Like all township boys, Rocks was mad about sport. He played football, but not with the same obsessiveness as his younger brothers. He preferred softball, an interest he shared with Tsietsi. Rocks’ best positions were first base and shortstop; he and Tsietsi devised makeshift bases and stole the bats from their school. He also trained as a welter-weight boxer. Rocks fought for the Jabulani Boxing Club, where he was considered to have a reasonably good left jab. Nomkhitha hated him boxing; she wanted her children to aspire to something more genteel like tennis. But Rocks dismissed it as an effeminate game. Growing up in the ghetto, you had to assert a masculine image to fend off tsotsis, or pickpockets.
Gangs were also a problem. They formed around a particular section of the township: Orlando had its gang, White City its band of youths, and so on. The gangs attacked mostly at night, brandishing knives, hatchets, all manner of crudely fashioned weapons. In an attempt at justice, a teacher at Rocks’ school organized a kind of vigilante group to punish the perpetrators. Rocks once identified a boy who had assaulted a rival gang member; he marched him virtually across Soweto to be whipped by the vigilantes. A few weeks later, Rocks encountered the same youth on a train into town. This time, he was surrounded by his cronies; they held Rocks down for four train stops as the boy beat him up, splitting open his forehead.
His family’s poverty weighed heavily on Rocks. As a child, he would dream of toys. It was always the same fantasy: Joseph somehow found extra money and bought him all the playthings he coveted. At first, Rocks held his parents responsible for their condition. They had too many children to support; two or three offspring would have been manageable. But Rocks ultimately came to blame apartheid for their impoverished state. He arrived at this conclusion gradually, through the small epiphanies so many black children experienced when they ventured beyond the township.
Rocks’ awakening began when Nomkhitha allowed him to go by train into Johannesburg on errands. He was spellbound by the cars he saw there: the speedy, sleek vehicles, driven mostly by whites, that jammed the city’s streets. It was a rare thing for a black person to own a car. And all the goods on display in the store windows; Rocks had never imagined such luxuries existed. But he could not afford them. They were for the white customers, who paid with great bundles of notes they produced from their pockets or purses. Rocks, meanwhile, bought only the cheapest items, carefully counting out the coins entrusted to him.
His perception of the disparities between blacks and whites deepened as he got older. Along with several classmates, Rocks participated in a drama festival at an all-white high school in one of Johannesburg’s northern suburbs – the first time he had set foot in such an institution. He was astounded by what he saw: the library, auditorium, gymnasium, laboratories, modern classrooms. Rocks’ overcrowded, understaffed school had virtually nothing. Everyone knew the government spent far more on white students than on blacks; in fact, it was about twelve times as much. But this most tangible manifestation of apartheid opened Rocks’ eyes and angered him.
The more he encountered the white world, the more embittered Rocks became. The sightseers who took the bus tours of Soweto from Johannesburg were a poignant example. Some were foreigners; but many white South Africans also went on the trip, gaping at the township and snapping photographs as though it were a different country. (This would probably be the only time any of them ever ventured into a ‘location’.) One stop on the itinerary was in front of Rocks’ school. The passengers didn’t disembark; that was considered too dangerous. Instead, they threw sweets and coins at the children from open windows – a practice Rocks hated. It made him feel like an animal on display in a zoo.
As an adolescent, Rocks worked during the school holidays at Joseph’s construction company. He did odd jobs: filing, making tea, washing cars, delivering messages. Besides the extra money it provided, the work gave him a glimpse of the conditions under which his father worked. Joseph, as the president’s driver, was treated respectfully by the company’s highest officers. But the other white employees barely hid their contempt for the black workers. With a son’s sensitivity, Rocks cringed at the thousand daily little humiliations his father endured.
Of course, Rocks could not talk to his father about what he saw as the injustices of apartheid; Joseph would allow no such discussions under his roof. The 1960s were a time of terrible political repression. After its banning, the ANC had gone underground and, ending a fifty-year-old tradition of non-violence, formed a military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation). On 16 December 1961, the day Afrikaners celebrated the defeat of thousands of Zulu warriors in the previous century, Umkhonto exploded a series of home-made bombs around the country. The attacks were timed to avoid injuring people and were aimed at symbolic targets: the Bantu Affairs Commissioner’s offices in Johannesburg; a nearby post office; electricity pylons in Port Elizabeth. Umkhonto committed scores of similar acts of sabotage until July 1963, when the police raided its secret headquarters at a farm in Rivonia, near Johannesburg. The officers arrested most of Umkhonto’s leaders; eight of them, including Nelson Mandela, were sentenced to life in prison after a highly publicized trial in April the next year.
The raid on Rivonia effectively stilled black political opposition for a decade. What remained of the ANC and Umkhonto were forced to reassemble in exile, far from South Africa’s borders. The PAC too had to reorganize outside the country. (Poqo, or ‘pure’ in Xhosa, a terrorist group with ties to the PAC, had engaged in acts of violence for a brief time; the police destroyed it in 1963 by arresting thousands of its adherents.) An entire generation of black activists was imprisoned, banned or exiled. To deter the resurgence of political movements, the police assumed unbridled powers of arrest and detention and recruited an army of black informers; the government imposed harsh restrictions on the press.
The measures left blacks utterly intimidated. The life imprisonment of the ANC/Umkhonto leaders on Robben Island, off the coast of Cape Town, seemed the end of politics itself. People shunned the discussions that had animated so much of daily life. To speak of such matters was to invite repression. The ANC’s protest campaigns of the 1950s, the Freedom Charter, the actions of Umkhonto – all slipped into obscurity, suppressed by parents too frightened to tell their children. Newspapers could not even print Nelson Mandela’s photograph. One evening, Rocks asked his father about graffiti he had seen spray-painted on an electrical sub-station on his way home from school. ‘Who is Mandela?’ asked Rocks. Joseph slapped him across the face and walked out of the room.
If working at his father’s construction firm exposed Rocks to the quotidian indignities of apartheid, it also opened his eyes to the future. He decided he would become an engineer. Rocks had wanted to study law, but law required a knowledge of Latin, and his teachers at school discouraged him from attempting the language. Engineering seemed the next best thing: the draughtsmen with their drawing tables and precision instruments appealed to Rocks’ sense of order. Nomkhitha was delighted.
When Rocks entered high school, Joseph acquired an old, abandoned trailer from his company and set it in the small yard behind the house. It was a kind of study for Rocks, a refuge from the raucous children who inhabited every corner of his home. He crammed for his matriculation exams there. Rocks also attended study groups at his high school; called ‘cross-nighting’, these marathon sessions began in the evening and continued until the early hours of the morning. (Rocks’ school, Morris Issacson, was one of the few places in Soweto that had electricity.) After supper, Rocks would take a blanket and a thermos filled with coffee and walk back to school. There he and his friends thrashed out the finer points of a subject, filling the blackboard with equations or quotations, until they drooped with exhaustion. They were determined students: one way or another, their lives would be different from their parents’.
Tsietsi, the next-born, was, by contrast with his older brother, a great extrovert. As a youngster, he appeared highly-strung and given to histrionics: when denied something he wanted, Tsietsi cried until