Overseas, they called him, among other things, the ‘conscience of South Africa’; here he was just a pain in theneck, one of the Bleeding Hearts brigade who intermittently displayed the wounds of mankind for the edification of the readers of the London Observer. If there had to be people like that, I still didn’t want to meet them.
The fact that Jonathan Steele, looking exceptionally shabby, called for me in a small English car, not less than ten years old, whose battered appearance made even the Canton Hotel’s luggage-boys laugh aloud, put the dunce’s cap on the whole excursion.
Jonathan Steele was not at all repentant about the previous night; indeed, he only mentioned it once, and that indirectly, when he said: ‘I thought Muddley excelled himself, didn’t you?’ There were so many answers to that one that I didn’t make any of them. Instead I said: ‘I have to be back by half-past twelve.’
‘That’ll give us about an hour there,’ he answered, rather offhandedly. ‘Probably your saturation point.’
I forebore to say that in some ways I had reached this already.
We took the Main Reef road, through busy traffic, and then branched south, towards Teroka. Tall buildings gave way to smaller ones, and then to the open veld; the surfaced road trailed off into a yellow dusty track, bad alike for the hair and the nerves. Steele drove his horrid little car well, but our progress was not easy; deep ruts, corrugations, and that enveloping ochre dust all conspired with the heat to complete our discomfort.
Then, on the skyline, I saw the outlying shacks of Teroka Township.
It was what I had expected – not better, not worse; a sprawling mess of tin shanties, hessian shelters, lean-to sheds made of planks and barrel-staves. The buildings (for want of a better word) seemed to have been planted higgledy-piggledy, but there was a road system of sorts; a distorted latticework of pitted tracks, deeply scarred by wagon wheels and rivulets of drainage, and cluttered by every sort of refuse and every breed of goat, dog and child.
It was stiflingly hot; the air smelt acridly of woodsmoke, natives and excrement; a pall of dust enclosed it all like a murky blanket. I wanted to turn back, admitting without argument that I wasn’t this sort of person. But for a number of foolish reasons, compounded of pride, good manners and simple obstinacy, it had already become too late.
As we drove towards the entrance gates, Jonathan Steele said: ‘Fill your lungs. This is the authentic stink of South Africa.’ My conviction that this was a special promotion, designed to shame Marie Antoinette under the cruel spotlight of reality, returned anew.
Then came two minor surprises, the two things I remembered best about that morning. At the rusty barbed-wire gate which marked the entrance to Teroka, a native policeman waved us to a standstill. He looked indulgently at the car, which might indeed have served as a Class II taxi: then he looked at us, and his bearing changed. He said to Jonathan Steele, with not too subtle insolence: ‘Sir, no entrance to Europeans.’
It was easy to understand why he enjoyed saying it. Normally, no white man in South Africa could be disciplined by a native; here was one of the few special cases where the policeman’s writ enabled him to step across that line, since under the new apartheid laws certain civic areas were barred to the ‘non-designated’ race, whichever that was. While appreciating the fact that this was the policeman’s big moment, I still disliked the implications.
‘Tell him to get out of the way,’ I said, loud enough for him to hear.
The first surprise was that Jonathan Steele answered him, not in English or Afrikaans, but in a native language which I took to be Zulu. They talked rapidly for about a minute, Shillingford’s name occurring here and there; and then the policeman stood aside and we went through.
‘Do you really know Zulu?’ I asked, impressed.
He looked puzzled. ‘Zulu? He wasn’t a Zulu. That was Shangaan.’
‘Now how did you know that?’
‘The earrings,’ he said. ‘They had the Shangaan tribal emblem.’
‘You seem to be doing things very thoroughly.’
He grinned. ‘I’m writing a book about South Africa.’
