Читать книгу A Burning Hunger - Lynda Schuster - Страница 15
ОглавлениеCHAPTER FOUR
The Children
The rioting in Soweto continued for two more days. Battles raged throughout the township: bands of angry youths set fire to government buildings, throwing stones and bottles at the assembled police. It spread to central Johannesburg when about 300 white students at the University of the Witwatersrand marched from the campus to protest against the indiscriminate killing of schoolchildren in Soweto. Several hundred black workers joined in the demonstration. About a hundred white vigilantes, brandishing knives, metal pipes and clubs, attacked the demonstrators; arriving at the scene, a group of security officers beat the marchers with batons.
Soweto’s near-anarchy, and the government’s response, stunned South Africans. Not since the massacre at Sharpeville in 1960 had they witnessed anything of this magnitude. Editorials in the English-language press, the voice of the white opposition, blamed the Nationalist government for ignoring an obviously volatile situation. They demanded an immediate accession to the students’ demands. Some black newspapers called for an end to apartheid itself.
But the Nationalists – at least publicly – professed to be as shocked as anyone. The Minister of Justice and Police, James Kruger, told members of Parliament that the government did ‘not expect anything like this to happen’; agitators, he said, were to blame. To quell the unrest, the government sent 1,500 police into Soweto and effectively sealed off the township. Armed with automatic rifles and other guns, the security men appeared to shoot randomly into the crowds of black youngsters; often, they simply fired from their moving vehicles. The police also shot at people out of the helicopters that dropped tear gas on the township.
Their tactics worked. By the end of the third day, the fighting began to abate. Nearly 200 people had died; thousands of others were wounded. One hundred and thirty-nine buildings and 143 vehicles, many of them belonging to the police, had been demolished or wrecked. But the uprising was hardly finished. Like a forest fire that sputters and dies, only to re-ignite elsewhere, violence erupted in countless other townships across the country.
In Soweto, the police started to raid the Mashininis’ home at night, ostensibly looking for Tsietsi. The first raid was terrifying. The police came at about two o’clock in the morning, blocking off the surrounding streets with their ‘hippos’. Nomkhitha and Joseph awoke to a deafening pounding on the door; torches shone in every window, illuminating the policemen with their guns drawn. They screamed in Afrikaans to open the door. Joseph let them in and about a dozen security men, black and white, rampaged through the house, shining their lights in the eyes of the sleep-dazed children, pawing through wardrobes, peering under beds and behind the stove, tearing apart furnishings in their search. A white officer demanded to see Tsietsi.
‘He isn’t here, he never came home,’ Nomkhitha stammered, drawing a blanket around her nightgown.
‘Where is he staying?’
‘We don’t know.’
Disgruntled, the policemen stormed out of the house. Joseph, Nomkhitha and the children stood silently around the dining-room table, trying to calm their pounding hearts; the littlest ones shivered from the cold and fear. Nomkhitha put the younger children back into bed. Then she, Joseph and the others began tidying up the chaos the police had left in their wake. They had just finished and were drifting off to sleep when they heard a thunderous noise: torches shone in every window, guns appeared silhouetted against the light, men yelled in Afrikaans that they were going to kick in the door. Joseph raced from his bed to unlock the bolt. And another raid began.
From that time forward, night after night, the police conducted raids on the Mashinini home. Often, they came several times within the span of a few hours. They inflicted a kind of psychological terror upon the family, especially on the youngest members. As the last rays of sunlight disappeared and darkness descended on the township, some of the younger children would start asking Nomkhitha, ‘Will the police come tonight? Will the police come tonight?’ They took to waking at every noise, running to their parents’ bed. At the first hint of the approaching ‘hippos’, the youngsters roused everyone; the family was usually waiting for the police when they came.
Eventually, Nomkhitha’s exhaustion and fury at having her home violated overpowered her fear. ‘Get out of my bedroom!’ she shrieked at the policemen busy dumping the contents of her dresser on the floor. ‘How dare you touch my things!’ Once, she began scolding the security men about their weapons. ‘I will not answer your questions if you have all these big guns in my house. Get out with these guns, they are frightening my children, they can’t sleep at night.’ Surprisingly, the policemen complied by putting the larger weapons outside in their cars; the commanding officer explained to Joseph they had to keep their sidearms for their own protection.
On another occasion, Nomkhitha refused to respond to their interrogation until they sat down on chairs. ‘It’s not my culture!’ she shouted at one group. ‘Take seats if you want to talk to me. Take seats!’ Nomkhitha yelled at the policemen in Xhosa and English; they swore back at her in Afrikaans, muttering about this kaffir bitch who gives birth to terrorists. The adversaries made for a striking scene, exchanging insults in mutually unintelligible languages in the dead of night.
Nomkhitha’s stridency drove Joseph mad. In contrast to his wife, Joseph was calm, polite, careful not to do anything to upset the intruders. After the police left, Joseph would beseech Nomkhitha not to provoke them; he feared the security officers might do something horrible because of her belligerence. Nomkhitha retorted that he was too passive. But her outbursts frightened the children too. Tshepiso would clamp his hands over his ears to shut out the exchanges between his mother and the policemen, repeating to himself: I wish she would be quiet, I wish she would be quiet.
Even after the security officers withdrew, the Mashinini house remained under constant surveillance. A Volkswagen Beetle was always parked, rather conspicuously, across the street; a second one was stationed up the road. Nonetheless, Tsietsi managed to sneak home every few days. He would furtively approach the back of his family’s lot and peer through the leaves that covered the fence. If no policemen were visible, he would give a high-pitched whistle that his siblings recognized. The noise brought them racing to the yard. Tsietsi sent one of them to the front as a lookout, while the others eagerly plied him with questions about his activities. He recounted stories of his escapades and taught the youngsters revolutionary slogans. ‘Amandla!’ they chanted, their clenched fists punching the air, ‘Black Power!’ If he were feeling particularly bold, Tsietsi entered the house to have a bath, change his clothes, eat a meal – all the while singing anti-apartheid songs. Sometimes he stayed for as long as an hour. Then Tsietsi would creep back to the fence, check the area for ‘hippos’, and disappear into the labyrinth of Soweto’s back-yards.
Nomkhitha eagerly awaited Tsietsi’s visits; they allowed her to know that he was alive. But she also feared for his safety every minute he spent at home. With all the raids and surveillance, the police were bound to find Tsietsi in the house one day. Nomkhitha could not understand why they kept missing him. She began to suspect they were trailing Tsietsi, hoping he would lead them to fellow student leaders. Or perhaps the black policemen, who often watched the house without their white commanding officer, secretly sympathized with the uprising.
