Roots of Outrage. John Davis Gordon

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ to ribald remarks about bearing the Immorality Act in mind when he crawled on his hands and knees to thank her for her nice thank-you letter. Then Willy Thembu said: ‘Why doesn’t Luke do a full-length feature on her, her whole history, a sort of “Day in the Death of an Indian Beauty under Apartheid”? Hey – why doesn’t he talk her into screwing a few top-cops, and then we blow the story?’

      ‘Hey, how about that …’

      The boss grinned. ‘But we’d be sued – and Miss Gandhi would go to jail.’

      ‘But so would the politicians and the top-cops!’ Butch Molofo said happily. ‘The Afrikaner establishment would have egg all over their faces! We’d make a sort of Mata Hari out of her – a love-nest spy. I bet that girl would go for it, she’s a trouble-maker. And I bet she’s in the thick of the ANC’s underground – I bet she knows what this guy Nelson Mandela’s up to …’

      But the boss shook his head. ‘We’re trouble-shooters, not troublemakers, and we don’t make ourselves accomplices to crime. Anyway, Miss Gandhi’s been over-written lately.’ (Mahoney was very disappointed.) ‘But what we should do is start building a profile on this guy Nelson Mandela – to be ready for the day he does something dramatic. Luke – you start on that, between other stories. Start in the newspaper cuttings; look up every reference to him and his wife, Winnie. And you’re a law student – maybe it’s time you wrote us a nice piece on that ridiculous Treason Trial that Mandela was involved in. “What is treason in this land of ours?” Reminding us how the cops broke up the Congress of the people at Kliptown when the Freedom Charter was formed, arrested thousands, put a hundred and fifty-six on trial for treason, how five years later there were only thirty-one accused left because the government had withdrawn charges against the rest due to lack of any real evidence of treason. Explain to us what treason now means in our poor benighted country under our new draconian legislation. Can do?’

      ‘Can do,’ Luke said. ‘I’ll get my father to check me on the law.’

      ‘Good.’ The boss looked around the table. ‘So what else is happening out there?’

      Fred Kalanga took his feet off the desk to pour himself another shot of brandy. ‘Talking about Nelson Mandela, I’ve heard a bit of talk in the shebeens that we’re going to start seeing a few bangs from him soon. Something about the ANC changing its policy of non-violence.’

      There were some cheers. The boss said: ‘Doesn’t surprise me – the ANC has got to resort to violence sometime soon if it’s going to retain credibility with the blacks. But Drum doesn’t publish rumours …’

      Two weeks later Justin Nkomo came to work for Drum, on probation. Mahoney was delighted to see him again but he soon concluded that Justin was not going to fit in: he was too serious and bookish. Sure, he drank, but not enough. He wrote good prose, but not flip enough. He wanted to enjoy life but he was not flash enough for Soweto. Sure, he loved women but he was not hip enough. ‘Our intellectual’ they called him at Drum.

      It was a month after his arrival that Drum staged their debut of Our Black Springbok. Justin had been sufficiently tested at nets to convince the publisher he was on to a winner of a story. Now he persuaded the Witwatersrand University first cricket team to turn out, and the first baseball team, he invited the sportswriters of the daily newspapers to come along, and several members of the British and United States consulates in the hopes that Justin might be offered a scholarship.

      ‘I hope to God he doesn’t let us down after all this.’

      Mahoney was worried too – this had been his idea. Please God … he prayed as Justin walked out onto the university cricket pitch.

      It was not, of course, to be a cricket match: it was an exhibition, and a wager. The publisher had offered five hundred rands to the university cricket club if Justin failed to score a century. And what an exhibition of slugging it was! The university team were astounded – and so were the sportswriters.

      ‘They did not know what hit them,’ the Star reported. ‘There at the crease stood this gangly young black man, holding his bat like a caveman’s club, smashing the university’s best bowlers to all corners of the field as if swatting flies. Having reached his century in record time – thus winning the wager for his sponsor, Drum – the batsman, armed now with a baseball bat, repeated the same phenomenon against the best pitchers of the university’s baseball club. The man is a genius with a bat: he has little style but who needs that with an eye and brawn like his? It would be foolish to tamper with such unorthodox brilliance. If there were no apartheid in this sports-mad land of ours he would, without a doubt, be a Springbok cricketer in a year or two, if not immediately. There is every chance that if he and Drum play their cards right, this man Justin Nkomo will be offered a sports scholarship to an overseas university. Indeed, the United States cultural attaché, watching wide-eyed, told me that he was certain that an American university would snap him up. South Africa will be the loser. What a sporting tragedy …’

      Three months later Justin Nkomo accepted a scholarship to the University of Miami. Many years were to pass before he returned.

10

      In those days Mahoney shared a big, seedy, four-bedroom apartment with three other bachelors: Shortarse Longbottom, a tall, thin, mournful young reporter on the Star, Hugo Wessels, known as Huge Vessel because of his capacity for beer, who was a young reporter on an Afrikaans newspaper, and Splinter Woodcock, a law student who was justifiably pleased with his genital endowments. The apartment was on the top floor of an old apartment block in Hillbrow, on the edge of downtown Johannesburg, one of the most densely populated areas of the world. By day the area teemed with blacks, employees of the shops and restaurants and cheap hotels, and servants who worked in the cheap apartments, but at night they all disappeared back to the townships beyond the horizon.

      Most of the apartment blocks had servants’ rooms on the very top but ‘locations in the sky’ were discouraged under apartheid. There were servants’ rooms on Mahoney’s rooftop and it was a term of the lease that they should not be occupied, but Mahoney had purloined a key and he went up there to work when the partying got too hectic downstairs. They called the apartment The Parsonage because there was a substantial turnover of young ladies at breakfast all weekend. The parties were fine with Mahoney, because he had most mornings free, but the weekend was an important time for him to study, at least during daylight, though it was great to know the party was going strong downstairs whenever he was ready to join it.

      The Parsonage piss-ups began on Friday afternoons in the staff canteen of the Star, where the junior reporters of Johannesburg’s various newspapers gathered to solve the problems of the world and flirt with the female junior reporters, including Gloria Naidoo, who wrote for the fashion page, and Wendy Chiang, who wrote for the book page, and Innocentia Molo, who wrote for the Sowetan. This multi-racial gathering was not illegal, but to adjourn together across the road to the Press Bar of the Elizabeth Hotel was illegal because of the Group Areas Act and the Liquor Act. Miss Chiang, Miss Naidoo and Miss Molo were not allowed to darken its white doors, so the party usually graduated back to The Parsonage. And this, strictly speaking, wasn’t illegal either: people of different races were not actually forbidden to meet in private homes provided there was no question of contravention of the Immorality Act, the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, the Prohibition of Political Interference Act, the Influx of Unwanted Persons Act, the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which authorized a policeman to detain you for twelve days without trial, the Suppression of Communism Act, the Seditious Publications Act … It wasn’t actually illegal – not yet – but Sergeant van Rensburg and his squad were СКАЧАТЬ