Читать книгу A Burning Hunger - Lynda Schuster - Страница 13
ОглавлениеCHAPTER TWO
Joseph, Nomkhitha and the Children
The day after the wedding celebrations, elders from Nomkhitha’s and Joseph’s family sat down with the newlyweds and, as was their tradition, talked about the couple’s responsibilities: From today, you are no longer a boy and girl. Now you are husband and wife; soon you will have a child. You must act accordingly.
It was a difficult transition. Nomkhitha found the living conditions at Sara’s uncomfortable. Her mother-in-law rented two rooms in a big brick boarding house; Sara, Joseph, Nomkhitha, Joseph’s sister May and her four children all squeezed into the small space. Although always surrounded by people, Nomkhitha felt lonely. She had to stop speaking Xhosa out of respect for her mother-in-law, yet she didn’t know Sotho. Nomkhitha, eager to prove herself as a makoti, a young bride, devoted much energy to mastering the new language. That accomplishment alleviated her sense of isolation only slightly. Being the dutiful daughter-in-law and wife meant subordinating her culture, her ways, to those of the Mashininis. Nomkhitha had a brief respite when, a few months after the wedding, she gave birth to a son, Mokete. Tradition required that a woman return home the week before the arrival of her first-born, and stay there for the first month of the baby’s life. So Nomkhitha got to go back to Letitia’s for a glorious, five-week reunion.
Joseph, too, was overwhelmed by the changes. Supporting a wife and child seemed an enormous task; how could he provide a home for them on the pittance he earned? With little confidence, Joseph put his name down for a tiny plot of land offered by the government in the areas reserved for black inhabitants. The Johannesburg municipality had acquired considerable acreage to the south-west of the city on which to house its proliferating black population. It charged rent for the minute pieces of land carved from these tracts; but tenants owned whatever abode they constructed. The government hoped to engender social stability among the disenfranchised blacks by making them homeowners. Of course, because it retained possession of the land, the government could dismantle the native locations – as they were known – at will and only pay compensation for the dwellings it destroyed.
In this manner, Soweto was created. (The name is an acronym for South-Western Townships.) The place was unspeakably bleak: barren, brown, dusty. Few trees grew there. The streets were narrow and rutted; they flooded when it rained. Hillocks of garbage decomposed by the roadside. It took hours to commute to work in Johannesburg. But with the areas allowed them already crammed, blacks were desperate for any place to live; they flocked to get their names on the government’s list for Soweto. Joseph and Nomkhitha rejoiced when, the year after Mokete’s birth, they were allocated a plot in the township.
They were among the first families to move to Pitso Street in the Central Western Jabavu section of Soweto. Their neighbourhood consisted of a rubbish-filled field across the road and a smattering of shops. The plot was similarly spartan: the government provided a single cold-water tap and a latrine – both outside. At first, Nomkhitha and Joseph could only afford to erect a zinc shack. In that small space they had to cook, eat, sleep. (They would later build a ‘matchbox’ house: the ubiquitous, concrete structures that, when seen from afar, made the township look like rows of monochromatic blocks marching to the horizon.) Despite the rudimentary nature of their residence, Nomkhitha and Joseph considered themselves lucky. They had got away from the suffocating closeness of Joseph’s family and, unlike many of their friends, they had their own home.
To make more money, Joseph left his job at the medical school for one in a factory manufacturing brushes and brooms. The factory operated on a piece-work system: the more shoe brushes Joseph turned out, the more he earned. The pressure to produce was tremendous. Foremen were forever shouting at the workers; if someone made a mistake or dawdled, his entire line was penalized. Employees had to punch a time clock to use the toilets. The tea-break lasted exactly fifteen minutes: a bell rang, and the workers rushed to gulp down a cup of the steaming liquid; another bell rang, and workers rushed back to their machines. Joseph hated his job – but kept at it because he had a family to support.
That sentiment became the watchword of Nomkhitha’s and Joseph’s marriage. In the beginning, Nomkhitha still had hopes of pursuing an education: Okay, I’m married, she would tell herself, but that doesn’t mean I can’t go to school. I’ll find a way somehow. But then the babies started coming: two years after Mokete’s birth, Tsietsi was born. Lehlohonolo came two years later. Then Mpho. Then Lebakeng. Then Moeketsi. Then Tshepiso. And so on: a new baby arriving just about every two years. Nomkhitha would give birth to a total of thirteen children – all of them boys, but for a set of twin girls.
At times, she resented the demands of so large a family. But, like many African women of her generation, Nomkhitha felt powerless to prevent her pregnancies. Contraception was viewed very much as a woman’s responsibility. Medicines were expensive; Nomkhitha could not afford to buy birth-control pills every month, and she had heard that using them sporadically could make her even more fertile. Nomkhitha dreaded the opprobrium each new pregnancy seemed to bring. Some neighbours made innuendoes about her being an ignorant country girl; others were more forthright and demanded to know why she just didn’t get an abortion. But Nomkhitha had seen the injuries, and death, caused by the illegal procedure and feared endangering her health. Years later, she would speak proudly of the courage it took to resist the pressure: ‘I never miscarried, never aborted,’ she said, ‘so I could live and die in peace.’
Nomkhitha and Joseph, by necessity, became consumed with providing for their children. In his endless quest to earn more money, Joseph obtained a driver’s licence and went to work at a brewery. His job was to drive salesmen around the Eastern Transvaal. Joseph left home on Monday morning and returned on Friday, sleeping in a different place every night. He was not allowed to stay in the hotels with his salesman; they were only for whites. Instead, Joseph was relegated to the drivers’ rooms: filthy, cramped places filled with all kinds of winged and horned creatures. If the room were not too horrible, Joseph would spend the night there in a sleeping bag. He usually found it unbearable, though, and wound up sleeping in the car. Still, Joseph liked the job. His territory was beautiful, verdant country: here were the open spaces, the cattle, sheep, goats, and the infinite fields of maize that he had left behind. Here he could breathe again.
Joseph stayed at the job for several years, then switched to driving for a construction company – a position that allowed him to work in town, returning home every night. And the salary was better. But he never seemed to have enough money for his ever-expanding family. Joseph often regretted not having continued his education so he could get better-paying jobs. While working at the medical school, he had attended classes three nights a week in the hope of obtaining a junior-high school certificate; his employer offered the study sessions for free. But Joseph was exhausted after a full day’s work and by the amount of studying required for the certificate. After two years, he gave up.
While Joseph and Nomkhitha struggled to provide for their family, remarkable political events were happening around them. The African National Congress, the country’s oldest black liberation movement, led thousands of people throughout the 1950s in campaigns to defy the apartheid laws. In 1955 it had convened a two-day, outdoor mass-meeting in Kliptown to adopt a set of democratic principles. The ANC solicited suggestions from across South Africa; their request produced an overwhelming response. Members of trade unions, clubs, schools, women’s groups, church organizations and cultural associations heeded the call, sending their ideas on everything from brown paper bags to scraps of foolscap. The Freedom Charter, as the final version was called, eloquently proclaimed: ‘. . . 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 . . .’. It was a revolutionary document. The government thought it treasonous: 156 leaders and activists who participated in its adoption were arrested a year later and put on trial.
