Between Nostalgia and Dystopia

Chapter One

1.

Knowing Millicent, the divorce papers would have been filed, and before the end of the week, they would be served, and one more chapter in the passage of my life would be ending, in the year of the great pandemic, 2020. And now, four years later in the year 2024 after having survived several successive waves of the Covid-19 pandemic another short but significant chapter in my life teeters at the brink of coming to an end. Thirty-four years ago in the year 1990 after encountering Millicent Rosen by chance in Exclusives Bookshop in Hillbrow, and after exchanging nods of mutual recognition, a subtle smile played on her lips, and I immediately fell in love with her. A few days later, we met once more, again by chance. This time as new members of the Wits Film Society’s first meeting of the year. We had both independently joined the film society. The main lecture theatre in the John Moffat Architecture Building at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) was the usual venue for the Society’s fortnightly lectures and film evenings. Outside the John Moffat Architecture Building at the edge of the large rectangular pond teeming with goldfish, koi and carp we became more fully acquainted. We discovered that we shared a lot including a passion for cinema as an art form. The year 1990 also marked the end of the social upheavals and political turmoil that had characterized the lost decade of the 1980s in South Africa. It needs some explanation on what was meant by our becoming ‘more fully acquainted’. We were not complete strangers. Before coming to Wits as students, we had both completed our high school education at Damelin College, so as teenagers, we shared a common past. We had had the same schoolteachers, the same school subjects, the same school milieu, the same school history, and the same school experiences. Experiences imbued with that rare and unique ethos that belongs to an elite private school rooted in the inner-city of Johannesburg. It was a multi-storeyed school with no open playgrounds or sports field; a school spilling out onto the streets and pavements, of what was once a vibrant and exciting city. We also grew up in similar kinds of neighbourhoods. In my case, it was on the East Rand, in a mining town called Boksburg. In her case, it was the Southern Suburbs of Johannesburg. We both grew up in neighbourhoods that were heterogeneously white in terms of ethnicities and language. Neighbourhoods that were inhabited by residents who were from working and middle-class backgrounds. She grew up in the Hill, a suburb in the south of Johannesburg close to Rosettenville. Historically, her family roots were firmly anchored in the Southern Suburbs, her father an attorney managing his own notary and conveyancing firm in Linmeyer, and her mother running her own estate agency office in Rosettenville. Her paternal and maternal grandparents, originally from Lithuania, had been shopkeepers in Rosettenville. She was in standard seven when I was in matric. As a fourteen-year-old, she was an exquisitely delectable teenager but exceeding aloof and sullen, a loner who did not mix. Of course, I noticed her, passing each other daily in the school corridors and on the stairs, we made frequent eye contact, looking directly into each other eyes without smiling. I would never have guessed that she was going to be my future wife and that she would bear our three daughters in quick succession each one a little Rosa Luxemburg clone of Millicent blended with the shadow of the Moor in their complexions and the Spaniard in the fullness of their womanly figures. Millicent, in her short hemmed gym, was just below medium height, slim but shapely, displaying eye-catching legs encased in black tights. Her dark auburn hair was tightly braided into a long plait that reached the middle of her back or sometimes tied up in a ponytail. Her features, the shape of her face and her profile bore a remarkable but prettier resemblance to Rosa Luxemburg (as you have now probably guessed). She had the same sad eyes and forlorn demeanour. Yet she was not frail, in fact, she was physically strong and athletic. At Wits, she was a talented sprinter and a skilful fencer, and also a champion chess player. Over her entire life, starting from her school days, she had been a driven workaholic. There was a brashness in her manner, and she could be quite intimidating. When our lives intersected in the shadows of those towering plane trees at the edge of the pond filled with colourful koi in the fading twilight on that hot February evening, I was 25 and she was 22 years old. She had completed her B.Com degree with distinction and was in the final year of her LLB. After graduating with a PhD in 1989, I had managed to get appointed as a lecturer in the Department of Genetics. She fell in love with the highly intelligent, knowledgeable, cultured, gentle, funny, and debonair Dr Gavin Swift. After a short courtship we got married, in fact, we decided to get married when she was in the first year of her articles as a candidate attorney. Coming from a secular Jewish family her parents did not really object to her marrying a Gentile. However, to iron out all potential wrinkles I volunteered to convert. That’s how I became Dr Josh, and eventually Prof Josh to my students. In the early blissful years of our marriage during the early 1990s, we lived in Isipingo Street in Bellevue several blocks away from Rockey Street, but within easy walking distance. It was also during that time that a wide swath of the old residential suburbs on the southern, western, and eastern perimeters of the inner-city of Jo’burg began to undergo rapid demographic changes. Following the white migration from the inner-city and also from the suburban peripheries of the inner-city, the residential vacancies, in houses and high rise apartment blocks, were rapidly filled by an influx of African, Coloured and Indian migrants, changing the racial profile of the previous all-white historical-heart of Jo’burg, the City of Gold. Historically, before the late-1980s, the peripheral suburbs surrounding the inner-city core of Jo’burg were once whites-only working and middle-class suburbs, due to segregation policies they had remained white for almost a hundred years. The above suburbs included Ophirton, Booysens, Haddon, Turffontein, Forest Hill, Kenilworth, Rosettenville, Jeppestown, Belgravia, Malvern, Bez Valley, Judith Paarl, Betrams, Doornfontein, Joubert Park, Braamfontein, Yeoville, Bellevue, Berea, Hillbrow, Mayfair, Fordsburg, Crosby, Brixton, Langlaagte, Westdene, and Triomf (previously Sophiatown). We too became one of those white families who migrated from a previously white suburb, which had become too ‘black’. We wanted to start a family as soon as possible and so we started looking for a home in a more ‘suitable’ suburb (Jewish) in the north of Jo’burg. However, Millicent’s father informed us that there was a 5 000 m² vacant stand hidden at the end of a cul de sac bordering the Klipriviersberg Nature Reserve in Mondeor. The property belonged to a deceased estate, which was intestate. On his prompting, we bought it for a very reasonable price. He was very attached to Millicent and I don’t think he was keen on her move to the north. Listening to Philip Tabane & Malombo: Phamba Madiba. I will for now continue with the story of my life before I met and married Millicent. But first, let us fast forward into the future. In the year 2023, I turned 58. I had been waiting for days on end for Zhang to fetch me so that Gazala and I could be reunited in China. Remember this bit of information. Now let us go back to the very beginning.

