When there was a wedding, the townships came alive. Up to a month before the ceremony, a white flag was hoisted at the front gate of the intended’s home. Every night leading up to the wedding, a street choir of relatives, neighbors, and family friends paraded up and down the avenues practicing wedding songs in Zulu, Sotho, and Tswana. The wedding itself was a near-riotous celebration with the choirs of the bride and groom challenging each other in a competition of poetic songs and harmonies in praises to the couple. The songs were filled with advisory lyrics, sympathetic wishes, and taunts, and were accompanied by ululations from the old women, admonitions from the male elders, feasting, dancing, and debates. The bridal couple would march in front of one of the choirs composed of the bride or the groom’s family and friends. The two choirs would challenge each other all afternoon up and down the street, singing, “They have taken her away from us, she’s gone, our little baby”; “Sweep, sweep away the dirt, girl, never feed your family surrounded by filth”; “Your aunt is a tart, they sleeep with her behind the garbage cans”; “She too young to be wed”; “While her head was spinning from the joy of being in love, they whisked her away”; and countless other songs with the strangest and funniest lyrics and dances—composers and choreographers unknown. And of course a band usually was hired to play at the reception.
There was music in the air, but Johanna did not allow records to be played in the house. A zealous, God-fearing, Lutheran prayer woman, my grandmother considered playing records blasphemous in those early days. However, her widowed sister, Martha Motsoene, had three children—Aunt Lilly; Lincoln Putugwana, who was studying to be a teacher at the renowned Kilnerton Training Institute outside Pretoria; and Aunt Tinnie, a high school dropout who helped run the shebeen. Uncle Putu and Aunt Tinnie were crazy about music, and they played Putu’s treasured 78-rpm records on his wind-up gramophone whenever he came home for the holidays. They would dance the jitterbug and sing full-throated with the records, especially the ones by the Glenn Miller Orchestra, featuring the Modernaires. Putu’s favorite song was “Chattanooga Choo-Choo”; he would play it over and over. Uncle Putu played these records so often that at the age of three I started to sing along with them, even though I had no idea what the words meant (I’m still not sure). I was fascinated by the gramophone and would carefully wind it up while Uncle Putu held it steady for me. Putu had the most beautiful baritone voice, and although I am more of a screamer, my uncle remains the greatest influence on my singing style. I still imitate his phrasing, breathing, and pronunciation.
This was my first obsession with music. From then on, my heart and soul opened to every kind of music. Living in a country that is so pregnant with every kind of ethnic and traditional music and people obsessed with buying records, I became a music addict. To this day, I consume music with exactly the same disposition I had toward it when I was a child.
Many homes back then had gramophones. More well-to-do ones had plug-in or battery-driven “radiograms.” They all blasted their music at high volume—especially on weekends, when folks would leave their doors wide open so that the music would waft out over their yards and into the streets. I spent many an hour leaning against the fence of someone’s home, listening to their records, when I should have been running an errand for Johanna. I would often reach my appointed destination having forgotten the message I was supposed to deliver, which would of course lead to a whipping. But it was worth it.
The music of Louis Armstrong, Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, and Tommy Dorsey, who were all the kings of the swing era, had a very heavy influence on South Africa’s big bands of that time. Bands like the Jazz Maniacs, the Harlem Swingsters, the Merry Makers, and the Merry Blackbirds played many of the songs made popular by the American orchestras, like “Take the A Train,” “In the Mood,” “One O’clock Jump,” “Tuxedo Junction,” “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You,” “The Continental,” and scores of others. These African bands sported the same fashions as the Americans and read music from orchestral arrangements published by Chappell Music, which were available at music shops in the main cities and towns. The African bands also composed township versions of American swing music, styles that came to be known as marabi, mbhaqanga, jit, and kwela, hybrids that have stood the test of time, many of which are still popular today.
