Tandia (28 page)

When the three women reached St Peter's church hall it was already crowded. The people at the protest meeting were somewhat older than the boxing crowd and a fair proportion of them were women. Some wore the green, black and yellow uniform of the ANC and carried banners protesting against the eviction notices and the demolition of Sophiatown. Most of the women were dressed in their glad rags, though even those dressed to the nines could not compare with the sheer glimmering bulk of Mama Tequila. Madam Flame Flo was, of course, well known as one of Sophiatown's most notorious shebeen queens and in this particular company perhaps not as well liked as with the boxing crowd. Her shebeen had often enough seen the money these women worked so hard to get used by their men for the liquor which drove them crazy and chased them into the arms of the good-time girls. Many of them believed that Madam Flame Flo was letting the community down. Some, though, did call their greetings; they were the ones who knew that Madam Flame Flo gave generously to the ANC and helped in unorthodox but useful ways.

Madam Flame Flo and her party were led to the front row by a buxom woman wearing the colours of the ANC. The mood in the hall was optimistic and there was a great deal of laughter as people recognised friends and warmed to the business of the protest. Soon all the seats were taken and only standing room remained.

Father Huddleston, Sophiatown's much loved Anglican priest, standing on the slight platform at the front of the hall, looked tall and frail. The priest stood to one side of a slightly battered-looking kitchen table, his long arms clasped below his waist. He wore a priest's cassock fastened by a wide leather belt. His head was remarkable, with its pronounced jaw, thin hawk-like nose and piercing blue eyes. He had a crew cut; the barber's impatient clippers seemed to have shaved him clean to the skin from the top of his large ears to the curve beginning at the crown of his head. At the very top of his head grew a tuft of evenly clipped, thick, steel-grey hair which seemed well adapted to survive in the harsh, rarefied climate of his six foot five inch frame. Everything about Father Huddleston suggested selfdenial. He was the Model T Ford of the priesthood, a stripped-down sort of a man at the extreme opposite end of the pompous, vainglorious posturing of the clerical order. Had he been in the church of Rome he would have been a serious candidate for sainthood, an idea he would have found unnecessarily mawkish and unseemly. There was nothing saintlike in the general behaviour of Father Huddleston. He was an ordinary and often impatient man who stood his ground and had his say, fearing no one, never slow to debunk the sophistry of apartheid or to challenge the actions of the police or the authorities. In fact, his character was best summed up by Madam Flame Flo when she pointed him out to Tandia. 'That's Father Huddleston. I'm telling you, man, he's one sonofabitch of a priest.'

It was not Father Huddleston's meeting. He was simply lending the venue and opening the evening with a short prayer. The chairman of the protest meeting was a young African seated alone at the table. His name was Robert Resha and he was well known to most of the audience in his role as an ANC executive as well as sports writer for
Drum
magazine, the urban African magazine delighted in by' the blacks and held in great suspicion by the white authorities.

At the conclusion of a short prayer the entire audience sang in perfect harmony, 'Aaaahmen!' Then they moved on to sing
Nkosi Sikelela i' Afrika',
the one-time Presbyterian hymn which has become the black national anthem of South Africa. The protest meeting had begun, and the audience waited eagerly for Robert Resha, who was known for his bold and fiery speeches.

Father Huddleston left the stage and took his place in the front row of the audience, where an empty seat awaited him. Now alone on the platform, the young black man rose quietly from where he now sat alone at the table on the platform. He lifted his right arm high, fist clenched, thumb extended.
'Mayibuye Afrika!'
he cried.

The crowd, their own arms extended in salute, returned the cry.
'Mayibuye Afrika!,
'My brothers and my sisters,' he began, 'tonight you will not hear from me, or Father Huddleston. Tonight we have a new speaker who is known to you all, but who is also not known to you.' He smiled. 'Because this man is a very quiet cat, this man is a man of action who has not before used words for the cause.'

There was a sigh of disappointment in the crowd. They had come to hear a fiery speech by Resha himself; now they were going to be subjected to a novice. They had put away their tiredness and dressed up for nothing.

