From Cape Town, we took a British ocean liner to Durban. The outstanding feature of this trip was that at sea, South African laws did not apply at all. The cast was invited to sit at the captain’s table, which had been specially extended for us. The captain welcomed us enthusiastically and assured us that we were as free as any white passenger on his ship. Although the rest of the cast had been on this kind of voyage before, for me it was a special taste of total freedom from segregation and oppression that only exacerbated my hunger to get out of South Africa. That night I wrote Huddleston another long letter of appeal from the ship.
In Durban we stayed at Mrs. Phillips’s boardinghouse, the only place that would accommodate black American merchant seamen working on the Farrel Lines, an international shipping company. I moved in with Louisa Emmanuel, her boyfriend Ray Jacobs, and another colored couple. The next day, however, the Woodpeckers persuaded me to move in with them because I would have the freedom to bring women to our quarters after the shows. These guys were the playboys of the company. The day after the first show at the Durban City Hall, they took me to Lamontville Township’s supermarket, where they selected a buxom, big-hipped beauty whom we invited to the evening show, after which she came to the boardinghouse with me. The ’Peckers also brought their own women, and after a few bottles of brandy, we each dug into our partners with the lights on. From time to time the crazy singers would leave what they were doing to cheer me on, as if they were watching a soccer game. At first I was embarrassed, but they screamed, “Go ahead and do it, boy. Don’t keep the babe waiting. We’re with you all the way—yeah!” This bizarre scene was repeated every night with different women. Louisa and her roommates scolded the Woodpeckers, claiming they were corrupting me. But Victor Ndlazilwane, the group’s leader, just laughed. “This boy is a man now, and he is having the time of his life. Don’t try and turn him into a little pussycat. Go to your room and let the cobwebs envelop you in your dull existence. Leave the boy alone!”
Victor and his colleagues warned me that if I thought Durban was a man’s paradise, I was in for a major treat in Port Elizabeth. When the revue hit Port Elizabeth, a coastal city along the Indian Ocean between Cape Town and Durban, we played for two sold-out weeks at the famous Feathermarket Hall. The Durban scene was repeated every night at our boardinghouse in New Brighton Township. After the show closed, we had a few days off before we were to head back to Cape Town. The Woodpeckers hadn’t warned me sufficiently about the women of New Brighton. Every one that I had spent my nights with came back to my room in turns. It was obvious that they had arranged it among themselves to give each other a chance, because after one of them had spent a few hours with me, another would impatiently knock at my door. My current partner would suddenly remember something urgent she had to attend to, quickly jump into her clothes, and greet the one waiting outside very cheerfully. This went on for three days, right up until we boarded the bus, which took us to the ship. By then I was a pathetic, worn-out shadow of myself. The Woodpeckers literally helped me onto the ship with Victor laughing, “We warned you, sonny, but you wouldn’t listen.”
I was only seventeen, and I craved adoration and respect from the Woodpeckers. And they gave it to me. Things had been great, but now my johnson was so sore I had trouble walking upright. I had to sleep on my back because of the pain. Finally I went to a doctor in Cape Town and confessed my sexual antics. He told me, “You have gonorrhea. If you keep doing this kind of thing, you could end up dying or never be able to use your penis for anything except pissing. Does your family know what you’re out here doing? This is disgusting!” My johnson had now become a painful scab. I had to take penicillin shots for the rest of the tour. It didn’t matter: my addictions to alcohol and sex were well under way.
