In early March, my parents took me to see Buitendacht, now Germiston’s Manager of non-European Affairs, about using his influence so that I could get my passport. I was ashamed to see how my parents had to grovel at this motherfucker’s feet, calling him baas and morena (king). In Payneville, it was my mother who had taught him the ropes when he was a rookie superintendent fresh out of Stellenbosch University. At the time, he was green and knew nothing about African life. Now here he was, sitting on his high horse as manager of Native Affairs. Sickened as I felt, I was nevertheless helpless. I needed the damn passport. In order to be issued one, an African had to supply a letter of reference from his local police station, the Special Branch Police, his parish priest, his last school principal, a letter from his overseas sponsor, a letter of acceptance from the school to be attended, four hundred pounds in cash in case the applicant was stranded abroad, proof of available funds for a round-trip ticket, sufficient expense money for six months, and a health certificate. They really made it almost impossible for a kaffir to leave the country. Buitendacht told my parents and me that it was a waste of time to go through the trouble of trying to study music overseas. Instead, I should finish school and get a constructive job in South Africa. I looked at the motherfucker like he was crazy, quietly cussing him under my breath. In the end he said he would try his best and telephone my parents with a disposition. We never heard from him.
On March 21, shortly after the visit to Buitendacht, I was at Dorkay House with Ian Bernhardt, preparing our itinerary for the Jazz Epistles’ national tour, when we got word that the police had just opened fire on a crowd of Africans in Sharpeville, who were demonstrating against the town council’s raising of rents. More than 69 demonstrators were killed and 250 wounded. Almost all of them were shot in the back while fleeing from the police. I didn’t understand the full import of what had happened until the following day. We only had state-controlled radio stations and a few newspapers. There was no television. People in the townships were roaming the streets, furious at this news. An atmosphere of major rebellion was in the air. Robert Sobukwe and many of his colleagues held a demonstration where they all burned their passbooks in public. The entire ANC leadership, with Albert Luthuli at the helm, immediately repeated the same action. More than thirty thousand people marched from Langa Township to Cape Town City Hall to protest the outrage. All over the country, rallies, demonstrations, and marches were being organized. The government rolled out the army and elite police with battle tanks, armored military trucks and vans, and tens of thousands of troops to man strategic points in the townships and other volatile parts of the country. The atmosphere was tense.
The government declared a state of emergency and the country was turned into a military state. Gatherings of more than ten people were outlawed. Because of this new law, Bernhardt told us our national tour had to be canceled. The detention of political leaders of the ANC, the PAC, the Communist Party, and the trade unions, along with other radical activists, went into high gear. Some leaders fled the country illegally. Mandela and Tambo announced the beginning of the armed liberation struggle from Tanzania. Other African leaders sought asylum in the few newly independent African countries. All liberation organizations were now banned. The government was especially incensed that Mandela and Tambo had slipped through their fingers.
Shortly, Mandela returned to South Africa and for the next few years lived as a fugitive all over the country, visiting his new wife, Winnie, while keeping on the run. It was decided that Oliver Tambo should remain abroad, where he would keep the ANC alive, lobby support internationally for the liberation struggle, and arrange for the training of fighters. I was continuing my studies with Vitali and Bradford. After a late lesson one night, I went to sleep over at the Bermans. Just before midnight, members of the Special Branch Police came to arrest Monty. They turned over every drawer and desk and ransacked most of the house, looking for documents. As they led Monty handcuffed out the front door, they were surprised to see me sleeping on the couch. One policeman asked, “What are you doing here in the white people’s living room?” I quickly made up some shit about coming to visit my aunt and her boyfriend, but their one room was too small for me to sleep, so the baas let me sleep on the couch. The policemen didn’t believe me. One of them called Spengler to inquire what should be done about me. All Spengler kept screaming in his ear was: “Fuck the kaffir, do you have Berman?” The policeman would answer in a concerned voice, “Yes, we have Berman, but there is a kaffir in the house.” Spengler repeated, “I said, fuck the kaffir, do you fucking have Berman?” One more time the policeman answered, “Yes, we have Berman.” “Then, fucking, bring him to me for fucking godsakes,” Spengler exploded. The policeman took my passbook details and vowed to follow up on my lie.
After the police left with Monty, it took a long time for us to go back to sleep. The next morning Myrtle, surrounded by her four daughters and her housekeeper, was very cool, but obviously upset for the children’s sake. She told me it was best that I go home and lie low, because if the police came back and found me, there would surely be trouble.
When I got to Natalspruit Township, the streets were crawling with black and white policemen armed with machine guns atop tanks, ready to kill. This was the first time I had seen something like this. African policemen had never carried guns before. The previous night, when the white policemen had arrested Monty, was my first time I’d ever seen a white man in handcuffs. When I told my parents what had happened, they agreed that I should stay close to home. I also told my mother that Myrtle had asked that she not call her at work or home, because all the telephones were most likely tapped. In a few days the police came back for Myrtle, leaving her daughters with the housekeeper. Even though I was lying low, I paid occasional visits to Dorkay House, where the mood was pretty glum, especially after Myrtle’s arrest. Everyone was very down. However, many Dorkay House members had joined the underground, preparing to go into exile for training, or just helping to organize sabotage squads in their townships. At Whitey’s shebeen near the Albert Street Pass Office, where most of the Drum magazine staff came to drink, I ran into the journalist Lewis Nkosi, who had written in his Golden City Post Sunday column about how I had been found in the Bermans’ living room when the police came to arrest Monty. He was with my cousin Ronnie Manyosi, a fellow journalist and crack photographer. I went after Lewis: “You motherfucker, you dirty motherfucker. How the fuck could you write something like that when you know I am waiting for my passport? Whose side are you on, anyway?” I wanted to kill him.
