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Patti gave him a wave and her magnificent smile, dropped her hands to her knees, stuck out her beautiful backside at him and shook it. And a gasp went up from the white boys and girls, then laughter, then scattered clapping that gathered momentum. Patti Gandhi stood on the tip of the diving board, grinning and waving and blowing kisses, and Frikkie van Schalkwyk, of the Umtata Municipality Recreation Department, gave a roar of outrage and charged.
Frikkie ran up the steps onto the lawns, puffed around the top end of the pool, leaping over the gleeful white bodies, heading for the high-dive on the other side. He scrambled furiously up it, huffing his municipal outrage, and as he reached the top Patti blew him a splendid kiss, and she dived.
Patti Gandhi dived in a beautiful beaming swallow, just as Frikkie burst onto the board to roars of derision. She disappeared under the water in a streaming of long black hair. Frikkie blundered to the end, furiously shouting at the water, torn between diving in after her and retracing his outraged steps to confront her on the other side with the long arm of the law. Patti broke surface in the centre of the big pool, tossed back her long hair like a whiplash and beamed up at Frikkie: ‘Come in! The water’s lovely!’
And Frikkie hurled himself in after her. He landed in a mighty belly-flop to roars of delight and ‘Go, Frikkie, Go!’ and ‘Faster, Frikkie, Faster!’ from the gleeful teenagers. Frikkie van Schalkwyk thrashed with all his might across the pool to apprehend the delinquent Patti Gandhi, and Patti Gandhi laughed and reached the ladder on the other side just as Frikkie was reaching the middle.
She scrambled lightly up it, her. golden body glinting, and she skipped joyfully to the head of the pool to draw Frikkie that way and cried: ‘This way, Frikkie –’
Frikkie changed direction and thrashed towards her, and Patti skipped back the other way and shouted: ‘Over here, now, Frikkie, over here –’
But Frikkie van Schalkwyk, custodian of the Municipality of Umtata Bye-Laws (Recreational Facilities) (Swimming Pool) as amended, was no fool, hey. Not for him to thrash this way and that to the tune of a cheeky bladdy Coolie, hey: he heaved himself up the ladder in a furious gush, and stomped off to summon the police, to laughter and cries of ‘Spoil-sport.’ Patti Gandhi sauntered back to the high diving-board, grinning, and began to climb again.
Luke Mahoney was near the foot of the ladder. He watched Patti climb, looking up at her legs, and the beauty of what he saw, her lovely rounded bottom, her golden thighs, the sheer female magnificence of her, was to stay with him for the rest of his life.
Patti reached the top, unzipped her little hold-all, and pulled out the chain. She wrapped it once around her waist, and padlocked it into position. She wrapped the other end around the ladder, and padlocked that. She picked up both sets of keys and slipped them into the panties of her bikini. Then she lay down decorously to sunbathe while she waited for the police.
‘Where’re the keys?’ the sergeant demanded.
‘Up my pussy,’ Patti smiled.
It took an hour to get Patti Gandhi down because the police had to retreat to find bolt-cutters. She was sorely tempted to push the policeman off the high-dive into the water, uniform and all, but she resisted it: No violence, great-uncle Mahatma Gandhi had said, Passive resistance only … But passive resistance meant she had to be carried down the ladder over the shoulder of the sergeant (who enjoyed clutching her lovely thigh), had to be carried bodily out of the swimming pool grounds.
She made a very dramatic spectacle, her beautiful buttocks up in the air, her long black hair hanging down the policeman’s rear, sweeping the ground, being carried away by the long arm of the law to face justice. There was no more laughter: a silence that was almost awe had descended on two hundred white teenagers, almost shame. Patti Gandhi had made her point. Her great-uncle would have been proud of her.
