Tandia (22 page)
As Tandia brought him a second Scotch, Professor Ryder rose from his chair. He took the glass from her absently. 'Magistrate Coetzee, I am, I must say, enormously impressed by your' perspicacity.' He paused, preparing to make his point. 'But I must insist, you have missed the central point, the simple question of biology. My people have been in Natal for a hundred and ten years, ever since the 1840 settlers. We, the British South Africans, realised just like the Boer South Africans that miscegenation was not the way to go forward, that the mix of black and white didn't advance the noble savage or appreciate the white man. In fact the opposite was trueâ¦' He stopped suddenly and 'coloured violently, turning to look at' Mama Tequila. 'I do apologise, Mama Tequila, what I have just said must seem unforgivable to you. I beg your forgiveness, I apologise.'
Mama Tequila laughed. 'What are you apologising for,
Professor? Embarrassing me? Or for telling what you think is the truth?'
'Well, erâ¦.'
But Mama Tequila continued. 'I am a coloured person, that not a person in South Africa. A black is a person, and a white is a person. But I am a non-person. For the Afrikaner I am his guilt. He calls me a
Hotnot,
because he says I'm from the Bushman and the Hottentot, or a Cape Malay or even round here in Durban, a Mauritian coloured or a
Maasbieker,
who is a coloured person who supposed to come from Mozambique. Always I am something else from somewhere else, not what happened when his daddy or his
oupa
lay down with a black kaffir girl when the
ounooi
has gone to visit her sister in another
dorp
.
'For the Englishman I am an inferior non-person, a mistake for which he thinks only the Afrikaner is responsible, a
boere
bastard! How come there are four million nonpeople like me in this country, answer for me that, hey? I'm telling you something, Professor, I am the result of the hate and the fear and the greed Magistrate Coetzee just talked about. Three hundred years of hate and fear. So what am I? I'm going to tell you now! You the Britisher! You the Afrikaner! You the Jew! You the Indian! You know what I am. I am the child of South Africa. Not the non-person, the
real
person! You hear, I, me, this person who is sitting in this big chair, Sophie Van der Merwe, born in District Six on August 28, 1889, in Cape Town. I am the only
real
South African!' Mama Tequila was crying quietly. Her tears, gathering mascara on the way, ran black down her rouged cheeks. Professor Ryder sat down abruptly, as though he had been filled with air and now was suddenly and unexpectedly deflated.
Sonny Vindoo got up from his chair and moved over to join Tandia, who ran over to comfort Mama Tequila. 'Please, take no notice, I am just a stupid old woman, a
hout kop,'
she sniffed. Tandia, more brandy for Magistrate Coetzee, also Scotch for the doctor and the professor.'
'No, no I'm fine,' Dr Louis said, placing his hand over his glass.
'Go sit, Sonny,' Mama Tequila said, pushing the little Indian gently from her. She smiled through her tears. 'I don't know from where comes these stupid words, I am jus' a old coloured woman who doesn't know no better, man! Now it my turn to apologise, Professor.'
Old Coetzee rose from his chair a little unsteady on his feet, but when he spoke his voice was quiet and reasoned. 'What we have just heard, maybe it will not change any of us. I am a Boer, an Afrikaner, my mind says one thing, my heart says altogether another thing. We,
die volk,
we a stubborn people, a stupid people of the heart. I don't think we will ever learn this simple lesson.'
He polished off the remainder of the brandy and handed his glass to Tandia, indicating with his open palms that he did not require a refill.
Mama Tequila, who had recovered from her lapse, hoped to hell he would remember Sarah was not available tonight and would go home quietly.
The magistrate removed his gold hunter from his fob pocket and glanced down at it. 'Professor, it is getting late and you are our guest, so I will spare you further rhetoric. It is a strange little fraternity here tonight, very unexpected, hey? I'm sure you will appreciate that what has been said in this room is private. How is it that a man can go his whole life and never sit down and talk in a group such as this one? The true terror of apartheid is that it separates our minds, we do not know each other's thoughts. We all have too much to lose by loose talk. But I just got this one more thing to say. It concerns Tandia Patel, who as you can see is a coloured person. A non-person just like Mama Tequila. She is also a
real
child of South Africa and I must add, as an old man of course, if all our children were as beautiful we would be the best-looking race of people on earth.'
