South African Stories - Two: The Group Areas Act
The first story is entitled "The Group Areas Act." The Group Areas Act of 1950 designated specific living areas for the different ethnic groups in South Africa. The law was repealed in 1990.
Isingisi Beach was a small town on the Indian Ocean coast of South Africa in that part of Natal then known as Zululand. It was said, not always in jest, that Isingisi was the "last bastion of the British Empire," and the Isingisites, as they called themselves, thought of themselves as Englishmen. Whenever they went to England to visit their relatives, they would say that they were "going home." They did not think of themselves as Africans as the Afrikaaners did.
One family, the Van der Merwes, were the only Afrikaners ever to live at Isingisi Beach.
Margaret van der Merwe was from an English-speaking family, the Roys, who lived at Isingisi Railway Station, a mile from Isingisi Beach. While the Beach was for the pure-white middle classes, the Station was for the slightly off-white working classes, some Colored artisans and a few Indian merchants. Margaret's family was looked down upon by the Isingisites as "poor white trash." It was sometimes said that the Roys "had a touch of the tar-brush".
They were an unambitious clan. The men were content to work at the local carpet factory which employed mostly Indians and Coloreds. For several generations none had ventured any further afield to find better work, and the women were not avaricious. Their greatest pleasure was to spend the weekend at the Beach. The men fished in the surf, or chiselled mussels from the rocks and the women refreshed them from bottomless baskets of food and beer. Only Margaret felt any discontentment with her lot. She longed to live at the "Beach", not at the "Station".
In the heady days after the Second World War she met a handsome Afrikaner who was stationed at the government Roads Department encampment halfway between the Beach and the Station, a collection of prefabricated huts known to the Isingisites as the "Roads Camp". It's inhabitants were poor Afrikaners.
One of Margaret's brothers had met this young Boer while fishing at the Isingisi River Mouth one weekend. He then introduced Adolphus van der Merwe to his sister the following Christmas Eve at the Isingisi Island Hotel's usual dance party. Adolphus proved to be an energetic dancer, and Margaret, feeling the effects of cheap "champagne", found herself enjoying the warmth and firmness of Adolphus' sweaty muscles, and his ruddy excited face. When she momentarily sobered up she realized that she had had no intention of leading on this unprepossessing Boer. She muttered something about the sweltering summer's night and ran out onto the verandah to cool off. As she watched the moon rise out of the Indian Ocean and travel slowly along the silver path which it had laid out for itself along the sea, Adolphus came up behind her and placed his hands on her shoulders. They gazed at the moonlight on the waves and the river, which disappeared westwards past the island and into some mangrove swamps where frogs croaked and whistled in chorus. Warm breezes bore spray from the surf at the river's mouth and smelled of seaweed. Margaret licked the salt from her lips.
She had never felt less romantic in her life, yet she could not resist the unasked for intimacy of the simple Afrikaner when he suddenly put his arms about her waist, surrounding her with his foreign smell and shape. His silence, because he could not speak English fluently, seemed so adult and reserved compared with her boisterous brothers.
Margaret Roy married Adolphus van der Merwe six months later when it became obvious that she was pregnant. Her family, because they were so generally tolerant and easy-going, did not object strongly, and what little disapproval they did express was ignored by Margaret in her usual willful way.
Later she regretted her marriage when it dawned on her that the only job her husband had any intention of doing was the one he already had with the Roads Department, mostly because of his lack of English. This meant that she had to live in one of the mobile homes in the Roads Camp, which though halfway to her desired destiny, was still not the Beach.
She began to nag her husband to improve himself, and did so continuously over the next ten years, but her ambitions seemed to be finally thwarted in 1955 when Mr van der Merwe was not quite fatally squashed by a steamroller.
At first Margaret thought that she had been condemned to a life of hopeless poverty, but soon her willpower came to the rescue. She somehow succeeded in renting a small garage at the Beach which she then converted into a drycleaning depot. On Tuesdays she collected the Isingisites dirty clothes and sent them to Durban where they were cleaned. They were then returned each Friday to their grateful owners. Soon she expanded her business to include a florist shop.
She also took a lease on the "Round House" on Dick King Road. This house, while charming, was not to the taste of most of the Isingisites. It was too impractical; an awkward octagon with many unusable corners, but it was the only house on the Beach which was within Margaret's means to rent. At last she had succeeded in attaining her lifelong dream of living at the Beach, a definite step up from her lowly beginnings at the Station. Though her husband was now incapable of working, and spent most of his time fishing, Margaret was not unhappy and was respected by most of the Isingisites.
Isingisi Beach, in the Fifties, boasted an odd mixture of houses. There were a few "beach cottages", raised on stilts to foil the termites, and many large, very private, rather utilitarian buildings almost invisible behind huge hedges and full-foliaged trees. There was also a handful of more imposing homes like the "Spanish Villa" and the "Tudor Mansion".
Though the real beauty of Isingisi Beach came from an abundance of tropical vegetation, most Isingisites strove to recreate the ideal English garden. Everyone had a few rose bushes struggling under the scorching sun, and most had beds of snapdragons, pansies and petunias. Those who did their own gardening soon learnt to plant plenty of native succulents and hardy perennials from Australia or Central America. But nothing remained tamed for too long. Africa soon re-asserted her uncontrollable self. The tough silverleaf, Natal plum and Hottentot fig soon re-appeared in the sandy soil which was so well suited to their primitive needs. They grew so relentlessy that they were most often left to riot where they may, and snakes such as the deadly green or black mambas, and puffadders lurked in the untidy undergrowth.
At dusk and dawn bands of monkeys stole the bananas which grew in most back yards. By noon flocks of yellow weaver birds chattered amid the tree tops silhouetted against a sky too bright and white with sunlight to look at for long. The humid nights were filled with the pungent smells of red soil exhaling the day's heat, and insects swarmed towards all exposed lights.
The Isingisites sat on their verandahs in the dark, watching the lightning burst and dart across the dark horizon. They listened more to the sound of the ice clinking in their glasses of gin than they did to their conversation. They talked of the terrible mess the Boers were making of the country, with their silly new "apartheid" policies. Meanwhile their Zulu maids prepared roast beef and potatoes for dinner and overheard snatches of dialogue which drifted slowly through the open kitchen window on the viscous midsummer night's air.
"In the old days we never talked of the native problem. Well, maybe we whispered about the Color Bar, just among ourselves I mean, but we didn't rub the kafirs' noses in it, did we? Since these bloody Boers have let the cat out of the bag with their talk of "apartheid", who knows what will happen next?"
"The air is so close I can't breath properly."
"Why, only the other day I was saying to Cecil that these damn Boers will give away the whole game. Of course they take everything so seriously, religiously. All the wrong things, mind you, like their painfully naive brand of republicanism which certainly can't cope with the delicate ins and outs of big business and overseas investors."
"When will that storm break? Not that I'm looking forward much to a cloudburst and a plague of flying ants soon afterwards, and the cooling effect of the rain lasts barely a half an hour."
Pieter was the only child of the Van der Merwes; the product of his parents' brief, pre-nuptial co-operation. He was ten years old when they moved from the Roads Camp to the Beach. For the next five years all that he ever needed for happiness was contained within the ten square miles of earth called Isingisi Beach. He fished, with rod or net, in the tidepools which were scattered around Hlephuka Rocks (The sunbathing types seldom strayed far from the sandy beach which gave the seaside village its name). These rocks were underwater jungles, alive with fishy beasts. He would squat over them for hours, his bare feet clinging intuitively to the slippery rocks, his blonde hair standing up in the sea-breeze, his blue eyes almost swimming among the rainbow of brightly colored anemones and sea-urchins. The seaweeds were the tree trunks and vines of a watery forest. Pieter's prey was the abundance of nervous crayfish, shy octopi, comical hermit-crabs and dappled dogfish.
If the wind were blowing fiercely off the ocean, tossing clouds of foam onto the rocks and blowing sand across the beach, Pieter would take cover in one of the numerous caves which tunneled into Hlephuka Rocks. One of these caves was so small that it automatically excluded prying adults. It was also so difficult to reach - through a downward twisting tunnel - that those who were tiny enough to negotiate it were usually too afraid to do so. Pieter felt invulnerable here and spent many an afternoon hiding from storms either of nature's or of his mother's making. He knew that no other humans entered the cave because his old tin box full of chocolates, cheese and crackers had not yet been tampered with or removed. However, plenty of beasts frequented the cave, some leaving droppings or tracks, others nibbling any goodies Pieter may have left deliberately unprotected outside of his tin box.
When high tides covered the rock pools and flooded the entrance to his cave Pieter would jump on his bicycle and head for the sugar-cane plantations or remote lagoons south of Isingisi. He would search for frogs or snakes to add to his growing collection, or simply sit in the sun eating a stalk of sugar-cane and listening to the chant of the Zulus as they harvested the crop.
Try as he might to escape the civilized world, Pieter's mother was determined to tame him. He was sent to the local English school. His teacher, Miss Beals, whose nickname was "Eels", at first took a disliking to him and hit him with a ruler on a boil on the inside of his elbow. It burst and he ran home. Margaret went over to Eels' house and lectured her while holding tightly onto to the startled teacher's collar.
