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Kaffir Boy
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Kaffir Boy in America
Miriam's Song
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Deadly Memory
The Last Liberal

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Kaffir Boy
Kaffir Boy in America
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KAFFIR BOY IN AMERICA

CHAPTER ONE

As the jalopy left the yard and rattled up the potholed street, I turned my head for a last look at my family, standing in a row in front of the shack, waving sadly in the pale morning mist. There was my mother, brother, and five sisters.

Dad and me in North Carolina

My father had already left for his menial job under white bosses, who ignored his self-taught skills as a carpenter and underpaid him. I wanted to tell the driver to turn back but I didn't. My family vanished from sight. I wondered if I would ever see them again alive. The year was 1978 and I was 18 years old.

The jalopy lumbered through the narrow, garbage-strewn streets of Alexandra, a South African ghetto, along which ghostly figures of black men and women hurried to catch the black buses, droning in the distance, that would carry them to their places of toil in the white world. Suddenly, rounding a corner into Twelfth Avenue, we stumbled upon a convoy of police vans and trucks stationed along the street. A pass raid was in progress. Black men and women, some half-naked and others disheveled, were being hauled out of their shacks and flung into the vans and trucks, leaving behind children standing in tears in front of smashed and gaping doors. Panic seized us. The driver, a short, gaunt, middle-aged Venda man, quickly suggested we turn back and follow another route. "No, they've already seen us, Nditwani," I said. "If we turn back they'll get suspicious. Drive through and let's keep our fingers crossed." We spoke in Venda, our native dialect. The name "Nditwani" meant "What are you doing to me?" "What if they stop us?" Nditwani asked anxiously. "You may never get to America."

"I will," I said defiantly. "My papers are in order. My passbook has all the necessary stamps."

"But mine doesn't," Nditwani said. "Remember, I live in Alexandra illegally." The Peri-Urban authorities, white administrators who lorded over the ghetto, had repeatedly refused him a residential permit, insisting that he belonged and should return to the Venda homeland where he could not eke out a living. "It's too late now," I said. We had already entered the police zone. "If we turn back we'll surely be stopped. Anyway, they seem to be having so much fun rounding up and humiliating their prisoners that they probably won't even notice us."

I said all this in a calm, determined voice. It was all bravado. In truth my heart throbbed with fear at the likelihood that we might be stopped, interrogated, and possibly arrested on some trumped-up charge. The jalopy slowly made its way past the police vans and trucks with barred windows. The short distance of a block seemed interminable. I prayed silently. Several black policemen in brown uniforms, armed with truncheons and sjamboks (rawhide whips with metal tips), threw brief glances at us but did not order the car to stop. They seemed preoccupied with rounding up the scores of men and women and ensuring that none escaped. Prisoners meant money in the form of bribes and arbitrary fines. At last we were through. Panic subsided.

"That was a close call," Nditwani said.

"Yes, very close," I replied with a sigh.

But my relief was short-lived. What if my home just a few blocks away were raided before the morning was over and my mother arrested? Where would she get the bail or bribe money, since she had insisted that I take every penny with me because "you need a little something to start you on your new life in America? I boiled with impotent rage. Was I doing the right thing in leaving? Shouldn't I stay and fight it out like all the rest? My heart was torn.

"Don't leave," a voice pleaded inside me.

"Leave and save yourself," a second voice countered.

"What's there to stay for?"

"Your family, the struggle," the first voice said.

"What about your freedom?" the second voice returned.

"What about America? What about your dreams?"

I left. The instinct to survive, sharpened by years of living under the nightmare of police oppression, without freedom, without hope, told me that leaving was the right thing to do and that someday the reasons would be made clear. But guilt continued to torture my heart.

