Читать книгу Robert McBride: The Struggle Continues - Bryan Rostron - Страница 15

Robert McBride and Gordon Webster met on their first day at the Bechet College of Education. Robert soon established that Gordon was the younger brother of Trevor Webster, who also lived in Wentworth. Robert went straight up to Gordon and said, ‘Your brother saved my life.’

Robert explained that three years previously, during his last year at school, he had been playing soccer in the school grounds when some local gangsters bust up the game and took the ball. Robert had challenged the leader who pulled a knife on him. Unknown to Robert, Trevor Webster had been watching. He came up quietly behind the gangster, clouted him over the head and disarmed him.

Robert and Gordon were both cautious and highly suspicious by nature, but they established an almost instantaneous rapport. At first, Gordon told his brother Victor, Robert came across in such a challenging macho fashion that he thought jokingly to himself, ‘I’ll have to hit this guy to test my strength.’ Victor Webster recalls: ‘They shared many interests, including a dedication to physical fitness. Gordon was a keep-fit fanatic. He loved running, boxing and soccer, though he couldn’t do too much of those because of his eyesight. But the main thing was that he could talk to Robert in a way that he couldn’t talk to anyone else.

‘Gordon was so shy and quiet, and Robert seemed to bring him out. Gordon used to hide his feelings, he was a one-word man, though not with Robert, who also made him laugh. Gordon had a shy, captivating smile, quite mischievous really, and when he laughed it was quite explosive. They were very close. In our family we discussed a lot of things, but not politics. I never showed my hurt to anyone, except my older brother Trevor.

‘I think Gordon took the same view – and the person he could show his hurt to was Robert. Gordon was extremely mild mannered. But if you wanted to make him mad, you only had to say something bad about Robert and he would get really angry. They had a very profound friendship.’

The Bechet College of Education which they attended was the only teacher training college for Coloureds in Natal. In its 50-year history it had never had permanent premises and the college was housed temporarily in a former white girls’ high school, which had abandoned the building for more suitable accommodation. For a while the site had been used as a storehouse by the Durban Corporation and then turned over to Bechet in 1979. The building was a faded, worn out colonial dream.

Bechet College (its motto was ‘Through Toil to Victory’) was immediately opposite the Greyville Racecourse, home of the exclusive Durban Turf Club with its plush modern covered stand and circular lush green racetrack, which adjoined the Royal Durban Golf Course. The race course was the venue for South Africa’s most socially competitive and fashion-conscious horse racing event of the year, the Durban July. Many of the surrounding streets mimicked a polished, thoroughbred pedigree: Ascot, Epsom, Newmarket and Derby. On the other side of the race course were the luxuriant Botanical Gardens, on the ridge beyond that snuggled the red roofs and trim gardens of the white suburbs of Musgrave and Essenwood, and in the distance loomed the grey obelisk-like tower of the University of Natal.

The college was a frayed, two-storeyed, turn-of-the-century colonial building, with a red-tiled roof and shabby, creamy white façade; along the entire front of the rundown building, under a red tin overhang propped up by slender wooden columns, was a long, gloomily shaded veranda. The college was screened from the road by a row of densely leaved wild fig trees and the worn entrance gate was flanked by drooping palms with dying, flaccid fronds. Inside, the shadowy corridors and sombre classrooms were permeated with an unmistakable aura of transience and decay. The college was dilapidated and overcrowded with few facilities – no sports ground, no laboratories, a cramped library and paint peeling off the walls in the stark classrooms.

There had always been dissatisfaction among students about the conditions, and when Robert and Gordon arrived it was simmering again. Bechet was exceptionally overcrowded, with between three and four hundred students at a time. There was considerable anger that, by contrast, the two white teacher training colleges in Natal were dramatically below their enrolment quotas; at the Edgewood Teacher Training College, with superb facilities and sports grounds, there was only one third of the possible intake, while the Afrikaans Durbanse Onderwyskollege was under threat of closure due to the lack of students.