2.

As an only child, I grew up in Witfield, a white middle-class suburb in Boksburg. After completing my primary school education at Martin School in Boksburg North, my secular, churchless, and religionless, but gentle and kindly parents, who had married really late in life, had become sufficiently well off to send me to Damelin College, which in those days was located in a building called the Damelin Centre, on the corner Hoek Street and Plein Street, in the Jo’burg CBD, close to Park Station. My father worked nearby as a draughtsman for the Anglo-American Corporation at 44 Main Street and we travelled together in the mornings by train to Park Station from Boksburg Station. Most afternoons, after school I travelled back alone to Boksburg, and my mother would fetch me from the station. We did not have a maid, my mom did all the washing, cooking and housework. I grew up in a clean, well-ordered, and loving home, wanting for nothing, enjoying a carefree and untroubled childhood, with my nose mostly stuck in comics and books. My teenage years were much the same. During my high school years at Damelin College, I mixed mainly with kids who were from the outlying northern and eastern suburbs of Johannesburg (Jo’burg). As a result, I gradually morphed into a Jo’burg boy. Jo’burg had become transfused into my blood. My parents who were teetotallers, and also bookworms, lived cautious, dutiful, and law-abiding lives. Every December during the Christmas Holidays we went on our annual two-week caravan holiday to the South Coast, camping at the same Amanzimtoti caravan park under the same giant mango tree behind the same bushy dunes teeming with vervet monkeys, boomslangs and green mambas.

3.

I grew up to be like my parents dutiful, cautious and always conforming to the rules. They were the most important people in my life. I had never done anything rebellious or went against their wishes or advice, but a tragic event, the death of Dr Neil Aggett in 1982 changed all that. At the time, I was in standard 10. Dr Neil Aggett’s death in detention did not escape my attention. How could it? The day after his death, his photograph, an iconic portrait of an intense-looking young man with long dark hair and beard, a medical doctor and trade unionist, was boldly emblazoned on the front page of the Star Newspaper that my dad had brought home. My mom said his photograph reminded her of Che Guevara. Who was Che Guevara I asked? My dad explained that Che Guevara and Fidel Castro were the leaders of the revolution which overthrew the Batista regime in Cuba, and Che Guevara was eventually murdered by the CIA in Bolivia. It eventually transpired that Neil Aggett had been murdered by the security police while in detention at John Vorster Square. I read the article and followed all the subsequent newspaper reports. When it was announced in the newspaper that his funeral service was scheduled for 11.30 am on Saturday the 13th of February at the Anglican Cathedral, Church of St Mary the Virgin, on the corner of De Villiers and Hoek Street in Johannesburg, I informed my parents that I wished to attend his funeral. This was something that came out of the blue for them. They gaped at me in complete astonishment. Typical of my dad, his cautious response was: ‘I don’t think that is advisable.’ My mother chipped in: ‘Your father is right, I agree with him, I don’t think it is advisable.’ I stunned them when I firmly informed them that I was indeed going and that there was nothing that they could do to stop me. Not another word was said on the matter. My parents were timid and gentle people, they were incapable of harming anyone intentionally. I was their most precious gem. That Saturday morning I got up early, showered, shaved, polished my black school shoes, put on a white school shirt, got dressed up in the tie and suit that had been bought for special occasions like weddings. I said goodbye to my parents before walking off to Boksburg Station from Witfield. I was not angry with them, I actually felt bad, I also felt sorry for them, I did not want to hurt them, but this was something I had to do. And strangely enough, they realized that and they had the wisdom not to stop me or threaten me. It was to their credit because it deepened my love for them. Nothing could have prepared me for what I was about to experience in the Cathedral. There was only a very small minority of white faces, excluding Neil Aggett’s parents and family. The majority of mourners were black. I sat pressed between black mourners in the middle of a pew in the middle of the cavernous Cathedral that was crowded to overflowing. And the dancing in the aisles, and the singing, and the waving of raised fists, transported me into a realm, into a world I could never have imagined existing as a white schoolboy. And I wept freely with no shame during the service. After the church service, I marched shoulder to shoulder with the 15 000 strong singing mourners behind the ANC flag-draped coffin which was carried all the way from the Cathedral on the shoulders of many volunteers to his final resting place at Westpark Cemetery. And I sobbed my heart out at the graveside when the crowds solemnly and with great dignity sang Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika. I was overwhelmed by the ethos and the pathos of the occasion. And then after Neil Aggett had been laid to rest I trudged back to Park Station, emotionally drained, in the company of a more subdued army of mourners. And on the way back they treated me as a comrade, and many shook my hand in the African manner, and they asked no questions as we made our weary way back to Park Station, all of us physically exhausted, and footsore. At the railway station, I entered the station concourse building through the entrance that was reserved for whites only, and they continued down the street around the block to the hidden non-white entrance. It was late in the afternoon, and twilight was approaching rapidly when I entered the silent and empty vastness of the Park Station concourse, making my way down the stairs onto the dimly lit platform.

4.

