuddy had always been a devout churchgoer and now he was a lay minister in the New Apostolic Church. He was married with three children and the children went to private white schools. His son was even conscripted into the South African Defence Force.

Robert was fascinated: ‘Once my uncle Leslie saw Spuddy’s daughters in the street with their white friends, in their school dresses and straw boaters. They walked away, pretending not to know him. They didn’t want to be seen with a Coloured relative.

‘At first, listening to my father, I felt quite condescending towards my cousins. But later I was jealous of them, because they were going to a white school and all our relations talked a lot about them.’

It was an enticement: ‘I felt they were different. You know, in another world.’

No one could tell Robert where the McBrides had actually acquired their surname. There were two family legends locating the origin with Derrick’s unknown great-grandfather, but details of this European inheritance remained an exotic rumour. Doris had once heard talk of two drunken Scots brothers jumping ship in Durban at the turn of the century, but that was as much as she knew, and the story fizzled out.

The other version traced the lineage, via a misspelling, to an Irishman named John MacBride who had fought in the Boer War on the side of the Boers. MacBride, from Westport in County Mayo, was a Fennian, a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, dedicated to the expulsion of the English from Ireland. Forced to leave Ireland for political reasons, he arrived in 1896 in Johannesburg, where he worked on the mines.

In the summer of 1899, as the British were trying to provoke a war against the Boers, MacBride issued an appeal ‘to Irishmen to remember England’s manifold infamies against their own country, and on this account to volunteer the more readily to fight against a common enemy for the defence of Boer freedom.’

MacBride helped form and lead the Irish Brigade and was given the rank of major. They fought at Colenso, Spion Kop and Ladysmith, and Major MacBride was wounded at the Battle of Tugela Heights. After the British occupied Johannesburg the Irish Brigade fought a ferocious rearguard action to keep the road to Pretoria open. Finally, as the Boers resorted to a desperate guerrilla war, suitable only for those who knew the veld, the Irish Brigade disbanded and MacBride left South Africa via Delagoa Bay in 1900. But according to McBride family lore, during his stay the major had a liaison with a Malay woman, who bore him an illegitimate child, thus abandoning in South Africa both progeny and a bastardised version of his name.

MacBride was a small, wiry, unattractive man with red hair and skin burnt brick-red by the South African sun. He continued to style himself ‘Major’ for the rest of his life. Unable to return to Ireland, he settled in Paris, where he married the Irish actress and revolutionary Maud Gonne. The poet WB Yeats had unsuccessfully proposed to Maud Gonne and Yeats wrote that from the moment he met this beautiful woman, ‘the troubling of my life began’.

The troubling of Maude and Major John’s lives began shortly after they married in 1903. He drank, beat her, and following the birth of a son, Sean, they parted. He was later allowed to return to Ireland, where he became a water bailiff for the Dublin municipality.

The end came when MacBride took part in the uprising of Easter 1916. For five days a small band of Republicans held key points in Dublin and the ‘Major’, returning from a wedding, joined up with a group that took over Jacobs Biscuit factory. After the surrender, MacBride was among those executed, refusing the customary blindfold.

In his elegy, Easter 1916, Yeats refers to MacBride as, A drunken, vain glorious lout, He had done most bitter wrong / To some who are near my heart, but concludes,

Yet I number him in the song …

He, too, has been changed in his turn,

Transformed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

Whiteness, in the theology of apartheid, was the Holy Grail: venerated, sought after, source of myths and tribal longings for purity and salvation. To some, whose genealogy gave them a tenuous link to this elusive Grail, it became a state of mind. Robert was proud of his European ancestry, and says, ‘I spoke about it openly and proudly whenever I got the chance.’ The symbol of all those aspirations, the ‘Open Sesame’ to a decent life, was just visible on clear days from Wentworth. To the north on a distant hill like a shadowy obelisk, he could just make out the tall central tower of the university.