Teachers at the college remember Robert well, but Gordon was so shy and self-effacing that few can even recall what he looked like. In contrast to the casual, colourful ‘African’ style Robert had adopted, Gordon’s dress sense was as neutral as possible: neatly pressed beige slacks and freshly ironed white shirts. He never did anything to draw attention to himself.

The college deputy said, ‘Gordon was very quiet and unnoticeable. On a couple of mornings I gave him a lift in and you just couldn’t draw him out at all. Robert was much more forceful. He was outspoken, like his father. I remember he came to me once and said, “You teachers are frightened – go and tell the department what our conditions are like.”’

Other teachers remember Gordon as ‘pleasant, nice, gentle, shy’, but recall nothing else apart from the fact that he wore glasses. They used to ask each other, ‘Which one is Gordon Webster?’ One teacher said, ‘Gordon was the absolute opposite of Robert, who would never sit back and accept what you told him. Gordon wouldn’t speak unless spoken to, and then he would be as brief as possible. You never expected him to air any views.’ Another said, ‘Gordon was particularly reticent, he just didn’t participate. He used to sit in the corner, silent. Robert, on the other hand, was quite outspoken and opinionated. One felt one had to be tactful, or he might be irritated. He was quite volatile, not the ordinary, run-of-the-mill student. He was articulate and had a big mouth, always challenging. In class, he seemed to have quite strong views about everything – speech training, poetry … I remember he always used to say, “Isn’t that a contradiction?” He was bright, and obviously thought a lot. Robert was original.’

Gordon proved to be hopeless at maths and Robert spent a lot of time helping him as maths was one of his strong subjects. Gordon was also sensitive about his rural accent, for which he still got teased. When asked where he was from, Gordon would say, ‘Pietermaritzburg.’ Robert remembers how angry Gordon got when another student said in front of a group, ‘Come off it, man, you’re from the bundu – you’re a plaasjapie.’

They spent a great deal of time together, and Robert found Gordon a thoughtful, calming influence. ‘At college they used to tease me a lot about fighting gangsters and he talked me out of getting angry with them,’ says Robert. ‘Gordon was always someone who was moderate, though he was not scared of anything. He was a very gentle person. I was not at all calm and he had a steadying influence on me. He gave me a sense of direction.’

Once when Robert had fallen out with his father over working after college, Gordon had actually taken Robert home and pressed him into apologising to Derrick and making up.

‘Gordon was quite formal, and sometimes it would seem like he was pulling your leg,’ says Robert. ‘He would always say, “Hello, how are you?” and “Really?” in that heavy rural accent. The moment you spoke to him, you liked him. He was impressive. We became friends quickly. We’re like brothers, really.’

Gordon is more emphatic. ‘Brothers?’ he says. ‘More like twins!’

They shared the same taste in music, both of them having a passion for reggae; particular favourites were Toots and the Maytals, Jimmy Cliff, and above all Bob Marley. His redemptionist lyrics gave them pride and confidence in black culture. But most of all it was politics that they discussed.

After the brutal repression of the township uprisings there had been several years of relative calm. Suddenly in 1983 that changed dramatically with a powerful upsurge of black organisation and resistance. The catalyst was the whites-only referendum pushed through by the Prime Minister, PW Botha, making him an executive president.

Botha was implementing a doctrine known as Total Strategy, formulated by the department of Defence, which observed, ‘We are today involved in a war, whether we wish to accept it or not.’

Part of the strategy was to try and drive a wedge between Coloureds and Indians, on the one hand, and Africans on the other. In the 1983 referendum, whites voted for the establishment of a separate House of Representatives for Coloureds and a House of Delegates for Indians; Coloureds and Indians, while still denied the vote in general elections, were being allowed to vote for these bodies which had puny legislative powers and could be easily overridden by a white veto. This device was greeted with derision by the majority of Coloureds and Indians. Blacks, as ever, were excluded. Resistance to this divide-and-rule strategy revitalised black organisations and trade unions, leading to the formation of the United Democratic Front, an alliance of over a thousand organisations representing over two million people.