In the meantime, a group of dissident members was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the ANC. Known as Africanists, they believed that whites had come to dominate the ANC; in their view, white involvement only furthered the black dependency that apartheid created. The Africanists also objected to what they saw as the excessive influence of the outlawed South African Communist Party on the ANC. The proof, they said, could be found in a section of the Freedom Charter demanding that ‘the mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole’. The Africanists were essentially correct: the two organizations had become inextricably intertwined. To purge themselves of these undesirable elements, the dissidents abandoned the ANC in 1959 and formed their own organization, the Pan Africanist Congress.
Disaster struck soon after. To compete with a similar ANC plan, the PAC called for a day of mass demonstrations the following year on March 21. Blacks were to march in protest against the much-hated passes – an ill-advised public show that was sure to lead to confrontation. Several thousand demonstrators gathered outside the police station in Sharpeville, a small township south of Johannesburg; the crowd was unarmed and generally calm. Suddenly, with no discernible provocation, the police who had been guarding the building opened fire on the protesters. They continued to shoot as the panicked people turned and fled. When it was over, sixty-nine Africans were dead – most of them shot in the back. One hundred and eighty-six people lay wounded.
The massacre provoked outrage and condemnations outside the country. The South African government was unperturbed: it declared a state of emergency, allowing the police to detain thousands of activists without charge or trial. Ten days later, it banned both the ANC and the PAC. The government had effectively ended all means of quasi-legal protest; efforts to defeat apartheid would now take a violent turn.
Nomkhitha followed these events closely. She ran to the shops every evening to buy the newspapers, then pored over the stories. Nomkhitha admired the ANC greatly, but was sceptical: how could these young people ever change things? She tried to engage Joseph in political discussions, much as Daniel had done in their house when she was young. But Joseph wouldn’t countenance such talk. He had no reason to believe that things would ever be different; no one he knew owned a shop or a farm. Such aspirations were a waste of time. Joseph’s only hope was to earn enough money to educate his children; that was the way, in his opinion, to a better life.
But it was a difficult path. After several years of trying to manage on one salary, Nomkhitha had little choice but to get a job. She found a position as a machinist in a factory that produced women’s clothes. The factory was downtown; one of Joseph’s relatives worked there and had told her of the job. She sewed side seams in dresses and hems in skirts with about sixty other women. The pay was meagre but much needed; Nomkhitha could barely afford to take time off to give birth to a new baby. She worked until a week before the delivery date, then stayed at home for a month afterwards – less than half the time allowed for maternity leave under South African law. Nomkhitha found it cheaper to hire a babysitter. One of the neighbourhood’s old women – aunties, they were called – would accost Nomkhitha on the street during her pregnancy and, jabbing a finger into her burgeoning belly, announce, ‘This one is mine. I’m going to look after him.’ And when the children were three years old, Nomkhitha could leave them at a nearby crèche.
Joseph and Nomkhitha still barely managed. The family rarely ate meat; Nomkhitha served pap (a stiff maize-meal porridge) and cabbage, or pap and onions and tomatoes instead. A kindly butcher saved good beef bones for her, which she added to the stew to make it more savoury. There was no money for emergencies: if one of the children became ill, a visit to the local clinic ate up half of Nomkhitha’s weekly pay. Joseph used his Christmas bonus each year to buy the children one set of clothes and one new school uniform. Despite the hardships, Nomkhitha tried not to despair. She had been raised to believe that God never imposed a burden on a person he could not bear; on bad days, Nomkhitha reminded herself that many people in Soweto could not even afford to eat. She took heart from the fact that her children never went to bed hungry.
It was a far cry from the privilege and status she had known as a girl and expected to continue into adulthood. That world had virtually disappeared. Daniel had died soon after Nomkhitha’s wedding, and her half-siblings immediately began fighting over the division of his estate. In the meantime, the government passed the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act, which established eight, ethnically based Bantustans. Under the law, blacks – who comprised about 73 per cent of the population – were allocated 13 per cent of the country’s most underdeveloped land. Although the majority of Africans resided in ‘white’ areas, they were to become citizens of their own ‘tribal homeland’; in this way, blacks could forever be deprived of political rights inside South Africa itself. Transkei was the first to be so transformed. In 1963, the government’s Transkei Constitution Act turned it into a semi-autonomous ‘homeland’. Daniel’s lands were confiscated by the new regime, his stone house knocked down. All was lost.
Reduced to penury, Olive moved to Johannesburg. She searched in vain for a teaching position and was eventually forced to take a job as a domestic with a white family. They knew nothing of the Great Place, the majesty of court, the beauty of an imbongi’s poetry. Olive’s employers could not be bothered to learn her surname, let alone the origins of her quiet dignity and excellent English. To them, she was just another kaffir woman come to clean their toilets and change their children’s nappies.
Nomkhitha saw her dreams vanish. She had long ago abandoned the idea of becoming a nurse, but still yearned for some sort of profession. Nomkhitha used to pass a secretarial school every day on her way to work. She would stop and stare at the advertisement in the window: the smiling, smartly dressed woman sitting at a large desk, surrounded by office equipment. The tableau looked so respectable, so modern. After allowing herself a few minutes’ reverie, she would sigh and continue down the street; they could never afford the tuition fees.
But if Nomkhitha could not achieve her ambitions, she was determined that her children should. She began buying books for the kids with the few pennies she salvaged at the end of every month. Starting with comics to get their attention, she pointed out the pictures and explained the stories. As the children grew, they graduated to more sophisticated books in Sotho and English. It didn’t matter that Nomkhitha arose before dawn, worked all day in the factory, returned home to cook supper and wash out nappies – she always read to her children. Her dreams, she decided, would become theirs.
Mokete, Tsietsi, Mpho, Lebakeng and Tshepiso came to be the most politically active of the Mashinini children. Each arrived at his involvement from a different path. For some, it was a studied decision; for others, a hasty act of volition or sheer chance.
Being the first-born, Rocks (as Mokete was called) felt the full weight of his parents’ expectations. School was paramount; on this subject, Joseph and Nomkhitha were unrelenting. Joseph beat Rocks when he played truant. Nomkhitha made him – and the other children, as they got older – sit at the dining-room table after supper every night to do their homework. (Rocks developed a passion for the comic books Nomkhitha bought. His favourite was Chunky Charlie: a hero-type who slunk around in a heavy overcoat, laden with various tools that were useful in fighting crimes.) His parents taunted him if he neglected his studies: he would end up like the men who emptied the night-soil buckets left on the streets in the morning, they warned, or as one of the chaps who lugged the fifty-kilogram bags of coal to houses for cooking and heating. Rocks took the admonitions to heart; those people were figures of derision among children in the township.
