by Z. P. Dala
Sizwe’s disappearance sparked off a wave of dissent. We had been fools to think we could ever have contained our fight to a peaceful, intellectual one. The wave spread, mainly among the youth. News of Sizwe’s and his nephew’s plight moved like wildfire, and soon even our best orators and writers could not contain the rage of the youth. They began to throw stones, they began to get careless in their rage, openly walking around after curfew, or defying their white bosses.
It all seemed like a wild, crazy game at first. But when graffiti slogans made way for bricks thrown through windows by overexuberant and raging members of the Movement, we knew that the days of pamphlets and words were coming to an end. I held firm to my job at the hospital, using the time to keep my ears peeled for any bits of information that filtered among the white doctors, who ignored me, and the ever-looming police, who watched me carefully. Any information I could find I wrote in code in my journal, and then copied and passed along to one of my comrades, who would undertake the complicated steps to get the information to the leaders of both the Black Consciousness Movement and the newly forming United Democratic Front. In this way, we found little clues of where the Special Branch would be raiding next, ensuring our apartment was always kept clean of any signs of political activity. We hid things well. Any policeman who came would just find a group of layabouts reading fashion magazines. It was illegal then for a gathering of people to occur in one place, but that was confined to outdoor spaces. In the apartment, we hid so many people when the police paid a visit, I often wondered if you shook the apartment as in an earthquake, how many people would fall out of the cracks.
Gladys had been sent away to finish her internship in a township, in a black hospital. Obviously, to the white man, an Indian feeding you pills was slightly better than a Black.
There is something very profound about belief. It carries you across the dark days. It makes you trust that somewhere inside the nebulous clouds of doubt and a never-ending struggle that there will be a day when truth will be realized. And recognized. We all wanted both: truth and recognition. It didn’t really matter which came first. But when you are part of a struggle that strips you of an identity, that turns you into a piece of a dangerous machine, every tiny aspect of individuality struggles and strains to burst out of confined quarters.
We learned first that we were nothing. We learned early that we were less, that our place in the land was as small as the specks of dust that never left the soles of our feet. And suddenly, all the loneliness and all that subservient kowtowing began to take a shape that made us belong. We had a tribe. And our tribe understood. Our tribe had a purpose that was larger than personal suffering.
It was time to forget who we once were. Indian was not Indian anymore. Beautiful meant new things. Clever took on the best of monikers. Fighters. Warriors. Finally our worlds began to make sense. Sylverani, the Indian girl with hair in thick ropelike plaits from a township where only Indians were allowed to live, died then. Sylvie was born. A nonwoman, yet a strong female; a non-Indian, a nonperson. Only a cogwheel. And a willing one. When we struggle, when we fight injustice, there is no I and there is no you. There is only us. And we shall overcome.
And yet equality does not always extend a generous hand. Men talked of it, they wrote of it, and they claimed they fought for it. But they were men. They owned the struggle. Our leader always spoke highly and fervently about the power of women, and how their role in the struggle was so necessary, but sometimes when he allowed the men to push us women into corners or to silence us midsentence, I wondered about men, and whether they would truly accept the power of a woman. Deep within their fighter bones, they had no place for a full form of equality. I joined them, a woman in the room. But I was never their equal. They understood egalitarian words and waxed eloquently on high-minded theory. In the real world, they believed that equality belonged only to their kind.
The divide between men and women in the struggle made us unhappy in our conjoined twinness. It became a silent code. Yet another code that we had to learn. Not a code of dashes and zeros, not a language of identifying informants and allies. But a lovely little code of us and them. Our bodies and their bodies bore bruises of sameness, the uniformity of beatings did not distinguish between the body of a man and the body of a woman. But men were the self-proclaimed owners of the struggle.
In other words, the struggle was sexist.
