Читать книгу Robert McBride: The Struggle Continues - Bryan Rostron - Страница 13

Pietermaritzburg lies in a wooded hollow of the green hills of the Natal Midlands. It is a compact, sedate, rather Victorian town, which prides itself on its azaleas and its Englishness. In the suburbs are expansive avenues, and orderly sports fields where white schoolboys in immaculate white flannels play cricket, watched by others in purple blazers and straw boaters. In the city centre, lawyers maintain cramped offices in the warren of narrow alleyways round Chancery Lane and Gray’s Inn, alongside the boutiques selling chintzy floral dresses and colourful African trinkets.

Pietermaritzburg was founded by the Voortrekkers, dreaming of an independent Boer state. They declared the short-lived Republic of Natalia (which resolved to ‘drive all blacks not working for the whites beyond the Umtamvuna River’). In 1842 it was occupied by the British and became a garrison town. Today it remains the provincial capital and is still dominated by the tall red-brick tower of the ornate Victorian City Hall. There is a cult of preservation and restoration which occasionally strays into caricature, like the Victoria Club, a glum imitation of a London gentleman’s club, crankily flying the Union Jack. On the whole Pietermaritzburg slyly plays up to this old world affectation and settler nostalgia. It is trim, quiet and composed: a contented echo of British colonial sensibility.

Gordon Webster became aware of the true consequences of his colour when, at fourteen, he left the protective wilderness of New Hanover and was sent as a boarder to the Haythorne High School for Coloureds in Pietermaritzburg. It was a severe shock. As his elder brother George had found: ‘You left home and you realised there was apartheid. You were suddenly “Coloured”. At the small Indian school you were just one of the pupils, but now you were something to be kept separate, like a special, second-class caste.

‘On the bus to Pietermaritzburg, the front was reserved for whites only. We hadn’t been prepared for this total segregation of facilities. We hadn’t really been exposed to whites. Then suddenly we were exposed to apartheid, and you realised you didn’t belong here. There were so many divisions, a hierarchy of prejudice, from different shop entrances for Europeans and non-Europeans, to things like Coloureds being able to drink in their own pubs or buy alcohol, whereas Africans couldn’t even buy a drink unless they got an exemption from a magistrate … .

‘Coloureds also had their own segregations, and you soon learned that at school. A lot of Coloureds, because of their sense of inferiority, take pride in their white ancestry. They are very aware of the colour of skin and the texture of hair. Even some of the teachers discriminated, being softer on lighter-skinned kids and giving the worst punishment to the darker students. The children can also be quite cruel about these colour differences, like calling the darkest ‘sneeu’, snow. This colour fixation marks everyone, though some are more affected than others. Gordon was very distressed by it.’

His teachers remember him as a conscientious and able pupil, but shy, lonely and withdrawn. He was darker than most pupils and his features were distinctly African, for which he was teased. Some pupils also mocked him for the faint trace of an Indian accent he had acquired at his primary school.

Gordon hid from the school that his mother was an African and he did not let on to his classmates that his mother tongue was Zulu. One day when Agnes came to the school, the principal said in front of Gordon, ‘What does this girl want?’

There was something feline, almost demure, about Gordon. With his fresh, round babyish face and slim body, he was sensitive and inordinately timid. In addition, he had begun to wear thick-rimmed glasses for his near-sightedness.

There was one boy who was particularly picked on. He, too, was from a rural area and looked and sounded African. Gordon got dragged into several fights for objecting to other pupils calling his friend ‘kaffir’.

In Pietermaritzburg, Gordon was at last able to make some comparisons concerning the conditions of his own life: it was immediately apparent that the white schools were incomparably better off. They had swimming pools, tennis courts, sporting facilities, good buildings and smaller classes. At Haythorne there was no school hall, no library, one soccer pitch and up to 45 pupils in a class.