Although the police did not catch Tsietsi, they almost captured Rocks. He had returned to Soweto when his college closed a few days after the uprising began. Rocks slept at home on the first night; after experiencing the police raids, he decided it would be safer to stay with friends. He went back to the house at the end of the week to retrieve his luggage, which he had posted to himself. Rocks was in the bedroom, examining the banned literature that filled the suitcase and waiting for Tshepiso to bring him a sandwich from a nearby café, when the police surrounded the house. Rocks tried to flee through the back door, but to no avail: policemen, their guns drawn, were everywhere.
Rocks opened the door. The police swarmed into the room; an officer ordered Rocks to produce his pass book. ‘Where is Tsietsi?’ he demanded. ‘Where does he sleep?’
‘I really don’t know, I’ve just got back from college,’ Rocks answered, speaking rapidly. ‘Look, here’s my ID, here’s my suitcase, you can see where it was sent from. I have no idea where Tsietsi is.’
The officer ordered his men to search the house; one of them looked at the labels on the closed suitcase without bothering to open it. The policemen marched Rocks outside, presumably to take him away for interrogation. By then, a mass of youths from the neighbourhood had gathered around the patrol cars. Perhaps concerned about causing yet another violent incident, the officer told Rocks to report to a particular room at police headquarters the next day. As the security men drove away, Tshepiso appeared with Rocks’ food. Unnerved by the encounter, Rocks told Tshepiso to eat the sandwich; he grabbed his suitcase and left.
For the first weeks after the uprising, Tsietsi and his fellow activists helped with the burials of the children who had been killed by the police. This was no easy task. The government refused to publish a list of the dead; the Action Committee members had to rely on rumours of which families had been affected and where they resided. The student leaders were helped by the Black Parents’ Association, a newly formed group of Soweto professionals. The BPA got undertakers to donate coffins to the grieving families and the taxi association to provide, at no cost, 700 taxis for transportation to the funerals. Tsietsi spent his days traversing Soweto with Winnie Mandela, a prominent figure in the BPA.
Around this time, the few representatives of the exiled liberation organizations in South Africa attempted to recruit Tsietsi and other members of the Action Committee. Tsietsi debated with Khotso Seatlholo the merits of the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress, and rejected them both. Tsietsi sensed the groups were trying to steal the students’ glory and take credit for the uprising. ‘Where have these guys been all these years?’ he asked Khotso. Tsietsi was most disturbed by the ANC’s Freedom Charter; he could not accept the idea that the country belonged to everyone who lived there. Whites, he believed, tended to impose themselves and their vision on the fight for liberation. It was not for them to tell blacks how to conduct their struggle.
Tsietsi preferred the advice of veterans like Drake Koka, who had remained in the country and assimilated the militancy of the Black Consciousness movement. Besides being a leader in the movement, Drake had the additional allure of having organized an independent black trade union. Tsietsi and some of his colleagues met with Drake late on Wednesday nights in a house in Dube. They christened it ‘The House of Exile’, after a Jimmy Cliff song: the conspirators anticipated they would soon be in exile because of their activities. Drake discussed political theory and strategy with his young disciples. He bombarded them with basic questions: What are you going to do next? Whom are you going to mobilize? What kind of pamphlets will you produce? Which people will you target?
The youngsters differed from the activists of the 1950s in their restless eagerness. Nelson Mandela’s generation had been willing to work, slowly and methodically, towards their goals. By contrast, Tsietsi and his counterparts were impatient to do things that seemed rash and immature; the victories in Mozambique and Angola dazzled the youths, at times clouding their judgement. They often clashed with their mentor. Still, Tsietsi struck Drake as extraordinary, possessing a fearless nature and charisma which, in Drake’s view, were the essence of leadership.
The student activists understood they had a unique opportunity. After toiling for years to build a following, a single event had suddenly engaged Soweto’s youngsters. Now they had to devise a way to tap that politicization. Drake and other, more experienced, government opponents pressed the students to think beyond the narrow issue of Afrikaans instruction. A sustainable revolt needed to embrace a broad range of grievances; it should also attempt to involve adults.
As a first step, the Action Committee members decided to enlarge their group to include representatives from every secondary and junior secondary institution in Soweto. Tsietsi and his colleagues traversed the township after classes resumed at the end of July, urging students to send delegates from each school to a meeting at Morris Issacson High School on August 2. They also exhorted youngsters to return to classes, which many were still boycotting; school was the only place in which everyone could be organized.
Dozens of students appeared at Morris Issacson on the appointed day, dressed in their respective uniforms. (The school’s principal sympathized with the uprising and turned a blind eye to their presence.) Tsietsi presided over the meeting. Two students from each of the township’s forty secondary schools were elected as representatives. Tsietsi retained his position of chairman; Murphy Morobe became the vice-chairman, replacing Seth Mazibuko, who had been detained after June 16. During a break in the proceedings, the journalist Duma Ndlovu sought out Tsietsi and a few of his colleagues. ‘What do I call you guys now?’ he asked. After some discussion, Duma dubbed them the Soweto Students’ Representative Council; the group’s new title, along with the photograph he took of Tsietsi, arms upraised in triumph, appeared in Duma’s story the next day.
When the meeting resumed, Tsietsi launched into a forceful argument for organizing a march into town and a general strike. The two protests had been planned in advance by the old Action Committee at the urging of Drake Koka and others. Tsietsi told the representatives that the students would march to the security police headquarters in Johannesburg on August 4 to demand the release of the detainees. If we take our demonstration into town where there are lots of whites, Tsietsi asserted, the police will be loath to shoot so readily.
Students would involve their parents by convincing them to stay away from work for three days, beginning on August 4. The strike was intended to show support for the children’s demands. The school representatives peppered Tsietsi with questions about the stay-away; with little knowledge of the ANC’s protest campaigns of the 1950s, they were incredulous. Tsietsi explained: We don’t have guns, but we have economic power. If our parents don’t go to work for even a half-day, think of how much white South Africa could lose. If we hurt the capitalists, those capitalists are going to start talking to the government. And the government will have to address our demands.
The representatives agreed to both proposals. They also decided that the Black Parents’ Association would present a list of demands about Bantu education, on their behalf, to the government. The meeting adjourned on a buoyant note: everyone was eager to begin the protests again. Mpho, who had been elected as a representative of his school, was preparing to leave the hall when Tsietsi stopped him. ‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing?’ Tsietsi asked softly. Mpho nodded. ‘You know, if I had my way, you wouldn’t be here,’ Tsietsi continued. Mpho nodded again, thrilled at his brother’s concern. Tsietsi enquired about Joseph and Nomkhitha and the raids on the house until a group of admirers engulfed him, cutting off the brothers and ending their conversation.