CHAPTER NINE
In 1971, Durban had begun to shine with a patina of politics. It was the Durban Moment, and the frustrating labyrinthine streets and alleys thronged with angry activists who kept their documents, registers of active members, and pages and pages of manifestos and banned articles written by the founding fathers who were now imprisoned, close to their chests. Speeches and marches flooded the humid streets, and chasing the headiness of ego, men stood on podiums and enjoyed the sounds of their own voices. They paraded their resistance, and allowed testosterone-laden war cries to ring out in the squares. They grew drunk on the power of the audience. The drug was rich and spicy, and they imbibed.
Preening, the males had much to say—peacocks are so much more beautiful than their drab female halves. It is a powerful thing to rebel, to be a renegade. Sex came so freely offered to the man on the podium. Danger was the aphrodisiac; it made the blood rise and swell. Indeed, the struggle was real, the struggle was fatal, but it also brought its gifts. In the reckless times, when young blood rushed with a cocktail of defiance and knowledge, we reached out for each other in throes. Lovemaking was dangerous, and that is why it was so sweet. Men and women who were denied one another’s bodies found that they responded so rapturously when forbidden.
We were the silent sisters of the struggle, we women. We understood it well enough.
The deeper into the heart of activism I delved by attending meetings and rallies, by listening to the passionate speeches made by young men tasked to become leaders, the more involved I became, eventually officially placing my name on the register as an active member of the African National Congress. Now, all the splintered movements and groups began to unify, and although it was a process where many egos were ruffled as each leader of each group had to give up his control, they understood, after many meetings, that a combined, solid effort was what would win. The unified groups then melded their members into the large body of the African National Congress, with one leader and one charter. I willingly fused my writing work as a member of the Congress, and I began to join in the effort to produce and print activism literature, plays and poetry that spoke the rhetoric that our jailed leaders could never speak. Still a firm believer that violence was not needed to win this battle, I contained my work to solitary writings. And once I was in the ANC, I knew that I would never leave.
The men and women of the Congress were given an equal chance to vent their minds. But in life as in activism, men’s speeches and their tirades were given more weight. Perhaps they felt women’s words held too much emotion. Or perhaps they felt that our words had their place.
There was no romance in the struggle. Our leader was in a jail; our leader was probably dead. But we sensed him, pushing us onward. And as strongly as many members pushed themselves into the arts of warfare, preparing their military practices for the day when they would have to take up arms, so strongly did we grab and touch and feel one another. Because one another was all we had.
When comrades who were willing and passionate were given their orders to flee to the secret training camps abroad to learn hard combat skills and weaponry training, they did not hesitate to take up the call. But on the nights before they were preparing to leave, they clung to each other just for warmth and comfort.
Young boys and girls who had barely held a knife were sent to the training camps to be taught how to assemble and disassemble AK-47 rifles in the Soviet Union, and to pack and smuggle them into South Africa via Angola. Grenades sometimes went off in untrained hands, and some as young as 16 would arrive back in Durban with hands blown off, miserable and as
hamed that they had failed our struggle. I received them, the ones that actually survived the bush training, and the rough bush surgery, often their limbs gangrenous or so mauled that activities such as brushing their teeth was an impossibility. I found ways to smuggle them into our hospital late at night, watching their feverish eyes, and often watching these youth die before they got there. I swore never to touch a weapon in my life. I held on for nonviolence. Little did I realize that the day when I would ask for a gun was soon upon me.
It had been one of those Saturday nights at the hospital. I found myself swinging like an exhausted pendulum between doing actual work and consoling distraught night-shift nurses who had been given double-barrel shifts in Accident and Emergency—the worst place to be on a Saturday night. The dog-tired women swarmed around me, teary eyed, moaning of having been on their feet for over 24 hours, complaining of drunken students retching and hitting out with huge arms and legs at the nearest human target, using words no one wanted to hear. The hospital in the city center served a population that still harbored the deepest racism. It sent white patients into wild rages when they encountered a person of color who had an education, a good English accent, and a position of power over their sick bodies.