Gordon played soccer, and took up boxing and weight-lifting. But gradually he retreated into contemplation and passivity. The shy reserve which had been apparent at home became an unsettling solitude at school. He confided his thoughts only to his diary, a black hardbacked school notebook, which he completed diligently every day, attempting to make sense of his adolescent confusion.

A recurring theme of this diary was his mother’s severity. She still continued to beat him, even for trifling misdemeanours. Agnes’s one aim was to ensure that her son should follow her other children and rise well above the subsistence level of a rural peasant. Gordon’s nephew Godfred remembers how Agnes began to have to chase after Gordon to beat him.

But there were also happy times at home. His friendship with Bheki Ngubane was as strong as ever. Bheki and his brother Ndaba continued going to the African farm school. Bheki and Gordon shared a passion for soccer and they supported Kaizer Chiefs, a black Soweto team. At night they would play reggae records on the ‘gumba-gumba’, an old-fashioned gramophone. Gordon spent much of his holidays reading, particularly Westerns.

One vacation, the boys had a secret drinking party, and Gordon got drunk for the first time. ‘He was so unruly,’ says Godfred. ‘He became noisy and happy. He announced he was going to be a doctor.’

Gordon had always told his mother that when he grew up he wanted to be a doctor; she had never had the heart to tell him what an improbable ambition that was. Agnes was concerned that he should escape from their rural poverty, but that he should also understand his station and ‘learn the ways of the Lord’. But if Gordon ever introduced the subject of politics at home Agnes would dismiss it by saying, ‘White is white and black is black. It is our fate. It is retribution and there is nothing we can do about it.’

Gordon was eventually appointed a prefect. This was not because he showed any distinctive leadership abilities. The school authorities, on the contrary, seem to have perceived him as compliant and submissive, and therefore a malleable agent. Certainly he did not appear to threaten authority in any way.

In 1980 came the school boycotts. Although a prefect, Gordon did not organise or lead these protests at Haythorne. He merely followed, swept along with the strike action against their inadequate facilities and emasculated education. His mother was appalled. Agnes came to the school and insisted Gordon return to his classes.

She pleaded with the principal to let her son back in. Agnes and the school principal came to an agreement: Gordon would be permitted to rejoin on condition that the principal should administer a sound thrashing. Gordon was dismayed that his mother should have been party to such a deal, yet he was not sufficiently sure of himself to either repudiate her authority or stick with his political protest. He bowed to the humiliation.

Behind that veneer of obedience, however, Gordon was beginning to resolve his personal confusion. He had a clear idea of his own sense of justice. He now felt his school reflected the misrepresentations of apartheid. He did not make an outright challenge, but as a prefect he avoided administering punishments for traditional misdemeanours. Unobtrusively Gordon attempted to ameliorate the effects of discrimination, both by teachers against their own pupils and among the pupils themselves. He understood how insidiously prejudice can undermine those it is practised against. Gordon wished to find a way in life that would help counter such distorted experience. By the time he was due to leave Pietermaritzburg, he had decided to become a teacher.

Robert McBride was working as a welder. He joined a Durban firm and after a year’s apprenticeship as an instrument fitter, he went to work for Sasol, the state oil-from-coal corporation.

Here he experienced the full effects of job discrimination, with incompetent white immigrants often lording it over more experienced African workers. Robert’s outlook was now transformed: rejected by the white world, he had retreated badly hurt. He put away his ‘white’ suit, and cut off his white friends. ‘After the incident at rugby,’ he said, ‘I suppose I changed to the other side.’ The white way of life, which he had previously so desired to embrace, was now reviled. He dressed in what he considered to be a more African fashion, with bright, bold colours and chequered tops. He allowed his hair to grow long again and combed it out into an Afro. He spent as much time as he could in the sun. He wanted to be darker. ‘I became,’ he says, ‘more African than the Africans – a radical black.’

