Читать книгу Robert McBride: The Struggle Continues - Bryan Rostron - Страница 9

To Robert it didn’t seem odd when he was growing up that there weren’t any white people where he lived.

He saw them sometimes when they were out in the car, and he noticed that his father used to get angry at them and curse them when they were on the motorway or at an intersection. He’d often say things like, ‘Stupid bloody whites, look how they behave, they’re so arrogant, these people, they’ve no bloody consideration.’ His father would denounce all white people, muttering harsh judgements that the young boy could not understand. But he didn’t worry about it as that was the kind of thing his father did when they were out in the car and there were whites around.

The whites lived in Durban. It wasn’t at all like where Robert and his family lived. The suburbs had a quiet, almost genteel English air about them; there were wide boulevards with names like Coronation Road and Chestnut Avenue, despite the subtropical abundance of the vegetation and the hot evening breeze that blew in off the Indian Ocean.

In town, alongside high-rise air-conditioned office blocks were the remnants of the colonial past, unlikely alien landmarks in the sticky heat. In the main square a plump statue of Queen Victoria, erected by public subscription for those volunteers who fell in the Boer War, faced a Baroque Revival City Hall with field cannons standing ceremonial guard alongside tall palms on its trim lawns. Europe jostled uneasily with Africa, as if perpetually anxious that classical order and precision might be swamped by tropical excess.

Hidden among the palms were other stone memorials to frock-coated dignitaries in stiff collars. These exemplars of European civic rectitude stared sternly into the distance, searching far beyond the horizon for their inspiration, perhaps far away to the Motherland or even ancient Greece, resolutely ignoring the immediate sultry reality of shrieking Indian mynah birds which perched in the surrounding palms by night, or African workers from nearby offices and building sites who rested in their shade by day.

The city was full of Africans and Indians by day; at night they vanished, whisked away after sunset to their own racially exclusive locations.

Durban was a vigorous, modern city with the largest port in Africa, but its pride was the expansive beachfront of luxury hotels, the wide span of pure-grained sand and a shimmering aquamarine ocean warm enough to swim in all year round: a nirvana for sun-worshippers and surfers.

These beaches were reserved exclusively for whites, and in summer they were saturated with huddled droves of bronzed, oil-glistening bodies.

Along this stretch, bounded on one side by Addington Hospital where Robert McBride was born, and at the northern end by the snake park, were cafés, bars, restaurants and nightclubs: the playground of white South Africa on holiday, known as the Golden Mile.

Further south, on the other side of the busy docks and the landlocked Bay of Natal, was a promontory the shape of a finger. Here facing the ocean was a diminutive range of hills known as The Bluff, a luxurious white suburb with large gardens, swimming pools and double garages. Beyond that was a wide no man’s land, comprising first a bird sanctuary, then a small swampy lake and finally a patch of scrubby bush. This acted as a buffer to Wentworth, a non-white residential area. Most of the racial arenas were divided by buffer zones.

The McBrides lived in Wentworth. Hemmed in on one side by an industrial estate and on the other by the Mobil oil refinery, it sprawled over several lilliputian hills. Wentworth was eleven kilometres from Durban city centre, just off the freeway on the route to exotic South Coast holiday resorts like Amanzimtoti and Umtentweni. There was nothing exotic about Wentworth.

The main approach was up Quality Street, past the gloomy Girassol Café and at the crest of the hill the dour, decaying Palm Springs Hotel. The sandy roads were rutted and uneven, often strewn with building rubble and household rubbish, and after a sudden tropical downpour the craters in the road would form small lakes. Packs of dogs roamed the dusty streets and children played in the open storm drains.

The houses were mostly cramped, identical red-brick units, or mean corrugated-iron shanties, with dusty backyards piled high with discarded tyres, rusty fridges and disused car parts.

And everywhere alongside this urban dereliction was a lush riot of tropical fecundity: mango trees, pawpaw, guava, banana, avocado and the brilliant flowering of the pink and purple tibouchina tree.

At night the Mobil oil refinery glowed with a thousand pinpricks of light in the velvety dark, and its slender, 50-foot chimneys belched out vivid flames like some vast starship from outer space. The refinery was heavily fortified with tall barbed-wire fences, concrete walls and commanding watchtowers with spyholes.

It had once been attacked, in one of the few military actions in that area, by an African National Congress unit armed with rocket launchers, but the police soon winkled the unit out of their strategic position on the hill and gave chase to the guerrillas right through Wentworth, finally pinning them down in a paint factory in Hime Street, where all four insurgents were shot dead.

By day the oil refinery emitted a constant plume of greyish-white smoke and sometimes by evening a sulphurous stench hung over Wentworth. It was a cloying, acrid smell that bit deep into the lungs, and if the weather was particularly humid (often before one of those sharp summer squalls) there would be a pall of pollution so palpable it was like a dust storm or a very fine drizzle. Sometimes on the darkest nights the chemical haze enveloped the whole ghetto like a light shroud of mist.

