#8

Ghetto Metaphors: A Life without History (1994)

Overport swirls. The morning scoops schoolchildren into buses and commuter vehicles form long chains to the city, a huge caravanserai stretching to the port.  The air fills up with heat and is inhaled; it’s humidity an offence to thinly membraned lungs. Sunlight wastes no time in burning up your skin. Soon the streets are emptied and lie bare.  Only the sparsely snowed litter which seems to emerge from the street itself, serves as a reminder of the hour just past.  A new life begins now and I am revealed to the world against a backdrop of silence.  This new silence is like the inside of a cave; the protrusions guarding the entrance are jagged but inside it is silent and warm.  You are safe within the ignorance of what is outside.

Sometimes I walk down the street and I could swear that I’m in Cape Town, the light shining a blinding white upon everything and the houses bunched like jostling piano keys.  Sometimes I feel it would be no different to be standing in a shop in India, sifting through stacked, all-purpose shelves and wondering, in amazement, at the shop-owners ability to remember the precise location of even the most arbitrary product.  Sometimes it is a movie, revealing America in everything to be seen.  Very seldom am I forced to realise that this is Africa in the traditional sense. It seems lost here – somehow misplaced – a white lie about our history, about how we’ve come to be here.  A written history can be re-written.  Even the Bible was a re-write of Christianity which left us lost in Athanasius’s world.

Pretty soon the Azaan is sounded.  This is the month of the fast where Muslim men, women and children will abstain from all physical nourishment from sunrise to sunset every day until the birth of the new moon.  Men who have families, men who are addicts, men who fuck other women, men who beat their wives, men who truly love, and men who live harmlessly are all one and the same in this binding execution of faith, tradition and belief.  Soon the streets sway in the whiteness of religiously clad male individuals and groups, some of them smoking, getting in a few breaths before bowing to the east to commence the days purging.

The sun’s crimson envelope filters onto rooftops, between trees and into grassy patches where children run their soft breath into the air.  Our children are beautiful, many of them born from young women who have conceived unintentionally, too early in their lives to comprehend the great burden that fate has placed upon them.  The responsibility of rearing the child is often only partially assumed by the young parents; the grandparents usually assuming greater responsibility for everyday child-raising.  The grandparents are usually old and weary, with not enough energy to chase a young energetic child around the neighbourhood parks and streets.  The child wanders in and out of love in an extensive community of absent fathers, young girlish disco-going mothers, uncles, aunts, cousins, street hustlers, bullies, pimps and prostitutes but often emerges with no real authority figure and is soon free to do whatever he or she desires. 

From a young age we are softened to alcohol abuse, drug abuse and physical abuse to such an extent that it becomes our normality.  It is therefore easy for most of us to continue swimming in these waters.  Our buoyancy is an illusion which masks a slow drowning.  In this place the innocence of childhood is short-lived. Our children are robbed of that sacred period of innocence that makes their foundation. Aren’t the lexicons of psycho-spirituality formed then?  The question is inevitable; who makes our childhood what it is? Who destroys its innocence? There are many who say we do it to ourselves.

Just over the hill the suburb appears to be a mirror of ours, but on closer inspection it is considerably different.  The streets are clean, the gardens are noticeably bigger.  In the streets, parked cars note the absence of people. Wide pavements line the streets. And the mansions; they cast shadows upon you as you walk by, every second and every step confirming a world that you will never be a part of; that you don’t belong to.  This legacy is written there, Apartheid ingrained in a suburban geography that is not about to change.  Master and middleman accompanying two sides of a ridge; the servant, slave or whatever you will is located farther away on hills which escape my blurred vision.  They are not a part of this world.

Every morning, I find myself staring out a bus window at the rows of apartment blocks that line the streets of Brickfield Road, the journey a further testimony to the distance between me and the world outside Overport.  It confirms my unmitigated inequality and irrelevance as a voting citizen.  “Citizen of what?” … my citizenship is restricted to Overport.  This is where I’ve spent my life, the only place where I have rights. This is where I claim them, by force if necessary.