Robert started making enquiries about his black ancestry. Derrick was delighted that his son had renounced the white world as it had been a source of considerable antagonism between them. ‘Derrick just didn’t like Robert trying to be on the white side,’ says Doris. ‘He didn’t care who they were or what they were doing, he just didn’t like Robert mixing with them.

‘Of course it was a feather in Derrick’s cap, this change. He said, “I told you so, I told you about associating with them.”’

Robert and Derrick were now completely reconciled; in May 1982 Robert agreed to work full-time with his father and returned to live with his parents at Hardy Place. While working, particularly when away from Durban at the Secunda Sasol plant, Robert had given most of his earnings to his mother. That same year Doris finally resigned her job as a remedial teacher and opened up a take-away. The family were still desperately trying to improve their financial position.

The Day ‘n’ Nite Take-Away was right opposite Derrick’s workshop, eighteen metres across a concrete forecourt, in a small enclosed area of a dozen or so other workshops. This unit was called Factorama, situated on the edge of the Jacobs Industrial estate, near the Police Training College for Indians and opposite the Wentworth youth community centre, whose premises had previously been prison cells for the old military camp. Like all the workshops in Factorama, the take-away was a red-brick block with corrugated-iron roofing.

The shop was open from six a.m. till eleven p.m., and the licence required them to stay open even later if any of the workshops at Factorama were working late. All the family were involved, including cousins. Doris did the cooking and operated the till, while Bronwyn and Gwyneth helped serve the customers. They provided cooldrinks, fish and chips, pies and bunny chows – a Wentworth speciality consisting of half a loaf of white bread stuffed with curry.

It was exhausting, but the family enjoyed being in such close proximity; Derrick and Robert were able to pop over for their meals, or to give a hand if necessary. From across the courtyard they kept a wary eye on the shop in case of trouble. ‘There were a lot of incidents at the shop, people who were drunk or trying to steal,’ says Robert. ‘My father and I were often there, and at night we used to serve through the hatch because it was so dangerous.

‘There’d be things like this drunk pissing in the front of the shop. My father stopped him, so he brought out a knife. His friends came in to back him up. I hit one of them with a Coke bottle – he caught me on the side of my cheek with a knife. My mother opened the hatch and passed through a long pole used for opening a high window, and I chased them away with it.

‘Another time a guy sent my father to make a bunny chow and when Derrick went out the back, he came through the window to get at the till. It set off the alarm. I was outside and I blocked his way out of the window. He took out a knife – my father grabbed his hand and burned it on the oven. The guy dropped his knife and Derrick knocked him unconscious.

‘One afternoon three men came to the shop, causing trouble, and two of them attacked my father. My mother started shouting, so I ran up. One guy kicked me – I’d been eating bread and began to choke. Another ran for the car to get a gun and my father hit him with a bin. There was a five-minute fight and then we overpowered them. We called the cops, and that’s when we found out these guys were themselves cops.

‘The police charged us, but the magistrate threw it out. One of them came back later, with another cop, and pulled out a gun. He threatened us but then backed down. The cops always gave us a lot of trouble. The fact is they didn’t like my father.’

Father and son had re-established that striking rapport people had noticed between them when Robert was a boy. Robert recognised this affinity: ‘The way we think about things is very similar. Politics was our hobby together. Both of us knew, without debating, that we stood in the same position.

‘Something I particularly admired was that he never backed down from what he believed, even when the odds were totally against him. I mean, in business you should not be politically inclined because you can’t be too fussy about getting contracts, there’s all sorts of graft involved – and Derrick would never get caught up in that. He’s very proud and I’ve inherited a lot of that. Our experiences, in many ways, are very similar.’

One predicament both endured was the hostility of whites when they saw them with what they assumed to be white women. According to Doris, ‘It happened quite a lot to Derrick and me. They’d say “Sies” as they passed, or crude things in Afrikaans. You know, “She prefers a black man …” “… or a whatnot.” That’s what they call Coloured people, whatnots and Hottentots. If they didn’t say anything to you they’d look, stare in such a way that would make you feel like a heap of dirt. Once the police came to my home. My father opened the door and they told him, “Do you know your daughter is going out with a black man?” My father said, “What black man?” The policeman said, “Kaffirs and Hottentots.” I was married at that time. My father said, “She’s a Hottentot herself, so what must she do?” The policeman felt so small, he just turned red.’

