Honorary White (7 page)

At the end of the concert, I stayed to meet the musicians. I expressed my delight at the power and joy of their music, all the more impressive in the face of the white South Africans' determined attempts to humiliate and degrade the black man. The vocalist-bongo drummer spoke for the others.

“How is it where you come from?” he asked me. “Where is this place Guyana? In Africa? Where?” His face dripped perspiration which he occasionally scooped away with a forefinger. A handsome young man of medium height, filled with energy which seemed ready to erupt out of him. I told him where Guyana is, pinpointing it on that other continent.

“Tell me about the people,” he said. “Are they all black, like you? Tell me about them.” Looking me up and down as if to discover any difference between him and me, them and me.

I told him briefly something of my people. He then asked how long I'd been in Johannesburg, how much I'd seen of the city and the black people and what was my general impression of their condition. Before I could reply, he held up a broad, thick-fingered hand and warned me:

“When you talk about my country, don't pity me. Look at us.” Here he moved closer to me as if to emphasize that we were of approximately the same height.

“Talk to us as one of us. I will tell you how I live here and you will tell me about life in your country. I will tell you that I am deeply dissatisfied with the conditions of my life here and perhaps you will tell me that you are dissatisfied with conditions in your own country. We black men have been here for thousands of years. We have learned how to survive the heat and the floods and the drought, the hunger and the times of plenty. Now we must learn to live through slavery, right here in our homeland. We will live through this present experience. Our music is an expression of the spirit, just as survival springs from the spirit, just as hope, love, and strength are things of the spirit. Come, my brothers,” he beckoned to the others to come nearer around us. “Come and tell our friend here how we can live in shit and still make music.”

His voice had acquired a sharp edge, cutting into me. His round face was grave, the eyes hard, glittering. I guessed his age at twenty-eight or thirty. The voice which had given such poignancy and power to his songs was now low and sonorous, the words tinged with bitterness.

“Tell our friend here that we are of Africa as the dust of the veld and the wind which blows it and as the rivers which are its blood. We are permanently of Africa, as the dust of our fathers is mixed with the dust of the veld. Now we are humiliated here and must bend in the dust. But we will be established again in our rightful place when we learn to pay more attention to things of the spirit. Do you hear me?”

I nodded. I was hearing him.

“I do not speak of your church. I speak of the spirit of man. When we learn, as our fathers did, to pay more attention to things of the spirit, we will know how to work together and suffer together and, once again, be established together in our fatherland.”

Abruptly he walked away, the others breaking up to follow him.

Two of his companions, Jim and Joe, remained with me and told me more of their daily lives. They seemed to take it as a matter of course that they would encounter great difficulty in everything.

“Wish we could invite you somewhere for a drink or a cup of coffee,” Joe said, “but there is nowhere in this damned city where a black man can buy something even as simple as that. Sorry.”

“Don't worry,” I told him. “It's enough for me to be able to talk with you. How much do you practice?”

“Oh, we manage about five or six hours a week. We all have jobs here in the city, but we are arrogant enough to believe that we can do better. Much better. Don't you agree?”

“Readily. Listening to you play, now hearing you talk, I've no doubt whatever of your abilities.”

“You flatter me, my friend. Say, why don't we get the hell out of this place?” Nodding to Jim and me to follow him out. Downstairs he said, “Wouldn't do much good to talk too much up there. Too many ears listening to everything.”

“I'm staying at the Landdrost Hotel not far from here,” I told them. “Why don't we go there and have a drink or whatever?”

“That the new big hotel that Bob Foster stayed at?” Jim asked.

“Yes.”

“Okay! I'd like to see inside one of those places.”

“A hotel is a hotel,” I said.

“So speaks the rich American visitor. You're beginning to sound like Bob Foster. You know what that son-of-a-bitch said when he was here? He said that South African Blacks were well off. Said he wouldn't mind buying a house and living here. You know what's funny about that? If he wanted to, he could buy a house here. As an American he would be treated differently. Even if we had the money we are prevented by law from owning land. But they'd let that loud-mouthed bastard buy land if he wanted it. Hell, he's a big-shot boxing champion and he's American.”

