Alice made Derrick do much of the housework, including scrubbing the floors, and in a desperate attempt to earn his mother’s affection the little boy worked frantically hard. One day Derrick overheard a relative remark, in Afrikaans, ‘Hy werk homself wit,’ (He’s working himself white). Derrick says, ‘I grew up with a deep hatred of whites. I made up my mind to get even, no matter how long it took.’
Religion, he felt, had also been appropriated by the whites. He believed the church encouraged whites to feel superior and taught blacks subservience. As a child, Derrick had been a devout altar boy, but had resented the fact that Coloureds had to sit in a separate section from whites, while blacks were barred altogether. When being prepared for his confirmation he was asked if there was anything he disliked about the church, and Derrick replied, ‘The colour bar.’ Only when he recanted this heresy was he confirmed, but thereafter he lost his confidence in the church.
In the years immediately after the Second World War, when he was at school in Kimberley, Derrick associated with a group of young communists, but he wasn’t really anti-capitalist – he was anti-white. In 1948, following the coming into power of the Afrikaner Nationalist government, he and some teenage friends made home-made bombs which they placed on minedumps around Johannesburg.
With a group of other young Coloured intellectuals, Derrick formed an association called the Inner Circle. They debated the options of joining other organisations dedicated to the overthrow of apartheid. The regulations implementing racial segregation had been stepped up considerably since the National Party had come to power, and every single aspect of their lives was fenced in by rigid race laws. In 1955 Derrick attended the historic meeting of the Congress of the People in Kliptown that drew up the Freedom Charter. But by then Derrick and the rest of the Inner Circle had come to the conclusion that talking and passive resistance campaigns had got the opponents of apartheid absolutely nowhere. They believed only armed insurrection would bring about change.
Totally isolated and unwilling to join other more widely based movements, the Inner Circle collapsed as its disillusioned members retreated into passivity. They withdrew from politics and devoted themselves to individual pursuits. One became a doctor, another went into exile in Zambia, becoming a wealthy businessman. Derrick became an alcoholic.
He had been drinking heavily for several years. Doris says it was his mother who really drove him to it. ‘He applied to the medical school at Wits University in Johannesburg to study as a doctor. In those years it was almost unheard of for a Coloured to go there, and Derrick was one of the two Coloured students accepted. He had a really good pass and was so happy. His father was also thrilled, but Derrick had to pay for the entrance fee … his father, Bobo, had actually put some money aside for Derrick to go to university.
‘Derrick completed all the forms and asked his father for the money. Alice asked, “What does he need the money for?” His father replied, “To go to university.”
‘Well, Alice said, “What does he want to be a doctor for? I need the money for Spuddy’s wedding!” At the same time, in December, his eldest brother was getting married, you see. His nickname was Spuddy, like in potatoes. It was a toss-up between Spuddy’s wedding and Derrick’s education. Spuddy won – Spuddy being the favourite with fair hair, green eyes, all those sorts of things.
‘That incident did a lot to influence Derrick’s way of thinking in later life. Oh, Derrick talked about that a lot. He left home because of it and was very angry. He cut himself off from all his family and never wanted to go back again. I think that was the point that made him drink, you know.
‘He was frustrated and disillusioned, but above all he wanted his mother’s affection. Yet there was nothing he could do to change the colour he was.’
Not being white, Derrick could see no point in getting a regular job; he would only have to travel long distances every day for very low pay. Instead, he became a street-corner hawker. He sold anything, particularly spare auto parts, but gradually he found it more profitable to deal in stolen property, and this degenerated into running a gambling school and then a shebeen, one of the thousands of illicit drinking dens that flourished in the vigorous underworld of Johannesburg’s dispossessed and rootless black population.
Eventually he enrolled in a teacher’s training course, but the facilities for Coloureds were so inferior that Derrick made himself highly unpopular with the authorities for constantly denouncing the system as unjust, comparing it with the excellent facilities provided for white student teachers. Having completed the course, Derrick gave up teaching almost immediately.
He took a job as a clerk in the Labour department. By now he was drinking brandy heavily: ‘I felt I had nothing to live for – life seemed worthless. I felt excluded, so I drank.’
After finishing work one afternoon, Derrick went for a few drinks with a colleague, Desmond Stoltenkamp, who was also a qualified teacher and, like Derrick, a prodigious drinker. Desmond told Derrick he’d heard there were so many vacancies for teachers in Durban that agents would actually be waiting on the railway platform to offer qualified people jobs on the spot. They decided to leave for Natal that evening. They did not even go home for a change of clothes but simply headed straight to the station and caught the first train to Durban.
There were no eager recruiting agents to greet them on the platform; in fact there were no teaching jobs at all. Desmond, having sobered up, renounced drinking the very next day and thereafter never touched a drop. He remained in Durban, though. Derrick continued drinking, and the pair of them sustained a succession of jobs: on a motor assembly line, as carpenters and chimney sweeps, before they finally found teaching posts. And Derrick met Doris van Niekerk.
Meanwhile Spuddy had prospered. He had performed the South African miracle, the apartheid equivalent of passing through the eye of a needle. He now passed for white.
All over South Africa there were people who lived in a twilight zone of racial identity, always terrified the police would catch them out. In slum areas of Cape Town, not yet embraced by the Group Areas Act, there were wives and daughters who went in through the front door because they looked white, and husbands and sons who entered furtively by the back because they didn’t. There were Coloured prostitutes who had freckle-faced blond children; they would hire white prostitutes to play ‘mother’ for the white school sports day.
For others, who had always assumed they were white, reclassification could come like a celestial revelation. Men came home after work to find officials waiting on their doorstep with papers that proved they were not white after all. People were summoned daily to be questioned and scrutinised. In Cape Town those under suspicion reported to Room 33, where sittings were held in camera.
Among those deliberately ‘trying for white’, the lucky ones managed to procure documentation to back up their assumed white status. Spuddy not only passed for white, he now had papers to prove it.
Spuddy had acquired his nickname when his mother worked in a fish and chip shop and he had gorged himself on potatoes. He was tall and sallow and people assumed he was white. As a teenager he’d got a job as a scaffolder because the foreman thought he was white. It was not a job open to Coloureds, and after Spuddy had completed some official forms the foreman called him into his office and closed the door. The foreman tore up the forms, handed him a new set and told him to fill them in again. In the section marked ‘race’ Spuddy had put Coloured. The foreman told him to put down that he was white and never, ever mention that he was Coloured again. Spuddy did as he was told. He got his first set of papers. He was officially white.
Derrick made his contempt for Spuddy extravagantly plain. He maintained his brother had reneged on his background and associates in return for privileges from people who were persecuting his own family. Derrick used to say to Robert, ‘My brother is an idiot, but he’s got the vote and I haven’t!’
Derrick vented all his pent-up resentment in denunciations of Spuddy. ‘He’s selfish and stupid. We’ve never been to visit him in his white area. He told another brother