The second surprise was Father Shillingford himself. We found him at the door of his ‘church’, a wretched tin shanty with a yellow pine cross over the door. Shillingford was a small, modest, rubicund man, far from Christlike – if Christlike means bearded, lean and dramatic, as the painters persuade us. He had a dusty brown cassock, and cracked boots. Only the eyes were out of the ordinary – pale, looking at you, and at the horizon behind you, in one embracing glance. I suppose they were the give-away; the rest of him couldn’t have been less distinguished.
He greeted Jonathan Steele like an old friend, and myself with the reserve normal in a priest.
‘It’s very good of you to come,’ he said. ‘We don’t have many visitors.’
‘Miss Marais writes for the newspapers,’ said Jonathan Steele, as if trying to put in a good word for me.
‘Oh yes, I know,’ said Father Shillingford.
I decided that they weren’t going to get me down. ‘This isn’t my usual area of operations, Father,’ I said.
He narrowed his gaze until it reached my face, and answered: ‘There are many different kinds of slum.’
‘But she is interested,’ said Jonathan Steele, rather harassed.
Once again he seemed to be apologising for me – for the way I looked, my jewellery, my shoes. It was true that I seemed out of place in Teroka’s grimy ugliness, and for my part I was going to take damned good care to keep things that way … There was a naked boy-child sitting on the lowest of the church steps – coal-black, innocent, and very beautiful. He was a small, engaging fellow creature now, but in a few years he would be a native, probably criminal or sexually dangerous. Father Shillingford wasn’t going to change that fact, and he wasn’t going to change that feeling in myself, either.
These were odd thoughts for me, Teroka thoughts, and I turned away from them. I wanted nothing so much as to be back in my suite at the Carlton, preferably drinking the second of two dry martinis. But that respite was still some distance, and many ugly sights and people, away from me.
Father Shillingford led us first into his church. The sunlight fell pathetically on the worn pews, the beaten earth floor, the altar-cloth stained by rainwater at one corner.
‘We are very poor, as you see,’ said Father Shillingford.
He seemed to be waiting for me to say something, but I had nothing to contribute. This was a shanty-church in a native location: I had expected it to be poor and shabby. To remark on that aspect of it would be as silly as attending a striptease act, advertised as such, and then saying: ‘But she’s naked!’ I had known Teroka would be naked.
‘And of course people break in at night, and take things,’ Father Shillingford continued. ‘I used to be able to sleep here, but that’s not allowed any more.’
‘He bicycles here from Johannesburg every day,’ said Jonathan Steele. ‘Fourteen miles.’
I had known about that, too.
Our excursion now became progressively more dull, as well as hot and irritating. Outside the church, we walked slowly down one of the streets, picking our way past the children and the goats, occasionally pausing to peer inside some wretched hut or sacking shelter. We were freely stared at; some of the men looked at me in a way I considered impermissible (it would certainly have had my father reaching for his sjambok). But throughout our tour Father Shillingford was seldom greeted, and never with any particular enthusiasm.
When I commented on this: ‘It’s true,’ he said, rather sadly. ‘It’s something which has happened the last year or so. They think all Europeans are either spies or exploiters – even me, and I’ve had this mission for nearly eight years.’ He was staring at a fat old woman selling a horrible confection that looked like pink peanut butter, and staring b
eyond her, as usual, at some ultimate horizon. ‘They’ve got to move on soon, you see. Even from this wretched place.’
‘Under the Group Areas Act?’
He nodded, his cheerful red face sombre. ‘That’s the magic phrase the Government uses … In future this is going to be a white area; all these people have got to get out, by the end of the year.’ He looked round him, at the squalor and filth of Teroka. ‘You wouldn’t think that would worry them much, would you? But this is home. It’s been home for twenty years or so. They own these houses and these bits of land. Now they’ve had orders to leave and start somewhere else, farther out of town.’
‘But it’s part of the overall plan,’ I said austerely, ‘to get Johannesburg properly zoned. There’s going to be a white area, and a native area. That makes sense, doesn’t it? You don’t want them all mixed up.’