For the next year I progressed with the group to the point where I was leading the band. We toured pretty much nonstop. The makeup of the troupe would change slightly from time to time as musicians and other troupe members would leave and new ones join. While we were doing a six-week stint at the Johannesburg City Hall, Miriam joined our revue, replacing Dolly Rathebe, who went on maternity leave. Miriam was already, at twenty-five, unquestionably a full-fledged star. She had just quit the Manhattan Brothers because during a concert at the Bantu Men’s Social Center, Boykie and Kit had reappeared, pulled out pistols, and tried to abduct her while she was on stage. A shoot-out ensued between Boykie and Kit and the Young Americans, Sophiatown’s colorful gang led by Boetie Nkehle, fresh out of jail for a murder rap. Miriam barely escaped with her life, but because he’d saved her from abduction, she automatically became Boetie’s girl. Herbie had been after Miriam to join his company for a while anyway, and offered her much more money than she was making with the Manhattan Brothers. More important, African Jazz promised her a safer environment than the Manhattan Brothers circuit, and, of course, my being in the band was an extra incentive. The two of us resumed our romance and lived together on the road for the next few months. This was the first time we experienced this kind of long-term, exclusive intimacy with each other—or, in my case, with anyone.
Dorothy Masuka and Victor, the leader of the Woodpeckers, had an open relationship while we were on the road because he was married back in his hometown of Benoni and had a few women in every city. Dorothy and Miriam were close friends, and when we got back to Port Elizabeth, Miriam went to live with Dorothy at her father’s house. I went to stay at the old boardinghouse with my crazy friends the Woodpeckers, where we quickly returned to our debauchery. Miriam was furious and deeply hurt, and made it clear that she would not be as tolerant of my philandering as Dorothy was with Victor. I was too young to understand at the time, but I had just that quickly destroyed a beautiful relationship and broken the heart of someone who really loved me. By the time the show hit Cape Town, Miriam was cultivating a serious romance with Sonny Pillay, the star of the show. I was actually relieved, because Sonny was very close to the Woodpeckers and me, an occasional drinking buddy, and a highly sophisticated gentleman, far more disciplined than us. I was happy for Miriam and glad the pressure was off me.
By September 1957, I had become the bandleader of the show and felt I deserved a raise in pay from ten pounds a week to at least fifteen. Herbie disagreed—he told me I was too young for that kind of money. He said there was no way he was going to give me a raise. He asked, “How much does your father earn?” I replied, “Fifty-six pounds a month.” Herbie said, “Now, if I pay you fifteen pounds a week, you’ll be earning four pounds more than your father. Don’t you think that would break his heart?” That was it. I wasn’t going to take that kind of insulting bullshit. I quit on the spot. On the bus ride home from Pretoria, I was fuming but also felt a bit of a thrill. This was my first confrontation with a white man in South Africa, and though Verwoerd was still tightening his screws around Africans, I felt victorious nonetheless for confronting the exploitative Alfred Herbert. When I got home and told my parents, they screamed with laughter. “So, what do you plan to do now, boy?” my father asked.
That night I wrote Huddleston yet another letter. I explained that I was tired of the white shit in South Africa and asked him to please try to get me a music scholarship.
The following morning I went to Dorkay House. The place was buzzing with artists scurrying for appointments, musicians leaning against their horn cases, hoping to land a gig, or just practicing on their instruments playing jazz cover tunes and original compositions in one or the other small rehearsal rooms. In the large rehearsal hall I noticed some of the Manhattan Brothers caucusing with Todd Matshikiza, a gifted composer, journalist, and pianist. It turned out the Manhattan Brothers were going on a Cape Province tour and they needed a trumpet player—I was lucky enough to be hired on the spot.
For two decades the Manhattan Brothers had been South Africa’s most popular group. However, their Cape Town concerts were only sparsely attended. Word was that they had stayed away too long and the Woodpeckers, who had also just left African Jazz, were now t
he new darlings of township audiences. Todd Matshikiza was abruptly summoned back to Johannesburg to begin work on the jazz opera King Kong. Clive Menell, the CEO of Anglo-Vaal Mining, who had been working for years with Todd to make the musical a reality, had secured enough investors. King Kong was about the life of the controversial heavyweight boxing champion Ezekiel Dlamini, who, while in prison for strangling his girlfriend to death in a jealous rage, committed suicide by drowning himself rather than serve his twelve-year sentence.
