Kaffir Boy: Part III

The bleachers at centre court were supposed to be fully integrated, but most black people kept to themselves, sitting in a cluster in the northeast section of the stands, an area without a canopy and fully exposed to the torrid Transvaal sun.

Scaramouche turned out to be not only a good coach but a confidant and a surrogate father.

Through Scaramouche I learned that the South African National Lawn Tennis Union (S.A.N.L.T.U.), an organization that ran black tennis, was so underfunded, so understaffed, its officers so embroiled in a power struggle, that it could manage to host only a handful of badly run tournaments a year.

Worst of all, I found among members of some churches a readiness to accept their lot as God’s will, a willingness to disparage their own blackness and heritage as inferior to the white man’s Christianity, a readiness to give up fighting to make things just in this world, in the hope that God’s justice would prevail in the hereafter

His repudiations of Christianity had as their launching pad the popular African expression “when the white people came, we had the land and they had the Bible; now we have the Bible, and they have our land”; an expression he always used to accuse priests, pastors, evangelists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses of collaborating with what he called “descendants of treacherous white missionaries.”

The principal rescued me by saying, with effusive pride, “Johannes, I’m proud to inform you that you’ve been awarded, based on your academic record, a government scholarship to pay for your schooling for each of the three years of secondary school.”

Each student’s curriculum was rounded off by the Afrikaans, English and vernacular languages.

He, a black man, had repeatedly impugned the government of South Africa and its policies of apartheid.

In a country where the writing of political slogans on walls was considered a serious crime, talking about political matters was tantamount to treason, punishable by hanging, if you were black.

But the National party refused to end apartheid; instead, each year the system was fortified by the promulgation of laws to entrench white rule and privilege.

His coming meant so much to blacks, who literally worshiped American blacks who proved that they could triumph in a white man’s world, a world that many of us believed was booby-trapped with all sorts of obstacles designed to sink blacks deeper into the mire of squalor and servitude, where white people wanted them to belong.

None of our ancestors, as far as I could tell from our distorted history, had ever been shackled and considered chattel, bred and traded like cattle, as the ancestors of the American black had been.

He was unequivocally opposed to racial segregation, yet he led an all-white South African team to its first-ever Davis Cup victory (won by default when the other finalist, India, refused to play in protest of apartheid).

My mother proceeded to tell me about her meeting that afternoon on the bus from work with members of the Twelve Apostle Church of God, who subsequently proselytized her to their religion.

“You’ll be sending them back to the Bantustan, am I not right?” he asked peremptorily.

It seemed as if he thought himself the only one privileged to address the white man as “sir,” and I had infringed on that prerogative.

The tone of his voice suggested that hitherto he had been bored, but that I had, by my unexpected usurpation of the black interpreter’s duties, injected some excitement into the otherwise routine job of interrogating and sentencing a black Influx Control offender.

Policemen with riot gear, rifles, tear gas canisters and sjamboks poured out of the trucks and formed a phalanx across the wide street.

If it had not been for the cordon the army had formed around Alexandra, there would have been a massacre of whites.

The government was of the mistaken belief that the student rebellion was ANC-inspired, that students’ grievances about the inadequacies of Bantu Education were chimerical, and that as soon as outside Communist agitators had been ferreted out, tried and hanged, blacks would once more be the peaceful, law-abiding, subservient lot whites were used to.

Hundreds of black clergymen, journalists, civil rights activists, teachers, lawyers, students and anyone suspected of subversive acts had been detained.

The horrors of African nations under the throes of communism were graphically spelled out: mass starvation, coups and counter coups, mass murders, high infant mortality rates, torture for political dissidents, Draconian laws allowing for any opponent of the system to be arrested without charges and detained without trial.

Blacks everywhere were brandishing newspapers with the headline:
ASHE PAINTS WIMBLEDON BLACK

Some of these youths were beginning to infiltrate back into the country in sorties, armed with submachine guns, bombs and other sophisticated weapons.

Though I knew from hearsay and from reading newspapers and books that American society was freer than South African society, somehow my experiences as a black man who had lived all his life under unremitting oppression and racism told me that no country in the world that had blacks and whites living together, and was run by the latter, was without racial segregation of some form.

The personality changes he underwent while in America enabled him to accept me as an equal, to respect my opinions and idiosyncrasies as a black man, no matter how abstruse he found them, or how vehemently he disagreed with them, at times.

In refusing to do so he was simply being greedy, intransigent and ruled by unfounded fears and mistaken beliefs.

I still visited the ranch and played with Helmut during the week, but I learned more from the surreptitious Saturday morning meetings with Andre.

Was this his way of reneging on his promise to help me join a white club?

“Try some serves,” he said in his mellifluous American accent.

I told her about the sophistication of the apartheid machinery, the battery of Draconian laws used to buttress it, the abject poverty in which a majority of blacks were sunk, leaving them with little energy and will to agitate for their rights.

“I’ll be matriculating soon, and I need to at least have an idea about what lies ahead.”

Given its long miscegenation history—begun when Jan Van Riebeeck and his men, the first whites to settle South Africa, arrived in 1652 without wives—the city was purported to be a most liberal place.

I could see Stan receiving an anonymous missive detailing my humiliating defeats, ending with the statement: don’t waste your time on him.

Since “independence” was foisted on the Transkei, the tens of thousands of Xhosas living in Crossroads were to be stripped of their South African citizenship and deported to the tribal reserve.

“Apartheid,” I said, “thrived on the enmity and fear between black and white.”

Black man after black man, black woman after black woman were sent back for more papers, more receipts, more certificates, more of everything that would satisfy the whims of bureaucrats who reveled at the sight of a grovelling black man or woman.

Americans continued to welcome and listen to black South Africans (among whom were those who fled during the 1976-77 crackdowns) who could provide firsthand accounts of black life under apartheid, instead of the South African government and its huge propaganda machine being the sole purveyor of such information.

When I began work at the bank I knew that much of their suffering would be ameliorated.

But now I was leaving them, to venture alone into the unknown, to cast adrift my ship in search of freedom and liberty in a new land.