People sway and those who are standing lurch like infants as the bus is ground into winding roads until a stop is seen.  Here, people spew out of the door and spill out onto the pavement where they find their separate paths.  The process is an ongoing one, with a constant consumption and regurgitation.  To me, the bus has always been an insect.

The windows of the city shops drift by like drowning polished mirrors, each submerged in the next, dreaming out a mosaic of reflections, advertisements and “For Sale” signs that stay up all year round.  The lower part of town is third world, a bazaar atmosphere penetrating every existing breath of space.  It bustles and ropes through arcades, alleyways, sideways and street crossings.  So powerful is this muscular foot of the city that I am drawn into it to further nourish the lifeblood of the city; its people.  Being consumer orientated, every aspect of the city is magnetic.  Attraction is the basis for selling, the consumer is the lap-dog of the seller, who is also his fortune teller, his mate and lover at a reasonable price.  Even the inevitable hunger is a barricade to buy ones way out of.  Smells waft in and out of existence while people hunt en masse; trophy hunters of products, only to retire them within their homes where they can judge their progress by it, and assure themselves that they are providing for their children.  I wonder if they really know what their children need.

Sometimes I take a walk up to Um’s house where we discuss the futility of South African Indian culture over several whiskeys.

“All you have to do is take one look at Impressions[1] to realise how truly lost we are as a community!”

Sometimes we argue against our own ideas, laughingly accepting the irrational, dogged, misguided nature of the community as its only vice in its survival against the continual onslaught of change.  Each day that we meet we spend picking out the savoury from the unsavoury in what has become our most aggressive healer – this culture, this clan culture; it does everything to protect its own.

Our favourite thing though, is to hit the streets at night.  Subtropical cover shrouds the night in a deeper darkness.  One often can’t see into the shadows.  They seem infinitely dark, hiding everything with infinite nothingness.  The contrast to the day is striking.  Where the day yields the full breadth of a deep blue African sky, the night hides the sky from you in numerous thickly vegetated hills and valleys which trap the heat and humidity from the day that had past.  The smell of the earth seems stronger at night, like it’s matured enough through the day to bring about its full radiance now.

Often, the pungent aroma of dagga wafts through the sickly humid heat, complementing the smell of the earth from which it is grown. ‘Durban poison’, as it is proudly and more commonly known. Or further up North in Empangeni and Richards Bay, where it is known more simply as “Zulu-guay” (‘Zulu-cigarette’).  It was a way of giving a stamp of informal cultural approval to dagga.  Often, the reason why young guys are out at night is to meet up with a few friends and share a joint and a few cigarettes.  Alcohol is used, but it isn’t an everyday drug, at least not until they get older, have kids and can’t get out the house often enough to blast a joint.

We’re always armed.  We don’t feel protected by anybody else but ourselves and each other.  Even that is sometimes shaky though, and one is never quite sure of whose jealousies may surface.  Often it is in drink-fuelled tirades that one discovers how somebody close to you may actually resent you for things you were completely unaware of, or who actually has it out for whom in the group.  The dark night holds many surprises and often I feel if I listen closely enough I will hear the night warn me of its next surprise.

Boredom is a difficult feeling to shrug off here.  Any drama soon becomes entertainment and captures the restlessness of everybody around and mirrors it.  It is tacitly understood that if a person is pushed over the edge they may react in a murderous way.  In fact, among most of us the latent potential for homicidal reaction to a perceived injustice is a sign of strength.  The young are infected with this kind of defensive attitude; an attitude that says, “Don’t fuck with me!” It becomes a mark of independence, and in the same way as an animal that needs to mark its territory does, it makes for a clear display of the social boundaries that the individual which bears the attitude holds.  It is an attitude derived from generations of being fucked with.

What makes a human being?  It seems that this is a question with which we are obsessed, yet we cannot comprehend the meaning of the question itself.  To ask, “what makes a human being?” is like asking ‘what makes an ocean’ or ‘what makes a colour?’  It is to tie us to definition, which we naturally resist.  Why is it not more useful to ask ‘what makes a good human being?’ Old South Africa defined us all for us; you are this and you are that – so who needs a question like “what makes a human being?”, or even, a ‘good’ human being?  All we’re concerned with is ‘what makes a man’ and ‘what makes a woman’.  This is the basis of the sectarianism.  It starts at the loins.

