South African Stories - One: The Population Registration Act
This story is called "The Population Registration Act," which was enacted in 1950 and was the cornerstone of apartheid, classifying the different racial groups, thus making the Group Areas, Immorality and Mixed Marriages Acts possible.
There were three basic racial classifications under the law: Black, White and Coloured (Mixed). Asian (that is, South Asians from the former "British India") was later added as a separate classification as they were seen as having "no historical right to the country".
An Office for Race Classification was set up to overview the classification process. Classification into groups was carried out using criteria such as outer appearance, general acceptance and social standing. For example, it defined a "white person" as one who "in appearance is obviously a white person who is generally not accepted as a Coloured person; or is generally accepted as a white person and is not in appearance obviously a white person." Due to the fact that some aspects of the profile were of a social nature, reclassifications were not uncommon, and a board was established to conduct that process. The Population Registration Act was repealed in 1991.
Buried amid the advertisements in the "Sunday Times" in August of 1961 was a small article "Alles Sal Reg Kom [Everything will come right]- Family Divided by Race Optimistic." It went on to say:
Thoreauna McCoy, the mother of Derek McCoy, said yesterday, "Alles sal reg kom. It was all a terrible mistake. But Derek will be all right now."
Derek is the 14 year old boy who was refused admission to the High School of the small Karoo town of Meerkatspruit. He spent 14 years thinking he was white. His parents say they are not playwhites but could not explain why Derek is black.
"He was a throwback", said his father, Dennis McCoy, adding "He was never a happy kid. Always sulky. This is the best thing that could have happened."
For 14 years Derek was simply accepted in the Karoo Junior School as having a "touch of the tar brush", something not unusual in the Karoo. But when he applied for high school, school officials determined his race classification to be Cape Colored. He ran away after his 25 year old cousin, Alek Bosman, broke his nose last week after hearing the news that Derek failed to get into High School. The police found him in King William's Town and returned him to his family. Derek said he had been trying to travel to his Aunt Lenina in Durban. Derek's mother said she has since sent her son to live with her sister in Durban.
"He wanted to be with his Aunt Lenina," said Mrs McCoy.
"Yes," said Mr McCoy, "Lenina's a throwback just like Derek. It runs in my wife's family."
Like Derek, Lenina had also been exiled from her family 30 years previously for being too black to "pass for white." At first he was uncomfortable in his new surroundings but, as he got used to Lenina, he began to question her daily about his family history. This was a tricky feat owing to her unpredictable mood swings.
He never hesitated to encourage Lenina if she showed the slightest sign of an attack of nostalgia. Sometimes he would even wheedle her against his better judgement. If Lenina were in an unpredictable state of mind, Derek stood as much chance of being slapped across the side of the head as he did of being invited to join her for a cup of tea.
One Sunday afternoon, while Derek was helping his aunt wash up after dinner, Lenina said: "You wouldn't believe that there was a time when your father was an easy-going man."
Derek saw his chance and asked: "Where did my mother and father meet?"
Lenina straightened up and put her wet hands on her hips absent-mindedly. She wore a doek [scarf] wrapped around her hair, and a cigaret barely adhered to her lower lip. She squinted in the smoke and coughed irritably before answering: "Here in Durban, on holiday, after the War."
"Which war?" asked Derek.
"Why, the Second World War," she shouted in his ear, inadvertently as she bent over to smack the cat with a dish towel. "What do you think? That I'm as old as Methusela?"
Then she stopped talking because she was suddenly pre-occupied, or, as she would put it, "trying to fathom something." Sometimes Derek had to prompt Lenina several times before a gush of nostalgia broke through her usual dam of brusqueness, and even then she would speak with little or no awareness of her nephew. She often left half of her thoughts unspoken, except silently to the ghosts within her imagination. She was not by any means uncommunicative, but it was easier for her to visualize her recollections in her mind's eye than to put them into words.
After they had finished the dishes Lenina made a cup of tea and joined Derek who was sitting with his feet inside the still warm oven because it was a chilly July afternoon. She had a faraway look on her face, but little twinges of inner laughter or sorrow twitched around the corners of her eyes and mouth, and Derek began to hope that this was a sign that his aunt would soon begin to talk. She did.
"At that time," she mused more to herself than Derek, "I still lived on the farm - get down Poochie," she added, all in one breath, to the dog who squatted beside her scratching her leg for attention, "with my dad and mom. Your mother was a nurse at Jo'burg General Hospital. She lived with our older sister, Satya, and her traffic-cop husband in Jo'burg in, oh, nineteen hundred and oxcart. After a while we found that we actually had to like her husband because he turned out to be a real refined Afrikaner, not a skaap - voetsek Poochie," she added, again without pausing, to the dog which she slapped with the dishrag that she kept permanently draped over her left shoulder. The dog yelped and bolted under the table.
Derek, fearing that his aunt was about to mix up her reminiscences, as usual, into a non-chronological jumble which would make sense only to herself, asked: "Before what? One minute you're talking about your parents, then about Auntie Satya's silly husband ..."
"Well, I'm trying to tell you what you asked. It's you who ask all these bladdy silly questions. How am I supposed to know what I'm thinking till I see what I say? Between you and the bladdy dog my mind is spinning, and all I get is insults about my family."
Lenina exhaled a stream of cigaret smoke so acrid with belligerence that Derek coughed and the dog sneezed, hitting its snout on a leg of the table.
Fearing an unprovoked attack he remained silent till the gleam of battle in Lenina's ferocious black eyes slowly died while she lit another cigaret. But she had to vent her feelings on someone so when the cat jumped onto her lap she knocked it senseless to the floor.
Seeing the results of her handiwork (the cat stared at her dazed and indignant) she quickly cooled down and said: "I don't mean to be cruel but it's the absolute limit when I can't even smoke a fag in peace first with the bladdy dog and now with you."
Derek kept silent, thinking it best to presume that she was addressing the cat.
Then she continued: "Besides you know how catfur gets stuck in my throat and makes me cough. So when your mother saved enough money she decided to take our mother and father, who was very sickly, and treat them to a holiday here in Durban because they were so poor and my mother was worked to the bone by the depression and the Drought, and the War didn't help the farm either. I was feeling like death warmed-up too, but they couldn't take me because, well, because there was this really cheap hotel for whites and I was too black. It wasn't a very posh hotel, and nobody knew them in Natal, so they thought they may as well stay there eventhough it was a white hotel. That was the Ocean View Hotel in those days but it's been pulled down now. Your father and his first wife and his mother, grandma Gypsy, owned it. Well, to cut a long story short - your mother and your father fell in love."
"So my mother broke up my father's first marriage then?" Derek ventured to ask bravely, his embarrasment mixed with the thrill that his mother had once been a femme fatale.
"Of course not," Lenina puffed, more shocked than indignant, "SHE already had another man."
Derek understood SHE to mean his father's first wife. He waited for Lenina to continue.
Eventually she said: "I tell you SHE gave your father a run for his money SHE did, what with fooling around while he was away during the War. He got back to find HER in bed with a Scotsman, who had been billeted at the hotel after being in a Japanese
POW camp for years, with only one leg and no balls, as your father, not I, would say. When your father tried to divorce HER for adultery the Scotsman got medical evidence that he couldn't do it, but SHE got a divorce I tell you, the crafty cow, by pretending that SHE didn't know Gypsy was Colored before SHE married your father, and that your father had married her under false pretenses. Well Thoreauna was caught between a mad dog and a pigsty, as they say in the classics, and couldn't just watch your father go to the dogs over a bladdy silly bitch like that vain spoiled white cow, who didn't even know the difference between right and wrong, let alone her arse from her elbow, eventhough SHE drove your father to drink. No, it's grandma Gypsy I blame for everything. That woman has ruined your father's chances in life in more ways than one. I mean do you know how Gypsy loved all that stuff, the secrets and the scheming and the sneaky sex? It's Gypsy I blame for encouraging HER who needed a mother's firm guiding hand not whispering in the dark like a couple of schoolgirls. But your father was sick of it all by then, though he could see no wrong in his mother of course. It was the poor bladdy Scotsman who got blamed, eventhough his second and third legs were blown to kingdom come. Thank goodness your mother came along to straighten out your father's life. So my parents came back to the farm and Thoreauna went back to Jo'burg to nurse at the General. Because of the scandal of the divorce your father sold the hotel. He's always been too impulsive, the bladdy stupid poephol (asshole,) but it's Gypsy I blame for everything," Lenina concluded empathically.
