Sparks in the Township

Iwas born in 1960 in Durban. My father and mother were medical nurses. My grandfathers were both Presbyterian preachers, from Zululand. My father was an anc supporter. He spent some time in Dar es Salaam when I was small. I’m not sure that he went because of politics: people got out for lots of reasons, for opportunities or dignity. He came back for the sake of the family. But anyone who had been abroad was targeted by the Special Branch once they returned to South Africa. Although he was not really active, they used to visit him every week or so when I was a child; he died more or less a broken man. He definitely had an influence on me. I remember him showing me some political books: there was one in a brown-paper cover, so I never knew the author or title. When I was six we moved to Zululand. My parents worked in a hospital there run by a Scottish missionary, who tried to work along progressive lines. There was a black Jesus in the chapel, for example—that was something in those days; we used to point him out to each other. At that time, Buthelezi was considered quite a hero—he refused to accept ‘independent homeland’ status for Zululand, toured the country speaking out for black people and met with the anc. Even my father was fooled when he set up Inkatha with the colours black, green, gold: ‘It’s the colours of the anc!’ he told me; only the older people knew that then.

After my parents separated my brother and I were sent to a Catholic boarding school, run by the Dominicans, near Durban. My mother thought it was the best school around but it had a really strict regime, with punishments for everything. The food was terrible, too. I was there for four years—I was expelled after the school strike in 1976. Not that I was particularly political: more of a rebel in a generic sense, getting caught out of bounds, or drinking. But there was a spontaneous strike at our school after the police massacres in Soweto on June 16, 1976. The situation was very tense. Some students came in to talk to us; they had more experience and were at the forefront of the boycott. I didn’t play much of a part but these things quickly affect everyone. We felt under very strong pressure. We were all expelled, sent home. A month later the school authorities handpicked the ones they wanted to return. But they told my brother and me not to come back—they had some problem with me. After that I transferred to a township school in Newcastle, on the other side of Natal, where my father was living. I matriculated there.

In 1979 I started at Fort Hare, in the Eastern Cape. It’s the oldest black university in South Africa; Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo went there. I studied sociology, although at first I was enrolled for a BA in Personnel Management. When I arrived, there was the normal hullabaloo about which course to take. We were shoved around and didn’t get proper guidance, and this was a special new syllabus that they wanted to recruit students to. We studied sociology, industrial psychology, statistics, other social-science subjects. It made a big impact on me—at first, not politically: I was just fascinated by the ideas, and a whole new world opened up. It must have been around this time that I stopped believing in God.

Sociology was a bit better than some of the courses: there were a few black lecturers who tried to put the other side; Eastern Cape was a political place and Fort Hare has that prestige. We read dependency theory as well as the classics: Durkheim, Weber. There was a special course, ‘development policy and administration’, where we learned about the Group Areas Act and apartheid policy. It was meant to train young blacks in apartheid administration but it was taught by a good teacher, Mike Sham, who tried to give us a different perspective. He used to lend me books. But there was also the baptism by fire of the grading system. Many of the courses that were strategic for black students—statistics, anthropology, accounting—had something like a 10 per cent pass rate. Some people got a low mark on their first test and never recovered. But each one counted, and if you didn’t get around 50 per cent overall, you failed the course. Come September, all those who didn’t make the year mark had to face the ritual of returning home. Typically, some of them were your friends. It was the expulsions, I think, that made for the solidarity among us, when there were outbreaks of defiance.

The country wasn’t yet on fire, but there were things going on. When Mozambique got its independence in 1980 there were student demonstrations and class boycotts in support of frelimo. A group of students put up a manifesto, signed with a popular name—something with a bit of mystique, like ‘The Wolf Man’—and we all read it. This happened three or four times. Then there was a meeting in the Great Hall. Everyone came to listen to the debate; it was quite democratic. I wasn’t really political yet, but the atmosphere was so highly charged: not only in the country, in terms of people striving for freedom, liberation; but with frelimo showing the way, the possibility. There was hope. But also we felt, at least myself and my friends, that we were so oppressed in that university. Everyone shared a sense of relief and wanted to support the boycott; there was no question of breaking it—perhaps one or two people might have tried, but it was too strong. So we were all expelled for ‘political disturbances’, as they were called. The same thing was happening at every black university. After a month you could reapply and the authorities would select who they wanted.