But in this rural backwater they had little idea of any wider meaning to these unpleasant experiences. Their mother had no formulated political views. She was semi-literate, having spent only a couple of years at a Methodist mission school, and her strict religious observance, which emphasised obedience, led to a submissive conservatism in all things. Agnes bowed to authority and the accepted way of the world as being the will of God. If asked, she simply said, ‘It is our fate.’
They were all, however, afraid of Hillerman. He was a local plantation owner of German extraction, an irascible, rough man, whom all the black children regarded as a cruel and unpredictable tyrant. Hillerman was fair and Aryan-looking, with a red face. He always wore shorts and braces over his khaki shirts. He was said to whip African children, though he didn’t dare with the Websters as they’d had a ‘white’ father, though he’d cuff them over the ears. It was Hillerman who gave Gordon his first, savage taste of white intolerance.
Hillerman owned many cattle and he was in charge of the local government cattle dip. Margaret Webster says, ‘One day, as usual, Gordon and his friends took our cattle to the dipping tank, and when Hillerman counted the cows and found there were only fourteen instead of fifteen he became very angry, even though they were not his cattle. Gordon explained that one of the calves had been struck by lightning the night before.
‘Well, Hillerman didn’t believe him, and said he was a liar. He whipped Gordon across the chest with a sjambok. Hillerman was cruel and particularly nasty to Africans. He whipped him hard, and told Gordon that he wouldn’t believe him till he brought the dead animal to him as proof.
‘Gordon was crying and terrified, but he and his friends dragged the dead calf all the way there to show Hillerman. Gordon came home frightened and still weeping to tell me what had happened. I think it is perhaps the incident in his life that he feels most bitter about.’
By the early 1970s the effects of the Group Areas Act had reached New Hanover. It was declared a white area. Black families not required to work on white farms were evicted, as were the majority of Indians; the New Hanover Indian primary school was closed down. Children Gordon knew were summarily uprooted and removed elsewhere.
The Websters were also issued with expropriation orders, but due to the fact they owned their own small parcel of land, they successfully resisted this attempt to dislodge them. Nevertheless the blueprint of discrimination from Pretoria, which had previously seemed so remote, now hung over them as a perpetual threat.
As the world closed in on his secluded childhood, Gordon soon discovered that lurking beyond the protecting Blinkwater range were further, more insidious, indignities.
4
The more Robert McBride ventured into the wider world beyond Wentworth the more he came up against white intolerance. At Ansteys beach with his nephews he was chased off by an angry crowd of whites; going shopping with his mother to a supermarket in a white area on a Saturday he got into a fight with local white youths who jeered, ‘Get out – this isn’t your area!’ Even so, he was fascinated by his white ancestry and wanted to know everything about his European background. Robert began to pester his parents, particularly Doris, with questions about the white strands in their families.
Doris answered him with amused tolerance … her father was an Afrikaner called Van Niekerk who drove buses in the rural area of southern Natal, and he fell in love with one of his passengers, a Coloured nurse named Grace. They had to elope to Pietermaritzburg in order to marry, as Van Niekerk had been engaged to marry the daughter of the local magistrate. This was 1928, 21 years prior to the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act.
After having five children, the Van Niekerks came to Durban in search of better work, and Doris’s father got a job with the Corporation. Doris met Derrick when they were both teaching at Clarewood, a primary school for Coloureds. At first, she says, old man Van Niekerk didn’t like Derrick at all. ‘My father was a peculiar bird. He had his funny habits, and he was very old-fashioned, from the country, and he thought Derrick was this terrible city slicker from Johannesburg and he thought that Johannesburg was … you know … Sodom and Gomorrah.
‘Derrick was loud and quite argumentative and drank a lot. People in the country areas are inclined to keep quiet and accept things and Derrick was the absolute opposite of that! He was always rowdy and if he’d been playing rugby he’d come back with a swollen eye or something and my father would say, “This animal has been fighting.” He also didn’t trust him because he drank. Derrick drank a lot in those days.
‘My father watched me closely. It wasn’t because Derrick was dark. My mother’s mother was black and he adored her. A black person was fine with him. He didn’t really like Derrick because he had different ways and ideas. Derrick was hot-headed, always ready for a fight – the devil from Joburg!
‘We had a secret wedding. My mother knew but kept quiet. Actually, after the wedding we had the cheek to go back to my parents’ house. My cousins had been making little snacks while my father was asleep and I said to my mother, “You must tell father we are married.” But he just walked away. He sat on the back porch and got drunk with some other old men.
‘For some time my parents had been living in a white area, number 55 Berriedale Road, near Ridge Road. Nobody said anything to us, in fact the neighbours on both sides were quite friendly with my mother. They would see her going off in her nurse’s uniform and they would be pleasant and talk. It was a nice house, spacious and pretty, especially compared to what we had been living in before. It was white outside, my father painted all the doors black, and there was a lovely big brass letter-box on the front door. There was a comfortable, enclosed veranda and about half an acre of garden, with big shady trees, avocado and peach.
‘It was in 1963-64 when they really started dividing and moving people. They put them in trucks and moved them out. They were saying, “This is an Indian area or a white area and you cannot stay here anymore.” They appropriated the houses, just took everybody out and people simply lost their homes. That’s when Derrick and I were moved to Wentworth.
‘My parents continued to live in Berriedale Road till 1964, when my father died – as my father had been white, they’d been all right, but after that they just wanted my mother out of there. She went back to Harding.’
When Robert tried asking his father about his white antecedents, however, he met with an intemperate response. Derrick’s great-grandfather had been white, either Irish or Scottish. But he detested his white blood. He loathed the whites for what they had done in South Africa. He particularly hated the psychological distortions racial discrimination had visited upon its victims: indoctrinating some (who didn’t quite make the grade as white) to hate themselves and pathetically aspire to be accepted as white. Derrick himself was a victim of this perverse psychology.
Derrick McBride had hated his own mother. He was too black for her, and she never forgave him for it. He told Robert, ‘Anyone who practises discrimination in their own family is deserving of contempt. My mother discriminated against me. God, how I despised her! When I was born, someone told her she had a son, and someone else said, “But, Alice, he’s black.” She never let me forget that.’
Derrick McBride’s father was dark, but Alice’s mother had been white and Alice was inordinately proud of her own fair complexion and straight brown hair. Her first two children inherited this colouring, but Derrick was born with a dark complexion – a constant reproof to her white aspirations. She punished him by withholding her affections and making him work harder than the other children.
They lived in Johannesburg, and Alice used to send the young Derrick into the neighbouring white suburb to hawk her home-baked cakes from door to door. He was often set upon by bigger white boys and robbed of his wares, and when he returned home empty-handed, Alice would beat him. He had three brothers and a sister, but Derrick was the only one Alice selected for these unpleasant errands.
Although she was discriminated against herself for not being white, it was