St. Peter’s students were arrested regularly for passbook violations. Huddleston, who opposed the passbook system, usually stormed to Rosettenville police station to get them released. On many occasions the furious priest was known to strike out at racist policemen with venom unbecoming his station. Huddleston would follow such incidents with days of meditation, confession, and marathon prayer.
The school took on a new character, as the draconian apartheid laws made us all feel very insecure. We found solace in our schoolwork, soccer, and other, unsanctioned campus activities. Shortly before my fifteenth birthday I met Nomvula, a dark-skinned, sixteen-year-old, pear-shaped girl, nicknamed “Mouse.” She was a day scholar. Every day after school I walked Nomvula to the bus. After a few weeks our courtship really blossomed; there was an alley near the terminal where we would kiss and fondle each other while we waited for the bus. I could tell from the way she would rub against my hard dick with her crotch or hand, and how she would let me put my hand up her thighs and let my fingers slide inside her, that she was ready to give me some trim. One day Nomvula agreed to take a later bus so that we could go to Happy Valley, a prohibited, secluded spot far beyond campus, hidden by hills, valleys, and huge eucalyptus trees. If you were caught there, expulsion was automatic. Many babies were conceived on the grassy knolls of Happy Valley. We found a soft patch of grass where we lay down, and I began to kiss Nomvula all over the neck, chest, and face as I slid out of my khaki shorts. With my coaxing, Nomvula wasted no time slipping her panties off from under her school uniform tunic. Before I knew it, her legs were high up in the air like the sails of a ship, as she panted and moaned with the joy of a baby sucking on its mother’s teats. As our out-of-control lovemaking reached boiling point, I suddenly felt that I was about to die. I began to suffer loss of breath and heart palpitations, and saw stars. I had an earthquake of an orgasm. I screamed and was about to faint when out of the corner of my left eye I spotted a rinkaals, a cobralike snake common to South Africa, raising its head through the grass about three yards from where we were lying. Out of pure instinct, I grabbed my pants, yanked Nomvula off the grass, and shouted for her to run up the hill while I hotfooted in the opposite direction. The last time I saw her, her beautiful little black ass was disappearing up through the boulders of a hill, her panties swinging in her right hand, her feet nimbler than a mountain goat’s. I put my pants on at the top of Happy Valley and calmly walked toward the Hill, where I bought a peanut snack bar from Christo’s grocery store and proceeded to walk back to school with a big grin on my face. My mind was completely puzzled, my underpants wet from a mixture of perspiration and residue from our fore-play. Nomvula did not return to St. Peter’s after that day, and I was sad that we would never get together again. That was my first sexual experience and, needless to say, the strangest.
Knox Kaloate, a schoolmate of mine and a big jazz record collector, was inspired by my quick mastery of the horn and asked Huddleston for a trumpet. Old Man Uncle Sauda now had two students. We were soon playing the simple duets that our trumpet teacher assigned us. Stompie, who had been taking lessons for a while from Drakes Mbau, the lead trumpeter of the Jazz Maniacs, was now working as an office filing clerk. He visited us on some weekends and showed us some of his new tricks with the horn. Stompie had become a very good player, far more advanced than Knox and me. His prowess made us even more enthusiastic about becoming virtuosos on our instruments. By September 1954, Knox and I had learned even more songs, duets from Sauda’s lesson books, popular ballads, and American romantic standards. Of course, our noisy enthusiasm did not sit well with the monks and the residents of the neighborhood. They eventually requested Huddleston to find us more suitable quarters for our practice sessions, where our blowing would not interfere with their solemn meditations and prayers. In an arrangement with Mr. Darling, Huddleston was able to secure us permission to use the school carpentry shop across from the science laboratory.
This music fever became contagious. George Makhene, a senior, put together a partial set of drums from the equipment of the now-defunct Boy Scouts. Huddleston bargained with Bob Hill for more instruments, including cymbals, tomtoms, a high-hat, and a foot pedal to augment George’s percussion outfit. We were allowed to carry the rickety upright piano from the school hall into the carpentry shop, where Henley “Bach” Magobiane started to play with us alongside Monty Mahobe, who was now the proud owner of a white, upright double bass that Bob Hill had managed to scrounge from somewhere. “Bach” did not last too long in the band. He was a classical musician with no dance rhythm whatsoever. George, an awesomely muscular weightlifter who had now elected himself bandleader, fired “Bach” and brought in Ivan Mosiah as his replacement. No one liked to disagree with George too much.
We now had a rhythm section. The five of us began playing cover tunes such as “C Jam Blues” and “Tuxedo Junction,” and township favorites by groups like the Harlem Swingsters, Ntemi Piliso, and Zakes Nkosi. We tried our best to imitate the recordings we had, but slowly we started to establish our own sound.