Wentworth was a ‘Coloured’ area, and white people never came near it. To young Robert, that seemed perfectly normal and he never gave it a thought. Most people in Wentworth didn’t have any work and the main social activity was drinking. To Robert that was quite normal too. He didn’t think there was anything odd about it for a long, long time.

That was the way things were.

Robert McBride was born on July 6, 1963. His parents Derrick and Doris were both teachers. Robert was a much wanted child, for the McBrides had been married five years and had previously lost a daughter at birth.

They had moved to Wentworth while Doris was heavily pregnant with Robert. This had not been a voluntary transfer: under the Group Areas Act, which stipulated in which area each racial group could live, all those whose classification was Coloured were forced out of the city centre and its immediate suburbs. As Derrick and Doris McBride were Coloured, they had to relocate.

For those being evicted, the municipality had set aside a zone which occupied approximately two square kilometres, officially called the Austerville Government Village, although everyone knew it as Wentworth.

It had been built as a Second World War military transit camp. There were drab rows of identical red-brick barracks, while most streets had no names or any form of lighting.

The camp was laid out on a grid system, divided into sections named after British naval heroes like Drake, Frobisher and Hardy, although this echo of imperial grandeur was not reflected in the bleak surroundings. There were no facilities such as schools or shops, so when the displaced new community first moved in they had to convert the existing military buildings. The old cinema became the Anglican Church of St Gabriel and the block houses in Drake, which had been the kitchens, were transformed into homes, often housing families of ten or more in one-bedroom units.

The McBrides were assigned to Flat B, previously a First Aid clinic, in a road with no name in an area called Lower Assegai. It was not the home they had been promised, but it was clean and neat and there were burglar-bars on the windows. It had a kitchen and lounge as well as a bedroom, so they had more room than many of their neighbours, and outside there was a small grass yard where Doris immediately began planting shrubs and herbs. Eleven months after Robert’s arrival, their second child, Bronwyn, was born.

When Robert was a baby the family used to call him ‘Pepe’, after an animated cartoon Doris had seen with her younger sister, Girly, at the bioscope (as they called the cinema). The cartoon had a theme song that went, ‘Face as funny as Pepe, smile as funny as Pepe,’ and when Girly first saw Robert she shrieked, ‘Pepe!’

Round-faced and smiling, with his large ears and puckish mouth, he had a deceptively mischievous appearance. Yet for a child in such turbulent surroundings, Robert was uncommonly tranquil and obedient. He was a skinny little boy and quite solitary, although he spent a remarkable amount of time with his father. He had an even, light brown complexion and close, curly dark hair. Doris was livid when a neighbour called him kroeskop (woollyhead).

Doris was a big strong woman with a soft creamy tan complexion. Derrick on the other hand was dark; he had a long, animated face with strong, aquiline features, and he gesticulated energetically with his hands, constantly pushing back his thick-rimmed glasses. He was slim, and his wiry frame twitched with an anxious, edgy compulsion, the complete opposite to Doris’s calm stoicism. Derrick was so zipped up that he was in constant motion, even finding it difficult to sit still for an entire meal. Words poured out of him in an assertive cascade and in conversation he ricocheted from subject to subject with demonic energy. The family nicknamed Derrick ‘The Grader’, though no one could remember why, and at school the pupils called him ‘The Coke Bottle’ – if you shook him up, he’d explode. His passion was politics.

Derrick and Doris were fearful about the prospects of bringing up their children in the harsh, unnatural conditions of Wentworth. Unemployment was high, with many families living below subsistence level. Over a third of all children were illegitimate and alcoholism was chronic. The despair among the young was endemic and most young men saw no point in finishing their schooling, attaching themselves instead to the wild youth gangs which could murder a rival from another area simply for stepping into their territory. Wentworth was regarded as one of the most violent communities in South Africa.

Derrick felt a particular sense of foreboding for his son’s future. The government policy to separate the races in all spheres of life was being pushed ahead fast and all opposition to these policies was ruthlessly suppressed. In May 1963, two months before Robert was born, the government had introduced the General Law Amendment Act, which gave the minister of Justice the power to detain anybody in solitary confinement without trial for 90 days, and thereafter for further periods of 90 days – again and again, according to the minister, ‘until this side of eternity’.

This crack-down, and the increasing pace of apartheid legislation, was greeted by sporadic and sometimes amateur acts of sabotage, culminating in 1964 when a young white man placed a time bomb in the main concourse of Johannesburg railway station, severely injuring several people and killing one elderly woman. White opinion was outraged and by 1965 the minister of Justice had extended the period of detention without trial to 180 days.

It fell to Doris to teach her son the practical ins and outs of where he could legally go or not go. ‘It all depends,’ she explained to Robert, ‘on the colour of your skin.’ The world was divided into two simple categories. On park benches, playgrounds, buses, in post office queues, or on the beach, the sign SLEGS BLANKES meant that he was not allowed. It meant ‘Whites Only’. The sign Robert had to look for was NIE-BLANKES. That meant ‘Non-Whites’.

Robert was a quiet, reflective boy, and at an early age he kept asking why he couldn’t do certain things. Doris found herself having to explain the situation again and again.

