Still Grazing

by Hugh Masikela

  As the noose of apartheid’s fascist terror began to tighten around the necks of Africans, even though most of us were teens, we were becoming more politically conscious by the day. Cognizant as we now were of the bleak future racism was beginning to paint for us, political resistance took center stage in our lives. Verwoerd hated us, and we hated him. He never saw what he was doing as racist, but rather as a scientific philosophy he felt was good for everybody. He believed it was unreasonable to accept Africans as normal, intelligent human beings who could become lawyers, doctors, or scientists. To him, Africans did not possess the mental tools required for any advanced study. That’s why the government spent eight times more on education for whites than for Africans.

  A few smaller Anglican Mission schools stayed open, deciding to accept the government’s ultimatum, feeling, in Huddleston’s words, that “it was better for children to have a rotten education than none at all.” But Huddleston and St. Peter’s broke ranks, choosing “death with honor.” For a long time Verwoerd had been dying to get rid of Huddleston, but lacked an excuse. Now he had Huddleston in his cross-hairs. Soon after the decision by the Anglican Diocese to close St. Peter’s, Verwoerd appealed to the leadership of the Order of the Community of the Resurrection in Mirfield to recall our favorite priest.

  Huddleston’s vow of obedience to his religious order left him with little choice but to comply with his superiors’ demand and return to England. His expulsion was headline news in all of the South African newspapers. Many Africans saw his submission as a victory for Verwoerd, but Huddleston had no choice. It was a major blow for the African and political resistance communities, who lost one of their most valued resistance icons. Deflated, yet determined, the African people continued to focus their lives toward finding ways to beat the system that was destroying them. At the grassroots level, they devised sophisticated methods to anticipate where police raids would strike in our communities. These schemes were much more complicated than tossing pebbles on corrugated iron tin roofs. Africans created phantom employment, and forged signatures in the passbooks, to keep the police at bay. They learned how to stay a few steps ahead of the police at all times. They were going through an emotional transformation. But the more they schemed, the more efficient the apartheid system became.

  The dragnet of apartheid pulled all of us into a net of treachery, as either victims or informers. The ears of the Special Branch police force were everywhere. Family members became suspect. Lovers became untrustworthy. Names were taken at every political meeting, and many who were hauled in for questioning were intimidated into selling out, or if they stood their ground, they were subjected to torture and round-the-clock surveillance.

  In the midst of all this terror, somehow township music was in its golden era, burgeoning as never before.

  Dolly Rathebe, South Africa’s first African film star, magazine cover girl, and mbhaqanga and jazz and blues singer, used to say that “as evil as apartheid was, it could never completely destroy us because our music was the one thing the white government could never take away from us.”

  South African jazz orchestrations had their roots in ethnic wedding songs, and a cappella choral compositions, written mostly for school choirs. Marabi, mbhaqanga, and kwela were hybrid styles born from African interpretations of European missionary songs of worship and traditional African folk songs played in the style of American swing.

  The township bands and combos were flourishing, especially in the Johannesburg area. Saxophonist Gwigwi Mrwebi’s Harlem Swingsters, featuring Chief Manana on the double bass, and Boetie “Vark” Selelo’s Savoys, featuring Nchimane Manana on saxophone and Stompie Manana on trumpet, both originated in Sophiatown. From Orlando Township came the Jazz Maniacs, with Ellison Themba, Kippie Moeketsi, Mackay Davashe, and Zakes Nkosi on saxophones, Drakes Mbau on lead trumpet, Jacob Moeketsi on piano, Tai Shomang on double bass, and Boykie on drums; this was South Africa’s top orchestra.

  Peter Rezant’s Merry Blackbirds were the African society band that played such upper-crust functions as prominent weddings, national beauty pageants, and ballroom dance competitions at the Bantu Men’s Social Center. From Cape Town came Christopher “Columbus” Ngcukane’s orchestra; from the Eastern Cape came Lex Mona’s Serenaders; and from Durban, Dalton Khanyile’s big band. There were many other big bands out of Vereeninging, Bloemfontein, Port Elizabeth, Queenstown, Benoni, and Kimberley, the diamond capital located in the Northern Cape.