Upstairs there is a woman who never speaks.  She is seldom seen without her daughter and wears a scarf whenever she goes out.  She looks strong, and carries herself with a grace that betrays her sadness.   Her husband is a big man who often sneaks women into his flat when she’s not around.  He’s civil, a good man, feeding of boyhood for fear of his balding scalp.  I often wonder who, between the two of them, has a more striking impotence. 

Not far down the corridor live his relatives.  They see everything but say nothing, at least to her.  There is no reason to, for she knows the man she chose to marry.  Her daughter is her focus, her life force, the reason she is still here.  One day her daughter is going to grow up.  Her mother will probably be praised for what she has lived with, but there will always be more, and for how long can any human being remain indifferent?  She will wait until he is old, and unattractive, to take back her power and dominate him.

I like him for the fact that he is helpful.  He doesn’t make a show of his religious convictions although he rules over his wife Islamically.  This is common where I live.  One night I came in late and as I lay in bed I heard a woman in the throes of lovemaking.  I just knew it wasn’t her.  I wondered whether she was at a funeral or had just decided to leave but in the morning she was there as she would always be, leaving the chain unbroken for her child to enter into … an eternity of suffering for women of her kind, who break gently, permanently.

We forget them as they are spewed out of the phallus, every idea a product of its viscosity and every thought determined by its factory.  We forget quickly what it is to be human.  In a predatory world we sometimes burrow under the walls of sanity to survive.  Our failure is a product of our belief.  The message is preached clearly; stand up, rise above the mob too high and you will be lynched.  They cannot allow you to win for the very basis for its – and their – survival crumbles.  Their system is faulted and laid to rest.  They become aliens in a new world and their protests are mere knocks on the insides of coffins.

So this leaves her motherhood, her last bastion of hope and purpose, a pillar to which she clings, and will in turn hide her in its shadow.  The pillar grows stronger as the bones of her kind bind the earth in which it is placed.  There is the distinct stench of death here, a death in all cycles; the past, the present and the future.  These are women who worship a God who has defined a role for them and accept it as part of their fate and responsibility on earth.  Their chains are their redemption and their children blossom in the shade of the pillar.

I am awake but I am still in it.  Breathing all around me this life exhales impurity like a disease.  With the windows open I can feel the local air penetrating, frictionless to the point of being forgotten, but I can feel it.  I live in a building which is shared by many people.  I live alone, but we’re all living in the same residue of Apartheid planning; the basis of our thought is totally sectarian in nature.  We are comforted by being told not only what to think, but how to think.

Born here, you cannot escape what you are born into.  An umbilical mass shapes over you and drenches you in its blood. It will forever feed your thought.  It is not easy to live where we do.  Out here it is not a trend to feed off depression.  Pain is for real.  Emotions aren’t on display and very little is talked about.  My land is a picture painted by a hand who knew only the extremities of humanity – a hand of absent soul.  I have friends who are forever destined to live out their lives in self-crafted shells; hard as they come.  Life starts as a challenge and ends as an unjust duel to which death is imminent, a mere formality.  We struggle to exhume ourselves from the stagnance in which we live.  Our fathers lived here.  They too were born out of coffins and carry a wooden scent, firm and unyielding.

What is reconciliation if we can’t reconcile the past with the present?  How can there be a real future that we can all participate in when the past has been rewritten in the text and speech all around us?  The reality of our past is written into the minds of generations through a myriad of experiences, and a million stories ensure that the reality cannot be forgotten – but unless it is written and acknowledged that reality remains one of the proletariat, an aside to mainstream culture, media and the way in which the future unfolds for us all.  We know how easily a history can be rewritten and have learnt how to preserve our history whilst our oppressor re-writes it for his purposes.  We pass it on through our children, through the consciousness imbued in every step and movement; the way we talk, the way we walk, and the way we look at you when you drive through our neighbourhoods.

---

[1] A local South African Indian television show.