Luke Mahoney pulled on his clothes, jumped on his bicycle and rode flat out up the hill to the golf club to find his father, his face suffused with anger, his heart bursting with guilt, and pity. ‘I’ll finish my game,’ George said, on the tenth green, ‘it won’t do her any harm to spend a few hours in the cells before I get her out. It may save her from many, many more in the future. That girl is headed for big trouble …’
‘She’s in very big trouble now!’ Colonel Visser said furiously. ‘Christ, man, Mr Mahoney, I’ve turned a blind eye to the convent, and I’ve given her two chances in two days! Christ, girl, what have you got – a death wish?!’
‘On the contrary, sir,’ Patti said quietly, ‘I have a life wish.’
‘A life wish …’ Colonel Visser groaned. ‘Christ, young lady, I’ve tried to give you a decent life, and to do that I risked my life – my career. Got, man, if my superiors in Pretoria knew that I knew about that convent business, I would face disciplinary proceedings, hey!’ He held a finger out at her nose. I risked my career for you, because your father here has never given us any trouble! But you! You’re a disgrace to your family and your race! …’
‘Oh my goodness gracious me, sir,’ Mr Gandhi said, ‘I apologise for my daughter, sir …’
‘Apologise to the magistrate on Monday!’ Colonel Visser shouted at Patti, ‘apologise for all the trouble you’ve put us to! And the trouble you’ve caused Mr Mahoney! Apologise for the shame you’ve caused your father, who’s never put a foot wrong in his life here!’ He wagged a finger: ‘Take my advice and throw yourself on the mercy of the court, young lady, and apologize. And maybe that will save you from reform school!’
Patti looked at the good colonel with big beautiful almond eyes: Reform school?’
‘Yes! Because you’re a born troublemaker if ever I saw one –’
‘Trouble?’ Patti said with big eyes. ‘I’m causing trouble?’
‘Yes! Breaking the law deliberately! Christ, man, can’t you see what trouble, what … chaos people like you could cause in this town – in this country! Christ, man, we live surrounded by millions of kaffirs! Can you imagine the trouble if millions of kaffirs came into this town and tried to swim in our swimming pool! Or went to the library and demanded books?! Or went to the Rex Café, hey, man?! Got, man, there would be chaos, hey! And that’s why these laws are necessary! Yes, necessary! There must be order, hey! And you, young lady –’ he jabbed his finger at her – ‘are trying to destroy this order with your bladdy silly nonsense!’
He turned to George Mahoney: ‘No, sir, I can’t withdraw the charges this time! Okay, I’ll give her bail, but it’s Juvenile Court on Monday! And then she’s on that bus to Natal to the other Indians if she wants any further education, hey! No more convent, thank you very much! Not only does she bite the hand that helps her, she commits malicious damage to property, cutting a hole in the Municipality’s fence!’
Patti leapt to her feet. ‘“Malicious Damage to Property”?’ she cried. She pointed north furiously: ‘At this moment, as we speak, the bulldozers of the South African government are smashing down the whole of Sophiatown!’
3 (#ulink_f4c8eabe-dd9e-5a1d-8e3d-15baaa14fd2c)
Sophiatown. A teeming black city within the golden city of Johannesburg, a sprawling mass of run-down houses and shacks, grubby shops and fly-blown markets, bleak churches and mosques, bazaars and shebeens and brothels and sweatshops and junkyards and outdoor lavatories, a slum city of rutted lanes that turned to mud in the rains and swirling dust in the hot dry winds of the highveld winter, a sprawling slum of blacks and Coloureds and Indians and Chinese and poor-whites, mangy dogs and scrawny chickens, riddled with gangs of tearaways and petty criminals, a city of thieving and robbery and knifing and murder and fighting and trickery and protection rackets and disposal of stolen property, drug-dealing and the illegal brewing of the fire-water called skokiaan: Sophiatown was an eyesore, insanitary, an offence to the exquisite sensibilities of the new social science called Apartheid.