On the platform stood two teenage girls, they had their ice skating boots hanging around their necks. I recognized them. We had been in the same primary school class from grade 1 to standard 5. They had spent the day ice-skating at the Carlton Centre. They were Kamilla Galambos, who had a dark-toned Indo-Aryan-Romani complexion, long raven black hair, big brown eyes, slutty and strikingly beautiful, whose parents had arrived in South Africa from Hungary in 1956. Her friend was Alžběta Hasek, who had long platinum blond hair, blue eyes, wanton and pretty, whose parents had arrived in South Africa from Czechoslovakia in 1968, and they both stayed in Witfield in the same street, in the street of my parent’s home, where I too lived. During our primary schools years, we had been close friends, the pair of them had spent many school holidays and weekends at my home. In the winter July holidays, we often spent the whole day in our lounge reading comics and playing board games. I had boxes of comics that my dad had collected. It was an eccentric hobby of his. During the summer on Saturdays or Sundays, we often walked together to the ERPM swimming pool, spending carefree sun-drenched summer days under cloudless cobalt vaulted skies swimming together and lying on the warm concrete slabs in our wet costumes deeply engaged in the conversational world of adolescent kids. Eurythmics: Love is a stranger. I had been in love with Kamilla from I don’t know when. After exchanging greetings, Kamilla asked: ‘What's up with the suit?’ I told them that I had been to Neil Aggett’s funeral and that I had marched in a long winding phalanx. I told them how I was swept along, as if I was being carried away in the current of a mighty river, with thousands of black mourners, who were chanting, singing, holding placards and flags, and were waving a sea of clenched fists in the air. I told them about the tumultuous sound of countless heavy footsteps tramping in unison on hard tar all the way to Westpark Cemetery and back to Park Station. They both stared at me, eyebrows raised, eyes enlarged for increased dramatic effect, mouths gaping in exaggerated amazement. ‘What the fuck! Who is Neil Aggett?’ Kamilla exclaimed. I took out a copy of the funeral service programme from my jacket pocket. I unfolded it and showed it to them. Their brows furrowed, their expressions one of confused perplexity, they, in turn, examined the programme before giving it back to me. It turned out that it would be too long a story in trying to explain everything to them while on the train journey back to Boksburg. To them, my attendance at the funeral did not make any sense. It was dark when we walked back from Boksburg Station to Witfield. I gallantly offered to carry their ice skating boots. They both lit up cigarettes. I declined when they offered me a cigarette. We walked along Comet Road in the dark, beneath the spreading canopies of massive ancient oak trees that bordered the road, loaded with the late summer bounty of acorns. The road, bathed in the diffuse yellowish glow of street-lamps, guided our journey through the infamous suicide bend, a sharp right-angled anti-clockwise or leftwards bend (direction northwards on the compass), wrapping itself around the sprawling EPRM workshops, giant corrugated clad hulks, which lay hidden behind a high corrugated fence. Coming out of the bend the road straightened for a short stretch before gently swooping rightwards (general direction still northwards) making a generous and curvaceous swing past the mine admin buildings on the left, and the recreation hall, gold assay labs and the single men’s quarters on the right. The famous but dangerous S bend ended at the robot intersection with the more famous Main Reef Road.

I need to mention that wedged between the various mine buildings, mine dumps and headgears, were the characteristic West, Central and East Rand suburban enclaves consisting of tight rows of semi-detached corrugated iron mine houses with their small backyards, tiny front gardens and wire gauzed verandas and entrance porches. They housed the white working class, the carpenters, electricians, fitters and turners, plumbers, welders, assorted mechanics, shift bosses and skippers, who worked on the mines of the Witwatersrand. Yellow mine dump, whitish slime dams, and towering steel headgears straddling the vertical mine shafts of Angelo, Cason, Hercules and Cinderella were familiar features of the Boksburg residential urbanscape. Mine cages were used to convey miners up and down the vertical mineshafts. Ore was transported up the vertical shaft using skips. Skippers operated the overhead winches for the lifting and lowering of cages and skips.

I must also mention that I travelled daily from our home in Witfield to the Boksburg Station along this route while I was at Damelin High School and during my undergraduate years at the University of the Witwatersrand. Crossing at the robot intersection, we continued along the oak-lined road, which cut the ERPM golf course into two halves. On our left, shadowed in darkness was the ERPM swimming pool situated on the corner of Main Reef and Comet Road. If one turned left into Main Reef Road, it would take you past Angelo Mine and the old Angelo Hotel on its way to Germiston and Johannesburg. For the three of us, this last leg of our night journey was also a journey down memory lane as Kamilla reminded us. It was along this road that we had once frequently walked to the ERPM swimming pool before the parting of our ways at the end of primary school and the beginning of high school. They went to Boksburg High and I ended up going to Damelin College in Johannesburg. The last time we were together as a threesome was in 1977 which was five years ago. We were twelve years old then and in standard five. At that time, all three of us were crossing that psychosexual threshold of metamorphosis, which had been orchestrated by surging floods of sex hormones coursing through our bodies. I began to experience intense and pleasurable rushes of erotic arousal due to the action of overactive glands and raging ganglia that were often triggered by the bodily closeness of Kamilla. On one memorial occasion, we were sitting close together on the sofa in our lounge. Alžběta was lying on the carpet on her stomach, her elbows supporting her hands and wrists on which her head was propped while she read a comic. Kamilla and I were sharing a classical comic, The Iliad, it was lying open on my lap and her thigh was pressed against mine. I was fully erect and felt pleasurably overwhelmed by the physical closeness of her body. Of course, she had no idea what effect she was having on me. In the change rooms before and after swimming at school, pubic hair was ubiquitous and dangling flaccid penises were expanding to full measure, and it was a time when boys speculated about the phenomenon of sex. I had been circumcised as an infant and it seemed that more than fifty percent of the boys in our standard five class had also been circumcised. The three of us all lived in Edward Street across the road from Witfield Lake or Dam. It was a beautiful warm night, bats were flittering about, the frogs were croaking and the crickets were chirping. We spoke for a while about old times while standing under a lamppost in the street, moths and beetles swarmed under the light. It felt like I had made a promising re-connection with Kamilla that could develop into something romantic.

5.