Mackay Davashe, Kippie Moeketsi, and Nathan Mdledle, the leader of the Manhattan Brothers, went out looking for a pianist to replace Todd. Christopher “Columbus” Ngcukane, the great bandleader and saxophonist from Cape Town’s Langa Township, led them to Dollar Brand (now Abdullah Ibrahim), a brilliant piano player. For the next three months, as we crisscrossed the Eastern Cape, our reception went from fair to spectacular, but we were still not selling out our venues—nor were we making any money. I was spending a lot of time during my days with Kippie and Abdullah Ibrahim around a piano. They would teach me the complicated chord structures for the latest Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker compositions and songs from the limitless book of Duke Ellington, Abdullah’s favorite. Abdullah, who had brought his acoustic guitar along, often regaled us with folk songs from Cape Town’s colored minstrel carnival. He was a living reservoir of that genre’s repertoire. He also had a rib-cracking sense of humor. If I didn’t make any money, at least I received a music education I could never have afforded from these two musical geniuses during our fateful summer tour.
On my return to Johannesburg, my parents along with my two younger sisters, Elaine, eleven, and Sybil, five, met me at Germiston station. When I got off the train, my sisters began to giggle at the sight of me. This continued all the way to our house in Natalspruit. Not understanding the reason for all this mirth, I finally asked my mother, “What is the matter with these girls?” She said, “Oh, Boy-Boy, my poor child, you are so thin. You look like a skeleton.” My sisters now shrieked with laughter. My mother finally had to reprimand them. Shortly after moving back with my family, my father hit me with a dose of reality. He told me I was expected to pay a portion of the household bills and help look after Sybil. I was insulted at first, but deep down I knew he was right. I had left school and made the choice to live in an adult’s world. Since I hadn’t saved any money to get my own place, I had no choice but to live under his roof, by his rules.
My mother spoke to Mr. Hlahatsi, the chief clerk at the Natalspruit Municipal Office, part of the Germiston City Council, to see if he could get me a clerical job. Hlahatsi, who had known me as a child in Payneville, was much loved by the Afrikaner township manager, Mr. Williams, because of his head-scratching, ass-licking, Uncle Tom ways. He and my mother had worked under Buitendacht when he was a young township superintendent in Springs. Buitendacht was now Germiston’s manager of native affairs and one of Verwoerd’s top advisers. After bowing and cheesing on my behalf, Hlahatsi was able to secure me a job at the municipal office as a language interpreter/housing clerk for Du Plessis, a young, arrogant Afrikaner graduate of Stellenbosch University, the training ground for apartheid bureaucrats. I had to translate Zulu, Sotho, Tswana, Xhosa, and the other indigenous languages into Afrikaans for him. To qualify for a house in South Africa, an African had to prove that he had either been born in the area or had lived there for at least ten years—all in accordance with the government’s Urban Areas Act and Influx Control legislation.
Every day I had to work in an office that was one of the principal mechanisms for oppressing Africans. I worked with bigoted Afrikaner administrators and alongside Uncle Tom blacks who looked the other way in order to keep their low-paying jobs. Here I was helping to process papers that dictated where and with whom people could live, translating for my “boss” what their exact status was, and getting caught right in the middle of the decisions that displaced so many Africans out of the areas they and their ancestors had been raised in, and deported them to barren, arid homelands and gulags—the Siberias of South Africa—where it was next to impossible to eke out a living or even cultivate the hard, wretched earth to grow food or graze cattle. I was working deep inside the very system that engineered forced removals of families, prevented people from being together because of their ethnic backgrounds, and rearranged their lives so that the new Afrikaner hierarchy could dispossess them of their properties, their lands, their livestock, their pride and their humanity.
