In mid-1947 my father graduated from the Johannesburg Technical College, to become one of the first Africans to obtain a diploma as a health inspector and was offered a better-paying job in Alexandra Township, a post that would require him to spend many months in the field vaccinating people against smallpox, malaria, and other infectious diseases. My mother was unwilling to leave Payneville. This enraged my father. She argued that we were a comfortable family, living in an electrified, semi-luxurious home. She felt that my father had a good job. He had actually pioneered a municipal-subsidized fruit and vegetable market and milk depot where you could buy a pint for two pennies, and the market produce was dirt-cheap, endearing him to the large impoverished section of the community. She explained to my father how abandoned they would be if he left. I was doing extremely well in school and needed to continue my piano lessons, and there were no piano teachers in Alexandra Township. My mother had a good job as a social worker; the community had embraced her, and Superintendent Buitendacht had just appointed her chief social worker. “I really don’t understand why we have to move, Tom,” she shouted.
I heard the loud argument from my adjoining bedroom. My father was incensed. He was the husband, and my mother had to obey him, period! She disagreed and all hell broke loose.
My mother was a petite woman, only four feet nine inches tall. My father, on the other hand, was six feet three inches tall and built like an ox. He beat my mother all around the house. He kicked her over and over again while she lay coiled on the dining room floor. Eventually she passed out. I came running out of my bedroom, horrified at the sight of my mother’s blood all over the floor. I was certain my father intended to kill her. I was only eight and small for my age, but I tried to measure up to my dad. I begged him to stop. He slapped me across the kitchen floor, and when I landed at the bathroom door, I saw stars and heard birds tweeting in my ears. Dazed, I couldn’t believe what was happening.
My dad left the house in a fury and swore that if he found us in the house when he returned, he would kill us. He was totally psychotic as he slammed the front door and kicked everything in his way, including Bonzo, our new dog, who ran away whimpering out of the backyard, toward Third Avenue.
My mother, semiconscious, was lying in a pool of blood. Her whole face was swollen, one of her eyes was closed, her skin had turned dark purple and bloody blue. It was around eleven o’clock at night. My father had locked their bedroom door and left with the key so that my mother could not even change clothes after she washed the blood from her face and hands. There was no transportation around at that time of night, so we walked to the clinic near the entrance to the township. My mother’s dear friend Mrs. Zondi lived in an apartment behind the municipal clinic, where she was head nursing sister. She treated my mother’s wounds as best she could, and insisted that we spend the night with her. My mother refused her offer. We left and walked, cold and barefoot, about two miles to the Springs train station. It was May, with winter coming. The nights were really cold. Mrs. Zondi loaned my mother the train fare for the two of us. At the time, Barbara was in Witbank with Johanna. At around midnight we caught the last train to Johannesburg. Shivering and still stunned, my mother and I sat holding each other in a dazed silence as the train made its way to the City of Gold.
My mother and I arrived at the Doonfontein train station, outside of Johannesburg, which was just a stone’s throw away from the shebeen owned by Ouma Mary, Walter Bowers’s second wife. It was after midnight, but the joint was still jumping. When we walked through the back door, Ouma Mary and her daughter Aunt Meisie burst into tears, and were quickly joined by her sons, Uncles Boetie and Victor and their siblings Sidney, Basil, and Ollie. My mother, with her swollen face and half-closed eye—and the other one bloodshot from crying—tried to recount to them what had happened hours earlier. Everyone cried uncontrollably. Ouma Mary immediately closed the shebeen for the night, giving the boot to her puzzled customers. Seeing how exhausted we were, she prepared a place for my mother and me to sleep in her train-carriage-shaped house with its long corridor that ran along at least ten rooms from the kitchen to the front lounge.