‘But only because it’s in the wrong place in terms of this dreadful Group Areas Act!’ George Mahoney thundered in parliament. ‘If Sophiatown were safely out of sight beyond the mine-dumps it would not matter a jot to this government that it is an insanitary place, Sophiatown could then rot in Hell for all this government cares!’
‘Is the Honourable Member for Transkei aware that Sophiatown is also a den of iniquity where so-called liberal young whites, such as university students, think it’s funny to go dancing to black music, dancing amongst blacks, dancing with blacks even, and drinking illegally in their shebeens, and smoking dagga and even contravening the Immorality Act with black prostitutes, hey!’
‘Good gracious me!’ George Mahoney cried. ‘What will these students think of next!’
Yes, Sophiatown was also fun. A fun place to go slumming, if you had the nerve. To risk your skin and risk the cops. A place of jazz bands, zoot suits, rock and roll, gambling dens, American cars, snazzy girls and with-it wide-boys, beauty competitions and prize-fighting, Miss Sophiatown and Mr Wonderful, striptease, six-guns and flick-knives and Hollywood heroes, Porgy and Bess, James Cagney and Louis Armstrong, Harry Belafonte and Humphrey Bogart, hard drinking and dangerous living. Chicago, Africa-style. Live hard, die young and leave a good-looking corpse: that was the hip attitude and tempo that was captured in Drum, the glossy magazine written and published in Johannesburg that had made Sophiatown glamorously infamous.
‘Does the Honourable Member for Transkei – wherever that is – honestly think that it is proper, that it is right, that it is Christian, that white people go and degrade themselves in a place like that? What I cannot understand is the Honourable Member’s objection to implementing God’s will by the orderly eradication of sin, and social upliftment! And they had plenty of warning!’
‘“Social upliftment”?!’ George Mahoney roared. ‘How about social impoverishment?! How about social destitution! How about … government profiteering! Yes, profiteering, Mr Speaker! Despicable, money-grubbing, corrupt, mendacious profiteering by this government at the expense of the poor for the benefit of the rich! Why do I make this serious allegation? Because this government has compulsorily bought up Sophiatown, plot by plot, at its present slum value, and then, having evicted the poor unfortunate black owner who did not want to sell, it has sent in its big yellow bulldozers to raze his hovel to the ground. Then, waving the magic wand of the Group Areas Act, it has declared the area a white suburb, put in tarred roads, sewers and electricity, and sold the self-same plots for a fortune. For ten-fold! For twenty-fold! ‘He glowered around, then appealed: ‘Is this not despicable? What kind of government is it who takes advantage of its poorest citizens by first legislating that they must sell cheap, and then legislating that the new owner, this government, will sell expensive!’ He spread his hands to the heavens and cried: ‘Good God, Mr Speaker, I tell you that this government is the government of Ali Baba!’
Uproar. Outrage. Honourable Members wanting to leap over their benches and get their hands on the Honourable Member for Transkei.
Social upliftment? A whole society, a whole way of life, a whole livelihood was broken up and the pieces dumped out there in the bare veld beyond the horizon where it wouldn’t be seen. The convoys of government lorries arriving in Sophiatown, the hordes of policemen, the civil servants with their clipboards, the loudspeakers blaring instructions, the bulldozers rumbling, waiting. The army on standby. The poor people filing down the lanes to their designated vehicles, carrying their pitiful possessions, loading them on, climbing up; the waving goodbye, the weeping, the stoicism. ‘Hurry up, please hurry along there, please!’ Those who refused to cooperate were carried. ‘Come along, please, no nonsense now!’ The convoys rumbling out, the bulldozers rumbling in, the crunch of walls coming down, the dust rising up. The long convoys with their police escorts wound through Johannesburg, piled high with people and their belongings, out towards the sprawling black city of Soweto – bureau-speak for South Western Townships – past the vast rows of identical little joyless cottages, the spread-eagled squatter shacks, and on into the veld beyond. And awaiting them were row upon row of numbered wooden pegs in the ground, and government officials with their lists, allocating the little plots. The goods and chattels were dumped on the bare ground, and the vehicles turned back to Sophiatown for the next load of human despair.