Joseph and Nomkhitha closely monitored Rocks’ progress in school. Any slip in grades during the year prompted a warning to improve; it also put him on a kind of probation, during which it was difficult to extract money from his parents for extracurricular activities. The Mashinini children were expected to finish among the top five students in their class. The family would ridicule anyone who ranked lower throughout the December school holidays; those who succeeded were rewarded with a rand. Joseph always threw a party to celebrate the good grades. He bought sodas, sweets, crisps, peanuts; and he gathered the children around the dining-room table to offer a prayer of thanks. It was the best day of the year. Rocks chafed under this intense parental scrutiny, but ultimately came to see its value. He would be one of the few of his boyhood gang to graduate from high school.
The pressure he felt from his parents turned Rocks into an introverted, measured sort of person. (In that, he took after Joseph. When political violence overwhelmed the township in later years, Nomkhitha often dashed headlong out the door to witness each new confrontation. Joseph, on the other hand, first changed into sports shoes – in case he had to run from the police.) To his younger siblings, Rocks was the serious, bookish big brother. He acted as a kind of surrogate father during Joseph’s absence, meting out punishments and inspiring awe; the youngsters knew they had to be quiet around Rocks. His parents also expected him to set an example for the others. That often meant getting blamed for their transgressions: when Tsietsi used to appropriate the meagre spending money given the children – a constant source of squabbles among them – Rocks was censured.
Like all township boys, Rocks was mad about sport. He played football, but not with the same obsessiveness as his younger brothers. He preferred softball, an interest he shared with Tsietsi. Rocks’ best positions were first base and shortstop; he and Tsietsi devised makeshift bases and stole the bats from their school. He also trained as a welter-weight boxer. Rocks fought for the Jabulani Boxing Club, where he was considered to have a reasonably good left jab. Nomkhitha hated him boxing; she wanted her children to aspire to something more genteel like tennis. But Rocks dismissed it as an effeminate game. Growing up in the ghetto, you had to assert a masculine image to fend off tsotsis, or pickpockets.
Gangs were also a problem. They formed around a particular section of the township: Orlando had its gang, White City its band of youths, and so on. The gangs attacked mostly at night, brandishing knives, hatchets, all manner of crudely fashioned weapons. In an attempt at justice, a teacher at Rocks’ school organized a kind of vigilante group to punish the perpetrators. Rocks once identified a boy who had assaulted a rival gang member; he marched him virtually across Soweto to be whipped by the vigilantes. A few weeks later, Rocks encountered the same youth on a train into town. This time, he was surrounded by his cronies; they held Rocks down for four train stops as the boy beat him up, splitting open his forehead.
His family’s poverty weighed heavily on Rocks. As a child, he would dream of toys. It was always the same fantasy: Joseph somehow found extra money and bought him all the playthings he coveted. At first, Rocks held his parents responsible for their condition. They had too many children to support; two or three offspring would have been manageable. But Rocks ultimately came to blame apartheid for their impoverished state. He arrived at this conclusion gradually, through the small epiphanies so many black children experienced when they ventured beyond the township.
Rocks’ awakening began when Nomkhitha allowed him to go by train into Johannesburg on errands. He was spellbound by the cars he saw there: the speedy, sleek vehicles, driven mostly by whites, that jammed the city’s streets. It was a rare thing for a black person to own a car. And all the goods on display in the store windows; Rocks had never imagined such luxuries existed. But he could not afford them. They were for the white customers, who paid with great bundles of notes they produced from their pockets or purses. Rocks, meanwhile, bought only the cheapest items, carefully counting out the coins entrusted to him.
His perception of the disparities between blacks and whites deepened as he got older. Along with several classmates, Rocks participated in a drama festival at an all-white high school in one of Johannesburg’s northern suburbs – the first time he had set foot in such an institution. He was astounded by what he saw: the library, auditorium, gymnasium, laboratories, modern classrooms. Rocks’ overcrowded, understaffed school had virtually nothing. Everyone knew the government spent far more on white students than on blacks; in fact, it was about twelve times as much. But this most tangible manifestation of apartheid opened Rocks’ eyes and angered him.
The more he encountered the white world, the more embittered Rocks became. The sightseers who took the bus tours of Soweto from Johannesburg were a poignant example. Some were foreigners; but many white South Africans also went on the trip, gaping at the township and snapping photographs as though it were a different country. (This would probably be the only time any of them ever ventured into a ‘location’.) One stop on the itinerary was in front of Rocks’ school. The passengers didn’t disembark; that was considered too dangerous. Instead, they threw sweets and coins at the children from open windows – a practice Rocks hated. It made him feel like an animal on display in a zoo.
As an adolescent, Rocks worked during the school holidays at Joseph’s construction company. He did odd jobs: filing, making tea, washing cars, delivering messages. Besides the extra money it provided, the work gave him a glimpse of the conditions under which his father worked. Joseph, as the president’s driver, was treated respectfully by the company’s highest officers. But the other white employees barely hid their contempt for the black workers. With a son’s sensitivity, Rocks cringed at the thousand daily little humiliations his father endured.
Of course, Rocks could not talk to his father about what he saw as the injustices of apartheid; Joseph would allow no such discussions under his roof. The 1960s were a time of terrible political repression. After its banning, the ANC had gone underground and, ending a fifty-year-old tradition of non-violence, formed a military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation). On 16 December 1961, the day Afrikaners celebrated the defeat of thousands of Zulu warriors in the previous century, Umkhonto exploded a series of home-made bombs around the country. The attacks were timed to avoid injuring people and were aimed at symbolic targets: the Bantu Affairs Commissioner’s offices in Johannesburg; a nearby post office; electricity pylons in Port Elizabeth. Umkhonto committed scores of similar acts of sabotage until July 1963, when the police raided its secret headquarters at a farm in Rivonia, near Johannesburg. The officers arrested most of Umkhonto’s leaders; eight of them, including Nelson Mandela, were sentenced to life in prison after a highly publicized trial in April the next year.
The raid on Rivonia effectively stilled black political opposition for a decade. What remained of the ANC and Umkhonto were forced to reassemble in exile, far from South Africa’s borders. The PAC too had to reorganize outside the country. (Poqo, or ‘pure’ in Xhosa, a terrorist group with ties to the PAC, had engaged in acts of violence for a brief time; the police destroyed it in 1963 by arresting thousands of its adherents.) An entire generation of black activists was imprisoned, banned or exiled. To deter the resurgence of political movements, the police assumed unbridled powers of arrest and detention and recruited an army of black informers; the government imposed harsh restrictions on the press.
The measures left blacks utterly intimidated. The life imprisonment of the ANC/Umkhonto leaders on Robben Island, off the coast of Cape Town, seemed the end of politics itself. People shunned the discussions that had animated so much of daily life. To speak of such matters was to invite repression. The ANC’s protest campaigns of the 1950s, the Freedom Charter, the actions of Umkhonto – all slipped into obscurity, suppressed by parents too frightened to tell their children. Newspapers could not even print Nelson Mandela’s photograph. One evening, Rocks asked his father about graffiti he had seen spray-painted on an electrical sub-station on his way home from school. ‘Who is Mandela?’ asked Rocks. Joseph slapped him across the face and walked out of the room.
