Black Like You

by Mashaba, Herman;

  The people shifted in their seats – I remember hearing this – but I didn’t want to open my eyes and look at them. I was afraid at what I might see in their eyes. Hate? Despair? When I did eventually look up, I saw their slumped shoulders, their attitude of defeat. I understood why my mother did not want us to work for white people. I squeezed my eyes shut and vowed I would never put myself between the crosshairs of a white man’s folly and his wrath.

  Fortunately for my mother and her family, her father was a Lutheran minister. He had the opportunity and the means to move away from that hotbed of hatred, and so he packed up and went south. The family settled in Hammanskraal, where my grandfather was a preacher until the day he died.

  Chapter 5

  As a knoxman, I was relatively independent. I didn’t have to be subservient to any white man. I made enough money to buy pap, stewing meat, bread, milk; I had enough to get to school and back every day and, most importantly, I had entertainment money. Louis and I visited shebeens where older guys hung out, and when we were not thinking up ways to relieve them of their cash, we kept our ears close to the ground, alert for any opportunities that might arise. We were hungry for a break that would earn us enough money to hit the big league. But our big break seemed elusive.

  One lazy afternoon we were talking to a school friend Jankie about our situation.

  “I know how you can make some big money,” Jankie said.

  My curiosity was piqued.

  “So, are you going to tell us?” I asked.

  “Some local gents have stolen a welding machine. It’s from one of those new factories – in Babelegi,” he said, referring to an industrial area outside Hammanskraal. “But there’s a problem. The welding machine is ‘hot’, and those moegoes from the police college are looking everywhere for the machine. Those new boys want to make some arrests.”

  “OK, so what’s this got to do with us?” Louis asked. I tapped him on the ankle. Jankie had seen the interest in my eyes and his confidence had received a boost.

  Louis sat back and put his arms behind his head, feigning lack of interest.

  “Hey, I must decide if I fit you guys in. I know where the machine is hidden. If you two guys have got a plan for the machine, maybe there’s a chance for you,” Jankie said, his eyes narrowing.

  At that stage I didn’t have a clue as to who might be interested in buying the machine, but what I did know is that a welding machine meant a job: if you could weld, you could repair and also make things. In the townships and villages of Hammanskraal, anybody who had a welding machine could make a living repairing car exhausts, or welding gates and window frames. With this in mind, I decided that we’d get hold of the machine and worry about a buyer later; if I had possession of it, I’d have an asset in my hands.

  “I’ve got some ideas,” I pretended, trying to sound confident. “And, we’ll split the money – a third for each of us.”

  Having no better alternative himself, Jankie agreed to my deal and we made arrangements to recover the welding machine.

  We met a couple of nights later. It was moonless and dark, but Louis and I braved the bush, following behind Jankie, hoping that we would not come across any snakes. Jankie led us this way and that, along a meandering sandy path.

  “Hey, Jankie, do you know where we’re going or are you just guessing?” I asked as we scuttled around in the dark. I’d grown impatient, believing that we were on a wild-goose chase, but soon enough Jankie stopped.

  “Here it is, here.” He pointed to the ground, and I could see his eyes widen in the dark. Louis and I started digging with the shovels that we’d brought with us. We unearthed the welder, which was far heavier than I’d anticipated.

  “Yoh! It’s so heavy,” I said. “How are we going to carry it back to my house?”

  My arms were already aching from all the digging, and I almost wept at the thought of having to carry the machine all the way back along the path. But, having no option, we heaved and moaned and carried it a short way, then we put it down and rubbed our hands, and then we picked it up again and carried it a little further, maintaining this stop-start method of carrying until we eventually arrived home and hid the welder in an outbuilding. But now that the welder was in our possession, Jankie was reluctant to leave.

  “So, when we sell the welder we will split the money three ways. Okay? That’s the deal, hey, High Man,” he said, looking hard at me. I grabbed his hand and held it.

  “A deal is a deal, Jankie. When we sell the machine, you’ll get your share,” I said.

  The brand-new welding machine was worth about R600 – far more money than any of us had ever seen. We were so eager to earn ourselves a cut of the money that disposing of the welder become the focus of our attention. We were all excited, but I insisted that we exercise extreme caution before we offloaded it. At a shebeen one night, we found ourselves in the middle of a group of men loudly speculating as to the whereabouts of the stolen machine. I kept a straight face as I listened, knowing that the welder was too hot to move. When we left the shebeen I waited until we were well out of earshot, then I held Louis and Jankie by the wrists and swore them to secrecy.

  “If you say anything about this, we’re all going to go down. So shut up. If they catch us, the cops will put us in jail and throw away the key,” I hissed. The thought of incarceration sobered them both up, and they promised to keep their lips clamped.

  By this stage we were living in Leboneng – where, in 1977, my mother had been offered the chance of looking after a friend’s house on a rent-free basis. But most people in Leboneng could not afford electricity, so Louis, Jankie and I had to rack our brains to think of someone who might want an electric welder. For days, my mind was in a spin as I tried to think of a suitable buyer, and then it finally hit me – Moersekont. He was the local kingpin, a drug dealer who lived in a village about five kilometres away, and he was the original hard-core bad guy. Everybody was afraid of Moersekont, and it was unheard of for anyone who wasn’t part of his inner circle to dare approach him. But I’d had an idea, and I tried it out on Louis.

