To be continued.
10
Questions
House Sitters Service
Provides responsible people to live in and look after your house, servants, animals, garden, pool, while you are away. Telephone 41-3903
– The Star, June 1974
Joe
The press repeatedly raised – and dashed – my hopes that Ali would visit South Africa. Just months after I started the archive, it was reported that Ali, or rather Clay, was coming to the country to present a series of lectures. New York agent Richard Fulton, like many after him, tried to keep politics out of the picture. Ali’s talks would not deal with race, he said, but with finding meaning and purpose in your life. We do not want people in South Africa building up any feeling that Ali is coming to cause trouble. The unnamed reporter pointed out that the anti-apartheid organizations, like the American Committee on Africa, had not yet commented on the plan, although they had condemned Percy Sledge’s 1970 concerts and a proposed visit by Aretha Franklin. Whether or not resistance from these quarters played a part, the lecture tour did not go ahead.
In mid-1972, speculation about a South African visit flared up more intensely. Three promoters were trying to set up a local fight: Reliable NE Promotions, Danie van Zyl and Dave Levin (working with agent Bill Miller in New York). Reliable seems to have been the frontrunner. Ali’s lawyer Bob Arum met company representative M A Karolia and two financial advisers in New York to discuss a fight against an as-yet-unnamed opponent at Ellis Park, Johannesburg in September. Arum called on the South African consul general in New York to gauge the government’s attitude. Apparently the promoters had already approached the government directly.
Arum conveyed Ali’s position: he would fight anywhere if the hotel and other facilities were acceptable and the visit would be completely non-political. On the racial segregation of the spectators, Mr Arum indicated that he would reluctantly accept segregated seating. He warned, however, that if the proposed fight became embroiled in South African politics it would be called off.
Arum also reacted, with no apparent irony, to a report in which promoter Danie van Zyl said that both Frazier and Ali favoured apartheid and were eager to box in the Republic. Dismissing this as outrageous, Arum said that politicizing the fight in this way would prevent it from happening at all. As far as Muhammad Ali is concerned, South Africa is like any other place in the world. If the financial arrangements are satisfactory he will fight but he will not get involved in the political situation.
Ali had been speaking out on race and politics for a decade and any attempt to hold politics at a distance in this case was doomed to fail. South Africa was not like any other place in the world. Asked whether Muhammad Ali, as a Black Muslim, favoured racial separatism as distinct from the enforced apartheid of South Africa, Mr Arum said Ali himself would have to answer that kind of question.
Later it was reported that the proposed fight had been postponed indefinitely because of uncertainty about the attitude of the South African boxing authorities and Government. Essentially, the government’s position was that it would not proceed with the visas until the South African Boxing Control Board approved the fight. And presumably the Board was under pressure not to approve the fight or felt it could not do so until it was clear that the boxers would receive visas.
This bureaucratic impasse gave the Ali camp a way out. Ali’s booking agent Chris Dundee explained that South Africa could not be fitted into the schedule. Ali would be facing Floyd Patterson at Madison Square Garden in September, and would then go straight for Frazier, and so another fight was out of the question. Apartheid had nothing to do with their decision.
Late in 1972, there were reports that Ali would be fighting Al Jones in Johannesburg in November. Ali denied that African delegates to the United Nations had pressured him to stay away from South Africa, but conceded that they may have pressured his lawyer. Arum himself was quoted as saying that tremendous pressure was being put on Ali to cancel his plans.
Ali commented: As long as there is an arena in South Africa where the Blacks will have separate but equal seating I will be happy. Odd as it is to see the phrase ‘separate but equal’ attributed to Ali, it does not come from the apartheid handbook: As a Black Moslem I am in favour of separation. We want to have our separate schools, our separate social institutions, our own culture. We want our own country and our own flag. This is more than an appeal for religious autonomy. We want everyone to marry into their own group, whether they are Black, White, Chinese or Mexican. We love ourselves and we want our children to look like us.
