by Elsa Joubert
I didn’t know if they were pressing us forward or trying to go back, Mosie remembers. Then we were swept down the street by the crowd. We moved with the stream of people running as if they were following their own legs.
We ran down a lane near the station, other people came running from it.
God, Poppie, he told Poppie. Then the thing was right in front of me.
It was near the station in an open place that the crowd pushed up against a car in which a white man was sitting. Somebody shouted something, somebody else started pushing the car. Quickly more people joined in. I nearly got shoved over the roof of the car. They took it by the sides, it was over, it was lying on its roof. The white man was out and yelling to his friend somewhere. Somebody shouted: He is from a newspaper! The white man was bending down, covering his head with his arms as the people started hitting him, when the car began to burn.
God, Poppie, it made a noise like ‘WHAAA’ when the petrol on the ground exploded.
The fire and the heat pushed the people back. Or maybe the blood on the man’s head, running through his fingers. Maybe a stone, or a broken bottle that hit him.
I felt a cold wind in my stomach. I thought: God’s truth, they’re going to kill him. The man next to me I knew, but his face had gone all funny like. I didn’t know his eyes. He had a stone in his hand. We were drowning in the noise but I shouted at him. I wanted to take his arm and stop him. Major pulled me away. They’ll finish you, he shouted, and I didn’t listen.
Then Major pulled again and shouted: Come, Wili, the dogs. They’re bringing the dogs.
People ran so fast, they ran over each other. Women were run over, then children, but they got up and ran again. We ran as if we had an electric charge in us. The white police stopped beside the white man lying in his red blood on the road. The black police followed the people running down the lanes, hitting everybody with their kieries. Wham, wham, I heard the police hitting and the people shouting. The white man from the newspaper was carried away, they said.
What happened to his mate I don’t know.
Mosie and Major went by a roundabout route through the Port Jackson bushes to Nyanga. Late at night they knocked at Poppie’s house and she opened the door.
Inside Mosie’s friend Johnnie Drop-Eye was also waiting for them. She closed the door quickly and listened to Mosie’s story. The whole location, she told him, already knew about the newspaper reporter. He had died. The people killed him with stones and bottles.
From that time on Mosie stayed at home. He was frightened he might get beaten up. Those who went to work and came back by bus were beaten up badly. It was from that time that Mosie decided to study with the Red Cross and St John’s Ambulance.
The strike lasted for three weeks.
We had a difficult time, Poppie tells, but it was not too difficult. Hungry but not starving. Bread lorries came into the location, and white people brought food, mealie meal and milk for the children. If they saw white people bringing food, they let them in. There was very little paraffin, but we went to the dunes to get firewood, dragging back dry branches.
During that time mama was working in a fruit factory in Wolseley, because it was the season. But when she heard about everything, she was worried and came to Cape Town to see what was going on. When she saw all the men sitting at home, not being able to work, she said: Somebody must earn money. This old thing of mine will see to it that everybody just dies of hunger before he’ll give us a penny, the old bastard. If I only knew where the old miser hides his money, we would not have it so difficult, she told Poppie. She then made as if she were going to the dunes to get wood, but she took a bus and returned to Wolseley.
The worst worry was about your own people. About tata-ka-Bonsile who was coughing and could not get his injections at the clinic, about mama’s children walking like stray things all over the place, until Poppie told Jakkie: Come and live with me and bring Baby along, and Katie, too, because she has to look after Baby. Also about buti Hoedjie who didn’t care a damn when he was drunk and told the police: Stick the dompass up your arse, but told the same thing to the strikers. But she was worried the most about buti Plank who might come in from the boats and get beaten up by the strikers because he had been working.
On whose side her stepfather was she did not know. He was a two-face, people said. He preached in church but did all kinds of wicked things. And the more mama was made to suffer because of him the more he said: Man, I love my church very much.
During that time churches were in danger, Poppie explains. The people wanted to set fire to them. I remember our mfundisi at the Holy Cross church getting men to guard the place at night. They could not sleep, not for three weeks because of this threat to burn the churches. The people felt they were suffering too much and how come the churches received so much money? Everybody had to be the same.
When are you going to church again? mama used to ask buti Plank or buti Hoedjie.
And Plank would answer: God, sisi, what’ll I be doing in a church? They take you like a chicken and pluck all the feathers round your arse hole. And I am not for this bare-arse business.
This was the way people felt and how they were talking. And lots of people who had a lean time, felt that the ministers were pushing them in the same way as the whites. While people were walking up and down in the streets the minister would be out warning against all this disturbance. So they felt: The minister is with the white people in this thing, making our life miserable. I never heard them say God was a white man because they understood about God, but they said: There is pressure on the mfundisi that he should do what the white men tell him to do. Others said people gave money to the church and the church did nothing for them. There was no difference; all the churches were in danger, the strikers did not want to know anything about God.
Mosie guarded the church with the others and with the mfundisi. Night after night. For Poppie this was cause for both gladness and fear – gladness because he was helping, but fear that for this the strikers might turn their hate on him.