Tandia felt herself blushing violently. Old Coetzee continued. 'Today, out of a possible five hundred marks in five subjects in her matriculation exams, Tandia Patel obtained four hundred and eighty-one! Is this a non-mind in a nonperson? Is this the inferior result of miscegenation? Or do you have a place in the Law faculty of your university for a beautiful, intelligent, real child of South Africa?'
Tandia could feel her heart pounding and her head seemed to fill with blood. She burned fiercely; then she grew as suddenly cold. She tried to hold herself rigid, but she seemed to have no control, and her entire body trembled as the professor spoke.
'Tandia Patel will be the first coloured female student to read Law at Natal University, that is my promise,' Professor Ryder said quietly.
Tandia brought her hands up to her face and burst into tears. She wasn't prepared for this moment. Her upbringing contained nothing in it which told her how to react. She panicked and turning on her heels rushed for the doorway. Pushing blindly through the door, she found herself in Juicey Fruit Mambo's arms. 'Oh, oh, Patel, daddy! I been accepted in the best white circus!' she wept The huge black man picked her up, his gold incisors flashing, and his smile seemed to disappear past his shotaway earlobe. 'Edward King George Juicey Fruit Mambo, we very happy for going to the university, Miss Tandy! We very smart combo, for surer He laughed, swinging her around again. 'Me, myself, I am cleaning for dat classroom and you, you learning to be big, big lawyer for de people so de white policeman he be very, very afraid!'
Maybe there is some connection between repressive regimes and good roads? The road from Johannesburg to Durban is claimed to be equal to any in the world, including the autobahns built by Adolf Hitler and the autostrada constructed in Italy by Mussolini. As roads go, this one is wide, fast and well made, with long perfectly flat grey stretches. There is a popular notion that parts of it are designed so that Sabre jets can land on it when the black revolution comes.
The journey in the big Packard promised to take just over five hours of fairly sedate Juicey Fruit Mambo driving. Mama Tequila with Tandia in tow was headed for Sophiatown to visit her sister Flo, or Madam Flame Flo as she was known by the
majietas
and the bright boys of Kofifi, the other name by which this rag-tag, multiracial community was known. Madam Flame Flo was the biggest shebeen queen in Sophiatown, a well-known figure who had resided there since the mid thirties.
In this little Chicago with its unpaved, dirty alleys and roadways delineated by leaning fences, ruts and puddles, the good mixed in almost equal proportions with the bad. There were some rich people, but they were overwhelmed by the poor; and as for the middle class, they were simply those families who ate three times a day.
In Sophiatown there were stone walls topped with glass built by the wealthy to keep out the marauding poor, but these most often acted as the one sturdy wall to the shanties of beaten tin and scraps of timber which were abutted to them. In this thoroughly mixed community there were no nature strips or carefully manicured lawns to create a noman's-land separating the haves from the have nots. No municipal laws called for segregation by colour, income or status, so Sophiatown became more a conglomeration of ways to live than the result of town planning.
The township paid almost no taxes and in return received very little help. The utilities were almost non-existent, and electricity was a status symbol. Most families lived and died by lamp and candlelight. A toilet was usually a pit in the ground topped with a small moveable outhouse of Corrugated iron with a crude seat built into it. In the summer the sides were too hot to touch and hundreds of bluebottles IDled the interior. You could hear and smell the presence of a
kakhuis
long before you arrived at it.
The sprawling 'Blackopolis', as the newspapermen called it, was also the biggest pain in the arse the Nationalist government had on its racist agenda. There were also other, smaller pimples on the backside of apartheid.' Alexandra to the north, Orlando township to the south-west and, of course, Cape Town's ancient and venerable District Six, a slum which had existed for nearly two hundred years. But none was thought quite as important to cauterise from the body of the Nationalist state than was Sophiatown. Blacks from every tribe, as well as those who had been Kofifi-born and claimed no tribe at all, coloureds, Indians, Chinese and whites, lived together and had done so for well over thirty years. Racial harmony was not what the government were about and they had no intention of allowing an example of it to continue.
In fairness, the word 'harmony' was a description ill suited to the goings-on in Kofifi. Sophiatown was an untidy drawer which had jammed and refused to close in the neatly arranged filing cabinets of Johannesburg, where every class and colour knew its proper place. But Sophiatown was also the last living demonstration of the thing Old Coetzee had spoken about in Mama Tequila's salon, where people put aside their differences and had a shot at living together as human beings. Another name for it was hope.