Ali tells another reporter: White and Black can’t get along…There’s gonna be separation – physical separation – of the two races. I don’t know when, but it’s gonna be soon. Allah says so. Black people must have their own land. The American must repay the Black man for his work and slavery, or else America is going to be destroyed…White people aren’t my enemies…I’m with them every day. It ain’t hate we’re teaching, it’s racial pride. Look at my daughter, Maryum. She looks like me. My wife over there, she looks like me. It’s not right for a man to marry out of his race.
It’s easy to see how Ali’s comments were construed as support for ‘separate development’ and racial purity. They would have warmed the hearts of the nationalists in South Africa who were then pursuing the homeland policy and prosecuting people under the Immorality Act. Yet the same people could not have taken kindly to comments like this: I’m fighting for my freedom and carrying the hopes of my 30 million Black people here and that’s what my mission is.
Branko
In his last years at high school Joe falls in with a character called Mikey van der Plank, a cocky little bugger I don’t like much, but at least he’s a bad influence on my brother. They go into town on a Friday afternoon and they tell Mom they’re going to Stereo Heaven, where their pal Davenport has a weekend job and they can listen to records all day. Instead they go to Perry’s snooker saloon on the dodgy side of Church Square, a dim, dingy hall up a staircase that smells of stale beer and cigarette smoke, with twenty tables under lights.
I had my Perry’s phase too. Some of the top-class amateurs use the place to practise (there aren’t any pros) and you can watch a frame or two if you keep still when the guys are potting. You lighties aren’t even suppose to be here, the manager told me and Louis Ferreira the first time we tried our luck there. If you eighteen, my name is Mary. I’ll lose my licence if the cops find you here. So here the rules. Don’t make noise. Don’t drag the rests over the cloth. Don’t lie on the table. We don’t wanna see your trick shots. And don’t put your quart down on the edge of the table here. These tables was recovered last year. If you spill beer on our lovely cloth, you or your old man will pay. Got it?
Then Joe and Mikey start hanging out at the Keg and Tankard. Despite the name it’s just a garden-variety bar at the end of an arcade in Schoeman Street. The Suid-Afrikaanse Landbou-Unie has its HQ in the building and the boozers find this amusing. They’re always joking about the Agricultural Union and the drought and the crops in the fields. When the place first opens the manager dishes out free monkey nuts and encourages everyone to throw the shells on the floor to create some atmosphere. In the end you’re ankle-deep in shells. Then the fire department gets to hear about it and declares it a fire hazard, so it’s back to the Marley tiles.
Mikey has a philosophical side, Joe says, and it comes out when he’s pissed. As they’re reeling home from Sportpark station after a night at the Keg, Mikey will look up at the stars and say: Is there anyone out there? Where does it end? What are we doing here?
Sometimes the two of them go to an actual kroeg, one of the hotel bars with batwing doors onto the street, the Belgravia, where Grandpa Reilly liked to drink, and drink, or the Edward on Paul Kruger Street, or they nurse a quart at the Culemborg where the beer is more expensive. They think they look like grown men on their stools a
t the long bar, but actually it looks like some barfly brought the kids. Ask me.
Mikey has a sister and she’s Joe’s first girlfriend. She’s just a kid, but then so is he. He takes her to see Hawk at the City Hall – her Mom drives them there – and they sit around on the lawns among the hippies trying to look cool. Walter Battiss is there. Joe knows who he is because he taught Uncle Eddie art at Pretoria Boys. He’s the only real artist any of us has ever come across. He’s carrying around a bucket of water with a mealie in it and Frieda – that’s the girlfriend – dares Joe to go and ask him if he can buy it. He must say he’s hungry. So Joe goes over and says, Mr Battiss, do you remember Eddie Reilly? You taught him in the 1950s. And Battiss says, Yes, I remember him well, a very talented boy, what’s he doing these days, and they talk a bit. Then Joe goes back to Frieda and says, It’s not for sale. He’s going to eat it himself.