30
The second week of the strike the hate and death came to Poppie’s street.
She saw it with her own eyes.
It came during the night. When the murmur of the anger came, she could hear it distinctly. From afar, and all the way closer. Mosie wasn’t home, Johnnie Drop-Eye had gone as well. When the growling and thunder came down her street and came past her house she went to the door and called to tata-ka-Bonsile: I am standing here because I have to be ready to open the door if Mosie comes or Johnnie. But they didn’t come to her house. She saw they were young fellows, all carrying kieries. They went across the street to the house of Mr Mfukeng, the shopkeeper.
Come out, Mfukeng, they shouted. Come out, we want to see you.
They wanted to break down the door. One of the young men struck a match and the low flames sprung up in the night and died down again as the grass in front of the house burned.
Come on outside, Mfukeng, we’ll burn down your house over your head.
They were young people and had known Mr Mfukeng from the time that they could first walk. They had been to his shop hundreds of times. It was therefore as if they were frightened when he opened the door and they saw him standing in the doorway.
Get out, he shouted at them. Get out, you swine.
The young men slowly backed away, some picked up stones and threw them on the roof of the house and at the fowl-run round the back where they heard a cackling start up in the darkness. Mr Mfukeng was still shouting and they backed away, then left at a slow run.
The fire was eventually put out. The silence came back. Poppie left the window and lay in the dark, waiting.
The next morning they were back.
Mr Mfukeng left his house early, pushing his bicycle. Carefully he looked up and down the street as he walked the bicycle to the gate in front of his house.
He came across the street and talked at the window of Poppie’s house.
Molo
, neighbour, he greeted Stone. I am going to look for the people that wanted to burn houses at night. They talk Sotho because Mr Mfukeng is a Sotho, and Stone, who came from Herschel near Basutoland, knew Sotho. He pushed his bicycle on to the house of some other Sotho people in the street, and went inside.
There the young people of the previous night found his bicycle. This time they came with a motor tyre and petrol. Poppie heard the shouting and came out to see. She heard shots being fired – maybe policemen or soldiers shooting people, she thought. She started running to fetch her children in, when she saw the thick smoke of the burning tyre and the bicycle in the fire, the glint of its spokes visible through the black smoke.
Mr Mfukeng must have fired from the door, Poppie explains, because the revolver was still in his hands when the young people took him. It must have been the revolver which made them go out of their minds. They hit the revolver out of his hand with kieries, then they attacked him about the head with kieries and bottles, they hit him with bricks and he pitched forward, there in the street near where the bicycle was burning on the burning tyre. He got up from the ground, and turned down the street like he wanted to get away, his arms above his head to keep away the kieries’ blows, till somebody threw a brick at him. It hit him in the back, making him stagger. Still he staggered on, but stones were now raining on him, some against the back of his legs. Then he pitched forward and lay all stretched out on the street, his arms in front of him. Even so, he did not lie still, there on the sand of the street. He crawled on, dragging his left leg behind him. And now it was stones and bottles and every kind of object raining down on him as he crawled slowly like a snail.
I cannot move, my feet are stone. I can see his blood on the road, but I cannot do anything.
A woman who lived near me and was family of Mr Mfukeng ran from her house and threw herself on the man lying in the street. The crowd stood back and did nothing to this woman.
He was not dead yet. The older people went to the shop to call his wife and they brought a stretcher and pulled him on to it. Mr Mfukeng had many wounds, his blood shone. They picked him up and carried him into the house of the woman who had thrown herself on him, then they tried to get a doctor. He was a white doctor and he came with the Saracens, he couldn’t have come by himself. But by the time he got there Mr Mfukeng was finished, already dead.
This now was one of the bad things I saw with my own eyes.
This Mr Mfukeng was a very quiet man. He once asked my husband to work with him in his shop in Nyanga, because of tata-ka-Bonsile also speaking Sotho, but he could not take on the job because of his sickness. His wife worked in the shop as well. He was a very neat man, very light in colour, very fond of a suit and a hat. When they killed him it was the first time I heard he was C.I.D.
The police fetched away his wife the same day he died; they fetched her with a police van, her things were put in another van. They were afraid the people would kill her as well.
Buti Hoedjie had gone for a walk up against the dunes that morning, and he saw what was happening in the street.
It was the shooting with the revolver, said buti Hoedjie. The people were uncertain before, they only wanted to burn the bicycle. He shot in the air to frighten them; then the young ones knew why he carried a revolver, because he was C.I.D. Only white people and black policemen carry revolvers, and maybe coloureds.
Poppie’s hands trembled while she poured tea for buti Hoedjie and tata-ka-Bonsile. She had drawn the curtain in front of the window, because she did not want to see Mr Mfukeng’s house. All day long the curtains remained drawn. She cooked something on the Primus, even though it was a waste of paraffin. She did not have the courage to go outside and cook over an open fire.
There were rumbling noises in the street, now a jeep, now an army truck. From the time of the murder it did not stop, day in, day out.