That year the number of acts of sabotage rose noticeably. One ANC action stunned the white population, for it brought this intermittent guerrilla war right into the heart of their capital with a huge explosion in the centre of Pretoria, close to the South African Air Force headquarters, killing nineteen people and injuring 217. The South African government retaliated with an attack on the Mozambique capital of Maputo, where ANC personnel lived; an air raid destroyed fifteen houses and a nearby jam factory, killing five and wounding 26. The following month Pretoria extended the call-up period for compulsory military service for all white males between the ages of seventeen and 65.

Robert and Gordon spent much of their time together discussing these developments. ‘We agreed on a lot,’ says Robert. ‘We realised singing and symbolism was not enough. We were not people who could go to a meeting and feel easy about putting our fist in the air, or toyi-toying. We did not just want to talk.’

Robert was still strongly influenced by Black Consciousness, which held that blacks needed to free themselves psychologically and shed their slave mentality, that blacks could only be liberated by themselves and therefore whites should be excluded from their struggle. Gordon, on the other hand, was profoundly influenced by reading the Freedom Charter, the declaration that had been drawn up by the Congress of the People at Kliptown in 1955, and which had been adopted by the African National Congress. It called for a multi-racial front against racial oppression, declaring in its preamble, ‘That South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people.’

Unlike Derrick McBride, Gordon did not hate whites, yet when discussing violence he used a phrase reminiscent of Robert’s father: ‘The only way to speak to them is to use their own language.’

The question he constantly put to himself, and repeatedly asked Robert, was, ‘Can I live with myself and do nothing, when every day I am insulted by my life?’

While he was at college Gordon lived with his eldest brother George and his family in the Coloured district of Sydenham, which was divided from the white area of Sherwood by a buffer zone of tall grass and bush. Sydenham was more respectable and middle class than Wentworth, where Trevor Webster lived. Gordon definitely did not want to live in Wentworth. After they had left home, his older brothers had all been forcibly removed to Wentworth and settled in a rough former barracks known as Ack-ack Camp. Gordon had visited Ack-ack as a boy and been shocked by the squalor and violence.

George Webster had finally qualified as an attorney after a long, arduous struggle – or as he says, by ‘sheer lunacy’. He owned a small, neat villa in Sydenham facing the buffer zone. Gordon was almost as much of an enigma to his own brothers and their families as he was to everyone else. He would seldom join in and voice an opinion; usually he retreated to his room and kept to himself. Gordon was so elusive that his image is even absent from photographs. When the Websters search among their family snaps, they are astonished to find that Gordon fails to appear in family groupings, even when they remember him being present on those occasions. He had almost succeeded in making himself invisible.

George’s wife Lucy used to worry: ‘How will this timid boy ever be a teacher?’ Her sister Moira, says Lucy, used to get furious with Gordon. ‘What sort of teacher are you going to be?’ she’d demand. ‘You don’t express an opinion, you’re not interested in politics, you never go to any meetings.’

When people came to visit, Gordon usually hid in his room, but one evening during his first year at college Moira and her friends came round for a party and they insisted on taking Gordon dancing. In fact he was thrilled, so they took him with them into Durban to an ‘open’, racially mixed disco. It was the first time Gordon had seen blacks and whites mix freely or seen whites dance. When he returned Lucy wanted to know what he thought. Gordon smiled and said, ‘Whites have no sense of rhythm.’

Gordon was painfully shy with girls. His mother had imparted a strict sexual code to him, insisting on no physical relationship outside marriage. Once at school when he was fourteen he had been caught petting with a girl and had been severely punished. For a while he’d also had a girl pen-friend in Zimbabwe, but that, as far as George and Lucy could make out, was as far as his shyness would allow him to go.