Tsietsi and his colleagues spent the next two days working furiously to organize the protests. Word quickly spread among students of the impending march. But the Soweto Students’ Representative Council (or SSRC, as it came to be known) wanted the youngsters to give their parents pamphlets about the stay-away. The activists used various sources to produce the literature, Drake Koka among them. Drake found a young printer in Johannesburg who sympathized with the uprising and convinced him it was his duty to help.
He met the printer at his building at midnight. After paying the watchman a small bribe to gain entry, the two conspirators worked almost until dawn. Drake sent the printer home to the township in a taxi; he did not want the young man to risk being caught in Drake’s car with the illegal literature. Drake stuffed the pamphlets into three boxes, which he placed on the back seat of his Volkswagen Beetle. He planned to leave them at an agreed site, to be retrieved and distributed by his young protégés. On the front passenger seat, Drake put a large birthday cake for his daughter’s party in the afternoon. Then he started for Soweto.
A policeman stopped him at a roadblock on the outskirts of the township. Drake immediately hopped out of the car and opened the boot, which was empty. ‘Ah, you know what to do!’ the policeman said in Afrikaans.
‘Yes, baas,’ Drake replied, playing the meek African. ‘I want to help as much as possible. Oh, these tsotsis, they’re doing such terrible things.’
Pleased, the policeman strolled around the Beetle and saw the cake sitting on the front seat. ‘Is it someone’s birthday then?’
‘Yes, baas, my little girl. And we would be honoured if you could come around and join us for a cup of tea this afternoon.’
Seeming more pleased, the officer declined. He told Drake he could go – without bothering to examine the contents of the boxes on the back seat. Drake jumped into the car and drove off, sweat pouring down his back.
On the morning of August 4, before daylight, thousands of youngsters descended on Soweto’s railway stations. They posted themselves at the entrances, armed with placards that read Azikhwelwa! – We won’t ride. (The slogan came from the protest campaigns of the 1940s and 1950s; students plucked it from a banned book recounting the history of the anti-apartheid struggle.) Those adults who tried to push their way into the stations were assaulted by the youths, sometimes with stones. Commuters in vehicles fared little better: the students erected roadblocks at the edge of the township, stopping cars that tried to pass and threatening their drivers.
The SSRC’s march began later in the morning. The plan was much the same as that of June 16, with older students setting off from their respective schools and gathering others along the way. Tsietsi led the group from Morris Issacson. This time, the demonstrators brandished placards of a different sort: ‘Release the Detained Students’ they demanded; and ‘It Happened In Mozambique, It Can Happen Here’. The change reflected an evolution from protesting against forced Afrikaans instruction to opposing the political system itself. Indeed, the government had relented on the language issue when schools reopened in July, but the uprising had, by now, progressed too far. And, in contrast with June 16, this time thousands of adults who had not gone to work joined the young demonstrators. An estimated 15,000 people converged on a main road leading out of Soweto to march into town; they were a disciplined group, flashing peace signs at policemen who lined the streets and calling out to black security officers to join them.
A barricade of ‘hippos’ stopped the marchers near the New Canada railway station at the north-eastern edge of the township. Using loudhailers, the police instructed the demonstrators to return home; when they tried to advance, the police began lobbing tear gas into the crowd. The marchers stopped and regrouped. With shouts of ‘Peace!’ and ‘We only want our brothers who are in prison!’ they again attempted to continue along the road. Now the police opened up with large quantities of tear gas, chasing the marchers from the area. Incensed, the youngsters retaliated by burning down the houses of black policemen, attacking other buildings and destroying vehicles. Soweto was alight once again.
The violence continued for several days; Tsietsi explained the youths’ actions in a lengthy interview in The World newspaper. ‘The students felt they had had enough,’ he said, ‘not only of the system of oppression at school, but of the system of this country – the way people are ruled, the way the laws are made by the White minority and all that. Students had had enough of what was being given to them by the White man, our parents and our teachers . . . What the people of today, especially the White people, should realize is that the student of today is not saying the people must be free, but the people will be free. I believe the time is near when people will be free.’
Despite the failure of the marchers to gain entry to Johannesburg, the SSRC leaders were encouraged by the protests, especially the stay-away. They saw the latter as having great potential to damage the government. Tsietsi and his colleagues immediately began planning for another strike later in the month; the more workers they could draw in, the more successful it would be. They found the preparations difficult. For reasons of security, the SSRC leadership led a kind of nocturnal existence, working from late in the afternoon until the early hours of the morning. Tsietsi again went from school to school, trying to keep morale up and resentment against the police simmering. He warned students against intimidating adults this time. The idea, he said, is not to confront them on the morning of August 24 – the date of the next stay-away – but to educate and prepare them.
The brutal methods the police employed to crush their rebellion made some on the SSRC yearn for more radical measures. At a meeting to complete the details of the stay-away, Tsietsi was suddenly called from the room. Khotso Seatlholo took over as chairman; he managed to convince the representatives they ought to attempt another march into town. ‘We will always be easy targets for the police in the township,’ Khotso warned. ‘We are dying in Soweto, but that doesn’t affect whites in any way.’
When Tsietsi returned, Khotso informed him they were discarding the idea of a strike in favour of a march. Tsietsi rejected it as a failed strategy. ‘Whites seem to value property more than lives,’ he said. ‘They’ll still shoot at us, whether we’re in town or in the township. So why waste our lives? We can do something much quieter and more effective: hit them where it hurts, in their wallet.’ At that, Tsietsi called for a vote; the representatives agreed to pursue the stay-away. (Tsietsi later issued a statement to the press that condemned ‘police action in Soweto by irresponsibly shooting at students on their way to school or black children playing in the location as it has been reported in the newspapers. We see it as an unofficial declaration of war on black students by our “peace-officers”.’)
Tsietsi’s identification as the president of the SSRC, his photograph in the newspapers, his public statements – all seemed to taunt the government and intensify its determination to arrest him. Unable to catch Tsietsi at home, the police tried another tack. They claimed that for his own security, Tsietsi ought to hand himself over to the authorities; a group of disgruntled workers wanted to kill him because of the uprising. When that failed, the police posted a 500 rand reward for information leading to his arrest. Tsietsi Mashinini was now the most hunted man in South Africa.