It was after eight o’clock when I arrived back home. Dad and mom were waiting anxiously for me in the lounge. They had watched the 8.00 pm news and were now fully appraised regarding the funeral. My mom hugged me, made me sit down at the dining room table, fetched my food from the warming draw, and generally made a huge fuss. My parents had shown grace towards me, and profound faith in me, when they did not stop me from going to the funeral. They were old. My mother was forty-something when she gave birth to me. They could sense that I had been through a life-changing experience. It must have been written on my face and evident in my deportment. Sitting by the dining table, facing me while I ate, they listened in sombre silence without interrupting me as I told them everything in dramatic detail, from the beginning to the end. I tried to explain what it felt like being there, searching for words that would capture the atmosphere and the mood, inside the cathedral, and during the march, and at the graveside. Of course, I had been deeply touched in the depths of my soul. Neil Aggett was now my hero. I told them about solidarity – it was a new word that I had learnt. I told them that the blacks had accepted me and that I did not feel the least bit uncomfortable for one single moment. I told them about the blatant waving of illegal flags and the brazen unfurling of long banners celebrating the banned ANC and the South African Communist Party. I must have spoken for an hour, at the end of which I was completely exhausted, my legs felt like lead from all the walking, after a hot bath I climbed into bed and fell immediately into a deep sleep and Kamilla filled my dreams.

6.

That Sunday, the whole day, Kamilla was on my mind. By the end of the week, I had fallen in love with her. After another two lovesick weeks, I built up enough courage to phone Kamilla when my dad was still at work and my mom had driven off somewhere. In a manner of speaking the ship had already sailed, she was going out with some other guy. Anyway, my love for Kamilla did not wane. Months passed by, and then in early September, she phoned me out of the blue. I did not know it, but she was on the rebound after having broken up with her boyfriend. She became my first girlfriend, a relationship that lasted until the New Year. Those months were filled with bouts of heavy petting on Friday nights and weekends in her parents’ lounge or at some party in Boksburg, usually held in the garage. Then there was the night of the Matric Ball, held at the Boksburg Town Hall. After the function, we went to an all-night pool party at someone’s home in Parkdene. We all donned our bathing costumes and gathered around the pool in the backyard. The pool light was on, a braaivleis was underway, and music was playing. There was a huge galvanized steel tub packed with ice and beers and cold drinks. Bottles of champagne arranged in rows on a nearby table packed with long-stemmed plastic champagne glasses. The HiFi stereo sound system connected to an electrical extension cable began to pump out the music of the rapidly fading 1970s disco era. The year was 1982, and the sounds of the discotheque were going to be the vibe for the party. Because of my murmuring heart, I would be starting university in the new year, whereas the overwhelming majority of the virile lads with their strong hearts, gathered around the pool in their bathing trunks, slugging back beer, would be doing their two-year military service, vir fokken volk en land (for fucken folk and land). Kamilla having swopped her ball gown for a bathing suit in one of the bedrooms emerged through the kitchen door into the pool patioed backyard wearing a black bikini under her T-shirt. Towel hanging around my neck I was already in my Speedo standing at the edge of the translucent neon-blue lit pool on the far side away from the milling boisterous crowd. Corks flew into the air from cracking bottles of champagne, beer cans popped with an explosive phzzz, and Kamilla joining me asked: ‘Should we swim?’ And the voice of Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ began to caress the warm velvet night. We swam intertwining our bodies, arms, and legs like copulating porpoises. Later that night, me still sober (one can of beer), Kamilla slightly inebriated (two glasses of champagne), we snuck away to the privacy of a gazebo covered in vines, hidden away in a bushy corner of the front garden. Our mouths and tongues feasting voraciously, my hand caressing her vulva with curious fingers, first the index and then both indexes slipped into Kamilla’s moist and very hot vagina. After a sudden deep-throated intake and release of hot champagne-flavoured breath, she began moaning softly. Her warm cheek pressed against mine, she whispered: ‘You can fuck me if you have FLs.’ I did not have any FLs and I never again had the opportunity to fuck Kamilla, before she went back to her old boyfriend. Dear reader in my erotic fantasies for the rest of my life I have revisited that night, time and time again, and I have fucked Kamilla in my imagination a million times without ever reaching the level of satiation I could have achieved on that night of wild love. I have lived with a lifelong regret of not having fucked Kamilla. To me, she was the hottest woman on earth. I would never know what it would have felt like to fuck her. I had learnt a lesson, from that day onwards whenever I was with a girl I was always armed with a condom in my pocket. One never knows when it would be needed.

7.

During the year of my matric, Neil Aggett’s funeral had opened up the doors of my own political enlightenment, especially with regard to my parents. Stuff that I would never have otherwise known about them became disclosed. It was during that year that my dad said that neither he nor my mother had ever supported or believed in apartheid. In fact, they were both adamantly opposed to apartheid and the Nationalist Party government. On learning about their political views, I saw them in a new and positive light, and because of this, I developed a new deeper respect and love for my parents. They were definitely not like the parents of my school friends. This also explained why they were not outgoing or sociable and their reluctance to socialize in general with neighbours or the broader white community in which they happened to be embedded because of the force of circumstances. Furthermore, my dad admitted that following his exposure to members of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) before the Second World War and during the War, when serving with volunteers in the South African forces in North Africa, amongst whom there were also members of the CPSP, coming under their influence, he seriously considered joining the CPSA, especially after the War had ended. During the War, he became a member of the Springbok Legion and through his membership, he also became acquainted with other young men who also happened to be communists. Attempts were made to recruit him into the Communist Party. Before the War from his communist acquiesces, he had learnt about Fanny Klenerman and the Vanguard Bookshop. He often visited the bookshop, which was on the second floor of Hatfield House in Eloff Street. He also frequented Solomon’s Bookshop owned by Mr Solomon who was a Russian Jew. Later Fanny Klenerman’s shop was moved to Warwick House at 51 Von Brandis Street where it occupied a larger ground floor space. After the War, the bookshop was pressurized to find alternative premises. It then relocated to another building at 28 Joubert Street. It was originally a dilapidated building, which the Johannesburg Building Society (JBS) had restored for the rental of shop and office space. At its new premises, which turned out to be a good location, it occupied the space on the ground or street level and the basement level below. A neon sign emblazing ‘Vanguard Booksellers Pty Ltd’ was put up to advertise the shop. Here during the post-War years, the shop flourished, enjoying huge support from the political Left community of Johannesburg. But unfortunately, once more they were forced to move, the shop being located at a site that had developed into a prime business location meant that rentals could be increased and clients with deeper pockets could be attracted to rent shop and office space. They set up shop close by in Commissioner Street in 1966 the year in which I was born and the year in which Verwoerd was assassinated. Unfortunately, in 1974 Vanguard Booksellers was forced to close, as it could no longer be sustained as a going concern, bringing an end to an era.