After a while, however, they discovered that when Gordon was not out with Robert he was seeing a girl. He never brought her home or talked about her, so all they knew was that her name was Anne and that she worked as a nurse for the local dentist, Dr Adams. Anne was African, a Xhosa from the Transkei, whose mother was a domestic servant in Durban. Anne herself, they discovered, lived nearby in the white area of Sherwood in servants’ quarters; but, as with everything else, Gordon kept that side of his life to himself.

Whenever he could Gordon returned to visit his mother in New Hanover. He was much more relaxed about his relationship with her, for he now understood her severity and rigid discipline as a mother’s desire for her children to escape her rural poverty. But he was also increasingly anti-religious. Agnes had become a Presbyterian and Gordon believed that his mother used religion as a shield against reality and as a way of denying the political enormity that surrounded them. He said, ‘I was impressed when the minister spoke about us humans being made in the image of God, and that all human beings are the same in His eyes. But I was quite baffled by this because in reality this was not so.’

He maintained that religion, soccer and music were the opium of his people. His childhood friend Bheki Ngubane had no interest in politics at all; he was soccer mad. By now Bheki was working as a driver for an electrical firm in Pietermaritzburg, though he, too, came back to New Hanover to visit Agnes at every opportunity. Bheki’s elder brother Ndaba had become a policeman, and at first Gordon avoided him; he told Bheki the reason was that Ndaba was a ‘gattas’ (urban African slang for cop). However by the end of his year at Bechet, Gordon felt this was unfair, accepting that Ndaba was not as bright as Bheki, and that with the high unemployment that prevailed he simply needed a job.

Under Gordon’s steadying influence Robert was developing a more coherent political outlook. At the end of their first year at college he was elected to the Students’ Representative Council, and at the beginning of the following year he opted for the full four-year course of a Higher Education diploma. Robert’s optimism and long-term confidence were not echoed by Gordon, who was increasingly pessimistic and weighed down by political events.

In 1984 black youths and students were once again in the forefront of protest marches and demonstrations, but violence was on the increase and Gordon felt they were engaged in a fruitless venture.

‘There’s no point in protests and demonstrations,’ he concluded. ‘They are futile. The real patriot must act.’

Robert was aware of his friend’s gathering sense of desperation. The crisis came that August. It was the first election for the new tri-cameral parliament, where Coloureds were to have their own House of Representatives. Gordon felt this was not only a sham for Coloureds, but an insult to Africans, who were not even given this palliative. He would have a token vote, denied to both his mother and to Bheki Ngubane. A week before the elections he asked Robert, ‘What kind of law is it that makes my mother less human than me?’

Together with George and Lucy, he attended a protest meeting at St Anne’s, the local Catholic church. It was packed with Coloureds and Indians; the crowd was so large that people had to stand outside. ‘On the way back in the car Gordon was very quiet,’ said Lucy. ‘He asked, how could anyone vote on a colour basis – and when our black brothers have no vote?’ Gordon felt that all talk of reform was utterly empty. The government had responded to the new wave of civil unrest by sending in the military to help the police. All he was being offered was a vote in a token election which excluded even his own mother. That decided him. He told Robert of his decision first, and then he told his girlfriend Anne: he was going into exile to join the African National Congress.

‘He wanted to talk to someone,’ said Robert. ‘He was very hurt. It was not an intellectual thing, but something he felt – we both felt – very deeply. Activists were having to run away, not people who preached violence or anything, just people who demonstrated and organised, and we felt that was no good. They couldn’t even sleep at home. We didn’t want to run. We wanted to do something, get involved. I started thinking, we must hit back! I understood how Gordon felt. I put myself in the victim’s shoes. I understood his pain, I began to feel the pain with him.

‘He wanted me to go with him, but I felt I couldn’t. He knew I had responsibilities at home. Also, I didn’t want to sit in a refugee camp, so he was going to send a message to me. He was sad, but his mind was made up. He was disappointed I was not going with him, but he was going to go anyway.’

