One Sunday afternoon I saw Rex walking down Twelfth Avenue with a beautiful young woman who was wearing a black and white polka-dot dress with matching black and white shoes. I had not seen her around Alexandra, and imagined she was someone he had picked up from Rosebank. They had just gotten off the bus from town when Juba, a tall, muscular, light-skinned man, started taunting Rex and his lady friend. Rex was cool. He flashed his customary smile. With his arm around his woman’s tiny waist, Rex tried to ignore any confrontation. He was wearing a white pinstriped suit, a black shirt, a white tie with black polka dots, black and white two-toned brogue shoes, a silver belt and a matching walking stick, with a white rose in his lapel. The couple wore wide-brimmed straw hats, also adorned with polka-dotted bands, hers with a ribbon in the back that hung down almost to her shoulders. Rex ignored Juba and slowly walked into his yard, where, after taking off his jacket and their hats, the couple sat on his front porch and tried to enjoy a raspberry drink on that September afternoon, all while Juba continued his ranting and raving.
My friend Steve picked up his top and string and, with a knowing smile, suggested that we walk over to Ped’s house and join him and Dikeledi, who were looking on from their front yard. The commotion was beginning to stir the neighborhood. Most of the neighbors and the kids were now leaning over their front-yard fences or peering from the front porches in the direction of Juba, watching his loud and boisterous shenanigans in the street. Uncle Rams was visiting with my parents. None of them were aware of what was going on, because they were inside enjoying tea and Marie biscuits.
Juba wore a short-sleeved khaki shirt, a size too small, to show off his biceps, triceps, and pectorals, with his muscular abs rippling through his unbuttoned shirt. Veins were sticking out over his glistening muscles as he paced up and down in front of Rex’s yard, all the time screaming how he was going to rub Rex’s face in the stagnant water on the side of the street and kick his ass right down to the bus stop at the corner of Selborne Road, the only tarred street in Alexandra, where the buses made their last stop before depositing the rest of the passengers at the bus terminal. Rex sat there smiling, drinking raspberry soda with his woman, while the two of them listened to Louis Jordan records on his battery-driven phonograph. It was at full volume, blasting “Pinetop’s Boogie-Woogie,” “Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens,” “Caledonia,” and “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman.”
Juba kept shouting: “Come out, Rex, don’t be hiding like a little Boy Scout behind that woman. I’m gonna teach you a lesson, Rex. You’ve been having it too easy, boy, beating up on all those mama’s babies and making people think you are the strongest man in Alex. Today everybody’s gonna find out that Juba is the real crocodile in this township. I’m gonna make you shit in your pants and piss all over this street, bubba. Come on out here Rex, you sissy. Come on out and fight.”
Rex continued to ignore the taunts, and calmly replaced Jordan with Louis Armstrong. Juba’s shouts were now competing with “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” “Basin Street Blues,” “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” “When You’re Smiling,” and “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You.”
More onlookers were now filling the street. Some were on their way back to their domestic jobs in the suburbs, and others were heading home from the bus terminal. The human traffic seemed to fuel Juba even more. “Come on, Rex, you are wasting all these people’s time. They are dying to see me kick your ass up and down this fucking street.” Still unmoved by Juba’s bravado, Rex continued smiling and nodding his head. My friends and I could see that Rex and his girlfriend were now laughing hysterically. Just when it seemed as if Juba’s antics were losing their appeal and the crowd was beginning to thin, Juba blurted out some bile that crossed the line. He started an assault on Rex’s mother, how she was a witch and had slept with every man in Alex, and how the police had all lined up at the barracks to have their turns with her.
The music stopped. Rex’s smile vanished. He went inside his house, but quickly returned, barefoot and shirtless, wearing just black training shorts. His lanky body appeared dangerously slight in comparison to Juba’s rippling physique. At first I was worried for Rex. Steve quieted my apprehension. “I think you better be praying for Juba. He’s really gonna need it.”
In a matter of seconds they were going at each other. Juba threw the first hard punches at Rex, who stood there as if he were being brushed with a feather. Juba continued pummeling Rex’s face and body, but Rex withstood the assault. Perspiration was flowing from the two of them as if water had been doused onto their glistening bodies. Finally, Rex got tired and said, “I’ve got to get back to my girl.”
Steve anticipated Rex’s onslaught: “Watch this, it’s all over now.” And with that, it was Rex’s turn. Juba had punched himself out, but had done little to hurt his opponent. Rex pulled Juba’s head from the back of the neck and butted his own against it. There was a thunderous, cracking thud. Dazed, Juba staggered back. Rex grabbed his head again and this time banged it against his left knee, then the right knee. Then Rex held Juba by his shoulders and kneed him in his rib cage with his left knee. There was a loud snapping sound, as if a large branch had been broken off a tree trunk. Juba slumped to the ground. Blood oozed from his mouth and nostrils. He never moved again.
Ped broke the silence. “It’s all over.”