  There were innumerable talented female singers including Dolly Rathebe, Thandi Mpambani, Joyce Sineke, Louisa Emmanuel, Dixie Kwankwa, Rose Mathyss, Dorothy Masuka, and Susan Rabashane, and male crooners like Ben “Satch” Masinga, Joey “Maxims” Modise, Isaac Petersen, and Sonny Pillay. And of course there was Miriam Makeba.

  My homeboys, the Boston Brothers, led by Sam Williams, featuring “Boston Red,” Vandi Leballo, Joey Maxims, and Lawrence Masinga were spending a lot of time with the Huddleston Jazz Band at St. Peter’s, mentoring us. There were hundreds of other performers who made up the music community of South Africa at the time. They mostly performed on weekends in the municipal township recreational halls.

  The government despised our joy. They couldn’t figure out how Africans could still find any pleasure under such harsh social conditions. They were particularly annoyed when Africans jammed with white, Indian, and colored entertainers. Race mingling of any kind was resented by the apartheid government. They didn’t even want Africans from South Africa mixing with Africans from other parts of the world. When Sidney Poitier and Canada Lee came to South Africa to film Cry the Beloved Country in 1951, they were allowed into the country as indentured servants of the film’s director, Zoltan Korda, and labeled “foreign natives.” All foreign natives were kept apart from South African–born Africans in single-sex hostel complexes or in the homes or hotels of their employers. Isolating ethnic South Africans from Africans born outside the country drove a cultural and psychological wedge between them that still exists today in the form of the most despicable xenophobia imaginable.

  Toward the end of 1954, the Huddleston Jazz Band was on the boil and so was my love affair with our vocalist, Linda Kieviet. Much to my parents’ relief and Huddleston’s joy, I passed my repeat year near the top of my class. The rest of the band members were equally successful with their studies. I was not so lucky with Linda. Like Vera Pitso, she was adamant about refusing to sleep with me. The frustrating part was that when the girls refused to sleep with me, they never explained why. Even worse, Linda Kieviet later became the lover of our drummer, George Makhene.

  My profile got a boost during the holidays, when the Merry Makers hired me to play trumpet in Elijah Nkwanyana’s place, who had switched to tenor saxophone. One weekend the group had a wedding gig in Warmbaths, about fifty miles north of Pretoria. We set out in two seven-seater DeSoto sedans with one of the cars carrying the double bass and drum kit fastened to a rack on the roof. Just before sunset we arrived at the bride’s home, on a farm on the outskirts of Warmbath’s black township. The bride’s family fed us well and the brandy began to flow. Much to my surprise, one of the bridesmaids was Miriam Nkomo, a former classmate of mine from St. Michael’s. Miriam was about four years older than I, and now a student at Marianhill College in Natal. After playing a pre-wedding rehearsal set for the family, Mankomo, as we called her, and I sat in a corner of the courtyard and enjoyed a pint of brandy, reminiscing about our primary-school days. Soon we were kissing, and after a few more swigs of brandy we lost ourselves in each other. Spurred on by the brandy, Miriam fetched a blanket from inside the house. We made love for hours on top of it near the chicken coop. I’d never known it was possible to make love for so long—it must have been the brandy! Mankomo returned to the house some time after midnight, and I made it to one of the sedans, where I passed out in the backseat. I had no idea where the rest of the band members had gone, but I assumed they had been kidnapped by local women for horizontal entertainment. The next morning Mankomo knocked on the
back window of the car. She had a basin of hot water, some soap, and a washrag for me to wash up. She also gathered my clothes and pressed them for the afternoon wedding while I waited in the car in my drawers. She returned them with a breakfast of a big steak, some fried eggs, and brown bread.

  By late morning the rest of the band materialized, one by one, in time for us to play the wedding celebration just before lunchtime. Aside from playing the Wedding March song and other marriage favorites as we marched up and down the street behind the bridal party without a rhythm section and our lips almost numb, we still had to play that evening’s wedding reception. Since there was no hall in the township, we set up on the large wraparound porch of the bride’s palatial home to play the reception. We did all the township dance favorites: “Tamatie Sous,” “Ibhabhalazi,” and Elijah Nkwanyana’s hit compositions “Siya Giya” and “Thimela.” The Merry Makers were a very tight band indeed, and the wedding revelers could not get enough, screaming for encores well into the night. The band let me play many solos, and were knocked out by the style I was developing, a cross-section of Elijah’s style with a little of Banzi’s playing and a touch of Clifford Brown and Dizzy Gillespie’s phraseology. Listeners were fascinated to watch me stand toe-to-toe with the veteran musicians.