***Note: To view the next chapter of Fragments click here.

***Note: To view the previous chapter of Fragments click here

#7

Yet what was there to be learnt

Yet what was there to be learnt when the troubles had duly passed,

But that struggle meant sacrifice and that sacrifice was unending.

That what was lost could never be reclaimed,

That there was no salvaging of it.

And so it is,

That there are many tales of glory,

But few of sacrifice,

In the myths and fables,

Of struggle and revolution.

For struggle is not momentary,

It is ever-ongoing,

And what is endured is a thing of sacrifice,

A thing that time cannot repair.

A thing of endurance,

And not of interruption.

A rupture in time that can never be sealed,

Like the scarred flesh of a wound,

A rupture in time that can never be sown back,

That can never be remade whole.

A mark never born alone,

That’s what sacrifice is.

There are tales of struggle that soar very high,

But they can never convey with the fullness of truth,

What sacrifice wreaks in the circles and cycles of life.

And it does not do it once,

And it does not do it twice,

But it does it still.

It spreads outwards into the lives of others,

And they are bound to it as were you.

It is an unending trauma that sacrifice inflicts,

An open wound that will not heal.

Between pain and loss it moves,

Yet sacrifice is not brokenness,

And about this I must be clear,

For sacrifice is not a dearth of spirit,

But a commitment to it.

For brokenness reigns when you are unable to struggle.

Brokenness is not struggle.

Yet painful it is,

It is not struggle.

Yet lasting it is,

It is not struggle.

It does not sacrifice,

It hasn’t the choice,

But to endure its plight.

Brokenness does not know,

And it does not venture to seek out choice.

Yet that is not the whole of it,

For there are those that know not either,

Neither sacrifice nor brokenness have they endured.

And yet their notions duly fool them,

That struggle is their pledge.

For that struggle that they pledge,

Knows nothing of the edge,

Of revolution.

That severs as it turns,

And turns for evermore.

The spirit is its engine,

And struggle is its chore.

Space may bend,

And time may follow,

And matter may call them both,

But of struggle it is certain,

It knows no safely guarded berth.

***Note: To read the next chapter of Fragments click here

***Note: To read the previous poem from Fragments click here.

Ageless Leo

This age thing,

I was hoping,

It would be a sage thing,

But somedays,

It feels like nothing,

But an age thing,

A not to slumber on thing,

But a gauge thing,

Like a weather thing,

Where any thing,

Is everything

But for a moment,

I am not a thing,

And a birthday brings,

More rings,

And more greetings,

To remind me,

That life flings,

More numbers,

And more learnings,

More slumbers,

And more churnings,

Every cell is replaced,

Every 11 months

How then,

Can an age thing,

Define anything?

I am more,

Than anybody can sing,

Than any poets words can ring,

I am not a thing,

But an ageless everything

#6

The Butterfly Effect

Everywhere in chains,

It rustles,

Bustles,

And ropes around him,

Whether crouched,

Or rising,

Every sweep of his hands,

Seeking freedom,

Only drawing,

The world towards him,

A whole globe,

Of hidden connections,

Unsettled,
With every movement.

To view the previous chapter of Fragments click here

To view the next chapter of  Fragments click here

Fatima Chapter 9 |1962: Like Father Like Son

 

Between the 60s and the 80s, Shakes’ was the countries best black batsmen, on paper and in person.  Perhaps he could have been as good as Barry Richards, who’d been reared and nurtured on the best facilities available in the country and was coached by some of the best players in the world. 

Shake’s, however, was forced to leave Natal at six, in 1954 by order to live in Volksrust in Transvaal, where he had 3 teachers in his school.  His father Ahmed had been born in the Transvaal, and under the Immigration Act of 1905 which restricted Indians from moving between provinces he had to go back.  Ahmed had married Hanifa in Durban and had wished to stay there with her sister and his brother and their new family, but was forced to leave after a series of attempts to find a solution to their woes.  It was a cruel system, which wore heavily on them and there was a deep sadness when they were forced to pack up.

“Mahomed?”

“Yes … what is it?”

“There’s someone at the door!”