I was mesmerized. I had never seen someone get killed. “Are all of Rex’s fights this short?” I asked. “This one was too long,” said Bomber.
The people quickly dispersed at the sound of the ambulance and the police cars in the distance. When the police arrived, two white officers took statements from a few curious onlookers. Juba’s body was bundled and then loaded into an ambulance. In ten minutes the police were finished with their business. Rex was not arrested. And a few minutes later, life was back to normal on Twelfth Avenue, with Rex’s phonograph blaring Ella Fitzgerald’s “Sentimental Journey.”
Gonna take a sentimental journey, gonna set my heart at ease … All the while Ped’s dog, Ginger, went about his business with a juicy meatbone under a peach tree.
3
THROUGHOUT THE 1940S OUR FAMILY frequently made arduous trips to see my father’s parents, Hopane and Mamoshaba, on their farm in Walmaanstal, north of Pretoria. Getting to my grandparents’ farm was always a nightmarish experience. We would take the bus from Alexandra Township to Germiston, and change there for the train to Pretoria. South Africa was, of course, very much a segregated country. There were signs that read EUROPEANS ONLY and NON-EUROPEANS ONLY all over the country. The train stations had white sections and black sections on the platforms. The trains were arranged so that the white and black carriages came to stop at their designated places on the station platforms. That way the different colored folk could easily board and depart from their parts of the station and never mingle with the whites. The train drivers, stationmasters, ticket sales clerks, train conductors, and railway police were all white. If you were caught in the wrong compartment, you were thrown off the train at the next station—if you were lucky enough not to go to prison and get the shit beaten out of you. Lord have mercy on your black soul if you entered through the white entrance or sat in their waiting rooms. A white person, on the other hand, had no problems if he or she invaded a black space. They were either assumed to be there in an official capacity or quickly made aware that they had erred. They were only jailed if regarded to be communists or troublemakers who insisted on hanging out with black people.
The police machinery was put in place to ensure that apartheid functioned smoothly and that anyone who broke the law was brought immediately to justice. Even Hitler’s Nazi machinery never equaled the timely responses of the police forces to disruption, or the swiftness with which black “lawlessness” was defused. The apartheid system was evil and perverted, but ran like a clean machine. If you were over the age of sixteen and not white, your every moment and movement had to be accounted for. To travel from one township to another, to the l
ocal town center, to another province, to work, to church, or wherever, you had to have permission, and you only had seventy-two hours to stay in an area where you were not a resident. If you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, it was your ass, and there was no telling where you would end up or what your fate would be. It could be jail. You could be farmed out for cheap labor, or just disappear forever—probably ending up dead in some police station. Your corpse would end up in an unknown grave in some concealed area known only to your executioners.
Women traveling with children and elders were not harassed as much as adult males. We therefore never went to Walmaanstal with my father by train, only if he was driving. Somehow the police always showed respect for an African who drove a car. It was only when we used public transport that we traveled with “Polina,” as the Batlokwa fondly called my mother. Pretoria was a city whose Afrikaner men could be compared to America’s Ku Klux Klan. It was the sacred meeting and plotting area for Afrikaners. It was not uncommon to see an African male assaulted by a gang of Boers, as these racists were commonly referred to, for walking on the sidewalk with whites or daring to talk back or for just being black.
From Pretoria Station, we would take the Pietersburg train deep into redneck Afrikaner territory. Disembarking from the black section of the train, we would take the black-operated bus to a remote village stop, from where we would walk through arid, hilly country to Hopane’s farm.
Seeing us approaching his farm from the distant horizon, Hopane would stand on a mound of earth and sing our praises for the next half hour. Trudging toward our grandfather from inside a cloud of dust, we marched with parched lips and sweat pouring from our bodies, our clothes and brows dripping in the baking heat of the northern Transvaal. We couldn’t make out what Hopane said from his mound, praising us profusely while we trudged toward him. With the breeze blowing in our direction from where he stood, we were only able to catch a few of his praises. I never knew what he was saying. We could hear only the last phrases of the praises as we came to within earshot.
Hopane and Mamoshaba scratched out a decent living in those days on their farm, growing maize and raising chickens for eggs and cows for beef and milk. Hopane painstakingly constructed a wall of stone around his farm with his own hands. This intense labor gave him severe arthritis in his back, making it difficult for my grandfather to raise his legs when he walked. He sort of shuffled around. You could hear his feet dragging as he walked about his house—shush-shush-shush-shush-shush. My grandfather was a dignified man who prided himself on his work on the farm—but cussing under his breath and endlessly spitting as he went about his work. On many nights he would sleep with the chickens in order to catch the snakes that slithered into the chicken coop to feed on the baby chicks and eggs. With the sunrise and the rooster crowing, Hopane would emerge victorious, with several dead reptiles hanging from his shoulders. But Hopane was most proud that he had educated his six children, including my father, Thomas Selema.