Huddleston enjoyed our enthusiasm. He became fascinated with the band as more boys came to him begging for instruments. My cousin Jonas Gwangwa got a trombone; another cousin of mine, Chips Molopyane, and Prince Moloi got alto saxophones, and “Moon” Masemola got a tenor saxophone. We started to get on the nerves of the school’s prefects, nuns, teachers, and monks, and many of our male schoolmates were jealous because we were attracting the attention of several fine girls who came by the carpentry shop whenever it was permissible. Some of them were really keen to sing with the band. The school’s bookworms found us especially annoying. St. Peter’s was coming alive with the sounds of the Huddleston Jazz Band. The only thing we had on our minds was rehearsing. The fact that we had all been avid jazz and mbhaqanga record collectors, who shared the same musical tastes, gave us a pretty large repertoire to choose from as a group. All we had to do was assign each person his part to play. Our experience in ensemble singing in the school choirs and at chapel had honed our harmonic capabilities, which we were able to apply to our band. We became a pretty tight unit in a very short time. By September of 1954 we had put together a hot band augmented by a singing quintet of two girls and three boys. They sang compositions from groups like Glenn Miller’s Modernaires, Tommy Dorsey’s Pied Pipers, the African Ink Spots, and the Manhattan Brothers. Knox doubled on vocals, joining my new girlfriend, Linda Kieviet, who was also the band’s lead vocalist.
One Sunday afternoon, Huddleston loaded fourteen of us into his pickup truck and drove us to a reception at the Donaldson Center in Orlando Township for British Commonwealth flyweight boxing champion Jake Ntuli’s homecoming reception. He was the first African to win an international boxing title, and Huddleston had known him from when he was just starting out. Huddleston was very excited by Ntuli’s achievement, and thought he’d be an inspiration to all of us. Because we were allowed out of the school only once a month, this chance for an extra outing was like a furlough for a bunch of death-row prisoners. When we got to the reception in the small hall, we sat in the balcony where we could watch the overflowing crowd downstairs thrill to a performance by the Cuban Brothers, a popular Jo’burg singing quartet. The group was great, but all of our attention was focused on the young, velvety-voiced female singer they were featuring, who we were told had just come to Johannesburg from Pretoria. The Cuban Brothers accompanied her with oohs, aahs, and doo-wops on “Nomalizo,” a popular ballad about a stunningly beautiful woman who had seventy-two lovers. The singer enthralled the entire audience but left the men completely smitten. She was breathtakingly beautiful, with large brown eyes, high cheekbones, a perfectly shaped nose, a body sculpted by the ancestors with a small waist, and with big, long, shapely legs carrying an ample but beautifully rounded behind. She wore sexy black high heels and a tight, hip-hugging, strapless red dress that allowed us a bird’s-eye view into her cleavage from where we were sitting. Her stunning physical attributes were only matched by th
e beauty of her voice. On the ride back to St. Peter’s, all we could talk about was Miriam Makeba. When we got back to campus, the other boys asked us about Jake Ntuli, but forget him; all we wanted to talk about was this tantalizing African goddess we had just seen, with a voice made in heaven, a body by Leonardo da Vinci, a brilliant gap-toothed smile, the dreamiest eyes, and remarkable charm.
Soon we all were fantasizing about being big-time musicians and hanging out with Miriam Makeba, the Cuban Brothers, the Manhattan Brothers, Dolly Rathebe, and the other great South African music giants. Huddleston continued to marvel at our fervor, but reminded us of our promise to him that we would not let the music interfere with our studies. He assured us that if we did, he would confiscate all of our instruments and that would be the end of the Huddleston Jazz Band. We walked the straight and narrow for the rest of the school year, concentrating on our studies, but spending all of our free time on sports and music. Later that year, when she joined the Manhattan Brothers, I cut out all the photographs of Miriam Makeba that I could find in Drum, Zonk, and Bona magazines, and the Bantu World newspaper.
As more guys wanted to join our group, Huddleston had to target other donors. He knew a lot of rich white liberals who salved their guilt by donating to his charities, and was able to get us additional instruments from time to time. Spyros Skouras, a top movie executive from America, visited South Africa and surprised Huddleston by outfitting our whole group with new instruments and band uniforms. However, Skouras insisted that we wear gray cowboy shirts with tassels and black dress pants. We weren’t crazy about the uniforms he bought us, but a new drum set, a double bass, an electric guitar, three trumpets, an upright piano, three alto saxophones, two tenor saxophones, three trombones, and five clarinets made it easy for us to tolerate the gaudy outfits. Suddenly more students wanted to join the band. The newspapers began to publish articles about the Huddleston Jazz Band. We were now playing all the monthly dance socials. The girls loved us. We were soaking it all in.
