Are We There Yet? (8 page)

When the police eventually swooped late on 26 June 1955, officers painstakingly recorded the details of every delegate. One hundred and fifty-six of the leading activists were arrested and charged with treason. Held in two large cages at Johannesburg's Fort Prison, they came to represent the democratic doppelgangers of the 159 members of the all-white South African parliament. This mass incarceration proved to be a boon for the resistance leaders as it gave them their first opportunity to openly discuss the Struggle en masse. It was a situation the government had been trying to prevent for years and founding ANC leader Albert Luthuli later reminisced, “The frequent meetings that distance, other occupations, lack of funds and political interference had made difficult, the government now made possible”.

The trial drew international attention and funds were channelled from around the globe for the plaintiffs' legal fees, food and clothing. The charges were eventually dismissed and the detainees were released to jubilant scenes. The Freedom Charter had claimed its first victory.

In 1960 another group of protesters assembled to voice their objections to the pass laws. Their assembly point was the Sharpeville police station near Soweto. The protest was organised by the Pan-African Congress, a splinter group of the ANC headed by the charismatic Robert Sobukwe who advocated a purely Africanist philosophy and rejected the idea of working with whites.

A crowd of between 3000 and 5000 assembled for a peaceful protest, buoyed by the news that similar gatherings were taking place at nearby settlements. After a scuffle in which one of the police station's perimeter fences was pushed over and a section of the crowd surged forward to have a sticky, the police panicked.

“Then the shooting started,” recalled journalist Humphrey Tyler. “We heard the chatter of a machine gun, then another, then another. Hundreds of kids were running too. One little boy had on an old blanket coat which he held up behind his head thinking perhaps that it might save him from the bullets. Some of the children, hardly as tall as the grass, were leaping like rabbits. Some were shot.”

Tyler described a policeman who had taken up a position on top of a Saracen vehicle and was firing his machine gun into the retreating crowd in a 180-degree arc “from his hip as though he was panning a movie camera”.

When the ricochets of bullet on bone eventually dimmed and the corpses on the road stopped twitching, sixty-nine protesters were dead. Almost 200 were rushed to nearby Baragwanath Hospital.

On duty that night was a medical intern named Desmond Miller. He had left the tiny country town of Vredefort a few years earlier to study in Johannesburg and nothing could have prepared him for the carnage he was about to encounter.

“We got word that dozens of casualties were en route,” he told me, “and had to clear the wards of people whose conditions weren't life-threatening. We assessed and dismissed as quickly as we could, then spent what felt like days picking bullets out of people.”

Miller, who subsequently migrated to Sydney shortly after Soweto erupted in the infamous riots of 1976 and had the good sense to marry my mother some years after my father died, recalled: “Every single one had been shot in the back. These people were running for their lives, but still the police kept on firing.”

* *

Oupa was palpably proud to live in Soweto and as we skirted an area he termed the Wild West – a trio of suburbs bitterly and bloodily disputed by at least five gangs – half-a-dozen shots rang out from the cemetery on a hill nearby.

“Gangstas,” spat Oupa. “To show their respect for the friend who died, they shoot the coffin as it is being lowered into the ground. I don't understand these young guys – they just want to be like Americans with their rap music, guns and crack. Because many of them have grown up in Soweto, they have no connection to their tribal culture and its sense of right and wrong. Their parents were the ones who suffered under apartheid but these young guys have a sense of entitlement. They know nothing about their heritage. They're not interested in the fact that people struggled so they could have the opportunities and freedoms on offer. They just want it easy.”

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?”