Ronnie stepped between us, as Lewis objected while backing out the door. “I’m just doing my job, I’m a journalist,” he said.
“Journalist, my fuckin’ black ass,” I said. “I swear Lewis, don’t let me catch you alone. I’m going to break your head because I don’t care anymore. You fucked me up for life.”
Somebody pulled him away from Whitey’s while he was still protesting, “I’m a journalist. I’m a journalist.”
Just in case the Special Branch Police might come looking for me after Lewis’s stupid piece, I went to stay at my uncle Kenneth’s house in Springs. He put me to work looking after his supermarket while he took off for Durban, claiming he had never been on a holiday. He said there was no way the police would come looking for me in his shop. I would be safe there. This was all tongue-in-cheek, of course.
Three weeks after Sharpeville, Premier Hendrik Verwoerd was shot point-blank, but the assassin failed to kill him. The incident gave him a whole new “messianic” persona. After his release from the hospital and recovery, Verwoerd began wearing white suits. To celebrate the assassination’s failure, he gathered his cabinet and staunchest followers to a ceremony where he released a white dove into the air. The dove refused to fly and instead walked away from the ceremony, with press photographers snapping it from every possible angle. It was not a good omen.
From that day on, the apartheid guillotine came crashing down on the country with more v
enom than ever before. Spengler’s Special Branch Police surveillance was intensified; a huge budget was created to pay more agents and collaborators. Political arrests, banishments, assassinations, house arrests, banning orders, accelerated treason trials, and every manner of ploy to get the country under apartheid’s foot was introduced into the daily lives of South Africans. Our paranoia had now been upgraded to fear, loathing, suspicion, anger, and hate.
The next month was even tenser. There was no music work. Everyone was on edge. Tired of sitting at home, one day I decided to go to Dorkay House to see if anything was happening. Besides, a few days earlier, Ian Bernhardt had left a message for me at home that he needed to see me. When I arrived at Dorkay House, he told me that Robert Loder of Anglo American Mining, a major supporter of Union Artists, had secured the money for my round-trip airplane ticket to England, plus five hundred pounds in pocket money. I was a step closer to getting out of South Africa. I was thrilled, but stayed guarded. I really had to be cool and stay below the police radar. Kippie and the Epistles were upset that I would soon be leaving the group, but they understood. Besides, we couldn’t work anyway.
Around mid-May, my mother called me in Springs and told me it was urgent that I come home because there was something very important she needed to discuss with me. My uncle Kenneth had just returned from his vacation. Worried, I hurried back to Natalspruit, apprehensive and wondering what kind of news my mother had in store for me. When I got to the house, she was still at work. When she came home for lunch, she told me to sit down at the kitchen table. She then pulled a passport out of her bag and put it in front of me. I was so happily stunned and excited that I jumped into her arms and hugged her tight. I rushed in my father’s car to tell Ian Bernhardt the news. He quickly called the travel agent to book me on a plane the next day. The night before my departure, I wrote a long letter to Barbara. It was sad having to leave without seeing her. She had been my first friend. The following morning I picked up my tickets and pocket money, drove back home, and started packing.
My parents took the afternoon off from work, and after a light lunch we drove to the airport with my sisters Elaine and Sybil. I waved good-bye to my grandmother, who had come to bid me farewell. She had raised Barbara and me in Witbank, and the reality of my departure hit me full-blast because for the first time I had a strong feeling that this would be the last time I would be seeing my sisters, parents, grandmother, and all the people I had known all my life. Fearing that the Special Branch Police could show up anytime, we had made my departure as low-key and secretive as possible, because the fact of my having been present in the Bermans’ house during Monty’s arrest hung like a dark cloud over my exit.
My grandmother told me, “I don’t care what you do, Mousie, you don’t have to send any money or gifts, even if you’re very successful. Just always remember one thing: Write to your mother, my child.”
Although I was very sad to be leaving, deep in my heart I was excited and relieved to be leaving this cursed, godforsaken land.
Alf Kumalo, a family friend and Drum magazine photographer, my uncle Putu, and his three young sons met us at the departure lounge. My flight was announced around four o’clock. After Uncle Putu led a short prayer, we posed for some final pictures. I hugged my dad and kissed my mother and sisters. I was paranoid. I kept thinking the Special Branch Police were going to show up and arrest me. I was anxious to clear immigration. After I passed through the turnstiles and the security officers, I turned and waved to everyone who was now pressed against the fence. Alf somehow got onto the tarmac and was snapping away.