Thereafter Eels took kindly to Pieter and even offered to teach him to play the piano at her home, free! Pieter entered an even more blissful phase of life. Pieter and Eels became friends, confided in each other. Eels was a member of the Black Sash anti-apartheid organization, and would trek off to Durban every Saturday morning to shake a collection can on Smith Street, or march with placards in front of the Post Office in protest of the Afrikaner government's latest forced removals under the Group Areas Act. While she never lectured Pieter about politics, he found himself beginning to think of his parents as ignorant and prejudiced.
Pieter was fifteen when his secluded idyll came to an end. His mother had decided to send him to a boys-only English high school in Durban, thirteen miles away. Now he had to wake up an hour earlier each morning in order to catch two buses to school, and by the time he got home in the late afternoon, it was too late to fish, swim or ride his bike. He most definitely was not comfortable in the straightjacket of Anglican conformity which was his new school, with its plump white boys and their endless obsessions with cricket and girls' tits. Though Margaret knew that it seemed cruel to send her son to this school, she also knew that she was giving him an opportunity for which he would later be grateful. Pieter understood this and, as much as he hated it, he stuck it out. But, here in this crowd of boys, he began to feel lonelier than he'd ever felt before. Margaret advised him to toughen himself up.
Lying awake each morning, waiting for his father to call him, Pieter would try to stifle the horror he felt at having to go to school. He would cover his head with his sweat-sticky sheet and pray for time to pass quickly so that it would soon be summer and the Christmas holidays. On weekday mornings the screaming chatter of the Indian mynah birds outside his window seemed irritating instead of amusing. Pieter would cover his ears and moan with self-pity.
If it had been a Saturday morning, he would have jumped out of bed and flung open his window. Then, sitting on the sill in his pyjamas he would have laughed at the at the battle between the mynahs and the monkeys in the mango tree. The monkeys wanted the ripe fruit, but the mynahs regarded the tree as their territory. They were fearless and always eventually succeeded in driving the monkeys away with their shrieks and deadly accurate dive-bomb attacks. When the battle was over Pieter would dash down to the beach for a quick swim before breakfast. On Saturday afternoons he usually went to Miss Beals' house, and at night there would be the film at the Town Hall.
One Monday morning Pieter lay sweltering beneath his sheets, waiting for his father to call him. He dozed off and began to dream shallowly of ripe papayas.
Then the anxiety-ridden voice of his father shattered his dreams and he awoke to the smell of coffee, bacon, hot buttered toast and sliced papaya which his father had prepared for him. Pieter dressed quickly and went to the kitchen. He glared at his father who was slumped at the table, fat, shirtless and glistening with sweat, with a cigaret dangling from his lower lip. Adolphus exhaled a cloud of acrid smoke.
Pushing the ashtray towards his father priggishly, he said: "Do you have to smoke while I'm eating? You know it makes me nauseous."
Adolphus was humiliated and hurriedly stubbed out his cigaret and removed the ashtray from the table. He seemed suddenly frail and forlorn to his son. Pieter wished that he could bring himself to soften his attitude towards his father.
"Alles sal reg kom," ("Everything will come right.") said Adolphus van der Merwe, lighting up another cigaret unconsciously, "soon you'll be able to lie in bed for as long as you like or..."
"I know..." Pieter interrupted, "...or go fishing or swimming or..."
"You'll be okay," Adolphus continued, oblivious to his son's reproachful mood. "You'll see. Everything will be fine when this year of school is over."
"You say the same thing every morning," his son said, adding spitefully, "mere platitudes."
Pieter knew that his father would not understand this word, which he had only recently acquired himself from Miss Beals. Pieter's cruelty to his father was fuelled by his shame at having an unkempt, uncouth, common, unsophisticated father. "Skaap" was another word that Pieter had recently learnt at his English school. He had known, of course, that it was the Afrikaans word for sheep, but his schoolmates referred to Afrikaners as "skaaps". Adolphus was simply a "skaap" to his son's peers.
Pieter's parents seldom spoke about politics, but at school he began to discover that the world was filled with terrible problems. One of the greatest problems, according to his English schoolmates, was the stupid and stubborn Afrikaner.
Whilst Miss Beals did not use such inflammatory language, she, nevertheless, agreed with her fellow Britons. As 1960 progressed Pieter began to think they were right.
Robert Sobukwe, the president of the Pan Africanist Congress, called for a nationwide campaign of civil disobedience to protest the Pass Laws. Pieter read in the newspapers about Sharpeville, where a crowd of African women had gathered to burn their ID cards. When the police ordered them to disperse the crowd threw stones at them. The police opened fire and killed sixty-nine of them. The British government condemned Prime Minister Verwoerd for his heavy-handed dealing with the protesters.
Soon afterwards, when Verwoerd was shot in the head, the members of the Isingisi Country Club celebrated that night with a braaivleis (BBQ) and beer-bash, only to discover the next morning that the architect of "Seperate Development" had survived the attempted assassination.
Miss Beals told Pieter: "The Country Club clique is as stupid, in its own way, as the Afrikaner government. Verwoerd will now be seen as blessed and protected. He will return with more political strength than before, and the Afrikaners will push ahead with their plans for total apartheid."
To Pieter, the whole year seemed to consist of one crisis after another. Towards the end of the year a mob of Zulus raged through the Indian areas of Cato Manor, burning and looting shops and houses, allegedly in retaliation for an incident in which a Zulu child had been short-changed by an Indian merchant. The horde then ran up the hill from Cato Manor towards one of the wealthiest suburbs in Durban, where Pieter's school was situated. When the Zulus began pouring through the schoolyard the pupils were told to crouch beneath their desks. Pieter cowered under his desk for what seemed like most of the afternoon, listening to the sounds of thousands of thudding feet and bloodcurdling war-cries. He thought he heard, "Bulala!" He knew that meant "Kill!" in Zulu. A stone smashed through one of the windows and rolled towards the feet of the teacher, who stood in front of the blackboard, beating his palm with his cane, a look of fury on his red face.
School was closed for a week while the rioting was quelled, and when Pieter returned there were Saracen armored cars in the rugby field. Their guns were aimed at Cato Manor in the distant valley below.
Soon it was December, time for the long summer holiday, and Christmas. For six long weeks Pieter swam and fished and visited Miss Beals. He soon forgot all about the riots and the problems which beset his country.
When he returned to school in January 1961, Pieter saw that the Saracens had been removed. The lawn on which they had stood had turned yellow and grubs wiggled in the sunlight. Pieter hoped that this year would be happier, but it was not.
Verwoerd stormed out of the British Commonwealth. A referendum was held to institute an independent Republic of South Africa. There was talk of the Province of Natal seceding from the rest of South Africa and remaining loyal to the Queen. Some of the staunchest secessionists lived in Isingisi, which was an enclave of the English opposition, the United Party. Miss Beals, a member of the Progressive Party, did not usually see eye-to-eye with her fellow Isingisites, but in this, she agreed with them. Despite all the threats, Natal did not secede, and, as the majority of white South Africans had voted for the formation of a republic, the Isingisites adapted grudgingly.
Soon afterwards Verwoerd gave the nearly one million Indian immigrants the South African citizenship which had been witheld from them by the British for one hundred years. None of the Isingisites guessed what this move portended, though a few muttered that Verwoerd had made a secret deal with the wealthiest Indians in Durban, and wondered what the trade-off would be.
As the year dragged on Pieter found himself becoming increasingly worried and depressed by his classmates talk of politics. He understood that they did not hate him personally. They simply hated the Boers because their parents had told them to. Though Miss Beals professed not to hate the Boers, Pieter sensed her condescending attitude towards them, and not even her intellectual analysis could comfort him. He found the antidote to his worldly troubles in the Bible that his mother had given him for Christmas. Though Margaret did not go to any church, she read the Bible religiously. Pieter began to read it with his mother, and found a shield to protect himself against the problems he forsaw looming in the adult world beyond school.
It was because of Pieter's growing reputation as a religious fanatic that his most controversial classmate, Steven McIntyre, sought out his company. Steven collected eccentric friends. He was very confident in manner, owing to his parent's great wealth, and spoke pedantically and at great length about politics; about such things as "Ninety Day Detention", "House Arrest" and "Banning". Steven was a member of a Gandhian pacifist student group whose leader was an Indian medical student, Sonny Naidoo.
Many rumors about Steven circulated at school. It was said of him, because of his association with Naidoo, that he was a communist. One day after school, Steven took Pieter to visit Naidoo.
Naidoo greeted Pieter by saying: "Steven tells me that you're very religious."
"I suppose so," Pieter answered. When he looked into the Indian's eyes, he was at first intimidated and he thought that he saw such a deep seriousness that he wanted, impulsively, to confess his innermost secrets to Naidoo. Pieter felt that maybe Naidoo would understand everything; all the complications; his very difficult position as an Afrikaner who disagreed with apartheid.