‘It’s very sad,’ she says. ‘You don’t know how to explain it to your children. You have to find a way to say, “You’re different.” It was usually left to me to explain. Robert was always wanting to know. Derrick would give me a look. So you’d try to find a way to answer that didn’t make him feel inferior. It was painful. Sometimes I’d lie.

‘Once we were walking along the beach and we came to a paddling pool with white kids playing in it. Robert wanted to jump in. I said, “You can’t – you’ll drown.” Robert couldn’t understand why he wasn’t allowed to join in. “But I can swim better than them,” he said. “I won’t drown.” In the end it always came down to simply saying, “You’re not white.”’

The first racial incident that Robert can remember occurred when he was nine years old. He and two of his friends from Wentworth went down to a floodwater channel which ran out to sea, where they would trawl for small fish with old sacks employed as makeshift fishing nets. White children played down at the floodwater channel too, and they always got along well with the Wentworth boys until one day a white man came along and, without any warning whatsoever, kicked Robert and began shouting at him in Afrikaans that he should not be there.

Robert was holding an old jam jar, full of water, in which they had put some of the guppies they had caught, and the red-faced white man snatched the jar out of his hands and smashed it on the concrete causeway. Robert burst into tears and the three Wentworth boys fled home as fast as they could.

After that, whenever they returned to the same floodwater channel to fish, the white children jeered at them and tried to chase them away.

The second racial incident took place a year later when Robert was ten years old. His family had gone on a trip up to Johannesburg and one afternoon they visited Zoo Lake. Robert and his sister Bronwyn wandered off and came across a gang of small children all roughly his age who were crowded round some buckets. In these buckets were goldfish and the other children were looking at them and twirling their fingers in the water. Robert joined this little knot of children, and after a while he too began to dangle his fingers in a bucket.

Suddenly a large Afrikaner youth raced over and kicked Robert from behind, right between the legs. The youth shouted furiously, ‘You can’t do that, you little bastard!’

Robert stood there stunned and in pain. Unable to speak, he pointed to the other children, then burst into tears. The young Afrikaner was shaking with rage: ‘Voetsek,’ he yelled. ‘You are not allowed here. You’re not white.’

It was Robert’s first experience of real hatred, and ever afterward this episode remained his own private symbol of injustice. Racial prejudice, arbitrary and inexplicable, seemed like a savage kick from behind.

The racial divide for Robert McBride, however, was not that simple; he was not white, yet neither was he black. In the ‘Book of Life’, the popular term for the 49-page identity document the South African government was attempting to issue to everyone, he was classified as Coloured.

This referred to a person of mixed race. Originally the term Coloured lumped together anyone who was not European or African, with several sub-divisions, which in Proclamation 46 of 1959 were defined as Cape Coloured, Cape Malay, Griqua, Indian, Chinese, ‘other Asiatic’ and ‘other Coloured’. The Japanese, after much soul searching, were exempted and granted honorary white status as their country had so much trade with South Africa, and subsequently Indians were hived off and officially designated as a separate group. These distinctions were very important for they determined almost everything in life, from where a person could live, to what job they were allowed to do, and whom they could legally marry.

The rigidity of this racial classification, however, was made extremely tricky by families like the McBrides. Doris McBride’s father was a white municipal worker of Scottish extraction, while her mother had been the daughter of an Irish father and an African mother. Derrick McBride, on the other hand, had Irish and Malay ancestry.

This sort of elaborate mosaic led to numerous subsequent amendments to the Population Registration Act. Proclamation number 46 was declared void in 1967 by a judge of the Cape Town Supreme Court on the grounds of vagueness, and later that same year the Population Registration Act, number 64, was introduced in an attempt to plug those gaps. It made a determined effort to clear up the exact criteria to be used for racial classification, declaring a white person to be someone who: (1) In appearance obviously is a white person and who is not generally accepted as a Coloured person; or (2) Is generally accepted as a white person and is not in appearance obviously not a white person.

To keep these lines clearly demarcated, and to mop up the truants and anomalies, the adjudication was done by the Race Classification Board. This was the final arbitrator. Where the question of a person’s skin colour was not clear the board investigated, evaluated and passed definitive judgement. Fingernails were examined, the shape of a nose scrutinised, or a comb pulled through the hair. A man’s barber could be summoned to give evidence, or a strand of hair examined by the police laboratories.

It was the Race Classification Board’s prerogative to re-classify a person’s colour. Every year an average of over a thousand people officially changed colour: Coloureds became white, some whites became Coloured. There were Coloureds that became black, Indian or Malay, Griquas or Chinese. There were Malays that became Indian and Indians that became Malay and Malays that became African and Africans that became Indian.

Blacks, however, did not become whites.

If this confused anyone as to where all that left the Coloured group, the wife of South Africa’s future state president, Marike de Klerk, spelled it out in 1983: ‘You know, the Coloureds are a negative group. The definition of a Coloured in the population register is someone that is not black, and is not white and not an Indian. In other words, a non-person. They are the leftovers.’