Lenina got up to pour another cup of tea and when she returned to put her feet in the oven she needed no more prompting.
She lit another cigaret and began: "Your father bought a small house in Jo'burg for him and Thoreauna. I don't need to tell you that Gypsy went to live with your father and mother. It was Gypsy who made Thoreauna into a martyr and insisted they all live in Orange Grove and pass for white, which my parents never agreed with, you know, not even for those two weeks in Durban on holiday when they were so embarrassed that they never even went to the beach. I suppose your mom got used to it in Jo'burg, but never meant to do it all the time. You know, eventhough I couldn't fit into my family because of my blackness, your mother an I have always been close. We tell each other everything. Thoreauna did not like being deceitful. She was sure they'd get caught sooner or later.
"You know how your chickens come home to roost, which they did because, when you were born that was the end of it and your father never forgave your mom, eventhough it was just as much on his side of the family as ours, only WE didn't try to play white the way Gypsy had done for so many years that she'd forgotten what could happen if you weren't careful. Besides your father and Thoreauna had known right from the start about each other. It was like telepathy the way they could just tell without even asking. But he was stubborn and decided to try for white just because Gypsy pushed him into it. It nearly broke his heart when you were born black. Well they had to move because the neighbours were beginning to talk so they packed up lock stock and barrel and moved to that one-horse dorp in the Karoo, although by that time I was beginning to see things the way Gypsy saw them, especially, as far as I'm concerned, anything goes when it comes to surviving in this sick society where poor white trash thinks it's better than us. It seems a shame when there is so much white rubbish in this world who don't deserve to be white."
Lenina sighed and continued: "When I first moved to Durban I hated it, what with hundreds of those lower class black Indians walking on fire and drinking black chicken's blood and as crooked as hyenas. They would sell their own grandmothers. One Indian woman even chopped off her child's legs so they could go begging in town. Well I can't say for sure, but that was the rumor anyway. But after a while it sort of grew on me. Ooo really it isn't so bad after all. See how this cat's fur affects me, I'm allergic to its fluff. It makes me itch all over just to think of it."
She drifted off as she became absorbed in scratching her scalp while her cigaret dangled forgotten from her lower lip. The cat curled up unnoticed on her lap. Suddenly Lenina jumped up. The cat clung to her skirt by it's claws. She slapped it back and forth with her dishcloth till it decided to retract it's claws, drop to the floor an bolt out the kitchen door.
"Bladdy stupid cat. Germs!" she hissed.
"Germs?" asked Derek.
"Yes, germs, are you deaf or something? I said germs," she said, adding: "Now get your feet out of the oven. I've got to get on with my work, not that anyone ever offers to help. No, all I do all day long is scrub and cook and not a word of thanks from you or my snot-nosed monsters of children or your drunken selfish uncle who just lies on his bed all day listening to rubbish on the radio, eating garlic till it stinks right out his pores. And all you want is food. Just plain cupboard love. None of you care what happens to me. I could drop dead over the stove and you wouldn't even notice till you smelled burning and thought it was supper."
Because of his sensitivity, Derek had reservations about confiding in his aunt. He was afraid of becoming vulnerable to her relentless domination of anyone she sensed was weaker or more scrupulous. But he needed her confidence and he exploited her penchant for strolls down memory lane, because he felt that only she held the key to his security. He would deliberately wheedle recollections from her while they sat in the kitchen after Sunday roast (with their feet in the stillwarm oven in winter or in basins of cold water in the heat of December) drinking endless cups of tea while his uncle slept off his surfeits of porkfat and brandy.
One sleepy Sunday afternoon Derek asked his aunt about his grandmother, Gypsy, whose past was wrapped in myth and mystery.
"The fact is I don't know all the dates and stuff," began Lenina, "but as far's I know Gypsy was born in Port Elizabeth around 1888. Her great grand-father landed in the Eastern Cape in 1820 when it was only a beach surrounded by thieving Xhosa tribes and the Boers who thought they'd gotten a rotten deal. But I don't know history and Gypsy's never been forward with the filthy facts of her family, but supposedly she never knew her great-grandfather, Tom Taylor, who was from somewhere in England. The way Gypsy tells it anyone'd think it was Buckingham Palace. Still he was lucky or strong enough to survive the trip, though there was not much reason for him to stay in England. The only choice he had was between starvation there or a chance to own a piece of land here; to grow his own food in sunny South Africa. His wife had kicked the bucket during the crossing, and, still being only twenty, he took a Xhosa woman for a wife. I suppose one excuse's as good as another, and together they cleared the plot of land he had been allotted and grew mealies (corn) I think and succeeded in producing one son. Then the Xhosa woman died while giving birth to a daughter, but no one except your grandmother knows the whole truth and all I know is what Gypsy's brother, Googie, told me before he died, because she's ashamed of her past. Why, I don't know. You can't make a pig's ear out of silk stockings as my mother used to say."
Lenina lit another cigaret from the stub of the previous one and said as she exhaled: "Googie told me how Tom Taylor's and the Xhosa woman's son, Alfred, farmed the land, grew vegetables and married a woman, who not even Googie knew about, except they had five kids one of whom was Gypsy's and Googie's mother, Beatrice, who was seduced by a travelling salesman from Port Elizabeth where she followed him only to find that he was already married and she was pregnant. So to feed herself and the child born shortly after, she sold her favors to sailors and bore many children each of which had a different father and which was sent to a nun-run orphanage in Kingwilliamstown as soon as it was weaned. One of the babies was Googie, who admitted this to me, and the other was Gypsy who didn't."
Lenina had not looked at Derek once and seemed almost oblivious to his presence. She seemed to be talking to herself: "I could never find out what really happened because the only one besides Googie who I ever met was Lolly, who you should remember from when, oh, you must have been seven and you all came her to Durban to live with her for a while, supposedly because she was a poor helpless old lady who had just had her left leg amputated from sugar, but really it was because Gypsy and your poephol of a father thought she'd kick the bucket soon and leave them her house and a big fat bank account as she had only one child, a drunk epileptic derelict, totally unfit to be the heir to anyone other than a baboon, as your father would say, not I.
"So they waited for Lolly to die, which she didn't because for some reason she took a fancy to you. You seemed to cheer her up, which Gypsy said was due to spite as she was thrilled that someone else's son was as big a handicap as her own. But I don't remember Lolly being a witch like Gypsy. Probably it was because you, unlike her son, are as black as she was. Anyway she didn't die and you had such fun with her. Don't you remember how you used to sneak up on the old girlie and see how many times you could spot her stump flashing from under her lacy nightgown whenever she sat straining on her commode? Funny how she didn't mind. Then, when Gypsy decided that Lolly was going to live forever, you all moved back to the Karoo and sure enough she upped and died a week later and left you everything for when you turn twenty-one. That put Gypsy's nose out of joint. But I'll never forget how we laughed when we asked you why you wanted to look at Lolly's stump all the time and you said it was because you wanted to see if she was black all the way through. One thing you can say about Lolly, is her house was lovely, with the smells of polished wooden floors and snow white lace curtains smelling of lavender and the windows whose panes were so bright that the sun sparkled in them, though her servants hated her being such a slave-driver."
Lenina suddenly looked at Derek and said: "Still she gave you a leg up in life. When you're 21 you'll be a rich man. Gypsy's so vague about her past it was only through Googie that I found out about her mother's station in life but just get her started on her own accomplishments and you'll never hear the end. Like when she escaped from the orphanage at the age of sixteen and entered a beauty and talent contest for white girls only and won, and out comes the old brown snapshot of herself dressed in cheap jewellery and looking just like a real gypsy, but prettier I must admit, and happy because it got her a job in a night club singing and playing the piano. She had plenty of admirers, and then in 1907 along came Eugene Murphy, who was a charming and witty Irishman of about thirty who swept Gypsy off her feet and took her to Grahamstown, where she forgot that she was an orphan with mixed-blood and married him. In 1908 she gave birth to your father. By now Gypsy was passing completely as white and she got ambitious and took to nagging Eugene to move north to Jo'burg and your grandfather soon drank himself into oblivion with the money he made gambling with miners, and in 1914, just as the first South African soldiers were going to the Great War, he died, drunk in a gutter, alone, but Gypsy wasn't upset because she had meanwhile become the mistress of a rich Jew, and the only thing standing between them was your father's foreskin, so your poor father was circumcised at the age of eight in order to show him she was serious about becoming a Jew."