  “Moersekont is our only hope,” I said, knowing full well that Louis wasn’t going to agree with me.

  “Are you mad? Moersekont will get his guys to moer you. Those maniacs will sommer stick you,” he cried, hysteria rising in his voice.

  “Just listen, Louis. Moersekont’s house is always lit up. He must be running all those lights from a generator. You see, if he’s got a generator, maybe he needs a welder too,” I said.

  Louis looked at me as if I was crazy and just shook his head. So I played my trump card.

  “Moersekont will make sure that our names are never given to the police. If some busybody does find out that we’ve sold him the welder, they won’t say a word. Because it’s Moersekont who bought it. Do you see now?”

  Still Louis said nothing.

  “Man, everyone’s much more scared of Moersekont than those laaities from Police College,” I said.

  Louis suddenly grabbed my hand and pumped it, his eyes wild with delight as he gave a low laugh.

  A few days later, Moersekont came to my mother’s house to inspect the welder. I knew, though, that if my mother caught sight of him she’d be furious. I could imagine her saying, “Where are your brains, High Man? What are you doing with this thug?”

  So while Louis distracted my mother, I took Moersekont to the outbuilding and showed him the welder. He grumbled a bit as he looked it over.

  “I’ll give you R150,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, the price is R300.” I turned around as if to go. I knew what the machine was worth, and I could tell by the glint in his eye that Moersekont wanted it.

  “Okay, I’ll take it with me, and then I’ll bring you the money later,” he said.

  I swallowed; my mouth felt dry. I struggled to seem nonchalant.

  “No,” I said again. �
��When you bring the money, you can fetch it.” Though I was terrified of his lurking thugs, I managed to suppress my fear.

  “Right. I’ll come back this afternoon with the money.” Then he turned on his heel and left.

  Although Louis and I laughed about my bravado, I realised the power of being neutral and showing no emotion, especially when it came to negotiating. It is a lesson that was born out of fear and intimidation, and it proved invaluable in developing negotiating skills that I later used in all my business dealings. Johan Kriel, one of my first business partners, used to say that he did not know where my ability to sit out tense negotiations came from – well, this ability had its roots in situations like the one involving Moersekont.

  True to his word, he arrived that afternoon and paid us the R300. Louis and I were dizzy with delight. We had never had that much money in our lives. We took the wad of notes to my bedroom, closed the door, lay on the bed, threw the blue R2 notes into the air, and laughed as they rained over us; the feeling of having so much money was euphoric. The following day we met Jankie and gave him his share – R100.

  “Who did you sell it to?” Jankie asked, seeming to waver between taking the money and asking for more, hoping to negotiate a bigger share for himself.

  “To Moersekont,” I said.

  Jankie swallowed and grabbed the money. I knew then for sure he’d never be persuaded to turn on us if pressured by his friends or the police.

  That was our first big windfall, and I admit that my fingers itched to blow the money in a big way.

  “I know what I’m going to spend my money on,” I said to Louis.

  “What?” he asked.

  “A car. A black-and-white Mini that’s for sale. I’m going to buy it. Hey, imagine how impressed the girls will be,” I said.

  I wanted that Mini badly. For months, I had fantasised about owning a car, and impressing the girls.

  Fortunately, Louis tempered my ambitions. “Are you mad? Us two boys arriving at school in a car? What do you think they’ll say?”

  “Ja. They’ll say we were up to nonsense,” I said, and we both burst into laughter.

  I realised the recklessness of my desire, and agreed that buying a car would draw unwanted attention to us.

  “Okay, then, let’s go to Babelegi and buy ourselves some All Star shoes, Dobshire trousers, and London Fog fedoras,” I suggested. Louis sighed with relief that common sense had prevailed, and off we went.

  The following weekend, we hit the shebeens, each with a girl on either arm; we partied non-stop – dancing, drinking and throwing money around.

  When life is hard, you quickly realise that you have to be resourceful or die. I was tired of walking to school in shoes with flapping soles, tired of Louis having to rely on an unattended tap to fill his stomach. I was no longer prepared to submit to poverty, so gambling, dagga peddling and petty crime laid the foundation of my initiation into entrepreneurship.

  I was extremely lucky that I never became addicted to drugs or alcohol. When we didn’t have enough money for a loaf of bread or a packet of mealie meal, we bought 20c bottles of benzene that were generally used to remove dirty marks from laundry. But I didn’t use the benzene for laundry; I sniffed it. I placed a cloth over the lid and inhaled the vapour, and within seconds I was completely out of my mind. When I was high on benzene I was able to shut out everything – I could have walked through a field of thorns and I would not have felt a thing. I also tried smoking cigarettes, but because this brought on severe coughing bouts, I was forced to stop.

