The Long Walk to Freedom (14 page)

We returned to the Crown Mine offices, where the white compound manager was considerate to us because of the letter we presented from Mr. Wellbeloved. Just then, Mr. Piliso passed by the office, saw us, and then stormed in. “You boys! You’ve come back!” he said with irritation. “What are you doing here?”

Justice was calm. “We’ve been sent by Mr. Wellbeloved,” he replied, his tone bordering on defiance. Mr. Piliso considered this for a moment. “Did you tell him that you ran away from your father?” Piliso then countered. Justice was silent.

“You’ll never be employed in any mine that I run!” he yelled. “Now, get out of my sight!” Justice waved Wellbeloved’s letter. “I don’t give a damn about a letter!” Piliso said. I looked to the white manager, hoping that he might overrule Piliso, but he was as still as a statue and seemed as intimidated as we were. We had no rejoinder for Piliso, and we sheepishly walked out of the office, feeling even more humbled than we had on the first occasion.

Our fortunes were now reversed. We were without jobs, without prospects, and without a place to stay. Justice knew various people in Johannesburg, and he went into town to investigate a place for us to stay. In the meantime, I was to fetch our suitcase, which was still at Piliso’s, and then meet Justice at George Goch, a small township in southern Johannesburg, later that day.

I prevailed upon a fellow named Bikitsha, whom I knew from home, to help me carry the suitcase to the front gate. A watchman at the gate stopped us both and said he needed to search the bag. Bikitsha protested, asserting there was no contraband in the suitcase. The watchman replied that a search was routine, and he looked through the bag in a cursory way, not even disturbing the clothing. As the watchman was closing it, Bikitsha, who was a cocky fellow, said, “Why do you make trouble? I told you there was nothing there.” These words irked the watchman, who then decided to search the case with a fine-toothed comb. I became increasingly nervous as he opened every compartment and probed every pocket. He then reached all the way to the bottom of the case and found the very thing I prayed he would not: a loaded revolver wrapped inside some of my clothing.

He turned to my friend and said, “You are under arrest.” He then blew his whistle, which brought a team of guards over to us. My friend looked at me with a mixture of consternation and confusion as they led him away to the local police station. I followed them at a distance, considering my options. The gun, an old revolver, had been my father’s and he had left it to me when he died. I had never used it, but as a precaution, I had brought it with me to the city.

I could not let my friend take the blame in my stead. Not long after he had entered the police station, I went inside and asked to see the officer in charge. I was taken to him and spoke as directly and forthrightly as I could: “Sir, that is my gun that was found in my friend’s suitcase. I inherited it from my father in the Transkei and I brought it here because I was afraid of gangsters.” I explained that I was a student from Fort Hare, and that I was only in Johannesburg temporarily. The officer in charge softened a bit as I spoke, and said that he would release my friend straightaway. He said he would have to charge me for possession of the gun, though he would not arrest me, and that I should appear in court first thing on Monday morning to answer the charge. I was grateful, and told him that I would certainly appear in court on Monday. I did go to court that Monday and received only a nominal fine.

In the meantime, I had arranged to stay with one of my cousins, Garlick Mbekeni, in George Goch Township. Garlick was a hawker who sold clothing, and had a small boxlike house. He was a friendly, solicitous man, and after I had been there a short while, I told him that my real aspiration was to be a lawyer. He commended me for my ambition and said he would think about what I had said.

A few days later, Garlick told me that he was taking me to see “one of our best people in Johannesburg.” We rode the train to the office of an estate agent on Market Street, a dense and rollicking thoroughfare with trams groaning with passengers, sidewalk vendors on every street, and a sense that wealth and riches were just around the next corner.

Johannesburg in those days was a combination frontier town and modern city. Butchers cut meat on the street next to office buildings. Tents were pitched beside bustling shops and women hung out their washing next door to high-rise buildings. Industry was energized due to the war effort. In 1939, South Africa, a member of the British Commonwealth, had declared war on Nazi Germany. The country was supplying men and goods to the war effort. Demand for labor was high, and Johannesburg became a magnet for Africans from the countryside seeking work. Between 1941, when I arrived, and 1946, the number of Africans in the city would double. Every morning, the township felt larger than it had the day before. Men found jobs in factories and housing in the “non-European townships” of Newclare, Martindale, George Goch, Alexandra, Sophiatown, and the Western Native Township, a prisonlike compound of a few thousand matchbox houses on treeless ground.

Garlick and I sat in the estate agent’s waiting room while a pretty African receptionist announced our presence to her boss in the inner office. After she relayed the message, her nimble fingers danced across the keyboard as she typed a letter. I had never in my life seen an African typist before, much less a female one. In the few public and business offices that I had visited in Umtata and Fort Hare, the typists had always been white and male. I was particularly impressed with this young woman because those white male typists had only used two slow-moving fingers to peck out their letters.

She soon ushered us into the inner office, where I was introduced to a man who looked to be in his late twenties, with an intelligent and kindly face, light in complexion, and dressed in a double-breasted suit. Despite his youth, he seemed to me an experienced man of the world. He was from the Transkei, but spoke English with a rapid urban fluency. To judge from his well-populated waiting room and his desk piled high with papers, he was a busy and successful man. But he did not rush us and seemed genuinely interested in our errand. His name was Walter Sisulu.