Singing male quartets like the Manhattan Brothers and the African Ink Spots were heavily influenced by American groups like the Mills Brothers and the Ink Spots. The Andrews Sisters, Ella Fitzgerald, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Lena Horne, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, and Sarah Vaughan inspired home-grown singers like Dolly Rathebe, Thandie Klaasen, Snowy Radebe, Dorothy Masuka, and Miriam Makeba. Sepia film shorts and movies like Stormy Weather and Cabin in the Sky had a major influence on South Africa’s urban African fashion and hip lifestyle—the zoot suits with gold chains, two-toned shoes, and wide-brimmed hats, the women’s flared dresses and white, ankle-length socks, the bump-and-grind dances, wild jitterbug, gold-capped teeth, switchblades, dark glasses, and “hip” walks were all adopted in the streets and townships of South Africa. The urban African-American lifestyle has never ceased to influence African urban life. African-American music has always played a major role in the lives of Africans all over the continent, especially in South Africa.
But back at Johanna’s shebeen, where no records played, life went on. My grandmother may have been a devout Christian, but her real obsession was with business—trading, dealing, and hustling. She ran a strict, organized shebeen, which sold a brew called Barberton—a very potent sorghum beer—that distorted people’s faces and often caused swellings of the legs, lips, cheeks, hands, feet, eyes, and liver. This debilitating concoction anesthetized those of her clients who drank it. It quenched the thirst of the hard-working miners who just wanted to forget, for a while at least, the suffocating woes of their world. She also sold healthy, unspiked sorghum beer, brandy, gin, and whisky, which were consumed in the dining room and living room of her house by her educated friends—teachers, ministers, businessmen, nurses, lawyers, doctors, preachers, burglars, thieves, and con men—the elite of the booze world.
But even without records, music surrounded us, especially on the weekends. The drinkers and miners would arrive at the shebeen and sing sad folk and traditional songs like “Ngeke ngiye Kwa Zulu Kwa Fel’ u Baba” (I’ll never go back to Zululand. That’s where my father was killed); “Languta Tsotsi, u ta ku tekela mali Tsotsi” (Watch out for the city slicker, the pickpocket and the mugger. They’re all out to take your money); “Matsidiso, ngwana Rakgadi, ha e sale, u tsamaya, ua re siya re le bodutu, Wa re u ya Gauteng” (Matsidiso, my aunt’s child, ever since you left us lonely and sad, saying you are off to Johannesburg, you promised to write to us but we never heard from you); and “Ndemka Kudala ekhaya, Ndi Khumbul’ iKhaya Lam” (I’ve been gone so long from home, my heart cries out with longing for the home where I was born).
Come Sunday, migrant laborers would dance in their knee-high rubber boots to the accompaniment of feverish rhythm guitars, war chants, and hollered commands. They’d mesmerize onlookers with their complex dance routines, slapping the outsides of their boots, smashing their heels together to produce rhythm patterns and choreography that left their audiences astonished. The boots had been issued to them for use in street-sweeping, hosing, ditch-digging, and mining, but these workers transformed them into percussion instruments capable of producing the most complex and beautiful rhythms.
The township was ringed by a carnival of ethnic dances put on by thousands of Zulu, Swazi, Venda, Chopi, Baca, Fingo, Hlubi, Tsonga, Tswana, Sotho, Ndebele, Pedi, Zingili, Lobedu, and Karanga warrior ensembles. They’d stomp the grounds of empty velds and parks, grassy knolls and vacant lots, chanting, drumming, hand-clapping, singing; in their colorful traditional costumes made of beads, feathers, and leather, they’d supplicate at the spiritual feet of their ancestral gods. Kicking up clouds of dust with their bare fe
et, they caused the grass and the earth under them to tremble and give way to a past that they had come to glorify in rhythm and song, while also sending a salvo of terrifying curses to remind their oppressors and colonizers of their impending doom for leaving Europe to come and enslave the Africans. The warlike dances fascinated the urban throngs who watched them. Gigigi and I and our friends would seek out their venues, gape in pleasant wonder, and later try to imitate their every graceful move.