“Why do they always have to come so early, at 3 ‘o clock in the morning?  Don’t they know we have children?  They don’t have any feeling these people.  They just want our land, to chase us back to India so they can take everything we built.”

“Shush ma, it’s not the time now.”

“Tell them that!”

Shakes could hear shuffling, while his father got out of bed, found his slippers and made his way to the door.  He had a dugu behind the door in his right hand but placed it next to the wall, but within reach, after he’d looked out the window.  It was cold.  In these parts of Natal, in "cane country", the valleys held cold pockets which could freeze the water dripping out of a tap, forming a long icicle to the floor by morning.  He knew who it was.  They always came at this hour to make the point that you should feel harassed.  These were the herders, they herded people out of their homes and onto long journeys to faraway places, often away from family. 

“Hey Sammy!”

“Open up man! We can’t stand here all morning waiting for you.  I saw you in the window there!”

He turned to his partner and muttered under his breath,

“These focken coolies kry geen slaap met al daai Kerrie.  Hulle’s te besig om te kak!”

(“These coolies get no sleep with all that curry.  They’re too busy shitting themselves”)

Mahomed opened the door and felt the freshness of the morning air.  It was crisp and clean, marred only by the occasion of two policemen, dressed in suits, who looked like they’d been up drinking all night.  Their ties were loosened, and their pants had creased in various junctions, indicating long periods of sitting or lying down.  The one policeman had a smudge of red to the right of his collar along the side of his neck.  He looked quite happy with himself, and held a piece of paper in his hand, which he waved in Mahomeds face,

“You see this?  You know what it means?  It means you must get out of Natal!”

“You, and your brother!”

“It means you have to leave before the end of this month.  It’s official.  I don’t know why I have to keep coming here over and over again.  This is the last time! Next time we come here you will be under arrest … you hear me?”

He leaned forward now, peering at Mahomed through glazed eyes.  Mahomed reached out and wordlessly accepted the paper.  He took a look at it briefly and scanned over the page.

“It says here, that I have to vacate the province by 1955”

“Look here, don’t get funny with me eh?  I’m tired, I’m not here to put up with your shit.  All you coolies have a story.  What’s the story now?”

Mahomed passed the piece of paper back to him.  He looked at it, squinted for a while and looked over at his partner, “Hennie, can’t you fucking type man?  You put next year’s date on this thing!”

“What … oh shit, never mind, I’ll do it again!”

“Should I be expecting you tomorrow at this time again?”

“What?  Did you say something coolie?  I don’t remember asking you to speak! We’ll be back whenever the hell we want and you can be damn sure that you’re not going to be here in a month’s time!”

Mahomed asked them with a straight face, deadpan and person-less in its gaze.  He didn’t want to antagonise them.  It was best to play a simpleton role and say as little as possible.  He didn’t trust the whites anymore.  In the old days things had been okay, but now there was a new more sinister force at work.  They were feared and revered and expected it of everyone. 

“Could you perhaps drop off the next notice at my shop during the day?  I’m sure it would be easier for you too …”

“What the hell is wrong with you?”

“I’m sorry, it’s just that my wife is worried about disturbing the children this way - They have to go to school!”

“Your wife?” he looked at Mahomed mockingly.  “Tell that Mary to do as you say and not to try to get you into shit eh?  Our job is not under your command.  I’m not a patient man and you’ll find that out if we have to arrest you.  We will see you again when we are ready with your documents.  You should start packing soon – and your brother too!”

The policeman spoke as though he was the law.  In reality, this is exactly what was achieved by the repeated and systematic use of the police to enforce obscene political and economic agendas rather than to protect and serve society.  Many individuals became the face of the law and were actually criminals within the law. 

The Immigration Act had placed severe restraints on an Indian community which generally thrives on interaction, economic, social and cultural.  It was a way of trying to address ‘The Indian Question’, much like the hitherto ‘Native Question’.  White settlers were equally afraid of brown settlers as they were of natives.  This is why brown settlers are not the same, even though they are often viewed in that light.  While they may have no customary rights, they do bring a custom of their own, which takes root and finds a place amongst the already existing customs. 