Robert began to see the absurd, pitiable side of all his attempts to align himself with whites. One evening he went into Durban to collect Claudette after work. He was sitting on a marble flower pot on the pavement, right next to a lorry with a squad of black labourers on the back. When Claudette crossed the street to join him, he became aware of the black labourers’ approving attention. ‘They were talking loudly, commending me. They were happy I had a “white” woman.’

He found it impossible to accept himself as a Coloured; he thought the term itself to be derogatory, a dirty word. At this point his friend André Koopman introduced him to the philosophy of Black Consciousness. André was older than Robert, and had been detained by the police for six months in 1977, at a time when all black opposition movement and organisations were being banned or forced underground. He also exposed Robert to a whole range of radical black writers and black musicians.

Robert seized upon this black literature and music: ‘Mentally, I suppose, I commenced resisting. I began taking an interest in the struggle, and I paid a lot of attention to what had happened in Zimbabwe. I felt very anti-white. I was angry. I’d say things like, if a black child gets killed, a white child should be killed. I was very bitter.’

Robert’s greatest passion, however, was reggae music, particularly that of Bob Marley. It gave voice to his sense of a universal racial iniquity, as well as his search for personal identity. He particularly liked ‘Zimbabwe’:

So arm in arms, with arms

We will fight this little struggle ‘Cos that’s the only way

We can overcome our little trouble.

It was purely rhetorical for Robert, for his involvement in politics was still no more than discussion and denunciation. He listened obsessively to the music, as if the words and the sound alone would bring the walls of Jericho tumbling down. It did not propel Robert to take any action, but it drew him out of his insecure sense of isolation. ‘It’s you, it’s you, it’s you I’m talking to …’ It gave him a renewed confidence in himself and the possibility of change. ‘Slave driver, the table is turned/Catch your fire … you gonna get burned.’ There was an optimism in reggae, a driving, infectious faith that there was indeed a Kingdom of Justice, and it was at hand:

Now the fire is burning …

Ride, natty, ride

Go deh dready, go deh

Robert responded to this yearning expressed by Bob Marley, an apocalyptic desire for an end to exploitation, the millennial dream that the meek may inherit the earth:

Let righteousness cover the earth

Like water cover the sea …

Marley was a devout Rastafarian, venerating Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, as the Messiah, the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, the Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah. He believed that his people had been taken into captivity, like the Jews to Babylon, and that Ethiopia was the Promised Land:

We’re leaving Babylon

Into our Father’s land …

Robert was not influenced by the Rastafarian belief that there was a Promised Land somewhere else on earth – just as some black Christian sects promised their followers a kingdom in the hereafter for their suffering here below. But for Robert, Babylon came to be the symbol for all evil, a powerful image of everything that weighed people down and oppressed them, as in his favourite Bob Marley record ‘Babylon System’:

Babylon System is the vampire

Sucking the blood of the sufferers …

For all his talk about how he wanted to ‘destroy the sickness’ in his society, Robert had done nothing at all. He extended his excitable interest in politics, which he discussed avidly with his father, but he had still taken no active steps to oppose apartheid, other than to continue to dress ‘black’ and listen to reggae.

However, he was bored as a welder. He was restless, inquisitive, frustrated, hemmed in by all the restrictions that cramped his life. In 1983 Robert finally elected to follow in his parents’ footsteps. He decided, like Gordon Webster, to become a teacher: he would go to a Coloured training college where he would be taught by Coloured staff to become a Coloured teacher for Coloured pupils. It seemed, after all, that Robert was not going to demolish Babylon. He was going to try and make the best of a bad world.