I always hobbled away from nights like this, my mind churning with the desperation of nurses and doctors of color, who had no one to speak for them. Only once had I tried to collect their grievances and taken them to the stern hospital manager, Mr. McNamara, a man who would not look ill-placed behind a huge, high platform wielding a gavel. He had not even allowed me to continue my plea. I showed him the pages and pages of grievances.
“Mr. McNamara, I really think that if we allow a union to form, this Union of Medical and Health Workers would work together with management to make things better for everyone.”
He threw the pages toward me, I hadn’t even sat down and the leaves of paper fell on the carpeted floor at my feet. He looked at me with a bland, dry look and spoke. “So, Doctor Pillay, do you enjoy being called ‘Doctor’?”
I nodded.
“Yes, you . . . you I have seen running around the wards, trying to push yourself forward, overpleasing, showing off. You know this English term—‘upstart’?’”
“I’m not!” I said sharply, and with his raised eyebrow, I tempered my speech. “I mean, I know the term, but I can assure you, sir, I don’t show off or anything. I just do my job as best as I can.”
The old man still regarded me with ice blue eyes. “Well, I have heard little whispers, my dear doctor. Whispers that you have long been involved in some activities, joining a bunch of rebels and communists, having your big mouth flapping at meetings. I have heard . . . but I suppose I choose to not say anything. Unless . . .”
I was shocked. I had been very discreet about my political involvements. Was there someone among us who was an informant? I could not lose my job now; I would be lost. Thoughts swirled around my wearied brain like the swirls of smoke from the cigar that the manager had lit and pulled on deeply.
“No . . . I . . . I haven’t. I mean, I promise you, sir, I am not involved in things like this. I . . . I just do my work, and then I go home to my parents’ apartment and remain there. We are a conservative family.”
He dragged again on the cigar, and looked toward the window. After a long silence, when I shuffled from aching foot to aching foot, he sat staring out at the beautiful Indian Ocean, which crashed in warm, angry waves onto the shore near the hospital.
“Doctor. Take my advice. Find a husband, go and do all those Indian fire rituals you people do at your weddings, and then keep his bed warm. I can see that the places you are going is going to cause you, and me, much trouble. So forget any grand union ideas. Or else forget even being allowed to practice this degree called medicine that we so kindly put in your lap. Understood?”
I lingered for perhaps a second too long, instead of jumping to his words and scuttling away, mouthing sorry and yes sir, absolutely sir, thank you, sir, never again, sir . . .
His eyebrows shot up at my delay. Suddenly, he banged hard on his dark, wooden desk, and the sound echoed through the room and bounced off the door that was tightly shut. I jumped in shock and suddenly saw the menace in his eyes.
Quickly, I hastened to pick up a few pages of my neatly written list of grievances, each one followed by a stupid color-coded suggestion of how to address it.
I don’t think I was able to grab even half the papers, before he banged the desk again, harder this time. I ran out of his office.
My breath came in short, harsh bursts as I ran down the flights and flights of stairs to exit the hospital. Even as doctors on call, we nonwhites were not allowed to use the elevators, no matter the emergency. The stairs it was, and the stairs it always would be. As I exited the main doors, my lungs gulped in salty air, thought to be a tonic for the patients when the hospital was first built. Now, the salt burned my eyes and my chest.
“Haai, Dokotela! Ini?” Hey, Doctor! What?
I looked to find one of my favorite security guards arrive for his shift. He almost reached out to hug my shaking body, and then we both stopped ourselves. The white security police from the Special Branch, who always posted themselves all over the hospital, looked in our direction.
“Nothing. It’s nothing, Cedric . . . I’m just tired.” I muttered and walked away. I didn’t stop trembling until I had walked all the way down the Beachfront Esplanade, my practiced footsteps only allowing myself to walk on the tiny footpath that people of color were allowed to walk on. The early-morning workers, street cleaners, and domestic servants walked on the path too. The silence was palpable, only the raging sea created a soundtrack to raging hearts and minds. And on that day, mine was one of them.
