The Bang-Bang Club Read Free Page B

had failed to register the situation of black South Africans, had never been to see how different a township school was from my own greenlawned preserve, had no inkling of starvation in the homelands - ethnically-based reserves to which black people were forcibly moved out of ‘white’ South Africa. My mother had instilled in me a sense of justice and fairness that would probably ensure that I grew up to be a ‘nice’ white: one who did his military service, paid taxes and bought defence bonds, and might vote for a less racist, relatively liberal party in an effort to appease his conscience. I would have been one of those blind deaf-mutes who ensured South Africa made enough money to pay for apartheid, without ever getting my hands dirty in directly oppressing anyone.
    I was just 16 when I enjoyed my first holiday away from my parents, experimenting with rum and mampoer moonshine along the beautiful coastline of the Natal South Coast that was reserved for whites. It was during that summer holiday that I fell for an Afrikaans farm girl whose mashed toes began my education in the racial ugliness underpinning our society.
    My buddies and I were playing beach soccer when a lean, long-legged girl with hazel eyes and flowing hair joined the game. Her name was Michelle and she played like a boy. As the game slowly petered out, just the two of us were left kicking the ball around. Michelle told me she had learnt to play soccer with the children of the black labourers who worked on her father’s farm. She showed me her toes, crooked and misshapen from playing barefoot on uneven patches of farmland. It was with an aggressive irony that she referred to her black playmates as kaffirs. I was shocked, but then understood that her use of the word was comparable to the way black Americans had appropriated the word ‘nigger’ to blunt its sting. She had grown up with black kids in one of the most brutally racist sectors of white society. As a child, she had been allowed to play with black kids, but now that she was growing up, she was expected to leave her black friends behind. The whites’ biggest fear was that one of their girls would sleep with a black man. Michelle was a
teenager rebelling against her environment and a society mired in racism.
    I was startled and attracted by her anger, intrigued by the sense of social injustice that vaguely lurked outside my suburban world. But my life was filled with school, sport, experimenting with alcohol and learning about those mysterious creatures called girls.
    By the time I left for university in Pietermaritzburg, far from home, in the eastern province of KwaZulu-Natal, I had become involved in socialist politics and was tutoring black schoolkids from nearby township schools as they prepared for their final school exams. From them, I learned the then-banned hymn and liberation anthem, ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’. The all-white university was awash with poisonously right-wing students, many of them fleeing black rule in newly independent Zimbabwe, the former Rhodesia to our north. South Africans called them ‘when-we’s’ after their habit of whining about how good things used to be: ‘When we were in Rhodesia ...’ They were generally distinguishable by their clothes: short-sleeved shirts, rugby shorts, long socks and desert boots. From them I first heard the term ‘oxygen-wasters’ applied to black people and it shocked me. Before long I was involved in several brawls and other ugly confrontations. After the April Easter break, I learned that I had been chosen to play rugby for the province’s under-20 side. Though I very much wanted to play in that team, I had already decided to quit the sport - the racism endemic in rugby depressed and angered me too much. I even began to root for any team that played against the South African national side - the Springboks, resenting their victories.
    No bright advertising jingle could ever sum up the other, darker formative forces in my