Suddenly, people who had shunned Joseph and Nomkhitha offered to hide their son. The Mashininis took a dim view of such proposals. The reward was the equivalent of a year’s salary for a domestic worker and thus a considerable temptation, especially to poor township residents. The SSRC officers were equally sceptical and decided to limit knowledge of Tsietsi’s whereabouts to two people. Barney Makgatle, who was older than most of the activists, became Tsietsi’s chauffeur. He had years of driving experience, knew the township’s byways, and could spot a roadblock from a long distance. Selby Semela, another SSRC member, took on the role of companion to Tsietsi. A measured, cautious youth, Selby often acted as a balance to Tsietsi’s extreme self-confidence. They made for a strange trio: the driver, the comrade and the impassioned leader, traversing the township at odd hours, addressing students at various schools, distributing pamphlets, sleeping in a new safe house each night.
Tsietsi began to lead the police on a chase. With Drake Koka providing an ever-changing array of cars, a mythology arose about Tsietsi’s ability to evade capture. People likened him to Nelson Mandela, who was given the apartheid-modified appellation of the Black Pimpernel in the early 1960s for his escapades while being hunted by the government. One such story about Tsietsi had him presiding over a meeting of SSRC members at Morris Issacson High School when it was surrounded by security officers. Acting on information that Tsietsi was inside, they made the youths leave the building one by one. Tsietsi, dressed in girls’ dungarees and a beret, sauntered past the policemen; they looked him up and down – and let him pass.
Another tale put him at Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto in the middle of the day. Poppy Buthelezi, a young girl who had been shot by the police on June 16 and was paralysed from the waist down, was hospitalized there. As the weeks passed and the uprising progressed, she heard the parents of other wounded students muttering about how this was all the fault of Tsietsi Mashinini. One afternoon, a young man bearing a large basket of fruit appeared on the ward. Striding over to Poppy’s bed, he handed her the delicacies. ‘Tell them you got this from Tsietsi Mashinini’, he said, then disappeared down the hallway.
One such story was immortalized on film. Drake had asked a friend’s grandson, who was visiting from Germany, if he could rent a car in his name; since the grandson was unknown to the police, the vehicle most likely would not raise suspicion. The young man agreed. Drake rented a small grey car and gave it to Tsietsi and his companions to use. With no real purpose and full of teenage bravado, they drove it directly to the Moroka police station in Soweto, where they remained for a time. As they left the car park, the youths thrust their fists out of the windows in the black power salute – a gesture that was captured on film by a passing photographer, Peter Magubane. Drake would see the picture on display in London after he went into exile. He was astounded by the spectacle: the apartheid regime’s ‘most wanted’ fugitive sitting on the doorstep of the police, virtually daring them to look up from their desks and arrest him.
Nomkhitha feared Tsietsi’s luck would not hold. And, if the police did capture him, she believed he would die in detention. The authorities would say he had hanged himself, or jumped from a window, or done any of the other implausible things they gave as explanations for the scores of activists who died while in police custody. Tsietsi scoffed at Nomkhitha when she spoke of her concern. ‘I wish I could see my funeral,’ he laughed, with all the arrogance of youth. To a black journalist, Tsietsi said: ‘I don’t say they can’t get me. I know they can kill me any time. What they don’t know is that they cannot kill the spirit. They will kill me now, but there will be another Tsietsi, a day or even an hour later.’
Despite the brave talk, Tsietsi understood the precariousness of his existence. One night he took Khotso Seatlholo to the weekly meeting at the House of Exile. ‘This young fellow is going to be very close to you,’ Tsietsi said as he introduced Khotso to Drake. ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen, but in the event of a slip-up or my leaving, please give him the same help you’ve given me.’ Turning to Khotso, he added, ‘Any time you do anything as a member of the SSRC, you must consult with Drake.’ The formalities thus completed, Tsietsi and Drake launched into a discussion of the night’s topic: the failures of the first stay-away. Drake criticized the SSRC for not giving workers advance warning of the strike. They need to be better educated, he insisted, and they need more pamphlets. Tsietsi agreed; he and his associates were already addressing the deficiencies as they prepared for the next stay-away.
But Drake doubted whether Tsietsi would live that long. The police now suspected Drake’s involvement with the youth and an officer had told Drake his colleagues would kill Tsietsi when they found him. On the same day, Drake heard that a bullet fired at Tsietsi as he drove through the township had missed his head by millimetres. Drake took the incidents as warnings. Given Tsietsi’s penchant for courting danger, Drake decided he had to find a way to get him out of the country.
He considered several plans, only to discard them for one flaw: transportation. The cars Drake could hire had licence plates from Johannesburg or the seaside city of Durban; a group of young black men travelling in a vehicle from those areas, the scenes of much violence, was sure to attract the attention of the police. Drake confided his frustration to a friend, Reverend Legotlo, a clergyman and political activist who had great sympathy for the uprising. Reverend Legotlo offered to drive Tsietsi across the border in his car. Its licence plates from Pretoria, the country’s capital and an Afrikaner stronghold, would be less conspicuous.
Drake sent an urgent message to Tsietsi that he needed to see him immediately. Despite Drake’s insistence that it had become too dangerous for him to remain, the youth was in no mood to discuss his departure from South Africa. ‘I don’t want to leave the struggle,’ Tsietsi kept repeating. ‘What good will I be in exile?’
‘You’ll continue the struggle outside the country,’ Drake suggested gently.
It took Drake several sessions of such exchanges to convince Tsietsi that he would have meaningful work to do in exile. Tsietsi finally agreed to go, on the condition that Barney and Selby accompany him. As part of his preparations, Tsietsi paid a final visit to Khotso, bringing him a large number of pamphlets; Khotso had been designated as the next SSRC president in the event something happened to Tsietsi. ‘I’m going to have to go sooner or later,’ Tsietsi told his friend. ‘Be very careful after I’ve gone. Don’t be reckless. Don’t sleep in the same place twice in a row. Be sure to see Drake at least once a week.’ With that, Tsietsi bid Khotso farewell.
Tsietsi also went home to say goodbye to his family. His arrival astonished Nomkhitha; she had just read a story in the newspapers, planted by Drake, that Tsietsi had fled South Africa. Tsietsi was delighted by the ruse. Now the road is clear to go, he explained, but would not tell his parents when he was departing or his destination for fear of further implicating them. Nomkhitha kissed and hugged Tsietsi; she clung to him for an extra second, not wanting to let him go. Yet she knew he would be safer outside the country. Nomkhitha took comfort in the belief that he would soon be back; if the uprising continued apace, South Africa would be liberated in just a year or two. Joseph said he wanted to pray. The family formed a circle, joined hands and bowed their heads as Joseph intoned a prayer for his son’s safety. Then Tsietsi left, with a smile and wave of his hand as he vanished into the night.