If working at his father’s construction firm exposed Rocks to the quotidian indignities of apartheid, it also opened his eyes to the future. He decided he would become an engineer. Rocks had wanted to study law, but law required a knowledge of Latin, and his teachers at school discouraged him from attempting the language. Engineering seemed the next best thing: the draughtsmen with their drawing tables and precision instruments appealed to Rocks’ sense of order. Nomkhitha was delighted.
When Rocks entered high school, Joseph acquired an old, abandoned trailer from his company and set it in the small yard behind the house. It was a kind of study for Rocks, a refuge from the raucous children who inhabited every corner of his home. He crammed for his matriculation exams there. Rocks also attended study groups at his high school; called ‘cross-nighting’, these marathon sessions began in the evening and continued until the early hours of the morning. (Rocks’ school, Morris Issacson, was one of the few places in Soweto that had electricity.) After supper, Rocks would take a blanket and a thermos filled with coffee and walk back to school. There he and his friends thrashed out the finer points of a subject, filling the blackboard with equations or quotations, until they drooped with exhaustion. They were determined students: one way or another, their lives would be different from their parents’.
Tsietsi, the next-born, was, by contrast with his older brother, a great extrovert. As a youngster, he appeared highly-strung and given to histrionics: when denied something he wanted, Tsietsi cried until he vomited. He would suddenly and inexplicably start to sob, as though he had been hurt. But as Tsietsi grew, he evolved into a charismatic personality who charmed everyone he met.
He was the leader among his siblings. Acknowledged as the cleverest in the family, Tsietsi dominated the dining-room table at night: doing his homework, helping the others, discussing the finer points of a vexing problem. As with Rocks, Nomkhitha imbued him with a love for reading. Tsietsi, in turn, conveyed this passion to the younger children, especially when they had became too numerous to command much of their parents’ attention. In this manner, he became something of a mentor to his brothers.
As the second-born, Tsietsi seemed to escape much of the pressure Nomkhitha and Joseph imposed on Rocks. He developed a playful nature and a lively imagination; among his many inventions, he created a clandestine society called The Secret Seven, based on the children’s books by Enid Blyton. The Secret Seven included two of his brothers and four friends. Tsietsi found hidden meeting places, to enter which required a secret password. There the seven youths devised stories about engaging in exciting and daring undertakings. At the end of each meeting, Tsietsi brought out a cake or some other special treat that he bought with the two-cent dues collected from the members. Like the books that Tsietsi devoured, the game transported him and the other boys beyond the wretchedness of life in the township; for a brief moment, they could dream childhood dreams.
Like Rocks, Tsietsi was a gifted athlete who excelled at softball, tennis and dancing. But he devoted the most energy to karate. The speed and discipline it required suited Tsietsi’s personality perfectly and he liked the fact that the flashy, martial-arts moves made him an exotic figure among the thugs of Soweto. Tsietsi was forever frightening Nomkhitha with sudden karate chops and high-pitched yells. When his siblings begged to learn, Tsietsi taught them turns and kicks, lining them up in the yard for drills. They were thrilled: this was the big brother who deigned to notice them. And they adored him.
To those outside the family, Tsietsi seemed an appealing, if frenetic, youth. He affected what was called an ‘American hippy’ mode of dress: bell-bottoms, peace symbols, an Afro hairstyle. (Tsietsi habitually stole clothes from Rocks – especially for social engagements with girls, who thought him something of a dandy.) Just as he was a force within his family, Tsietsi exhibited a natural leadership among his peers. He was a whirlwind of activity: president of the Methodist Youth Guild; chairman of a youth burial society; chairman of his school’s debating committee and of the Debating Group Association; chairman of a social club; head of a softball club; a freelance writer for the black edition of the Rand Daily Mail. Dispatched by Nomkhitha, Rocks spent countless evenings trying to find Tsietsi and bring him home for dinner.
Tsietsi also had a contentious side to his nature. He made and lost friends with equal swiftness – often because of his penchant for provoking people. Tsietsi’s siblings knew this aspect of his character well: pushed beyond his tolerance one day, Lehlohonolo (or Cougar, as he was called) threw a stone at Tsietsi’s head while he was standing in the kitchen. Tsietsi ducked, and the projectile hit one of the yellow cabinets. The dent that it left became part of family lore.
In the same manner, Tsietsi delighted in testing established limits. One day he decided, against all the regulations, to light up a cigarette in class. It was a free period and the teacher had left the room. Another instructor happened to walk by at that moment; smelling smoke, he entered the class to investigate and found Tsietsi with the forbidden tobacco, surrounded by his friends. The teacher immediately brought them before the school’s disciplinary board. Tsietsi was suspended from school for a few days; his companions received lashings with a cane.
Despite his carefree personality, Tsietsi was a brilliant student; Nomkhitha thought he would become a lawyer. A weekly radio programme about famous court cases, Consider Your Verdict, particularly fascinated him. Tsietsi started out in a chair listening to the show, but in his excitement slowly crept towards the console until, at the climax, he was virtually sitting on top of it. Afterwards, he and Rocks had heated debates in English about the episode’s outcome. Sometimes friends from the neighbourhood joined in; the younger Mashininis would listen in awe as Tsietsi, who had a singular command of the language, dominated the arguments.
Tsietsi’s love of English and English literature prompted his classmate, Murphy Morobe (who would later become a prominent political leader), to confer upon him the title of ‘Shakespeare’s friend in Africa’. To Nomkhitha, his oratorical prowess seemed a direct line from his grandfather, the imbongi. Tsietsi’s talent came to define his adolescent life; he used it to make friends and recruit like-minded youths to his projects. And he employed it to express a nascent hatred of white people – utterances whose virulence surprised his parents.
As head of his debating team at Morris Issacson High, Tsietsi regularly competed against other schools. Debating clubs were immensely popular in the township: students vied fiercely for membership in them, and their debates were always well attended. Khotso Seatlholo, an intense, articulate youth, was in the audience at Naledi High for a contest against Morris Issacson. The topic was ‘The Pen is Mightier than the Sword’; Tsietsi argued for the motion. Khotso was spellbound. Unlike the other speakers, who were clutching reams of notes, Tsietsi had only a small index card which he barely consulted. He was bold, eloquent, witty, quick thinking. It seemed impossible that Tsietsi was the product of Bantu education (as it was called under apartheid). He exuded an uncanny confidence; his closing statement brought a standing ovation from the audience.
Afterwards, at a social gathering, Tsietsi sought out Khotso. Khotso felt flattered: Tsietsi was popular, well-known, a prefect at his school. He had a swarm of girls around him. Tsietsi made polite enquiries about Khotso’s family and church affiliation; they talked for a while, then Tsietsi left. Khotso gave little import to the encounter.