  After the gig, Mankomo and I made more passionate love with the help of a full bottle of brandy. The next morning I woke to the rooster’s crow and a throbbing headache. Painfully hung over, we left Warmbaths sharing stories about our wild weekend while passing around a bottle of Limosin brandy as we headed back to Springs.

  Later that day I received two pounds as payment for playing the wedding with the band. I was thrilled, even though I got less than the rest of the guys. They explained that I was still an apprentice, and my day would come. But I had passed my first tests, both as a professional musician and as a lover.

  I played a few more gigs with the Merry Makers before the end of my vacation, and was able to save a little money to buy some fine threads. I returned to St. Peter’s in late January 1955, energized by my music. I was looking forward to passing on to the Huddleston Jazz Band all the knowledge I had picked up from the Merry Makers during the holidays. My parents were concerned because once again a decision had to be made about which high school I would attend now that St. Peter’s was closing, but I also noticed they were more guarded about my musical progress. My father was especially lukewarm. The Batlokwa people, his family clan, prided themselves on education and community service. Music, to them, was something that respectable people listened to, but that was only played by irresponsible, illiterate, drunken layabouts. My parents had never thought that giving me piano lessons and exposing me to jazz records would lead to anything like what was now happening to me. I knew that in their hearts they were very worried.

  As the end of the year drew nearer, the thought of St. Peter’s closing down and Huddleston’s recall to England brought gloom over many of us. Two farewell concerts were organized by a cross-section of community and church activists. We played the dance portion for the second concert, which took place on the first weekend of the December school holidays at the Davey Social Center in Benoni’s Twa Twa Township. That concert featured performances by the cream of African music entertainers, including the Manhattan Brothers, featuring their new vocalist, the “Nut Brown Baby,” the “Nightingale,” Miriam Makeba. This was the second time I saw her, and every time our eyes met that evening, I got a warm feeling inside. The same thing seemed to happen to her, but I dismissed it as a figment of my imagination. After all, she was seven years older than I, and already a national star. When she sang, she bowled over the entire audience—there were endless screams for encores.

  At midnight the audience moved the chairs and benches against the walls to make room for dancing. Most of the top musicians from the Merry Makers and the Jazz Maniacs who had played earlier stayed around to catch our set and jam with us for a while. Huddleston and the other dignitaries had left along with Miriam, the Manhattan Brothers, and the rest of the performers. About two hours later a gang of about thirty boys in their late teens, armed with knives and handguns, rushed into the hall, most of them bleeding. The women and young girls ran onto the gigantic stage, shaking and crying with fear. One of the gang members was bleeding profusely from the side of his head and screamed, “Germiston one side, Benoni one side, Springs one side, Boksburg one side, Alexandra one side, Brakpan one side, Orlando one side,” ordering people to group with their townships. Some of the Orlando people tried to join the other groups, but were rejected and pushed away. The gang went for the Orlando section, stabbing them mercilessly, as the victims literally slithered up against the wall before they fell to their deaths. Blood was everywhere, gushing from some of the victims like water from sprinklers, splattering on the attackers and all over the floor. People were frantically trying to get out of there. Some were begging for mercy and crying like babies. The groups from the other townships couldn’t be sure they weren’t next in line after the gang was through with the Orlando section. The weeping, moaning, and fainting made for a pathetic scene around the hall. Some of the gang members were waving guns, machetes, long daggers, and tomahawks at the band, forcing us to play Elijah’s “Siya Giya” over and over again as accompaniment to the carnage. “Play, motherfuckers, if you don’t want to see your mothers’ behinds. You better play, you fucking shits.” Then they would fire a few shots into the ceiling of the hall. Girls were swooning and fainting all around us on-stage. Shaking in our funny cowboy uniforms, we played harder than we had ever played before. Even tough George Makhene had sweat pouring from his entire body as he sat behind his drums; he banged them like a champ, aware that his life depended on every stroke of the beat.