Robert did so well in his final school exams that he was accepted into the University of Natal, Durban campus, in the faculty of Engineering. This was the different world – a largely white world.

The campus stood high on a ridge above Durban: spacious, tranquil, landscaped, privileged. Approached by steep, tree-lined avenues with names like King George V, Bowes-Lyon, Princess Anne and Queen Elizabeth, it had an expansive colonial graciousness. At the top, looking down at the remote docks, a statue of King George in his Garter robes was surrounded by flowering shrubs, palms, cacti and green shaded trees with tropical birds. Behind the university were lush rolling foothills, the beginning of the Valley of a Thousand Hills which stretched away to the Drakensberg mountains.

White youths wandered between classrooms in multi-coloured shorts and T-shirts as if they had just come in from surfing. There were some Indian and African students, but Robert preferred to keep the company of white students. ‘I was leading a false life,’ he said later, ‘forcing my company on white people.’

There was no transport from Wentworth so Robert had to walk, getting up at four in the morning if he had an eight a.m. lecture. Doris would see him sometimes standing at the bottom of the hill at the shabby intersection of Quality Street, hoping for a lift. ‘It was so discouraging because there was nothing you could do to help. He’d have a big bag with all his books, and if it was raining he’d get soaking wet.’

Although he was trying to ingratiate himself with the white students, Robert was aware of odd looks and comments behind his back and overheard remarks such as, ‘He looks like he’s just come out of the trees.’ He compensated by trying to act and dress more white than the white students. He had his curly hair cropped very short. No white student ever said anything to his face. Instead, those who resented the presence of ‘non-whites’ on their campus expressed their unambiguous feelings in graffiti on the toilet walls: BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL BUT IT LOOKS LIKE SHIT ON A KAFFIR.

Doris remembers Robert describing this disparaging closet dialectic. ‘One would start on top of the wall as high as he could and say something about black people, then there would be a reply from a black student under that about white people.’ Robert said he could stand reading for hours in the toilet. ‘I thought it was funny, because when I was a teacher you would catch little guys scribbling – they’d take a chance and write dirty things on the wall and run away. But university students?’

Robert, like his father, had actually wanted to study medicine, but Derrick had insisted that he enrol in engineering. It was not a subject Robert enjoyed. After five months, the exhaustion brought on by walking to the campus and back, as well as having to work in his father’s workshop when he returned home, meant that Robert dropped out.

By now Robert had a girlfriend, Claudette, who was very fair, with a pretty, freckled face and red hair. She worked in town as a secretary for an insurance company, and although she was classified as Coloured and lived in Wentworth, white people in Durban simply assumed she was white. Her little brother called her ‘White Spook’. Claudette was a simple, uncomplicated girl, with no interest in politics, and the family nicknamed her ‘The Cat’. Doris thought she was a sweet girl but a bit silly; and quite clearly she was besotted with Robert.

He says, ‘Claudette was an extrovert. We never had a serious conversation. She was happy. She wasn’t ambitious. She wanted to be a housewife and have lots of children. She liked dressing up and looking smart. She liked going to the movies, the drive-in. She loved dancing – I don’t, and sometimes we’d have an argument over that. She wanted to know why I wouldn’t take her out dancing and I said that dancing was for younger people, when they are looking for someone, and I used the argument that our dancing days should be over. She liked to go out and be sociable and the centre of attention. She liked to gossip. She liked food – I used to cook from a book, and her favourite was custard trifle. Mostly Claudette liked simple pleasures … like going down to a particular ice-cream parlour near the beachfront where they had exotic fruity ice-creams – banana, pineapple, mango, pawpaw.’

It was when they went in to Durban that there was trouble: ‘It was hurtful. I used to be stunned. It was like a blow to you. I just felt as if I’d been hit with something hard.

‘Old ladies in an arcade would stare at us, for example. One would draw the other’s attention. You could see her expression change – shock, as if something nasty had dropped out of the sky. Then they’d stare after us till we disappeared.

