by Ufrieda Ho
gave chase.
‘I did not stop immediately and all I could do was drive off, roll down
the window and throw out all the money, the betting slips and everything,’
he said.
‘When I looked in the rearview mirror I just saw the money flapping
around and the coins bouncing off the tar. It was really heartsore to work
so hard for your money and then to have to throw it all out the window
like that. But I had no other choice, there was nothing else I could do
because when they caught up with me, they would have arrested me if they
found all the fahfee stuff in the car,’ my uncle told me.
The story stunned me. It stunned me that the memory of the day’s loss
was so distinct even years after his children had grown and years after
he had put his fahfee days behind him. It stunned me, too, because I had
assumed that a shopkeeper had a better, more secure, life than a fahfee
man.
Fahfee tested the elasticity of laws and it was high risk. On the days
the fahfee man’s bribes did not work, he was hauled downtown and kept
locked up for a few hours. Very few fahfee men were processed according
to judicial procedure. I did not hear of a single incident until I was an adult
about people who actually came face to face with a magistrate. Fahfee
as a transgression did not warrant the amount of paperwork for most
policemen and less so for a courtroom. The arrests and heavy-handedness
were about a show of power and about the clout of threat.
Three or four times throughout my childhood I can remember the alarm
of a late night phone call from my father or one of his colleagues telling us
that he was being held at a police station. There would be a flurry of phone
calls as my mother made more inquiries to make sure my dad was safe and
that he would be released soon.
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Longing and absence became normal for us. Wishing my father to be
near more often and knowing that that was not possible was part of our
lives and our childhood. Those nights thinking that he could be taken
from us and put in prison would send me into an internal frenzy of worry.
At the same time I knew we were all expected to be composed enough not
to lose it even when we knew the dread of bad news loomed as a very real
possibility.
I visualised my father locked up like an animal, shouting to be let out,
ignored and harassed by the cops and also by other inmates. It was the
Hollywood picture of imprisonment that stalked my imagination.
In reality, the fahfee men were probably made to sit in the corner of
some grimy charge office or holding cell. They were deliberately not told
what was going to happen to them and they were punished by the silence
and the hell of looking over and over again at the oily Prestik marks
showing through outdated posters or listening to the hum of fluorescent
lights. The cop would move behind the counter and find some paper to
drag his black ink pen across slowly. The show of officiousness was a very
effective weapon of bureaucratic torture.
Even though we knew that my father would be let out with a bribe
or a fine, we never took these arrests lightly. He could come across that
one policeman who would want to make an example of my father and
detain him overnight or force him to show up in court to face even stiffer
penalties.
Years later, I met a fahfee man who said he was one of the rare cases
who did end up being charged and forced to make his case in front of a
magistrate.
I joined him on rounds for some fieldwork for an anthropology research
paper I was writing. I used a pseudonym for him, Georgie.
He was unusual because he was younger than my father’s generation
of fahfee men, he had a high school education in South Africa and he had
some technical training as a mechanic. Still, he ended up as a fahfee man,
working for himself and taking on the mantle of a new breed of fahfee
men. He was regularly able to use his English proficiency to talk himself
out of an arrest. Sometimes, he offered the cops a bribe as low as R30. It
was a very low bribe, full of scorn, meant to show disrespect and contempt
in his own subversive way. Unlike my father’s generation of fahfee men, he
got to play the rebel a bit. He was still the mouse, but now it was a mouse
with attitude. I liked it a lot.
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Georgie was not reckless, though. He had been caught those years
earlier and the magistrate gave him a five-year suspended sentence. During
that time he was forced to change his livelihood and he helped out as a
mechanic’s assistant and the family had to rely more heavily on his wife’s
income.
Today he is back at his banks, still dodging the police, still threading
his way through the secret paths between rows of shacks. In these places
where he finds his betters, the roads look like they come to a dead end
but if you drive a little further along the dusty streets they lead to more
informal settlements, the contiguous overflow from ordered urban life.
It was 2007 when I met Georgie, but in some ways he took me right
back to the life of the fahfee men in the 1980s and early 90s. Fahfee had
changed very little: the same betting slips were there, even the purses
numbered with thick markers. Also unchanged were the townships and
locations. Now they had names like Chris Hani and Ramaphosa but there
were still few trees to hold back the dust. Houses were still shacks made
up of zinc sheets and salvaged pieces of scrap held together by wire. People
still arrived home by foot, dropped of somewhere by a taxi or from the
train station.