But Tsietsi returned to see Khotso after school the following week. Again, he asked about Khotso’s family, his church, membership in clubs, and so on. Thus began a pattern that continued for several weeks: Tsietsi would appear at Naledi at the end of the school day once a week to talk. He and Khotso would find an empty classroom or, if the weather was fine, sit outside. They covered a range of mostly neutral topics, but occasionally Tsietsi would insert a question about the situation in South Africa. Khotso understood that Tsietsi was trying to tease out his political views. But Tsietsi’s approach was so slow and convincing that Khotso, despite his reservations, found himself being drawn to his new friend.
Mpho, the fourth son, shared little of his older brothers’ anguish about being a poor township boy. Growing up in the political void of the 1960s, it seemed the normal state of things. His house was like his neighbours’ (albeit more cramped), his possessions not dissimilar to theirs. In fact, Mpho felt a great sense of security. Long before he had friends, his gaggle of brothers provided protection and fellowship.
But there were hazards to having so many siblings. At mealtimes, Nomkhitha seated the youngest children on the floor of the living room. (The older ones got to eat at the dining-room table with their parents.) She set down a big bowl of pap with vegetables or traces of meat and there followed an intense struggle to get at the food. Despite the exertion of sharing from one bowl, Mpho came to think of eating as a highly communal experience. It would take him a long time after leaving home to adjust to using his own plate; having a meal in such a manner seemed so solitary, so lonely.
Eating on the floor required a careful choreography. You had to balance getting enough food to eat with finishing promptly; the first to push away from the bowl got his pick of the after-dinner chores. For Mpho, there was always a kind of tension: resisting the lure of more food allowed him to stand up and claim drying, the easiest of the jobs. Gluttony meant some other brother would assert his right before him. That left the washing-up, an odious task or, even worse, cleaning the floor. The older children were responsible for washing and drying the dishes and setting them on the table for the younger ones to put away. In Soweto, girls traditionally did this type of work; but until 1974, when the twins Lindi and Linda were born, the Mashininis were a family of boys.
As such, they were also obliged to do chores around the house, and to finish them before Nomkhitha returned from work late in the afternoon. The children had to wash the breakfast dishes, clean out the ashes from the morning fire, make the beds, fold their clothes, scrub the tiles and sweep the floor. They were each assigned tasks in different rooms; and they were always grumbling about the injustice of doing a particular chore today when they had done it yesterday. ‘Okay, you ate yesterday,’ Nomkhitha would retort, ‘so should we get someone else to eat for you today?’
Lighting the fire in the afternoon was the bane of Mpho’s life. He simply could not work out how to do it and play football after school. Mpho devised three strategies, all of which had serious drawbacks. He could light the fire immediately upon returning home, before heading out to a match. But the fire was sure to burn out in the three hours or so before Nomkhitha’s arrival. Or he could dash home at half time, hurriedly kindle a blaze and check the chimney for smoke, then race back to the field across the street to finish the game. The fire rarely caught properly and would be stone cold by the time Nomkhitha entered the house. As a third course of action, Mpho could keep playing until the last possible moment, until he saw Nomkhitha walking tiredly up the street. Then he would sprint home and madly start making the fire.
Football was, unquestionably, the most important thing in Mpho’s existence. The rubbish-littered field across from his house regulated the pulse and rhythm of his youth. School, church, household chores – all seemed nothing more than interruptions to the real substance of life: playing football. He could not step outside without seeing that field. It was beckoning, seductive, omnipresent: the stuff of dreams.
In the summer Mpho played barefoot; when he was older and had got a bit of money, he bought takkies, or sports shoes. Each neighbourhood had its own team, but would send its best players to participate in area competitions. On Sundays, Mpho and his mates went to the nearby hostels where migrant labourers lived. The workers organized their teams along tribal lines, but were often short of players and paid the township kids to fill in the open positions. Mpho could earn as much as three rand in an afternoon, a princely sum. (He could also take a shower, a unique experience. The hostels had virtually the only showers in the township.) Nomkhitha never knew of Mpho’s exploits; he feared she would have been outraged. As it was, she would often march over to the field and, screaming at Mpho, jerk him from a game.
Swimming was Mpho’s other great passion. The township had only one public pool, located in White City – a section of Soweto named for its low, white houses made from concrete blocks. Mpho liked to spend the entire day there during the summer holidays, returning home at night ravenously hungry and exhausted from the sun. But swimmers had to pay an entrance fee of two cents and Mpho always struggled to find the money. One method was to ‘liberate’ it from the gangs that roamed the area. Mpho, his older brother Cougar, and a group of friends often ambushed a squad of Zulu youths who had to pass through Mpho’s territory to arrive at the pool. They would thrash the youngsters and appropriate their money. But that didn’t ensure a day of swimming: they still had to negotiate the back streets of White City to avoid getting molested themselves by a gang called the Damaras (after a Namibian tribe), bent on relieving Mpho and his companions of their coins.
One day they decided to use Cougar, who had had polio as an infant, as a kind of courier. (The disease had attacked his leg and arm, but permanently affected only the latter.) After assaulting the Zulus, Mpho hid the money in the hand of Cougar’s disabled arm. Then he pushed Cougar to the front of their group as they approached the Damaras; the gang, seeing that Cougar was disabled, let him pass. At that moment, Cougar accidentally let the precious coins clatter to the ground. There was no swimming for them on that day.
Like his siblings, Mpho was always desperate for money. His one steady source of income came from reselling train tickets. Trains were the main mode of transportation between the township and Johannesburg; taxis and buses hardly ran in the black areas. On Sundays, Mpho’s parents sent him to stand in line to buy a six-day ticket for the coming week, the cheapest fare. As a reward, they allowed him to sell the sixth ticket (still valid for another day) back at the station on the following Saturday morning. Mpho charged 30 or 40 cents for the 50-cent ticket, a saving for people who wanted to go into town to shop. He got to keep the money he earned: sometimes he spent it on the admission to see his beloved Orlando Pirates football team play at Orlando Stadium; or he treated himself to an orgy of potato chips, sodas and candies.
Mpho occasionally went to work in town on the weekends, washing the cars of white people. Nomkhitha didn’t like him doing this because it kept him in Johannesburg all day – a forbidding thing for a child. But Mpho had virtually no knowledge of whites; the car-washing forays provided his only contact with them. And so he eagerly looked forward to the treks into town. To him, whites weren’t actually people; they were rich other-beings who lived somewhere beyond his range of vision.
Being a Mashinini, Mpho was diligent at attending school. He and the other children arose before dawn; Nomkhitha, who departed at six o’clock, lit the fire and left water warming on the stove so they could wash. Joseph used it first, then the others, according to age. After gulping down a mug of tea Joseph prepared for him, Mpho walked to school. His class consisted of about fifty students and one teacher. The children sat two or three at a desk. The rest of the school was equally overcrowded and operated on a staggered schedule: Mpho’s grade spent half the day inside a classroom, the other half sitting under a tree outside. When it rained, the two shifts had to squeeze inside the sultry, suffocating room.