"What is circumcised?" asked Derek.
Lenina answered: "They cut off the long skin on the end of your pielietjie. Now don't interrupt me anymore. Of course Gypsy never talks about this and pretends that she only had two husbands, but your father hasn't forgotten how she divorced the Jew to marry Andrew McCoy. Now, of course, she likes to say she was a widow when Andrew came along. You know, there she was a penniless widow sniffling into her hanky smothered in cheap perfume when along came Andrew McCoy and saved her from a fate worse than death, which was true in a way because she'd only married the Jew for money, but she did seem to love Andrew, and he loved her, eventhough she wasn't much of a catch by then, having gotten rather fat, and your father was what they would nowadays call a juvenile delinquent.
"Gypsy had somehow picked up one rather mysterious daughter, Rose, who was very brown and inconvenient and who was never fully explained to us, but I've guessed that she was the daughter of the Jew, who divorced Gypsy when he realised she had a touch of the tarbrush, but Gypsy said that she had adopted the child out of the goodness of her heart, which I've never noticed. She doesn't seem to even have a heart, just lies, schemes and dark deceit, like her bloomers, smelling of lavender water to cover the stink of her piss which turns peacock blue because she takes pills to get rid of water in her legs and she seldom makes it to the toilet in time, as your mother's told me. But, if she and your father get drunk at the same time and in the same way, they laugh themselves silly joking about how Gypsy had to play the piano in a brothel to keep the wolves from the door before Saint Andrew McCoy turned up. But when she's sober she will deny this, and your father goes along with her lies because she has a lot more things hanging over her son than versa visa."
Lenina lit another cigaret and continued: "Anyway, McCoy was a strong hardworking dependable young man newly arrived from Scotland, and he must have been terribly lonely, almost a boy, ten years younger than Gypsy, but huge, built like an ox. He married the damsel in distress, the self-renewing virgin, and packed your father off to reform school, and adopted the inconvenient daughter, much to Gypsy's relief, but he died in a mining tragedy just before the depression leaving her a house and widow's benefits and money in the bank. So at last Gypsy was respectable, far from her Cape Colored past and financially independent. As soon as possible she lost little Rose.
"No-one would imagine that your father was once no better than a tsotsi, because when he got out of the reformatory he teamed up with a Lebanese gang and later ended up in jail with them for breaking and entering. Luckily that German immigrant took a fancy to him and trained him to be a wrestler and, while his weight was at first an advantage, his laziness soon turned it to flab and he got too fat to move fast enough in the wrestling ring, so he had to give it up and try easier ways of making a living. He became a bouncer in a naughty nightclub, then a bookie in a bucket-shop he and his friend, Ralf, ran. Then he became a conman. Remember when he and Ralf sold broken glass to that Belgian tourist who thought they were diamonds? It wouldn't have worked if the Belgian wasn't leaving South Africa in a big hurry.
"Then he married HER the 'beautiful blonde bombshell', the white bitch who cheated on him during the war. At first he decided to forgive her but then your mom turned up and put a stick in his spokes. Well he upset her applecart too, or something did, because she would never have gotten involved with him if it hadn't been so humid in Durban. You know, Durban was very romantic after the War and Thoreauna had never seen the ocean before. It made her drunk in a way, and she wasn't thinking straight. She had never really listened before to Christmas beetles and the bullfrogs singing so loud, and the camaraderie of the soldiers returned from war, and they were all so hungry for women. You can't blame the poor sods.
"Well they all flirted with Thoreauna and she began to feel important at last, and your father noticed that she was pretty, which, believe it or not, she was in those days. And she noticed how lonely and sad he was, and the next thing she knew she was in love with a married man. He told her it was all over between him and HER, and he was suing HER for divorce. Well, you know the rest. Maybe you don't understand it, but you've got to see that your mom also had her own miseries. She was trying to forget the suicide of her fiance in Jo'burg, who was a white male-nurse who wanted to be an actor. The rumor was that he killed himself because he was queer. But Thoreauna could never get it out of her mind that he took an overdose because he discovered that she was really a Colored. So she was relieved when she found out that SHE was suing your father on the grounds that he had decieved her about his blackness.
"But I'm not ashamed of my background. If only you had known my father. Of course your father's real father died before it was possible for you to have been born, but you were already born when my dad died, though you were too young know what's what. He was a saint, my father, Theophilus Gustavus Bosman. He was born in Malmesbury, in the Cape, in 1883. His family was not really regarded as Colored because the rest of the family was white and owned land and they could trace their ancestors back two hundred years to the Huguenots, but somewhere along the line one of them married a Malay or a Hottentot, who knows, no one talks about it. At first this was not a problem. Only later they married into a Dutch Reformed family and the white Jouberts got separated from the black Bosmans, or, as they called us, 'the Bushman side of the family', because my great-great aunt Miepie married a half Bushman-half Dutch slave. Well, she was the darkest daughter and supposedly retarded or dumb, but how can you believe that my wonderful refined father, Theophilus Bosman, came from that but grew up to be a school teacher, as was my own mother, Fanny, who was the whitest daughter of the slightly brown Beauchamp family, who supposedly were descended from an aristocratic English remittance man and a black woman from Mozambique.
"The match between my father and mother was not approved of at first by the Beauchamps as they had high hopes of marrying all their daughters off to white men because they were educated. But apparently they relented when they found out that my father had left the Dutch Reformed Church and had not gone to help the Afrikaner Republics fight the British during the Boer War, and had become a Christian Scientist and a pacifist, which wasn't as good as being Anglican, but was better than being a Calvinist in their eyes. So they got married in 1910, when the Union of South Africa was formed from the two British colonies and the two Boer Republics, which was a good omen for my father.
"His parents also had reservations about the match because the Beauchamps were not Afrikaans. So the two sets of in-laws didn't speak to each other for two years until my older sister was born, and called Satya because of Gandhi, and then the new Grandmas seemed to get over their language problem while they dripped and drooled over the new baby, who was by all accounts gorgeous even then. Well, of course they would all think so. She was the first blond baby in a hundred years. Of course her blue eyes didn't last and soon turned dark brown like everyone else's, but still all went well until 1915 when the Great War began to infect even the Cape and my father decided to take his small family and his two spinster sisters, Sarie and Sissie, who I think were devoted less to Mary Baker Eddy than they were to my father, and go and live on a small farm in the Karoo, where they could live away from a society which my father felt was so sinful and sick he didn't want his kids in it.
"In 1915 a second child was born, your mother, who they named Thoreauna, after the American writer. In 1918 I was born. Because I was so dark the grandparents on both sides said I was a sign from God that my parents were arrogant and immoral. But that wasn't the end of it, because the final straw was when my father and his little family all became vegetarians. Well, the Bosmans and the Beauchamps now washed their hands of their children and my father was at last free to live life without interference and the next ten years, according to him, were heaven. I was named Lenina, after the Russian Bolshevik. Later my dad regretted that, but at that time he thought that Lenin was a saint. So he floated around his little farm reading Gandhi's pamphlets and Thoreau and Tolstoy and eating vegetables and talking to his pigs and cows.
"Then the Great Drought began in 1926 and by 1930, when I was a hefty boeremeisie, I began to hear about the Depression, which I remember like yesterday. I can see Sissie and Sarie sitting like a pair of old black crows near the warm iron stove in the bare winter kitchen day in and day out, and us kids always seemed hungry, and the farm was turning to desert, but my father didn't notice and just carried on twinkling behind his old steel-rimmed glasses. My mother grew red in the face with rage and her hair turned white with frustration and her old hands and her heart became calloused with hard work, said my dad, but she struggled to scrape enough food for one day at a time from the farmyard and field, while daddy roamed his land reading Eugene Marais' 'Soul of the White Ant' and trying to imitate that writer by sitting every afternoon on a crag at the top of a hill of boulders so he could watch a tribe of baboons, who my mother accused of taking from his own kith and kin the love that was rightfully ours. But my father had faith and my mother didn't, and he saw God in Nature and he believed in mind over matter, so you can't blame him for loving animals more than people who are so selfish and materialistic.
