by David Smiedt
The air was soon filled with the frenetic sound of kwaito, a local amalgam of boyz in da hood rap, African street slang and the odd Afrikaans glottal.
“Here come the Beemers,” sighed Oupa. Sure enough a quartet of top-of-the-line Z3s driven by scowling mourners in Ali G ensembles slid past, daring us to make eye contact.
Not that gangs hadn’t long been part of township life. Back in the 50s one of the most prominent had been the Hazels. Seriously, if you were naming a batch of hoods with no good on their minds and knuckledusters in their pockets, wouldn’t you steer towards a name that inspired fear? Amid thoughts of whether the Hazels ever mixed it up with the Veras or rumbled against the Ethels, I couldn’t help but notice how busy the graveyard was for a Tuesday afternoon. Not that I had any legitimate basis of comparison, mind.
There were four funerals on the go, each attended by at least 200 mourners. These were not the quiet sniffling-into-a-hanky affairs I was used to. There was diaphragm-shaking wailing going on; bosoms were heaving and coffins were being clung to.
I asked Oupa if this was a particularly hectic day in tombtown. He shook his head sadly and replied, “Not since AIDS arrived in Soweto”.
A death in the family is a lavish affair in black cultures. The send-off reflects the esteem in which the metabolically-challenged was held and many families take on fat slabs of debt to ensure the last hurrah is appropriate. Others spend years contributing to funeral funds which operate on a similar principle to life-insurance policies.
We left the heaving hordes to their grief and drove on past handpainted mural advertisements on concrete walls and gunmetal-grey streetlights to which posters advertising cheap abortions were tied. From time to time we’d stop at an intersection where a mate of Oupa’s would pull up beside us or rib him from the sidewalk as he made his daily circuit of Soweto with the obligatory wide-eyed whitey in tow.
The roads were dominated by the 10,000 minibuses which ferry Soweto’s residents to and from work. This massive industry arose in response to the apartheid government’s lack of adequate public transport and there isn’t a town or city in South Africa which wouldn’t come to a swift commercial halt if the local taxidrivers went on strike. A ride from Soweto to Jozi, as it is known by township residents, will set you back a dollar.
Passengers motion in the direction of an approaching cab, which will frequently lay down an inch or so of rubber as the driver crunches the brake pedal as one would a roach on the kitchen floor. This invariably causes the cars behind him to swerve like sidestepping ruckmen. Unlike many other cities where such behaviour would generally by greeted by the rolling down of windows, expletive medleys and the casting of aspersions on another’s parentage, most taxidrivers in South Africa are merely fixed with an admonishing shake of the head or the briefest of glares.
This is because they generally carry a fearsome reputation for responding to a minor fracas with extreme violence. Their vehicles are prime targets for the carjackers who service a network of chop shops where taxis can be disassembled and unrecognisably reconfigured within hours. As a result the overwhelming majority, most of whom are regular joes trying to make an honest buck, have been forced to arm themselves with hot pieces, which also come in handy when turf wars break out between the taxi companies vying for a chunk of this multimillion-dollar game.
The Orlando West section of Soweto lays claim to the only street in the world that two Nobel laureates have called home. From this neatly nondescript patch of middle-class Soweto came two men whose humanity and lack of vengeful bitterness was made all the more remarkable by the brutality of the regime determined to deprive them of their rights. Desmond Tutu lived on the corner in a modest whitewashed home shaded by trees and bounded by a metre-high concrete wall. A block up the road was the compact brick bungalow that lawyer Nelson Mandela came home to after a day at his Johannesburg office. It was from this light-drenched living room that he plotted revolution in the 1960s with his comrades and second wife, Winnie.