8.

My mom arrived in Johannesburg in 1942 from Beira. After finding employment as a seamstress in the garment industry she joined the Garment Workers' Union of South Africa (GWU). Like my father, as a young woman, she was also exposed to members of the CPSA and developed a favourable view towards the communists. She expressed her admiration for Solly Sachs who was the general secretary of the GWU. Towards the end of the 1950s, the garment manufacturer she was working for went bankrupt. She walked the streets of Johannesburg looking for work. She tried to find work as a lady's clothing sales assistant or admin clerk at the OK Bazaars on the corner of Pritchard and Eloff Street, and at John Orr’s Department Store on Pritchard Street, and also at Stuttafords on the corner of Rissik and Pritchard Streets. But had no luck. She eventually got a job as a factory worker with Levers Brothers. The company had opened a factory in Boksburg in 1955. The tiny flat she moved into in Boksburg was a light powder blue coloured two storey building on the corner of Railway and Comet Streets. It was owned by a Greek café owner whose shop also formed part of the building. Across the road from the Greek’s café were a bicycle shop and a Portuguese fish and chips café. She bought a bicycle as her means of transport to get to work, which happened to be several kilometres away at the eastern end of Commissioner Street. As serendipity would have it, my father was renting a tiny house on the corner of Elm and North Avenue just around the block from the fish and chips café. Clifford Swift and Maria Sánchez kept on bumping into each other at the Greek or the Portuguese café while buying bread or milk or fish and chips, and she took a liking to the shy man and he, in turn, could not hide his infatuation for her. And their first topic of conservation: How they both had grown to enjoy the clickety-clack sounds of passing trains at night. After a long courtship, they got married in 1961 at a civil ceremony officiated at the Boksburg magistrate's court. She was 38 and he was 41, and they were both comfortable with not having children. Anyway, she fell pregnant and I was born in 1966 when she was 43 years old.

9.

I am not quite finished with the Vanguard Booksellers saga. On that, Sunday afternoon after reading about the life and death of Neil Aggett in the Sunday newspapers, my dad retrieved two cardboard boxes from the bottom of a built-in cupboard in the spare room and opened it on the lounge carpet. It was packed with books on politics and philosophy, which he said I could have. He would organize a bookshelf for me in my room. His favourite author on politics was Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin. He had copies of Bakunin’s ‘God and the State; Statism and Anarchy; Marxism, Freedom and the State’. Both of us were kneeling on the carpet. I flipped through the pages while he rummaged through the boxes. He kept on saying that there were other important books, which I should read. He was searching for some particular book that he considered to be very important indeed, mainly because it expounded quite thoroughly on what Bakunin was saying. He eventually found the book, it was Robert Michels’ ‘Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy’. I also flipped through the pages of Michel’s book on oligarchical tendencies. I was 17 years old. All this stuff was Greek to me. But that was not what was important. I was awe-struck by the fact that my father had these books and knew about political stuff, which I could never have imagined. My dad and my mom knew about Marx, socialism, communism and trade unions. And they were both anti-apartheid and against the ruling Nationalist Party. In my mind, they were on the same page as the protesters and trade union speakers at Neil Aggett’s funeral. My mother brought in a tray with the tea and a plate of biscuits she had baked. It was her turn to say something. What she said was simple: ‘Apartheid is evil. I know what it feels like to be black in South Africa.’ I remembered the words: ‘she is as dark as a Moor’. All the books had little stamps or little stickers on the inside of the front cover: Vanguard Booksellers Pty Ltd 28 Joubert Street. All the serious books on the bookshelves in our home, books by Musil, Mann, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Gorky, Tolstoy, Kafka, Updike, and Hemingway and so on, also had the same address stamp or sticker. My dad had bought them over many years from Fanny Klenerman’s bookshops a venue frequented by the liberal and Left-wing intelligentsia of Johannesburg, not to mention the Trotskyites and Anarchists. The Who - Won't Get Fooled Again, 1978. What does it feel like to be black in apartheid South Africa?

10.