Learning brought little joy to Mpho. The aim of Bantu education was, in the words of its Nationalist creator, Hendrik Verwoerd, ‘to prepare blacks for a status in life as hewers of wood and drawers of water’. Often Mpho’s beleaguered teacher seemed to go through the motions of teaching: thirty minutes spent on history; thirty on geography; and so on. Mpho saw these classes as something to be endured. His real education took place at night around the dining table: there his older brothers brought to life the dry, uninspiring stuff of school, stimulating him with their debates and drawing him into their world of books and ideas.
Unlike his older brothers, Lebakeng (or Dee, as he was called) was neither studious nor serious. As the fifth child, Dee saw himself as a kind of nexus between the older siblings and the younger ones. He nonetheless found his closest companionship in a cluster of school friends. He and four of his classmates formed the core of their school choir, where Dee sang first tenor. They dominated their school football team. They designed identical tunics out of old mealie bags and wore them as team uniforms. When they decided to skip their studies to play a match, they did so en masse. (Dee’s love of football was such that Nomkhitha’s voice alone, wafting across the field and summoning him home, was the only thing that could stop him from playing. Even his sobriquet had football associations: it came from a player for the Moroka Swallows.)
Dee had a bit of the devil in him. His younger siblings saw him as an aggressive, flamboyant type, forever trying to arrange business deals. Dee befriended the children of neighbourhood shopkeepers and wheedled cold drinks and sweets from them. He gambled with fervour; his favourite game was to spin a coin, shouting out to anyone within earshot: Heads or tails? Heads or tails? Dee always managed to have money. Sometimes he appropriated the change his parents left for the children to buy bread and used it to gamble. On other occasions, Dee spent the coins intended for the church collection on vetkoeke (fat cakes): greasy, fried confections that could be had at a nearby café. He also rolled dice, but that stopped the day Dee noticed Joseph observing him from the back-yard. For a while, he carried a knife.
His siblings were of two minds about Dee. They often reported him to their parents for stealing the bread money and making them go hungry. Dee would receive a punishment that night, but by the next morning he was always so cheerful that his brothers felt a bit ashamed – until the next infraction. Even Nomkhitha was ambivalent. She knew him to be mischievous and disobedient, and yet he could be so helpful. ‘I’m going out now,’ he would say, struggling into his football clothes, ‘but if you need me, just stand at the door and call.’ And when Nomkhitha called him, he indeed came running.
Dee found school boring. He was dogged by the brilliant reputation of his older brothers. Like the others, he did his homework at the dining-room table at night by candlelight. (The house caught on fire three times because of the candles, a not uncommon occurrence in Soweto. Few, if any, homes had electricity. The fire usually started in a bedroom while the family was in another part of the house. Once, all the children’s clothes were destroyed.) Dee could not see the point of devoting much energy to his studies. Whites held all the power; blacks had none. When he finished school, he would work for the white man in some prescribed job. That was the way of the world.
Once, Dee and his classmates were taken on a trip to the Voortrekker Monument near Pretoria. A hulking granite structure, the Monument stood as a temple to the struggle between (white) civilization and (black) barbarism. It was constructed so that at noon on December 16, the day that Afrikaners commemorated the defeat of the Zulu warriors, a ray of light shining through the Monument’s dome would strike an inscription on a cenotaph. The symbolic tomb honoured Piet Retief, a Boer leader murdered by the Zulus. The purpose of the outing was to make history come alive for the students. But Dee didn’t need to gaze upon cold marble friezes to grasp the significance of white domination; under apartheid, he lived it.
A more quotidian lesson could be found in the constant police presence in Soweto. That, for Dee, was a live thing: the police were everywhere, rounding up men whose passes weren’t in order. Every day Dee saw long queues of transgressors, miserable and defeated, handcuffed together and sitting on the ground, waiting to be taken to jail. Policemen were the highest figures of authority in the township. It seemed natural that Dee would aspire to enter the profession when he grew up, perhaps as a traffic officer – they got to ride on motorcycles. Then again, maybe he would be a teacher – they dressed better than most of the adults Dee knew.
By the time of Tshepiso’s birth – he was the seventh child – Nomkhitha and Joseph were too burdened to lavish much attention on him. He was left mostly to his own devices. At a young age, Tshepiso developed a loathing for school: he despised the overcrowded classroom, the single, harassed teacher, the long list of supplementary reading his parents could not afford. He had to beg his friends to share their books with him. His teacher tormented him on the subject constantly. ‘Where is your book?’ she would demand in front of the class. Next week, Tshepiso always stammered, I promise I’ll buy it next week. But Joseph never had the money until much too late in the school year. The next week Tshepiso would be subjected to the same humiliating interrogation.
Despite his antipathy to school, Tshepiso – as was characteristic of Nomkhitha’s children – loved to read. Mpho supplied him with cast-off books. Tshepiso developed a reputation as the laziest of the siblings: he would stumble from his bed, search around the house for a book, then – instead of doing his chores – crawl back beneath the blankets to read. He spent hours engrossed in magazines, newspapers, paperbacks, any printed material he could find. Only Nomkhitha’s threats of retribution would rouse him from his reverie.
His ardour for reading notwithstanding, Tshepiso was, in other respects, a typical township boy. He excelled at removing the spokes from abandoned bicycle wheels and, using a wire as a kind of prod, conducting races through the streets of Soweto. He collected large pieces of scrap metal to make into sledges for the sandy hills that dotted the township. He created catapults from smashed bottles, arrows from sticks and bits of wire; these he employed in competitions among his younger siblings and friends to shoot down birds.
Tshepiso found it difficult being part of so large a family. He sucked his thumb until he was seven and was tortured by his older brothers for it – they smeared his thumb with chili peppers as a deterrent. In another act of dissuasion, they inflicted small cuts with a razor blade on the top of the digit. Tshepiso saw his siblings not only as tormentors, but as the cause of his poverty. His house felt suffocatingly crammed, especially at night when everyone was present. Joseph and Nomkhitha slept in one bedroom, the latest baby between them. The older children stayed in the dining room: they pushed the table to one side and pulled out a bed from underneath a sofa. The youngest ones – Tshepiso included – slept in the other bedroom, packed into beds, squeezed onto the floor. Tshepiso would dream that his house had miraculously expanded during the night; on waking, he peered around the room, hoping to see wide spaces beyond the bodies of his sleeping brothers.
