In A World They Never Made

All the world knows that in Johannesburg, blacks and whites live at once together and apart under the color bar of South African apartheid. The high-rise world of shops, cinemas, theaters, restaurants and garden suburbs is white--except for the mines, the factories, the kitchens, back yards and streets, where the blacks go about working for whites. The vast shoe-box complex of workers' houses, Soweto (and smaller areas like it), is black. Whites are allowed to go there only on guided tours offered as a tourist attraction. Black townships are neat as cemeteries; they smoke with the life of thousands of cooking fires. Down to earth, here are struggling peach trees, scrap lean-tos, rutted streets of beat-up vehicles, chickens, curs, children, gangsters, dark little shops and--always--a big white-owned liquor store.

It's a black man's world made by white men.

The guided tour won't tell much about what it's like to live defined by other men's idea of what you are. Black writers who did this in the Sixties all have been gagged by government banning or exile, and a year or two ago there was silence. Then--sweet, wild, thin, raw--the voices began again. Who speaks? Who has the nerve for it?

Up through the cracks in the laws that overlay their lives, black street-corner poets have pushed like those peach trees germinated from pips spat into the dust. The stock vocabulary of American black consciousness is not theirs; although they write in English, their mother tongues have not been torn out in the Diaspora, and although the dirt beneath their feet is proscribed for the time being, it is the earth where their lineage lies, unbroken.

Look upon me as a pullet crawling from an eggshell laid by a Zulu hen ready to fly in spirit to all lands on earth

writes Oswald Mtshali, working as a messenger for a white firm and going home to Soweto at night. These writers are a new breed, poets trying to assert life as whole men, in spite of laws designed to lop them down to white specifications. A hopeless attempt? A kind of unanswerable protest of survival?

It's not fortuitous that they write poetry rather than prose. Image and metaphor bamboozle the censors in their pursuit of "subversive" statements. Yet any articulate black must be suspect; their work is pawed and pored over. Oswald Mtshali had a visit from the political police after a poem had been published in a white newspaper; since then, a collection of his poems has sold 10,000 copies in South Africa, mainly to whites, whose enthusiasm probably arises as much from radical chic as from love of poetry. Such are the paradoxes of Mtshali's life. He is a neat, friendly man with well-polished shoes and the bold-planed mahogany face and almost girlishly beautiful eyes common to Zulus; his vision of the many hungers of his people sometimes takes on hunger's hallucinatory horror, as when it combines with the metaphor of blacks' castration by deprivation:

My father is not there. He had left me, a child, with his penis to eat for a boerewors [sausage] and his testicles to slice as onion and tomato to gravy my dry and stale mieliepap [porridge]

The Babi Yar of the township Yevtushenkos is Sharpeville, where 67 Africans were shot during the anti-pass demonstrations of the early Sixties. But the pass, a document of identity that restricts his movement and freedom to sell his labor, is still a burning resentment in every black man's pocket. Writers Sydney Sepamla and Stanley Motjuwadi carry theirs, just like any laborer or beggar. Sepamla is personnel officer for black workers in a factory and writes plays without ever having seen the inside of a real theater; the theaters of Johannesburg are for whites only. Motjuwadi, at 41, is veritably the only survivor in Johannesburg of the Fifties' group of ebullient young bloods whose forum was the back-yard speak-easy and whose credo was that they could change their world through their writings. Some went into exile; some died there; for some, the world ended no bigger than the circumference of the bottom of a final bottle. Motjuwadi is still a journalist on one of the black-oriented but white-owned magazines and papers where once they all worked together. He has come through, a quiet triumph, with a thick scar across one eyebrow and a gentle, small-hours-of-the-morning face.

Young Mongane Wally Serote, after selling insurance and digging white men's gardens, went to the neighboring country of Swaziland for peace to write. When he came home to South Africa, his poems and typewriter were taken from him and later he himself was detained by the police. After eight months, he was released--but the typewriter remains in custody. Now, he seems to bring with him the terrible silences of solitary confinement, as he sits slender, stiff and stark-eyed. He reads Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Le Roi Jones, Eldridge Cleaver and is preparing to go to the U.S. this year to study. Preparing means a patient process of endless applications and supplications for passport, scholarships and sponsorships and a heavy dependence--probably resented by him--on the cooperation of whites on both sides of the ocean. He has just married but knows he must leave his bride behind in the townships from whose brutalizing life his poems manage to extract either some familiar tenderness or the bitter pathos in a dead man's clothes.

It is said of black women in South Africa that they have strong graceful necks because they load their burdens on their heads: a conveniently romantic image of a mother figure expected to carry the weight of her family's world on her skull. Joyce Nomafa Sikakane is a 28-year-old black girl--with a lovely, delicate-featured face and a solid, Maillol body--who, seemingly, could fit the role. But she bears a different burden. She is under a political ban following a long spell of detention in prison and acquittal in two political trials. She has never fitted docilely into ordained roles, whether imposed by black tradition or white oppression. She was the first black woman to work on a white newspaper in Johannesburg. When she came out of prison, she met and married Samson Fadana, a black man who had just served eight years as a convicted political prisoner. They were together a matter of months before he was banished to a tribal area where she is not allowed to follow. She's alone in the townships now. Her ban prevents her from working as a journalist. You catch a glimpse of her, sometimes, about the city--a wave, an alert smile, no Afro pompadour nor hoop earrings necessary to assert her courage and identity.