"Anyway she drove him out of the house with her nagging, and Satya couldn't stand it anymore so she left and went to Jo'burg where she met her white traffic cop husband and got married in 1934. In 1939 Thoreauna left because the war was coming and they needed nurses, and went to live with Satya, and my father's heart was broken, but not as badly as when Satya suddenly died of a brain tumor during the war and left four beautiful kids with no mother. So Thoreauna raised them for a few years till their father remarried, and by that time they were old enough to cope with a stepmother, except she was a raw Afrikaner from Onderdiebobbejaansepoephol (a joke meaning under the baboons asshole) and couldn't even cook. Then I went to work as a cleaner at the General where your mom also worked and where she met and became engaged to the white male nurse who wanted to be an actor, and was so gentle and played the piano with his slim white hands, just like that Tchai-scotch-ky, but only better. But he was over sensitive and couldn't survive in this hard world so he killed himself a month before they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.
"When the War was over I packed my bags and went back to the farm where I found my parents in an even worse state than me. Even Sarie and Sissie had left and gone to live in a cheap hotel near District Six in Cape Town. My poor father looked like he was a hundred next birthday, and my mother was becoming senile so I told Thoreauna. She took what money she had saved during the war and brought them to Durban for a holiday, and, well I've already told you the rest."
One night when his aunt and uncle were already asleep, Derek crept into the kitchen and took down from the top of the dresser the old biscuit tin in which his aunt kept her departed father's writings. He felt that he needed something solid to tie him to the past. He opened the tin on the kitchen table and stifled a sneeze as dust puffed up from the yellowed brittle pages of Gandhi's pamphlets. Derek's heart stood still as the frail pages crumbled in his hands. At the bottom of the tin was an old brown notebook which he opened and began to read:
May 1931. African mythology is simpler than Greek or Norse, but no less wonderful. The origin of Death is told in an ancient Hottentot tale of the Moon and the Hare. Once upon a time the Moon called upon the Hottentot God, which is also known as the Praying Mantis, and told him to go to the people with this message: "As I, the Moon, die, and in dying live, so shall you also die, and in dying live."
So the insect set out with this message, but before he could reach the people, the Hare intercepted him. Now there are plenty of tales of the great trickster, the Hare, among all Bantu from southern Zaire to southern Cape and the Hottentots absorbed Bantu culture when the Tswana and the Xhosa migrated south. All these tales tell of how deceitful and mischievous is the Hare.
So the Hare asked the Insect: "What's the hurry? Where are you going?"
The insect answered: "The Moon has sent me to tell the people that as she dies, and in dying lives, so shall they also die, and in dying live."
Then the Hare said: "You're such a slow and clumsy runner. Let me take the message to the people."
And with that he ran off and coming to the people told them: "The Moon has sent me to tell you that as she dies, and in dying perishes utterly, so shall you also die, and in dying utterly perish."
Then the Hare went to the Moon and told her what he had said.
The Moon became angry and shouted: "How dare you tell the people something that I have not said?"
With that she took up a stick and hit him on the nose, and since that time the Hare has had a split lip.
This farm turns to dust. All my cows are dying but I cannot give up.
Derek turned the pages. Some were so stained that he could not decipher them no matter that his grandfather's writing was as simple and legible as printing. He read:
July 1932. I now think of this as my Depression Diary. In more ways than one. I cannot let my family down. I can never show them how this drought has destroyed all my hopes of a Garden of Eden in Africa. Oh, God are we cursed? Is this white blood that runs in my veins poisoning me? While the whole world falls to pieces about my ears I turn to history and ancient myths.
Among the Zulus there is a legend that Chaka once prophesied that white men would invade his country, flying from the sky like birds and building houses out of mud like swallows. A popular Zulu folk-song consisting of only one line, chanted over and over in varieties of melody and harmony, says: "This country is ruled by the birds."
A Xhosa song tells of the arrival, in 1820, of the first British settlers to the eastern Cape. Some of them came to an area near which some Afrikaner trekboers (pioneer farmers) were already farming. They called it New Bedford after their hometown in England. The Afrikaners, feeling that they were being encroached upon, went to the chief, Ngquika, and asked for his help in driving out the English. Ngquika refused, saying (so goes the song): "I do not sit by the fire before I've caught the drift of the wind. I do not wish to concern myself with quarrels that do not involve my people. There is no help for you, I regret. There is no help for you."
No, this country was born out of trouble and horror and the whites have ruined the lives of their black brothers here. The Xhosas especially were ruined by the whites. In May 1856, when they were being squeezed off their land by the British 1820 settlers, a young Xhosa girl, Nongqause, was sitting gazing into a pond one day when the Ancestors spoke to her thus: "Go back to your people and tell them to burn all their mealies and kill all their cattle, then the Russians will come out of the sky and drive the British into the sea." She did and her people obeyed the voices of the Ancestors. The Russians didn't come, and most of the Xhosa died of starvation. How could a young uneducated girl know about Russians? Who put her up to this? There is more to this than meets the eye. Truly mankind is full of sin. But I must not let my mind dwell on evil. I will be more cheerful in the future even when Fanny fights with me and drives me away to my baboons.
Derek sat at the kitchen table turning page after yellow page, moving ever further with his grandfather into the past. He read:
Is it 1934? When the Drought first started I was still so full of faith. Little Lenina runs around in the farmyard playing in the dust which swirls up from the dry-baked yard and makes her cough and cry. The car which I bought in 1927 is rusting and falling slowly to pieces under the willow tree which sinks its roots beside the well with its creaky handpump and the windmill moves in the wind but brings up very little water. And the pigsty. How I loved the pigs. As parched as the farmyard is it seems like an oasis compared with the surrounding veld, a checkerboard of longdead bone-white grass and black patches charred by fires started in the merciless summer's sun. The springbok, blesbok and eland have long since wandered away in search of water or died for lack of it. Only my small tenacious band of baboons ekes out a living on the krans cliff) which towers against the setting sun, and white tickbirds stalking locusts stiltwalk the black burnt veld.
One night, at the height of the Drought, while the whole family sat somberly around the kitchen table listening to me reading Mary Baker Eddy, the Hotnot woman came rushing in to say that a Bushman had been caught stealing one of the chickens. There had been rumors that a strange man had been seen living in the Bobbejaanskrans caves, eating lizards and snakes. Well I told the Hotnot woman to keep the Bushman in the yard till we had finished our nightly prayers and put the children safely to bed. Then I went to see what all the fuss was about. As I opened the door the light from the kitchen spilled across the African blackness and I saw that the farm kafirs had the Bushman pinned to the ground and were kicking him. I told them to take the Bushman to the ploughshed for the night.
As the two men led their captive away they began to punch him in the ribs and kick his shins. I called on them to desist and to give the Bushman fresh straw and two blankets and to be sure that no harm came to him until the police were sent for on the morrow. As he turned towards the kitchen door the Hotnot woman ran out into the yard and began to spit at him and shout "thief" at the retreating figure. I chided her and ordered her to take the Bushman some biltong (jerky,) bread and tea with a little sugar and milk. Then I went inside but I could not sleep or forget about the little Bushman. As I later told Fanny, while I knelt beside my bed that night praying for rain, I felt a moist breeze on my cheek and something made me think it was the breath of the starving Bushman. In the morning the Bushman was found dead beneath one scrawny blanket with a plate of putu lying untouched beside his thin, small corpse. So I fetched my Bible and told the farmworkers to bring the body to Bobbejaanskrans. There we buried him in the little cave, which I had once chosen for my own grave. And I read: "Want so lief het God die wereld gehad, dat hy sy enigegebore Seun gegee het, sodat elkeen wat in hom glo, nie verlore mag gaan nie, maar die ewige lewe kan he."
[For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.]
That day clouds began building up on the horizon and at sunset they burst over the farm. Everyone except my stern old Fanny danced in the rain. It only lasted a few hours, but that was enough to make us rejoice. We never mentioned the Bushman again.
Derek had not noticed that the sun had risen. When his aunt entered the kitchen he jumped in fright. She looked at the books, but said nothing. Derek felt happy. He knew he had found his true family.
Lenina made tea and lit a cigaret before she said: "So you've discovered your grandfather's books. Keep them. They're yours. No one in your family will appreciate them. This is your home now. Soon you'll be 21 and a rich man. You don't need your playwhite family. I know I don't. There's nothing wrong with being Coloured. We are the only true South Africans. One day this country will be ours."