  While I share fellow motorists’ annoyance when stopped at traffic lights by glue-sniffing kids begging for money, I understand why these children hang out on street corners, sucking at plastic bottles. I’ve experienced that same sense of wretchedness. I am thankful for the invisible hand of God that steered me away from addiction and a wasted life. Pobane was not so lucky, however. He had developed a taste for alcohol, and it gripped him so tightly that he was never able to release himself from its hold. It was alcohol that ended up killing him. On the day that he had the fatal accident in 1988, he had been out drinking with his colleagues.

  Looking back on my boyhood, I admit that I am not proud of some of the things that I have done. But because I was not prepared to work for whites in the suburbs, I had to work for myself – and that meant taking advantage of the meagre resources that were available in the township. And most of the time, my choices were not legal.

  Chapter 6

  I developed a strong sense of black consciousness while I was growing up. Of course, Black Consciousness as an ideology has a long history, and I had no idea at the time of its origins or development. It was only later that I learnt about the advocates of Black Consciousness and their popularisation of the “Back to Africa” idea, with its call for an end to colonial rule, and its plea for the decolonisation of black people’s minds – ideas that filtered down to South Africa during the 1950s with Robert Sobukwe and the Pan Africanist Congress.

  I was not consciously aware of any of this history, but as a young black male growing up under apartheid, I inevitably developed a sense of black consciousness; how could I not? Our families and friends were bringing home horror stories on a daily basis, accounts of exploitation by whites, random demeaning acts of violence towards black people – the stories never ended. Newspaper posters continually headlined the saga of racism. One story featured employers who were arrested for allowing the children of their domestic workers to spend the Christmas holidays in the suburbs with their mothers; another reported on black nurses in Ladysmith who were only permitted to attend to white patients when the patients were asleep or anaesthetised; yet another concerned black members of a Methodist church in Amanzimtoti who were prevented from attending services because a white neighbour objected to the congregants passing by his front gate.

  As teenagers in the mid-1970s, my friends and I traded such stories as we sat smoking and drinking in the shebeens; we joked that one day when blacks took over the country we would make whites suffer for their crude and cruel racism.

  “A pass! I won’t make them carry passes, I’ll make them wear big signs around their necks: everyone will know their age, their marital status – and it will give their criminal offences,” one man said.

  “Yes, the sign must be so heavy they can barely walk,” his neighbour laughed.

  “Anyone who does not wear the sign will be arrested,” we all agreed.

  Although we joked about acts of retribution against racists, it was our way of defusing the anger and humiliation we felt.

  There were laws that governed every aspect of our lives. The Group Areas Act (1950) decided where we could live, usually in villages or towns far from any employment. Two years later, the Natives (Abolition of Passes and Co-ordination of Documents) Act – commonly known as the Pass Laws – entrenched the Group Areas Act, defining the areas where we could work. These areas were dumping grounds, or otherwise dormitory townships, for workers in the cities some distance away. The 1949 Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act was amended in 1957 to forbid all sexual relationships across the colour line. A year later, the government passed the Riotous Assemblies Act, which allowed the Minister of Justice to stop political gatherings, specifically those of the South African Communist Party (SACP). However, from the 1960s, the government prohibited public meetings of Black Consciousness groups such as the Pan Africanist Congress and other banned political organisations such as the African National Congress and the SACP, forcing these groups to hold their meetings in secret. In Hammanskraal, people often whispered behind their hands about planned local political meetings.

  “There’s a meeting at St Peter’s this weekend; pass on the word.”

  The St Peter’s Seminary in Hammanskraal hosted many Black Consciousness meetings where national leaders from various religious, black and left-wing political organisations congregated to voice their displeas
ure with apartheid structures. These groups believed that if their dissatisfaction was registered in a collective voice, they might influence the restrictive racial policies of the time.

  Hammanskraal was at the time one of seven regions that fell within the borders of Bophuthatswana, a “homeland” that the South African government had set up in 1961 for the Tswana people (the “homeland” was later given “self-rule” in 1971, and finally “independence” in 1977). We were never fooled, though, by the government’s attempted deception regarding self-governance, the protection of Tswana culture and the accelerated industrialisation of the area.

  It was all part of the grand scheme of apartheid, and we knew it. “This is rubbish. Afrikaners are only interested in protecting their own culture,” people said. The Black Consciousness Movement saw these Bantustans for what they were – a separation of black people which should not be tolerated; it was a clear divide-and-rule strategy.

  Most people in Hammanskraal were opposed to the proposed “independence” of Bophuthatswana. To protest against the government’s plan, the Black People’s Convention (BPC) held a meeting at St Peter’s Seminary in Hammanskraal on 25 July 1977. The BPC had been established five years before by various black groups in South Africa; it excluded whites, and propagated the notion of black communalism. Arising out of the matters discussed at this meeting, the BPC wrote an open letter to Chief Lucas Mangope – the President-in-waiting of Bophuthatswana – protesting against the independence of the so-called homeland. This perceived act of defiance had people talking, and it had angered the government. Those of us who were living in Hammanskraal at the time read newspapers that had published summaries of the letter, and we gathered on neighbours’ porches to listen to radio stations that aired snippets of the letter. The World newspaper, which most of us read, published the letter in its entirety.