Joe’s notes about Perry’s and Battiss are in the blue file and some of it rings a bell. But at the time my brother’s secrets were of no interest to me. I was in the army and he had to grow up on his own. When I look back he’s a younger boy than the one who starts boozing and gripping his girlfriend (as he inelegantly puts it) in the back row at the Capital. For me, it’s like he spent the whole of high school in Standard 7.
Joe
It was early spring and the weather had warmed, but we were still in our winter uniforms of grey flannels and blazer, and I was sweating as I walked home from school down Rabie Street. I walked on the tar close to the kerb, keeping to the shade of the pines that grew in a long row beside the road. Beneath the trees was a barbed-wire fence and beyond that a field.
My thoughts must have been elsewhere, because I was almost on top of the fallen woman before I saw her. She was an old woman wrapped in a blue blanket and she lay on her back beyond the fence, with one leg folded under her and the other caught between two strands of wire. The trapped foot was in a blue slipper with a brightly coloured pompom on its toe. A barb had punctured the brown skin of her calf and a trail of blood ran down over the curve of the muscle. Her head was turned to one side and she was staring at me.
I should have gone to help her, but I couldn’t move. The deadweight of my schoolbag dragged on my shoulders and sweat ran down my sides. I was rooted to the spot, as bound to the earth as one of the pines, and yet my thoughts lifted out of the everyday and circled upwards. What was I thinking? That a trap had been laid for me and was about to be sprung. But why? She gazed at me unblinking, and I gazed back, numb with dread. If she had called out for help (I tell myself) the spell would have been broken, but her lips were pressed into a grim line. We were muffled in silence as if the sky had fallen over us like a hot blanket.
A bicycle went past and skidded to a stop. The bike had thick tyres and a wicker basket over the front wheel and the rider was a small black man wearing a grey dustcoat over his clothes. He kicked down the stand, hoisted the bike onto it and came closer, stepping lightly, with his fists balled, and for a moment I thought he was going to hit me, but he turned aside and squatted at the fence. While he spoke to the woman, I read the words ‘Henry’s Stationery’ on the back of the dustcoat, and then I looked at the bicycle and saw a large roll of brown paper canted in the basket. Kneeling in the grass, he eased the wires apart and freed her leg.
Wat makeer jou?
I thought he was speaking to her. But he had straightened up to face me and his tone was disappointed rather than concerned. What’s wrong with you?
He did not expect an answer. Catching up the tails of his coat with one hand, he prised the wire strands apart by stepping on one and raising another, and stooped swiftly through the fence. The woman groaned as he knelt beside her.
The blood flowed into my limbs and I fell back into my own body. I went on walking down Rabie Street almost as if nothing had happened. My face was burning and I kept glancing over my shoulder to see if I was being followed.
Every open field around there had a path cutting across it to shorten a walker’s journey. She must have taken a short cut and lost her footing as she climbed through the fence. The heat had made her dizzy. She was unwell. The strands of this explanation twisted together sensibly. But the logic of my part in the story, or rather my failure to find a part in it, escaped me.
I passed the Webbers’ house. There were four brothers and they had a band, the Webber Brothers Band, like the Allmans. Sometimes on my way home from school I heard music coming from the house, clamorous versions of ‘Born to Be Wild’ and ‘Aqualung’, but today the place was quiet.
In the shade of the flyover, where Jean Avenue passed under the Ben Schoeman freeway, I put down my bag to rest for a minute. Cars and trucks droned overhead and the pavement seemed to tremble. Then I walked on again.
I turned into Von Willich Avenue and crossed Durham and Cornell and Columbia. We’d lived in Cambridge Road for years before I found out the streets were named after universities.
Wat makeer jou?
It was a good question.
11
The Rumble in the Jungle
New York. – The Watergate special prosecutor’s office has moved to subpoena former President Richard Nixon as a prosecution witness in the Watergate cover-up trial, it was disclosed today.