Copyrighted 2005, Patrick Joubert Conlon, Aantrek Publications
There were three basic racial classifications under the law: Black, White and Coloured (Mixed). Asian (that is, South Asians from the former "British India") was later added as a separate classification as they were seen as having "no historical right to the country".
An Office for Race Classification was set up to overview the classification process. Classification into groups was carried out using criteria such as outer appearance, general acceptance and social standing. For example, it defined a "white person" as one who "in appearance is obviously a white person who is generally not accepted as a Coloured person; or is generally accepted as a white person and is not in appearance obviously a white person." Due to the fact that some aspects of the profile were of a social nature, reclassifications were not uncommon, and a board was established to conduct that process. The Population Registration Act was repealed in 1991.
Buried amid the advertisements in the "Sunday Times" in August of 1961 was a small article "Alles Sal Reg Kom [Everything will come right]- Family Divided by Race Optimistic." It went on to say:
Thoreauna McCoy, the mother of Derek McCoy, said yesterday, "Alles sal reg kom. It was all a terrible mistake. But Derek will be all right now."
Derek is the 14 year old boy who was refused admission to the High School of the small Karoo town of Meerkatspruit. He spent 14 years thinking he was white. His parents say they are not playwhites but could not explain why Derek is black.
"He was a throwback", said his father, Dennis McCoy, adding "He was never a happy kid. Always sulky. This is the best thing that could have happened."
For 14 years Derek was simply accepted in the Karoo Junior School as having a "touch of the tar brush", something not unusual in the Karoo. But when he applied for high school, school officials determined his race classification to be Cape Colored. He ran away after his 25 year old cousin, Alek Bosman, broke his nose last week after hearing the news that Derek failed to get into High School. The police found him in King William's Town and returned him to his family. Derek said he had been trying to travel to his Aunt Lenina in Durban. Derek's mother said she has since sent her son to live with her sister in Durban.
"He wanted to be with his Aunt Lenina," said Mrs McCoy.
"Yes," said Mr McCoy, "Lenina's a throwback just like Derek. It runs in my wife's family."
Like Derek, Lenina had also been exiled from her family 30 years previously for being too black to "pass for white." At first he was uncomfortable in his new surroundings but, as he got used to Lenina, he began to question her daily about his family history. This was a tricky feat owing to her unpredictable mood swings.
He never hesitated to encourage Lenina if she showed the slightest sign of an attack of nostalgia. Sometimes he would even wheedle her against his better judgement. If Lenina were in an unpredictable state of mind, Derek stood as much chance of being slapped across the side of the head as he did of being invited to join her for a cup of tea.
One Sunday afternoon, while Derek was helping his aunt wash up after dinner, Lenina said: "You wouldn't believe that there was a time when your father was an easy-going man."
Derek saw his chance and asked: "Where did my mother and father meet?"
Lenina straightened up and put her wet hands on her hips absent-mindedly. She wore a doek [scarf] wrapped around her hair, and a cigaret barely adhered to her lower lip. She squinted in the smoke and coughed irritably before answering: "Here in Durban, on holiday, after the War."
"Which war?" asked Derek.
"Why, the Second World War," she shouted in his ear, inadvertently as she bent over to smack the cat with a dish towel. "What do you think? That I'm as old as Methusela?"
Then she stopped talking because she was suddenly pre-occupied, or, as she would put it, "trying to fathom something." Sometimes Derek had to prompt Lenina several times before a gush of nostalgia broke through her usual dam of brusqueness, and even then she would speak with little or no awareness of her nephew. She often left half of her thoughts unspoken, except silently to the ghosts within her imagination. She was not by any means uncommunicative, but it was easier for her to visualize her recollections in her mind's eye than to put them into words.
After they had finished the dishes Lenina made a cup of tea and joined Derek who was sitting with his feet inside the still warm oven because it was a chilly July afternoon. She had a faraway look on her face, but little twinges of inner laughter or sorrow twitched around the corners of her eyes and mouth, and Derek began to hope that this was a sign that his aunt would soon begin to talk. She did.
"At that time," she mused more to herself than Derek, "I still lived on the farm - get down Poochie," she added, all in one breath, to the dog who squatted beside her scratching her leg for attention, "with my dad and mom. Your mother was a nurse at Jo'burg General Hospital. She lived with our older sister, Satya, and her traffic-cop husband in Jo'burg in, oh, nineteen hundred and oxcart. After a while we found that we actually had to like her husband because he turned out to be a real refined Afrikaner, not a skaap - voetsek Poochie," she added, again without pausing, to the dog which she slapped with the dishrag that she kept permanently draped over her left shoulder. The dog yelped and bolted under the table.
Derek, fearing that his aunt was about to mix up her reminiscences, as usual, into a non-chronological jumble which would make sense only to herself, asked: "Before what? One minute you're talking about your parents, then about Auntie Satya's silly husband ..."
"Well, I'm trying to tell you what you asked. It's you who ask all these bladdy silly questions. How am I supposed to know what I'm thinking till I see what I say? Between you and the bladdy dog my mind is spinning, and all I get is insults about my family."
Lenina exhaled a stream of cigaret smoke so acrid with belligerence that Derek coughed and the dog sneezed, hitting its snout on a leg of the table.
Fearing an unprovoked attack he remained silent till the gleam of battle in Lenina's ferocious black eyes slowly died while she lit another cigaret. But she had to vent her feelings on someone so when the cat jumped onto her lap she knocked it senseless to the floor.
Seeing the results of her handiwork (the cat stared at her dazed and indignant) she quickly cooled down and said: "I don't mean to be cruel but it's the absolute limit when I can't even smoke a fag in peace first with the bladdy dog and now with you."
Derek kept silent, thinking it best to presume that she was addressing the cat.
Then she continued: "Besides you know how catfur gets stuck in my throat and makes me cough. So when your mother saved enough money she decided to take our mother and father, who was very sickly, and treat them to a holiday here in Durban because they were so poor and my mother was worked to the bone by the depression and the Drought, and the War didn't help the farm either. I was feeling like death warmed-up too, but they couldn't take me because, well, because there was this really cheap hotel for whites and I was too black. It wasn't a very posh hotel, and nobody knew them in Natal, so they thought they may as well stay there eventhough it was a white hotel. That was the Ocean View Hotel in those days but it's been pulled down now. Your father and his first wife and his mother, grandma Gypsy, owned it. Well, to cut a long story short - your mother and your father fell in love."
"So my mother broke up my father's first marriage then?" Derek ventured to ask bravely, his embarrasment mixed with the thrill that his mother had once been a femme fatale.
"Of course not," Lenina puffed, more shocked than indignant, "SHE already had another man."
Derek understood SHE to mean his father's first wife. He waited for Lenina to continue.
Eventually she said: "I tell you SHE gave your father a run for his money SHE did, what with fooling around while he was away during the War. He got back to find HER in bed with a Scotsman, who had been billeted at the hotel after being in a Japanese
POW camp for years, with only one leg and no balls, as your father, not I, would say. When your father tried to divorce HER for adultery the Scotsman got medical evidence that he couldn't do it, but SHE got a divorce I tell you, the crafty cow, by pretending that SHE didn't know Gypsy was Colored before SHE married your father, and that your father had married her under false pretenses. Well Thoreauna was caught between a mad dog and a pigsty, as they say in the classics, and couldn't just watch your father go to the dogs over a bladdy silly bitch like that vain spoiled white cow, who didn't even know the difference between right and wrong, let alone her arse from her elbow, eventhough SHE drove your father to drink. No, it's grandma Gypsy I blame for everything. That woman has ruined your father's chances in life in more ways than one. I mean do you know how Gypsy loved all that stuff, the secrets and the scheming and the sneaky sex? It's Gypsy I blame for encouraging HER who needed a mother's firm guiding hand not whispering in the dark like a couple of schoolgirls. But your father was sick of it all by then, though he could see no wrong in his mother of course. It was the poor bladdy Scotsman who got blamed, eventhough his second and third legs were blown to kingdom come. Thank goodness your mother came along to straighten out your father's life. So my parents came back to the farm and Thoreauna went back to Jo'burg to nurse at the General. Because of the scandal of the divorce your father sold the hotel. He's always been too impulsive, the bladdy stupid poephol (asshole,) but it's Gypsy I blame for everything," Lenina concluded empathically.