At the hotel, I noticed their nervousness as they followed me to the desk to collect my key, then up the elevator to my room. We ordered drinks and sat down.

“Christ, just look at me,” Joe suddenly exclaimed. “I'm as nervous as a kitten, just coming into this place. A grown man, but the Whites have got me so that I'm scared of my own shadow. Scared to be in their big, shiny hotel even as the guest of a black man like myself. Isn't that too funny, for Christ's sake? What am I? Jesus Christ! What am I?”

“Take it easy, Joe,” from Jim.

“Shit with take it easy. He's black like us, so he should understand. Look at me, damn it, look at me and tell me what I am. Our friend here can come into our country, move about as he pleases, live in a hotel like this. In short, he can live as a man. We heard he writes books. He can afford to come all the way here to look at our country and us.” Then to me. “Tell me, Mr. Braithwaite, author and VIP, in what way are you different from me?”

“In no way that I can think of,” I replied.

“Thank you, my friend, for nothing. Let me tell you a little about me. I have a university degree. From Fort Hare, the black university. That means it is not as good a degree as if I'd had it from a white university. Anyway, that degree suggests that at some time in my life I was ambitious, imaginative, and hopeful. At Fort Hare I used to talk with others like myself, mostly about our hopes and plans for the future. Look at me now. Each day from eight to five, I stack goods in the carrier of a bicycle and deliver them to contemptuous white housewives who never see me, never address me directly. They just point to where they want the stuff put. I've been doing that job for three years and I bet not one of them knows my name.”

“Don't think about it,” suggested Jim. “We're all in the same boat.”

“Think, hell! I don't think about it. To think is to see myself, to recognize the thing I have become in three short years. Sometimes I wish I could kill myself, but what then would become of my wife and two small children? I once read somewhere that prisoners held in solitary confinement spend hours watching ants. I tried that. Do you know what happened? The ant walked away. It had somewhere to go. I have nowhere to go. I no longer think. I am one of the living dead of Soweto.”

Listening to him I was hearing myself again. I, too, had thought my situation hopeless.

“What about your music?” I asked, anxious to disperse the painful reflections.

“What about it? Did you enjoy it?”

“Immensely.”

“Listen to the man, Joe,” Jim said, sarcastically. “He says he enjoyed our music immensely. What do you think of that? He is able to enjoy, which is a luxury we can't afford. We don't enjoy our music, man. We need it, like an addict needs his
dagga
†
.
It's our survival kit. And there's the other thing. Somebody might like our music well enough to want to do something about it. Cut a record! Arrange a tour! You never know.”

Smiling his sad smile as if accustomed to watching his dreams fade and die.

“Shit, man, you never know,” said Joe. “Like today. The white men there at Dorkay House. That one in the blue blazer. The bald one. American, I think he is. The other one is local and he told his American friend about us, so he came to listen. Not for nothing. We're tired of performing for them for nothing. He, the American, paid for the session. Anyway, there's always the chance they might like what they hear—”

“Sure, sure,” Jim interrupted. “How many times have we gone through that exercise. You know, I've come to the conclusion that I'm mad. Totally mad. Why else would I be sitting here in this fucking hotel where I am not welcome, drinking this man's booze, which is against the law for Blacks, and being what I am not. I could not buy him a stinking cup of coffee, so he brings me here, in this white man's luxury pit, and orders whisky, served to us obsequiously by one like us. It's all madness. I am a human being but I'm restricted to performing menial functions for a miserable pittance. You say, what about my music? I would like to play it and enjoy it, but I play it to relieve myself, not to enjoy. Like the job I do. I don't enjoy it. I just do it and try not to think of it. If I let myself think of it, I'd hate myself and choose to die. I'm dislocated from life. I'm quite mad.”