– Pretoria News, September 1974
Branko
There are smallholdings on the eastern side of Von Willich Avenue, plots of a few acres with the houses set far back from the road. We can see the Drummonds’ house from our front yard, a small stone castle sticking out above a field of fruit trees. Morris, who’s a year ahead of me at school, spends his afternoons on the ramparts practising the bagpipes.
His own mother doesn’t want him in the house, Mom says, and who can blame her. You’d think he’s strangling a cat.
The Drummonds’ orchard might once have earned a smallholder a living, but the trees haven’t been pruned for years. In this wild place full of crackling veld grass and scurrying animals, we play at being frontiersmen.
When Sylvie’s cat Smokey disappears, we reckon he’s been run over or killed by a dog. Six months later, or perhaps it’s longer, Joe and Tim Knowles and I are rooting around under the Drummonds’ apricot trees when we spot what’s left of Smokey high up in the fork of a branch. At the sight of him, the grinning skull and bared claws, my skin crawls. Tim is up the tree like a monkey and poking at the fur with a stick. It hardly even pongs, he says. We’re used to coming across the seeping carcasses of cats and dogs on the roads and stirring up the maggots in their broken ribcages. All the juice has gone out of this one: he’s just a furry grey bag of bones, moulded to the branch like a rotten fruit the flies have sucked dry.
We tell Dad about our find and he says Smokey must have gone up there to die. It’s a cat’s instinct. Leopards do the same thing when they’re wounded or sick.
He sends Joe and me back to the orchard with a saw to retrieve the body. He could do it himself more easily, but he wants us to do it. We’re learning a lesson.
We take the rip saw from the pegboard in the garage and a length of old tow rope with frayed ends and we go all the way around the block and up Columbia Road so that we don’t go past the Knowleses. With hardly a word spoken, we’ve decided to leave Tim out of this mission.
I climb the tree as easily as going upstairs. You could build a tree house in a tree like this, except that it doesn’t belong to us. The carcass frightens me less from close up. It might have been made in the Arts and Crafts class out of chicken bones and fun fur. I tie one end of the rope around the branch, saw through it and lower it down to Joe. The cat’s remains don’t weigh much, but we bear them home solemnly between the two of us for the sake of ceremony.
We dig a grave at the bottom of the yard, between the last row of fruit trees and the wall, one large enough to hold cat and branch, and bury him right side up the way we found him, with his chin resting on a knot and his paws
dangling down. Sylvie doesn’t want to see him, she’ll die, but once the hole’s been filled in and a brick laid on top like a tombstone, she comes down and cries, and says we’ve done a very good job.
Joe
The sportswriters of the 1970s waged a rearguard action against the rise of television by asserting the value of newspapers as a means of documenting and understanding the world. They were champions of the written word.
You can see them at work in the blow-by-blow accounts of big media events like the Fight of the Century. On the whole, their descriptions of the bout are formulaic: Frazier, moving in close, dug two hard rights to Ali’s body…Ali pumped over a left and right and then another left and right to the head…Ali peppered two more jabs to the head. Yet even these repetitive runs emit small flashes of life: Ali prayed in his corner before the opening bell…The referee told both to stop talking…Frazier taunted his opponent and then took two jabs to the head. But Ali had a worried look on his face…That fleeting look in round 5 presages how the fight will end and tells us we are not yet in the age of the visual image. Even in the most functional contexts, reporters are still ‘painting pictures’ in words.
Telecommunications had sped up. On the day after the Fight of the Century, The Star proudly told its readers that the radio pictures published in that day’s edition were received directly from Madison Square Garden. The films were processed in specially built darkrooms under the ring and transmitted by radio to London, where they were piped to The Star’s picture receiver in Sauer Street in a non-stop operation. Piped? Non-stop. Like a canister full of cash down a pneumatic tube in a department store. But the point was made. The proximity of the reproduction to the flesh-and-blood fighters – ‘under the ring’ – and the immediacy of the transmission magically closed the geographical distance and put everyone ‘ringside’.
The Distance Page 16