During my undergraduate years between 1983 and 1985, I involved myself in various Wits student-initiated protest actions, which were linked to the United Democratic Front (UDF) programme of mass protest action. At the height of the people’s war in 1989 with my PhD done and dusted there were no jobs, South Africa had just slipped into recession. Abdullah Ibrahim playing: Mannenberg. I was pressed for money and that was when I made my brief sally into the world of business as a sales rep while waiting for something better to come along. It was while I was repping that Dr David Webster a senior lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology at Wits who was deeply involved in activist work was assassinated outside his home in Troyeville in May 1989. I also went to his funeral service which was also held at the Anglican Saint Marys Cathedral. Again, I found myself weeping freely and uncontrollably at the funeral service in the Cathedral. Sitting around me were the VIP dignitaries including ambassadors from various foreign embassies who also wept. It was a moving service. The African Pioneer Jazz Band played while the women members of the Orlando Pirates football fan club dressed in their black buccaneer T-shirts danced and toy toyed up and down the main aisle waving their fists in the air, the atmosphere while heavy with grief was also strangely festive at the same time. Johnny Clegg delivered the eulogy. Once again, I marched shoulder to shoulder with masses to Westpark Cemetery. Once again, I cried and sobbed as we marched in the funeral procession. My clenched fist raised in the air. My heart ached bitterly. After Johnny Clegg’s passing in July 2019 following his struggle with pancreatic cancer Millicent and I went to his memorial service, which turned out to be a memorial celebration of Johnny Clegg’s life as an artist and musician at the Sandton Convention Centre. Again, I wept freely. Millicent also sobbing and whipping her eyes constantly. Neil Aggett, David Webster and now Johnny Clegg, it felt like I had spent my life weeping. It was the same with Chris Hani’s assassination, I followed the funeral on TV, and again I wept with deep sorrow while I watched the funeral proceedings. With the deaths of Neil Aggett, David Webster and Chris Hani something also died in me, but also something was reborn in my heart. They were heroes of hope. And I followed the last days of Joe Slovo also with feelings of sadness and compassion, and I also wept as I watched his funeral on TV. Now as I write while listening to the lyrics of Johnny Clegg’s ‘Asimbonanga’ I hear him name the names of our struggle heroes…Steven Biko…Victoria Mxenge…Neil Aggett…’ and all the others, the memories and the heavy pathos of those times still move me deeply. And how often, especially when I have been in the grip of melancholy, have I replayed Abdullah Ibrahim’s ‘Mannenberg’? I also once played Mannenberg to my dad and mom, and they listened for the entire 13.40 minutes. During my undergraduate years at Wits, my mom would every now again ask: ‘Please play that Mannenberg again for us.’ Abdullah Ibrahim had touched something deep in her own soul. Was it the Moor? And they would both listen intently, the two of them, in the lounge in Witfield, in Boksburg. What were they thinking, what were they feeling? And I would let the tape run and we would listen to the next track: ‘African Herbs’. Where did this stirring and hypnotic music come from? Then we listened to the next track: ‘Soweto Is Where It's At’. Of course, the piano was foundational, but it was blended and fused with Marabi piano, and also with the classical piano and church hymns, and if you listened carefully you could hear Sufi chanting and Indonesian and drumming traditional Xhosa music mingled with ancient San and Khoi musical elements, not to mention European folk, both regimental and parlour music, and Boer Langarm dance band music, and Kwela (pennywhistle) music and Mbaqanga (township jive) music, and Cape Malay ‘Christmas choirs’ music, and Cape Nagtroepe, and carnival music, and the bass guitar, and the drums, and the perpetual wailing of the trumpets and saxophones, and the syncopated beat holding it all together, this whole arrangement created by the supreme genius and master jazz improviser, Abdullah Ibrahim. This was the music played at Neil Aggett’s funeral, the music which always brings tears to my eyes and joy to my heart. A full hour of Abdullah Ibrahim would go by before my mom got up to make tea.

11.

Who was I in terms of ethnicity? This question could not be answered. I can only imagine who I was then and who I am now. If I had an original identity, say a birth identity, it was one that was completely amorphous. I was not a native of any country, meaning I had no discernible ‘over-seas’ ancestral roots. I could not tell you where I came from with respect to my ancestral origins. I belonged to that diverse, heterogeneous and generally nebulous group of white people who are called English-speaking South Africans. The Queen and England meant nothing to us. The generation of white English-speaking South Africans into which I was born did not by any stretch of the imagination constitute a homogeneous ethnic group. Maybe I am speaking from the narrow perspective of my own personal world. This was the way I perceived the ‘community’ into which I had become inserted or thrown into as a consequence of the blind vicissitudes of history. We tended to be individualistic and often eccentric. We were a collection of diverse individuals bound together by the English language. We had no historically rooted culture to speak of! Nationalism, and even patriotism, was something completely foreign to us. This suited me just fine, I liked being different. Being different was important. I never wanted to be the same as everyone else. I think this rule applied to all of us, to my generation anyway, to all who were born into the melting pot of the East Rand. We were diverse. We were descendants of British, Irish, Afrikaans, Dutch, German, French, Italian, Greek, Lebanese, Portuguese and Jewish parentages. Some of us were half Portuguese, half Italian, half Greek or half Lebanese. Some of us had quite dark Mediterranean complexions, an ancient touch of Africa in our bloodline. Born into the Republic of South Africa we were nothing more than a heterogeneous and diffuse mixture of the white working and middle-class ethnicities, who I suppose could be collectively classified as ‘white’ settlers, who had also become with time culturally disconnected from the British Empire, and the kind of ‘Englishness’ that goes with it. We had acquired our own sense of ‘being English’, which was an Englishness heavily infused and blended with all kinds of Americanisms. We belonged to that post-Second World War generation who happened to be born into the world of the turbulent 1960s. To sum up: We belonged to an English-speaking generation of white South Africans who had subsequently become to varying degrees Americanized through continual exposure to American mass culture transmitted across the Atlantic through the medium of the great American novel, movies, music and comics. As a group, we were not inordinately religious. It would not be inaccurate to characterize the generation of white English-speaking South Africans to which I belonged as being relatively more secular than religious. I had no religious or ethnic affiliations until I met Millicent. As a class of white English-speaking South Africans, soccer was our sport of choice. And we grew up reading American comics and our choice of immigration destination would have been the USA by default. America would have been our natural alternative home. We had been nurtured on a literary diet of Marvel, Batman, and Superman comics. Throughout my childhood right up until the end of adolescence America always seemed to be so vividly close even if it was in reality physically separated by a geographic divide of Atlantic Oceanic proportions. From the comics, I was familiar with all the everyday American words such as: soda, ketchup, drugstore, movies, gas, gas station, sweater and jelly and so on. Later in life, post-1994, the fetishization and essentialization of racial differences would become an obsession that one would have to deal with anew, ironically, given the passing of apartheid. There were indeed more important kinds of differences than racial identities. There were class differences and differences due to social stratifications. There were social hierarchies and social inequalities. There was the underlying class struggle shaping the course of history. Amongst the English-speaking whites’ passivity, complacency and complicity ruled. While growing up in the late 1960s and 1970s we lived a schizophrenic existence. The reality of white English-speaking South African youth during those times could be summed up as follows: When we grew up there was a complete absence of any kind of local media or popular mass culture whether it be in the form of music, film, books, magazine or comics which could articulate or express or mirror or reflect or construct or project or confirm a sense of identity and belonging. During our formative years in the 1960s and 1970s, we fell into a separate but distinctive heterogeneous enclave of whites who spoke English. To repeat, English was the cohesive glue, which held this amorphous white collective together. In terms of culture, our focus and imaginary construction of identity and belonging was not turned inwards upon ourselves, but rather outwards, externally to the dominant Anglo-American metropoles of the Northern Hemisphere, and because of this the form, content and substance of our sense of identity and belonging were constrained by impossible and unbridgeable distances. For example, instead of ever having the opportunity of experiencing live rock concerts where the Beatles, Rolling Stones or The Who played to mass audiences, we listened to their music on radios or tapes or records, a listening which was completely divorced from the live experience of a rock concert or the cultural ethos which gave rise to the music we enjoyed and which was an integral part of our lives. Culturally we lived impoverished lives. Our world was boring, banal, superficial and empty. Not knowing anything better from first-hand experiences this was the kind of life we were forced to endure as the progeny of white settlers who inhabited the world of the Global South.