Robert Resha raised his hand. 'Be not disappointed,' he proclaimed, using the biblical style. 'This man, he is a Zulu, with the golden voice of his people. You will remember tonight. This is my promise to you.' He turned, walked to a doorway leading from the back of the stage, and nodded at someone the crowd was unable to see.

To the sudden delight of the audience Gideon Mandoma, dressed impeccably in a navy serge suit, white shirt and red tie, stepped through the doorway. As though he was announcing a boxing match, Robert Resha threw up his arms. 'Ladies and Gentlemen, citizens of Sophiatown and all who live in Western Native, I give you my friend and all-Africa boxing champion, Chief Gideon Mandoma!'

Gideon walked towards the table to the warm applause of the audience. Even the mums of Sophiatown, who couldn't have cared less about boxing, knew of Gideon Mandoma, the quiet, smiling Zulu who was black champion.

'My friends,' Gideon began slowly, his English carefully enunciated. Madam Flame Flo had told Tandia how Gideon Mandoma had educated himself by going to night school and doing a correspondence course and how, in just five years, he too had sat for and passed his matriculation examination last November, the very same examination that Tandia had passed so brilliantly.

The English that the young chief spoke was less the language of Sophiatown and more the one he'd learned from his school books. Gideon now told of his coming to Sophiatown from Zululand via Durban, where at the age of twelve he had left his kraal because of a severe drought to seek work and where, by joining the YMCA, he'd been introduced to boxing, finally coming to Johannesburg at the invitation of Mr Nguni.

'I am telling this for you, because you see I am two things in my life. I am a Zulu who was born in a kraal, who herded my father's cattle and who respected the laws of my chief. But also I am someone else,' he smiled, 'I am a majieta!' The audience laughed as he identified with the tough, cynical, street-smart young men of Sophiatown. 'Now I cannot return to my father's house, even if I am a chief and those people need me. Because now I am much more, I belong to a new tribe of Africa.' He smiled again. 'We who live in Sophiatown, Alexandra, Orlando and all the other townships, in Jo'burg, Durban, Port Elizabeth, Cape Town, even Pretoria, we are the new people. We are the new South Africans. We are not Zulus, or Pondo, Swazi, Sotho, Basuto, we are not coloured or Indian and even yes, we are not white! These things are past, they cannot be brought back. This is the new Afrika and this place…' He paused and looked about him as though he were looking beyond the tin walls of the church hall. 'This place is the birthplace of the new Afrika, the new South African.' He paused again and looked about the room at the serious faces looking up at him, his own face serious. Tandia could feel her heart pounding. She could see that the people around her felt the same way; not a stirring or a cough broke the silence.

'Let me tell you the ways we are different. The language we talk, it is not English, it is not Afrikaans, or Zulu, or any of the languages of the tribes. It is the language of all! Here English, there Afrikaans, here Zulu or Sotho or Fanagalo.

The music we play, we call it jazz, but it is not American, it is not English or the
tickie-draai
or
boere musiek
of the Afrikaans, it is Township, township jazz. It is our music.

Our ways are our ways and our thoughts are our thoughts.

New ways, new thoughts. New people.

'Let me tell you why we must fight to keep these new ways. Our ways are not the ways of the Boer. This man, this white Afrikaner tribe, they do not want to be a new people. They wish always to be an old people. They believe in white superiority, this is an old way. They say the white race, the Afrikaner race is God's race and they are God's servants and we, the black people and the coloured people, we must be the servants of God's servants! It is God's will, it is God's purpose, it is so because everybody knows, God is a white man and he is on their side!'

Gideon smiled and then laughed, his brilliant smile lightening his face so that the audience found themselves chuckling with him. 'But we must not grow angry at the white, racist God-fearing government of South Africa. Because you see, what they want for themselves, they also want for us. When Or Verwoerd and Mr Strijdom speak of apartheid, they think in their hearts they are giving us what we want! They think the Zulu is like the Afrikaner and wants only to be with the Zulu, his own tribe, and the Sotho and the Shangaan and the Pondo and the Basuto they also, they want only to be with their own kind, to talk their own language and sing their own songs and marry their own women and' grow their own crops and tend their own cattle!'