Early the following morning, before the sun came up, Uncles Putu, Nico, Bigvai, Nakeni, and Kwakwa and my father arrived. They were all wearing overcoats and Italian fedoras. My father was carrying a small suitcase of clothes he had brought for my mother and me. I noticed that his eyes were also red from crying. With his sniffling and endless nose-blowing, he could hardly speak. Though he had come to make peace and apologize, Ouma Mary was livid. I was hoping she would speak up and not allow my mother and me to return to Payneville with my father. I was terrified of what he would do to us once we got back home. My aunts Lily, Tinnie, and Clara came to Doornfontein around lunchtime. I had no idea what they were discussing. A few hours earlier I had seen my mother for the first time since the previous night. Her face and head were covered with a large, black, chador-like scarf. We began crying, but my mother assured me she was fine. “Go and play, Boy-Boy, Mama’s okay.” Uncle Victor and Uncle Boetie were furious to see their “Ous Panie”—which is what they called their stepsister—in such a sorry state, and were bent on revenge. But Ouma Mary was against any physical retaliation.
“You boys should just stay put,” she shouted. “This is none of your business. We have settled this business peacefully. Yours is just to remember your manners and hold your bloody tongues. Tom will beat you to death if you want to take your chances fighting with him. That man will fuck you up! He’ll beat the shit out of you two, so you better stay put.”
I had heard stories of how my father once nearly beat five men to death one night when he was returning from George Goch with my mother. These guys tried to rob them and rape her. They all ended up in the hospital. The Masekelas had been raised as farm boys in the Northern Province, where Tsongas, Pedis, Ndebeles, and Vendas grew up perfecting boxing, head-butting, knee-banging, and kicking—all from a young age. But this made things even more puzzling to me. Why would my father, knowing his strength, want to beat my mother? It still baffles me more than fifty years later. That evening, Aunt Elizabeth arrived with Uncle Junius in his new Chrysler. They took my mother back to Springs. I was allowed to stay and spend the weekend until Sunday afternoon, when I took the train alone back to Springs and boarded a bus to Payneville, where I found our home bubbling with relatives. While my uncles sat in the backyard picnicking, my mother and aunts were inside cooking and baking. We enjoyed a good meal. Afterward I went to play soccer with my friends, while my father worked quietly on a wood sculpture in the backyard.
My father eventually moved to Alexandra Township to begin his new job. Uncle Kenneth took over the running of the milk depot and vegetable market for the Springs Town Council. He soon struck a deal with the town council and bought the dairy and turned it into a successful business venture, at a time when few Africans had such an opportunity. We moved into a house across the street from the milk depot on Second Street, and Uncle Kenneth took over the house on Central Avenue, and married Bellie, who gave birth to their first son, Billy. Kenneth became even more popular in his new job than my father had been. My father visited us on some weekends, and during this time my mother gave birth to Elaine.
After reconciling their differences and with my father promising to control his temper, Pauline finally gave in and we joined Thomas in Alexandra Township in the winter of 1947. “Come on, my dear,” Thomas pleaded. “Come to your house in Toneship, instead of this little box here in Springs. Superintendent Buitendacht, who is now manager of Native Affairs in Germiston, has a job for you there, which you can have at the snap of your fingers. It is only a thirty-minute bus ride from Alex. Come and start a new life there. I have a school ready for Minkie and Barbara. You have many friends and relatives in Alexandra. And you will love it.”
One of the reasons my mother didn’t want to move to Alexandra was that the township did not have flush toilets or electricity. The other was its reputation as the most crime-ri
dden township in all of South Africa. Everybody was shit-scared of Alex—“Dark City” as they used to call it. Many of its residents lived one day at a time, because there was no guarantee they would live to see the next. Life was unpredictable in “Toneship,” teeming with preadolescent knife-wielding thugs and adult gangs armed with all kinds of guns. There were Zulu gangs, who were lethal with their sticks, and Basotho gangs, called Ma-Russia, who always wore their traditional blankets and were even more deadly than the Zulus with the sticks they hid under their colorful blankets. There were the Baca, Fingo, and Hlubi clans, who worked as garbage collectors. When they were pissed off, the whole township would smell of rotten garbage. In the evening, Alexandra Township’s streets were buzzing with tens of thousands of workers returning from their menial jobs in downtown Johannesburg or the suburbs, where they were employed in every occupation that was considered too lowly for white folks. Among them were shoplifters, pickpockets, burglars, prostitutes, pimps, small-time gangsters, and hustlers of every kind. The streets also teemed with hawkers of fruits and vegetables, fatcakes and mielies (corn), and roadside ethnic fast foods and washerwomen carrying large bundles of white people’s laundry balanced on their heads for the weekend’s ironing, with little babies tied to their backs with moth-eaten blankets.