Drake determined that the youths would leave on August 23 in the evening. On the day of his departure, Tsietsi was interviewed at length by a journalist from Thames Television in London. The reporter and his camera crew were filming a programme on the uprising in the townships and arranged, through Drake, to speak with the student leader. Drake fixed a rendezvous at the Planet Cinema in Fordsburg, an Indian neighbourhood. Tsietsi, Barney and Selby were picked up in front of the cinema and driven to a house in Hyde Park, in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, for the interview. Tsietsi took an instant liking to the reporter and his colleagues, all of whom had the given name of John; he called them ‘The Johns’.
The programme was broadcast in Britain several days later. Entitled There Is No Crisis, it opened with pictures of Soweto in flames. ‘Since June the 16th,’ the voice-over explained, ‘when South African troops and police opened fire on a peaceful schoolchildren’s demonstration, the white government has presided over the largest massacre of its black population since South Africa came into existence. Hundreds of blacks have died, thousands have been wounded. Yet the white Prime Minister says there is no crisis.’
‘The killing started in Soweto, the huge black township outside Johannesburg,’ the narrator continued. ‘On June the 16th, Soweto’s schoolchildren gathered in protest against the introduction of compulsory teaching in Afrikaans, the main dialect of the ruling white minority. They met dogs, tear gas and bullets. The schoolboy who led the protest was nineteen-year-old Tsietsi Mashinini.’
The film cut to Tsietsi dressed in a knitted cap, open shirt, bell-bottom trousers and takkies (sports shoes), sitting in the garden of the house in Hyde Park. He talked about the confrontation between the police and the students. Despite official claims to the contrary, Tsietsi said he knew for a fact that more than 300 people had died by the first weekend of the uprising. He and some friends went to the government mortuary to look for people who were missing and saw bodies with numbers pasted on their foreheads ‘packed like potato sacks’. The highest number was 353.
Tsietsi explained the despair that Bantu education caused. ‘The black student in South Africa’, he said, ‘is being fed the type of education that will domesticate him to be a better tool for the white man when he joins the working community. School libraries, school books, they’ve got nothing to do with civics or anything that is affiliated with politics. We’re fed a lot of fiction stories. We don’t get much works on democracy, communism.’
The interviewer interjected that Tsietsi was most likely being described up and down the country as a communist. Tsietsi scoffed at such a classification. ‘It’s just that in South Africa,’ he replied, ‘if you’re not doing what the government expects you to do, then you’re a communist, of course.’
Producing an edition of The World, the interviewer showed Tsietsi the headlines: ‘Soweto Workers Stay At Home.’ (It was the first day of the second stay-away.) ‘I’m very, very happy,’ Tsietsi said. ‘The idea is that we blacks in South Africa don’t have arms. The only thing we can hit at the system with is to cripple the economy of the country and make our faint cries reach the ears of the authorities. Because apparently if we demonstrate, they just shoot at us. And if they don’t shoot, they detain a whole lot of students. Now we are trying to be as peaceful as possible. Detain the parents at home and the parents are with us and they are prepared to stay at home as long as the students want them to stay at home. With this, we believe the authorities will feel the pinch and some way or the other will have to succumb to our demands.
‘The system has done so many things and so much harm to my people,’ he continued, ‘that the people are no longer interested in having equal rights with the white people of South Africa. They want the tables to be turned so the white man can get a taste of his own medicine and feel what it is like to be oppressed.’
The film cut to a still picture of Tsietsi with his arm raised in a black power salute. ‘Now at nineteen,’ the voice-over explained, ‘Tsietsi Mashinini can expect at best a lifetime in jail if he is caught. As it is, Colonel [J.P.] Visser, head of Soweto CID, has put a 300 pound price on his head. That’s about a year’s pay for a black domestic worker.’
Returning to the Hyde Park garden, the interviewer asked Tsietsi if the police were liable to shoot him on sight. ‘Oh yes, sure,’ Tsietsi replied. ‘What Colonel Visser has been doing is he went to the Black Parents’ Association members and told them that he has official and positive reports that I have a machine gun in my hand. As far as I see it, he has just been trying to create an atmosphere where I can be declared a dangerous element so that when they meet me they don’t want to take me to court and be involved in a lot of legal intricacies. They just want to shoot me on sight and get it over with.’
Interviewer: ‘Realistically, looking at what you’re up against, is not a possibility somewhere in the back of your mind that this might be a futile struggle?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Tsietsi replied. ‘Whatever happens, the black people shall achieve what they want. We are aware that is a long struggle, but in the very near future, we will be what we want to be.’
The reporter, John Fielding, accompanied Tsietsi and his colleagues back to the Planet Cinema after finishing the interview, unaware that the young men were poised to flee the country. (The programme, when it was broadcast, would take note of the fact.) He pressed his business card into Tsietsi’s hand: call me if you’re ever in London, he shouted out the window as the car sped down the deserted street.
Drake and Reverend Legotlo awaited the three youths in the shadows of the cinema. Drake explained the escape plan: the minister would drive them the 650 or so miles to the Botswana frontier, which Tsietsi and his friends would have to cross on foot. The minister, meanwhile, would pass through the border checkpoint legally with his car and wait on the other side to take them to Gaborone, the capital. Reverend Legotlo gave the fugitives church-going clothes to don as a disguise. If the police stopped them along the road, the minister would say they were travelling to a church conference in Botswana.
Drake gave each of the youths 100 rands and wished them Godspeed. ‘Don’t let me rot in Botswana, Godfather,’ Tsietsi whispered in Drake’s ear, hugging him.
‘I give you my word,’ the older man replied.
No one spoke on the journey to the border. Tsietsi and his colleagues were terrified of what might happen when they began their trek on foot; they knew the South African army had orders to shoot anyone trying to cross the frontier. The minister was also grim-faced, checking and re-checking his rearview mirror. As he feared, the group got stopped behind a long line of other vehicles at a police blockade several miles before their destination. Tsietsi and his friends pulled their hats low over their foreheads but remained upright, visible to anyone who cared to look inside the car. Reverend Legotlo hurried outside to the rear of his station wagon and pretended to fix the licence plate.
‘Has my bishop already gone through?’ he asked the policeman who slowly made his way around the vehicle, glancing in the windows. ‘He was on his way to a conference in Botswana.’ When the security officer responded that the bishop had indeed passed the checkpoint some time earlier, Reverend Legotlo feigned alarm at being behind schedule – and the policeman waved the car around the barricades.