In Volksrust, they settled next to each other again, brother and brother, sister and sister, and started up a new business.  They would live here until 1962, whereupon a change in legislation allowed them to move back to Natal.  They did so immediately.  It was more than just a will to go back to a place full of family; it was also to right the grievous wrong that was done against them as a family.  Shake’s had no formal instruction in cricket as a result until, at 14, he returned to Durban.

Here, he attended high school in the city, at Orient High.  The Orient High school playground lies behind Curries fountain, with only a wall raised high up at the back of the playground as an obstacle, overlooked by the back of a large stadium score board.  The classroom windows look out onto Greyville race-course and Sydenham road, at the foothills of which Orient High School found itself. 

At first, he found Natal Indians a bit strange.  Their accents were different and they spoke faster.  He learnt quickly about the school and was chosen for the first team while he was still sixteen.  There was no coach for the team like in most Indian schools, even over the next thirty years.  Shakes would spend hours reading and searching for cricketing books and advice.  He knew that knowledge was essential for success.  He’d learnt that from his father.

Later, he played for local cricket teams which were multi-racial.  He would always refuse to play for a team which only accepted one colour or race of player and not another, even if they were an Indians only team.  This mould had been cast by his fore-runner, Ali Parker.  Parker was already a legend, having played for a whole variety of brown teams; Indian, coloured and Malay.  He probably only never played for a black team because he didn’t look black enough, but he’d set the precedent for Shakes when it came to integrated sport.  Sporting symbols were powerful symbols for the public under apartheid and Shake’s walked in his steps, even taking over the coveted captaincy of Natal Province when Ali would retire.  Shakes was the provincial captain of Natal Schools and Orient high from 1966 to 1969, when Natal won the inter-provincial cup for the first time in its history.  There were the makings of a legend in him, but it was to be of a different kind.  The world would complicate his plans, his desires to play cricket would have to play second fiddle to his desire to be an equal. 

“Equality first!” would be his essential consistent message throughout his career. 

I guess he also had a certain bloody-mindedness about him which hung loosely upon his frame … which Fatima loved about him.  He was a man after her own heart.  He knew where to stand his ground and where to give way. 

He was elevated to great heights in the local Indian newspapers and community and was widely known among non-whites in three provinces.  However, the white press never even heard of him until 1972, until he attended a coaching session at Natal University, along with a few other players.  It was controversial to accept white help at this stage in the seventies, when the struggle had intensified and black consciousness and student uprisings had grown to an explosive state.  The Natal Mercury reported it as if they’d found diamonds in the ghetto.  It hid the fact that there were so many other players and so many ordinary cricket loving fans who’d thrown their support into the survival of the sport for their children and others.  He felt disappointed at how they’d represented it, even though they’d mentioned him favourably.  They were pulling the old trick; they wanted to isolate and elevate a few token black players as a ‘shining example of their own nobility’ towards these underclass races which so desperately required their charity. 

“Fucking goras,” he thought, “always the fucking same! They steal everything we fucking own and then we have to beg for scraps from them.  They’re thieves, nothing better, nothing less! I’m not their fucking coolie – they can get someone else to go play in their ‘tea-garden’ games with the natives for entertainment.  I’m a professional, I want to compete!”

His mind turned to an earlier meeting he’d had with some senior SACBOC members who’d told him with regret and urgency that there was ‘no future’ for him in South Africa.  The white fullahs didn’t want to budge.  For all the modernisation and nobility they claimed it was just another rue of theirs; something they could hold up as an example of a happy country to the world outside, which was still largely inactive in its response to Apartheid.  White South Africa was doing well and didn’t need Shakes – he would have to play abroad if he wanted to get anywhere.

In 1972 white South Africans were living large.  The economy was strong (at over 2 pounds to the rand) and they could afford anything and go anywhere in the world.  The by then forcibly removed minions had been forced out into the townships, Bantustans and homelands, limbless coloured and Indian suburbs and a Nazi styled ‘lebensraum’ had been accomplished with great gusto.  They were happy.  They were comfortable.  They had wars and fears, but they were rich enough to continue them with impunity.  Nothing could shake them from their arrogance.  Southern Africa was to be of their design. 