  When it was over, seventeen people lay in large pools of blood. All of them had been stabbed to death. The gang ran out of the hall, apparently in pursuit of some who had gotten away. Much later, as we were packing our instruments, the African police entered the hall, led by several white sergeants with their disgusted “bloody black savages” expressions on their pink faces. They looked as if they were wondering why there weren’t more bodies. We finished packing our instruments and got the hell out of there. During the train ride back to Johannesburg, I wondered why the police had arrived when the carnage was already over. Apparently two rival gangs, the DMGs and the Fast Elevens, had come to the hall to revenge the fatal stabbing of a Germiston gang leader who had been killed the week before at a dance in Payneville. Word was that the police had known about the coming bloodbath but their attitude was, “Let them kill each other. It’s less work for us.” The mayhem obviously marred the debut public performance of the Huddleston Jazz Band. I was seriously concerned about how my parents would react when they heard about this, especially my mother, who had periodically warned me of the fights that took place at township dance concerts. The Golden City Post, a tabloid for African readers, came out the next day with a screaming headline: GANG CARNAGE AT HUDDLESTON’S FAREWELL CONCERT: 17 BOYS MURDERED IN COLD BLOOD. When my mother saw the front page of the newspaper, she left her cooking, sat down at the kitchen table, and began to cry. “Oh no, Boy-Boy, you have to stay away from this band business. Can you see how dangerous it is? You will be much better off getting yourself a good education and finding a good job. Oh no, I can’t afford to lose my only son.” She continued to weep quietly. I couldn’t answer her. My father came into the kitchen and tried to make her feel better. “Don’t take it so seriously, my dear. This doesn’t happen all the time. It was just an unfortunate incident.” I was relieved by my father’s intervention. It meant I could carry on playing.

  Our next performances took us on the road south to Pietermaritzburg and Durban. Following the Benoni riot, our parents were a little nervous about our traveling, and even though we had a chaperone, the parents of our female vocalists refused to let their daughters go with us. But we didn’t care; we were mavericks, excited about experiencing the glamorous world of show business. In Dece
mber the beautiful Drakensberg mountain passes, gorges, hills, plateaus, rivers, and lakes offer splendor to the eye the likes of which I haven’t seen anywhere else in the world. Double rainbows arced high up across the horizon where gaps in the clouds showed off a clear blue sky, sometimes with a moon that was visible in the light of day.

  The steam engine pulled into the Pietermaritzburg train station, where we disembarked, hung over and reeking of brandy and beer following the overnight trip. We had been drinking hard on the train ride because we wanted to be cool like the seasoned musicians we had read about in Drum magazine. Mr. Maphumulo, the head social worker in Sobantu Village Township, met us at the station and we were driven to the township’s municipal hall in several cars. A pick-up van carried our instruments and baggage. Following a short reception to meet the local folks, we were taken to a single men’s hostel outside the township. At first glance, the place looked clean. We settled in, had lunch, and were given a tour around town. We were delighted to see the posters nailed to the telephone and light posts:

  FIRST NATIONAL TOUR

  THE HUDDLESTON JAZZ BAND CONCERT & DANCE

  FOR TWO NIGHTS ONLY DECEMBER 14TH AND 15TH 8 P.M.

  SUNDAY 17TH DECEMBER MATINEE AT 2 P.M.

  ADMISSION 2 SHILLINGS AND SIXPENCE.

  DON’T MISS IT!

  After an early dinner we went to bed, exhausted from the train ride and all the drinking the night before. Around midnight we heard small objects dropping from the ceiling onto our beds, and a scratching noise over the floor. Soon we began feeling bites. I jumped up and turned the lights on. The room was filled with bedbugs scampering down the walls, some coming from behind the cabinets and under the door, while others parachuted from the ceiling. Our white sheets and blankets were marked with bloodstains—ours mixed with theirs. We shook our bedcovers and cleaned our dorm as best we could. The next two nights we tried sleeping with the lights on because the parasites didn’t seem as venturesome when the lights were on. Some of the guys drank after rehearsals and performances until they passed out, too drunk to care about bedbugs. But, bedbugs aside, the audiences loved our music. We played many of the mbhaqanga favorites popularized by the Harlem Swingsters, the Merry Makers, the Alexandra All-Star Band, and Zakes Nkosi’s Sextext; songs composed by Ntemi Piliso, Gwigwi Mrwebi, Zakes Nkosi, and Elijah Nkwanyana. The revelers always rushed onto the dance floor and went wild whenever they recognized these hit songs. George, Jonas, and I also composed a few catchy songs of our own, like “Motsoala,” which we got to record for Gallo Records the following year.