boss’s house provided the farm’s one bit of beauty. It was a trim, white structure with a tiled roof and green, sweeping lawns; orchards flanked the grounds. The workers always approached the area cautiously. They were afraid of encountering the farmer, a tall, thin man with a bony nose, pale eyes and gnarly hands. At the sight of him, the labourers abruptly changed their demeanour: they doffed their caps, spoke with diffidence, kept their eyes on the ground. The farmer talked to them in English-accented Sotho. He fancied himself learned in the ways of Africans and was forever explaining a certain custom or habit to his ‘boys’, as he called them. Yes boss, they would say softly, staring at their shoes and allowing only the smallest twitch at the corners of their mouths – as if he, a white man, had to explain their traditions to them. Their monosyllabic responses were meant to forestall the farmer’s temper and the sting of his sjambok, a whip made of rhinoceros or hippopotamus hide. The farmer was a stern, uncompromising employer who didn’t brook cheekiness in his boys. He had a deep suspicion of outsiders; white, ‘do-gooder’ types from Johannesburg, he believed, lurked everywhere, trying to incite his workers.
Life on the farm was harsh for the children, too. Joseph and his four siblings had to awaken at four o’clock each morning to milk Hendrik’s cows. Then, with little more in their stomachs than the mouthful of steaming milk they managed to filch, the children trudged to school – a journey of one-and-a-half hours each way. The schoolhouse was a small, thatch-roofed mud structure, set amid a clump of trees. It had little in the way of materials. There were no chairs, desks or textbooks; the children sat on the floor and wrote on slates with chalk. One teacher taught all 300 students, who ranged in age from six to twelve years old. (This was a grammar school; after completing school, the children were supposed to work on their respective farms.) Joseph studied geography, history, mathematics, English and Afrikaans. At one o’clock he and his brothers and sisters began the long walk back to the farm.
Afternoons were given over to fetching Hendrik’s cattle from the pasture. Joseph and his younger brother Phillip had to finish milking the cows and locking the gates to the kraal before sunset. Otherwise Hendrik beat them. But Phillip, who was impudent and prone to tantrums, often refused to go; Joseph would have no choice but to set out without him, accompanied only by his dog, Fly, a medium-sized yellow mongrel. Joseph adored the dog. Fly knew all the routines of the farm, even when it was time to bring the cattle back; at the appointed hour, he would bark at Joseph and start off down the trail. Later, when Joseph was older, it would seem to him that he spent half his childhood traversing those huge expanses of fields: trekking to and from school, chasing after cows, helping with the harvest. But he would also mark his love of open grasslands and uncluttered horizons from those days.
The farm provided few amusements. There were no newspapers or radios; a hand-cranked gramophone offered the only entertainment. Joseph spent much of his free time playing with his cousins, fighting with sticks or fashioning toys from abandoned bits of wire. Sometimes the farmer’s three small sons came around for a game of football. Joseph liked the boys, who spoke Sotho to him in a friendly manner, but he was terrified of their father and his dreaded sjambok.
Joseph’s real pleasure came from attending church. This he did unfailingly every Sunday; Sara insisted all the children go to worship. (She also made them say grace before meals and recite prayers at bedtime.) Joseph was raised as a Presbyterian; a minister from Vereeniging came to the farm every three months to conduct services. Lay preachers substituted for him on the other Sundays. They rotated among the various denominations of the workers: one week, the Methodist preacher presided; the next, the Dutch Reformed; then the Catholic; and so on. The service was held in the house of a family who belonged to that week’s chosen sect. Joseph loved everything about it: the singing, the praying, the emotionally charged sermons. The Bible, the only reading material available to him on the farm, also fascinated him. And so Joseph eagerly anticipated Sundays – even though he still had to collect Hendrik’s cows in the afternoon.
Sara also had secular ambitions for Joseph: she wanted him to be a doctor. But having received virtually no education herself, Sara knew little about matriculation. Besides, she and Hendrik could not afford to pay for his studies. Sara did washing on Mondays and Tuesdays for a neighbouring white family to supplement Hendrik’s pitiable salary. She had a little vegetable garden where she grew beans, tomatoes and potatoes; and Hendrik got a bag of mealies with his pay. But they still struggled to feed their family, let alone provide any luxuries. At Christmas, the children each got one pair of shoes, a pair of shorts and a shirt – their entire wardrobe for the year.
As Joseph grew older, he became increasingly restless. He and his best friend Thabiso – the son of another farm hand – met every evening in the barn after bringing in the cows; and in the dim, half-light of dusk, they talked about the future. Both were desperate to escape to Johannesburg. Despite being so close, neither boy had ever been to the city; there were no highways yet, and the train journey took two hours. Still, Joseph and Thabiso knew Johannesburg just had to be wonderful. Some of the young men from neighbouring farms who joined the army during the war had gone to Johannesburg. They would return home on weekends in their smart khaki uniforms and enchant the younger boys with stories of the glittering eGoli: the towering buildings, luxurious cars, stylish restaurants. Neither Joseph nor Thabiso had any idea what he would do there. But that was of little import; everything around them seemed dull and of little worth compared with what awaited them in the magical city.
Joseph completed grammar school. In 1946 his dream of escape dissolved: Hendrik died, forcing Joseph, at the age of fourteen, to take on his father’s work. Otherwise the Mashininis would be evicted from the farm. (Joseph’s older brother, Andrew, had left the farm to work in a mill; Phillip was too young, and his two sisters and mother too weak, to do the work.) It was terrible, enervating labour for a rather scrawny youth: ploughing, planting, harvesting, milking. Joseph began his day at dawn and didn’t finish until three o’clock in the afternoon. Because he was the youngest among the full-time hands, Joseph got the worst jobs. He was often yoked into a span of a dozen or more oxen and forced to lead them, barefoot, across the fields. Some of the foremen were kind and spared the whip; but others, perhaps out of frustration or just plain mean-spiritedness, struck the animals and caused them to surge forward – putting all their weight on Joseph. Most days, he could barely make it back to his room to collapse on the bed.
This routine went on for months. Just when Joseph felt he could no longer continue and the family would have to leave the farm, his luck changed. The farmer took a liking to him: he gave him the job of escorting his two youngest sons by bicycle to school in Daleside, a nearby dorp, or village. Every morning, Joseph bicycled the six or so miles with the youngest boy sitting in a box behind him; the other boy rode by his side. They went by dirt roads all the way into town. Joseph saw them into the schoolhouse; after propping the older son’s small bicycle in the yard, he headed back to the farm to do some light work in the flower or vegetable gardens.
At noon, Joseph returned to Daleside to fetch the children. It was not much of a town: a smattering of squat, brown-brick houses, a post office, a railway station, a garage. Beyond lay Transvaal’s endless fields. Dutchmen (as Afrikaners were called by the blacks) owned the handful of shops; they treated their black customers worse than dogs. Forbidden to enter any premises through the front door, blacks were forced to make their purchases through a small window in the back – after every white patron inside had been served. Walking around town was not much better: blacks had to step off the pavement onto the street to let whites pass. Joseph suffered these indignities quietly. He knew little of politics, and so he accepted the affronts, like hard work and poverty, as constants in his life. Still, Joseph liked going to Daleside. The occasional car or train he saw there reminded him of his dreams of the big city.
By the time he was twenty years old, Joseph’s life seemed to have hardened into an immutable pattern that often left him despondent. There were few opportunities for him on the farm; he became convinced that if he stayed, he would never escape the hardships Hendrik had known. Joseph wanted a different existence. His older brother Andrew had never returned from his job at a