Ironically, they benefited out of the cold war by pretending to be a considerable anti-communist power.  In actual fact, the international community had armed a Nazi state on the tip of Africa and charged it with ‘bringing stability’ to the region.  Even if it was a Nazi outpost, to the west, white Nazi’s were still better than black communists.  The Nazis went ahead and created large social infrastructures and state organs to administrate them – actually a white socialism.  

Armed with deterministic vision they recreated the landscapes, skyscapes and peoplescapes of the country by the pen and the gun, while the western world turned its head away, preferring white capitalist Nazis over black skinned communists, even though those black-skinned communists represented the majority of their peoples at the time.  Much like Vietnam, their cold war ‘help’ was un-invited and resulted in a repressive State which presided over 1.5 million deaths and 4 million homeless in the Southern African region.  Apartheid was declared a ‘crime against humanity’ by the UN in 1973[1].  Everybody knew about it; it’s just that nobody could be bothered to make the effort to do anything substantial about it because,

“Hell, if we need Nazis to fight off the communists, then so be it!”

Without the red-fear that gripped the capitalist world Apartheid would probably not have existed.  It probably wouldn’t have got very far without a considerably well-armed state that was propped up and armed by countries that are foreign to the continent (like Israel is today). 

In 1976 all hell would break loose when black school children would be shot and slaughtered indiscriminately across the country, starting with the Soweto uprisings.  The apartheid government would mow down the children in Soweto like skittles, and it seemed like a game to them; firing indiscriminately into crowds and groups of people where-ever they saw fit.  They would drag whole school loads of children off to jail and regularly shot and killed children with live ammunition, claiming (very much like Israeli soldiers do) that ‘stones and rocks’ were being thrown at them.  A generation of criminalised children developed a deep hatred, along with their parents and the communities, for the police and the army.  The hate already ran so deep that communities often preferred their own internal forms of vigilante policing to the police itself.  This was also responsible for the rise of many gangs and protection rackets in the communities accompanied by the spread of weapons, gambling, black-market goods and alcohol and drugs, as various groups, whether gangs, families or rings of businessmen took up the challenge of control and supply. 

Apartheid was not just enforced by the Afrikaner; it was endorsed by the west in its double language of duplicitous diplomacy.  Everybody wanted South African gold, diamonds, fruit, wine, maize, stock, minerals, etc.  Why sully their relationships over another ‘African’ problem?  In a sense it was true.  The Afrikaners were settlers with no traceable origin and place to return to and were thus Africans – they had nowhere to go! It was thus just another African dictatorship which they had to deal with! They happened to be white and capitalist enough – that made it easier.  The Afrikaner, originally a farmer, a boer; a person who farmed the earth and lived by knowing its ways, would now be exposed to the onslaught of the American capitalist dream, without even a real democracy.

“Yelll; this was nice!”

But it would ruin them too, creating generations of racist ignorant newly elevated white working class yobs who would grow further and further from their origins, creating myths and legends of their origins already having initially stolen the patois language of slaves and calling it their own to start with.  The first written Afrikaans is written in Arabic script, by Malay craftsmen, artisans or slaves.  The Afrikaners had hijacked a language in the quest for a valid sense of nationalism and used it to define themselves.  The fact that millions of coloured people also spoke Afrikaans didn’t cross their minds in any significant way.  They were ‘mixed’, but if you were light enough and had straight hair then you could qualify as white - it was a programme of genetic correction.  This would tear coloured families apart, leaving some parts stranded in ghettoes and prisons and some parts or individuals elevated to ‘white’ status.  White families too would hide and disguise their mixed looking children, developing deep psychologies of denial, entrenching further the social lie in their minds further; that being white was a culture and not just a colour. 

