Great Place, the majesty of court, the beauty of an imbongi’s poetry. Olive’s employers could not be bothered to learn her surname, let alone the origins of her quiet dignity and excellent English. To them, she was just another kaffir woman come to clean their toilets and change their children’s nappies.
Nomkhitha saw her dreams vanish. She had long ago abandoned the idea of becoming a nurse, but still yearned for some sort of profession. Nomkhitha used to pass a secretarial school every day on her way to work. She would stop and stare at the advertisement in the window: the smiling, smartly dressed woman sitting at a large desk, surrounded by office equipment. The tableau looked so respectable, so modern. After allowing herself a few minutes’ reverie, she would sigh and continue down the street; they could never afford the tuition fees.
But if Nomkhitha could not achieve her ambitions, she was determined that her children should. She began buying books for the kids with the few pennies she salvaged at the end of every month. Starting with comics to get their attention, she pointed out the pictures and explained the stories. As the children grew, they graduated to more sophisticated books in Sotho and English. It didn’t matter that Nomkhitha arose before dawn, worked all day in the factory, returned home to cook supper and wash out nappies – she always read to her children. Her dreams, she decided, would become theirs.
Mokete, Tsietsi, Mpho, Lebakeng and Tshepiso came to be the most politically active of the Mashinini children. Each arrived at his involvement from a different path. For some, it was a studied decision; for others, a hasty act of volition or sheer chance.
Being the first-born, Rocks (as Mokete was called) felt the full weight of his parents’ expectations. School was paramount; on this subject, Joseph and Nomkhitha were unrelenting. Joseph beat Rocks when he played truant. Nomkhitha made him – and the other children, as they got older – sit at the dining-room table after supper every night to do their homework. (Rocks developed a passion for the comic books Nomkhitha bought. His favourite was Chunky Charlie: a hero-type who slunk around in a heavy overcoat, laden with various tools that were useful in fighting crimes.) His parents taunted him if he neglected his studies: he would end up like the men who emptied the night-soil buckets left on the streets in the morning, they warned, or as one of the chaps who lugged the fifty-kilogram bags of coal to houses for cooking and heating. Rocks took the admonitions to heart; those people were figures of derision among children in the township.
Joseph and Nomkhitha closely monitored Rocks’ progress in school. Any slip in grades during the year prompted a warning to improve; it also put him on a kind of probation, during which it was difficult to extract money from his parents for extracurricular activities. The Mashinini children were expected to finish among the top five students in their class. The family would ridicule anyone who ranked lower throughout the December school holidays; those who succeeded were rewarded with a rand. Joseph always threw a party to celebrate the good grades. He bought sodas, sweets, crisps, peanuts; and he gathered the children around the dining-room table to offer a prayer of thanks. It was the best day of the year. Rocks chafed under this intense parental scrutiny, but ultimately came to see its value. He would be one of the few of his boyhood gang to graduate from high school.
The pressure he felt from his parents turned Rocks into an introverted, measured sort of person. (In that, he took after Joseph. When political violence overwhelmed the township in later years, Nomkhitha often dashed headlong out the door to witness each new confrontation. Joseph, on the other hand, first changed into sports shoes – in case he had to run from the police.) To his younger siblings, Rocks was the serious, bookish big brother. He acted as a kind of surrogate father during Joseph’s absence, meting out punishments and inspiring awe; the youngsters knew they had to be quiet around Rocks. His parents also expected him to set an example for the others. That often meant getting blamed for their transgressions: when Tsietsi used to appropriate the meagre spending money given the children – a constant source of squabbles among them – Rocks was censured.
Like all township boys, Rocks was mad about sport. He played football, but not with the same obsessiveness as his younger brothers. He preferred softball, an interest he shared with Tsietsi. Rocks’ best positions were first base and shortstop; he and Tsietsi devised makeshift bases and stole the bats from their school. He also trained as a welter-weight boxer. Rocks fought for the Jabulani Boxing Club, where he was considered to have a reasonably good left jab. Nomkhitha hated him boxing; she wanted her children to aspire to something more genteel like tennis. But Rocks dismissed it as an effeminate game. Growing up in the ghetto, you had to assert a masculine image to fend off tsotsis, or pickpockets.
Gangs were also a problem. They formed around a particular section of the township: Orlando had its gang, White City its band of youths, and so on. The gangs attacked mostly at night, brandishing knives, hatchets, all manner of crudely fashioned weapons. In an attempt at justice, a teacher at Rocks’ school organized a kind of vigilante group to punish the perpetrators. Rocks once identified a boy who had assaulted a rival gang member; he marched him virtually across Soweto to be whipped by the vigilantes. A few weeks later, Rocks encountered the same youth on a train into town. This time, he was surrounded by his cronies; they held Rocks down for four train stops as the boy beat him up, splitting open his forehead.
His family’s poverty weighed heavily on Rocks. As a child, he would dream of toys. It was always the same fantasy: Joseph somehow found extra money and bought him all the playthings he coveted. At first, Rocks held his parents responsible for their condition. They had too many children to support; two or three offspring would have been manageable. But Rocks ultimately came to blame apartheid for their impoverished state. He arrived at this conclusion gradually, through the small epiphanies so many black children experienced when they ventured beyond the township.
Rocks’ awakening began when Nomkhitha allowed him to go by train into Johannesburg on errands. He was spellbound by the cars he saw there: the speedy, sleek vehicles, driven mostly by whites, that jammed the city’s streets. It was a rare thing for a black person to own a car. And all the goods on display in the store windows; Rocks had never imagined such luxuries existed. But he could not afford them. They were for the white customers, who paid with great bundles of notes they produced from their pockets or purses. Rocks, meanwhile, bought only the cheapest items, carefully counting out the coins entrusted to him.
His perception of the disparities between blacks and whites deepened as he got older. Along with several classmates, Rocks participated in a drama festival at an all-white high school in one of Johannesburg’s northern suburbs – the first time he had set foot in such an institution. He was astounded by what he saw: the library, auditorium, gymnasium, laboratories, modern classrooms. Rocks’ overcrowded, understaffed school had virtually nothing. Everyone knew the government spent far more on white students than on blacks; in fact, it was about twelve times as much. But this most tangible manifestation of apartheid opened Rocks’ eyes and angered him.
The more he encountered the white world, the more embittered Rocks became. The sightseers who took the bus tours of Soweto from Johannesburg were a poignant example. Some were foreigners; but many white South Africans also went on the trip, gaping at the township and snapping photographs as though it were a different country. (This would probably be the only time any of them ever ventured into a ‘location’.) One stop on the itinerary was in front of Rocks’ school. The passengers didn’t disembark; that was considered too dangerous. Instead, they threw sweets and coins at the children from open windows – a practice Rocks hated. It made him feel like an animal on display in a zoo.
As an adolescent, Rocks worked during the school holidays at Joseph’s construction company. He did odd jobs: filing, making tea, washing cars, delivering messages. Besides the extra money it provided, the work gave him a glimpse of the conditions under which his father worked. Joseph, as the president’s driver, was treated respectfully by the company’s highest officers. But the other white employees barely hid their contempt for the black workers. With a son’s sensitivity, Rocks cringed at the thousand daily little humiliations his father endured.