For me, school holidays were no longer boring. I looked forward to spending them in Springs, where, through my uncle Kenneth’s hustling, I got to play with Peter Ntsane’s Merry Makers’ Orchestra. The band’s great trumpeters, Elijah Nkwanyana and Banzi Bangani, took me under their wings and worked with me. Once I returned to school, I passed on what I had learned to the guys in our horn section. I began to mimic Elijah’s trumpet style, elements that I still use today. He had a lazy way of phrasing, holding long notes to show off his fat, beautiful tone that sounded more like he was singing than blowing the trumpet. Elijah also had a high-pitched singing voice that drove the women nuts. Banzi’s style was much more crisp, faster and bright. He was a magician with the wah-wah mute and had a burnished vibrato on his horn that I found much harder to emulate. Elijah’s style, on the other hand, just sucked me in. The band only played their own compositions—crisp mbhaqanga grooves that had a touch of Benny Goodman’s sextet arrangements, peppered with sprinklings of bebop phrasings and tight harmonies reminiscent of some of Gil Evans’s early small band charts. It was irresistible. Playing in the Merry Makers’ trumpet section made me proud because there was hardly anybody my age playing with South Africa’s top bands. Stompie, who was now playing with the Savoys, was six years older than me.
The Merry Makers played dances all over the townships of the cities neighboring Johannesburg, but I was only playing with them at their nighttime rehearsals in the storefront barbershop that belonged to Peter Ntsane’s family. They felt I was still too young to go on the road with them. Besides, my parents would not have allowed it. By now Uncle Sauda had stopped giving me private lessons; I had learned all that he could teach me. My parents were beginning to notice my musical development. Whenever I was home, I would practice in the garage behind our house. Even the naysayers at school, who originally thought we were just making a lot of noise, were now giving us respect. My grandmother called me “Pu-Pu-Ru-Pu-Pu,” her imitation of the trumpet sound.
Back at St. Peter’s, with the band riding high, and the girls enamored with our rising fame, life had become pure joy. The thought that anything unpleasant might change this wonderful state of affairs never entered our minds. But everything was about to be turned upside down. One night after evening prayer in the chapel, Huddleston asked us to be seated. We thought he had some school announcements or would scold us for some major behavioral infraction. He had done this recently when a student hit a nun in the chest with a brick when he was nearly caught kissing his girlfriend after curfew in a remote corner of St. Agnes’s dark courtyard behind the girl’s dormitories. Instead, what he was about to tell us was far more serious.
“My dear creatures, the government has introduced a new law which will hereafter require all African children to be given an inferior education in their native languages. This means that when you complete high school, you will be far more inferior to a white child. As a Christian, I find this totally unacceptable. I have convinced the archbishop of the diocese to reject this system of education and to close all African Anglican schools in South Africa rather than agree to this barbaric law. I am happy to say that the diocese has agreed. Our school, St. Peter’s, I am afraid, will be the first one to close next December, at the end of the 1956 school term, because this despicable government has already spitefully declared it a black spot. I know this news comes as a great disappointment to you, but it is the only just and humane decision we could reach. Nobody is more shattered than I am, but we have chosen to reject Bantu Education, and there will be no turning back. I will remember all of you always in my prayers and have only the fondest memories of this place. May the blessings of God be always with you. Go in peace. Good night.”
Huddleston walked out of the chapel and left us stunned and weeping. We filed out speechless and filled with anger. Our having to get passbooks at the beginning of the school year paled in comparison to this blow.
Adopted in 1953, but implemented on April 25, 1955, the Bantu Education Act was designed to transfer African education from missionary control to the Native Affairs Department headed by Hendrik Verwoerd. As he put it, “I will reform [black education] so that natives will be taught from childhood to realize that equality with Europeans is not for them.” Verwoerd attacked the liberalism of missionary education, which gave African children ideas of growing up to live in a world of black and white equal rights. He later explained to the senate that there was “no place” for blacks outside the reserves, “above the level of certain forms of labor.” Therefore, “what was the use in teaching a Bantu child mathematics when he cannot use it in practice?” He added: “Education must train and teach people in accordance with their opportunities in life.”
African schools were no longer to study from the same lesson plans as those used in white schools; instead they would follow new course outlines based on government-recognized African languages. English, which had been the most common language of instruction, would be scrapped in primary schools and limited in secondary schools. There was mass resistance by African teachers and students to the new law. Arrests were followed by expulsions for the students and firings for the teachers. In one day, seven thousand students boycotted and were expelled. Verwoerd viewed boycotts as criminal acts of rebellion. The government later passed similar laws to control Indian and colored education. Two years later the Extension of University Education Act shut down undergraduate classes to nonwhites in all universities. Ethnic universities were created for nonwhites throughout South Africa. Once the act was implemented in 1959, many African academics quit or were fired. Afrikaans-speaking white professors replaced them for the most part.
The architects of apartheid calculated their strategic moves. Verwoerd recognized that expanding industries in white areas needed a cheap African labor force. He predicted that the nonwhite urban population would begin to decrease in the late 1970s, by which time apartheid would have succeeded in developing the “Bantu” rural reserves as alternative areas of employment. Verwoerd saw the
total separation between white and black societies as the final prize of apartheid. African labor in white society, he said, was like “donkeys, oxen, and tractors,” which could someday be replaced by other human machinery. White-owned mining companies, white farmers, white commercial and industrial businesses, and white homeowners throughout the country’s suburbs had espoused this philosophy for decades.
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