‘Claudette ignored it. She didn’t seem to worry. I never said anything but it worried me a lot. It irritated me, made me angry.

‘Maybe I developed a complex. I became self-conscious. Walking in town with her became an ordeal. I realise maybe I was going out with Claudette because she looks white, and now this was drawing attention to, you know … because next to her I wasn’t white, and seeing us together in Durban, the whites didn’t like it.

‘Men would deliberately go out of their way to bump into me. I never retaliated. Only afterwards I’d think – I should have hit that guy. At first, though, I’d be shocked and hurt, then angry.

‘Claudette noticed, but she knew it was best to be quiet. She was a peacemaker. After five minutes it would blow over, but I’d feel disappointed that I hadn’t retaliated. They were only jostling and bumping me because of my colour. Sometimes there’d be sniggers. I used to worry – am I doing the right thing in walking away?’

Despite these indignities, Robert pressed ahead with his quest for acceptance in the white world. The next step was to join a sports club. One of the top white rugby clubs in Natal was Northlands, later renamed Durban Crusaders, and they had opened their doors to a couple of non-white players without asking too many questions. Robert signed up.

The club was situated along the coast three or so kilometres to the north of the city, past the Durban Country Club, the Windsor Park golf course and over the Blue Lagoon, in the comfortable white suburb of Broadway. An imposing, white-pillared entrance led down the curving, palm-lined driveway to a spacious modern club-house.

It was effortlessly poised and unruffled: the gentle whirr of a lawnmower, the trilling of birds and from behind a tall hedge entwined with pink hibiscus, a faint clack of bowls. Elderly white folk, with leathery faces and impeccably dressed in white, crouched intently at their leisurely game, with muted cries of, ‘Well done, sir,’ and, ‘Nice one, Reg!’ In front of the club-house, surveyed from its wide terrace, were two immaculately maintained rugby pitches with floodlights.

The idyll did not last long. For a while Robert managed to keep the fact he had joined a white rugby club from his father, but when Derrick found out, he was angry and contemptuous. He wanted him to resign, and when Robert tried to convince his father that he merely wished to see the way whites lived and understand the way they thought, Derrick warned his son that he would regret it, and kept repeating his mocking nostrum: ‘Never trust a white man.’

Doris felt differently about these escapist ambitions, says Robert: ‘Mother was happy I was playing for white. My father was not. My mother is also a little mixed up about what she is because she has got a white skin and a black brain.’

Because of his chunky build and strength, Robert played in the lock forward position, and at first he was selected for the B squad. He suspected he was good enough for the first team and he wondered if he was being kept down on account of being different. After training or a match, instead of socialising with the other white players, Robert would pack up his kit and head straight back for Wentworth, where his father would be expecting him to give a hand in the workshop. Derrick’s disgust for his son’s social goal was quite open. ‘It’ll come to no good,’ he warned. ‘Those whites will turn on you.’

There were occasional snide remarks from opposition teams. During one match against the police, an opposition player – a lieutenant – got into an argument with Robert and ended it loudly, for all to hear, by dismissing him as a Hottentot.

Then Robert became aware of some of his own team-mates casting sly aspersions behind his back. He ignored them. But the strain between the two worlds – the gaunt reality of Wentworth and the white figment of his hopes – could not be reconciled.

While he had been unable to cope with the university, and the anxiety generated by accompanying Claudette into white areas was intense, it was the hypocrisy encountered at the rugby club which ultimately forced the break. This compelled Robert to acknowledge that he was striving for an illusion.

He might be a member, but that didn’t mean acceptance. Robert had hoped to find a certain image of himself in the response of these white sportsmen – and all he saw in the mirror of their attitudes was that he was not white.

So he became the opposite.

There was a decisive moment for this conversion. It came when he was finally picked for the A team. In the changing room Robert overheard another player commiserating with the dejected lock forward who had been dropped to make way for him. ‘Garry, don’t worry about it,’ said one white sportsman to the other, ‘Robert is just a bushie.’