Burger's Daughter (23 page)

—You mean they'd be like the black police are already. As Dhladhla said—just collaborators in a continued system of race repression ?—

But nobody took up Orde Greer's analogy; he doesn't have the curious tactfulness necessary towards the question of the black police who, although they have never yet refused to act against their own people, are still regarded as fellow victims, bullying and raiding under the orders of a common oppressor. Whites, not blacks, are ultimately responsible for everything blacks suffer and hate, even at the hands of their own people; a white must accept this if he concedes any responsibility at all. If he feels guilty, he is a liberal; in that house where I grew up there was no guilt because it was believed it was as a ruling class and not a colour that whites assumed responsibility. It wasn't something bleached into the flesh.

I was carried into the talk as one's feet carry one into some pattern of movement—a boxer's footwork, a runner's crouch—for which they have been trained. My voice crossed against and raised itself with others.—But is that so, James ? In the last ditch, mightn't the whites be prepared to bring in enough black capitalists to create a class-across-colour identity and solidarity—and consequently a common interest in holding down the black masses ?—

Marisa spoke with the authority of the Island.—I know that's what Joe's afraid of—he thinks it would link up with the ‘homeland' leaders, a way of keeping cheap labour, migrant labour, with a payoff for the ‘homeland' crowd and the favoured blacks in the white areas.—

—That's what I mean. The sort of thing the liberal opposition discuss when they try to get together. And the white Progressives are even talking about ‘shared power': they actually do have in mind something in the nature of political office—for the ‘right' black people, of course. That could have tremendous appeal for middle-class blacks. It goes further than offering Fats a voice on the national Boxing Board, or a black businessman a seat among the directors of Anglo-American.—

Orde put a palm out in a staying gesture to James on one side, me on the other.—D'you think a black group like that can have a place in the national movement ?—

James answered as I knew, marking off each word in my mind, he could be counted to.—Never. Its interests would stand in complete contradiction to those of the people as a whole, even in the context of national aims.—

—So what you want me to do ?—not let my boy fight overseas until you decide how we're going to smash apartheid?—Fats turned in almost comic dismay to Marisa.—Will it really help Joe and Nelson get out ?—He slopped a gout of whisky into James's glass, stopped with a grin before Dhladhla, who did not drink and whose abstinence was eloquent disapproval of the corrupting effect of white men's indulgences on others.—Wait for
him
to raise black consciousness so high Vorster and Kruger are going to see this big thing falling on them ?—

—So there's no danger—no hope, if you like to put it that way for some people—that group could have any place in the national movement—

Dhladhla interrupted Greer.—What national movement do you know?—

But it was inconceivable to anyone else in that company that Orde Greer was referring to anything but the African National Congress.—The fact is surely that the African bourgeoisie is being discovered—invented—by whites much, much too late to play the classic role, never mind the one they think it'll serve. That's the point. Not whether some black people want it or not. Do you realize—now he was addressing the room, the house, the streets, the whole ‘place'—for you black promoters and businessmen and teachers to come out on top the entire normal process would have to be reversed because the real class formation of a bourgeoisie would have to follow and not precede political power.—

How fascinated he was with his message, bringing in the familiar banned vocabulary the terms of the familiar banned aims of the faithful. They lull me; certainties around me in my childhood. For him they seemed to be discoveries; where had he come lately to them ?—but he is a journalist, although it is a camera and not a typewriter he uses, and it could have been that he would make himself a familiar in any milieu, reproducing knowledgeably any jargon appropriate to it. His job exposes him to everything. He's in the know: if he wanted to, he could talk exactly as one would expect from a racing driver at the trackside, or exactly as one would expect from a white Communist close to the ANC.

