Frankie and Stankie (37 page)

Her dad puts down his fork. ‘What's an isosceles triangle?' he says. ‘What's pi? What do you understand by cosine?'

‘Don't know,' Dinah says. ‘I don't know. I'm telling you, I don't know.'

‘Christ Almighty,' says her dad. ‘You really do know nothing.'

‘Told you,' Dinah says. Her brain, right then, is pure of mathematical concept, clean as a bleached-white sheet of paper.

It's in a spirit of challenge combined with a degree of withering contempt that her dad takes her on as a project. They're off school anyway, on study leave, so he sometimes teaches her all day. Then, if he's got lectures, he sets her some work to be getting on with. He gets her to work through books and books of past papers. Algebra, geometry and trig. Every day for four weeks she takes new concepts on board until the mist of four years has lifted and the high-school maths syllabus has jumped into focus before her eyes. The past papers are pretty formulaic, once you've cracked the code, so that, after three weeks, they're a cinch, a series of fun-and-games puzzle books in which Dinah knows all the tricks, is sailing through getting A's. Her dad is going through her work. Tick, tick, tick.

Yet nobody could be more delighted than her dad when Dinah comes home from the algebra paper white in the face and shaking. It's a paper that's wholly different from all the ones in the books of past papers – one which has caused her to scrabble feebly for the odd question she can understand.

‘Aha,' says her dad.
‘Aha!
The first intelligent Matric algebra paper in years, as far as I can see. Now this will separate the sheep from the goats.'

Dinah has never been sure about this expression. Ought one to want to be a sheep or a goat? And especially when it comes to
algebra? And ought her own father to be quite so delighted that, in this year of all years, the algebra paper should be so unusually ‘intelligent'? The only one in ten years in which all the predictable formulas have been turned around to stump the likes of his dozy daughter?

She pulls up on the geometry and the trig and – hurrah – she's got a Matric. She and Jenny are off to the uni and Dinah, in addition, has been awarded a nice little bursary that will pay for her to have a room in a hall of residence. Florence Powell Hall. Her very own room for the first time. And this isn't all, because Miss Maidment is on the phone soon after the Matric results come out.

‘Dinah,' she says, sounding a little skittish. ‘Now you'll be wondering why I've phoned.'

Dinah has straightaway begun to shake. She's trying to rack her brain. What now? What can it be now? Is it possible that she and Maud can be expelled, even now that they've actually both left? Are they to be the first posthumous cases of expulsion from GHS?

‘You,' says Miss Maidment, ‘have brought honour to the school.' She's using a curiously long ‘oo' sound in the words you and school.

‘Ah –' Dinah says.

‘You have won the Queen Victoria Memorial Award,' Miss Maidment is saying. ‘Dinah, it's a prize for the best Matric English Essay in the whole of the Union of South Africa.'

‘Ah –' Dinah says. ‘I see. Thank you.'

Funny thing is, it seems like no big deal to her. Not anything like as exciting as having a photographer pick you up and plant you, click click, on a silver Buick. Plus she has the usual spoiler's hunch that the prize will be specific to racial category – that the Queen Victoria Memorial Award will be one for which only white eighteen-year-olds are eligible.

So it's quite a surprise for her when, three weeks later, she meets the teacher's pet in a bookshop.

‘By the way,' says the teacher's pet. ‘About that essay prize of yours. I've been up to the Union Buildings in Pretoria and I've spoken to the Education Department. They gave me access to the Matric English papers – so I just happen to know that my essay got half a per cent more than yours.'

Dinah is blinking at her without comprehension. Half a per cent? What is she on about? It doesn't for a moment cross Dinah's mind
that the story doesn't quite ring true. It's just that it doesn't seem in any way significant to be competing over half a per cent. And especially not when Maud has just decided to go off and live in Swaziland, because she and one of the boyfriends are planning to manage a hotel in Mbabane. Not when she and Jenny are busy on the important business of planning their student wardrobe, a project they are embarked upon with all the devotion of twin brides laying down their sisterly trousseaux.