Mandoma leaned forward over the table, his eyes travelling once more over the crowd. His pauses were precise. He knew how to feel the crowd and manipulate it, massage it with his voice which rose and fell, I grew harsh then soft again, shot forward in a rapid spate of words and then rested until the audience silently begged for him to continue. Now he spoke quietly again. 'These Boers who believe in white superiority and race purity, they have made a fundamental error in believing that the black people also believe in this racist nonsense. They do not see that in Sophiatown and Cato Manor and Jacobs in Durban, in District Six and Windermere in Cape Town and the townships of Port Elizabeth and everywhere else where the black people huddle, we have become a new people, the new people of South Africa! We do not ask is a man coloured, or Indian or black, we do not ask his tribe, we ask only one thing!' Gideon Mandoma's voice grew low so that the audience strained to hear him. 'We ask only, is this a good man or a bad man? Is this a good woman or a bad woman? Is this a good child or a bad child?' His voice rose and grew harsh. 'Not black! Not coloured! Indian! Chinese! Not even white! We do not look at the colour of a skin, we look at the heart which beats inside the skin.'

Gideon Mandoma's voice began suddenly to tremble. He was plainly upset. 'It is this which the white man wants to kill. It is this love, it is this understanding, it is this beginning. These old white men and these old white ways want to kill the new South Africa before it becomes real.

And that is why they want to destroy Sophiatown and send us all to separate places which they have built to match our colour. This township, this dirty, ugly place of tin shanties and cardboard houses, this place where a black child is already old when he is ten years old, this drunken place of whores and shebeens, of dirty streets and hungry children, of sickness and murder. This is the place where freedom has decided to make its home, where the brotherhood of man can emerge, where his colour is the colour of his heart and not his skin. This is the place the white racists must destroy before it destroys them. They will show no mercy.

They will come in the night and in the early morning and they will load us onto lorries, our mattresses and our beds and our children and our cooking pots and take us to our new places. To Diepfontein and Soweto, to Coronationville.

Why cannot these new places with the new soccer stadiums and the schools and the health centres be used for all the people? Clean places where a man can rest and a family can grow up without fear. But this will not be. They will not be denied the inglorious, stupid, absurd concept of separation and superiority.' Mandoma paused, allowing his words to take effect, and then he began again, his voice low and steady, the voice of a leader bringing his people together, binding their wills and their determination to his own. 'We must fight. Not because we are servants and they are masters, not because we are black and they are white. But because the human race cannot progress backwards. They are trying to return us to a time and a place that cannot exist for us. We are a new tribe, the South African tribe, and we cannot go backwards, we cannot be undone, we cannot be ignored and, in the end, we cannot be defeated!'

'Mayibuye Afrika!'
someone shouted from the back of the hall, and soon the audience was standing, their fists in the air, shouting their defiance. Small groups of women rose and, pushing the chairs aside, began to sing and dance. Soon everybody was dancing and singing with their arms raised in the traditional salute. Gideon Mandoma was a new star in the firmament of black politics. First a chief of the Zulu tribe, now a chief of the people tribe. They had heard his power. He had the lion's breath. He had the lion's roar. He had the lion's courage and the gift of moving the people. This one was a new leader who would fight for them. From this point on he would no longer be a black boxing champion fighting to beat a white in the boxing ring. From now on he was a black champion who carried in his fists and in his mouth the message of the underclass, of the people who wanted justice for themselves and for their children - the tired, exhausted people who pulled the plough of the white man's South Africa. Gideon Mandoma would lead them to the promised land.

Tandia felt the power in the black man, the power to move and to make things happen. She would follow him. She knew she was in love with him, a thing she had thought impossible. But she also knew that she had heard the breath of the future. It had passed over her and whispered to her. She was a part of the fight, she would march beside Mandoma, she too would be a part, a fighting part of the new South Africa to come and of the new South Africans. She was not stupid enough to think it would come about through rhetoric or even violence. Geldenhuis was not an isolated, sick human being; he was in many ways, in the ways that counted when you summed up an enemy, a typical Afrikaner. He would die rather than give an inch. She saw clearly that her love was not what was needed, she would need her hate. Her hate. must be equal, it must surpass that of Geldenhuis. She sensed that Mandoma was not a man who could hate enough. He would need a woman beside him who could tear at the white man's flesh with her teeth. He would need her.