The day Gordon left South Africa, he and Robert went into Durban to see a film, Purple Hearts, about Vietnam. ‘It was like a last drink, only Gordon doesn’t drink,’ said Robert. ‘He joked, “You mustn’t sell me out!” Then he said, “I know you won’t.” That element of trust was there between us right from the beginning. It didn’t need to be discussed.’

They parted in Grey Street.

With Gordon gone, Robert felt more confused. He missed his friend’s clear sense of direction and his quiet advice. Although troubled by the yearning to take some dramatic action, and strongly tempted by his friend’s example of going into exile, Robert was still contemplating a more conventional future in South Africa. He and Claudette planned to get married a year after he finished college. They discussed having children, and Robert told her that he wanted to move away from the city. He proposed applying for a post in a rural area, and they dreamed about a happy family life with Robert teaching in a country village school.

He continued working after college, both at Derrick’s workshop and at the take-away. It was so dangerous working nights at the take-away now that the McBride family had applied for a firearm licence. They nicknamed their 9mm Beretta Parabellum ‘Betsy’.

At the beginning of the following year Derrick went into hospital with diabetes, which meant that Robert had to take even more responsibility. One evening he closed up the take-away at eight p.m. and was walking home because the car had broken down; he was carrying all the day’s till takings and he also had the Beretta. In Craton Road a group of five men appeared out of the shadows, blocking his path. One of them asked Robert for a cigarette and he explained that he didn’t smoke. ‘Okay,’ said the gangster, ‘if you haven’t got the cigarettes, just give us the money – and don’t tell us you haven’t got the money, because we know you’ve just come from the shop.’

Robert turned and ran, but he hadn’t got far before another group appeared in front to cut him off. He was cornered, and as they moved in, Robert saw they were armed with pangas. He took out the Beretta and fired a couple of warning shots in the air. The leader of the group laughed. ‘Those are just blanks,’ he said. Desperately Robert made a break for it, and sprinted towards a grassy bank; if he could make it to the top he would be clear away. But he was wearing rubber-soled sneakers and the grass was damp. Close to the top, he slipped and tumbled back; rolling over, he saw one of the gang members was right above him with his knife raised. Robert reached inside his jacket and fired: the gangster fell dead.

The others fled and Robert went straight to the police station. An inquiry found that he had acted in self-defence and the matter was taken no further. But Robert was upset and appalled; he was stunned that life just went on the next day as if nothing at all had happened; and nobody seemed to be asking why the victim had become a petty gangster in the first place or what circumstances had led to Robert pulling the trigger. He concluded that this death was the effect of a cause: the philosophy which trapped both him and the gangsters in cages like Wentworth.

It was Doris who saw how the incident haunted him. She remembers Robert waking night after night, shouting. The gangster had been shot clean through the head and he had recurrent nightmares about the huge, gaping hole.

Robert began spending more time with his friend Jimmy, a slim, nervous intellectual who lived nearby. They talked rather wildly and unrealistically about what actions they might undertake against apartheid, but mostly they listened to reggae music and Jimmy showed Robert his poetry. He also introduced him to more black music and writers like Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. Jimmy gave him a book, Soledad Brothers: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. It had a tremendous impact on Robert. Later he told the sociologist Fatima Meer: ‘It had an overpowering effect on me. I identified strongly with George Jackson and was moved in a way which I can’t explain, by his younger brother Jonathan, who rescued his brother George and two other comrades from the courthouse where they were being tried. Jonathan was shot dead. His action was so powerful – he gave his life for his brothers. George had been unjustly imprisoned and he was brutalised, and his brother was right to rescue him. George was later killed while attempting to escape from prison. They had taken military-style action and the world respected them for it. They had showed audacity and contempt. I believed that the whites would respect us when we, too, showed audacity and contempt.’

Jimmy says, ‘The more we read, the more we burned.’ Afterwards, when the enormity of what they were contemplating hit him, Jimmy had a nervous breakdown. He would sit up night after night, with a bottle of tranquillisers at his side, watching the dark road that led up to his house, waiting for the Special Branch to come and pick him up. They never came, but his hands still shake.