I entered the plane and was shown to my aisle seat by a white stewardess who insisted on calling me “sir.” Everybody else on the airplane was white. I was praying feverishly for the Special Branch Police not to show up. When the airplane finally took off, it was as though a very heavy weight had been taken off me—as if I had been painfully constipated for twenty-one years and was finally taking the greatest shit of my life. I said a little prayer for Monty and Myrtle, Robert Sobukwe, and all the thousands of political detainees who were up for treason. Because our flight to London was going via Salisbury, Nairobi, Khartoum, Cairo, and Rome, the pilot announced that it would take twenty hours.
Twenty hours! I thought a bottle of brandy and about six beers should get me to London easily. I realized for the first time that I had never ordered a lawful drink in my life. In the shebeen, when you ordered drinks, you asked for “a straight and fill the table,” which meant a full bottle and twelve beers. A “half-jack” was a pint, a “nip” was half a pint, a “honey” was a quarter of a pint. When the pilot announced that we would be landing in Salisbury in thirty minutes, I figured that the honey and one beer would do. But the white passengers were ordering gin and tonic, rum and coke, brandy and ginger ale, vodka and orange juice, whisky and soda water. It all seemed so strange to be drinking lawfully. Back home we didn’t mix our drinks; we had to share one glass, and often we had to drink in a hurry before the police came. The trick was to consume the evidence as quickly as possible and then break the empties. The police raids seemed so stupid now that I was sitting in this plane drinking with all these nice white folks who were ogling me unashamed, wondering if this nigger would know how to order a civilized drink.
Sensing the pressure that was now hovering over my social shortcomings, I was able to summon some of my moviegoing memories, and Humphrey Bogart came to me in a much-needed vision of social redemption, sitting in a bar on a high stool, cigarette dangling from his mouth, arrogantly telling a black barman, “A triple shcotch on the rockksh, light on the shoda.” I channeled that voice, complete with the lisp, much to the disappointment of the oglers, except the stewardess, who was anxious to lock up the galley before the plane landed. The drink she brought me was fizzy and flat-tasting, and the ice had diluted it. It lacked the shebeen sting of a neat drink—I decided right then that Bogart was a wimpy drinker. However, I ordered the same drink at every stopover and by the time I arrived in London, I should have been sloshed. But I was too excited to get drunk.
We landed in London on Wednesday, May 18, 1960.
My grandfather, Walter Bowers, a Scottish mining engineer and shoe cobbler (above left) married Johanna Mabena (above right). Johanna, on the left, is posing with her older sister, Elizabeth Motsoene, in the early 1900s. Photos courtesy of the author.
Solomon Khalu Bowers, Johanna’s son and a cinema manager in Brakpan, was murdered in 1947 by two jealous, racist white men who felt they deserved his job instead. He was thirty-two years old. At the trial, the judge released the killers with a warning “not to go around bothering black people.” Photo courtesy of the author.
My grandparents Mamoshaba and Hopane Masekela at their wedding in the early 1880s, dressed to the nines. The love of good clothes remains in the blood. Photo courtesy of the author.
My mother, Pauline (Polina) Bowers, was a schoolteacher before beginning a forty-year career as a beloved social worker. Photo courtesy of the author.
My father, Thomas Selema Masekela, was a noted pioneer sculptor. He also worked as a schoolteacher before becoming a health inspector. After fifty years of community service as an inspector, he retired. Photo by Alf Kumalo.
Selema and Polina’s children (clockwise from top left): Ramapolo Hugh was born April 4, 1939; Barbara was born July 18, 1941; Elaine was born March 23, 1947; Sybil was born September 29, 1953. Sybil died of AIDS in 1998, just ten days before her forty-fifth birthday. Photos courtesy of the author.
Showing off Satchmo’s trumpet, which had just arrived in the courier post (1956). Photo by Jurgen Schadeberg.
The same day that we received the Louis Armstrong trumpet, I took to the streets of Sophiatown, jumping for joy. Photo by Alf Kumalo, courtesy of UWC-Robben Island Museum Mayibuye Archives.
Walking down President Street in Johannesburg with my good friend George Molotlegi in 1955 (right). Photo courtesy of the author.
Performing with the Huddleston Jazz B
and in the recreation hall at St Peter’s in 1955. Photo courtesy of Bailey’s African History Archives, Johannesburg.
My mother kisses me goodbye before I board the plane to leave South Africa in 1960. Photos by Alf Kumalo.
Playing for Miriam Makeba’s second album, The Many Voices of Miriam Makeba, at RCA’s Webster Hall studios on East 13th Street in 1961. Photo courtesy of the author.
A year later, while the band was performing at Tivoli Gardens in Helsinborg, Denmark, Miriam and I took the band on a picnic on our day off. Photos courtesy of the author.
Miriam Makeba and me on our wedding day, May 9, 1964. Photos courtesy of the author.
In 1968, Jet magazine claimed that I eloped with Chris Calloway, Cab’s daughter. We were married only three months but the marriage was extremely turbulent and filled with so much substance abuse that it felt like thirty years. Photo by Jack Robinson/Vogue © Condé Nast Publications, Inc.
Still Grazing Page 15
