Authors: Neville Frankel
Bloodlines (11 page)
Halfway through the evening, all hell broke loose. There were shouts from the garden, the front door was forced open, and camera flashes went off like firecrackers as reporters pushed their way into the house and took pictures of black and white men and women partying together. I looked around for Michaela and saw her immobilized at the instant a camera flashed in front of her. She stood before a potted palm tree, eyes opened wide in surprise, and there was a smile on her face. She was dancing with a black man wearing a short sleeved white shirt, and against his dark skin she seemed pale and insubstantial. Someone grabbed the glass from my hand and emptied my whiskey out the window as the police arrived. Interracial drinking was against the law—had they found any alcohol we would all have landed in prison. Somehow, thankfully, all the alcohol disappeared in time, and the police left, taking the reporters with them.
The next day, the newspaper featured a front-page photograph of Michaela—a photograph you may already have discovered. What you can’t know from the photo is that by then she was already pregnant, and it wasn’t long before I was the subject of gossip and snickering.
I was in my second year on the engineering team at LeRoux and Raphael, a company that specialized in building bridges. The size of train engines and the weight they were drawing had increased beyond the capacity of bridges built in the early part of the century, and I had been hired as one of the junior engineers on the team working to increase the stress capacity of trestle rail bridges. The senior design engineer didn’t hesitate to tell me that it was my responsibility to keep my wife in line.
I was embarrassed by the publicity, humiliated to have my wife’s photo spread across the front page of the paper, and jealous to see her dancing with another man, her bare arms wrapped about his shoulders. But worse was the surprising recognition that what bothered me most was who she was dancing with. It was Mandla Mkhize.
.
Boston, 2001
W
inter has come to Boston, and a heavy snow falls outside my window. Each day I put a piece of myself into this manuscript, and it increases in heft and in consequence that I won’t be here to witness. At times I wonder about cause and effect—whether I’m writing the manuscript because I have cancer and want to get it all down before I die; or whether the act of writing is itself the cancer, drawing the life force from me.
I imagine, after I’m gone, that you will sit together and read what I’ve put down here. Perhaps that’s just wishful thinking, but it’s what I need to imagine in order to keep going. And what I imagine is that my intrepid daughter-in-law will be way ahead of me.
I imagine you, Dariya, after reading each section of the manuscript, running off to scour the databases you have access to. You’ll be searching for confirmation of what I’ve written; for proof that the events are true, and for names and places and facts that put you in front of the story. You will find news of apartheid and struggle, dissension and protest—but you will notice something bizarre as you scour the newspapers, and you may not recognize at first what you find so disquieting. You will find that in South Africa, just as you saw in Moscow, people continued to live their lives in even the most chaotic of circumstances. In the midst of headlines about apartheid policy, violence, protests and arrests, people took care of commerce, went to sales, watched the stock market and the cricket and rugby scores, celebrated and mourned.
Eventually you will realize that what so disturbs you is what was not reported. Between the headlines on apartheid—the politics of race—and the articles that reflected everyday life, there was a huge silence that had swallowed the entire black population. There was so little recognition of their existence in the news that they might have been a small population living out their lives on our border, instead of being a massive presence confined to scattered pockets throughout the country. The newspapers—all of them—reflected an almost absolute refusal by the ruling minority to recognize that there was a price to pay for their privileged lives, and that the bill was about to come due. You might see, between the lines of newsprint, that the future history of the country was writ large and clear. You might even find it astounding that from a distance, the direction of events was so predictable, but that at the time, those in power were able to pretend for so long and with such success—and at such a price—that they were in control.
And if you can tell from the newspapers you’re reading which way the political winds were blowing, you will feel a twinge of excitement when you reach March, 1960. That was the tipping point—and if your instincts are correct, they will tell you that this was also the point at which Michaela had thrown caution to the wind, and become involved in the activities that led to her downfall.
Sharpeville, 1960
What happened in March, 1960 came to be known as the Sharpeville Massacre. It changed everything in the country, and in our lives. Before Sharpeville, the country was divided; afterwards, it was polarized. It was the point at which the struggle against apartheid became a war. Not my war—there wasn’t enough room in our marriage for that. It was your mother’s war. And although neither of us was directly involved with what happened that day, we had friends who planned and executed parts of the demonstration. One of them you already know, if not by name. He was the black man the news photographer captured dancing with your mother at our friend’s party—and it was that picture, on the front page of the newspaper, that was to prove so destructive a few years later.