‘But it’s so cruel!’ broke in Steele. ‘My God, they already have to get up at five o’clock every morning, to queue up for those bloody buses to get to work by eight! Now they’re being pushed even farther away. And this place belongs to them! It’s theirs. How would you like to be kicked out of your house or flat or whatever it is, with no compensation and no appeal?’
‘I wouldn’t like it at all,’ I answered, ‘and I’m taking very good care to see that it will never happen.’
‘To you.’
‘To me.’
‘But that’s so selfish!’ said Steele, exasperated as I had intended him to be.
‘I am selfish,’ I said.
To my surprise and annoyance, Father Shillingford was smiling at me. It was not an amused smile; it even had elements of compassion and understanding, which I did not care for at all. Finally he said: ‘Miss Marais likes to be her own worst advertisement.’
It occurred to me suddenly that he and I were illustrating two aspects of integrity, the sacred and the profane, and that I much preferred mine. I engaged his intrusive blue eyes for a moment before replying: ‘I don’t fool myself, and I try not to fool other people.’
We did not stay long after that; I endured a few more streets, a few more smells, a few more insolent or sullen stares. More strongly than ever, I felt that I knew all this without being told it; I knew that Johannesburg natives were poor and meanly housed, that there was violence and theft, that they did not like or trust the white man. If it was Father Shillingford’s self-imposed task to try to soften this hard core of maladjustment, well and good. But when brought face to face with it, no bell tolled for me, nor would ever do so.
It was like getting involved with other people’s children on an aircraft or a train. If you betrayed the smallest interest in one of these deceptive brats, you were likely to become mother for the duration. Its sticky fingers would explore your hair, its wringing-wet pants would be pressed to your skirt; all its terror and boredoms would be your own. There was only one tactic to be employed on such occasions; to ignore it utterly, and if necessary pull a horrible face and frighten it away for good.
When we were driving away from the smells and the corrosive dirt of Teroka, Jonathan Steele said: ‘I’ll bet that’s one social engagement we won’t be reading about in your column.’
I was now comfortably beyond such minor strifes, but I wasn’t speechless on that account. ‘You really are rude, aren’t you?’
His hands on the steering wheel of his rotten car were, for a moment, steady. He said, with what seemed to me to be extreme care and concentration: ‘Kate, you are very beautiful and very accomplished. But whether you are lying flat on your back, or striding along to victory, Teroka is still there.’
Chapter Four
I forgot Teroka speedily, though the words ‘very beautiful and very accomplished’ stayed with me, echoing for two busy days in many different places – Joel Sachs’ office, at conferences in my suite, at parties, in the street. At the advanced age of twenty-six, I still received enough compliments to satisfy a not-too-swollen ego; it was odd that I should remember Jonathan Steele’s, particularly since he had tacked on to it a sexual image – ‘lying flat on your back’ – which normally would have annoyed me very much. I decided that I wasn’t working hard enough … I did not see Steele again; Eumor said that he was ‘busy on his master-work’, and Bruno van Thaal said: ‘He can fry in hell for all I care,’ which seemed to dispose of the matter to the satisfaction of all parties.
Meanwhile I was enjoying Johannesburg, which I always thought of as ‘my town’ because I was born there, at a time when my father was emerging as one of the bigger stars in the gold-mining firmament. Working and playing there was always a tonic, after the more leisured pace of Cape Town. The Reef mines of the Witwatersrand were only sixty years old; the city which had grown on top of them was still a glorified mining camp, wide open, available for all corners. It wore always a flushed and hectic air, like a bride who might die tomorrow or an actor grown famous overnight.
People – young and old, thin or fat – threw their bodies on it at eight o’clock each morning, extracted every ounce of gold or profit during the next eight hours, and then rushed home in the evening to gamble it all away again. It lived perpetually on its nerves, hopes, fears and suspicions; and since there was no limit of any sort to human greed and gullibility, the whole place was jumping, on a round-the-clock, twenty-four-hour basis.