Bible-thumping “born again” men and women of the Holy Sanctified Donkey Church, a palm-leaf-crowned baby donkey in the lead, would sing soulful African gospel at the gates and tall fences of the houses in the township, pleading with us all to repent, to accept God. “Guquka,” they’d yell, wiping drenched foreheads with their white handkerchiefs. Their prayer women paraded in purple blouses and leopard-skin-patterned velvet hats, black skirts, stockings, and shoes, singing louder than any tabernacle choir could, punctuating their songs with an occasional “Hallelujah!!! Aaamen!!!”
Prayer women and church wardens from all other religious sects—(Presbyterian, Methodist, Anglican, Lutheran, Dutch Reformed, Swiss Mission, Assembly of God, Catholic, African Methodist Espiscopal) sang from their citadels and processed through the township’s streets, competing with blaring radiograms, vocal groups, wedding choirs, traditional healers’ ensembles, gramophones, and children’s troupes playing in the streets, an ear-filling commotion that made the weekends resound with festivity. My friends and I rushed from one street to another, from squares to open fields, following Lekganyane’s Zion Christian Church brass bands as they marched in their military khaki uniforms, white boots, black caps, with sheriff stars pinned to their lapels, singing, “Our God is with us here on earth, clearly visible, generous and infallible.” We marched behind these battalions for God, lifting our knees high, following the ethnic pipers as though bewitched. We drank in the noises and reveled in the hilarious chaos of the weekend’s African sorcery and madness—oblivious of cold, rain, wind, dust, or curfew.
As the weekend came to a close, we would hang outside in Johanna’s backyard, under the apricot and apple trees, where the miners on makeshift benches droned like bees as they downed gallon after gallon of homemade hooch next to the chicken coop, singing heartbreaking chants about their homelands and the squalor of their hostels. We are crying over the filthy, funky, stinking, flea-ridden barracks and hostels we live in where they feed us that mishmash mush food that they dish into our iron plates, with an iron shovel. We think about our loved ones back home who we may never see again, because they might already have been forcibly removed from where we left them or wantonly murdered in the dead of night by marauding gangs or racist white farmers. We cry for our lands and herds that were taken away from us with the gun and the cannon, the dog, the tear gas, and the poison, with the bomb and the gatling, and when we hear that choo-choo train, a-steamin’ and a-smokin’ and a-chuggin’ and a-wailin’ in the far distance, then we cuss the choo-choo train, the choo-choo train that brought us to this godforsaken Witbank—Whooo! Whooooo! As the evening wore on, the miners’ loud arguing always signaled Johanna, who had to throw the rowdy ones out on the street and point them back to their barracks. Some would fight all the way to their bunks at the mines, bloodying each other and sometimes killing each other. The weekend always came to a regretted end with the Sunday-night church bells clanging in a new week.
Nobody cared too much about the mineworkers’ lives. No one in Witbank, not even Johanna, knew their real names or cared too much when they died. To Johanna they were just customers, faces in the crowd who drifted into her shebeen to drive their blues away and to put coins in her money apron. Some of her earnings ended up in the pockets of the municipal police and superintendent Lynn, the king of Kwa-Guqa, an English bastard.
After the weekend ended, the township dust settled on blades of grass, windowsills, corrugated iron roofs, porches, and tree leaves until the next weekend’s revelry once more raised it into the air. A child could not ask for a more spectacular fantasy.
In the mid-1940s, after World War II ended, affluence struck South Africa and money started showing up everywhere, even in the townships. The shebeens did brisk business; Johanna’s apron sagged with silver coins. Her brassiere burst at the seams to accommodate the countless pound and ten-shilling notes she kept shoving into her bosom. Shebeen queens like Johanna had no cash registers. She just threw the coins in her apron and stuffed the notes into the deep canyon between her bountiful breasts. Sometimes she did not count the money for days, especially when business was exploding over the weekends. Yes, times were good. Old General Smuts, what a pretentiously kind and clever bastard he turned out to be after the war. Still, the Boers remained red and mean and poor. The English? They had these little twitches at the corners of their mouths that made it difficult to determine whether they were smiling or just plain nervous. Those British, they were sly sons of bitches. Yes sir! Both seemed redder in the summer. The Boer women in their bonnets and long floral dresses accompanied by straw-hatted, ruddy men, seemed to turn even redder at the sight of black people. Their scowls were mean enough to drive a little black boy into a hole. They looked as if something smelled foul whenever black folks were in their midst. As kids, we figured they were just jealous. They had no rhythm, they couldn’t sing or dance, couldn’t play the drums, and didn’t know how to laugh. Johanna said Boers and the English were still trying to learn how to smile and that God had made their teeth dark yellow and rusty so they would be ashamed to show them. This was punishment, she said, for being so mean to us.