In 1972, Shakes would leave South Africa to England.  His overseas fair was funded by a game played in support of his talent by team-mates and adversaries alike.  Even though he played for Natal, the Transvaal Cricket Board organised the fund-raising event in his honour.  Non-white players were easily united into a cause.  Their everyday lives gave them a deep empathy for players trapped within this everyday system of robbery.  They were desperate to prove to the world that they shouldn’t be ignored, that they weren’t worthless, that only the South African government hid them from view and that ultimately it hid all of us from view.  It was easy to unite when the enemy was so clear.  It was not without penalty though, and Shakes would learn that these attitudes weren’t only confined to South Africa.  In England, although employed as a club professional he would live through the unfamiliar cold and rain in a leaky caravan until the manager took pity on him and took him into his home.  The conditions were unfamiliar but he still played well, averaging 30 and making 720 runs that season.  He was hard to hold down, even under difficult conditions. 

His contract wasn’t renewed though, and after facing bowling from the groundsmen (an intentional slight) at Lancashire tryouts he could see that there was little hope for him.  He had lived in Natal and understood the English manner of humiliating you without direct comment.  He felt humiliated, and he left, as they wished.  With him went the dreams and hopes of a child, a man and a community of well-wishers who’d come to adore and believe in him. 

When Fatima had told him she was pregnant there was a moment of joy in him.  He knew that now there were only two people who needed him for his real person, his wife and the baby in her womb. 

“I can’t feed them with cricket,” he thought, sitting on the plane home from England. 

Even in the plane cabin he felt the claustrophobic atmosphere that a mixed group of South Africans always had.  They were all more or less silent, nobody wanted to hear what each other really had to say.  Banal conversations, alluding to anything other than politics filled up the plane in a low background murmur.  Only a loud Zulu voice could be heard laughing away somewhere.  Looks of disdain passed from the white female passengers to each other.  They curled their noses up as if they expected to smell him in his voice.

***First posted on 31 July 2016. Thereafter lightly edited.

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[1] 14 December 1973 The General Assembly declared that the South African regime has "no right to represent the people of South Africa" and that the liberation movements recognised by the OAU are "the authentic representatives of the overwhelming majority of the South African people".  [Resolution 3151 G (XXVIII)]


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The Bus Ride

This is weird!

I’m on a bus in the Karoo,

B-grade movies blasting away,

Unsettling,

Offending,

Disturbing me

I can’t understand why,

Or who chose them for me,

Watching movies here?

It just highlights the house of cards that this global society is,

A simulation of life is what it is,

And out here,

There is no hiding from it

All you have to do is look,

Look out at what this semi-arid golden hilled,

Natural piece of land,

Spinning through space,

Actually is:

Reality,

The nature of nature,

Even what man does out here looks natural,

His fencing and rails and roads look insecure,

Dwarfed!

This is what I’ve always loved about the Karoo

When you look out at this,

You feel alone,

But not like you do in the city,

Here you feel alone,

But you feel presence,

Am I the only person on earth who feels this?

This craving to re-join or be a part of …

When I see the clouds meet the horizon so far away that it becomes indiscernible,

Distant,

And all around you,

You feel the globe of the earth

This is what it means to feel infinity,

To know it,

To savour it,

And find your place in it

I am no longer a child,

But I am a child!

Colours so subtle,

But so deep,

They lure you in to join them,

Purples and golds,

I wish I could dive into it,

Like some big swimming pool

Ah,

Time moves slowly here,

With lots of blues slowing it down,

Those clouds …

Here,

I can drink in the earth,

 With this big moon-ball,

Hanging high above the horizon,

Clouds streaming towards it,

Like great water highways of rivers,

Niagaring towards the big blue,

Indiscernible in the distance

I know this was needed,

The Bus Ride,

The moon,

Like a rock-locked pebble,

Rocks in and out of these great rivers,

And the poetry,

For once,

Lies outside this window

The sun leaves only hues of purple-blue to remind us of the day

Its wake, every day,

Leaves our consciousness refreshed,

Rested, unstressed,

With its hues challenging boxed perceptions,

Colours blending of their own accord

Beauty lies in process,

Aesthetic is what is left behind,

The scraps off the table,

The Maya,

Left behind for everyone else to piece together!

What is this world if full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare?

So here we are making more movie violence,

This time ancient violence

It seems this theme is persistent,

Our ever present madness!

Until we truly lose this we will be bound by it,

Never to truly live,

So we are trapped in a hell of our own making!