Reverend Legotlo let the three youths off at a place where they could slip through the border fence. Tsietsi and his colleagues had to navigate a stretch of farmland; by now, the sun had set and the three could barely make out the little huts that littered the landscape. They were afraid of stumbling on an army patrol. In their agitation, they forgot the minister’s directions and lost the way. The young men wandered about blindly all night. Exhausted, cold, wet from an intermittent rain, they had despaired of finding the crossing when a South African farmer, a black man, came upon them as the sun was rising. The farmer showed them the path. With a considerable expenditure of spirit, the youths managed to traverse the border and run to a grove of trees in Botswana, where they collapsed.
The second stay-away that Tsietsi and the SSRC planned was a great success. Owners of factories and shops in the Johannesburg area estimated that as many as 80 per cent of their employees failed to report for work; this, with less intimidation by students at railway stations and bus stops. It seemed the SSRC’s pamphlets had had an effect. Only a group of Zulus, who lived in an enormous hostel for migrant labourers, remonstrated against the students’ dictates. Incited by the police, the workers went on a rampage through parts of Soweto, attacking residents and their houses.
Mpho got swept up in the events. He became very busy after Tsietsi’s escape, which he and his family read about in the newspapers. Being Tsietsi’s brother gave him a certain cachet. Suddenly, he was surrounded by people who wanted to be his friend. This new-found celebrity caused him much anxiety. Now Mpho felt compelled to perform impeccably, to produce precisely the right answer when asked a question. At times, he resented the attention, suspecting that people sought him out not for his own sake, but because he was Tsietsi’s brother. (His younger siblings would share this feeling.)
The uprising of June 16 and the subsequent protests were a kind of crash-course in politics for Mpho, as they were for thousands of other township youths. The youngsters went from ignorance to activism virtually overnight. Years later, Mpho would remember it as a simple, almost idyllic time of political thought. He and his friends did not bother themselves much about doctrines or ‘isms’, as Mpho called them; in their minds, this was a fight between black and white. South Africa was their land, and they would wage war to the death, if necessary, to regain it. Never again would the arguments seem so explicit, so utterly right.
It was Mpho’s job, as an SSRC representative, to translate these sentiments into action. He spent his days visiting the handful of schools under his purview. Class attendance was still sporadic; students dressed in their uniforms every morning and went to school, but not to study. Instead, they waited for instructions from the SSRC leaders. Mpho strove to keep the youngsters engaged. This is only the beginning, he reassured them when the SSRC called for another three-day stay-away on September 13, the start of the revolution. He urged the youngsters to draw their parents into the protest.
With the succession of his friend Khotso Seatlholo as president, Mpho now was actually closer to the inner workings of the SSRC. Khotso entrusted Mpho with pamphlets to distribute in his territory. (In contrast with Tsietsi, who had held himself aloof from his brothers to avoid accusations of nepotism.) Together, Mpho and Khotso went to a famous sangoma, a witch doctor, to obtain safeguards against arrest. The sangoma made the two friends eat a special meal fortified with meat. He tied small vials filled with dark, evil-looking material – muti, or medicine – around their arms with the admonishment they must not eat fried foods, such as chips, that were prepared in shops. Pork was often cooked in the same oil; the muti would be rendered ineffective if exposed to pork.
Dee also found himself an object of attention because of Tsietsi’s aura. It was particularly true with girls; the Mashinini name seemed to have a magical effect on them. Whereas previously and with much trepidation, Dee had had to initiate relationships, girls now flocked to him. They wanted to talk about politics. And Dee, who never shone in school or in social settings, suddenly could speak with confidence. That he possessed such an ability came as an epiphany to him. Dee felt he had acquired a kind of certitude in being a Mashinini; it surmounted his shyness and allowed him to come into his own.
Dee never returned to his studies after June 16. Instead, he formed a gang with about a dozen young men from the area. Dee, at the age of fifteen, was the youngest; most of the others worked at jobs during the day and gathered at a safe house in the Mofolo section of Soweto at night. The refuge, a small garage attached to a ‘matchbox’ house, belonged to a woman the youths called Mama. She offered the sanctuary out of sympathy for the uprising, furnishing it with a few cots, blankets and pillows. There the gang cooked their evening meal and discussed the next day’s scheme. The young men became a surrogate family for Dee; he visited his parents only during daylight hours when the police presence lessened, staying long enough to bathe and change his clothes.
The gang had no formal ties to the SSRC. Instead, Dee would learn from Mpho what actions the SSRC planned and set off with his group to attend to enforcement. Dee’s freelancing caused Mpho much irritation. Once, he arrived at a school to find Dee already informing the students of a particular SSRC strategy. The gang’s favourite project was ‘educating’ the Zulu labourers who had opposed the stay-away. With the authorities inciting the hostel dwellers to violence, the youngsters’ hostility shifted to the Zulus; they were seen as substitutes for the police. Almost every night Dee’s gang engaged in battles with the workers. The Zulus tied red bandannas around their foreheads, the youngsters donned white ones, and the two groups would go to war on the streets of Soweto with knobkerries, axes and knives.
One night, Dee and his gang got word that the Zulus were planning to attack an area in the western part of the township. The youths decided to launch a preemptive strike. They made bombs out of bottles filled with sand and petrol; the smashing of the glass against the sand when the bottle was thrown created enough friction to ignite the petrol. The gang also armed themselves with stones and other projectiles. They did not want to be drawn into actual physical battle with the strapping, fit labourers; they knew the results could be lethal. Then Dee and his gang made their way to the hostel where the Zulus were holding a meeting. The youths discharged their weapons; the ensuing skirmishes between the two sides continued for a week.
Mpho and his friends also resorted to force to ensure that adults honoured the stay-away. They got into several brawls with the Zulu workers over the issue. One such encounter involved a labourer whose ear lobes had been pierced and weighted in the traditional Zulu fashion so that they hung down like large hoop earrings. Mpho and his colleagues pushed the man’s head onto a gate and locked one of his lobes to the post. There they left him, as though in stocks, for passers-by to see.
The youngsters understood they needed adult participation. Without the support of their parents and other workers, the stay-aways would fail; on their own, the students wielded little power over the government. They had to convince adults, especially the migrant labourers, that this was their struggle too. Drake Koka helped to issue a circular after the Zulu disturbances, imploring brother not to attack brother; but the task of including the older generation required a finesse that, at times, seemed beyond the students. Even Nomkhitha and Joseph were reluctant to jeopardize their jobs further by remaining at home. Their resistance appalled Mpho and Dee. You are the parents of Tsietsi Mashinini, the boys chided them. Of all the adults in the township, you are the very ones who shouldn’t go to work. In the end, they observed the stay-away, as did many Zulu labourers. And the strike turned out to be the most successful one yet.