12.

What changed me? I was born white and being born white, I inherited the sins of privilege and complicity, the sins of my settler forefathers whoever they may have been. How did I shed my white guilt? How was I liberated from the burden of being so privileged, and so advantaged, and so passively complicit in all kinds of historical wrongdoing? It was through none other than my father and my mother, yes, especially my mother, and also through Karl Marx, Mikhail Bakunin, and Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin, the last of these three names became my inspiration during my undergraduate years. My mother without saying a word made me see the world through different eyes. And I must not forget Millicent. Millicent stripped away the illusions and the bullshit. During the late 1980s, I found the idea of Anarcho-Communism immensely appealing, especially as my scepticism grew regarding the possibilities of genuine political liberation in the de-colonized world of the Global South. It didn’t matter if you were black or white or from a rich or poor background if you were an Anarcho-Communist. And so the sloughing off of the old self and followed by the subsequent metamorphosis was also greatly facilitated by immersing myself in the student Leftist ethos (a very Jewish ethos) at Wits and also by becoming a faithful customer of De Jong’s Bookshop across the road from Wits. My parents were generous with pocket money. While wanting for nothing in the way of clothes, my wardrobe remained sparse and Spartan, all I had were two pairs of faded jeans, a few T-shirts, a windbreaker and two old jerseys (black and navy blue), a pair of takkies, and a draw filled with scants and socks. It was all I needed in the way of clothing. My mother made sandwiches for my lunch, so I spent all the money that I was given on books, books published by Progress Publishers, Moscow, printed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and imported by the crate load by Mr De Jong, the enigmatic Hollander. During my undergraduate years, I managed to purchase, read, metabolize and digest most of the key works of Marx: Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, The Poverty of Philosophy, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Critique of the Gotha Programme, The Holy Family and so on so forth. Courtesy of Penguin Classics, I manage to buy the bulky paperback edition of Marx’s Capital Volume 1 and Grundrisse at Campus Bookshop also across the road from Wits. I also managed to buy and read Edward Roux’s Time Longer than Rope. As an Anarcho-Communist, I was not in awe of the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP), nor did I think much of the SACP’s two-stage theory of revolution or its conceptualization of colonialism of a special kind. Following a talk given at Wits by a journalist working for the Dutch branch of Amnesty International, I was left thoroughly disabused regarding the revolutionary and liberation credentials of the ANC and the SACP. And it did not matter if you were black or white or coloured or Indian or Chinese or Arab.

Chapter Two

1.

Between 1942 and 1958 my mom travelled each working day by tram to her place of work which was at a garment factory in Von Wielligh Street. After work, she caught the tramcar on Main Street. On her journey to her home in Malvern, the red double-decker tramcar travelled eastwards until it reached Berg Street. She preferred to sit in the front most seat on the upper deck, which gave her a grand unimpeded view of the passing scenes on her homeward journey. Rolling on the rail-line tracks the tramcar made a sharp ninety-degree right turn into Berg Street, travelling past Murray Park on the left until the intersection with Jules Street. At the robot (traffic lights) intersection, the tramcar made another sharp ninety-degree turn, this time to the left into Jules Street. Everybody knows that Jules Street was the longest straightest street in the world. It had twenty or more robots at the main intersections, all synchronized so that if you drove at the right speed you could pass through green lights from the one end to the other end of Jules Street. This was a well-known fact. At the east end, Jules Street ended in a fork, which marked the borders of a small suburb called Wychwood. At the west end, Jules Street ended at the intersection with the famous Main Reef Road. After the intersection with Jules Street, Main Reef Road becomes John Page Drive, which runs at an angle in a north-westerly direction. John Page Drive makes a series of branching fork-like intersections with Park Street (which becomes Anderson Street), Marshall Street, and Main Street before merging with Commissioner Street. On the far western side of the inner-city after passing under the double-decker of the De Villiers Graaff Motorway the two main streets cutting through the inner-city, Marshall and Commissioner Street, merge with the iconic Main Reef Road which continues on its westwards journey mapping the outer contours of the original gold-bearing conglomerate rocky outcrop which in 1886 following the discovery of gold resulted in the birth of the City of Jo’burg.

2.