Robert used to get angry at what he felt was the empty posturing of some prominent anti-apartheid leaders; he and Jimmy agreed there was too much talking, too little action. One day on a spur of the moment decision they decided to leave the country. They planned to go to Lesotho, but on arriving at Durban station they discovered there were no trains, so they changed their minds and caught one instead for Johannesburg, thinking to leave from there for Botswana. In Johannesburg, however, an Afrikaans ticket collector informed them there were no more trains that night for Botswana either. Thwarted, Jimmy and Robert retreated to Durban.

Throughout 1985 violence erupted in the townships as blacks vented their anger against apartheid. On March 21st, the anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre, police in armoured vehicles fired into a funeral procession of unarmed Africans at Langa township near Uitenhage, killing 20 people. The uprising spread and soon two or three people were dying every day. In July the government declared a State of Emergency in 36 districts.

At Bechet College the demands were mild by comparison; the students were still pressing for better premises. As a member of the Students’ Representative Council, Robert was one of the leaders. He was part of the delegation that presented their views to the acting principal, and he was prominent in organising meetings and protest action. The students began to boycott lectures and threatened that if there was no positive action they would boycott the exams at the end of the year.

Armed guards were sent into the college. The students called a meeting of parents to explain their position, and the parents voted overwhelmingly to support them. Afterwards Derrick McBride told a reporter from the Sunday Tribune: ‘People in that situation are going to be prey to other organisations of a military nature. It’s like taking away their pens and giving them AK-47s.’

Robert helped draft a petition regarding the conditions at Bechet College which was presented to the new Coloured House of Representatives. The response was swift. The Students’ Representative Council was declared illegal by Parliament, the students were suspended from their classes and Robert, as one of the leaders, was banned from taking his third year exams.

He was stunned. His conclusion was simple. ‘There is just no hope for a so-called Coloured person to really progress independent of the constraints of the authorities. It’s designed this way to keep a person just at a certain level where they want you.

‘Well, since we were suspended and banned after dealing with the issue at Bechet in a peaceful, legal manner, I decided that it can’t work. You can’t progress within the system.’

He decided that he wasn’t going to wait to join any organisation or underground movement; he was simply going to hit back. Robert had no coherent plan; his was simply an enraged and reckless impulse. With a group of friends he broke into Fairvale High School one night and attempted to burn it down. It was a botched operation, but even so they did considerable damage. Next, through a gangster, he and a friend acquired three illegal weapons, including a small lady’s handgun.

They vaguely intended to attack people associated with the system, but they didn’t really know what they were going to do, except that it was going to be something startling.

Then Gordon called.

It was November 1985 and he had been gone fifteen months. On his return, Gordon contacted two people immediately: first Robert, then Anne.

There was a message for Robert one evening to contact Gordon Webster at his brother George’s home in Sydenham. It had been raining hard all day, but Robert set out instantly and walked the eight kilometres to Sydenham. George came to the door and told Robert that Gordon wasn’t in; Robert ignored him and walked straight past. ‘There he was!’ said Robert. ‘He was his usual formal, polite self, a real gent. “Hello, how are you?” he said. “Take a seat.” Instead, we went into his room, and I said, “I’m so glad you’re back!”

‘Gordon looked different. There was something about his manner – he was a lot more self-assured.

‘I was so excited. I was speaking fast. I had made up my mind to put aside responsibilities, and take up others. It was a highly charged political atmosphere, but I didn’t know exactly what to do and we had no access to the ANC. Gordon came just at the right time, because I was desperate and might have done something foolish.

‘Gordon had already put my name down with a question mark. We went for a walk. He was going out of his way not to get me too excited. He was acting cool, he was calm. Like always, Gordon was steadying me.

‘I was ready though. He was shocked I agreed so quickly. Within five minutes, I was in.’