Читать книгу To Survive and Succeed - Mkhuseli Jack - Страница 10

An outlaw in the city

My stoic mother and I left Oyster Bay very early in the morning, taking a bus from the Humansdorp railway station, which was buzzing with activity – mostly with parents seeing their children off to school. They knew the names of the schools they were going to attend, while I, on the other hand, had no clue which school gate I would be walking through, if any.

The bus drivers were two massive white Afrikaner ‘okes’ with huge, hairy arms. Both wore khaki shorts and treated the passengers worse than farmers did their labourers. Their language was full of ‘jy’, ‘jou’ and ‘hei’ when they addressed anyone, including my mother. My mother and I did not exchange many words on our way to Port Elizabeth and I had the impression that she felt sorry for me.

We reached Down Station, Port Elizabeth’s main railway and state bus station, at 5 pm that afternoon. The only directions we had was my uncle’s address handwritten on a piece of paper. Someone directed us to a place called Terminus, which is the township bus and minibus taxi rank. Walking to the terminus was mind-blowing. The Strand Street was crowded with people rushing to get home. They were moving fast and shouting loudly. One kind stranger paused long enough to direct us to a bus with the destination sign ‘Seyisi via Grahamstown’. We bought tickets and boarded a crowded bus to New Brighton. It was the first time I had been surrounded by so many people and I felt quite overwhelmed.

It was an adventure, a completely new world. The hustle and bustle pushed my nerves to the limit. I had sort of been to Port Elizabeth before, night-time trips in the back of crowded old lorries or bakkies with canopies. The ‘transport’, as it was called, was owned by one of our church elders and the trips were to attend church services. Now, in different circumstances, I had no idea what to expect.

My Uncle Fred and his family were not expecting us. We’d had no way of contacting them to ask if we could come, or even to warn them of our arrival. When the bus stopped at Ferguson Road, we asked to be directed to the address on the piece of paper. People were helpful and we found our way to a corner house facing a municipal building used for sport and recreation.

Despite their surprise, my uncle and aunt welcomed us. Fortunately, only two of their seven children were still living at home – the others were already working, married or attending school elsewhere. The house was a semi-detached brick building consisting of three rooms: a kitchen, a family room/lounge and a bedroom. My uncle’s house had running water in the yard, which was a novelty for me. I was also fascinated by the flushing toilet we shared with our next-door neighbours. There was electricity for lighting and cooking. Life here was a total contrast to what I had been accustomed to on the farms.

Vuyisile, one of my uncle’s sons, was obsessed with jazz. He bought every jazz album that came onto the South African market. When he came back from work he would put the record player speaker through the window and the sweet sounds of his favourite record would flow out through the yard and the street. He had a collection of music by Timmy Thomas, Jazz Crusaders, Stanley Turrentine, Ella Fitzgerald and many other American jazz maestros. This jazz music was too slow for me. I was used to the fast mbhaqanga music rhythm of Mahlathini and the Mahotela Queens, Izintombi Zomgqashiyo, The Dark City Sisters and many other traditional musicians, including Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

My family and I discussed the schools I could attend in Port Elizabeth. They believed I would not have a problem getting enrolled in any of them because of my good academic record. Nobody said anything about the possibility of me getting into trouble with the law; the assumption was that I would not be harassed and fall foul of the reviled pass laws.

The following morning my mother and I made a trip to Cowan High, where my cousin Sindiswa was in Standard 9. We arrived on time. The bell rang and all pupils and teachers were summoned to the assembly point, where singing and praying preceded the principal’s speech. Mr Frank Tonjeni welcomed and congratulated those who had passed their classes and had words of encouragement for those who had not passed the previous year.

Those who had not been officially admitted to the school, myself among them, were advised to assemble in the front garden of the school, all 400 of us. We remained there until the afternoon without a word being said about our situation. Finally, as they started closing for the day, Tonjeni came out to inform us that his school was not taking any more pupils as it did not have space. There were, however, a few openings for those who had ‘excellent marks’. Of the 400 newcomers there my name was called among the twenty who had made that precious cut.

The next day I went to class 7C. The teacher asked for a document she called a ‘family card’. Apparently this card was issued by the municipality to keep track of the legitimate residents in a home and so prevent the influx of illegal immigrants. I promised to bring it the next day, which I did but, sadly for me, my name was not on the list. The law was viciously strict; without my name on that card I would not be admitted to this or any other class. The pass laws had delivered the biggest direct, personal blow I had ever suffered. It was a blow to the gut and I was devastated.

The teacher suggested that I return to the front lawn and join the rest of the students who were apparently in the same predicament as me: outlaws. Days went by with no word from the school. My mother left after two weeks, hopeful that something would shift. But every day we were told to come back the next day and this went on for two months.