“Don't listen to him,” Jim cautioned. “He's as sane as you are, but he gets that way sometimes. A drink or two and he'll snap out of it.”

I nodded, but I understood what Joe was saying, because I'd already seen enough to convince me that, forced to live as they were in the ghettos of Soweto and Alexandra, I would surely go mad. Christ, how could anyone feel ambition and hope while restricted to such a stinking environment? Most of the Blacks I'd seen in the city were neatly dressed. How did they manage it? What very special kind of fortitude was required each day and every day in this place to survive an hour, let alone a day? Maybe Joe was right. Maybe madness was the answer.

We spent another hour talking. They were like any black men I'd known in London, New York, Paris, or Jamaica—anywhere. Intelligent, sensitive, and smarting under racial pressure. We had more than enough in common to draw us close together.

I wanted them to be comfortable with me in the only place where we could be together in Johannesburg, but that very comfort was a continuing irritant. They'd come willingly with me, but, once in the room, seemed angry with themselves for being there and angry with me for causing them to be there. They drank, but without conviviality. We'd come up to talk about their music and their lives, but their only comments were on the “white man's luxury” of the hotel and my freedom to enjoy it. I wanted to remind them that I was paying for that suite but decided to keep my mouth shut. Perhaps they were aware of the “Honorary White” thing and were making sly digs at me. What did I have to do to prove that I was with them, sharing their identity? But was I? And what identity? Would I wish to live where they were forced to live, share their lives, suffer the same daily prohibitions and restrictions?

Would I live in Alexandra even for a day? What was my feeling of identity worth if I would not voluntarily share with them? At this level, fine. But what about the levels on which their lives were lived? Could I fetch and carry for the white man and call him
Baas?
The very thought of it sent cold shivers through me. Everything about my life had always pointed in the opposite direction. From childhood.

Into my mind flashed the memory of the Indian cane-cutter named Mungal Sirgh. A white manager on the Berbice sugar estate in Guyana where Mungal Sirgh worked had become impatient with the “lazy coolie bastard” and kicked him. Mungal Sirgh had replied by swinging his machete at the offending leg, slicing through the thick leather and opening the limb neatly from knee to ankle. Taken into custody, his repeated comment was, “He kick me. Kick is for dog. Mungal Sirgh not dog.” Christ, why did that come to mind after more than forty years? The “Honorary White” thing was no better than a kick in the ass. The intention was the same. To humiliate the black visitor; to deny him the dignity of his blackness; to remind him that in that society he had no identity except that which they, the Whites, chose to let him have. As a Black I was invisible, not there, not to them. To be seen and heard, I needed an overlay on my invisibility.

If that's how the Whites felt, to hell with them. But what about these men who called me brother? Why was there this gap between us? Perhaps they were saying something to me. Maybe they knew of the Honorary White label and resented it, for my sake. Or maybe they resented me for allowing myself into the situation—a black man labeled white and seeming to enjoy it. I was relieved when they left.

That evening, I asked the hotel doorman to call a taxi to take me to Parktown, a residential suburb of Johannesburg, where I'd accepted an invitation to dine. When the taxi arrived, the doorman opened the door for me and I gave the white driver the address. I could see him eyeing me speculatively in the driving mirror as we got under way. Eventually, he opened up.

“Are you from Botswana?”

“No,” I replied.

“Swaziland?”

“No. I'm not African.”

“Oh, you're a VIP from overseas.” Sounding pleased with himself as if he'd happened on the answer to the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.

When I paid him, the taxi driver gave me a card with the name and telephone number of his taxi company. At the end of the evening, I telephoned the taxi company and requested a cab to pick me up. I said goodbye to my hosts and waited outside for the cab which soon arrived.

I was about to enter it when the driver called to me.

“Hey you, wait a minute. This is not for you.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“This is not for Non-Whites. I'm not allowed to take Non-Whites in this taxi.” Meanwhile reaching backward in an attempt to shut the door which I held open.