Memory Is The Weapon

Chapter Six - A Brush with the Police

61 chapter six I had many brushes with the police. Like the time I alighted from a train at the Nancefield railway station on a visit to my mother in White City Jabavu in what is today known as Soweto.Atall black policeman stopped me. His huge hands gripped my belt, pulling my trousers against my private parts. ‘Pass!’ he shouted, so that the passers-by heard him. ‘I’m a Coloured,’ I answered, using the password to a semblance of privilege and temporary safety and immunity. It would work now, as it had several times before when police raided our house in Sophiatown in their hunt for pass offenders. ‘Half-caste Boesman is what you mean,’ he said, tightening his lethal grip, so that my testicles moved into my bladder.Aware of his brute force, he pressed harder and harder, grinning sadistically. Urine ran down A Brush with the Police 62 Memory is the Weapon my thigh, wetting his hand.Ablow stunned my jaw. Half-blinded, I sagged and his grip loosened. As I was coming to, another blow crushed into my ribs. Darkness. When I looked up there was a Boer policeman poking his baton at my exposed testicles. ‘Wat’s verkeerd, bruin balas?’(What’s wrong, brown balls?) I tried to speak but he ordered me to get up and leave. I turned to his black colleague and promised I would get him someday. ‘Get your kaffir-mother, you sonofabitch!’ he shouted to attract the attention of the bystanders. Some people laughed. A woman tried to help but I recoiled from her, angered by their derisive looks and their laughter. All my mother said when I told her of the incident was that I was beginning to understand one form of humiliation that was a way of life for her people. ‘Now you know a bit. With Coloureds it is different. You have many rights and privileges. Your colour ensures for you status and a future. No pass, no permits, no influx control, but it’s bad when your skin is black. I’m happier now that I gave you to your father’s people – otherwise you too would have suffered,’ she told me without pity. I argued that the policeman had been an African, a black person, and yet he had beaten me without regard for my youth. She replied that he had stopped being an African when he put on a police badge. He had become something totally different; a tool; a robot. Something else, but not an African. She said being an African was something great; transcending and human, with an open heart. In retrospect, she gave me something better than pity, for she helped me to believe in and understand Africanness. I wanted more than anything to be a true African. In 1952 1 was sixteen years old and would be seventeen in December . The winter was harsh and cold. I had already alienated myself from my father and most of the family at 16 Gerty Street; going astray – a street-fighter and thug for whom violence and obstinacy were the golden rule in the game of self-preservation. My folks didn’t care, I didn’t care and society cared least of all. My uncle Willie, the former World War II soldier, who was said at the time to be suffering from shell-shock, became openly and violently hostile towards me. His were the fists that had cut my lips on the first day of my return from the Catholic convent school in Durban. It had been his way of welcoming me back. A Brush with the Police 63 My grandfather had locked and bolted his house against me after it was discovered that I used to leave and re-enter it through one of the back windows. Burglaries had become common and frequently violent, and I was accused of having endangered his life. So another of so many doors had closed on me – some never to open again. Heavy steel doors of human indifference locking me out, isolating me, the same way I had rejected my family and shut them out. One night I led the Vultures against the Styles gang at their haunt on the corner of Edward Road and Gold Street. It was a fierce, toe-to-toe encounter with no quarter given on either side. Knives penetrated into soft dark flesh. Axes, swords and tomahawks – crudely...