I asked Georgie how fahfee men still made a living. He now competed
with the new government’s Lotto and the explosion of casinos across
the city. Bonus balls and the artificial interiors of casinos with controlled
temperatures tempted players away from men like Georgie, surely?
‘People still bet on fahfee because our bets are still so low and also
because the ju fah goung still comes right to their doorstep,’ said Georgie.
And he was right. I checked his betting slips and people were still betting
10 cents or 20 cents. It was a shame to think that R2.80 from a winning
10-cent bet was still something the poorest of poor South Africans looked
forward to.
I guess in the same way Georgie made his living adding up all those
failed 10-cent bets. Fahfee is never a first choice to make an income.
Georgie knew that more was expected from him because he had a shot at
education and because he could speak English fluently.
‘This is a mug’s game, I do not want my boy to follow in my footsteps,’
he said. He drove and smoked, his right arm, resting on a fully opened
window, getting darker than his left, just like my dad’s arms took on
different shades from his endless fahfee rounds.
Georgie’s fahfee life was a mystery to his family, the way he wanted it,
like my dad and the men and women of his generation wanted it.
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where to look if something happens to me, but more than that I do not
want them to be involved with any of this,’ he said.
Later that evening we returned to his home. His wife had already arrived
from her office job and was preparing dinner as we chatted a bit more.
‘Maybe, I will do this fahfee business for another five years, maybe I
can sell the banks to someone who wants to take it over and then I will
call it a day. It is not a great life because it is not safe and it is bloody hard
work,’ he said.
From the stove, his wife turned around and said: ‘That is what you said
five years ago.’
The risks were real. When I arrived at Georgie’s house earlier in the
day, he was starting his work day with prayers to the ancestors and to the
gods (Kuan Kong in particular) – for protection, he told me. Georgie said
that Kuan Kong, wielding his mighty sword and a formidable expression,
would cut down his competitors and the lurking dangers that he faced as
he headed off to his fahfee banks in the west of Johannesburg. He told me,
as he lit the incense, that since he started making the offerings and giving
thanks to the gods and ancestors things had started going more smoothly
for him. He grew up Catholic, but he said religion in the form of Hail
Marys as absolution from sin just did not cut it for him. Praying to the
gods and remembering the ancestors, he said, felt more like the right thing.
It was a return to his roots somehow and it fitted in more appropriately
with his life as a ju fah goung.
For my dad as a fahfee man of the 1980s, the risks came from the
harassment of police rather than the threat of criminals and thugs in the
townships. He was part of the township landscape after all. He knew its
unwritten codes, the hidden streets and secret places. He was not of the
community but he was expected, he was known.
In the suburbs, the Chinese also had to make themselves known, at
least known entities. They had to be seen and heard, but only just. They
had to be contained by what people could assume about them but they
could not be too conspicuous either.
The Chinese intentionally flew under the radar; undetected, they could
make their lives, make their money. Some Chinese did make money,
some even got rich but they could not be too showy about their fortunes.
Flashiness was not encouraged; it drew too many questions and frugality
was what the Chinese knew best. The shadow of hard times remained, the
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memory of what life used to be like in the villages of China did not fade
easily.
Many years later, I was reminded all over again of the frugality of so
many of the Chinese of my parents’ generation. We moved house for my
mother. Her things were put in boxes and old plastic crates that she marked
in Chinese. The boxes and crates seemed to come from a wellspring of
things that were half-functional, worn out or on the wrong side of their
expiry dates. My mother was not able to part with old clothes that she
never wore anymore but which were too good to throw away or donate to
a charity. There were spatulas with plastic handles that had barely survived
the great meltdown from a hot frying plan, dusty ornaments bought from
a trip long ago to Durban, along with toilet paper bought in bulk from an
opening special years before.
I moaned about having to pack these things, unpack them and dust
them off all over again. I told an old relative of ours I thought mom’s
things were better off in a rubbish dump or a charity shop. My aunty,
who is a bit older than my mother, said: ‘Yes, Ah Ngaan, it is a nuisance
to have to move these things and to sort them now, but do you know how
difficult it was for us to get these things in the first place? Sometimes I am
still grateful that I have a decent meal to eat at night.’