My mother lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment in Wone Court at number 344 Jules Street, Malvern. My mother was a curious person. She wondered why the small block of flats was called Wone Court. The word intrigued her. The word was not in the English dictionary. Someone said she should read Chaucer. She read The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer and found a verse containing the word wone: ‘To liven in delight was all his wone…’ She eventually established that it was an ancient English word no longer in use. As a noun, the medieval word ‘wone’ means abode, dwelling, or habitation. Used as a verb (wonen) it means to dwell or to abide. The etymology of wone and wonen can be summed up as follows: The words are linked to the Middle Dutch word wōnen, which in turn is related to the Old Dutch word wonon, and also to the Proto-West Germanic wunēn, which comes from the Proto-Germanic word wunāną, and which was ultimately derived from the Proto-Indo-European word wenh₁, which means to wish or to love. The Afrikaans verb ‘woon’ also means to live in or to dwell in. The Afrikaans noun ‘woning’ means home, dwelling, or abode. A Heideggerian-orientated concern with the existential significance of the architecture of human habitation necessarily revolves around the notion of building a building or a shelter as that special place for the furthering of ‘human well-being’. Wishing and loving and living and hoping and dwelling or abiding are interlocking words that working together have much to do with the significance of time and place and space, especially with respect to the attainment of the fullness and depth of human well-being. The old English word ‘dwellan’, from which the word dwell originates, also carries the meaning of straying from the path or being led astray. It also shares its roots and meaning with the Afrikaans word ‘dwaal’ which means to become lost or to stray from the path or to lose one’s way. To become lost or to stray from the path also means to lose one’s way in regard to finding one’s home, which is also a place where one dwells. Living and loving and wishing and hoping involves finding one’s way or place, and also not straying from the right path. This was my mother’s homespun philosophy. More to be said about this shortly. Going back to losing one’s way or straying from the path, there is also the Old Norse word dvelja, which shares etymological roots with words such as dwellan, dwaal and dwell, also carries the Heideggerian meaning of remaining or staying where one is. To dwell also means to stay on the right path and not to stray from that path or place in one’s life. These were the lessons, which I learnt from my dad and mom. The meaning of to dwell also extends to doing the right thing, which also entails wishing and hoping for the good, including love. My mother ‘strayed’ from Beira because she wanted to find her place in the world, a place where she could live the right kind of life, a life in which she could stay on the right path, a life of dwelling or abiding in the right place. My mother’s abode was at Wone Court in Jules Street. It was there that she spent some of the best years of her life second only to her abode in Witfield. For her, Beira could never be home. My mother was ‘thrown’ into the world. In Heidegger’s book ‘Being and Time’ he speaks about Dasein as being a person’s way of being open to their existence which included the disclosure of one’s place or the finding of oneself in a world, a world that already exists as a specific kind of place in time and space. The German word ‘Befindlichkeit’ has also been used by Heidegger in the sense of finding oneself in the state of having been thrown into a world. This is what is meant by our condition of being or existing in a state of ‘thrownness’. The key word here is ‘finding’. We find ourselves or discover ourselves always in a state of thrownness. It is in this way or mode of being-in-the-world that we discover or find ourselves. Finding one’s way in the world, finding one’s place of abode or dwelling space includes finding oneself in a world not of one’s own making. According to my mother, the word ‘find’ or how one finds oneself in the world corresponds to the use of the Spanish expression ‘encontrarse’, which means to find oneself in a situation or to be situated. To be in a situation affects how one feels emotionally and physically. And in human life, we often find that we have no control or influence over the situations in which we find ourselves. Hence her expression regarding the use of the word ‘encontrarse’ was equivalent to being thrown into the world or living in a state of ‘thrownness’ and finding oneself in this state or situation of being-in-the-world. Finding oneself always involves making decisions. It also involves being resolute with respect to finding one’s path or the way in the face of life’s difficulties. Her leaving Beira had something to do with her wanting to gain control over her life or over her situation, which also included finding her place in the world where she wanted to be, a place where she could be happy and fulfilled, where she could be on the right path, where she could be in the right place, by finding that abode or dwelling where she could abide, a place where she could find that sense of well-being, emotionally and physically. My dad always said our surroundings affect us in more ways than we could imagine. Our surroundings define our situation. My mother agreed. Our surroundings affected us in all kinds of ways. Space and place and time affect our sense of well-being. My father explained that this was why architecture and geography and topography and landscape and urbanscape and town planning were so important for the enrichment and flourishing of human life. In Malvern, at the corner of Jules and Naiad Streets was where one could find the ‘Kinema’ and some distance to the east, next to the old Malvern Hotel at the corner of Jules and 19th Streets was the place which used to be the ‘Metropolis’. These were the two movie houses (also called bioscopes in South Africa) that my mom patronized over many years while living in Malvern. Like my dad, my mother was an avid movie-goer.

3.

The suburb of Malvern was proclaimed in 1904. The land set aside for the new suburb fell within the boundaries of the farm called Doornfontein. Doornfontein was one of the original farms from which the City of Johannesburg emerged. It was in the streets of the inner-city and in Malvern that my mother encountered the subcultures of white masculinities which broadly characterized youthful South African males of the 1940s and 1950s who happened to be from white working-class backgrounds. Her perceptions were from the perspective of a highly intelligent outsider or foreigner. She noticed that they observed distinctive and identifiable codes of dress and hairstyle. They were preoccupied with their appearance and management of image. They wore Jarman shoes, stovepipe pants or jeans, leather jackets and they constantly combed their Brylcreem plastered hair into the popular Ducktail Style. According to my mom, they were all uneducated, loved to party at ‘sessions’, play pinball machines in cafés, ride motorbikes, visit roadhouses, read comics, spend their leisure time in billiard halls and bars, and frequent bioscopes. They adopted and adapted their style and slang from Western and American gangster movies. James Dean, Marlon Brando and Elvis Presley provided the macho role models which they idolized and imitated. While she enjoyed listening to the new rock-n-roll music of Bill Haley and the Comets, Eddie Cochran, Little Richard, Chubby Checker, Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley she filtered the music differently from the Ducktail gangs or the prevailing cultural norms of