Sisulu ran a real estate office that specialized in properties for Africans. In the 1940s, there were still quite a few areas where freehold properties could be purchased by Africans, small holdings located in such places as Alexandra and Sophiatown. In some of these areas, Africans had owned their own homes for several generations. The rest of the African areas were municipal townships containing matchbox houses for which the residents paid rent to the Johannesburg City Council.

Sisulu’s name was becoming prominent as both a businessman and a local leader. He was already a force in the community. He paid close attention as I explained about my difficulties at Fort Hare, my ambition to be a lawyer, and how I intended to register at the University of South Africa to finish my degree by correspondence course. I neglected to tell him the circumstances of my arrival in Johannesburg. When I had finished, he leaned back in his chair and pondered what I had said. Then, he looked me over one more time, and said that there was a white lawyer with whom he worked named Lazar Sidelsky, who he believed to be a decent and progressive fellow. Sidelsky, he said, was interested in African education. He would talk to Sidelsky about taking me on as an articled clerk.

In those days, I believed that proficiency in English and success in business were the direct result of high academic achievements and I assumed as a matter of course that Sisulu was a university graduate. I was greatly surprised to learn from my cousin after I left the office that Walter Sisulu had never gone past Standard VI. It was another lesson from Fort Hare that I had to unlearn in Johannesburg. I had been taught that to have a B.A. meant to be a leader, and to be a leader one needed a B.A. But in Johannesburg I found that many of the most outstanding leaders had never been to university at all. Even though I had done all the courses in English that were required for a B.A., my English was neither as fluent nor as eloquent as many of the men I met in Johannesburg who had not even received a school degree.

After a brief time staying with my cousin, I arranged to move in with Reverend J. Mabutho of the Anglican Church at his home on Eighth Avenue in Alexandra Township. Reverend Mabutho was a fellow Thembu, a friend of my family’s, and a generous, God-fearing man. His wife, whom we called Gogo, was warm, affectionate, and a splendid cook who was liberal with her helpings. As a Thembu who knew my family, Reverend Mabutho felt responsible for me. “Our ancestors have taught us to share,” he once told me.

But I had not learned from my experience at Crown Mines, for I did not tell Reverend Mabutho about the circumstances of my leaving the Transkei. My omission had unhappy consequences. A few days after I had moved in with the Mabuthos, I was having tea with them when a visitor arrived. Unfortunately, their friend was Mr. Festile, the
induna
at the Chamber of Mines who had been present when Justice and I met with Mr. Wellbeloved. Mr. Festile and I greeted each other in a way that suggested we knew one another, and though nothing was said of our previous meeting, the next day Reverend Mabutho took me aside and made it clear that I could no longer remain under their roof.

I cursed myself for not having told the whole truth. I had become so used to my deceptions that I lied even when I did not have to. I am sure that Reverend Mabutho would not have minded, but when he learned of my circumstances from Festile, he felt deceived. In my brief stay in Johannesburg, I had left a trail of mistruths, and in each case, the falsehood had come back to haunt me. At the time, I felt that I had no alternative. I was frightened and inexperienced, and I knew that I had not gotten off on the right foot in my new life. In this instance, Reverend Mabutho took pity on me and found me accommodation with his next-door neighbors, the Xhoma family.

Mr. Xhoma was one of an elite handful of African landowners in Alexandra. His house — 46, Seventh Avenue — was small, particularly as he had six children, but it was pleasant, with a veranda and a tiny garden. In order to make ends meet, Mr. Xhoma, like so many other residents of Alexandra, rented rooms to boarders. He had built a tin-roofed room at the back of his property, no more than a shack, with a dirt floor, no heat, no electricity, no running water. But it was a place of my own and I was happy to have it.

In the meantime, on Walter’s recommendation, Lazar Sidelsky had agreed to take me on as a clerk while I completed my B.A. degree. The firm of Witkin, Sidelsky and Eidelman was one of the largest law firms in the city and handled business from blacks as well as whites. In addition to studying law and passing certain exams, in order to qualify as an attorney in South Africa one had to undergo several years of apprenticeship to a practicing lawyer, which is known as serving articles. But in order for me to become articled, I first had to complete my B.A. degree. To that end, I was studying at night with UNISA, short for the University of South Africa, a respected educational institution that offered credits and degrees by correspondence.

In addition to trying conventional law cases, Witkin, Sidelsky and Eidelman oversaw real estate transactions for African customers. Walter brought the firm clients who needed a mortgage. The firm would handle their loan applications, and then take a commission, which it would split with the real estate agent. In fact, the law firm would take the lion’s share of the money, leaving only a pittance for the African real estate agent. Blacks were given the crumbs from the table, and had no option but to accept them.

Even so, the law firm was far more liberal than most. It was a Jewish firm, and in my experience, I have found Jews to be more broad-minded than most whites on issues of race and politics, perhaps because they themselves have historically been victims of prejudice. The fact that Lazar Sidelsky, one of the firm’s partners, would take on a young African as an articled clerk — something almost unheard of in those days — was evidence of that liberalism.

Mr. Sidelsky, whom I came to respect greatly and who treated me with enormous kindness, was a graduate of the University of the Witwatersrand and was in his mid-thirties when I joined the firm. He was involved in African education, donating money and time to African schools. A slender, courtly man, with a pencil mustache, he took a genuine interest in my welfare and future, preaching the value and importance of education — for me individually and for Africans in general. Only mass education, he used to say, would free my people, arguing that an educated man could not be oppressed because he could think for himself. He told me over and over again that becoming a successful attorney and thereby a model of achievement for my people was the most worthwhile path I could follow.