But, when he looked more closely into Naidoo's eyes, he saw an expression which could also have been polite condescension masking bored indifference. Then the Indian's eyes seemed to change again and he seemed to be looking at Pieter with eager curiosity.
Pieter realized that he would not be able to read Naidoo's face easily. He remembered that his father had warned him never to trust an Indian. ("Their hearts are still in India," contended Mr van der Merwe. "They are only in South Africa to make money, and, at the first sign of trouble, they'll bugger off back there or go to England.")
Pieter was torn between a temptation to let down his guard, and a wariness of the mild amusement which seemed to twinkle in Naidoo's eyes.
"Have you read the writings of Mahatma Gandhi Ji? You do know, don't you, that Gandhi lived in South Africa for twenty-one years before returning to India to liberate it from the British?" Naidoo asked in such a cold clinical manner that Pieter was taken aback.
"Yes," Pieter answered, and added, wanting to be sincere and frank with Naidoo, "if you mean about non-violent passive resistance, then I agree with everything he said and..."
Then Pieter caught a glimpse of Steven's face. It was frozen strangely in a mirthless grin. Pieter found that his words stuck in his throat. He could no longer speak in so candid and artless a voice, and muttered something inaudible. He wondered if he was being paranoid or if Steven and Naidoo were conspiring to make him look like a fool; all the while laughing silently at the Afrikaner simpleton.
Naidoo looked from one white boy to the other and seemed to size up the situation immediately. He turned to Pieter and said: "Steven also tells me that you are a minor poet of sorts."
Steven guffawed with a burst of released tension and sputtered: "Now isn't that a bit patronizing? A MINOR poet is little enough. But a poet OF SORTS is quite contemptuous, isn't it?"
The rest of the visit was dominated by Steven's superficial chatter. He seemed determined to prevent anything real or sincere from passing between Pieter and Naidoo. All of them were aware of this, and a heavy atmosphere of deceit began to permeate the room despite Steven's small-talk and silly jokes. Naidoo sat silently observing the two boys. His eyes were half shut. Steven giggled neurotically.
That night, in the secrecy and solitude of his own safe bed, Pieter decided that he needed to see Naidoo alone. He felt that he could tell the Indian everything, well, more than he'd ever told anyone else before; that nothing could shock Naidoo. Pieter hoped that he could explain to him a certain mystery: why did all the white adults seem to be avoiding something; to be reluctant to talk? Even Miss Beals shied away from discussing communism, and Pieter was more than curious. He thirsted after understanding. Pieter fell asleep with the thought that perhaps Naidoo was much misunderstood, even more of a pariah than himself.
The next day at school he said to Steven, in as nonchalant a way as he could muster, "People say that Naidoo is a communist. Is he?"
"Well, they're ignoramuses, I mean ignorami," Steven answered. "Most people don't even know what Marxism is, and anyway, most white South Africans regard any contact between the different races as communism, don't they?"
So 1961 passed, and Pieter's vision of the world began to blur ever more out of focus. He began to wonder if communism might be the natural outcome of Christianity, yet he could not understand the Marxists' atheism. He realized that apartheid was wrong, yet he sympathized with the whites' fears of loosing everything. They would, after all, be outnumbered five to one by the blacks in the power game. Miss Beals continued to inspire him. She fought not only the Afrikaner government but British complacency. She accused the British of being apathetic and complicit in apartheid. He came to see that she was despised by her fellow British Isingisites.
Out of insecurity and an awareness of his naivity, Pieter continued his friendship with Miss Beals and Steven. He did not have such definite answers as either of them but wanted desperately to be sure. During 1962 Pieter was drawn more and more into politics. He attended meetings with Steven. Eventually Pieter was invited to a very special meeting of the Gandhian group where Naidoo was slated to give a revolutionary speech.
Pieter sat quietly through the speeches preceding Naidoo's. At first he could not understand them. There seemed to be a schism developing. Some of the speakers denounced others. Slowly it dawned on Pieter that there was disagreement about the use of violence in the fight against apartheid. Some members felt that the use of violence went directly against the teachings of Gandhi, while others felt that the time for mere passive resistance had run out. Pieter longed for Naidoo to rise and speak out against this heresy of violence, and unite the members into the idealistic peaceful group they had once been. At last Naidoo rose. The noise in the crowd subsided and everyone listened carefully.
He held up his hands and intoned: "Comrades, some of us will never realize what's at stake in South Africa. Unfortunately that goes for many of my fellow Indians who are worried about loosing their thriving businesses by which they exploit their African brothers. This campaign is only the beginning. It's not just about apartheid. It's about justice and equality, and a fair distribution of the power and wealth. Yes, it's about turning the tables on the Afrikaner government, but it's also about the worldwide struggle to liberate the workers from the clutches of the capitalist oppressors. We can't think simply in terms of South Africa. We need to become engaged in the international struggle for social justice. I tell you this struggle is not for the so-called liberals. Liberalism is the way the capitalists destroy our revolution. We don't want liberalism. The Afrikaners are busy killing our brothers and sisters. Liberalism tells them to suffer in silence. Liberals are useful idiots as our great inspirer, Lenin, said. How long must we bleed before we strike back in righteous anger? We must all stand united now. The day is not far off when our African brothers will rise up in the townships and demand power to the people. Long live the peoples' struggle! Long live Poquo! Power to the people! Amandhala!"
Throughout Naidoo's speech there had been rumblings in the audience. A handful of Indians had left. When the remaining Indians heard the words "Poquo" (an African terrorist group) and "amandhla" (the Zulu word for "power") they became uncomfortable. Most Indians were not ready to embrace brotherhood with Africans. In fact many Indians despised the Africans as being uncivilized.
It was announced that Naidoo would take questions.
An elderly Indian man rose and asked: "How can you say long live Poquo when you know that, if you unleash violence among the Africans, your own people, the Indians, will be the first to die?"
Pieter waited breathlessly for Naidoo's answer, but he ignored the man and pointed to another raised hand. It was Steven's.
"Should our small group ally itself outright with the aims and means of Poquo?"
The man who had been ignored by Naidoo now began to shout, "No, never! They are a bunch of murderers..."
Naidoo pointed to the man and nodded to a group of Coloured youths standing at the back of the hall. They marched to the front, seized the old Indian man and dragged him out. The rest of the audience, mostly Africans and Coloreds with a smattering of younger Indians, rose and applauded Naidoo.
After this gathering, Naidoo drove Steven and Pieter to the home of a professor from Natal University. The large house was near the University high in the hills above the city, and had a view of Durban. Steven became absorbed in a conversation with the professor and his wife. Naidoo led Pieter out onto the verandah. Pieter looked in wonder at the lights of Durban stretching for miles east to the Indian Ocean. He could make out the outlines of the huge bay which made the city the largest port in Africa. None of the other guests came out onto the verandah because it had just finished raining, and the humid night was filled with millions of flying ants beating themselves to death against lighted window-panes or squirming underfoot. Suddenly Naidoo put his arm around Pieter's shoulders. Pieter froze and began to shiver.
The Indian asked, very quietly, "Would you show me your poetry one day?"
Pieter was in turmoil. Part of him was flattered. Only Miss Beals had ever asked to see his poetry before, and she had not been very enthusiastic because they were written mostly in Afrikaans. Not even his parents had ever read his poems. Yet, he could not forget what he had heard that night at the meeting, and he found himself, as if by instinct, lying.
"I've destroyed all my poems," he said, rigid with effort. "They were too controversial..."
"What on earth do you mean?" Naidoo asked with genuine surprise.
"They were too... religious..." Pieter stuttered.
"Well, I am sorry I didn't get to see them," said Naidoo, with what seemed to Pieter to be sincere disappointment.
Pieter began to feel guilty; to regret his deceitfulness, and was relieved when Steven joined them on the verandah.
"How can you stand all these creepy-crawlies?" Steven said as he sidled up to them. "Just look at all the squashed bugs. Oh, but I see what has kept you out here. The lights of the city are magnificent."
Pieter could not sleep that night. He became withdrawn and worried, and refused Steven's invitations to any further meetings.
One day, when Pieter returned from school, his mother shouted to him: "Come and look at this picture in the newspaper."
The picture was of Naidoo and a number of his followers from the Gandhian group. Steven's face peered over Naidoo's shoulder, blurred but unmistakable. Margaret had met Steven several times in the course of his friendship with her son.
"Isn't that Steven?" she asked. She didn't wait for the unnecessary answer but continued: "I see that he's got himself mixed up with some Indian communist. I hope you aren't involved in politics. See, they have put the Indian in for Ninety Days Detention. If you aren't careful you'll end up in trouble too. I'm not working myself to death putting you through school just so you can end up in prison or worse. Life is hard enough without making it complicated too."
When Naidoo was released three months later he was given a scholarship to Oxford, and left South Africa without a passport, never to return.
In January 1963 Pieter began his final year at high school. Politics took second place to the importance of study for matriculation. Steven was subdued, deflated by the fate of Sonny Naidoo. Pieter realized that his mother was keeping a closer watch on him. He studied seriously because he was not indifferent to her concerns, and the months passed by quietly.