The jalopy finally left the ghetto and entered a wide, paved road—roads used mainly by whites were always paved—leading to Lombardy East, one of the white suburbs through which we had to pass to reach the main highway to the airport. The sun had now fully risen and burned off the mist covering a large tract of farmland to our left as we headed east. The farm belonged to a choleric Portuguese derisively known among blacks as Matariani. He was notorious for underpaying and overworking his laborers. From time to time Granny, my mother, and other women in the neighborhood, most without permits to live in Alexandra, toiled for him, planting and harvesting corn, beets, potatoes and other crops. They were paid about three rands ($1.50) for a ten-hour day.

I sat stiffly alongside Nditwani, who now hummed a tune to himself. Since the police roadblock, the two of us had hardly exchanged a word. He seemed aware that I was grappling with a tormented conscience and thought it wise to leave me alone. The backseat was crowded with my luggage of several cheap suitcases and a totebag, packed with all my worldly belongings.

As I stared at the luggage, there came flooding into my mind the strange coincidences which had led me, at the age of eleven, to make that terrifying yet auspicious trip to the white world of Rosebank, a wealthy suburb of Johannesburg, where I met the Smiths, Granny's employers, who did not fit the stereotypes I had grown up with. The Smiths treated their black servants with paternalistic generosity. They introduced me to books that changed my life and provided a ray of hope in a hopeless world. Later, when I began working for them at several menial jobs—sweeping driveways, shining shoes, cleaning the pool, washing cars, weeding the garden, and polishing brass and silver—they gave me my first tennis racket, a slightly warped Rod Laver autograph model, which led me to extraordinary adventures in the white tennis world of South Africa.

Then there was that purely accidental—or was it accidental?—meeting with Stan Smith, the American tennis professional, and his wife, Margie, during the South African Breweries Open in November 1977, in which Stan reached the semi-finals in singles and won the doubles with Bob Lutz. I was the only black player participating and I lost in the qualifying rounds to Abe Segal, a former Wimbledon doubles champion with Gordon Forbes. Stan and Margie, after hearing my life story of growing up destitute in the ghetto, and my burning desire to go to college in America, had befriended me and made possible the miracle of my being awarded a tennis scholarship by an American college. Everything had happened so quickly. Nothing in all my life had prepared me for this day. Was I truly leaving or was it all a dream?

"You're very lucky to be going to America, you know," Nditwani said, breaking the spell of my thoughts as we entered Lombardy East.

"Yes. Very, very lucky."

"Man, just look at all those nice houses," he said, pointing out the window. "White people sure live like kings and queens."

In the bright morning sun the elegant houses of white folks could be seen in all their splendor. Birds sang from budding and evergreen trees, heralding the early arrival of spring in the Southern Hemisphere. Nditwani, a self-taught mechanic who repaired jalopies for a living, was one of my biggest fans. He had followed my tennis and scholastic career with interest. Though poor, he occasionally gave me money to buy books and used tennis balls, usually in return for my washing his cars. I appreciated his generosity.

"Things just don't happen this way for a ghetto boy, you know," Nditwani said. "So many of us try to escape from this hell but we always fail. We're like those prisoners in the movie Papillon. Remember Papillon?

We had both seen the movie, a favorite among males in the ghetto, several times at Kings, the local black cinema.

"Yes," I said. "I still can't believe they're letting me go."

"Well believe it, my friend," Nditwani said with pride.

"Believe it because our African gods, the gods of our ancestors, are powerful. They made this miracle possible."

"Do you really believe in Midzimu, Nditwani?" I asked. The pantheon of Venda gods was known as Midzimu.

"Of course I do. Don't you?"

"This god business is very confusing," I said. "There are so many of them. I don't know which one to believe."

"Well, whatever you choose to believe," Nditwani said, "don't ever believe in the white man's god."

"But my mother believes in Jesus Christ," I said.

"I respect your old lady," Nditwani said. "She's a good woman. There's no kinder person in the yard. But I think she's wrong to believe in the god of people who oppress us."

"I, too, have my doubts about the Christian god," I said. "You know what, Nditwani? I'll put off believing in any god until I have enough proof which is the true god and which are phony."