Rocks went underground after his encounter with the police at his parents’ house. He did not lack for places to stay; horrified by the government’s killing of their children, people in the township opened their homes, and meagre larders, to virtually anyone being pursued by the police. Rocks slept on all manner of improvised beds: couches, cots, bedrolls, floors. After only a night or two in one house, he would change to another to ensure his safety.
He resumed working with Indres Naidoo, the leader of his African National Congress cell. The ANC, like the Pan Africanist Congress, was caught unawares by the June 16 uprising and its aftermath. Neither group had enough strength inside the country to offer much support to the students. But Indres’ clandestine organization that sent youngsters abroad for military training was suddenly overwhelmed with potential recruits; emboldened by their victories against the authorities, the teenagers wanted nothing more than to learn how to shoot a gun, then return to South Africa to overthrow the government. The trickle of perhaps ten persons a month asking for training turned into a torrent of 100 or more. About 4,000 youths would leave the country by the end of the year. Rocks, with his contacts in the township, helped to recruit many of them.
Desperate for resources, Indres sought out Reinhard Brueckner, a Lutheran minister who was a great supporter of the anti-apartheid struggle. The minister gave him money to create a kind of self-help organization. They hired minivans, or kombis, ostensibly to transport youngsters who had been shot by the police to hospital. In fact, the organization was a front for Indres’ recruiting efforts. The vehicles ferried enlistees, using secret routes, to neighbouring countries where Umkhonto we Sizwe, the ANC’s military wing, had set up offices. Rocks’ recruits went to Swaziland. He hid them in various places in the township until Indres determined it was safe to send them across the border.
Rocks also worked as one of the numerous advisers to the SSRC. (Others were Winnie Mandela, the Black Parents’ Association and various church leaders.) He counselled a handful of youths within the organization known as the Suicide Squad. The teenagers had made contact with Umkhonto guerrillas in Swaziland and Johannesburg for rudimentary training; often their instruction consisted of nothing more than a pamphlet that was circulating underground. One such publication, written and illustrated like a comic book to mislead the police, recounted the story of Simon and Jane. These were no ordinary cartoon characters: Simon and Jane had very special friends, who educated them in the art of manufacturing Molotov cocktails.
Paul Langa, the Suicide Squad’s leader, was told by his mentors to seek out Rocks. The latter became a kind of scout for the group, identifying potential targets and urging the youths to take their war to the white areas of Johannesburg. Rocks also taught them about explosives. He had acquired his knowledge from a mining engineer and from Joe Gqabi, a Communist and one of the first Umkhonto guerrillas, who had trained for eighteen months in the Chinese city of Nanking. Of course, Rocks’ knowledge was purely theoretical. He knew, for instance, that a dynamite fuse should take about six minutes to explode after being lit. Rocks decided to test this one night while instructing the Suicide Squad in a friend’s backyard in Soweto; the youths needed to know how much time they would have to escape. With Paul holding the device and his colleagues gathered round, Rocks lit the fuse. He expected it to burn with a proper flame; instead, the device smouldered and smoked like a cigarette. Thinking it defective, Rocks returned to the house to find a torch so he could examine the fuse. He presumed he had several minutes until it detonated.
The next thing he heard was a loud bang. Rocks rushed outside; there he saw Paul, whose thumb and first finger on his right hand had been blown off, bleeding profusely. Rocks bundled him into a car and drove off in search of a doctor. It was long after midnight and he had to wake up a physician who had a clinic in the township. Rocks pointed a gun at the doctor’s head while he dressed Paul’s wound. ‘You do not go to the police about this,’ Rocks warned him. ‘If you tell anyone, you are a dead man.’
Despite the mishap, the Suicide Squad succeeded in blowing up several targets, including a railway signal box. The saboteurs considered the halting of trains essential to their cause. Railroad cars conveyed South Africa’s workers and goods; paralyse the trains, and you paralyse the economy. Even Rocks tried his hand at such sabotage. He and another member of his ANC cell attempted to derail a freight train near the township of Lenasia. They fixed a hook-like device to the track, but the locomotive easily ran over it, crushing the contraption.
Rocks did most of his underground work in a blue Volkswagen Beetle that he bought with money saved from his stipend while at college. He cut a rather conspicuous figure careering around the township in his brightly coloured car; the police, who had become aware of his clandestine activities, soon identified him as the vehicle’s owner. Rocks took to parking the car at one house and sleeping at another. Often, neighbourhood children would rouse him in the middle of the night, saying that the authorities had been around, looking for the driver of the blue Beetle. Rocks decided he would have to jettison the car: one night he parked it at his cousin’s house, removed the tyres and put the body on blocks so that the Beetle looked as though it were inoperative.
People were now frightened to let him stay in their homes. The police had arrested several activists who apparently mentioned Rocks’ name while being interrogated; a newspaper story reported that the authorities were searching for him. If Rocks were detained, he could have implicated vital figures in the ANC’s underground structures. Rocks judged that it was time to leave the country. He had decided long before that he would go abroad for military training after completing his studies; the idea was never far from his thoughts. This seemed an opportune moment to flee.
But just as Rocks was preparing to leave, the government sealed the borders in search of Umkhonto guerrillas. Rocks organized a meeting with Indres to show him the newspaper article that named him as a fugitive and explained his thwarted attempt to escape. ‘I’m too hot,’ he told Indres. ‘You’ve got to hide me.’
Indres agreed that Rocks was in danger. He knew several people whom he could ask to hide Rocks, people who were not directly involved in the anti-apartheid struggle but whose political or moral beliefs made them supporters of the cause. After some thought, Indres decided to ask Jennifer Hyman, a white journalist. She seemed a perfect choice. Indres and his family had known her for years and he trusted her completely. Sydenham, the all-white suburb in northern Johannesburg where she lived, was perhaps the last place the police would look for a black activist.
Jenny seemed predisposed to help Indres when he approached her with a request to shelter someone important, but she had several stipulations. She would not do anything to jeopardize her job, nor would she do anything illegal. And she was not about to drive anyone to the border. (Jenny had a friend who had gone to prison for helping an activist to escape.) Indres disclosed Rocks’ identity to Jenny with a plea not to reveal it to her husband – something she deemed beyond consideration. Clive Emdon, Jenny’s husband and a fellow journalist, was entirely sympathetic to Rocks’ plight. To work for the opposition press was to challenge the ruling authority; reporters were routinely detained by the police, interrogated, even assaulted. Besides, providing sanctuary for Rocks would give them the opportunity to do more than just chronicle the uprising.