Then, "like a bolt out of the blue", as Margaret had expressed it, the government proclaimed Isingisi Beach an Indian Group Area.
Just before this took place, Prime Minister Verwoerd had held a referendum to withdraw South Africa from the British Commonwealth and to create a republic. The referendum had passed quite easily but the voters of Isingisi Beach (being so attached to Britain) had voted against it. Verwoerd decided to destroy this last bastian of Britishness. Verwoerd had also just given South African citizenship to the Indians (eventhough many had been there for a century already) in an effort to get them on his side against the Africans. This was his bribe to the wealthy Indian businessmen of Durban.
Uptil now the Group Areas Act had only been used to remove blacks and Coloreds from certain chhoice areas which were then given to whites. This was the first and only time that whites were displaced by the Group Areas Act.
Little Churchills and local Emily Pankhursts suddenly popped out of the ranks of Isingisites and marched in front of the Town Hall to protest the action of the government, to denounce the injustice of the Group Areas Act and to accuse the Afrikaners of doing this only because they wished to break up a stronghold of political opposition. Pieter was surprised that Miss Beals did not join in these protests. She explained to him that she could not associate herself with these particular protesters because they had refused to support her in her protests against government oppression in the past. She was the first to sell her house to an Indian.
Then the Cholmondeleys announced that they had been planning to return to England for quite some time and they sold their house. When "Ye Olde English Tea House" was sold and closed, rumors flew that it would soon become a halal butchery, and the trickle became a flood. No one could resist the fabulous sums offered by the Indians for their old beach cottages, and soon the Van der Merwes were the last white family left at Isingisi Beach.
Adolphus' health deteriorated. The garage which housed Margaret's business was sold to a Mr Singh, who decided to take possession immediately. He employed Margaret to run the shop temporarily, until his son got married, at which time the new daughter-in-law would be expected to take over. The Van der Merwes had just enough money for food and rent, but could not afford electricity.
Pieter withdrew into a shell of shame at school, when, owing to his parent's poverty, he had to have patches stitched into the elbows of his worn-out blazer. He longed for the end of the year, but as the final exams approached he felt that he hadn't enough time to prepare. Then at last the exams were over, school was finished and Christmas was around the corner.
Just before Christmas Pieter received the results of his exams. He had passed "with flying colors", as Margaret boasted. That night Adolphus offered Pieter a cigaret and a brandy and cola. Pieter surprised himself by accepting, and together they sat smoking and drinking in the dark on the verandah, swatting mosquitos. They laughed and talked for the first time in perhaps ten years.
On the day after Christmas, news came that Adolphus' mother, while visiting her daughter in Johannesburg, had fallen and broken both hips. ("Drunk, no doubt," said Margaret, who had a low opinion of her mother-in-law.) She was not expected to live much longer, so Adolphus decided to go to Johannesburg to see his mother before she died. Against his wife's advice, he left two days later.
New Year's Day dawned hot and oppressive. Pieter awoke feeling sluggish and confused. His mother was also in a strange mood. They had been invited that day to visit her family, the Roys, at Isingisi Station, and set out reluctantly. Something besides the humidity made the atmosphere heavy. All through the visit Pieter and his mother exchanged impatient glances, till at last they could leave without putting a damper on the party.
As soon as they arrived home, their new neighbor, Mrs Kumar, told them that Auntie Marie had phoned from Johannesburg only minutes after they had left that morning, as well as several more times since. Mrs Kumar said that Marie had said it was urgent.
Just at that moment Steven arrived. Pieter had invited his friend for dinner while his father was away because Adolphus could not tolerate Steven, and called him a commie to his face. Pieter offered to begin cooking dinner while Margaret phoned Marie.
Then he said: "It's about my father. I think he's dead."
Mrs Kumar nodded gloomily and mumbled: "Maybe that is so. Your auntie sounded very upset."
Pieter looked at his mother. She turned away but not before he had seen in her eyes that she too knew as surely as did he. Margaret went with Mrs Kumar to use her phone and Pieter started cooking.
The phone call to Marie confirmed that Adolphus had indeed died during the night, of a stroke. Pieter felt numb. His mother seemed almost untouched. As they could not afford to transport the corpse back to Isingisi, Margaret had to fly to Johannesburg the next day to arrange the burial there. Pieter was not sure whether she had begged, borrowed or stolen the money for the fare, but she had only enough for herself. Pieter had to stay behind. Steven drove them out to the airport.
After they had seen the plane off, Steven offered Pieter a drink in the bar. Pieter had never been in a bar before. In fact he hesitated.
"Aren't we under-age?" he asked Steven, who assured him that they weren't.
Pieter entered the bar with his doubts still intact. Steven brought him a glass of cane-spirits and cola. The fiery liquor fumes went to Pieter's head suddenly, and he began to weep, quite unashamedly, though hardened barflies and sophisticated travellers turned to look at him.
"Why are you crying?" Steven asked.
"It's not because my father died," Pieter answered emphatically. "It's because my mother has never flown in a plane before, and I know she is frightened."
Having once embarked on the unpredictable sea of truth, Pieter felt free; free of the vanity which would have prevented him from crying in public; free of the fear which would have made him lie to Steven reflexively, in defense. He wiped away his tears and took a large gulp of cane-spirits. Then he smiled innocently at Steven. Did he imagine it or did Steven really look more serious than usual, almost sad? Pieter looked around and saw the same downtrodden expression on the barflies' and travellers' faces. Could it be, he asked himself, that he had just never before noticed how sad adults were? They all had pain and fear lurking behind their seemingly bold eyes.
When Steven leaned towards Pieter sympathetically, Pieter quickly said: "You know, you don't have to pity me. I've never felt better in my life. I feel as if I have just understood something for the first time. Death isn't that awful. Something deep inside me knows that my father is fine wherever he may be. I'm not even going to try to put it into words. All I know is that there is nothing to fear. As my mother would say, 'God's in his heaven and all's well on earth.' I know you think I'm drunk and that I'll feel differently when I sober up. Maybe I will but that doesn't make what I'm experiencing now less valid than feeling sorry for myself. No, this feeling of knowing the answer to all the questions, or rather of not having any questions, this is the truth. Misery is not the truth. You look sadder, well not sadder, perhaps more worried than me."
Steven stammered: "To tell you the truth, I am not happy. I've been lying to you, to my mother, the whole world. I've been living a lie, and I can't go on any longer."
"What lies have you told me?" Pieter asked. "Anyway, no matter what, it's not important. I've told you just as many lies. Life's too short for regrets."
"But it is important," Steven said, "when lies drag you down, or catch up with you when you least expect them to. You won't believe some of the lies I've told."
"I probably will," Pieter said. "But nothing you can tell me will shock me. None of it seems important in the face of this feeling of God's mercy, or natures's perfection, or whatever it is that I feel."
"Not even that I am a communist?" Steven asked.
"No, I already knew that," Pieter answered. "It used to shock me. I must admit that. Up till this very day. It made me very uncomfortable, but that is because I feared what others would think of me. Right now all those worries seem silly. My only concern right now is that if I try to explain to you what I am feeling, if I put it into words, I might loose it. Yes, I would like to share this feeling of happiness with everyone. Communism just seems so stupid to me right now. Making sure that everyone shares equally, usually with the help of a loaded gun; forcing everyone to share their worldly goods equally. Worldly goods aren't the antidote to misery. Happiness is, and that can't be coerced, or given or even taken away, because true happiness isn't dependent on anything. It's free, it happens regardless of how much misery you have, or what tragedies happen to you. It is a blessing form God."
"Well," said Steven, "It's been a long time since I heard such a resounding apology for the opium of the masses."
"Did you know," Pieter asked, "that I used to be ashamed to bring you home when my father was there? I just knew that he would make a fool of himself in front of you. Since knowing you, I became steadily more ashamed of being Afrikaans. I can't blame you for making me hate my father though. My mother is responsible for that. I'm just glad that I had a chance to have a good laugh with him before he died."
"I knew you were ashamed of your father," said Steven, "well, of being Afrikaans, I mean, but it doesn't bother me and never will."
"Amen!" said Pieter, "I mean, it doesn't bother me anymore either, and it never will again. Nothing will. It just all seems so silly right now. Afrikaans, English, black, white ... what does it matter now? We've all got broken hearts, and it seems that the only cure for that complaint is this strange happiness which comes out of the blue, when you're least expecting it, by the grace of God. There's nothing I can do about being happy or sad. It's up to God..."
"Well, you are in a very religious mood today," said Steven, "but you'll have to excuse me for a moment while I go to the toilet."
Pieter sat alone observing his fellow drinkers drowning their sorrows. Perhaps, he thought, Naidoo was right and I am a religous fanatic after all.
When Margaret returned from Johannesburg, she got a job as a cashier at OK Bazaars department store in Durban. Pieter swam and fished that summer as if he had never done so before. He was excited and felt that a new life was about to begin. Then his mother found a flat in Durban and she and Pieter left Isingisi Beach forever.