"Suit yourself," Nditwani said. "But I still believe that the African gods gave you this chance. They're watching over you. So don't waste it, or they'll get mad. And make us proud, my friend. Let the world know about our sufferings and our struggle and our dreams. Learn as much as you can in America and come back and teach us. There's a desperate need in Alexandra for educated people like you, as you know."

"Yes, I will come back."

"Okay, now that I've said what had been oppressing my chest, let me get back to the road," Nditwani said. "We mustn't get lost on this very special day." In the silence which ensued I pondered the strange fate which had decreed, against all odds, that I should survive the nightmares of my childhood—hunger, police raids and beatings, poverty, suffering, death—and at eighteen should leave my family, my friends, my home, everything and everyone I loved, to begin life anew in a strange land called America. Was there truly a purpose to my life after all?

My mother always insisted there was purpose each time something unusual occurred to alter my fortunes. She had said so when I was granted the permit without which I could not have registered at the local tribal school; again when I took my first trip to the white world of Rosebank and met the Smiths, Granny's employers; and a third time when I met the Americans Stan and Margie who made my dream of going to America come true. She was also the one who said, with tears streaming down her cheeks as she took the knife away from my hand, that she loved me, that I was her only hope and that if I died she would die too, that I should cling to life and things would get better. She emphatically believed that an all-knowing and loving God had planned everything right from the start, and that mischievous and ungodly people had temporarily botched things in a futile attempt to prevent the inevitable.

I lacked my mother's kind of faith in God. When I was still a mere child, apartheid had savagely robbed me of that innocence and trust without which such a faith is impossible, and had planted in my mind the seeds of a skepticism doomed to persist so long as I remained imprisoned under a system which maintained that the oppression and degradation of black people was God's law. Yet my skepticism had begun to be shaken, especially when I realized that countless black youngsters in the ghetto, some of them more gifted than I, had ended up dead, imprisoned, exiled, or driven insane by frustration, bitterness, rage and lack of opportunity. Others had become alcoholics, chronic gamblers, hardened criminals, drug addicts, unwed teen mothers and prostitutes, or had yielded themselves up, after heroic but futile struggles, to the countless temptations in the ghetto that led only to self-destruction. And here I was, at eighteen, relatively unscathed by comparison, going to America on a tennis scholarship, the first South African black ever to do so.

What power had saved me? I wondered. My own efforts? Talent? The spirits of my ancestors? Luck? My mother's inflexible resolve to see me succeed? Or was there indeed a greater power, in the form of the Christian God my mother worshipped, a God who governed her life and actions and gave her an almost saintly serenity amid the hurricane troubles of ghetto life? Maybe someday, amid freedom, in a society where I could read and question without fear of persecution, I would get to the bottom of this question of my mother's Christian God.

The jalopy left Lombardy East and entered the sprawling white suburb of Edenvale. As we drove past ritzy houses with tennis courts, I remembered the times when I had played tennis illegally in some of them, in defiance of segregation laws. I played with enlightened white friends, one of whom, Andre Zietsman, had studied in America. My thoughts turned to that strange and fascinating country. I wondered what sort of future awaited me there. Would my dreams, half-formed and fantastic as they seemed, be given the opportunity to come true? Was America truly the land of freedom and opportunity even for black people, as Andre had told me, as the magazines and pamphlets I had read, from the American consulate in Johannesburg and the embassy in Pretoria, depicted it to be, and as the few black Americans I had seen, the successful athletes, singers and entertainers, heralded it to be? Or was there racism and oppression lurking somewhere in American society that Andre had overlooked, that the contents of these magazines and pamphlets, and the lives and utterances of these superstars, had not revealed?