Dust, mixed with the foul sulfur smoke of red-hot braziers and coal stoves, was visible in the glare of the headlights of buses, occasional automobiles, and trucks. Horse and donkey carts delivering firewood and coal helped to raise even more dust than was already caused by thousands of pedestrian feet shuffling through Dark City’s unlit streets. They all hoped that they wouldn’t fall victim to the Friday-night bulvangers (“bull catchers,” slang for muggers) who were anxiously targeting their week’s pay packets. Terrified screams periodically pierced the trudging rhythm of weary feet above the blaring horns of vehicles, the tinkling bells of hundreds of bicycles, and the yells of milkmen, meat sellers, and drivers of junk carts. Dogs ran in and out of the multitudes, chasing after bitches in shameless heat. Gramophones blared out the music of township Kwela bands, pennywhistle combos, male and female trios and quartets, famous singers from home and abroad, gospel choirs and American swing bands. The streets were lined with buckets of feces mixed with urine in front of every home (whose backyards sported countless rented rooms and shacks), waiting for the migrant night-soil collectors who were infamously known as sampunganes. This was a name they detested enough to empty the contents of urine-filled buckets on the front porches of the homes of mischievous children who dared to shout “Sampungane!” at them. Mothers screamed out in shrill tones the names of their children, calling on them to end their street games and come home into the yards, out of the menacing darkness of Toneship’s dangerous streets. This was Alexandra Township, a far cry from Payneville.
But Alexandra wasn’t all bad for me—it wasn’t bad at all. In a few days’ time I met a huge cast of colorful characters on our block who taught me a lot about life, for better or for worse. First there was Steve, who lived in our yard. His uncle, Mabaso, was the chief water-meter reader for the Alexandra Health Committee’s Maintenance Department. The property we were living on belonged to the Health Committee. We lived in the main house. Adjacent to our house across the driveway was a row of adjoining two-room apartments. In the first flat lived a fat, motorcycle-riding, pitch-black, mean-tempered man named Malatsi. Supposedly he was an investigating detective for the health committee. His job was to find out who lived in Alex illegally, who was smuggling stolen goods, who was not paying their water and sanitation rates, and all other infringements against the committee. But residents despised him because he was an informer for the nearby Wynberg South African police force. When the police raided the township, they were merciless and destructive in their search for fugitives, contraband, or illicit liquor. Mostly the police were corrupt and the community’s hatred for them was venomous. Malatsi didn’t speak to anyone, and, knowing his role as a spy for the police force, no one in the community spoke to him, but only behind his back in whispers of disgust. Rumor had it that Malatsi was indirectly responsible for the deaths of many people in the community, and was one of South Africa’s worst sell-outs.
Mabaso lived with his wife, Bessie, a beautiful, light-skinned colored woman, who spoke fluent Shangaan. She was tall and dimpled, with flowing long hair, which she wore braided under a headscarf. She had pearly white teeth, a gorgeous figure with a narrow waist, a perfectly shaped pair of large, sculpted legs, and a friendly disposition. These physical attributes were spoiled by the fact that Bessie must have weighed over three hundred pounds. She usually wore just-below-the-knee German-print frocks and an apron. Whenever she would sweep around her apartment’s courtyard, Bessie exposed her gargantuan, porcelain thighs right up to her drawers. I could never figure out whether she did this on purpose or was simply oblivious of the disturbance she caused among the women, or the excitement she provided the men, whenever she bent over.
My friends and I took pleasure in ogling Bessie, even though we often got caught by a woman neighbor behind the back of the outhouse lavatories, where we would raise the back cover and peep past the shit pail to watch her pee. This curtailed our behavior for a while, but the urge to catch a peek at Bessie’s drawers and thunder thighs was irresistible. Playing marbles was actually the best game for ogling, because we played mostly on our knees, our heads to the ground and our eyes on Bessie’s prized thighs. Spinning tops was another low-to-the-ground game that allowed us to bend down and see those drawers. We were already dirty-minded little motherfuckers who couldn’t wait to feel those knobs in our short pants, our little dicks painfully hard as we jostled for a better position to eyeball Bessie’s elephantine thighs.