Copyrighted 2005, Patrick Joubert Conlon, Aantrek Publications
Isingisi Beach was a small town on the Indian Ocean coast of South Africa in that part of Natal then known as Zululand. It was said, not always in jest, that Isingisi was the "last bastion of the British Empire," and the Isingisites, as they called themselves, thought of themselves as Englishmen. Whenever they went to England to visit their relatives, they would say that they were "going home." They did not think of themselves as Africans as the Afrikaaners did.
One family, the Van der Merwes, were the only Afrikaners ever to live at Isingisi Beach.
Margaret van der Merwe was from an English-speaking family, the Roys, who lived at Isingisi Railway Station, a mile from Isingisi Beach. While the Beach was for the pure-white middle classes, the Station was for the slightly off-white working classes, some Colored artisans and a few Indian merchants. Margaret's family was looked down upon by the Isingisites as "poor white trash." It was sometimes said that the Roys "had a touch of the tar-brush".
They were an unambitious clan. The men were content to work at the local carpet factory which employed mostly Indians and Coloreds. For several generations none had ventured any further afield to find better work, and the women were not avaricious. Their greatest pleasure was to spend the weekend at the Beach. The men fished in the surf, or chiselled mussels from the rocks and the women refreshed them from bottomless baskets of food and beer. Only Margaret felt any discontentment with her lot. She longed to live at the "Beach", not at the "Station".
In the heady days after the Second World War she met a handsome Afrikaner who was stationed at the government Roads Department encampment halfway between the Beach and the Station, a collection of prefabricated huts known to the Isingisites as the "Roads Camp". It's inhabitants were poor Afrikaners.
One of Margaret's brothers had met this young Boer while fishing at the Isingisi River Mouth one weekend. He then introduced Adolphus van der Merwe to his sister the following Christmas Eve at the Isingisi Island Hotel's usual dance party. Adolphus proved to be an energetic dancer, and Margaret, feeling the effects of cheap "champagne", found herself enjoying the warmth and firmness of Adolphus' sweaty muscles, and his ruddy excited face. When she momentarily sobered up she realized that she had had no intention of leading on this unprepossessing Boer. She muttered something about the sweltering summer's night and ran out onto the verandah to cool off. As she watched the moon rise out of the Indian Ocean and travel slowly along the silver path which it had laid out for itself along the sea, Adolphus came up behind her and placed his hands on her shoulders. They gazed at the moonlight on the waves and the river, which disappeared westwards past the island and into some mangrove swamps where frogs croaked and whistled in chorus. Warm breezes bore spray from the surf at the river's mouth and smelled of seaweed. Margaret licked the salt from her lips.
She had never felt less romantic in her life, yet she could not resist the unasked for intimacy of the simple Afrikaner when he suddenly put his arms about her waist, surrounding her with his foreign smell and shape. His silence, because he could not speak English fluently, seemed so adult and reserved compared with her boisterous brothers.
Margaret Roy married Adolphus van der Merwe six months later when it became obvious that she was pregnant. Her family, because they were so generally tolerant and easy-going, did not object strongly, and what little disapproval they did express was ignored by Margaret in her usual willful way.
Later she regretted her marriage when it dawned on her that the only job her husband had any intention of doing was the one he already had with the Roads Department, mostly because of his lack of English. This meant that she had to live in one of the mobile homes in the Roads Camp, which though halfway to her desired destiny, was still not the Beach.
She began to nag her husband to improve himself, and did so continuously over the next ten years, but her ambitions seemed to be finally thwarted in 1955 when Mr van der Merwe was not quite fatally squashed by a steamroller.
At first Margaret thought that she had been condemned to a life of hopeless poverty, but soon her willpower came to the rescue. She somehow succeeded in renting a small garage at the Beach which she then converted into a drycleaning depot. On Tuesdays she collected the Isingisites dirty clothes and sent them to Durban where they were cleaned. They were then returned each Friday to their grateful owners. Soon she expanded her business to include a florist shop.
She also took a lease on the "Round House" on Dick King Road. This house, while charming, was not to the taste of most of the Isingisites. It was too impractical; an awkward octagon with many unusable corners, but it was the only house on the Beach which was within Margaret's means to rent. At last she had succeeded in attaining her lifelong dream of living at the Beach, a definite step up from her lowly beginnings at the Station. Though her husband was now incapable of working, and spent most of his time fishing, Margaret was not unhappy and was respected by most of the Isingisites.
Isingisi Beach, in the Fifties, boasted an odd mixture of houses. There were a few "beach cottages", raised on stilts to foil the termites, and many large, very private, rather utilitarian buildings almost invisible behind huge hedges and full-foliaged trees. There was also a handful of more imposing homes like the "Spanish Villa" and the "Tudor Mansion".
Though the real beauty of Isingisi Beach came from an abundance of tropical vegetation, most Isingisites strove to recreate the ideal English garden. Everyone had a few rose bushes struggling under the scorching sun, and most had beds of snapdragons, pansies and petunias. Those who did their own gardening soon learnt to plant plenty of native succulents and hardy perennials from Australia or Central America. But nothing remained tamed for too long. Africa soon re-asserted her uncontrollable self. The tough silverleaf, Natal plum and Hottentot fig soon re-appeared in the sandy soil which was so well suited to their primitive needs. They grew so relentlessy that they were most often left to riot where they may, and snakes such as the deadly green or black mambas, and puffadders lurked in the untidy undergrowth.
At dusk and dawn bands of monkeys stole the bananas which grew in most back yards. By noon flocks of yellow weaver birds chattered amid the tree tops silhouetted against a sky too bright and white with sunlight to look at for long. The humid nights were filled with the pungent smells of red soil exhaling the day's heat, and insects swarmed towards all exposed lights.
The Isingisites sat on their verandahs in the dark, watching the lightning burst and dart across the dark horizon. They listened more to the sound of the ice clinking in their glasses of gin than they did to their conversation. They talked of the terrible mess the Boers were making of the country, with their silly new "apartheid" policies. Meanwhile their Zulu maids prepared roast beef and potatoes for dinner and overheard snatches of dialogue which drifted slowly through the open kitchen window on the viscous midsummer night's air.
"In the old days we never talked of the native problem. Well, maybe we whispered about the Color Bar, just among ourselves I mean, but we didn't rub the kafirs' noses in it, did we? Since these bloody Boers have let the cat out of the bag with their talk of "apartheid", who knows what will happen next?"
"The air is so close I can't breath properly."
"Why, only the other day I was saying to Cecil that these damn Boers will give away the whole game. Of course they take everything so seriously, religiously. All the wrong things, mind you, like their painfully naive brand of republicanism which certainly can't cope with the delicate ins and outs of big business and overseas investors."
"When will that storm break? Not that I'm looking forward much to a cloudburst and a plague of flying ants soon afterwards, and the cooling effect of the rain lasts barely a half an hour."
Pieter was the only child of the Van der Merwes; the product of his parents' brief, pre-nuptial co-operation. He was ten years old when they moved from the Roads Camp to the Beach. For the next five years all that he ever needed for happiness was contained within the ten square miles of earth called Isingisi Beach. He fished, with rod or net, in the tidepools which were scattered around Hlephuka Rocks (The sunbathing types seldom strayed far from the sandy beach which gave the seaside village its name). These rocks were underwater jungles, alive with fishy beasts. He would squat over them for hours, his bare feet clinging intuitively to the slippery rocks, his blonde hair standing up in the sea-breeze, his blue eyes almost swimming among the rainbow of brightly colored anemones and sea-urchins. The seaweeds were the tree trunks and vines of a watery forest. Pieter's prey was the abundance of nervous crayfish, shy octopi, comical hermit-crabs and dappled dogfish.
If the wind were blowing fiercely off the ocean, tossing clouds of foam onto the rocks and blowing sand across the beach, Pieter would take cover in one of the numerous caves which tunneled into Hlephuka Rocks. One of these caves was so small that it automatically excluded prying adults. It was also so difficult to reach - through a downward twisting tunnel - that those who were tiny enough to negotiate it were usually too afraid to do so. Pieter felt invulnerable here and spent many an afternoon hiding from storms either of nature's or of his mother's making. He knew that no other humans entered the cave because his old tin box full of chocolates, cheese and crackers had not yet been tampered with or removed. However, plenty of beasts frequented the cave, some leaving droppings or tracks, others nibbling any goodies Pieter may have left deliberately unprotected outside of his tin box.
When high tides covered the rock pools and flooded the entrance to his cave Pieter would jump on his bicycle and head for the sugar-cane plantations or remote lagoons south of Isingisi. He would search for frogs or snakes to add to his growing collection, or simply sit in the sun eating a stalk of sugar-cane and listening to the chant of the Zulus as they harvested the crop.
Try as he might to escape the civilized world, Pieter's mother was determined to tame him. He was sent to the local English school. His teacher, Miss Beals, whose nickname was "Eels", at first took a disliking to him and hit him with a ruler on a boil on the inside of his elbow. It burst and he ran home. Margaret went over to Eels' house and lectured her while holding tightly onto to the startled teacher's collar.