‘Social upliftment?’ George Mahoney roared. ‘How about social cruelty?! Dumped in the bare veld, their goods and chattels exposed to the elements! And for this piece of dirt these poor people must now start paying rent! Dumped without a brick or a plank to start building even a shack! Dumped without toilets, with only one communal water-tap every so many hundred yards! Dumped without light, without fuel, miles from their employment, miles from shops, miles from the bus or train station. Dumped heartlessly, callously – and the Honourable Member has the towering brutality to call it social upliftment!’
He clutched his head: ‘Mr Speaker, the destruction of Sophiatown is not social upliftment, it is a stinking, reeking indictment of this government! And it shows this government is not only cynical and cruel, it is brainless … !’
Uproar.
‘It is stupid, Mr Speaker, to generate hatred amongst the people – especially as they are the majority! And it is stupid to bulldoze down one slum only to create another in the bare veld! But Sophiatown is only half the awful story – only a fraction of it! The rest of the story is even more tragic. Because the horror-show of Sophiatown is only the beginning of this government’s crazy plans of Grand Apartheid! As we speak the mad scientists in Pretoria are poring over maps and plotting more diabolical translocations of blackspots, more bulldozer jobs, more convoys, marking out more chunks of bare veld beyond the horizon upon which to dump its black population, to make more despair, more slums, more vice, more degradation, more bitterness, more hatred, more trouble for the white man in the future. Sophiatown is only the beginning! For as long as this government is in power we are going to see the heartbreak of Sophiatown repeated, from the northern Transvaal down to the Cape, from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic we are going to see the heartlessness of Sophiatown repeated, whilst this government relentlessly, suicidally, systematically turns the vast majority of its citizens into its enemies, guaranteeing that they will one day rise up and destroy the white man who thrust such injustice upon them!’ He stabbed at the heavens. ‘This government is busily, stupidly, blindly, self-destructing!’
Boos and laughter from the government benches.
‘Self-destruction by the government, Mr Speaker,’ George Mahoney shouted, ‘would be fine with me! The sooner the better! But the tragedy of it is that in so doing they will destroy the whole country too …’
4 (#ulink_55582a8e-b3e7-5e0e-ae31-15b714cae353)
Beyond the poor-white houses of Umtata, beyond the Coloureds’ area, where the grand house of Mr Gandhi stood out like a sore thumb, was the black Anglican Mission school, St John’s College, or St John’s Porridge as it was called, for African porridge is made of ‘kaffir corn’, which is brown. By law the two schools were forbidden to have anything to do with each other; but twice a year they did play a cricket match, illegally, for that had been a tradition pre-dating apartheid.
The St John’s Porridge team was not much good, except for one boy called Justin Nkomo. He had no style whatsoever, but what he could do was hit a ball. Any ball: fast, slow, off-spin, leg-spin, googlies, full tosses. Justin stood there in his tattered khaki shorts, holding his bat like a club, as the best high-school bowlers came thundering up to the wicket, and Justin swiped and the ball went sailing up into the wide blue yonder. He always hit the ball in the meat of the bat; he never edged it or blocked it – he smote it. The only way to get him out was to catch him on the boundary. St John’s Porridge put Justin Nkomo in as opening bat, and he stayed there while the rest of his team were dismissed. ‘Get Nkomo!’ was the message the high school team received from their cricket coach. ‘He’s your kitchen boy, Mahoney, can’t you sabotage him somehow?’