The sun had risen as I went up the two flights of stairs into the apartment that I shared, the one that always seemed to house a hundred bodies, men and women losing decorum, and sleeping in each other’s arms, strewn all over the floors and furniture. My job brought me to this home at odd hours, and I would often find a couple in the undulating throes of lovemaking, wedged behind couches, or under kitchen tables. By day, they were stern and serious cadres, organizing and planning, writing pamphlets and speeches. But when night crept to indigo dawn, they just reached for each other’s bodies, and even the married forgot their vows. All they needed was comfort.
As I crept into the apartment, dreading meeting anyone in my distraught state, all I needed was comfort too. I did not find it.
I found one of our regular visitors, one who seemed to always have his fair share of behind-couch comforting, and who always ate more than his ration of food that the women activists were always tasked to cook, no matter how busy or clever they were . . . when it was time to eat, all eyes would stray to a woman.
“Oh, Nathan,” I said, startled from my own thoughts, to find the lanky general secretary of a fast-flourishing mineworker’s union seated at the kitchen table, sipping tea. He looked up at me, his eyes dark and hooded, some sort of vitriol lurking inside them. Nathan had always been a shadowy figure to me. He never spoke much, but when he did, his words were violent, often filled with rhetoric that could inflame and incite. I had watched him seduce an angry mob of construction workers wielding large machetes and sticks, boiling to kill the foreman because their wages had not been paid for weeks. The foreman, a tiny, wiry Indian man, hid shaking and mewling. He had locked himself inside a crane control box.
It was Nathan, and only Nathan, who could quell this bloodthirst. The workers were strong, and they were hungry. It had been a potent combination that would have seen at least one man dead. As the crowd bayed, Nathan used flowery rhetoric, the almost pastorlike preaching at a crane pulpit. In trickles, the murderous mob had stood down, keeping their ire in a locked box, waiting for the day they would attack the white boss as he slept beside his lily-white wife.
The calming effect of Nathan’s words reached the highest ranks, and soon he received orders to prepare to join the world of unions, w
here the true politics lay. It was sweat that made the men’s skin boil. It was not, as most thought, a boiling of blood.
I always treated Comrade Nathan with a mixture of awe and apprehension. The air around him buzzed with something unstable and dangerous. His eyes never really met yours when he spoke, unless you were part of a clapping, roaring crowd. And today, after my draining night shift and my encounter with the hospital manager, Nathan was the last person I needed to encounter. I backed away from the kitchen door, hoping he was too lost in thoughts to bother with me. But Nathan had seen me, and he called out loudly.
“Aha, it is our doctor. What . . . don’t run away like that, Doc. Come, sit, have a cuppa with me.”
He dragged a chair next to him backward and it made a horrible screeching sound as metal scraped on cold concrete.
Reluctantly I took a seat, and my foot felt something hard yet pliable under the table. Someone had bedded down there for the night.
“Oh, don’t worry. It’s only Freddie. Needed a place, you know. They’ve been looking for him ever since he was caught at the Westville campus, rallying up a storm with the student council in broad daylight, shouting out his Marxist speeches. Stupid idiot.”
I barely knew the man he was talking about, but I rapidly pulled my foot away as I felt fingers begin stroking my ankle, advancing upward. Nathan saw it and chuckled. He pointed to the teapot on the stove.
“So, make me some tea, Doctor. Nice and sweet.”
I glared at him. Again his head nodded toward the old enamel jug we used as a teapot. It was the largest cooking vessel in the kitchen, and tea had to always be available.
“Nathan, I am really tired. I’ve just come off the trauma room night shift, okay?” I said, hoping my tone was placatory, and then wondering why I was so trained to make my tone appeasing, even when talking to a man who was clearly my intellectual inferior. I realized, with a sudden berating squeeze of my heart, that no matter how much I had to say, I always dropped my eyes and spoke in softer tones when the men in the room could summon devils with their voices.