Thereafter Eels took kindly to Pieter and even offered to teach him to play the piano at her home, free! Pieter entered an even more blissful phase of life. Pieter and Eels became friends, confided in each other. Eels was a member of the Black Sash anti-apartheid organization, and would trek off to Durban every Saturday morning to shake a collection can on Smith Street, or march with placards in front of the Post Office in protest of the Afrikaner government's latest forced removals under the Group Areas Act. While she never lectured Pieter about politics, he found himself beginning to think of his parents as ignorant and prejudiced.
Pieter was fifteen when his secluded idyll came to an end. His mother had decided to send him to a boys-only English high school in Durban, thirteen miles away. Now he had to wake up an hour earlier each morning in order to catch two buses to school, and by the time he got home in the late afternoon, it was too late to fish, swim or ride his bike. He most definitely was not comfortable in the straightjacket of Anglican conformity which was his new school, with its plump white boys and their endless obsessions with cricket and girls' tits. Though Margaret knew that it seemed cruel to send her son to this school, she also knew that she was giving him an opportunity for which he would later be grateful. Pieter understood this and, as much as he hated it, he stuck it out. But, here in this crowd of boys, he began to feel lonelier than he'd ever felt before. Margaret advised him to toughen himself up.
Lying awake each morning, waiting for his father to call him, Pieter would try to stifle the horror he felt at having to go to school. He would cover his head with his sweat-sticky sheet and pray for time to pass quickly so that it would soon be summer and the Christmas holidays. On weekday mornings the screaming chatter of the Indian mynah birds outside his window seemed irritating instead of amusing. Pieter would cover his ears and moan with self-pity.
If it had been a Saturday morning, he would have jumped out of bed and flung open his window. Then, sitting on the sill in his pyjamas he would have laughed at the at the battle between the mynahs and the monkeys in the mango tree. The monkeys wanted the ripe fruit, but the mynahs regarded the tree as their territory. They were fearless and always eventually succeeded in driving the monkeys away with their shrieks and deadly accurate dive-bomb attacks. When the battle was over Pieter would dash down to the beach for a quick swim before breakfast. On Saturday afternoons he usually went to Miss Beals' house, and at night there would be the film at the Town Hall.
One Monday morning Pieter lay sweltering beneath his sheets, waiting for his father to call him. He dozed off and began to dream shallowly of ripe papayas.
Then the anxiety-ridden voice of his father shattered his dreams and he awoke to the smell of coffee, bacon, hot buttered toast and sliced papaya which his father had prepared for him. Pieter dressed quickly and went to the kitchen. He glared at his father who was slumped at the table, fat, shirtless and glistening with sweat, with a cigaret dangling from his lower lip. Adolphus exhaled a cloud of acrid smoke.
Pushing the ashtray towards his father priggishly, he said: "Do you have to smoke while I'm eating? You know it makes me nauseous."
Adolphus was humiliated and hurriedly stubbed out his cigaret and removed the ashtray from the table. He seemed suddenly frail and forlorn to his son. Pieter wished that he could bring himself to soften his attitude towards his father.
"Alles sal reg kom," ("Everything will come right.") said Adolphus van der Merwe, lighting up another cigaret unconsciously, "soon you'll be able to lie in bed for as long as you like or..."
"I know..." Pieter interrupted, "...or go fishing or swimming or..."
"You'll be okay," Adolphus continued, oblivious to his son's reproachful mood. "You'll see. Everything will be fine when this year of school is over."
"You say the same thing every morning," his son said, adding spitefully, "mere platitudes."
Pieter knew that his father would not understand this word, which he had only recently acquired himself from Miss Beals. Pieter's cruelty to his father was fuelled by his shame at having an unkempt, uncouth, common, unsophisticated father. "Skaap" was another word that Pieter had recently learnt at his English school. He had known, of course, that it was the Afrikaans word for sheep, but his schoolmates referred to Afrikaners as "skaaps". Adolphus was simply a "skaap" to his son's peers.
Pieter's parents seldom spoke about politics, but at school he began to discover that the world was filled with terrible problems. One of the greatest problems, according to his English schoolmates, was the stupid and stubborn Afrikaner.
Whilst Miss Beals did not use such inflammatory language, she, nevertheless, agreed with her fellow Britons. As 1960 progressed Pieter began to think they were right.
Robert Sobukwe, the president of the Pan Africanist Congress, called for a nationwide campaign of civil disobedience to protest the Pass Laws. Pieter read in the newspapers about Sharpeville, where a crowd of African women had gathered to burn their ID cards. When the police ordered them to disperse the crowd threw stones at them. The police opened fire and killed sixty-nine of them. The British government condemned Prime Minister Verwoerd for his heavy-handed dealing with the protesters.
Soon afterwards, when Verwoerd was shot in the head, the members of the Isingisi Country Club celebrated that night with a braaivleis (BBQ) and beer-bash, only to discover the next morning that the architect of "Seperate Development" had survived the attempted assassination.
Miss Beals told Pieter: "The Country Club clique is as stupid, in its own way, as the Afrikaner government. Verwoerd will now be seen as blessed and protected. He will return with more political strength than before, and the Afrikaners will push ahead with their plans for total apartheid."
To Pieter, the whole year seemed to consist of one crisis after another. Towards the end of the year a mob of Zulus raged through the Indian areas of Cato Manor, burning and looting shops and houses, allegedly in retaliation for an incident in which a Zulu child had been short-changed by an Indian merchant. The horde then ran up the hill from Cato Manor towards one of the wealthiest suburbs in Durban, where Pieter's school was situated. When the Zulus began pouring through the schoolyard the pupils were told to crouch beneath their desks. Pieter cowered under his desk for what seemed like most of the afternoon, listening to the sounds of thousands of thudding feet and bloodcurdling war-cries. He thought he heard, "Bulala!" He knew that meant "Kill!" in Zulu. A stone smashed through one of the windows and rolled towards the feet of the teacher, who stood in front of the blackboard, beating his palm with his cane, a look of fury on his red face.
School was closed for a week while the rioting was quelled, and when Pieter returned there were Saracen armored cars in the rugby field. Their guns were aimed at Cato Manor in the distant valley below.
Soon it was December, time for the long summer holiday, and Christmas. For six long weeks Pieter swam and fished and visited Miss Beals. He soon forgot all about the riots and the problems which beset his country.
When he returned to school in January 1961, Pieter saw that the Saracens had been removed. The lawn on which they had stood had turned yellow and grubs wiggled in the sunlight. Pieter hoped that this year would be happier, but it was not.
Verwoerd stormed out of the British Commonwealth. A referendum was held to institute an independent Republic of South Africa. There was talk of the Province of Natal seceding from the rest of South Africa and remaining loyal to the Queen. Some of the staunchest secessionists lived in Isingisi, which was an enclave of the English opposition, the United Party. Miss Beals, a member of the Progressive Party, did not usually see eye-to-eye with her fellow Isingisites, but in this, she agreed with them. Despite all the threats, Natal did not secede, and, as the majority of white South Africans had voted for the formation of a republic, the Isingisites adapted grudgingly.
Soon afterwards Verwoerd gave the nearly one million Indian immigrants the South African citizenship which had been witheld from them by the British for one hundred years. None of the Isingisites guessed what this move portended, though a few muttered that Verwoerd had made a secret deal with the wealthiest Indians in Durban, and wondered what the trade-off would be.
As the year dragged on Pieter found himself becoming increasingly worried and depressed by his classmates talk of politics. He understood that they did not hate him personally. They simply hated the Boers because their parents had told them to. Though Miss Beals professed not to hate the Boers, Pieter sensed her condescending attitude towards them, and not even her intellectual analysis could comfort him. He found the antidote to his worldly troubles in the Bible that his mother had given him for Christmas. Though Margaret did not go to any church, she read the Bible religiously. Pieter began to read it with his mother, and found a shield to protect himself against the problems he forsaw looming in the adult world beyond school.
It was because of Pieter's growing reputation as a religious fanatic that his most controversial classmate, Steven McIntyre, sought out his company. Steven collected eccentric friends. He was very confident in manner, owing to his parent's great wealth, and spoke pedantically and at great length about politics; about such things as "Ninety Day Detention", "House Arrest" and "Banning". Steven was a member of a Gandhian pacifist student group whose leader was an Indian medical student, Sonny Naidoo.
Many rumors about Steven circulated at school. It was said of him, because of his association with Naidoo, that he was a communist. One day after school, Steven took Pieter to visit Naidoo.
Naidoo greeted Pieter by saying: "Steven tells me that you're very religious."
"I suppose so," Pieter answered. When he looked into the Indian's eyes, he was at first intimidated and he thought that he saw such a deep seriousness that he wanted, impulsively, to confess his innermost secrets to Naidoo. Pieter felt that maybe Naidoo would understand everything; all the complications; his very difficult position as an Afrikaner who disagreed with apartheid.
But, when he looked more closely into Naidoo's eyes, he saw an expression which could also have been polite condescension masking bored indifference. Then the Indian's eyes seemed to change again and he seemed to be looking at Pieter with eager curiosity.