It was in Luke’s final year at school, the year after Patti Gandhi disappeared in the bus bound for Natal, the year Luke became head prefect and was nominated for a Rhodes Scholarship, that Justin Nkomo became the Mahoney’s kitchen boy, in the sense that he exchanged a few hours’ household work every night for free board and lodging in the servants’ quarters. It was a fashionable act of charity to thus sponsor a St John’s College boy, but it was of questionable legality because under apartheid only bona fide full-time servants were allowed to reside on white property. Colonel Visser turned another blind eye, however, ‘as long as there’re no complaints, hey.’
Mrs Mahoney said to her son: ‘But, please, no cricket with this boy behind the garage wall; he’s here to work and study and I won’t have any familiarity.’
But there was cricket behind the garage wall and that was definitely illegal: bona fide kitchen boys don’t play cricket. Luke and Hendrik Visser, the police commandant’s son, and David Downes, the district surgeon’s son, had rigged some nets behind the garage and, when his mother wasn’t home, Luke would call Justin out of the kitchen to bat. They would hurl ball after ball down, but they could never knock those stumps over. Once David brought a real American baseball-bat along, to see what Justin would do with it, and he did the same. They tried to teach him a bit of style, to make him hold his bat straight, step forward to long balls, back for short balls, and though he tried, to be polite, within a minute he was back to his slugging style. They asked him how he did it and he replied it was ‘just easy’.
The other thing Justin Nkomo found easy was studying. His English was stilted when he first came to work for the Mahoneys – ‘Please scrutinise my endeavours, Nkosaan’ – but he soon became idiomatic. In the evenings, after he’d helped the cook, he was allowed to study at the kitchen table, for there was no electric light in the servants’ quarters, and he sometimes sent a message to Luke via the houseboy to come to the kitchen to help him. Luke found it easy to help him because; although they were both in their matriculation year, Justin’s curriculum was inferior. ‘Nkosi, what did Shakespeare mean when Macduff tells Macbeth that he “was from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d”?’
Luke said, ‘Well, you remember that the three witches have told Macbeth that no man of woman born can kill him? Well, Macbeth and Macduff are now fighting, and Macbeth is confident that Macduff cannot kill him, because of the witches’ prophecy, right?’
‘Correct.’
‘But now Macduff announces that he was not born of a woman in the normal way – so he can kill Macbeth. Because he was born by a Caesarean operation.’
The next night Justin said: ‘Our English teacher says you’re right.’ He added: ‘Shaka once had a hundred pregnant women slit open so he could examine the foetuses.’
‘Shaka did?’ Shaka, the Zulu warrior-king of the century, was one of Luke’s military heroes and he was interested in any new information about him. ‘Why?’
‘Because he was a stupid butcher.’
‘He was also a military genius.’
‘Then why didn’t he get guns? There were traders in those days who would have sold him guns. All Zulus are stupid.’
‘But the Xhosa didn’t get guns either, and they had more opportunity to get them than the Zulus – they fought nine Kaffir Wars against the white man.’
‘And you still didn’t beat us, Nkosi – we committed suicide in the Great Cattle Killing. But only four hundred Boers beat the Zulus at the Battle of Blood River.’
‘And why did the Xhosa commit national suicide – wasn’t that stupid?’
Justin Nkomo looked at the young master. ‘No, Nkosaan, because the girl prophet told them it was the right thing to do.’
‘But it was nonsense.’
‘Yes, because she was a false prophet.’
‘So if she hadn’t been a false prophet all the dead warriors of nine wars would have risen from the grave and the white man’s bullets would have turned to water?’
‘Yes,’ Justin Nkomo said.
‘And the Russians would have come?’
‘Yes.’ He added, ‘And one day the Russians will come. Like they have come to help the Mau Mau in Kenya.’
Mahoney was taken aback by this. He had heard such wisdom from his father, but coming from the kitchen-boy it was bad news. ‘Who says?’
‘My history teacher. Haven’t you heard of communism? The South African Communist Party? And the ANC, the African National Congress?’
‘Of course. But what do you know about them?’ They were talking a mixture of English and Xhosa now.