‘They decided to give you the prize,' the teacher's pet is saying, ‘because my essay was much too controversial.'

Dinah doesn't remember what the subject choices were, nor which one it was that the teacher's pet had happened to choose. ‘The Pen is Mightier than the Sword. Discuss'? She does remember, however, that her own was on the subject of ‘Clothes'. So the effect of the teacher's pet's passing shot is to make Dinah once again feel trivial. Little Miss Frothy, the 1950s wife, with her head full of frippery and frocks. A week's wages on a pair of shoes?! What an adorable silly-billy.

Jenny and Dinah have decided on the look. It's a pale consumptive look. They plan it in opposition to the predominant tanned beachcomber look, the Surfin' Experience look. They'll have pale make-up and pale lipstick and pale crisp lawn and pale sheer stockings the colour of buttermilk. They'll be visions as pale as desert sand. For Dinah, the look is making a virtue of necessity. For Jenny it's a quiet act of defiance against her mother who longs for her to be deepening her tan in a small bikini on North Beach. And then, that month, just as they set foot on the campus, the police turn their guns on an unarmed and peaceful crowd.

The people of a black township, thirty miles from Johannesburg, have gathered in answer to a national call to protest against the Pass Laws. More and more people crowd into the square between ten in the morning and lunchtime. Men, women and children. The police start shooting without any warning, raking the crowd in a wide arc from the top of an armoured car. They shoot and shoot until there's no one left in the square – that is, no one who isn't already a corpse. Afterwards, the police try to say that the crowd was armed. There is reference to ‘ferocious weapons'. But nobody at Sharpeville finds a single weapon among the dead, whose shot
wounds are mostly in the back. All they find are the scattered hats and shoes. Plus there's the odd abandoned bike. It's the end of peaceful protest in South Africa for what begins to seem like for ever.

Then, twelve years later, sixty thousand black trade unionists go on strike in Durban. So, legal or not, the trade unions are once again flexing their muscles. And then, four years after that, twenty thousand Soweto schoolkids take to the streets in protest. They've had enough, they say. They'd rather not go to school at all than put up with what's on offer. And that's the beginning of the end, for all that the government spends the next fifteen years on repression and window dressing. Because it looks pretty bad on global TV when a state turns its guns on its own children. But by this time Jenny, Maud and Dinah – all three of them – are long gone.

The Sharpeville Protest of 21 March 1960 is not an ANC event. It happens because the newly formed Pan-African Congress has just then broken away. It thinks the ANC is too cautious and too willing to work with whites. But the ANC is a movement with a history. It's founded in 1912 by distinguished black professionals who can be seen in old sepia photographs, wearing stiff collars and gold watch chains. They are the men who have founded black newspapers and black private schools. They've been educated at mission schools. Or some have been to English public schools. They put their faith in petitions and delegations. Steeped in Shakespeare and the Bible, they see themselves as Her Majesty's loyal subjects and as citizens of the wider world. It takes a lot to drive them to desperate measures, but the 1950s have seen their boldest and bravest strategies to date. The ANC's membership has increased hugely, thanks to the Defiance Campaign, and, right then, on the eve of the PAC breakaway, the organisation has decided on a nationwide anti-Pass Law campaign, which is planned for 31 March. So the newly formed PAC, in order to make an impact, jumps the gun and declares its own anti-Pass Law campaign for 21 March instead. That's the day that becomes the day of the Sharpeville shootings.

Robert Sobukwe is the new PAC leader. He isn't anti-white and he isn't short on brains but he has a passionate African dream. He believes the time is right for blacks to take bolder action. African states to the north have been winning their independence, and Harold Macmillan, the British Prime Minister, has just made his ‘Winds of Change' speech to the all-white South African parliament. ‘The Winds of Change,' he's announced dramatically, ‘are
blowing through the African continent.' The PAC has decided that South Africa can liberate itself by 1963 – that's if its black leaders will only grasp the nettle.