—
This
and
this
should happen and can't happen because of
that
and
that.
These theories don't fit us. We are not interested. You've been talking this shit before I was born. He's been listening.— Dhladhla pointed at James.—And where is he? And where am I? When I go into the café to buy bread they give the kaffir yesterday's stale. When he goes for fruit, the kaffir gets the half-rotten stuff the white won't buy. That is black.—

—You ignore the capitalist system by which you're oppressed racially ?—

—We don't ignore anything. We are educating the black to know he is strong and be proud of it. We are going to get rid of the capitalist and racist system but not as a ‘working class'. That's a white nonsense, here. The white workers belong to the exploiting class and take part in the suppression of the blacks. The blackman is not fighting for equality with whites. Blackness is the blackman refusing to believe the whiteman's way of life is best for blacks.—Tandi buried her face against his arm for a moment, threw back her head so that we caught her grin, her tongue curled out pink over her teeth.—It's not a class struggle for blacks, it's a race struggle. The main reason why we're still where we are is blacks haven't united as
blacks
because we're told all the time to do it is to be racist. ANC listened to that—

Marisa laughed.—ANC brought together the widest and biggest black unity there's ever been.—Her tolerance was the professionalism of the imprisoned leader's proxy, aware that the younger generation must be wooed against the day when he returns. Yet she was innocently motherly, if overwhelming sexual charm can ever be subordinate to any other; he was, after all, one of her own, her rebuke was confident. She's ready to move at the head of Dhladhla's students like the splendid bare-breasted Liberty in Delacroix's painting, when the time comes.

The schoolteacher kept trying to make himself heard.—Je-sus. No, I'm telling you!—the things they think they find at Turfloop—

Dhladhla had the air of seeing over heads, of having his back turned even to those people he was facing.—White liberals run around telling blacks it's immoral to unite as blacks, we're all human beings, it's just too bad there's white racism, we just need to get together, ‘things are changing', we must work out together the
solution...
Whites don't credit us with the intelligence to know what we want! We don't need their
solutions.—

Orde Greer drew in his face tight round nose and mouth and closed his eyes a moment.—And white radicals ?—

—Aagh! All these names you call yourselves—

—Communists who believe—like you—that reform is not the object. Whether you realize it or not, you've taken from them the idea that racialism is entrenched in capitalism (you turn their very words around, don't you) and you have to destroy one to get rid of the other. They believe it's just as impossible to conceive of workers' power in South Africa separated from national liberation, as it is to conceive of national liberation separated from the destruction of capitalism. A black man had a lot to do with working that out, a black Communist who happens to be called Moses Kotane, eh ?—He planted each phrase:—A national—democratic revolution—bringing to power—a revolutionary democratic alliance—dominated by—the proletariat and peasantry.—Except the bit about the dictatorship of the proletariat's been abandoned by Communists in Europe, by now. In Cuba, in Africa...it's probably still valid. Isn't that what you want ?—

—So what are you saying? There are a few good whites... And then? We can't be tricked to lose ourselves in some kind of colourless... shapeless...‘humanity'. We're concerned with group attitudes and group politics.—

—Communists believe in what you want—no, wait—what you want for
yourselves.
That's right? But they see black consciousness as racialism that sidetracks and undermines the struggle—

Dhladhla held the girl Tandi off from him by the wrist but did not leave hold of her.—Because the problem is white racism, there can only be one valid opposition to balance it out—solid black unity.—

—My god! Now you're quoting Hegel, dialectical materialism in its old-hat form, since then there've been Marxist thinkers who've disproved—

—Our liberation cannot be divorced from black consciousness because we cannot be conscious of ourselves and at the same time remain slaves.—

Slogans in the mouths of those who have re-cast them for themselves regain painful spontaneity for the tags and faded battle cries of causes the speaker doesn't acknowledge.

—Hell, that's beautiful, man ?—Fats held his palm up, weighing old words anew for us.

The baby had been making its way through a grove of legs. I picked it up to save it being stepped on, and it examined me, and then put out a little soft pad of brown hand and buffed me on the nose, laughing, laughing until the gurgles became liquid and saliva strung from its amber-pink lip.

