Hell, no: Being conscripted into the apartheid army to kill black people who had never done me harm somehow held little appeal
Thursday.
I should be writing. Instead, I’m re-reading John Matshikiza’s columns on the Mail & Guardian website.
Matshikiza was brilliant. His With the Lid Off column was the first thing I’d read in the M&G every Friday. Matshikiza played the computer keyboard like it was a grand piano, every word precise, delicate, hard thoughts flowing with absolute grace, balance. He documented a time of massive change with humour and insight and courage, used ordinary people to tell intricate stories and made us laugh.
Matshikiza made me want to really write.
It’s barely 7am and I’m already soaked in sweat.
A pre-work swim would be a magnificent way to cool off — at least temporarily — but there’s the small matter of the two deadlines (hopefully) that have to be met.
There’s also that nasty red effluent that poured into Durban’s Battery Beach over the weekend from a stormwater drain.
The water has cleared, but there are reports of people getting sick after swimming or surfing, so I reckon staying out of the ocean until at least Saturday is the way to go.
I’ve been swimming at Battery since I was a kid.
Growing up in Greyville, Battery was a 15-minute walk down Argyle Road for a swim in the ocean. Argyle Road is now Sandile Thusi Road, named after South African Youth Congress Durban leader and former political detainee.
Thusi was a serious-minded guy, but funny and gentle, a for-real cat.
He died, far too young, as a result of kidney damage he suffered during a hunger strike he participated in while in detention in the late 1980s.
By night the sand dunes at Battery were used by male sex workers and their clients to do their thing, so the beach, even in the whites-only days, never had any of the heavy “locals only” culture that came with Snake Park, Wedge and some of the other northern and central beaches.
It was also home to the Natal Command, the South African Defence (yeah, right) Force’s provincial headquarters. Only the ocean-facing facade of Command is still standing. The rest of it is going to become a film studio or a hotel or something.
I was sent to Natal Command in my matric year after my absence during registration week for two years of “national service” for the fourth year in a row was finally noticed. I was only a kid with no politics yet but I already knew I wasn’t going into the army, whatever happened. There was no way I was going to do anything to make calling me up any easier, so avoiding the registration process seemed like the logical thing to do.
My parents were solid.
They threw away all the correspondence from the school relating to the army. Ignored the phone calls.
My folks didn’t want me killing anybody. Neither did I.
The Muppet running the school’s cadets — pre-military service marching and occasional weapons drill conducted on Friday afternoons, which I generally traded for a whipping on Monday — and army recruitment gave me a talking-to about my duty to go and kill black people who had never laid a finger on me, unlike him and his colleagues. The stupid, arrogant fucker — who had a taste for bruising rebellious teenaged buttocks with a miniature cricket bat that he even had a name for — sent me off with a letter of apology to hand myself in and join the system for the following January’s intake.
Perhaps he expected me to be a compliant sheep and, pretty much voluntarily, with no physical gun at my head, hand myself over for two years in the army. My peers had, after all. Perhaps he bought my story that I suffered from seasonal illness, hence my absence for the same week, four years in a row, which just happened to be military registration week. Perhaps he thought I was stupid or that I didn’t have the guts to buck the system all the way, but I was sent off, with no armed escort or even a minder, to “do the right thing”, as he put it, and register.
I got as far as the bottom of Argyle Road, where I met up with this older cat called Glen, whom I knew from around. Glen was in his second year in the army and deeply regretful of not having headed for Port St Johns, where Durbanites unwilling to join the army headed because it was in the “independent” Transkei, rather than handing himself in.
Glen’s advice was simple. Don’t do it. The army system is broken. They don’t have the capacity to keep track of those they already have paperwork on. Keep on going. They’ll never find you.
The letter got as far as the rubbish bin in front of Command, where I threw it after ripping it into shreds before heading across the road for a spliff and a swim in the ocean with Glen, my career as a cog in the apartheid war machine over before it could start.