I’ve had no desire to follow his activities, and all I know about him is that he is still alive and healthy. He will apparently outlast me, which, I suppose, is neither here nor there. Some of my ambivalence will become clear as I explain what happened that day, the day that made Sharpeville famous.
The demonstration was intended to be a peaceful show of civil disobedience against the Pass Laws that made it mandatory for every black man to carry a reference book. Men would leave their passes at home, march to local police stations, and demand to be arrested. The idea was to overwhelm the police with thousands of peaceful men who were breaking the law, and who should by rights have been taken into custody.
No one knows what really happened during the protest. About 6,000 people—many of them women, children and elderly—were gathered outside the police station at Sharpeville. A few days earlier, several policemen had been killed elsewhere in the country, and the police were scared and jittery. When the demonstration began, there were half a dozen policemen inside the station. Earlier that morning the authorities were so concerned about the size of the crowd that they sent in a squadron of low flying planes, but had no success in dispersing the throng. By the time the killings occurred, reinforcements had arrived—there was a force of three hundred men and several armored cars. Standing on the roofs of these armored cars were soldiers armed with submachine guns. Anyone involved with civilian crowd control would have told them that it was a recipe for disaster—but those in authority were not thinking like civilians.
The people were curious—they’d been told that someone would be arriving to make an announcement about the Pass Laws, and they were waiting. Minutes before the shooting, the man in charge of the Special Branch had been able to walk through the crowd, arresting members of the Pan African Congress. He said later that he was able to do so because although the crowd was noisy, it was not violent.
There was apparently no command to fire—perhaps what sparked it was the sound of a door slamming, or a car backfiring. Perhaps someone threw a stone, and it bounced off the reinforced steel of an armored car. But suddenly one policeman opened fire, and fifty others joined in. The people in the crowd thought the police were firing blanks, and didn’t move until they saw bodies dropping around them. You can find photographs in the news reports of a young policeman on the roof of his armored car firing into the crowd. The whole event lasted for forty seconds, in which time seven hundred rounds were fired, killing sixty-nine people, a third of them women and children. Another hundred and eighty were wounded—again, about a third women and children. Most were shot in the back running away. Some of the dead were women carrying children in blankets on their backs—in several cases, mothers and children were killed by the same bullet. And there were accounts of soldiers initially taunting the wounded as they lay on the ground, telling them to get up and be off.
Later, there was an inquiry, and the Lieutenant Colonel in charge was questioned. He said he never gave the command to fire—but he made some comments that sound ludicrous today. Even at that time, his words were astounding. He said the character or the mentality of the blacks didn’t allow for peaceful gatherings; that anytime they got together in a crowd was an opportunity for violence. And when the presiding judge asked whether any useful lessons had been learned from the experience, he responded by saying that perhaps next time they would have better equipment.
Things changed after that day. The government was petrified. They placed the country under a State of Emergency, banned all opposition organizations and clamped down as hard as they could. Those of us involved in the struggle realized that it was the end of an era—and it was the event that decided Nelson Mandela to abandon his long held nonviolent stance. After that day, Mandela began to advocate acts of sabotage against the government. Not long afterwards, he went to Algeria, where he was trained in sabotage and guerilla warfare. The ANC went underground—but it didn’t die. Sharpeville gave birth to
Umkhonto we Sizwe
, Spear of the Nation, the ANC’s military wing. That’s how the struggle became a war.
So, you ask, what does Mandla Mkhize have to do with all this? The answer is, everything. Or, nothing. You decide.
Your mother and I were home that day, and we knew nothing until the telephone rang. I answered it. It was a call from an official with the ANC. I recognized his name, and knew that Michaela had worked with him. He was rushed and nervous, apologized for his hurry, explained what had happened at Sharpeville. At first I didn’t understand why he was calling, or why he was speaking to me. But it became clear that he wasn’t supposed to be talking to me—he had misunderstood his instructions.