Lenina got up to pour another cup of tea and when she returned to put her feet in the oven she needed no more prompting.
She lit another cigaret and began: "Your father bought a small house in Jo'burg for him and Thoreauna. I don't need to tell you that Gypsy went to live with your father and mother. It was Gypsy who made Thoreauna into a martyr and insisted they all live in Orange Grove and pass for white, which my parents never agreed with, you know, not even for those two weeks in Durban on holiday when they were so embarrassed that they never even went to the beach. I suppose your mom got used to it in Jo'burg, but never meant to do it all the time. You know, eventhough I couldn't fit into my family because of my blackness, your mother an I have always been close. We tell each other everything. Thoreauna did not like being deceitful. She was sure they'd get caught sooner or later.
"You know how your chickens come home to roost, which they did because, when you were born that was the end of it and your father never forgave your mom, eventhough it was just as much on his side of the family as ours, only WE didn't try to play white the way Gypsy had done for so many years that she'd forgotten what could happen if you weren't careful. Besides your father and Thoreauna had known right from the start about each other. It was like telepathy the way they could just tell without even asking. But he was stubborn and decided to try for white just because Gypsy pushed him into it. It nearly broke his heart when you were born black. Well they had to move because the neighbours were beginning to talk so they packed up lock stock and barrel and moved to that one-horse dorp in the Karoo, although by that time I was beginning to see things the way Gypsy saw them, especially, as far as I'm concerned, anything goes when it comes to surviving in this sick society where poor white trash thinks it's better than us. It seems a shame when there is so much white rubbish in this world who don't deserve to be white."
Lenina sighed and continued: "When I first moved to Durban I hated it, what with hundreds of those lower class black Indians walking on fire and drinking black chicken's blood and as crooked as hyenas. They would sell their own grandmothers. One Indian woman even chopped off her child's legs so they could go begging in town. Well I can't say for sure, but that was the rumor anyway. But after a while it sort of grew on me. Ooo really it isn't so bad after all. See how this cat's fur affects me, I'm allergic to its fluff. It makes me itch all over just to think of it."
She drifted off as she became absorbed in scratching her scalp while her cigaret dangled forgotten from her lower lip. The cat curled up unnoticed on her lap. Suddenly Lenina jumped up. The cat clung to her skirt by it's claws. She slapped it back and forth with her dishcloth till it decided to retract it's claws, drop to the floor an bolt out the kitchen door.
"Bladdy stupid cat. Germs!" she hissed.
"Germs?" asked Derek.
"Yes, germs, are you deaf or something? I said germs," she said, adding: "Now get your feet out of the oven. I've got to get on with my work, not that anyone ever offers to help. No, all I do all day long is scrub and cook and not a word of thanks from you or my snot-nosed monsters of children or your drunken selfish uncle who just lies on his bed all day listening to rubbish on the radio, eating garlic till it stinks right out his pores. And all you want is food. Just plain cupboard love. None of you care what happens to me. I could drop dead over the stove and you wouldn't even notice till you smelled burning and thought it was supper."
Because of his sensitivity, Derek had reservations about confiding in his aunt. He was afraid of becoming vulnerable to her relentless domination of anyone she sensed was weaker or more scrupulous. But he needed her confidence and he exploited her penchant for strolls down memory lane, because he felt that only she held the key to his security. He would deliberately wheedle recollections from her while they sat in the kitchen after Sunday roast (with their feet in the stillwarm oven in winter or in basins of cold water in the heat of December) drinking endless cups of tea while his uncle slept off his surfeits of porkfat and brandy.
One sleepy Sunday afternoon Derek asked his aunt about his grandmother, Gypsy, whose past was wrapped in myth and mystery.
"The fact is I don't know all the dates and stuff," began Lenina, "but as far's I know Gypsy was born in Port Elizabeth around 1888. Her great grand-father landed in the Eastern Cape in 1820 when it was only a beach surrounded by thieving Xhosa tribes and the Boers who thought they'd gotten a rotten deal. But I don't know history and Gypsy's never been forward with the filthy facts of her family, but supposedly she never knew her great-grandfather, Tom Taylor, who was from somewhere in England. The way Gypsy tells it anyone'd think it was Buckingham Palace. Still he was lucky or strong enough to survive the trip, though there was not much reason for him to stay in England. The only choice he had was between starvation there or a chance to own a piece of land here; to grow his own food in sunny South Africa. His wife had kicked the bucket during the crossing, and, still being only twenty, he took a Xhosa woman for a wife. I suppose one excuse's as good as another, and together they cleared the plot of land he had been allotted and grew mealies (corn) I think and succeeded in producing one son. Then the Xhosa woman died while giving birth to a daughter, but no one except your grandmother knows the whole truth and all I know is what Gypsy's brother, Googie, told me before he died, because she's ashamed of her past. Why, I don't know. You can't make a pig's ear out of silk stockings as my mother used to say."
Lenina lit another cigaret from the stub of the previous one and said as she exhaled: "Googie told me how Tom Taylor's and the Xhosa woman's son, Alfred, farmed the land, grew vegetables and married a woman, who not even Googie knew about, except they had five kids one of whom was Gypsy's and Googie's mother, Beatrice, who was seduced by a travelling salesman from Port Elizabeth where she followed him only to find that he was already married and she was pregnant. So to feed herself and the child born shortly after, she sold her favors to sailors and bore many children each of which had a different father and which was sent to a nun-run orphanage in Kingwilliamstown as soon as it was weaned. One of the babies was Googie, who admitted this to me, and the other was Gypsy who didn't."
Lenina had not looked at Derek once and seemed almost oblivious to his presence. She seemed to be talking to herself: "I could never find out what really happened because the only one besides Googie who I ever met was Lolly, who you should remember from when, oh, you must have been seven and you all came her to Durban to live with her for a while, supposedly because she was a poor helpless old lady who had just had her left leg amputated from sugar, but really it was because Gypsy and your poephol of a father thought she'd kick the bucket soon and leave them her house and a big fat bank account as she had only one child, a drunk epileptic derelict, totally unfit to be the heir to anyone other than a baboon, as your father would say, not I.
"So they waited for Lolly to die, which she didn't because for some reason she took a fancy to you. You seemed to cheer her up, which Gypsy said was due to spite as she was thrilled that someone else's son was as big a handicap as her own. But I don't remember Lolly being a witch like Gypsy. Probably it was because you, unlike her son, are as black as she was. Anyway she didn't die and you had such fun with her. Don't you remember how you used to sneak up on the old girlie and see how many times you could spot her stump flashing from under her lacy nightgown whenever she sat straining on her commode? Funny how she didn't mind. Then, when Gypsy decided that Lolly was going to live forever, you all moved back to the Karoo and sure enough she upped and died a week later and left you everything for when you turn twenty-one. That put Gypsy's nose out of joint. But I'll never forget how we laughed when we asked you why you wanted to look at Lolly's stump all the time and you said it was because you wanted to see if she was black all the way through. One thing you can say about Lolly, is her house was lovely, with the smells of polished wooden floors and snow white lace curtains smelling of lavender and the windows whose panes were so bright that the sun sparkled in them, though her servants hated her being such a slave-driver."
Lenina suddenly looked at Derek and said: "Still she gave you a leg up in life. When you're 21 you'll be a rich man. Gypsy's so vague about her past it was only through Googie that I found out about her mother's station in life but just get her started on her own accomplishments and you'll never hear the end. Like when she escaped from the orphanage at the age of sixteen and entered a beauty and talent contest for white girls only and won, and out comes the old brown snapshot of herself dressed in cheap jewellery and looking just like a real gypsy, but prettier I must admit, and happy because it got her a job in a night club singing and playing the piano. She had plenty of admirers, and then in 1907 along came Eugene Murphy, who was a charming and witty Irishman of about thirty who swept Gypsy off her feet and took her to Grahamstown, where she forgot that she was an orphan with mixed-blood and married him. In 1908 she gave birth to your father. By now Gypsy was passing completely as white and she got ambitious and took to nagging Eugene to move north to Jo'burg and your grandfather soon drank himself into oblivion with the money he made gambling with miners, and in 1914, just as the first South African soldiers were going to the Great War, he died, drunk in a gutter, alone, but Gypsy wasn't upset because she had meanwhile become the mistress of a rich Jew, and the only thing standing between them was your father's foreskin, so your poor father was circumcised at the age of eight in order to show him she was serious about becoming a Jew."