I sighed and nodded, agreeing with her. Looking around her shopfront
with its old newspapers doubling as placemats and a cigarette carton
flipped over as scrap paper, I knew she was right about hard work and its
disdain for waste.
By the late 1970s and early 80s, the Chinese were granted a few more
concessions than other non-white communities in South Africa. One main
concession was being allowed to live in white areas with neighbours’
approval. There were a few children who managed to enter whites-
only schools and sometimes school groups were allowed to take part in
cultural activities reserved for whites, like watching a play or taking part
in interschool programmes.
Our family did not live in a whites-only area even in the 1980s.
Neighbourhoods like Bertrams and Judith’s Paarl were grey areas, which
meant Indians, Chinese and coloureds could live there. On our street there
were a few Portuguese families and a single mom with a boy we watched
grow up over the years. She was a white woman who worked for the trade
union COSATU and sometimes we saw people from TV or the newspapers
come to visit. Her parties were lively and there was a standing invitation
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for my parents and the other neighbours. Of course they said thanks and
never went. We children peered over the wall into her windows and saw
for the first time the racially mixed group of people dancing to Prince’s
Raspberry Beret, laughing and topping up their glasses. There were also
the Isaacs and the Padayachees and by the early 1990s the first black family
moved into the street.
Living here we did not stand out too much. No one had a pool, a
remote-controlled gate or pedigreed pets; we still waved at each other and
noticed when someone did not make it to the bus stop after a morning or
two’s absence.
But even here, the Chinese had to hold on to a carefully constructed
public persona. It was too risky to confide in anyone who was not Chinese.
We did not talk about what dad did for work; we stuck to saying he
worked at a shop, even though he kept unusual hours that the neighbours
must have noticed. But no one bothered us much about it; they probably
knew anyway.
The Chinese community in South Africa stayed tiny. Even at its biggest,
it swelled to only about 25 000, and their small numbers made them
almost invisible, unseen and concealed. And it also made them less of a
threat and helped get them ‘special treatment’ through the concessions
but it entrenched a separateness and isolation. It meant having to defend
themselves against the tag of being honorary whites, for instance, having
to reassert the fact that it was the Japanese who were given honorary
white status. The demeaning ‘honour’ was not afforded to the Chinese in
South Africa.
At the Chinese school, we learnt some Chinese dances with feathered
fans, chopsticks and elaborate moves with our heads turned at right angles
and our fingers mimicking the flow of the wind through trees. We would
perform not just at parents’ evenings but also for visiting dignitaries
, white
school inspectors and the white mayors who came to visit the school every
now and again. The principal of the school was a smart but stern woman
who never showed warmth unnecessarily and who perfected the ugly art
of fake smiles for parents and for dignitaries. She, too, was part of this
perfect public display of what was polite and acceptable to the world
outside Chinese circles. On the days of one of these visits, she would wear
her beautifully patterned cheung saam, a mandarin-collared dress with a
discreet slit up the side of her leg, to show the embroidered richness of the
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sophisticated Chinese woman in her gracious refinement. On every other
day, she just wore her Woolworths outfits and stiff blazers with shoulder
pads.
Being associated with somewhere else was a useful foreignness sometimes.
It was an anomaly; it made the South African apartheid government less
sure that the Chinese were part of the black community they despised so
much. It demonstrated to the government behaviour that was the opposite
of holding up scribbled posters of enraged dissent or burning tyres and
hurling stones in protest.
The Chinese were not part of struggle politics. There were a handful
of Chinese who did get involved in fighting apartheid, but mostly they
kept to themselves, choosing not to rock the boat. If they remained pliant
and yielding, they could carry on working. Maybe then they could send
money back to China, or raise a child to celebrate a proper wedding with a
traditional lucky eight-course dinner and even the adopted Western custom
of a bottle of whisky on the guests’ tables.
The Chinese had no political home in the underground, in the struggle
of the black townships. But they also had no connection to the white
government. The Chinese may not have liked being treated like second-
class citizens but they could not associate with this nationalist thinking
either. They did not see enfranchisement and freedom as a right but as
something that would require more negotiation and sacrifice. It was
sacrifice, especially, as was national conscription. Growing up I did not
encounter one Chinese South African mother who recognised a cause that
justified her son fighting for the volk (Afrikaans nation or people).