Now divorced from Nelson – who is happily married to the widow of a political mate, the old fox – Winnie no longer lives here. She resides in a flashy palace behind three-metre walls which was built through donations from such luminaries as Moamar Gaddafi, Jane Fonda and Clint Eastwood. The old house has become a museum of deplorable tackiness which hardly befits the man whose life it purports to celebrate. After the carefully crafted detachment of the Apartheid Museum, this exercise in merchandising was as disheartening as it was blatant. T-shirts proclaiming Winnie – who could be bothered showing up for only three sitting days of parliament in 2002 – as “The Mother of the Nation” were on sale alongside perspex jars filled with dirt “direct from the Mandela backyard”. In the garage was a virtual shrine to the woman, composed of framed tributes and an airbrushed poster of her punching the air before an adoring crowd.
Long before she walked hand in hand with her husband through the gates of Victor Verster Prison, Winnie had achieved a measure of notoriety through a series of scandals, inappropriate comments and the kind of fashion sense that made Dame Edna Everage look like Coco Chanel. First, her coterie of henchmen was implicated in the kidnap and assault of a boy barely into his teens. Then she addressed a political rally at which she incited supporters to liberate South Africa through necklacing suspected police informers with a burning tyre filled with petrol. Her latest embarrassment involved allegations of embezzlement and the forged signatures of ANC Women’s League members. This was responded to with her now well-practised denials and predictable retorts of a witch-hunt.
None of this was even hinted at amid the ramshackle displays, the highlight of which was a gown reputed to have been worn by Mandela at the time of the treason trial.
The monumental crappiness of the experience was all but obliterated at the next venue we visited. Two gargantuan blades of steel come together like hands in prayer to form the roof of the Regina Mundi Church. Beneath its vaulted recesses and bathed in the subdued sheen of lemon stained-glass windows, Bishop Desmond Tutu took the pulpit with firebrand oratory advocating sanctions against the apartheid government. The church also provided sanctuary for protesters with sjambok- and shotgun-wielding police in pursuit. Bullet holes bear testament to the sieges that it witnessed. A statue of Christ that once stood outside until a messianic hand was removed courtesy of law-enforcement shrapnel today stood sentinel over a neighbourhood choir practice.
A group of fifty girls in smart uniforms, a dozen potential supermodels among them, had shuffled into the front pews, followed by an equal number of boys. It was obviously the low point of a school day that had plumbed new depths in tedium. The only thing both groups shared were discreet admiring glances in one another’s direction and a mutual desire for time to switch to turbo mode. Then they began to sing.
It was the kind of hymn that had me looking around the hall for a dog-collared type who would sign me up to Christianity. The girls’ voices blended into a singular symphony of the sweetest soprano given delicious depth by the bulbous bass of the boys singing the same lyrics a few phrases behind. The result was a traditional call-and-response gospel tune that filled my chest with joy and had my eyes brimming. I didn’t understand a word, it stemmed from a doctrine that was not my own, and yet it stirred within me a sense of elation for which I was wholly unprepared. I guess they don’t call ‘em spirituals for nothing.
Oupa was anxious to hit the road but I begged for one more song like a mosh-pit groupie braying for an encore. He looked at me with the blend of mild exasperation and tangible pity I used to dish out to my mother when she got misty in Hallmark commercials, but eventually acceded.
Oupa waited outside and I eventually found him chatting to a white woman beside a shed where a mosaic workshop was being held. “Is she teaching the congregants,” I asked as we clambered back into the car. “No,” replied Oupa. “They’re teaching her.”
Our route took us past the Hector Pietersen Museum which opened on 16 June 2002, twenty-six years to
the day after the blood-spattered riots ignited by the regime’s insistence that black students be taught in Afrikaans, the language of oppression. Although the museum commemorates the Soweto uprising which drew the world’s attention to the plight of South Africa’s oppressed majority and resulted in the international boycotts and sanctions which precipated the end of apartheid, it is named after the day’s most famous martyr. The thirteen-year-old featured in an iconic photograph that distilled the rage of the rioters and the brutality with which it was extinguished. From the screaming confusion of tear gas and hurled rocks emerges Mbuysia Makhubu in denim dungarees, his face contorted by grief, the dying body of Hector Pietersen in his arms. Besides him runs Hector’s sister Antoinette, her hand extended as if trying to halt the horror unfolding before her or at least stem the blood gushing from her brother’s mouth.