"What is circumcised?" asked Derek.
Lenina answered: "They cut off the long skin on the end of your pielietjie. Now don't interrupt me anymore. Of course Gypsy never talks about this and pretends that she only had two husbands, but your father hasn't forgotten how she divorced the Jew to marry Andrew McCoy. Now, of course, she likes to say she was a widow when Andrew came along. You know, there she was a penniless widow sniffling into her hanky smothered in cheap perfume when along came Andrew McCoy and saved her from a fate worse than death, which was true in a way because she'd only married the Jew for money, but she did seem to love Andrew, and he loved her, eventhough she wasn't much of a catch by then, having gotten rather fat, and your father was what they would nowadays call a juvenile delinquent.
"Gypsy had somehow picked up one rather mysterious daughter, Rose, who was very brown and inconvenient and who was never fully explained to us, but I've guessed that she was the daughter of the Jew, who divorced Gypsy when he realised she had a touch of the tarbrush, but Gypsy said that she had adopted the child out of the goodness of her heart, which I've never noticed. She doesn't seem to even have a heart, just lies, schemes and dark deceit, like her bloomers, smelling of lavender water to cover the stink of her piss which turns peacock blue because she takes pills to get rid of water in her legs and she seldom makes it to the toilet in time, as your mother's told me. But, if she and your father get drunk at the same time and in the same way, they laugh themselves silly joking about how Gypsy had to play the piano in a brothel to keep the wolves from the door before Saint Andrew McCoy turned up. But when she's sober she will deny this, and your father goes along with her lies because she has a lot more things hanging over her son than versa visa."
Lenina lit another cigaret and continued: "Anyway, McCoy was a strong hardworking dependable young man newly arrived from Scotland, and he must have been terribly lonely, almost a boy, ten years younger than Gypsy, but huge, built like an ox. He married the damsel in distress, the self-renewing virgin, and packed your father off to reform school, and adopted the inconvenient daughter, much to Gypsy's relief, but he died in a mining tragedy just before the depression leaving her a house and widow's benefits and money in the bank. So at last Gypsy was respectable, far from her Cape Colored past and financially independent. As soon as possible she lost little Rose.
"No-one would imagine that your father was once no better than a tsotsi, because when he got out of the reformatory he teamed up with a Lebanese gang and later ended up in jail with them for breaking and entering. Luckily that German immigrant took a fancy to him and trained him to be a wrestler and, while his weight was at first an advantage, his laziness soon turned it to flab and he got too fat to move fast enough in the wrestling ring, so he had to give it up and try easier ways of making a living. He became a bouncer in a naughty nightclub, then a bookie in a bucket-shop he and his friend, Ralf, ran. Then he became a conman. Remember when he and Ralf sold broken glass to that Belgian tourist who thought they were diamonds? It wouldn't have worked if the Belgian wasn't leaving South Africa in a big hurry.
"Then he married HER the 'beautiful blonde bombshell', the white bitch who cheated on him during the war. At first he decided to forgive her but then your mom turned up and put a stick in his spokes. Well he upset her applecart too, or something did, because she would never have gotten involved with him if it hadn't been so humid in Durban. You know, Durban was very romantic after the War and Thoreauna had never seen the ocean before. It made her drunk in a way, and she wasn't thinking straight. She had never really listened before to Christmas beetles and the bullfrogs singing so loud, and the camaraderie of the soldiers returned from war, and they were all so hungry for women. You can't blame the poor sods.
"Well they all flirted with Thoreauna and she began to feel important at last, and your father noticed that she was pretty, which, believe it or not, she was in those days. And she noticed how lonely and sad he was, and the next thing she knew she was in love with a married man. He told her it was all over between him and HER, and he was suing HER for divorce. Well, you know the rest. Maybe you don't understand it, but you've got to see that your mom also had her own miseries. She was trying to forget the suicide of her fiance in Jo'burg, who was a white male-nurse who wanted to be an actor. The rumor was that he killed himself because he was queer. But Thoreauna could never get it out of her mind that he took an overdose because he discovered that she was really a Colored. So she was relieved when she found out that SHE was suing your father on the grounds that he had decieved her about his blackness.
"But I'm not ashamed of my background. If only you had known my father. Of course your father's real father died before it was possible for you to have been born, but you were already born when my dad died, though you were too young know what's what. He was a saint, my father, Theophilus Gustavus Bosman. He was born in Malmesbury, in the Cape, in 1883. His family was not really regarded as Colored because the rest of the family was white and owned land and they could trace their ancestors back two hundred years to the Huguenots, but somewhere along the line one of them married a Malay or a Hottentot, who knows, no one talks about it. At first this was not a problem. Only later they married into a Dutch Reformed family and the white Jouberts got separated from the black Bosmans, or, as they called us, 'the Bushman side of the family', because my great-great aunt Miepie married a half Bushman-half Dutch slave. Well, she was the darkest daughter and supposedly retarded or dumb, but how can you believe that my wonderful refined father, Theophilus Bosman, came from that but grew up to be a school teacher, as was my own mother, Fanny, who was the whitest daughter of the slightly brown Beauchamp family, who supposedly were descended from an aristocratic English remittance man and a black woman from Mozambique.
"The match between my father and mother was not approved of at first by the Beauchamps as they had high hopes of marrying all their daughters off to white men because they were educated. But apparently they relented when they found out that my father had left the Dutch Reformed Church and had not gone to help the Afrikaner Republics fight the British during the Boer War, and had become a Christian Scientist and a pacifist, which wasn't as good as being Anglican, but was better than being a Calvinist in their eyes. So they got married in 1910, when the Union of South Africa was formed from the two British colonies and the two Boer Republics, which was a good omen for my father.
"His parents also had reservations about the match because the Beauchamps were not Afrikaans. So the two sets of in-laws didn't speak to each other for two years until my older sister was born, and called Satya because of Gandhi, and then the new Grandmas seemed to get over their language problem while they dripped and drooled over the new baby, who was by all accounts gorgeous even then. Well, of course they would all think so. She was the first blond baby in a hundred years. Of course her blue eyes didn't last and soon turned dark brown like everyone else's, but still all went well until 1915 when the Great War began to infect even the Cape and my father decided to take his small family and his two spinster sisters, Sarie and Sissie, who I think were devoted less to Mary Baker Eddy than they were to my father, and go and live on a small farm in the Karoo, where they could live away from a society which my father felt was so sinful and sick he didn't want his kids in it.
"In 1915 a second child was born, your mother, who they named Thoreauna, after the American writer. In 1918 I was born. Because I was so dark the grandparents on both sides said I was a sign from God that my parents were arrogant and immoral. But that wasn't the end of it, because the final straw was when my father and his little family all became vegetarians. Well, the Bosmans and the Beauchamps now washed their hands of their children and my father was at last free to live life without interference and the next ten years, according to him, were heaven. I was named Lenina, after the Russian Bolshevik. Later my dad regretted that, but at that time he thought that Lenin was a saint. So he floated around his little farm reading Gandhi's pamphlets and Thoreau and Tolstoy and eating vegetables and talking to his pigs and cows.
"Then the Great Drought began in 1926 and by 1930, when I was a hefty boeremeisie, I began to hear about the Depression, which I remember like yesterday. I can see Sissie and Sarie sitting like a pair of old black crows near the warm iron stove in the bare winter kitchen day in and day out, and us kids always seemed hungry, and the farm was turning to desert, but my father didn't notice and just carried on twinkling behind his old steel-rimmed glasses. My mother grew red in the face with rage and her hair turned white with frustration and her old hands and her heart became calloused with hard work, said my dad, but she struggled to scrape enough food for one day at a time from the farmyard and field, while daddy roamed his land reading Eugene Marais' 'Soul of the White Ant' and trying to imitate that writer by sitting every afternoon on a crag at the top of a hill of boulders so he could watch a tribe of baboons, who my mother accused of taking from his own kith and kin the love that was rightfully ours. But my father had faith and my mother didn't, and he saw God in Nature and he believed in mind over matter, so you can't blame him for loving animals more than people who are so selfish and materialistic.