Mamoshaba was the talkative one. She did a lot of cooking in the kitchen’s outdoor courtyard, where she held my sister and me as her captive audience while she prepared food. She asked endless questions about the people she knew in Alexandra, Springs, and Witbank; all her relatives and those of my mother’s clan. Impatient as I probably was with my grandmother’s never-ending banter, our visits were nonetheless wonderful. The country air, helping with the milking and herding of the cows, feeding the animals, collecting the eggs with Hopane, and following my grandfather around as he shuffled about the farm, listening to his endless retelling of our family history, how we were related to one Batlokwa, Venda, Tsonga, and Ndebele family after another, were the lessons that helped me define who I was and where my roots lay.
In 1948 the conservative-dominated National Party won parliamentary elections and gained control of the South African government. Apartheid—a word that literally meant separateness in Afrikaans—became national policy. Two years later the Group Areas Act was enacted. It was designed to segregate communities and relegate the black population to a small allotment of the nation’s land. In 1951, Hopane and Mamoshaba were among the first victims of the Group Areas Act when their farm was proclaimed a “black spot” in an area designated “for whites only.” Unable to fight the repressive government, my grandparents came to live with us in Alexandra Township. Although Mamoshaba seemed to enjoy the change—making friends with just about everybody she met—Hopane became bitter and sad. The new laws had yanked his life’s work right from under him. His precious farm had been taken away with only a pittance for compensation. Hopane hardly ever spoke after that. He just sat on our Alexandra porch from early in the morning, morosely shaking his head in amazement as he watched the daily activities of our neighbors and the people walking back and forth to the bus terminals. The passing cars and the weekend’s carnival, with all the fights and neighborhood commotion, drove him up the wall—he would just sit on the porch, grunting and spitting in disgust. At sunset he would shuffle into the house and keep to himself the rest of the evening.
One night my father’s temper got the best of him—again. Hopane had spilled some soup that he was carrying to his room, and my mother asked me to go outside and get a rag. It seemed innocent, but somehow my father felt my mother was accusing her father-in-law of being a slob. My father struck my mother several times, until she was left cowering and dazed against the kitchen wall. I jumped between them. “Papa, please!” I cried. He was about to hit me, but quickly changed his mind when my grandfather turned around and screamed at him to stop. “Selema, don’t you dare lay another finger on that poor girl. Don’t you remember the savage thing you did to her in Springs? I’ve been with your mother for more than sixty years and have never once laid a hand on her. Don’t you dare!” My father stormed out of the house. After midnight I heard him return without saying a word. Things were never the same between my parents after that. My father became withdrawn, almost a stranger in our home.
City life became too much for my grandfather. He felt trapped in a situation far beyond his control. All the crazy happenings in our home and around the township made him so irritable that he often quarreled with Mamoshaba. My parents decided that she should go and live with my uncle Kenneth in Springs, but the move didn’t help. Hopane became angrier, more difficult and withdrawn. He began to eat less and less, and six months later he fell very ill. Hopane practically willed himself to die. His daily routine was reduced to shuffling back and forth between his bedroom and the front porch. He died in 1952—from a broken heart, I believe. I was only thirteen, but I remember my grandfather’s passing with a deep bitterness. His funeral was especially sad for me because he did not deserve to be in Alexandra Township when he passed away. His dream had been to live his last days on his farm in Walmaanstal and to be buried there. His death and burial in Alex was not only painful for our family, but soon afterwards his widow lost what little zest she had for life as well. Hardly a year went by before Mamoshaba fell deathly ill. The cause of her death was definitely the shock of her husband’s passing and the impact of losing their farm. We buried my grandmother in Kwa-Thema Township cemetery. Thema was the new settlement for Africans who were forcibly moved from Payneville, Springs, after it too was proclaimed a “black spot” located in an area designated “for whites only.”
Aside from witnessing the destruction of my grandfather’s legacy and life, life in Alexandra during the late 1940s began taking a form that would shape my political and racial ideology. The legacy of dispossession, and racial social engineering, ensured that blacks would not—for the foreseeable future—enjoy the benefits of our continent’s wealth. The government had made it plain that Africans were less than second-class citizens. Their attitude was clear: Let them fight, kill each other, drink themselves to death, infect each other with venereal diseases, and work for little or no wages. Twelfth Avenue, where we lived, was the main artery through the township, leading to the main bus terminal at Number Two Square. People off for wo
rk would start for the terminal as early as 4:00 a.m. By the time I was up an hour and a half later, I could hear their feet shuffle on the gravel road in unison like an army of soldiers marching to the beat of a silent drum. Alexandra, like Kliptown and Sophiatown Townships, were black freehold communities where Africans could own property. It was also a political haven for radical activist leaders like Dr. A. B. Xuma, Walter Sisulu, Ida Mtwana, Lillian Ngoyi, Oliver Tambo, Albert Luthuli, and Nelson Mandela—all African National Congress stalwarts—who honed their organizational and oratorical skills at Number Three Square in Alexandra.
Still Grazing Page 5