A memorial stone close to where he fell lies beneath the entrance to the museum and bears both his name and witness to an uprising in which 555 others died. Most were protesters shot in the back as they scurried for safety. Others were so enraged by the slaughter that nothing could restrain them from attempting to take vengeance on the police who were armed with automatic weapons and stirred on by their secret nightmare of black rebellion fomenting before them.
As I pondered the memorial to dead children who deserved a better future sluggish rain began to leak from a contused and incontinent sky. Oupa noticed the degree to which I was moved and in a single sentence crystallised the fundamental similarities of all men: “Fancy a beer then?”
We wound up at Wandie’s, a popular lunch stop for the tourist buses that wheeze diesel through Soweto most days. It was late afternoon and the sharpness of the light had only just begun to soften. Burnished and backlit, the city took its foot off the accelerator. Commuters leapt lazily from minicab taxis, flicking smiling jibes and laughing farewells over their shoulders. The tempo had dropped from samba to slow groove and ambling in the twilight was the order of the day.
Across a rush-choked stream lay a football field we had passed earlier in the day. A sun-roasted slab of rectangular desolation, it sported the agricultural equivalent of a comb-over, with modest patches of jaundiced grass vainly clinging to a bald pate. Now, though, it was redolent with cries of “man on” and the leather-cushioned thud of perfectly executed volleys.
It was the soundtrack to my childhood and struggling to see a ball in the remnants of light leaking below the horizon was one of few experiences I shared with black boys growing up in the townships. The sports club where I played junior football was the first in the country to become multiracial. In 1978 the Wanderers Club displayed remarkable courage by instituting this policy which skirted dangerously close to being illegal. Not that we realised the enormity of the situation at the time. We just turned up to training one day to find a new centre back named Jacob in the squad. The novelty of his colour had dissipated by the end of the warm-up and the rest of us were impressed by his defensive instincts, aerial skills and willingness to dish out the odd elbow to the team pratt, a malicious turd of a child called Steven Hess with an overbite and a delicious sister called Terry who stood me up on a date some years later.
Jacob became the rock to which our defence was anchored and he and I played together for five seasons. He was my first black mate and the team formed a fiercely protective barrier around him when we toured regional centres where racism often surfaced. He came over to my house a couple of times, but I never went to his. The closest I came was when my visibly apprehensive father dropped him off on the outskirts of Alexandra after a game one night. We crunched to a halt on a rutted gravel road, the Merc’s light refracting through a bottle graveyard by the kerb before dissolving into a darkness flecked by a sprinkling of distant coal fires. The township had no streetlights at the time, yet my father wore the unmistakable pallor of a person standing directly beneath one. It was the first time I had seen him jittery.
“This is fine,” said Jacob, perceptive enough to lie. “My house is not far away. Thanks for the lift, Mr Smiedt.” With that he broke into a megawatt grin, leapt from the car with his kit bag slung coolly over his shoulder and was absorbed into the night as if by osmosis.
At the time sport was strictly defined along racial lines, of course. Rugby was a white game whereas soccer was predominantly played and watched by the black population, with Soweto clubs such as Kaizer Chiefs and Orlando Pirates generating a rivalry on a par with Liverpool and Manchester United, Barcelona and Real Madrid, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. The inclusion of players like Jacob led to white boys like me being invited to play curtain-raisers for national soccer league games. As a result I found myself among eleven excited under-12s making our way down the players’ tunnel of Soweto’s Orlando Stadium on a handful of occasions. Someone once told me that when you die, the journey involves travelling a dark corridor towards a welcoming light – if that is true, I found heaven in Soweto.
Orlando Stadium is a seething bowl of rivalry and expectation on match day. Comprised of wooden benches that accommodate far more spectators than modern plastic seating, the stands rise at impossibly sharp angles from the turf, giving spectators the appearance of being stacked one upon another like a chanting human pyramid. Being a goalkeeper I was closer to the fans than most. Aside from my coach and some team-mates, there was not a white face in the 50,000-strong gathering but we cared not a jot – we were playing before a packed stadium on turf so luxurious I even had a few practice dives. Much to the delight of those behind the goals.