Pieter realized that he would not be able to read Naidoo's face easily. He remembered that his father had warned him never to trust an Indian. ("Their hearts are still in India," contended Mr van der Merwe. "They are only in South Africa to make money, and, at the first sign of trouble, they'll bugger off back there or go to England.")
Pieter was torn between a temptation to let down his guard, and a wariness of the mild amusement which seemed to twinkle in Naidoo's eyes.
"Have you read the writings of Mahatma Gandhi Ji? You do know, don't you, that Gandhi lived in South Africa for twenty-one years before returning to India to liberate it from the British?" Naidoo asked in such a cold clinical manner that Pieter was taken aback.
"Yes," Pieter answered, and added, wanting to be sincere and frank with Naidoo, "if you mean about non-violent passive resistance, then I agree with everything he said and..."
Then Pieter caught a glimpse of Steven's face. It was frozen strangely in a mirthless grin. Pieter found that his words stuck in his throat. He could no longer speak in so candid and artless a voice, and muttered something inaudible. He wondered if he was being paranoid or if Steven and Naidoo were conspiring to make him look like a fool; all the while laughing silently at the Afrikaner simpleton.
Naidoo looked from one white boy to the other and seemed to size up the situation immediately. He turned to Pieter and said: "Steven also tells me that you are a minor poet of sorts."
Steven guffawed with a burst of released tension and sputtered: "Now isn't that a bit patronizing? A MINOR poet is little enough. But a poet OF SORTS is quite contemptuous, isn't it?"
The rest of the visit was dominated by Steven's superficial chatter. He seemed determined to prevent anything real or sincere from passing between Pieter and Naidoo. All of them were aware of this, and a heavy atmosphere of deceit began to permeate the room despite Steven's small-talk and silly jokes. Naidoo sat silently observing the two boys. His eyes were half shut. Steven giggled neurotically.
That night, in the secrecy and solitude of his own safe bed, Pieter decided that he needed to see Naidoo alone. He felt that he could tell the Indian everything, well, more than he'd ever told anyone else before; that nothing could shock Naidoo. Pieter hoped that he could explain to him a certain mystery: why did all the white adults seem to be avoiding something; to be reluctant to talk? Even Miss Beals shied away from discussing communism, and Pieter was more than curious. He thirsted after understanding. Pieter fell asleep with the thought that perhaps Naidoo was much misunderstood, even more of a pariah than himself.
The next day at school he said to Steven, in as nonchalant a way as he could muster, "People say that Naidoo is a communist. Is he?"
"Well, they're ignoramuses, I mean ignorami," Steven answered. "Most people don't even know what Marxism is, and anyway, most white South Africans regard any contact between the different races as communism, don't they?"
So 1961 passed, and Pieter's vision of the world began to blur ever more out of focus. He began to wonder if communism might be the natural outcome of Christianity, yet he could not understand the Marxists' atheism. He realized that apartheid was wrong, yet he sympathized with the whites' fears of loosing everything. They would, after all, be outnumbered five to one by the blacks in the power game. Miss Beals continued to inspire him. She fought not only the Afrikaner government but British complacency. She accused the British of being apathetic and complicit in apartheid. He came to see that she was despised by her fellow British Isingisites.
Out of insecurity and an awareness of his naivity, Pieter continued his friendship with Miss Beals and Steven. He did not have such definite answers as either of them but wanted desperately to be sure. During 1962 Pieter was drawn more and more into politics. He attended meetings with Steven. Eventually Pieter was invited to a very special meeting of the Gandhian group where Naidoo was slated to give a revolutionary speech.
Pieter sat quietly through the speeches preceding Naidoo's. At first he could not understand them. There seemed to be a schism developing. Some of the speakers denounced others. Slowly it dawned on Pieter that there was disagreement about the use of violence in the fight against apartheid. Some members felt that the use of violence went directly against the teachings of Gandhi, while others felt that the time for mere passive resistance had run out. Pieter longed for Naidoo to rise and speak out against this heresy of violence, and unite the members into the idealistic peaceful group they had once been. At last Naidoo rose. The noise in the crowd subsided and everyone listened carefully.
He held up his hands and intoned: "Comrades, some of us will never realize what's at stake in South Africa. Unfortunately that goes for many of my fellow Indians who are worried about loosing their thriving businesses by which they exploit their African brothers. This campaign is only the beginning. It's not just about apartheid. It's about justice and equality, and a fair distribution of the power and wealth. Yes, it's about turning the tables on the Afrikaner government, but it's also about the worldwide struggle to liberate the workers from the clutches of the capitalist oppressors. We can't think simply in terms of South Africa. We need to become engaged in the international struggle for social justice. I tell you this struggle is not for the so-called liberals. Liberalism is the way the capitalists destroy our revolution. We don't want liberalism. The Afrikaners are busy killing our brothers and sisters. Liberalism tells them to suffer in silence. Liberals are useful idiots as our great inspirer, Lenin, said. How long must we bleed before we strike back in righteous anger? We must all stand united now. The day is not far off when our African brothers will rise up in the townships and demand power to the people. Long live the peoples' struggle! Long live Poquo! Power to the people! Amandhala!"
Throughout Naidoo's speech there had been rumblings in the audience. A handful of Indians had left. When the remaining Indians heard the words "Poquo" (an African terrorist group) and "amandhla" (the Zulu word for "power") they became uncomfortable. Most Indians were not ready to embrace brotherhood with Africans. In fact many Indians despised the Africans as being uncivilized.
It was announced that Naidoo would take questions.
An elderly Indian man rose and asked: "How can you say long live Poquo when you know that, if you unleash violence among the Africans, your own people, the Indians, will be the first to die?"
Pieter waited breathlessly for Naidoo's answer, but he ignored the man and pointed to another raised hand. It was Steven's.
"Should our small group ally itself outright with the aims and means of Poquo?"
The man who had been ignored by Naidoo now began to shout, "No, never! They are a bunch of murderers..."
Naidoo pointed to the man and nodded to a group of Coloured youths standing at the back of the hall. They marched to the front, seized the old Indian man and dragged him out. The rest of the audience, mostly Africans and Coloreds with a smattering of younger Indians, rose and applauded Naidoo.
After this gathering, Naidoo drove Steven and Pieter to the home of a professor from Natal University. The large house was near the University high in the hills above the city, and had a view of Durban. Steven became absorbed in a conversation with the professor and his wife. Naidoo led Pieter out onto the verandah. Pieter looked in wonder at the lights of Durban stretching for miles east to the Indian Ocean. He could make out the outlines of the huge bay which made the city the largest port in Africa. None of the other guests came out onto the verandah because it had just finished raining, and the humid night was filled with millions of flying ants beating themselves to death against lighted window-panes or squirming underfoot. Suddenly Naidoo put his arm around Pieter's shoulders. Pieter froze and began to shiver.
The Indian asked, very quietly, "Would you show me your poetry one day?"
Pieter was in turmoil. Part of him was flattered. Only Miss Beals had ever asked to see his poetry before, and she had not been very enthusiastic because they were written mostly in Afrikaans. Not even his parents had ever read his poems. Yet, he could not forget what he had heard that night at the meeting, and he found himself, as if by instinct, lying.
"I've destroyed all my poems," he said, rigid with effort. "They were too controversial..."
"What on earth do you mean?" Naidoo asked with genuine surprise.
"They were too... religious..." Pieter stuttered.
"Well, I am sorry I didn't get to see them," said Naidoo, with what seemed to Pieter to be sincere disappointment.
Pieter began to feel guilty; to regret his deceitfulness, and was relieved when Steven joined them on the verandah.
"How can you stand all these creepy-crawlies?" Steven said as he sidled up to them. "Just look at all the squashed bugs. Oh, but I see what has kept you out here. The lights of the city are magnificent."
Pieter could not sleep that night. He became withdrawn and worried, and refused Steven's invitations to any further meetings.
One day, when Pieter returned from school, his mother shouted to him: "Come and look at this picture in the newspaper."
The picture was of Naidoo and a number of his followers from the Gandhian group. Steven's face peered over Naidoo's shoulder, blurred but unmistakable. Margaret had met Steven several times in the course of his friendship with her son.
"Isn't that Steven?" she asked. She didn't wait for the unnecessary answer but continued: "I see that he's got himself mixed up with some Indian communist. I hope you aren't involved in politics. See, they have put the Indian in for Ninety Days Detention. If you aren't careful you'll end up in trouble too. I'm not working myself to death putting you through school just so you can end up in prison or worse. Life is hard enough without making it complicated too."
When Naidoo was released three months later he was given a scholarship to Oxford, and left South Africa without a passport, never to return.
In January 1963 Pieter began his final year at high school. Politics took second place to the importance of study for matriculation. Steven was subdued, deflated by the fate of Sonny Naidoo. Pieter realized that his mother was keeping a closer watch on him. He studied seriously because he was not indifferent to her concerns, and the months passed by quietly.