—Isn't that beautiful? Duma—if you see my boy giving a knockout against a white fighter, you'll see something beautiful like that, man. I'm not kidding. You'll see he's just like you're saying. Isn't it ? Black body and black hands that did it...he doesn't care for
any
body. He feels—he looks—you'll see (Fats appropriated Dhladhla's term; perhaps he would take and keep it, overlay its defiance with the swagger of show-business)—
Blackman
.—His wave of laughter at himself swept round.

James Nyaluza's voice drew aside from it.—Verwoerd and Vorster did it. Fifteen years we haven't been able to reach the kids. It's all words for these kids, just new words... When the day comes when you have to act...what will they know?—

Duma Dhladhla and Tandi made a couple oddly counterparted by the baby and me. The shift of people as the discussion lost impetus left us in the arena of a moment whose nature was undecided: maybe we would begin to chatter inconsequentially, the obsessive forces charged between all who had been arguing or listening suddenly veering off, leaving little amicable drifts of people, cosy in their silent sociability of shared drinks and smokes on the house, like the huddled hangers-on who now and then loped out contentedly to the lavatory in the yard, or arguing away at treasured points they had not got anyone to listen to yet, like James captured by Orde Greer. Tandi suddenly addressed the baby in my arms off-handedly, in her own language. The baby went still and obstinate. Tandi spoke again. The baby gave a bouncing jerk against me and was quite still again. I was smiling down at him in the homage adults feel they must offer children without knowing why. Tandi held out her arms and at once the baby stretched his to her and was taken from me.

I spoke in the mild intimacy of girls of about the same age.—It is yours?—I meant I had thought the child was Margaret's and Fats'.

—They're all ours.—It was a forked flicker of the tongue; something that the one to whom it was addressed was not expected to understand, had no right to understand. She looked at me for a second; and turned away laughing aggressively, in talk, in their own language, with Dhladhla. She was teasing him, teasing the baby, he half-irritated, the baby half-in-bliss-half-in-tears. Margaret came and took it away from her, while she kissed it passionately and maliciously and it clung to her.

Somewhere near me the white journalist's phrases jingled like a bunch of keys fingered in a pocket.—...not peace at any price, peace for each at his—

The women were in and out of the kitchen. I made myself useful with Marisa who at once organized and delegated tasks among the pots of boiled fowl and meat, the potatoes and mealie-pap, the gravy that smelled of curry. Tandi's friend cut bread. Margaret was making her salads dainty with beetroot stars and radish roses.

Thanks madam
—the runts waited to be served by me, their fellow-guest, and ate seriously under their caps. Some people left without eating but others came in from the night as a matter of Fats' habitual sociability rather than because they had been invited. In fact I—Orde Greer and I—hadn't been asked for a meal in the way invitations are exchanged among whites, but simply had stayed on after dark until it happened to be the time when Fats' family usually ate. It's in this kind of black sociability, extending to blacks the hospitality already offered to white people in the tradition of my grandmother Marie Burger by Uncle Coen and Auntie Velma, that the Sundays in that house came about. We used to squat round the swimming-pool juggling hot boerewors from finger-tips to finger-tips; these children shared a dish on the floor, their fingers carefully moulding and dipping balls of stiff mealie-pap in gravy, while the baby and his grandmother ate from her plate.

Sitting on a plastic pouffe between James and Fats I was aware of the figure of Greer always seen from the back, planted with the hopeful and slightly ridiculous air of someone who has determinedly drunk more than anybody else, and makes a nuisance of himself on the periphery of one little group or another, taking with him his set of challenges, so that people might break off what they were saying but would either carelessly absorb his preoccupations or even interpret them wrongly in order to blend them with the direction of their own. He had mushed his food together without eating, already his abandoned plate had the repellent look of leftovers; someone stubbed a cigarette in it. Finally he was before Duma Dhladhla, unavoidable, ignoring the self-sufficiency of the trio, Dhladhla and the two girls. I heard him say very loudly, as if he and Dhladhla were alone—What would you do if you were me ?—