The way the writers of the following poems live is hardly exceptional. If they belong to an elite, it is the dead-end elite into which black artists and intellectuals are thrust by any Jim Crow society and the circumstances of their daily lives are exactly those of their humblest brothers and sisters. There is no chair of poetry in Soweto. The muse is in the beer hall, the casualty ward and the kwela-kwela--Black Maria--crammed with singing prisoners.

an agony

by Joyce Nomafa Sikakane

My head is heavy,my shoulders shrug,because despiteall my eyes have seenmy head has saidmy heart has felt,I do not believethat White, Black and Yellowcannot talk, walk, eat, kiss and share.

It worries me to thinkthat only people of my colorwill liberate me.

You mustn't trust a White manmy grandfather used to tell mewhen I was a child.You mustn't think a White man cares for youmy people caution me.You know when a White man wants to know you?When you bring him money!

The Indian? He's black as youbut not as poor as you.He knows his trade--cheating you.He's happy to lend you money,just forgets to mentionthe twenty percent interestuntil you have to pay it.

And the Colored? I ask.Ag! Him, they say.He doesn't know where he stands,but he prefers his skin whitestand his hair straightestand somehow forgets the second namesof his black and kinky cousins.

I know of Whites, Coloreds and Indianswho are not like that, I say.But I'm told they are only a few.Now what about you, my fellow African?We are intimidated, they say.Modimo, we're very, very busy, they say.

Not losingour passes,our birth certificates,our train tickets,our rent receipts,our urban residential permits(not to mention our money, our husbands and our lives).

My head is heavy, my shoulders shrug,because despiteall my eyes have seenmy head has saidmy heart has felt,I do not believethat White, Black and Yellowcannot talk, walk, eat, kiss and share.

pigeons at the oppenheimer park

by Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali

I wonder why these pigeons in the Oppenheimer Parkare never arrested and prosecuted for trespassingon private property and charged with public indecency.

Every day I see these insolent birds perchedon Whites Only benches, defying all authority.Don't they know of the Separate Amenities Act?A white policeman in full uniform, completewith a holstered .38 special, passes bywithout even raising a reprimanding fingerat offenders who are flouting the law.They not only sit on the hallowed benches,they also mess them up with birdshit.

Oh! Holy Ideology! Look at those two at the crestof the jumping impala; they are making love in fullview of madams, hobos, giggling office girls.What is the world coming to?Where's the sacred Immorality Act? Sies!

the watchman's blues

by Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali

High upin the loft of a skyscraperabove the penthouse of the potentate,he huddlesin his nest by day: by nighthe is an owl that descends,knobkerrie in hand,to catch the rats that cometo nibble the treasure-strewn street windows.

He sits near a brazier,his head bobbing like a fish corkin the serene waters of sleep.

The jemmy boyshave not paid him a visit,but if they comehe will die in honor,die fightinglike a full-blooded Zulu--and the baas will say:"Here's ten pounds.Jim was a good boy."

To rise and keep awakeand twirl the kerryand shoo the wandering waifand chase the hobo with "Voetsek."

To wait for the rays of the sunto spear the fleeing night,while he pinesfor the three wives and a dozen childrensleeping alone in the kraalfar away in the majestic mountainsof Mahlabathim--"Where I'm a manamongst men,not John or Jimbut Makhubalo Magudulela."

the clothes

by Mongane Wally Serote

I came home in the morning,There on the stoop,The shoes I knew so wellDripped water like a window crying dew;The shoes rested the first timeFrom when they were new,Now it's forever.

I looked back.On the washing line hungA shirt, jacket and trousersSoaked wet with pity,Wrinkled and crying reddish water, perhaps also salty;The pink shirt had a gash on the right,And stains that told the few who know,An item of our death-life lives.

The colorless jacket still had mud,Dropping lazily from its bodyTo join the dry earth beneath.

The oversized black-striped trousersDangled from one hip,Like a man from a rope beneath his head,Tired of hoping to hope.

taken for a ride

by Stanley Motjuwadi

I get my cuefrom the glint in the cop's eye.I have seen it before.So I have to find it.

I pull away from Monoand hug myself in desperation.Up, down, back, front, sides,like a crazed tribal dancer.I had to find it.

Without it I'm lost, with it I'm lost.A cipher in Albert Street.I hate it. I nurse it,my pass, my everything.

Up, down, back, front, sides,Mono's lip twitches,She looks at me with all the love.She shakes her head nervously.Up, front, sides, back, down,like a crazed tribal dancer.Molimo!

The doors of the kwela-kwela gape,I jabber at Mono.The doors swing lazy, sadistic, like Jonah's whale.A baton pokes into my ribs.I take the free ride.

to whom it may concern

by Sydney Sepamla

Bearer

Bare of everything but particulars

Is a Bantu

(The language of a people in Southern Africa)

He seeks to proceed from here to there

Please pass him on

Subject to these particulars

He lives

Subject to the provisions

Of the Urban Natives Act of 1925

Amended often

To update it to his sophistication

Subject to the provisions of the said Act

He may roam freely within a prescribed area

Free only from the anxiety of conscription

In terms of the Abolition of Passes Act

A latter-day amendment

In keeping with moon-age naming

Bearer's designation is reference number 417181

And he acquires a niche in the said area

As a temporary sojourner

To which he must betake himself

At all times

When his services are dispensed with for the day

As a permanent measure of law and order

Please note

The remains of RN 417181

Will be laid to rest in peace

On a plot

Set aside for Methodist Xosas

A measure also adopted

At the express request of the Bantu

In anticipation of any faction fight

Before the Day of Judgment.

"tired of hoping to hope--behold these items of our death-life lives..."