‘Communism,’ Justin said, ‘is good. Soon the whole world will he communist. Soon there will be a revolution all over the world. Like is happening now in Kenya with the Mau Mau, where your aunt comes from.’
‘Your history teacher says this?’
‘Yes. And then we will all be rich like you. Everybody equal.’
‘How am I rich?’
‘You have a bicycle,’ Justin Nkomo said.
‘And when we have communism will they give you a bicycle?’
‘Yes.’
‘Everybody?’
‘Yes.’
‘And cattle?’
‘Yes.’
‘And who will own the land?’
‘The people. Land is not owned, Nkosaan. Land is like the sun. And water. It belongs to the people. Only capitalism says land can belong to rich people who buy it.’
It was the tradition of the Mahoney household that dinner was devoted to intellectual discussions. Any subject was entertained provided it was supported by intelligent argument. If not, it was thrown out (‘Like in the courtroom.’). That night Luke mentioned this conversation at dinner. Aunt Sheila McAdam from Kenya was staying, making her annual visit to South Africa.
His mother said: ‘Typical. Nice boy, goes to a mission school, but believes in witchcraft. And gets his head stuffed full of communist nonsense.’
‘Unfortunately it’s not nonsense,’ George Mahoney said. ‘Apartheid will drive the blacks into the arms of the communists.’
‘Like’s happened in Kenya,’ Jill pronounced gravely.
‘Not quite – ’ Luke began.
‘No, we’ve got no apartheid in Kenya,’ Aunt Sheila said. ‘The Mau Mau rebellion was fostered by Russia, through Jomo Kenyatta who was befriended by the communists when he was in England.’
‘But the whites stole the blacks’ land?’ Jill persisted.
‘No, the Kenyan government bought the land from the Kikuyu, including land which the Kikuyu had never even occupied and to which they had no right. The Kikuyu were left with plenty of land, in guaranteed reserves. The land issue was an excuse dreamed up by Russia and Jomo Kenyatta to make the Kikuyu rebel and start taking those frightful oaths to kill the white settlers, so that the communists can take over – and then spread revolution down the whole of Africa, so Russia can take over.’
‘What was so frightful about the oaths?’ Jill demanded. ‘Drinking blood and all that?’
‘And the rest,’ Aunt Sheila said. She was a weathered, robust English matron, married to Uncle Fred, who managed the East African end of Harker-Mahoney.
‘Please,’ Mrs Mahoney said, ‘not during meals.’ She was the opposite of Aunt Sheila: an English rose.
‘Cutting up people and eating them?’ Jill said hopefully.
‘Please,’ Mrs Mahoney said.
‘Why did they make the oaths horrid?’ Jill demanded.
George Mahoney said to his daughter: ‘I’ve got a book you can read, Jill, called Something of Value by Robert Ruark …’
‘You know how superstitious the blacks are,’ Aunt Sheila said. ‘They utterly believe. The missionaries come and convert them to Christianity, teach ’em readin’, ‘ritin’ and ‘rithmetic, put ’em in pants and – bingo – they imagine they’ve done the trick of turning the black man into a civilized man.’ She shook her head. ‘No such thing. He may – reluctantly – come to accept the white man’s God – usually because of an uneasy feeling that the white man’s magic is pretty strong medicine – but he still also believes in Ngai, his own god, who lives up there on Mount Kenya, and in his ancestors who walk along behind him giving him a hard time, and in all the evil spirits, and in all the spells and curses a witch or wizard can place on him.’ She spread her hands. ‘Of course you do encounter some real Christian converts who have staunchly refused to take the oaths and suffered terribly for it – had their wives and children butchered in front of their eyes, and so on. But for most of them the whole raft of superstitions are still as real to them as the trees and the rocks and Mount Kenya.’
‘But what’s the oath?’ Jill demanded.
George Mahoney looked at his wife. ‘She’s old enough to learn about the darker side of the Africa she lives in.’