Madam Flame Flo had started making her fortune almost immediately after arriving in Sophiatown from the Cape. She had been a good-looking woman of twenty-five, with an almost pure white, blue-eyed bastard baby and no real prospects ahead of her.
Fortune had smiled on Flo Van der Merwe from the very beginning. At the bus station on her way to Sophiatown she had sat down beside a diminutive coloured man who took a shine to her blue-eyed baby daughter and who introducted himself as Geel Piet, which simply meant Yellow Peter. Flo was to learn that names were important in Sophiatown; but only the very rich and the law abiding, both of whom were in limited supply, called themselves by their real names.
Geel Piet, who claimed to have been a professional boxer and from the look of his face must have been a very bad one, turned out to have made a vocation of having his bones broken in just about every prison in South Africa. It was difficult to tell his age. His body seemed to bear witness to a series of unfortunate happenings more than to an aging process. It was as though he'd been poorly constructed in the first place, had been broken regularly over his adult years and on each occasion been badly mended.
Geel Piet had tagged along with the slim woman with the flaming henna-dyed hair and her chubby fair-skinned baby, promising to help her find accommodation. True to his word, he found her a place to live. A friend of a friend had a small, dark room for rent with a communal tap and a pit-toilet shared by several houses in the vicinity. The room was at the top end of Good Street, Sophiatown's major and most notorious thoroughfare. It had seemed to Flo an exciting and rather frightening place to live after the quieter streets of Cape Town's District Six.
After settling her in, Geel Piet had stolen five pounds from her handbag, her entire stake for a new life in the big city. He had returned just after eleven o'clock curfew that night with an armful of groceries, handing the destitute and distressed young mother twenty pounds. Geel Piet was a racing man extraordinaire and had brought home two winners at Turffontein racetrack that afternoon.
Geel Piet didn't stay in Sophiatown long. Over the ten years that followed, he used to visit Madam Flame Flo occasionally, always between bouts in prison. Even after she had become rich and a famous figure in Sophiatown, she never turned him away. Perhaps the only clean sheets and soft bed Geel Piet ever knew were in the spare bedroom of her large house. In her mind he'd laid the foundation for her fortune and Madam Flame Flo wasn't a fair-weather friend, the sort of person to forget a thing like that.
On the morning following her arrival in Sophiatown, Geel Piet had shown Flo how to brew a concoction which he'd learned to make in Barberton Gaol, a small but notoriously brutal and greatly feared prison in the Eastern Transvaal. The home-made liquor consisted of yeast, a quantity of the small-seeded brown maize known as kaffir-corn, brown sugar and the coarse brown bread the natives ate. It was all mixed together in a four-gallon paraffin tin filled with water and allowed to stand overnight. The result was a pungent brew with a real wallop! Flo had named it Barberton and dispensed it in jam tins at a nice profit to the Saturday-night Good Street crowd.
Over the years many shebeen queens had produced their own liquor, but Flo's special brand 'of Barberton was never seriously challenged. Some people said that her secret ingredient was arsenic, others claimed it was cyanide pinched from the gold refinery at Modderfontein, others that it was the rainwater she used from her big round tank. Madam Flame Flo never told, and in a country where liquor was forbidden to blacks (except for the sour, fermented porridge-like kaffir beer served' in government drinking compounds), she became a very rich and even, in her own way, powerful woman.
In 1945 Madam Flame Flo had heard of Geel Piet's death at the hands of a warder named Kronkie in the very same Barberton prison from which her famous concoction was derived. She had ordered a polished granite tombstone on which she'd inscribed:
GEEL PIET
We drink to
his
sacred memory.
DIED 1945
She'd loaded the headstone onto the back of a bakkie, driven the three hundred and forty miles to the tiny mountain town of Barberton, and arrived at the notorious prison. There she had demanded to see where Geel Piet had been buried.
At first the Kommandant had refused to take her seriously. 'Hey, jong, he was just a
boesman
who died. We just dug a hole and put him in.
Dood vlies is dood vlies!
Dead meat is dead meat. Who you think he was, Jesus Christ in disguise?'