Civic happiness was geared to the mining section of the stock market; not just for operators or investors, but for everybody. When the market was up, even the poor whites running the lifts were buoyant as bees; when it was down, there was not a smile to be had from a derelict taxi driver. To hold aloof from this fever was an eccentric blasphemy; even the silliest women, restless, wayward and palpably insincere, chattered of margins and coverage, stopes and assaye-reports, a clean-up in this and a sell-out in that. I sometimes wondered whether their terms of endearment, their loving words-on-a-pillow, were not darling West Driefontein, beautiful Blyvooruitzicht, dreamy De Beers…
To match this nervous financial tic, there were some astonishing crimes and misdemeanours. ‘Salted’ bore-holes, peppered with alien gold, sent mining shares rocketing, only to plunge earthwards again when the perpetrators went to jail. Huge bets went awry as horses responded too readily to doping, and jumped the railings or sped backwards round the course. Only in Johannesburg would a horse, having broken its leg in a scuffle at the finishing-post, be shot dead by a spectator who ran across with his revolver from the Ten Shilling Enclosure.
Members of ‘sherry gangs’ kicked each other to death, and blamed it on tropical rain. ‘Fishing-pole burglars’ angled for loot through open bedroom windows, hauling out trousers, bedclothes, lovers … A combination of altitude and aptitude gave people the world’s strongest heads; there might be heavy drinking in other parts of the globe, but here it touched unique peaks of glory, and the altitude took care of the hangover.
Above all, it was a generous town. Involved in any kind of charity, I would rather raise ten thousand pounds in Johannesburg than ten shillings in London or Paris – particularly Paris. Partly it was due to a very strong Jewish community – acquisitive, cultured and open-handed. A by-product of this was an anti-Semitism of an odd and disgusting kind; not the unselfish disliking the acquisitive, but the acquisitive disliking the ones who had out-manoeuvred them. Johannesburg, however, had room for them all.
For two days I worked and wandered in this unique climate. We succeeded in sewing up the Anglo-African account, in the teeth of convulsive opposition from another firm; and I discussed with Joel Sachs about a dozen different layouts which were now due for production (the actual artwork was done in the main studio down at Cape Town). Gerald Thyssen gave an exceptionally pleasant dinner party for me; we all went racing at Turffontein, where I lost at least a week’s profits on one of Eumor’s ungenerous crocodiles. Then it was the eve of my departure, and by way of farewell I dined with the boys and took them all to watch a wrest
ling match.
Like the act of love, all-in wrestling in South Africa was the same as all-in wrestling in any other part of the world; predominantly crooked, patently rehearsed and (as far as I was concerned) hilariously amusing. We arrived at the end of one bout (the loser was just being finished off with a folding chair as we walked in) and wangled enough space at the ringside Press table to make ourselves comfortable. Flanked by Eumor and Bruno van Thaal, I settled down happily to watch Honest John versus the Demon Barber (one fall, twenty-minute time limit, championship of the Lower Transvaal).
Honest John (a new arrival from Rhodesia) was one of the least honest performers I had ever seen in the ring. He was rather old, rather bald, rather cynical about the whole thing; but he was still a splendid character, versed in all the stratagems which make ‘show wrestling’ such a meaty conjuring trick. He gave us (and the Demon Barber – who was entirely hairless) the works; closed-fist punching, elbow smashes that missed the chin and took the larynx, eye-gouging, knees into the groin, muscle-plucking on the referee’s blind side. He was up to all the tricks of defeat also; quite unsurpassed at cries of pain, the groggy-knees routine, fist-shaking at the crowd and appeals to high heaven for justice.
Once, when he touched my shoe in landing outside the ring, he whispered: ‘Excuse me, lady,’ and then roared at the top of his voice: ‘Foul!’ Thrown out of the ring a second time, he pointed at a projecting nail in the floor at least a yard from where he landed, and screamed in agony: ‘Oh, my knee!’ Naturally we backed him to the limit of our lungs.
And then, halfway through, suddenly I was bored; and just as suddenly I knew why.