brothers.
By Tshepiso’s calculations, fewer brothers would have meant more money for the things he coveted. He yearned to buy a proper lunch at school. With the coins he received from his parents, he could only purchase bread and potatoes from the old grannies who sold food at the schoolyard gates; other kids (whom Tshepiso suspected came from smaller families) bought bits of meat for their sandwiches, cold drinks, ice cream. His school uniform caused him similar misery. The black shorts, white shirt, jersey, socks and black shoes cost more than a domestic worker’s monthly wage and the uniform the children received each Christmas had to last for the entire year. Tshepiso washed one of his two shirts every night. He brushed and pressed his single pair of shorts after each use, until they were shiny and threadbare. He stitched the holes that seemed to appear daily in his shoes. Tshepiso longed for shirts and shorts enough to last the entire week, and for a trunkful of shoes.
To have a more prosperous life, his parents told him, you must stay in school. But from a young age, Tshepiso understood the limits of even a good education. White people ruled them. He had seen how at night, Johannesburg, the white man’s city, shimmered with light; it seemed to Tshepiso the very essence of hope. Soweto was always in darkness.
Nomkhitha exerted the most influence over the children when they were very young. She was their confidante, the one they played with and cuddled. After work and on Sunday afternoons, Nomkhitha would sit with them on the veranda, talking, telling stories, teasing.
But as the boys grew, Joseph became the figure of authority. They craved his approval; each wanted to be his favourite. This was no easy thing. Joseph held himself apart as a strict disciplinarian – so strict, in fact, that neighbourhood parents used to compel good behaviour in their children by invoking his name. If Joseph found one of his sons being disobedient, he made the child lie down on the bedroom floor; Joseph then took off his belt and gave him a beating. (Behind his back, the boys called him ‘The Sheriff’. Rocks thought up the nickname from the Westerns he read).
Misconduct was subject to punishment by the belt. One day, Cougar, Mpho and about a dozen friends were putting small rocks on the rail lines near the house for trains to crush. The boys could have been electrocuted by the line or caused a train to derail. Suddenly, Joseph appeared on the other side of the lines and emitted a low whistle. Cougar and Mpho jumped up, terrified; they knew what the whistle meant. Go home immediately, he commanded them, lie down on the bedroom floor and wait for me to return.
Joseph had an array of belts with which to inflict punishment; some hurt more than others. The most feared was the one the children called Paris, after its manufacturer’s name. As painful as the beatings were, the boys preferred to have them administered immediately. Often, Nomkhitha would note a transgression, with a promise to inform Joseph. Then the culprit lived in unbearable anticipation for days.
(Smoking was another major offence; the children avoided smoking in Joseph’s presence. Of all the things Mpho would receive in jail after his arrest in 1977, none touched him more than the three packets of cigarettes his father included in his bundle. Mpho had thought Joseph unaware of his addiction.)
Beyond his authoritarianism, Joseph’s religiosity had the greatest influence on his children. He had switched to the Methodist Church, Nomkhitha’s denomination, because of disputes among the ministers in his Presbyterian parish. Joseph found the Methodist traditions powerful and satisfying. Every Sunday he donned the dark suit jacket, red waistcoat, grey flannel trousers, white shirt, black tie and lapel pin of his men’s guild. He sat with the other guild members at the front of church; seated near them were the manyano, or women’s guild. The married ones wore orange jackets, white collars, white caps, black skirts, black shoes and stockings. The single women’s garb was reversed: white jackets with orange collars. The guild members faced the congregants and the rows of hard, wooden pews. Small children, who maintained a murmur of babble throughout the service, played on the worn linoleum floor.
At a raised lectern, the preacher delivered the weekly sermon. He became intensely animated when expounding on a particular biblical passage, gesticulating with both arms and raising his voice to a fevered pitch. Behind him, a simple crucifix hung on the wall; a purple cloth, embroidered with the words ‘God is Love’, covered the altar. The members of the men’s guild listened intently to the sermon. Some held their heads in concentration; others, like Joseph, wiped tears from their cheeks.
When the service ended, the guild members rose from their seats. Pounding leather pillows like small drums and dancing in place, they exhorted the congregation to stand. The worshippers swayed and clapped their hands, their voices lifted in song; those who were moved by the preacher’s homily came forward to testify to their faith. The congregants responded with shouts of ‘Yes! Yes!’ and punctuated the end of each testimony with hauntingly beautiful hymns. The ceremony gladdened Joseph’s heart. For two short hours each week, he could forget about the terrors of apartheid: the police, the white bosses, the need to hide one’s true feelings, to act submissive. All that seemed to melt away in church. Here Joseph could express himself. He could allow himself to feel all the things denied him in his daily life. Here he felt free.
To ensure that his children found a similar refuge in the church, Joseph made religion a principal feature of their lives. He insisted they attend church services and Sunday school. On Wednesday nights, Joseph took them to interdenominational prayer meetings at private houses in the neighborhood. Saturday nights were given over to gatherings of the Independent Order of True Templars, a teetotalist group. The children’s branch, the Band of Hope, presented plays and concerts and held picnics. The older boys joined the Methodist Young Men’s Guild. They sang in the church choir. For a brief time, Mpho considered studying for the ministry. They all admired Joseph who, with tears coursing down his face, could enrapture a congregation with his preaching. (Dee believed that Mashinini men cried at the slightest provocation; it was as though they carried an overflowing tank of tears around on their backs.)
Their religious training left a deep impression on all the children. (Even as a freedom fighter years later, Rocks would pray in the guerrilla camps of Angola.) But the very education that their parents championed made the boys turn away from the church; they came to see it as something that blinded Joseph to South Africa’s political realities. With few exceptions, the various denominations discouraged resistance to apartheid. Liberation theology, which provided the moral justification for so many rebellions in Latin America, was virtually unknown in South Africa until the 1970s. Instead, the children saw a Church that urged prayer as the path to a better future. In their view, Joseph was waiting for a miracle that would never happen.
The boys also came to believe such passiveness perpetuated a sense of impotence among blacks. Joseph himself felt helpless to protect his children from the arbitrariness of apartheid; the political repression following the Rivonia Trial terrified him. He found security in the daily routine of work, home and church. In a world gone mad, the unvarying procedure provided a feeling of control in his life. It also, in his children’s view, bound him: Joseph could not see how things could possibly change. To upset the existing state of affairs was to invite disaster. Better to accept the daily injustices and find the beauty and glory of life elsewhere.
His children had a different sense of their place in the world. By the end of the 1960s, a new ideology began to sprout among university students: called Black Consciousness, it came into being as a rejection of white student leadership. (The youth organizations, with their multiracial membership, were virtually the only groups that actively protested injustices against blacks during the quiescence of the 1960s.) The ‘black power’ movement in the US greatly influenced the proponents of Black Consciousness, both in ideology and rhetoric. Black Consciousness insisted on the primacy of regaining self-confidence and a sense of independence. ‘Black man, you are on your own’, became its rallying cry.
The Black Consciousness activists launched education and community action campaigns throughout South Africa, aimed at reviving self-reliance among blacks. Their