As the various scenes of Edenvale—department stores, parks, schools, houses, bowling greens, athletic fields, billboards, neatly dressed white people, expensive cars, gas stations—glided past the car window through which I stared vacantly, I chided myself for thinking too much, for imagining things, for being too anxious. America was the land of freedom. Slavery had long been abolished and the legendary Dr. King had won black people their equal rights which had enabled them to perform wonders. There could be no apartheid in America.

I ran my eyes over the three Donnay tennis rackets on my lap, a gift from Andre. Along with books, they had been my salvation from a dead-end life, my passport to freedom. Maybe they would be my key to a new life of fame and fortune in America. Once in the Promised Land I hoped to pursue without restraints a dream I had cherished since I first heard of Arthur Ashe: to become a professional tennis player. Many people had advised me to abandon such a delusion, but here I was taking the first step toward making it a reality.

"You know," I said to Nditwani, as we finally entered the highway leading to Jan Smuts Airport. "I feel more powerful, more alive and full of hope armed with these rackets than I would if I were armed with guns. I know that sounds foolish. Particularly now, when guns are needed, and not tennis rackets, to fight back against white oppression. But that's how I feel."

"We all have to fight the struggle in our own way," Nditwani said, echoing words I had heard before and believed. "Some have to use guns. Others must become doctors and teachers and lawyers. Maybe you'll become our first Arthur Ashe. Who knows? Then you can prove to white people that we, too, can succeed if given the chance."

"I want to make tons of money playing tennis," I said. "Why?" he asked, laughing.

"Because money means power," I said.

"It's the only thing white people respect."

"How did you get so clever?"

"I have been learning the ways of white folks," I said. We again lapsed into silence. Our conversation was in spurts. Aside from my meditative mood, we had to be constantly on the lookout for the police, who under apartheid laws had the right to stop any vehicle driven by blacks and interrogate its occupants.

The silence brought into my mind thoughts about my family. The realization that I was leaving them filled me with guilt. Yet it fired my determination to succeed in America so I could alleviate their suffering, which I knew I could have done had I chosen to stay. And this knowledge added to the guilt. As the eldest of seven children, and the first in the family to be educated, I would have been there to protect my siblings from the destructive elements of ghetto life, to insist on the importance of their education, and would have paid for their school fees, uniforms and books. I would have been there to urge them—just like my mother and Granny had urged me—to set goals in life, to be ambitious, to believe in themselves, to have dreams. After all, I had against all odds completed my matriculation. With Andre's help, I had landed a banking job at Barclays Bank, with prospects of advancement and reward dizzying for a ghetto boy. I was paid five times the combined wage of my mother and father, though I had been on the job only a few months, and they had been drudges for white people for years.

But I had to leave. My mother understood that my yearning for freedom had made me leave. The others in my family did not. She had to help them understand. Yet I was mystified by how she had come to know the true meaning of freedom when she had spent her entire life under the stunting force of a triple oppression: as a woman, an illiterate and a black. There was no doubt in my mind that I could never have survived the hell of ghetto life without her. Tears came to my eyes at the thought of her.

"We've made it, Mark," Nditwani shouted with joy, pointing to a sign which read JAN SMUTS AIRPORT, NEXT RIGHT. "I can hear the airplanes." Once we reached the huge airport we had difficulty following the signs to the terminals. We were afraid of entering areas reserved for whites. We saw white policemen nearby but dreaded asking them for directions to the international departure terminal, lest they end up arresting us. So we kept going around in circles. Finally we spotted the sign INTERNATIONAL DEPARTURES. Nditwani dropped me and the bags at the curb.

"I can't risk parking the car and coming inside to see you off," he said. "I understand," I said. Since his papers were not in order, any mishap like a parking ticket could have landed him in jail or had him deported to the tribal reserves. "Thanks very much, Nditwani, and good luck on the way back. You'd better tell the family that you did see my plane off or they'll die of worries." "I will. The gods be with you," he said in Venda, a tear in his eye. We embraced and he left.