At one point a wily striker suppurating chicanery and arrogance razored our defence and deftly lobbed the ball over my head, resulting in squeals of delight from the fans a few steps to my rear. In a moment of athleticism so rare in my subsequent sporting endeavours that I sadly still cling to it today, I flung myself backwards like a diver off a high board, threw a hand toward the ball and tipped it over the crossbar.
The crowd roared their approval and I turned around to see tens of thousands of football aficionados nudging their mates with “Did you see that?” expressions plastered on their beaming faces. They continued to shout encouragement throughout the game and even applauded me off at full-time with “Good boy, keeper”. It was once-in-a-lifetime glory and I have Soweto to thank for it.
Oupa snapped me out my liniment-scented reverie with a coldie and the news that the dinner buffet was on. We made our way through a cosy terrace where a group of African-Americans were posing with Wandile Ndaba, proprietor, raconteur and Soweto bon vivant. “Welcome,” he declared to the group who I later learned were IT consultants from Detroit. “Welcome home.” Oupa rolled his eyes but the Yanks beamed like returning soldiers who’d just set foot on Mom and Pop’s doorstep in Encephalitis, Arkansas.
The buffet was comprised of a dozen three-legged cast-iron pots arranged in two rows of six. Since prime cuts were usually beyond the budget of your average township chef, many perfected the art of slow cooking the gristled goat flesh and sinewy steak purchased at street-side slaughter spots until it didn’t so much fall off the bone as leap from it. Pepper-scented chicken curries inveigled beside tomato-laced mutton stews and bubbling birianis. This fare was accompanied by pap, a white maize meal staple that is cooked with water until it reaches a consistency thick enough to mop up gravy flotsam.
I could hear my arteries hardening as dish after dish streaked with pearls of glistening oil was piled onto the mound in the centre of the plate.
Oupa joined me at the table clutching another pair of frost-kissed Castle Lager longnecks which played consort supreme to the meal by taking a crisp blade to the sauce-soaked meat.
By the time he suggested it was time to head back into Johannesburg, an obscene tally of carnivorous indulgence had left my face coated in a happy sheen, my fingers bearing the saffron stains of the tandoori junkie and my stomach groaning the painful symphony of distension.
Over the course of a single day my heart had been stolen, broken, melted and coated with choles
terol by South Africa’s blackest city. My next meal would be in its whitest.
Chapter 4
Postoria
Heading north from Johannesburg, a gentle sense of anticipation settled on me as I realised that from this point in the journey onwards, I would be experiencing destinations I had not lived in but only visited. The first was Pretoria. Located just seventy kilometres north of Johannesburg, it might well have been another planet when I was growing up.
The two cities could not be more different. Johannesburg was a pulsating commercial harlot founded on profit over principles where English was the language of choice. Pretoria was a staid and graceful administrative centre which formed the capital of a republic founded by Afrikaners fleeing British rule.
It was in Pretoria that my brother Richard underwent basic training as part of his two-year compulsory military service and we made the journey to visit him at the air force base most weekends. Between mouthfuls of Jewish comfort food such as fried fish and chopped herring, he would regale us with tales of 4 am inspections, beds whose corners could only be cajoled into the required right angle by slipping in a metal food tray, and the virulent anti-Semitism displayed by some in his barracks. Although he had never been fitter or stronger, I’d never seen him look so miserable as he did trudging back to his dormitory clutching some home-made fudge with which he would vainly try to soften the suspicions and stereotypes his cohorts held about Jews.
The base was a spirit-sapping paean to the philosophy of breaking down recruits in order to build them up again. However, the most noticeable attribute of Valhalla was that there was no irony in its name. It was the plushest, plumbest posting you could get for basic training and Richard was only stationed there through the intercession of a family friend who was well connected in the defence hierarchy.