On Saturday mornings the Indian market in Witbank’s town square was always overflowing with hundreds of Boers from the surrounding farms selling their summer harvests of every imaginable vegetable, legume, fruit, and livestock to the Indian traders. Around seven o’clock, the merchants opened their stalls and started shouting, “Chickens, velly, velly cheap. Bananas, man-goes, paw-paw, chickens—come buy, velly cheeeeep. Small one, two-and-six, beeg one, five-and-six! Come on, velly cheeeeep.”
Barbara and I became aware, from infancy, that being black meant that we were going to be harassed by white folks all our lives. Whenever we went to town on Saturday morning with Johanna to the Indian market or to buy at the white-owned shops, one thing was very obvious: Johanna did not command the same respect she had at home. Instead, white and Indian store owners called her “girl” or “nanny.” Oddly, in town, Johanna was humble and soft-spoken. When Barbara and I complained to Johanna that whites were calling us little baboons, she scolded us. If we questioned her reasoning, we were disciplined once we got back across the creek to our side of town. Johanna, as fierce as she was in the townships, was shit-scared of white folks.
Not surprisingly, there were many fights at 76 Tolman Street. The coal miners who came to drink in the backyard often started fights that they never finished because Johanna would intervene and beat the shit out of them—thrashings that sent the powerfully built Mozambicans, Malawians, Ndebeles, and Swazis staggering out of her yard. Johanna had three tenants who rented a couple of rooms in her backyard. One tenant was Uncle Bassie, a young colored man in his late twenties, who was a presser at the dry-cleaning store in town. Bassie was like a long-lost son to my grandmother, chopping firewood and breaking the huge nuggets of coal, helping with the painting around the property, putting up fences, and doing a little plumbing here, a little carpentry there—generally being the man of the house. Unlike Bassie, Johanna’s actual son, Uncle Khalu, lived in Brakpan and came to Witbank during certain weekends and holidays only to romance his girlfriend, Tilly Miga, and fight with her brother, called Boy, or, even worse, with his own mother. Bassie was an ideal substitute for Khalu. The two men hung out in Kwa-Guqa’s hot spots together, chatting up women and coming home late at night singing bawdy songs, happily drunk with their arms around each other’s shoulders. George rented the other room. A red-lipped man who was always drunk, he was a quiet and dignified office clerk from Malawi. His g
irlfriend, Molly, was born and raised in Witbank. She ran away from home in her early teens to come and shack up with George. They were madly in love with each other, drank heavily together, and fought a great deal.
One Sunday morning, George and Molly were arguing in their back room when Molly suddenly ran to the coal shed next to the chicken coop, grabbed an ax, ran back into the room, and continued the fight with George. A few seconds later, George emerged with the ax embedded in his forehead. Bassie, Johanna, and the other early drinkers tried in vain to dislodge it from his skull as the thick blood oozed from the wound, trickling down his face and clotting on his white shirt. Everybody was scolding Molly, who was trembling and weeping like a little baby. Johanna screamed louder than anyone: “You evil little satanic bitch, jezebel whore piece of shit! I hope the poor boy dies so that the white people can hang your little stinking black ass straight into hell where you belong—with the devil. That way I can be rid of both of you for good!” George, protesting through the river of blood flowing from in and around his mouth, gurgled weakly, “No, Auntie Johanna, don’t let me die!” Johanna shot back, “Shut up, you bloody makwerekwere shit. I’m tired of both of you bloody nincompoops!” I was terrified, whimpering and trembling at this horrible sight.
Still Grazing Page 2