And then there was the noise at night, in the sky above your head. They went out in the backyard to have a look. It was a helicopter flying low, a strong light shining from underneath it. Bonsile grabbed Poppie’s dress, shouting: Mama, I’m afraid.
I think they are throwing the light on the bush to see whether people are holding meetings, buti Hoedjie said.
They stayed in the backyard, close to the wall, in the shadow. They did not want to see Mr Mfukeng’s house.
We thought it would be burned down that night, Poppie explains. But people’s anger against him was finished, they did not come near the house. Only very much later, people who did not know Mr Mfukeng, or how he died, came to live there.
They killed him, using bricks from a church being built not very far from his house. That church was never completed. It is still standing like that to this day, half finished.
The feeling against the black police was fierce. From that year, 1960, people started murdering the police, because they were reckless. If they saw a black policeman walking alone, they killed him. Then the council moved the black policemen from their homes and let them live on one side, by themselves.
At Lamberts Bay I had seen teams playing kierie-hitting and how they beat each other and how they became angry. Here in the Cape I knew about the skollies and the bodies found in the bush after the weekend, even three at a time. At night we had trouble with my brothers, buti Plank and buti Hoedjie, walking about, drinking and fighting. Then we had to hire cars and take them to hospital. And the police came two, three o’clock at night knocking on our doors asking to see dompasses and permits to be in Nyanga. And if the police were drunk, they would tear up the permits in front of my brothers’ eyes and take them to the station so that they had to pay five pound fines which were pocketed by the police. I have seen a lot of ugly things but this was the first time that I had seen people kill somebody with their bare hands.
It was not for fighting or for money or because of drunkenness, it was something different. It was the worst thing I have seen, when they killed Mr Mfukeng, because he was C.I.D. and they hated him.
31
The strike in Nyanga lasted for three weeks, but after this time we heard the people of Langa were already back at work. When the police wanted to finish the strike, they started hitting everybody with samboks and kieries and rifle butts to make them return to work.
The people marched to the police stations, the Cape Town gaols were full. I had heard they marched to demand Kgosana; he had a reputation for saying terrible things at the meetings. He was a university student but they locked him up. The people marched to set him free, and the day they let him go he disappeared and escaped.
The last day of the strike the location was filled with policemen and soldiers. An army jeep went round the location and a man with a microphone said: The strike is over, people must return to work. It was early in the morning, not yet eight o’clock, when a helicopter came low over the houses and they spoke over a loudspeaker: You must return to work, it is now over.
After eight they came back again, the army jeep and the helicopter, and now they were saying something different: The people who are still in the location must return to their houses and stay there. Nobody is allowed to go anywhere, not to the shops or nowhere. Now the entrances to the locations were shut off and we had to stay in our houses.
And when I went to the outside tap to fetch water the white policemen said: You must turn back, but I kept on and fetched my water.
Through the windows we could see people being loaded into police vans, and those who could find no place inside had to follow on behind. It was a rainy day, and they walked in the rain. They went from door to door and every man they found not working they hit and loaded on to the army trucks and took to the police stations. We were afraid they were going to shoot them.
Later they also came to my house and we saw what they meant about people not going outside in the streets. It was so that they could beat the men right out of the houses. One would be knocking at one door, then another door, knocking everywhere, white and black policemen. They hit out with kieries and nobody co
uld get away. They filled my house and wanted to take my husband, but I showed them the doctor’s papers. The white policeman read the papers and told the others the man is ill, leave him be.
Buti Plank had such a big fright when he saw the men being loaded in the vans, that he hid in the fowl-run before they came to our house. He lay on the ground and pulled sheets of corrugated iron and sacks over himself, but the police found him there when they saw his feet sticking out from underneath.
Two policemen dragged him out, the one took his arms, the other his legs. His body dragged on the earth, his jacket dragging up round his neck. The fowls were going mad inside the fowl-run and while they were dragging him outside some of them sat on him and shit on his clothes. He did not fight, his only fight was to keep his body like a dead man. Chicken feathers were in his hair and he spat and blew to get the down out of his mouth and his nose. He spat and he swore terribly.
It was great fun for the children to see the grown-ups running away from the police. I remember my youngest stepbrother Jakkie killing himself with laughing when they dragged buti Plank out of the fowl-run. Jakkie was ten years old. Katie did not laugh, she was carrying Baby and looked away from this dragging business. But Jakkie and the other young boys laughed as if they wanted to kill themselves; holding their stomachs, lying on their backs in the sand and kicking in the air, making as if they were buti Plank being dragged away by the police.
When the police hit buti Plank into the van with their kieries, the children were still laughing.
Poppie screamed: Stop that laughing! Stop that or I’ll kill you.
Tears were running down her cheeks. It was different from the laughing when we were young and oompie Pengi was lying there drunk. It was not the children’s strike, it was the strike of the grown-ups. And the children laughed about it. They laughed when their tatas and their oompies and their elder butis hid underneath the beds or behind the clothes in the clothes cupboards or in the toilets and the fowl-runs and were dragged outside.