Robert Sobukwe is a tall, gentle, self-effacing man, but his speeches are fiery and effective. He's a lecturer in African Languages at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Wits is the most radical of South Africa's universities, just as Johannesburg is the boldest and most pacey of the cities. It's a city that's very unlike Durban. So that Dinah, on her only visit there to date, is surprised by the confident stride of its slim, stylish black women, because, in Durban, the black women she sees are nearly always domestic servants – plump, patient creatures in housemaid's overalls, their Afro hair hidden under a
doek
. That's unless they're up-country girls with mud hairstyles and bare breasts. Plus Durban's got the stupefying influence of its humidity. And then there's the lure of the beach. So Durban – white philistine Durban – is the place where repertory theatre has to cut short its runs and where the City Hall's classical music concerts have so far failed to thrive. Small sub-groups of record-collecting aficionados, like Dinah's dad, will gather in private living rooms to discuss the respective merits of Rosalyn Tureck and Glenn Gould, while Johannesburg, by contrast, is a hotbed of live performance. And there's a slogan Dinah's noticed, high up on the outside wall of the ‘Whites only' Johannesburg Public Library: ‘US BLACK FOLKS AIN'T READIN' YET', it says.

Sobukwe resigns his lectureship to lead the PAC's campaign. He sets out at dawn on 21 March, to begin the five-mile walk to his local police station, gathering groups of followers along the way. At the police station he's duly arrested and he's sentenced to three years in prison. But the state grants itself special powers to hold him for as long as it likes. It does so by inventing a special clause: the Robert Sobukwe Clause. So he's held for a decade in solitary confinement until his health has gone to pot.

Meanwhile, it's 21 March 1960 and black men all over the country have first destroyed their passes, then presented themselves for arrest. Mostly the crowds at police stations are dispersed by baton charges, but there's the odd fatal shooting. By the next day there's a State of Emergency along with fifteen thousand arrests. In Langa, on the Cape Flats, the police greet their new emergency
powers by barging into the single men's hostels and beating up the inmates. They enter the township houses and shoot at people, at random. And, in the morning, much provoked, thirty thousand black inhabitants are marching from Langa to the centre of Cape Town. They march in an orderly, peaceful way, twelve abreast, all along the wide expanse of de Waal Drive till they get to the main police station at Caledon Square. And, at their head, is a boy, a boy in shorts.

The boy is a young university student who has stepped into the leadership vacuum left by all the arrests and, though he looks more like a high-school boy, the crowd obeys him to a man. He negotiates with the police chief who tells him that passes will be suspended for a month while the law is reviewed. He's told that, if he disperses the crowd, a meeting will be arranged between him and the Minister of Justice. So the boy in shorts leads thirty thousand people back the way they came. Not a voice is raised in anger. Not a single stone is thrown. The Minister of Justice at this time is John Vorster. He's one of the dourest of the government's posse of wartime pro-Nazi saboteurs and when the boy presents himself for the appointed meeting, Mr Vorster is nowhere and the boy is thrown into prison. His name is Philip Kgosana.

So Jenny and Dinah start university under the shadow of the State of Emergency which lasts through most of their first year. Plus the army have occupied the campus, because it provides a perfect view of Cato Manor, the black township just below Dinah's house. Right then – from the vantage point of the library – Jenny and Dinah can see the men of Cato Manor surging out of the township and heading for Durban's main police station. Their aim is to demand the release of arrested leaders – and they're heading out in their thousands. Some are pouring up through Dinah's mum's unfenced garden where she's alone at home drinking coffee under her avocado tree. For a moment her heart is in her mouth at the sight of a hundred Zulu males who have armed themselves with stout sticks. But they greet her in a friendly manner, fists raised in the ANC salute, and Dinah's mum, who is shy about such gestures, gives them a girly little wave in return.

She doesn't know that, just beyond the valley, the police have gathered in armoured cars to block the protesters' routes. Nor that the police are being assisted by eager white male volunteers who
have brought along their personal guns to shoot into the crowd. Even so, a thousand of the Cato Manor protesters manage to get through. And they make it all the way down West Street to the city's main police station. So sleepy Durban turns out to be the venue for the last mass black protest before the ANC and the PAC are banned.