Indres and Jenny decided they would call Rocks by a codename. She suggested Sipho; her young son and daughter had a storybook entitled Sipho’s Trumpet. As agreed, Indres delivered Rocks to the small, unremarkable house at 29 Roslin Street in the middle of one night. ‘You must be very disciplined,’ Indres warned him before opening the car door. ‘You mustn’t leave the house, you mustn’t drink. Jenny is going to give me a full report of your behaviour.’ Then he said farewell to Rocks and raced back to the township, where he reported to Joe Gqabi, his fellow Umkhonto leader, that Rocks was now deeply hidden.
Rocks quickly settled into a routine. Clive and Jenny departed for work at their respective newspapers early, dropping Thandi, their daughter, at a crèche; their maid Nelly looked after Joshua, the baby. That left Rocks with the house virtually to himself. Despite the high wall that surrounded the house, Jenny advised him to stay away from the front rooms unless the curtains were drawn. He was not to go into the garden during the day nor answer the telephone. Thus confined indoors, Rocks methodically worked his way through the couple’s books. He cooked meals for himself. After Nelly fetched Thandi from the crèche, he spent hours feeding her in the kitchen, playing with her, cradling her.
Jenny came to like him immensely. She had been frightened of bringing a black stranger into her home, concerned that he might feel ill-at-ease with a white family or, worse yet, act obsequiously grateful. Her anxiety proved baseless. Rocks’ warmth and charm were immediately appealing, as was his relationship with Thandi; she, quite literally, jumped into his arms whenever he entered the room. Jenny knew little of Rocks’ background, but guessed he must come from a large family from the way he cared for her daughter. She also found his intellect impressive. Rocks seemed unlike many activists in the anti-apartheid movement Jenny had known, whose obsession with the cause made them appear one-dimensional. Here was a young man who read widely, who took a keen interest in other societies and other political systems. Late at night, after they had put the children to bed, Clive, Jenny and Rocks would sit in the garden and, under the cover of darkness, discuss politics endlessly.
Jenny’s biggest worry was that Rock’s presence would be discovered. No one, not even members of their families, knew that Rocks was hiding with them. Jenny tried to dissuade her friends from popping round for tea. As a preemptive measure, she made arrangements to meet the ones most likely to call on her in town. She managed the few unexpected guests by hurriedly concealing Rocks in Thandi’s bedroom at the opposite end of the house and confining the intruders to the lounge. As a last resort, Clive devised an emergency escape route for Rocks. He was to scale the ladder that hung on the garden wall (which Clive had put there years earlier for the neighbour’s children). Keeping close to the shrubs, Rocks would head to the road, then continue on to the nearby black township of Alexandra. Clive would wait for him at an arranged pickup point when the danger had passed.
Some gatherings at her home, like Thandi’s second birthday party, could not be avoided. Jenny and Clive considered cancelling the celebration, but Thandi had been anticipating it for weeks and would have been inconsolable. And they doubted they could contrive a credible excuse for their respective families. So on the appointed Saturday afternoon, Jenny locked Rocks into the laundry room with a blanket and pillow, a pile of books and a radio that he could play softly. The house filled up with the twenty or so guests: Helen Joseph, a tireless anti-apartheid campaigner; the Naidoo family; uncles; grandparents. As the day was warm, the smallest children took off their clothes and ate their ice cream in their underwear. Jenny could not relax. She had to make certain no one wandered over to the laundry, which would require explaining the locked door. Luckily, the balmy weather kept everyone in the garden; the party passed without mishap, and Jenny saved a piece of birthday cake for Rocks.
Jenny did not worry that Thandi would divulge Rocks’ existence. She told her daughter that Rocks was a visitor, a not-unusual occurrence in their household, and made light of his presence. Nelly, the maid, was a bigger concern. One day she asked Rocks why he used the boss’s toilet and not hers, the one reserved for (black) servants – the common practice in most white South African homes. ‘I’m a journalist from Cape Town and I work for the same organization as Clive,’ he replied, reciting the story he and Jenny had invented as his cover. ‘When Clive goes to Cape Town, he stays with me.’ Nelly seemed unconvinced.
Her suspicions deepened when two white men rang the doorbell one morning, claiming to be electricians come to check the meter. They seemed most interested in Rocks who, despite Jenny’s admonitions about staying indoors, was sitting in the garden by the pool. ‘Who is that boy?’ one man finally asked Nelly.
‘Oh, he’s my son from Cape Town,’ the maid replied. ‘He’s here to get money from me.’
After the men departed, Nelly said to Rocks: ‘I know you aren’t who you say you are. Where are your parents? At least I can tell them that you are still alive.’ Rocks gave Nelly his address in the township.
The next Sunday, dressed in her best church outfit, Nelly went to the Central Western Jabavu section of Soweto. She walked up Pitso Street, singing and clapping her hands the way township women are wont to do on the Sabbath when moved by the spirit and coming home from church. Singing and clapping, Nelly made her way to the Mashininis’ house where she found Nomkhitha and whispered something in her ear; then, still singing her love of the Lord and clapping her hands to a mighty rhythm, she headed back down the road and returned to the northern suburbs of Johannesburg.
The police raids on the Mashininis’ home continued, despite Tsietsi’s departure. One night, pushed beyond her tolerance, Nomkhitha snapped from the strain. ‘He’s gone, he’s left, he’s not here!’ she shrieked, chasing the security men outdoors. ‘Now leave my house! Leave my house!’
Nomkhitha’s hysteria only intensified ten-year-old Tshepiso’s panic. He stumbled through the next day feeling terrified: terrified the police would take his parents away; terrified Joseph and Nomkhitha might get caught in a riot on their way home from work; terrified he and his siblings would be left to fend for themselves. No one explained anything to him. The adults were always huddling, whispering, trying to keep their fears from the children. Nothing that happened after June 16 made sense to him.
As if the police brutality were not sufficient punishment, certain friends and relatives ostracized the Mashininis. Some avoided Nomkhitha, they said, because she was Tsietsi’s mother; he was the reason children had died or were in jail. Others stopped talking to all members of the family. A few particularly spiteful types propagated rumours: if you visit the Mashinini house, you will be arrested; if you are seen with a Mashinini, you will be arrested; and so on. (One bit of gossip had it that Nomkhitha was a sangoma, a witch doctor.) The revilement took a terrible toll on her and Joseph.
Not everyone treated the couple as pariahs, though. They found much support in their church: there the minister offered prayers for the children who were in detention or had fled and often mentioned the Mashinini family specifically. Members pointedly visited Joseph and Nomkhitha at home to partake of special services for the students. And many congregants spoke of their admiration for Tsietsi. They came forward to tell stories of previous encounters with him. While some were obvious fabrications, meant to aggrandize the narrator by his association with Tsietsi, most seemed true. The anecdotes conveyed a pride in knowing Tsietsi and solidarity with his family.