On that patch of grass I came across children from all over the province. Some were from Port Elizabeth, and I could never figure out how they ended up with us. Friendships were formed there, some that have lasted all my life. Mzolisi Dyasi was one of them. He would become a comrade of mine in the years that followed. Mzolisi was from a squatter camp called Emaplangeni which was as notorious as Red Location, known for having the most dangerous criminals in the city. Nomvula Manyota was from Red Location and she was a strong-willed bully. Nomvula was fascinated by me because, I guess, people could see from a mile off that I was a farm boy. My shoes were oversized; they used to be brown but through hard wear had turned black. The children from the city wore the correct colour and size shoes and I felt that I stuck out like a sore thumb. Being talkative was the only comparative advantage I enjoyed. Some were attracted not by what I was talking about, but by my speech and accent. When I attempted English, I spoke with a coloured Afrikaans accent, and this was mixed with rural ‘deep’ isiXhosa.

It was at that school that I met amazing students who later became household names in many different fields, especially in sport. Baba Nolokhwe was a 100-metre sprinter at primary school. Wiseman Mpahla hailed from Mendu, a little village outside Willowvale in deep rural Transkei. He had passed Standard 6 with flying colours the year before. His father worked at one of the motor-manufacturing companies in Port Elizabeth but this was also his first experience of big city life.

Principal Tonjeni was highly educated and inspiring to all the students. We learned that he had graduated from the University of Fort Hare and had furthered his studies overseas, yet he was a simple, unpretentious man. He got along with the students and seemed to be able to alleviate our frustration despite there being no apparent solution for getting us a place in his school.

By this stage, my peer group had gone beyond judging me by my farm boy attire and accent – I was that talkative! Some of the boys even started calling me Khusta for short. If I chirped something that annoyed my peers I would unceremoniously be told to ‘shut your big mouth’. Yet, as we hung out there day after day, our conversations turned to where we hailed from. My tales were of farm life and sometimes the folklore stories passed on by the elders. Conversation inevitably moved to the contemporary evil of the pass laws and the penury it had visited on my family, relatives and other farm labourers. This earned me a sizeable audience. While storytelling emerged as my strong point, my peers were just interested in girls. Some smoked dagga and others just reported in the morning and then disappeared into nearby shebeens to drink.

At the end of March we were told to report at a school in Red Location the next day. I was so happy at hearing the news that I barely slept that night. We were told to go to a place called Etrongweni, which means ‘prison’. The following morning we arrived at the place that was going to be our school. It was a dilapidated wood-and-corrugated-iron building with wooden floors that were broken and rotten. All the window panes were broken and the roof leaked. It was a hellhole, especially compared with my last school at Jeffreys Bay, which was a small but solid building.

We were divided into seven classes, each of which had an average of 57 children; in Jeffreys Bay there were only six. How would I work in such huge classes?

Our teachers promised us that we would be moved before the cold winter season, which was from July onwards when the frigid Antarctic polar fronts hit Africa and rumble up the coast from Cape Town to slam into Port Elizabeth with screaming southwesterly gales. We would be out of there and in a better place after June. The only advantage for me was the short walk from home. Most of our teachers were newly qualified and dedicated and determined to make something out of nothing. We had to wait a month before our textbooks were delivered, but those keen young teachers did not wait. They scrounged textbooks from colleagues at other schools and went for it. In that wretched building we were being taught flat out.

The school building had been a British military barracks used during the 1899–1902 Anglo-Boer War. Red Location itself was part of a temporary village created by the British army to accommodate troops. Apparently the name is attributed to the activities of notorious thieves in the area who stole pigs from railway trucks and back in the township painted all pigs red, including the stolen ones, so they could not be identified or traced.

This township was the most deprived and the roughest place in Port Elizabeth characterised by unemployment, poverty, malnutrition, and starvation. Most young men there relied on casual work at the docks. Red Location was the den of notorious criminals and gangs. The people in this township had no privacy: they drew their water from a central communal tap and even toilets were communal and open. Locals had to queue for everything.

But Red Location also produced people in the black community who excelled in the fields of education, sport and culture. I would later discover that the township was the breeding ground for the most brilliant freedom fighters in the struggle for justice and a hotbed of mass participation in the struggle during the early 1960s.

We were told that we were a satellite school of Loyiso High in Zwide township and that the following year we would be relocated to the main school. In July 1975 we were moved to a building belonging to the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church on the corner of Koyana Street and Johnson Road, close to where the Dan Qeqe Stadium was later built. The church building had been used as a crèche before we arrived. It was not structurally defective but it was small and cramped. The teachers were barely able to move between the rows of desks and they struggled to maintain discipline. The number of classes was reduced from seven to four.