As I lugged my heavy bags through the gigantic airport, white men and women gave me questioning looks, and some pointed at me amid whispers. The bunch of tennis rackets clutched under my arm apparently proclaimed me as the "black tennis star who was jetting to America," as one paper, the now-defunct Rand Daily Mail, had blazed the news of my imminent departure to the United States. Armed white policemen in neat uniforms and shiny boots stood at various locations inside the terminal. They stared at me as I made my way from the British Airways ticket counter to the international departure lounge. Except for the forlorn-faced men and women engaged in menial jobs, I was the only black in sight. I remained cool and occasionally stared back at an exasperated policeman. I relished the giddying and unbelievable prospect that in a few hours I would be beyond their reach, their persecution, their sadism, their vindictiveness, clean out of the house of bondage of which they were the guards. I wondered what they thought as they watched me leave. Did they know how ancient I felt at eighteen, how worn my soul had become? Did they know that I was leaving behind millions like me, who longed to breathe freedom in the land of their birth? Did they know that their ruthless enforcement of apartheid was embittering and destroying an entire generation, the hope and future of a people, the salvation of our beloved country?

If they did know, I wondered, was there a grain of humanity left in them to feel any remorse? I doubted it. For a moment I pitied them. But when I considered what they stood for, they became targets of my rage, a rage whose intensity frightened me, but which I couldn't help feeling. I cursed them under my breath and exulted in the thought that though they had tried many times, though I still bore the invisible scars of their barbarity, they had not broken me. I had remained defiant to the end. I even had the impulse to yank out my passbook, tear it to shreds and fling the pieces at their pink faces.

I reached the boarding area and was warmly welcomed by British Airways flight attendants with beaming faces who addressed me as "Sir." Some of the white passengers continued gaping at me, as if I were some monkey escaped from the zoo. There were no BLACKS ONLY or WHITES ONLY signs in the departure lounge. I boarded the wide-bodied jumbo jet without incident. Once inside, I stowed my carry-on bags and rackets and took a seat next to the window. In the seat across the aisle from me sat an elderly silver-haired white man in a khaki suit. No one occupied the two seats between us. I scanned the half-full plane and saw two other blacks, seated separately and alone. They looked like foreigners. I longed to join either of them for companionship but was afraid.

I tried reading a magazine but could not concentrate. I kept thinking about the white policemen. The police are such an inseparable part of a black South African's reality that once they invade one's consciousness it takes forever to get rid of them. Suddenly I became acutely aware that in a few minutes I would be beyond their reach. With this realization my sense of reality wavered. Doubts whirled in my mind that I would not be allowed to go. I wondered why the plane was taking so long to leave. Did the delay have something to do with my presence aboard? I recalled the problems I had experienced obtaining the passport. I expected momentarily to be dragged off the plane by agents of BOSS (Bureau of State Security) and told that I was not leaving for America after all, that something was wrong with my papers. I had heard of black people at the last minute being hauled off planes and flung into detention to prevent their leaving South Africa and telling the world the truth about black life under apartheid. I began trembling uncontrollably and my clothes were drenched in a cold sweat. My eyes darted anxiously about the plane. Stricken with anxiety, I felt dizzy and faint. A sharp pain pierced my breastbone. I loosened my necktie, reached above my seat, and released a gush of air. I took a couple of deep breaths. The elderly white man in the khaki suit leaned over and asked kindly, "Anything wrong?"

"Nothing, sir, nothing," I muttered. "I'll be fine. Too much excitement, I guess. I'm not used to flying." "Don't worry," he said. "Once we're airborne you won't even know that we're flying. Keep taking those deep breaths and just relax." "Thank you, sir."

I muttered a prayer under my breath. Slowly the plane left the gate. The flight attendants demonstrated how to use the safety equipment. We taxied down the runway. I scarcely believed it was happening. Tears came to my eyes. The strange symptoms gradually went away. I began to feel better. I sighed heavily several times. We were airborne. I was free at last.

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