By Tshepiso’s calculations, fewer brothers would have meant more money for the things he coveted. He yearned to buy a proper lunch at school. With the coins he received from his parents, he could only purchase bread and potatoes from the old grannies who sold food at the schoolyard gates; other kids (whom Tshepiso suspected came from smaller families) bought bits of meat for their sandwiches, cold drinks, ice cream. His school uniform caused him similar misery. The black shorts, white shirt, jersey, socks and black shoes cost more than a domestic worker’s monthly wage and the uniform the children received each Christmas had to last for the entire year. Tshepiso washed one of his two shirts every night. He brushed and pressed his single pair of shorts after each use, until they were shiny and threadbare. He stitched the holes that seemed to appear daily in his shoes. Tshepiso longed for shirts and shorts enough to last the entire week, and for a trunkful of shoes.
To have a more prosperous life, his parents told him, you must stay in school. But from a young age, Tshepiso understood the limits of even a good education. White people ruled them. He had seen how at night, Johannesburg, the white man’s city, shimmered with light; it seemed to Tshepiso the very essence of hope. Soweto was always in darkness.
Nomkhitha exerted the most influence over the children when they were very young. She was their confidante, the one they played with and cuddled. After work and on Sunday afternoons, Nomkhitha would sit with them on the veranda, talking, telling stories, teasing.
But as the boys grew, Joseph became the figure of authority. They craved his approval; each wanted to be his favourite. This was no easy thing. Joseph held himself apart as a strict disciplinarian – so strict, in fact, that neighbourhood parents used to compel good behaviour in their children by invoking his name. If Joseph found one of his sons being disobedient, he made the child lie down on the bedroom floor; Joseph then took off his belt and gave him a beating. (Behind his back, the boys called him ‘The Sheriff’. Rocks thought up the nickname from the Westerns he read).
Misconduct was subject to punishment by the belt. One day, Cougar, Mpho and about a dozen friends were putting small rocks on the rail lines near the house for trains to crush. The boys could have been electrocuted by the line or caused a train to derail. Suddenly, Joseph appeared on the other side of the lines and emitted a low whistle. Cougar and Mpho jumped up, terrified; they knew what the whistle meant. Go home immediately, he commanded them, lie down on the bedroom floor and wait for me to return.
Joseph had an array of belts with which to inflict punishment; some hurt more than others. The most feared was the one the children called Paris, after its manufacturer’s name. As painful as the beatings were, the boys preferred to have them administered immediately. Often, Nomkhitha would note a transgression, with a promise to inform Joseph. Then the culprit lived in unbearable anticipation for days.
(Smoking was another major offence; the children avoided smoking in Joseph’s presence. Of all the things Mpho would receive in jail after his arrest in 1977, none touched him more than the three packets of cigarettes his father included in his bundle. Mpho had thought Joseph unaware of his addiction.)
Beyond his authoritarianism, Joseph’s religiosity had the greatest influence on his children. He had switched to the Methodist Church, Nomkhitha’s denomination, because of disputes among the ministers in his Presbyterian parish. Joseph found the Methodist traditions powerful and satisfying. Every Sunday he donned the dark suit jacket, red waistcoat, grey flannel trousers, white shirt, black tie and lapel pin of his men’s guild. He sat with the other guild members at the front of church; seated near them were the manyano, or women’s guild. The married ones wore orange jackets, white collars, white caps, black skirts, black shoes and stockings. The single women’s garb was reversed: white jackets with orange collars. The guild members faced the congregants and the rows of hard, wooden pews. Small children, who maintained a murmur of babble throughout the service, played on the worn linoleum floor.
At a raised lectern, the preacher delivered the weekly sermon. He became intensely animated when expounding on a particular biblical passage, gesticulating with both arms and raising his voice to a fevered pitch. Behind him, a simple crucifix hung on the wall; a purple cloth, embroidered with the words ‘God is Love’, covered the altar. The members of the men’s guild listened intently to the sermon. Some held their heads in concentration; others, like Joseph, wiped tears from their cheeks.
When the service ended, the guild members rose from their seats. Pounding leather pillows like small drums and dancing in place, they exhorted the congregation to stand. The worshippers swayed and clapped their hands, their voices lifted in song; those who were moved by the preacher’s homily came forward to testify to their faith. The congregants responded with shouts of ‘Yes! Yes!’ and punctuated the end of each testimony with hauntingly beautiful hymns. The ceremony gladdened Joseph’s heart. For two short hours each week, he could forget about the terrors of apartheid: the police, the white bosses, the need to hide one’s true feelings, to act submissive. All that seemed to melt away in church. Here Joseph could express himself. He could allow himself to feel all the things denied him in his daily life. Here he felt free.
To ensure that his children found a similar refuge in the church, Joseph made religion a principal feature of their lives. He insisted they attend church services and Sunday school. On Wednesday nights, Joseph took them to interdenominational prayer meetings at private houses in the neighborhood. Saturday nights were given over to gatherings of the Independent Order of True Templars, a teetotalist group. The children’s branch, the Band of Hope, presented plays and concerts and held picnics. The older boys joined the Methodist Young Men’s Guild. They sang in the church choir. For a brief time, Mpho considered studying for the ministry. They all admired Joseph who, with tears coursing down his face, could enrapture a congregation with his preaching. (Dee believed that Mashinini men cried at the slightest provocation; it was as though they carried an overflowing tank of tears around on their backs.)
Their religious training left a deep impression on all the children. (Even as a freedom fighter years later, Rocks would pray in the guerrilla camps of Angola.) But the very education that their parents championed made the boys turn away from the church; they came to see it as something that blinded Joseph to South Africa’s political realities. With few exceptions, the various denominations discouraged resistance to apartheid. Liberation theology, which provided the moral justification for so many rebellions in Latin America, was virtually unknown in South Africa until the 1970s. Instead, the children saw a Church that urged prayer as the path to a better future. In their view, Joseph was waiting for a miracle that would never happen.
The boys also came to believe such passiveness perpetuated a sense of impotence among blacks. Joseph himself felt helpless to protect his children from the arbitrariness of apartheid; the political repression following the Rivonia Trial terrified him. He found security in the daily routine of work, home and church. In a world gone mad, the unvarying procedure provided a feeling of control in his life. It also, in his children’s view, bound him: Joseph could not see how things could possibly change. To upset the existing state of affairs was to invite disaster. Better to accept the daily injustices and find the beauty and glory of life elsewhere.
His children had a different sense of their place in the world. By the end of the 1960s, a new ideology began to sprout among university students: called Black Consciousness, it came into being as a rejection of white student leadership. (The youth organizations, with their multiracial membership, were virtually the only groups that actively protested injustices against blacks during the quiescence of the 1960s.) The ‘black power’ movement in the US greatly influenced the proponents of Black Consciousness, both in ideology and rhetoric. Black Consciousness insisted on the primacy of regaining self-confidence and a sense of independence. ‘Black man, you are on your own’, became its rallying cry.
The Black Consciousness activists launched education and community action campaigns throughout South Africa, aimed at reviving self-reliance among blacks. Their approach shocked white liberals. The refusal to accept white assistance of any sort and the insistance on creating exclusively black-run organizations seemed a kind of reverse apartheid. The movement’s most eloquent and potent proponent was Steve Biko, a medical student at Natal University. (His death in 1977, after being beaten and tortured while in police detention, would cause an international outcry.) With echoes of its counterpart in the US, the concepts of Black Consciousness seized a generation of youngsters who knew little of the ANC.