"Anyway she drove him out of the house with her nagging, and Satya couldn't stand it anymore so she left and went to Jo'burg where she met her white traffic cop husband and got married in 1934. In 1939 Thoreauna left because the war was coming and they needed nurses, and went to live with Satya, and my father's heart was broken, but not as badly as when Satya suddenly died of a brain tumor during the war and left four beautiful kids with no mother. So Thoreauna raised them for a few years till their father remarried, and by that time they were old enough to cope with a stepmother, except she was a raw Afrikaner from Onderdiebobbejaansepoephol (a joke meaning under the baboons asshole) and couldn't even cook. Then I went to work as a cleaner at the General where your mom also worked and where she met and became engaged to the white male nurse who wanted to be an actor, and was so gentle and played the piano with his slim white hands, just like that Tchai-scotch-ky, but only better. But he was over sensitive and couldn't survive in this hard world so he killed himself a month before they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.
"When the War was over I packed my bags and went back to the farm where I found my parents in an even worse state than me. Even Sarie and Sissie had left and gone to live in a cheap hotel near District Six in Cape Town. My poor father looked like he was a hundred next birthday, and my mother was becoming senile so I told Thoreauna. She took what money she had saved during the war and brought them to Durban for a holiday, and, well I've already told you the rest."
One night when his aunt and uncle were already asleep, Derek crept into the kitchen and took down from the top of the dresser the old biscuit tin in which his aunt kept her departed father's writings. He felt that he needed something solid to tie him to the past. He opened the tin on the kitchen table and stifled a sneeze as dust puffed up from the yellowed brittle pages of Gandhi's pamphlets. Derek's heart stood still as the frail pages crumbled in his hands. At the bottom of the tin was an old brown notebook which he opened and began to read:
May 1931. African mythology is simpler than Greek or Norse, but no less wonderful. The origin of Death is told in an ancient Hottentot tale of the Moon and the Hare. Once upon a time the Moon called upon the Hottentot God, which is also known as the Praying Mantis, and told him to go to the people with this message: "As I, the Moon, die, and in dying live, so shall you also die, and in dying live."
So the insect set out with this message, but before he could reach the people, the Hare intercepted him. Now there are plenty of tales of the great trickster, the Hare, among all Bantu from southern Zaire to southern Cape and the Hottentots absorbed Bantu culture when the Tswana and the Xhosa migrated south. All these tales tell of how deceitful and mischievous is the Hare.
So the Hare asked the Insect: "What's the hurry? Where are you going?"
The insect answered: "The Moon has sent me to tell the people that as she dies, and in dying lives, so shall they also die, and in dying live."
Then the Hare said: "You're such a slow and clumsy runner. Let me take the message to the people."
And with that he ran off and coming to the people told them: "The Moon has sent me to tell you that as she dies, and in dying perishes utterly, so shall you also die, and in dying utterly perish."
Then the Hare went to the Moon and told her what he had said.
The Moon became angry and shouted: "How dare you tell the people something that I have not said?"
With that she took up a stick and hit him on the nose, and since that time the Hare has had a split lip.
This farm turns to dust. All my cows are dying but I cannot give up.
Derek turned the pages. Some were so stained that he could not decipher them no matter that his grandfather's writing was as simple and legible as printing. He read:
July 1932. I now think of this as my Depression Diary. In more ways than one. I cannot let my family down. I can never show them how this drought has destroyed all my hopes of a Garden of Eden in Africa. Oh, God are we cursed? Is this white blood that runs in my veins poisoning me? While the whole world falls to pieces about my ears I turn to history and ancient myths.
Among the Zulus there is a legend that Chaka once prophesied that white men would invade his country, flying from the sky like birds and building houses out of mud like swallows. A popular Zulu folk-song consisting of only one line, chanted over and over in varieties of melody and harmony, says: "This country is ruled by the birds."
A Xhosa song tells of the arrival, in 1820, of the first British settlers to the eastern Cape. Some of them came to an area near which some Afrikaner trekboers (pioneer farmers) were already farming. They called it New Bedford after their hometown in England. The Afrikaners, feeling that they were being encroached upon, went to the chief, Ngquika, and asked for his help in driving out the English. Ngquika refused, saying (so goes the song): "I do not sit by the fire before I've caught the drift of the wind. I do not wish to concern myself with quarrels that do not involve my people. There is no help for you, I regret. There is no help for you."
No, this country was born out of trouble and horror and the whites have ruined the lives of their black brothers here. The Xhosas especially were ruined by the whites. In May 1856, when they were being squeezed off their land by the British 1820 settlers, a young Xhosa girl, Nongqause, was sitting gazing into a pond one day when the Ancestors spoke to her thus: "Go back to your people and tell them to burn all their mealies and kill all their cattle, then the Russians will come out of the sky and drive the British into the sea." She did and her people obeyed the voices of the Ancestors. The Russians didn't come, and most of the Xhosa died of starvation. How could a young uneducated girl know about Russians? Who put her up to this? There is more to this than meets the eye. Truly mankind is full of sin. But I must not let my mind dwell on evil. I will be more cheerful in the future even when Fanny fights with me and drives me away to my baboons.
Derek sat at the kitchen table turning page after yellow page, moving ever further with his grandfather into the past. He read:
Is it 1934? When the Drought first started I was still so full of faith. Little Lenina runs around in the farmyard playing in the dust which swirls up from the dry-baked yard and makes her cough and cry. The car which I bought in 1927 is rusting and falling slowly to pieces under the willow tree which sinks its roots beside the well with its creaky handpump and the windmill moves in the wind but brings up very little water. And the pigsty. How I loved the pigs. As parched as the farmyard is it seems like an oasis compared with the surrounding veld, a checkerboard of longdead bone-white grass and black patches charred by fires started in the merciless summer's sun. The springbok, blesbok and eland have long since wandered away in search of water or died for lack of it. Only my small tenacious band of baboons ekes out a living on the krans cliff) which towers against the setting sun, and white tickbirds stalking locusts stiltwalk the black burnt veld.
One night, at the height of the Drought, while the whole family sat somberly around the kitchen table listening to me reading Mary Baker Eddy, the Hotnot woman came rushing in to say that a Bushman had been caught stealing one of the chickens. There had been rumors that a strange man had been seen living in the Bobbejaanskrans caves, eating lizards and snakes. Well I told the Hotnot woman to keep the Bushman in the yard till we had finished our nightly prayers and put the children safely to bed. Then I went to see what all the fuss was about. As I opened the door the light from the kitchen spilled across the African blackness and I saw that the farm kafirs had the Bushman pinned to the ground and were kicking him. I told them to take the Bushman to the ploughshed for the night.
As the two men led their captive away they began to punch him in the ribs and kick his shins. I called on them to desist and to give the Bushman fresh straw and two blankets and to be sure that no harm came to him until the police were sent for on the morrow. As he turned towards the kitchen door the Hotnot woman ran out into the yard and began to spit at him and shout "thief" at the retreating figure. I chided her and ordered her to take the Bushman some biltong (jerky,) bread and tea with a little sugar and milk. Then I went inside but I could not sleep or forget about the little Bushman. As I later told Fanny, while I knelt beside my bed that night praying for rain, I felt a moist breeze on my cheek and something made me think it was the breath of the starving Bushman. In the morning the Bushman was found dead beneath one scrawny blanket with a plate of putu lying untouched beside his thin, small corpse. So I fetched my Bible and told the farmworkers to bring the body to Bobbejaanskrans. There we buried him in the little cave, which I had once chosen for my own grave. And I read: "Want so lief het God die wereld gehad, dat hy sy enigegebore Seun gegee het, sodat elkeen wat in hom glo, nie verlore mag gaan nie, maar die ewige lewe kan he."
[For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.]
That day clouds began building up on the horizon and at sunset they burst over the farm. Everyone except my stern old Fanny danced in the rain. It only lasted a few hours, but that was enough to make us rejoice. We never mentioned the Bushman again.
Derek had not noticed that the sun had risen. When his aunt entered the kitchen he jumped in fright. She looked at the books, but said nothing. Derek felt happy. He knew he had found his true family.
Lenina made tea and lit a cigaret before she said: "So you've discovered your grandfather's books. Keep them. They're yours. No one in your family will appreciate them. This is your home now. Soon you'll be 21 and a rich man. You don't need your playwhite family. I know I don't. There's nothing wrong with being Coloured. We are the only true South Africans. One day this country will be ours."
Copyrighted 2005, Patrick Joubert Conlon, Aantrek Publications
posted by Joubert at 3:03 PM
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