One of the oldest African residents in Germiston, known to just about everyone in the township, came into my office one day to complain that she had been asked to show proof in order to obtain a new home. She had never obtained any documents because she had lived in the area since the turn of the century and had never felt that such a process was necessary. “Even Buitendacht knows me. You can ask him yourself. Tell that little boy (Du Plessis) to phone Buitendacht now because he will tell him who I am.” I modified the translation for Du Plessis, explaining her status and suggesting that he call the manager of native affairs. Du Plessis went crimson in the face. Infuriated, he screamed, “Tell this bloody kaffir old maid to get the hell out of my office. And that if she does not come here with the right papers, it’s off back to blerry Lesotho with her black ass.” I refused to translate his insult, and told him so. “Then the both of you blerry get out of my office.” Du Plessis was now delirious. The old woman wanted to know what he was saying. I just said to her in Sotho, “It’s all right. Let’s go, Mama.” I led her to my office across the corridor and told her that she was better off going to Buitendacht’s office herself, because the little white boy didn’t understand who she really was. She agreed, and left my office looking very surprised. I immediately went to Hlahatsi’s office and tendered my resignation, much to his surprise. Watching Hlahatsi and the other clerks, all much older than me, carrying on like Stepin Fetchit, scratching, tap-dancing, and laughing even when they were insulted—“Oh, but the baas is such a funny baas, such a playful baas, such a kind baas”—was so sickening that I had often wanted to scream or throw up. It was nauseating, but this last episode with Du Plessis was the end of the line for me. I was not prepared to take any more of this shit. I had to get out of there before I killed someone. Mr. Williams, the township manager, summoned me into his office while I was packing my things and asked me to reconsider. He knew the old woman and would rectify the unfortunate mistake, but I told him enough was enough—I couldn’t stay any longer, especially for seventeen pounds a month. I was out of there.
To make matters worse, there was no external outlet to vent my frustration. My parents also worked for this system. Even though they were respected because the city council couldn’t function without their expertise, they were pissed off by Hlahatsi and his ilk. But they had very little choice—these were the only jobs available for people like them. Their only other alternative was to be political activists and go to jail. They were dedicated community workers, and people like the old lady that Du Plessis threw out of his office needed them all the time. They were not political animals. But I was embarrassed for them. After resigning, I had to watch my back because every township was teeming with government collaborators, and there really was no telling what consequences could befall me. My only consolation was that there were many like me who refused to take shit from racist white folks.
Hardly a week went by before my mother brought me a message to come and telephone Gwigwi from her office. I had caught a tidal wave of good luck. Todd Matshikiza had finished writing the music for King Kong. Jonas Gwangwa and I were required to copy the orchestral parts from the sketches, which Mackay, Kippie, Sol Klaaste, and Spike Glasser were writing out. These orchestrations would be the accompaniment charts for the different songs in the musical. South African–born Spike was specially brought from London’s Goldsmith Music Conservatory to be the chief orchestrator, and Leon Gluckman, who was resident director at the Windmill Theatre in the West End of London, was chosen to direct the production. Spike and
Leon were childhood friends.
This was a colossal undertaking. It was backbreaking work, but it felt good to be part of something that had to do with my craft. And at fifteen pounds a week, the money was delicious. Our team moved into Spike’s mother’s house in Berea, where the four orchestrators worked around the piano in the living room and passed the charts over to us, page by page, in the dining room, where we did all the copying of the individual orchestral parts. We worked from nine every morning until ten at night, with lunch and dinner breaks. Because we worked long hours, I moved in with the Bermans, who lived in Johannesburg’s northern suburb of Sandringham, the reason being that the buses to Natalspruit stopped running at nine-thirty in the evening. When we finished work, we always repaired to Sam Tau’s famous shebeen in Western Native Township, a favorite stop for musicians, actors, and journalists. Even if we got home at four in the morning, by eight o’clock we would always be waiting for Spike outside Dorkay House, hung over but ready to go to work. This was our daily routine, except on Sundays, when we had to find our own way to Berea. There were no days off.
Still Grazing Page 13