But Madam Flame Flo had persisted, and eventually she had been shown the plot where the prisoners who hadn't made it through their sentences lay buried: a large bare piece of ground where two or three hundred round boulders no bigger than a man's head were arranged in rows approximately five feet apart. The prisoners called it
amaTshe
and the warders simply translated this into
die Klippe,
the Stones. The boulders were all approximately the same size and of a whitish stone cut from a local quarry. Prisoners working in the quarry, when given the task of making a headstone, would shape it into a rough approximation and size of a human skull. At first glance, laid out in rows, the stones looked like a neatly organised killing field, which was a fairly accurate description of the state of affairs. Barberton wasn't a big prison, but it had more prisoner deaths than any in the country. The institutional joke among the Boer warders was that when a magistrate sentenced a black man to Barberton, he turned white. The Stones testified to the grim reality of this puerile joke.
The warder had waved his hand expansively over the stone-studded plot. 'Take you pick!' he had said, amused.
Madam Flame Flo had paid the man a pound to get three prisoners to unload the headstone from the bakkie and transport it by wheelbarrow to the Stones. Word had gotten around, and by the time the prisoners arrived, several more warders had gathered to witness the weird stone-laying ceremony for a beaten-up little boesman who wasn't worth a pinch of shit.
'Was die Hotnot jou soetman?
Was the Hottentot your sweetheart?' one of them shouted, and the others all joined in the laughter. There was no doubt about it, kaffirs were funny buggers, but these boesmen were fucked in the head spending good money on a tombstone for a worthless piece of shit like that.
Just then a tall, fair-haired warder arrived on the scene. 'Are you the woman looking for Geel Piet's grave?' he asked, more or less politely, in Afrikaans.
'Ja, baasie.'
Madam Flame Flo answered, not knowing what to expect from the white man.
'Kom!'
he instructed, and started to walk to the very centre of the plot where Madam Flame Flo noticed a white boulder perhaps one-and-a-half times larger than the others, and quite nicely carved into an almost completely round ball. The warder waited for her to arrive. 'Put it here,' he said, and, turning, whistled to the prisoners who had reached the edge of the graveyard. To Madam Flame Flo's surprise the young warder dropped to his haunches and rolled the whitewashed stone away.
The headstone must have been very heavy, for the metal wheel of the barrow cut a clear rut into the hard red clay. With great difficulty the three men lifted it from the barrow and placed it where the boulder had been. It sat in the centre of the bare plot, an obscenely new and extravagant symbol set amongst the humble skull stones. There seemed nothing more to say.
'Dankie, baasie.
Can you tell me please when he died, do you know the date?'
The sergeant smiled. He had a pleasant, open face and his expression wasn't in the least condescending. 'That's easy, man. It was the night the Germans surrendered.'
Madam Flame Flo thanked the warder again as the three prisoners, laughing among themselves, left, one of them wheeling the barrow containing the rock which had now been replaced by the ludicrous tombstone.
The warder looked directly at Madam Flame Flo for the first time and offered her his hand. Surprised, she accepted it. 'My name's Gert. I'm not saying the boesman was a good man,' he grinned at the memory, 'he was a proper
skelm,
but he was also a real man. Geel Piet was the best boxing coach I ever saw.' He turned abruptly and walked away.
Madam Flame Flo turned back to the polished headstone. Behind it the green hills rose up and rolled back and tumbled into mountains blued and smudged in the high distance. It was a beautiful place for an old lag to die.
'Slaap lekker ou maat!
Sleep well, old friend,' she said quietly, and then added, 'Thanks, you hear? Thanks for everything you done for me.' Then she began to weep quietly, less for her friend than for the hopelessness of her kind, the twilight people who didn't belong, the new children of Africa spawned from the ugly, guilty lust of white for black and unwanted by both. She thought of her daughter with her fair skin and blue eyes who had escaped the tyranny of colour but who could never have a child lest it throw back and condemn her for the fraud she was.
On her return to Sophiatown Madam Flame Flo tried to re-name her liquor. She wanted to call it Geel Piet, but the name never caught on. The original name, Barberton, stood for something, and that sort of thing is not lightly put aside.
Tradition in a daily start-from-scratch town like Kofifi, with few routines and even fewer laws, is important for continuity, a powerful emotional glue which holds people together.
A person can't just go around changing things willy-nilly, even if the sentiment is a good one.
Barberton, and for that matter its many imitators, produced an affliction known as 'liquor flame' amongst its often poorly nourished drinkers. Liquor flame was a skin disease which resulted in the top layer of the skin peeling away. It was this affliction which gained Flo her nickname. Far from being ashamed of it, Madam Flame Flo regarded the appellation with a great deal of pride.