Читать книгу To Survive and Succeed - Mkhuseli Jack - Страница 12

Black lives matter

I saw the red Ferguson tractor heading to the beach with three people clinging onto it with their fishing rods. I was home in Oyster Bay for the 1975 June holiday. They drove past our home at Klipdrift, which was the closest household to Grootbank where the catches were good when you fished off the rocks. I felt quite envious because the sea looked promising. At that time of year they would pull out galjoen, musselcracker, stompneus and geelbek. Redbait was plentiful on the rocks off the main Oyster Bay beach and the sand hid plenty of white mussels, which were good both to eat and to use as bait.

It was remote, but those anglers who knew about it would get there by driving beach buggies, four-wheel-drives and tractors along the beach and to the sea’s edge (vehicles were allowed on the beach in those days). That morning, the three guys on the tractor were Manie-boy Potgieter – not from my friends’ Eric and Marius’s family – his brother-in-law Mias and Jack Nodwele.

This Potgieter family were known as heavy-drinking ruffians and they were the first white family in the community to sell alcohol or run a shebeen on their farm. Some whites even spread the rumour that they were running a brothel and were too close to black people – because they treated us more or less as equals. They were undoubtedly violent thugs, but because of their immersion into black life, it was difficult to describe them as outright racists.

Later in the day, I was hanging out at the café with some friends when we saw the tractor driving along the beach, now with four people on it. As we watched, it stopped midway between Sandrivier and Oyster Bay and the two white guys started beating up Nodwele. The other man ran for his life. They beat Nodwele senseless then scratched a shallow hole in the sand and buried him, alive or dead. Then they drove the tractor over his body. He was dead by the time we got to him.

They had apparently come across Gcinile, who worked for the Potgieter family, on his way back from the fishing grounds and had given him a lift. They had been drinking and started quarrelling with Nodwele, and that’s when things got rough. One of the people who saw this happening way down on the beach was a police sergeant who was on holiday in Oyster Bay. He made sure that the two white men were locked up in jail.

Nodwele’s tragic death became one of the stories I told at political rallies, since it was through this graphic incident that I believed with all my heart that black lives mattered – that our lives were not cheap – even if we had no political rights.

* * *

Six months later, after passing my end-of-year examinations with good marks, I returned to Oyster Bay. It was unwise to push my luck by being in the township during the holidays – although the black municipal ‘police’ called Izibonda (employed to enforce municipal laws, including the pass laws) appeared to have grown ashamed of chasing so many ‘illegals’ whose only obvious crime was to hunger for education,

For the first time in three years, I was not stressed about my schooling for the next year: those of us at the satellite school had been told to report to the main school at Loyiso High in January 1976. The principal, Mr DD Vinqi, was a serious educator who was loved and respected by both students and teachers. Like all other educated black people of his generation, he had graduated from the University of Fort Hare. On certain days he would come to school wearing his black-and-gold striped university blazer, which I found inspiring.

Loyiso High did not only attract students who had pass law problems; it also attracted teachers who faced the same dilemma. I have been friends with one of them, Mr Nqweni, ever since those days. Certain parts of his life journey, which began in Gobe Village in Centane, Transkei, mirrored my own. He had passed Standard 6 at the age of fourteen – an impressive achievement during our time. According to him that was the best and easiest part of his life. From then on his life was to be bedevilled by the pass laws, financial worries and social rejection. His own educational journey was a start-stop syndrome. First, he could not go further with his studies because there was no money. He worked at a local goldsmith for three years for one pound a week, in today’s terms about R43. That money was the seed he used to get his studies back on track.

After working for four years he managed to save eight pounds. He sent the money by registered mail to his brother in Port Elizabeth so that he could revive his education. He was hopeful that all the stumbling blocks had been removed. However, he told me: ‘My dream turned into a nightmare once I got touched by the reality of the myriad of apartheid’s draconian pass laws.’ To find a school was not difficult, but to stay inside the classroom was a different story. The principal of Kwazakhele High was coincidentally his relative, a Mr Henry Mjamba who also came from a remote rural area and was fed up with the pass laws. He defied them and ‘illegally’ registered Nqweni.

I realised that the barriers I had faced as a child were nothing compared with what Mr Nqweni had been through. He boosted me mentally, and helped me confront the locked gates I was facing, and those that I would face in later years.

I was eighteen years old when I embarked on my second year of high school. My mind was starting to settle and I was toying with the idea of finding a girlfriend. I hadn’t even considered it before: I had been focused on fighting for my survival in the city and, with my education ambitions taking top priority, a girlfriend seemed an unnecessary distraction. But I did find myself out of place when other boys spoke fondly about their girlfriends and I also felt lonely at times.

Beauty pageants were a big thing in our schools. They used to happen on Thursdays. Mike Phantsi, a young entrepreneur popularly known as ‘Showbiz’, dominated the beauty contest turf among the schools. His main activity appeared to be organising these kinds of shows for local soccer and rugby clubs, and the like. Beauty-pageant tickets sold like hot cakes and schoolgirls loved them. There was a lot of interest in them, even for people like me who did not have a girlfriend. The girls themselves were attracted by the prizes up for grabs. Joyce Orie, a gorgeous schoolgirl, had become a household name in these beauty pageants. She even went on to compete nationally.

To my mind, my problem was not that I could not find a girl at school or at these beauty contests, but that my life felt complicated and I feared opening up to somebody who might not react well to this reality. Pressure was mounting as my friends desperately tried to hook me up with girls they felt were what they called ‘your type’, whatever that meant. The bigger issue was that I could not afford two tickets to the bioscope. My school money did not include the cost of taking a girl out. Going to the movies was a big deal for the girls. Guys who could take their girls to the Rio, Star or Reno cinemas were regarded as very ‘romantic’ and ‘hot’. I resigned myself to only flirting with the girls on the dance floors of the music shows. Yet I was happy with that.

I was an avid fan of the music shows, which took place on Friday and Saturday nights. Port Elizabeth prided itself on having some of the top bands, such as the Tulips, Montella, Black Slaves, Soul Jazzmen and, later on, the Afro-pop band of school-going girls and boys, the Afro-Teens. These bands had huge followings and they would fill any venue.

Attending these shows came with a perk for boys who might be asked by the girls to walk them home. These ‘walks’ had both positive and negative consequences. One day I accompanied a girl who I thought fancied me. I was excited at the prospect of having a girlfriend, even though just for a moment. But that excitement was short-lived. As we were walking in Grattan Street in New Brighton from the St Stephen’s Church Hall, I heard a voice behind us calling the girl by her name. He demanded that she go over to him. She refused and told him she was with someone. ‘Is that thing next to you someone?’ enquired the voice in that dark evening. The man retreated and walked away after the girl rejected him outright. I was shaken.