Then, "like a bolt out of the blue", as Margaret had expressed it, the government proclaimed Isingisi Beach an Indian Group Area.
Just before this took place, Prime Minister Verwoerd had held a referendum to withdraw South Africa from the British Commonwealth and to create a republic. The referendum had passed quite easily but the voters of Isingisi Beach (being so attached to Britain) had voted against it. Verwoerd decided to destroy this last bastian of Britishness. Verwoerd had also just given South African citizenship to the Indians (eventhough many had been there for a century already) in an effort to get them on his side against the Africans. This was his bribe to the wealthy Indian businessmen of Durban.
Uptil now the Group Areas Act had only been used to remove blacks and Coloreds from certain chhoice areas which were then given to whites. This was the first and only time that whites were displaced by the Group Areas Act.
Little Churchills and local Emily Pankhursts suddenly popped out of the ranks of Isingisites and marched in front of the Town Hall to protest the action of the government, to denounce the injustice of the Group Areas Act and to accuse the Afrikaners of doing this only because they wished to break up a stronghold of political opposition. Pieter was surprised that Miss Beals did not join in these protests. She explained to him that she could not associate herself with these particular protesters because they had refused to support her in her protests against government oppression in the past. She was the first to sell her house to an Indian.
Then the Cholmondeleys announced that they had been planning to return to England for quite some time and they sold their house. When "Ye Olde English Tea House" was sold and closed, rumors flew that it would soon become a halal butchery, and the trickle became a flood. No one could resist the fabulous sums offered by the Indians for their old beach cottages, and soon the Van der Merwes were the last white family left at Isingisi Beach.
Adolphus' health deteriorated. The garage which housed Margaret's business was sold to a Mr Singh, who decided to take possession immediately. He employed Margaret to run the shop temporarily, until his son got married, at which time the new daughter-in-law would be expected to take over. The Van der Merwes had just enough money for food and rent, but could not afford electricity.
Pieter withdrew into a shell of shame at school, when, owing to his parent's poverty, he had to have patches stitched into the elbows of his worn-out blazer. He longed for the end of the year, but as the final exams approached he felt that he hadn't enough time to prepare. Then at last the exams were over, school was finished and Christmas was around the corner.
Just before Christmas Pieter received the results of his exams. He had passed "with flying colors", as Margaret boasted. That night Adolphus offered Pieter a cigaret and a brandy and cola. Pieter surprised himself by accepting, and together they sat smoking and drinking in the dark on the verandah, swatting mosquitos. They laughed and talked for the first time in perhaps ten years.
On the day after Christmas, news came that Adolphus' mother, while visiting her daughter in Johannesburg, had fallen and broken both hips. ("Drunk, no doubt," said Margaret, who had a low opinion of her mother-in-law.) She was not expected to live much longer, so Adolphus decided to go to Johannesburg to see his mother before she died. Against his wife's advice, he left two days later.
New Year's Day dawned hot and oppressive. Pieter awoke feeling sluggish and confused. His mother was also in a strange mood. They had been invited that day to visit her family, the Roys, at Isingisi Station, and set out reluctantly. Something besides the humidity made the atmosphere heavy. All through the visit Pieter and his mother exchanged impatient glances, till at last they could leave without putting a damper on the party.
As soon as they arrived home, their new neighbor, Mrs Kumar, told them that Auntie Marie had phoned from Johannesburg only minutes after they had left that morning, as well as several more times since. Mrs Kumar said that Marie had said it was urgent.
Just at that moment Steven arrived. Pieter had invited his friend for dinner while his father was away because Adolphus could not tolerate Steven, and called him a commie to his face. Pieter offered to begin cooking dinner while Margaret phoned Marie.
Then he said: "It's about my father. I think he's dead."
Mrs Kumar nodded gloomily and mumbled: "Maybe that is so. Your auntie sounded very upset."
Pieter looked at his mother. She turned away but not before he had seen in her eyes that she too knew as surely as did he. Margaret went with Mrs Kumar to use her phone and Pieter started cooking.
The phone call to Marie confirmed that Adolphus had indeed died during the night, of a stroke. Pieter felt numb. His mother seemed almost untouched. As they could not afford to transport the corpse back to Isingisi, Margaret had to fly to Johannesburg the next day to arrange the burial there. Pieter was not sure whether she had begged, borrowed or stolen the money for the fare, but she had only enough for herself. Pieter had to stay behind. Steven drove them out to the airport.
After they had seen the plane off, Steven offered Pieter a drink in the bar. Pieter had never been in a bar before. In fact he hesitated.
"Aren't we under-age?" he asked Steven, who assured him that they weren't.
Pieter entered the bar with his doubts still intact. Steven brought him a glass of cane-spirits and cola. The fiery liquor fumes went to Pieter's head suddenly, and he began to weep, quite unashamedly, though hardened barflies and sophisticated travellers turned to look at him.
"Why are you crying?" Steven asked.
"It's not because my father died," Pieter answered emphatically. "It's because my mother has never flown in a plane before, and I know she is frightened."
Having once embarked on the unpredictable sea of truth, Pieter felt free; free of the vanity which would have prevented him from crying in public; free of the fear which would have made him lie to Steven reflexively, in defense. He wiped away his tears and took a large gulp of cane-spirits. Then he smiled innocently at Steven. Did he imagine it or did Steven really look more serious than usual, almost sad? Pieter looked around and saw the same downtrodden expression on the barflies' and travellers' faces. Could it be, he asked himself, that he had just never before noticed how sad adults were? They all had pain and fear lurking behind their seemingly bold eyes.
When Steven leaned towards Pieter sympathetically, Pieter quickly said: "You know, you don't have to pity me. I've never felt better in my life. I feel as if I have just understood something for the first time. Death isn't that awful. Something deep inside me knows that my father is fine wherever he may be. I'm not even going to try to put it into words. All I know is that there is nothing to fear. As my mother would say, 'God's in his heaven and all's well on earth.' I know you think I'm drunk and that I'll feel differently when I sober up. Maybe I will but that doesn't make what I'm experiencing now less valid than feeling sorry for myself. No, this feeling of knowing the answer to all the questions, or rather of not having any questions, this is the truth. Misery is not the truth. You look sadder, well not sadder, perhaps more worried than me."
Steven stammered: "To tell you the truth, I am not happy. I've been lying to you, to my mother, the whole world. I've been living a lie, and I can't go on any longer."
"What lies have you told me?" Pieter asked. "Anyway, no matter what, it's not important. I've told you just as many lies. Life's too short for regrets."
"But it is important," Steven said, "when lies drag you down, or catch up with you when you least expect them to. You won't believe some of the lies I've told."
"I probably will," Pieter said. "But nothing you can tell me will shock me. None of it seems important in the face of this feeling of God's mercy, or natures's perfection, or whatever it is that I feel."
"Not even that I am a communist?" Steven asked.
"No, I already knew that," Pieter answered. "It used to shock me. I must admit that. Up till this very day. It made me very uncomfortable, but that is because I feared what others would think of me. Right now all those worries seem silly. My only concern right now is that if I try to explain to you what I am feeling, if I put it into words, I might loose it. Yes, I would like to share this feeling of happiness with everyone. Communism just seems so stupid to me right now. Making sure that everyone shares equally, usually with the help of a loaded gun; forcing everyone to share their worldly goods equally. Worldly goods aren't the antidote to misery. Happiness is, and that can't be coerced, or given or even taken away, because true happiness isn't dependent on anything. It's free, it happens regardless of how much misery you have, or what tragedies happen to you. It is a blessing form God."
"Well," said Steven, "It's been a long time since I heard such a resounding apology for the opium of the masses."
"Did you know," Pieter asked, "that I used to be ashamed to bring you home when my father was there? I just knew that he would make a fool of himself in front of you. Since knowing you, I became steadily more ashamed of being Afrikaans. I can't blame you for making me hate my father though. My mother is responsible for that. I'm just glad that I had a chance to have a good laugh with him before he died."
"I knew you were ashamed of your father," said Steven, "well, of being Afrikaans, I mean, but it doesn't bother me and never will."
"Amen!" said Pieter, "I mean, it doesn't bother me anymore either, and it never will again. Nothing will. It just all seems so silly right now. Afrikaans, English, black, white ... what does it matter now? We've all got broken hearts, and it seems that the only cure for that complaint is this strange happiness which comes out of the blue, when you're least expecting it, by the grace of God. There's nothing I can do about being happy or sad. It's up to God..."
"Well, you are in a very religious mood today," said Steven, "but you'll have to excuse me for a moment while I go to the toilet."
Pieter sat alone observing his fellow drinkers drowning their sorrows. Perhaps, he thought, Naidoo was right and I am a religous fanatic after all.
When Margaret returned from Johannesburg, she got a job as a cashier at OK Bazaars department store in Durban. Pieter swam and fished that summer as if he had never done so before. He was excited and felt that a new life was about to begin. Then his mother found a flat in Durban and she and Pieter left Isingisi Beach forever.
Copyrighted 2005, Patrick Joubert Conlon, Aantrek Publications
posted by Joubert at 2:46 PM
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