Bafana Khumalo
‘JESUS! These people sure did give us grief.” I am at Museum Africa in Newtown, viewing an exhibition on the 1956 Treason Trial. “These people” are whites. The man who is invading this particularly private moment of mine is one of the workers at the museum. “Probably on a tea break” — I call on my great powers of deduction.
I want to tell him to leave me alone but I kinda find his comments useful. He is not old enough to have been at the trial, even as an observer, but he can provide me with the necessary earthy views which I might have lost, seeing I am now a middle-class darky who is “not really in touch with the feelings of the masses”. He is definitely one of the masses.
We walk to the entrance of the exhibition. The door is made to resemble that of a prison. As one opens it, there is a strong feeling of foreboding. “Kaam aan. Ngena s’boshwa — get in prisoner ,” he says to me, asking: “Have you ever been to Number Four?” (Number Four being some police station of note). “Yebo nkosi yami — yes my lord,” I decide to humour him. Two tourists of Caucasian extraction eye us disapprovingly as we laugh in some ethnic conspiracy — a conspiracy which says: “Even if we were to subtitle this exchange in some barbaric language you understand, you would not even begin to understand what it is about.”
My guide and I proceed further into the exhibition. We stop at a display featuring three policemen dressed in what must have been the height of fashion back in 1956: brown khaki for the whiteys and plain khaki for the darky. I smile ruefully as I regard the Harley Davidson they gather around.
“They should have given him a baton.” My guide points at the darky policeman. “He would carry a small little baton and arrest 40 people.” He shakes his head as though remembering some bygone day. “That’s how much power he used to have. Yes! Pass! That would have been the end of it all. Off to Barberton,” he says with the conviction of someone who was there.
I smile as we go into another room with newspapers of the time pasted on the wall. “140 plus in the bag but others searched”: that’s what the readers of the Golden City Post read on the morning of December 19 1956. I look for the byline on the story so I can rail against the reporter’s poor use of language, and I find none. I also discover in the story that the quote is from one of the policemen involved in “Operation T”, as they called it. “Damn! There goes my column,” I think.
My guide wonders out loud whether the article moved me. I nod absent-mindedly and he approves: “That’s good, you young ones don’t understand these things. You think all these freedoms came on a plate. They didn’t — we worked hard for them. Sacrificed!” he says, as though he led the calvary of sacrifice.
He’s beginning to irritate me and I wonder whether I should suggest that he go back to work. But that would be rude, as he had taken time off to educate me on the struggle. A smile of condescension appears at the corner of my mouth as I wonder whether every visitor gets a free guided tour of the exhibit. The answer comes quick and fast to me: it must be the huge sign on my forehead that says: “Middle-class darky. Out of touch.”