My new playmates and I weren’t the only ones given a free peep show; the men from the neighborhood were always conveniently on hand, coincidentally shaving or brushing their teeth at the communal tap, helping around the yard with the flowers or the vegetable patch, playing with the dog or feeding it, repairing a bicycle, doing a little carpentry, gossiping over the fence, having a haircut, crushing coal nuggets, chopping wood, or simply standing around contemplating the weather—whatever excuse was handy for an opportunity to catch a glimpse of Bessie’s thighs. I always suspected that Bessie enjoyed the attention, but never let on that she was aware of our behavior.
Mabaso’s mother also lived with them. She only spoke Shangaan and was a quiet, peaceful soul with a wad of snuff always deftly packed between her bottom lip and teeth that had turned brown from the tobacco. Between chews, she spat far into the distance, her ebony face encased in swarthy, wrinkled skin with a small nose and maroon eyes always staring into space. Her brain was probably numb from the ever-present nicotine juice oozing from the snuff, and she always wore an expression that seemed to cry out, “What the hell am I doing in this godforsaken and cursed place?”
Kokwana (grandmother, in Shangaan) was what we called her. It was always entertaining to watch Grandmother and Bessie argue about where she splattered the spent tobacco that she dug from under her bottom lip. Kokwana would flick it into the air and slowly replenish her desire for nicotine with a toot of the fine brown powder from her round tin. She’d inhale two big sniffs in each nostril before hiding the tin under her multilayered, beaded Shangaan mutsheka, a traditional skirt.
Cocky Tlhotlhalemajoe and his brother Mangi lived across the street from our house. To the left of their house was Ntate Montsho, who had an old 1930 Ford Prefect that he was always fixing and hand-painting with cheap glossy black paint. Montsho had a beautiful daughter, Sarikie, a little scorcher whom Cocky was banging. To the right of Cocky’s house lived Ped, Cocky’s cousin, who was about six years older than us, and already scarred by knife wounds on many parts of his body. He was good-looking, but mean like the devil. Ped was fearless and ready to pick a fight at any time with anybody. Ped’s family was just as rough, from his parents to his dog, Ginger, who never barked but sired just about all the puppies on the bl
ock. His sister Dikeledi wore micro-mini gym tunics that showed her thunder thighs. We all had a crush on her, but never mentioned it around Ped for fear of being murdered on the spot. Dikeledi was attending school at Alexandra High, where my uncle, “Rams” Ramatswi, was the principal. Ramatswi was as black as they came, but passed for colored and refused to speak any of the ethnic languages, pretending not to understand a word. If he had been an actor, Rams would definitely have won an Oscar. He especially liked to visit my home so that he could act out his colored role, a habit that my mother found rather amusing, since she hardly ever thought of herself as being colored. She humored Rams nonetheless.
Across from Ped’s house, next to us, lived an even rougher character, Ndevu, Ped’s best friend. Ndevu was mean with a knife, had been to reformatory a few times, and had already put a few boys in their graves. He usually walked away from the crime and the courts with an airtight self-defense plea. Up the street from Ped’s house lived his other cousins, Bomber, Mothlabane, and little Johnson Moloto. Bomber was built like a battle tank, his face and head riddled with stab marks. His taut, muscular body rippled with power. Nobody wanted to be in a fight with Bomber. Mothlabane, on the other hand, was a tall, lanky, weed-smoking golf caddy with a gift of the gab, sharp clothes, and mean township dance steps. He was always high, always telling stories, and always laughing. When he heard my name was Minkie, he christened me Mickey Janks, after the great golfer. Whenever he saw me walking down the street, he’d holler, “Mickey Janks Seghobhadzela, Mosimane o sa jeng Kolobe.” (Mickey Janks, the one who always asks for road directions; the boy who never eats a pig.) Only Mothlabane really understood the deeper meaning of these praises. We all just accepted them and never asked him to break it all down. Next to Ped’s house lived a tall, stringy, gap-toothed brother named Rex. He worked as a chef at a top Rosebank hotel. He was a sharp dresser, always carried a walking stick, and was never without a smile on his face. Rex, I soon discovered, was Alexandra Township’s toughest street fighter. He was not an instigator, but many brothers who fancied themselves to be ass-kickers would often—unsuccessfully—challenge Rex.
Still Grazing Page 4