They saw the ideology’s practical application in the ascendance of a black government in neighbouring Mozambique. In 1974, the dictatorship in Portugal collapsed, bringing to a halt the independence wars being waged in its African colonies. In Mozambique, the Portuguese withdrew and the Mozambican Liberation Front (FRELIMO, in Portuguese) took power in 1975. It was a stunning event. Here was an example on South Africa’s own doorstep of a black nationalist movement that had succeeded. White colonialists had been expelled, black freedom fighters had assumed control. Victory was possible. On black campuses across the country students devoured FRELIMO propaganda. Graffiti of ‘Viva FRELIMO!’ suddenly appeared on walls. The takeover also captured the imagination of liberal white youths: the Mozambican flag was raised on the central administration building of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where it fluttered briefly before being pulled down by right-wing students.
Unknown to Nomkhitha or Joseph, their two oldest sons had become involved in politics. It seemed inevitable: the high school Rocks and Tsietsi attended, Morris Issacson, was one of the most politically active in the township. Abraham Tiro, a charismatic Black Consciousness leader taught there for a while; he had a profound influence that continued long after his departure. (Tiro was later killed by a letter bomb in Botswana.) The school’s principal, although not outwardly an activist, permitted his pupils to form political organizations. (At other schools, more conservative administrators suppressed anything vaguely resembling opposition to the government.)
The boys’ political inclinations were as different as their personalities. Rocks embraced Black Consciousness while in high school. But he became disillusioned with the politics of protest; swayed by the writings of American black militants such as Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, Rocks concluded that armed struggle was the only way to liberate South Africa. That view was reinforced after he surreptitiously obtained banned literature on the ANC. (The students who had the forbidden books would pass them to Rocks, covered in brown paper to hide the titles, in the lavatory.) Rocks adhered to his conviction after he received a scholarship in 1974 from Joseph’s employer and went to study civil engineering at a technical college in Pietersburg, in the north.
There, having realized his parents’ dream of a chance at an education, Rocks decided to join the ANC. He knew the organization had a representative in Swaziland. One day, he and a friend rented a car and drove over the border to Mbabane. They managed to meet with the representative, who directed them to people in Johannesburg. Eventually, Rocks made contact with Indres Naidoo, a third-generation member of the ANC who was among the first Umkhonto recruits. In 1963, Indres had been sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for sabotage; on his release in 1973, he was put under house arrest. Still, Indres organized political classes for Rocks and several other young men. The tutorials met for one hour on Saturday afternoons in Dornfontein, a commercial section of Johannesburg. A black woman who ran a large furniture store and was sympathetic to the ANC allowed them to use a back room. Indres demanded strict punctuality from his pupils. The first lesson examined the Freedom Charter; Indres dissected it, clause by clause. The next lesson analysed the alliance between the ANC and the South African Communist Party. Then Indres discussed the Defiance Campaign. And so on, until he had covered the whole modern history of the ANC.
At the same time, Indres was setting up an underground organization to send recruits abroad for military training. He worked with Joe Gqabi, another early Umkhonto volunteer who had also recently been released from prison. Indres would sit on a bench in a downtown park, eating his lunch; Joe, strolling by, casually joined him. There they discussed potential enlistments to their guerrilla army. (The underground group also had an office on Commissioner Street, in the heart of Johannesburg’s business district. Ostensibly an insurance company, the site was considered too unsafe to carry on such sensitive conversations.)
Despite Rocks’ repeated request to be sent overseas for military instruction, Indres and Joe decided to keep him in the country. They were eager to build cells that would operate within South Africa and wanted Rocks to be a part of those structures. Indres entrusted him with distributing smuggled ANC and South African Communist Party literature. The illicit material had to be photocopied, then delivered to the appropriate people. It was dangerous but vital work. Virtually unknown in the townships, the ANC could not compete with the Black Consciousness movement without disseminating its own propaganda. Indres thought Rocks perfect for the job. From their first meeting, the youth had impressed Indres with his seriousness and keen intellect. Rocks was forever encouraging his fellow recruits to broaden themselves by reading; he particularly recommended the novels of Hemingway, Zola, Gorky and Sinclair because of their social commentary.
Rocks successfully hid his ANC work from Nomkhitha and Joseph. They believed he was busy studying to become an engineer at school in Pietersburg. If Rocks appeared regularly at the house in Soweto on Saturday afternoons, it was because he liked coming home. Only Tsietsi had an inkling of Rock’s political involvement, after Rocks began passing pamphlets from the ANC and South African Communist Party to him.
Tsietsi, meanwhile, had become steeped in Black Consciousness ideology. He was drawn to the clubs that sprang up in Soweto under the patronage of the South African Students’ Movement (SASM), a Black Consciousness youth organization. They offered an array of cultural activities to the township youngsters; the emphasis on black pride and self-reliance fitted well with Tsietsi’s loathing of whites.
He was an eager participant in a meeting in 1975 to form an SASM branch at Morris Issacson. Flyers inviting students to the assembly were distributed throughout the school and the turnout was enormous. Tsietsi, as always, mesmerized the crowd with his oratory; they subsequently elected him president. His was a small branch. Most students were too frightened to join the organization openly; they knew how severely the security police dealt with Black Consciousness proponents on the university campuses. Still, SASM had strong support within the school. At the branch’s monthly meeting, its officers usually presented a programme of cultural interest: a Black Consciousness speaker, a poetry reading, a discussion of African literature. The meeting room was always crammed.
As president, Tsietsi cultivated supporters outside the school like Khotso, the boy he had met after the debate at Naledi High School. At the time, Khotso was vehemently against organizations such as SASM; he thought of them as endless debating forums whose discourses could land you in jail. Khotso wanted only to get hold of a gun and overthrow the government. Tsietsi explained that while armed struggle was an inevitable step in the revolution, a political structure was needed before waging war. Patiently, he began schooling Khotso in the ways of Black Consciousness: whites in this country are defining us, Tsietsi explained, and we must begin to define ourselves. We’re not ‘non-white’, we’re black. To assist Khotso in his self-discovery, Tsietsi provided reading material: James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael. The banned books opened up new worlds for Khotso. He, like many young black South Africans, was profoundly influenced by the civil rights literature from the US.
Khotso and Tsietsi were constantly arguing. Theirs was an intellectual relationship: Khotso read a book, then debated its merits with Tsietsi. (As friends, they also argued the merits of football clubs and certain girls.) By March 1976, Tsietsi had converted Khotso to the SASM camp. He convinced Khotso to recruit other students to the organization. Tsietsi didn’t want them as formal, dues-paying members, but as partisans. He believed they were embarking on a quest for psychological liberation.
In fact, they were rushing towards a future that no one, not even the youths in their most fanciful imaginings, could foretell.
