Spuddy had accrued all the trappings of a white man. He lived in a white area of Johannesburg. He had worked himself into a better job as a French polisher and spray painter. He was a respected member of the community. Spuddy had always been a devout churchgoer and now he was a lay minister in the New Apostolic Church. He was married with three children and the children went to private white schools. His son was even conscripted into the South African Defence Force.
Robert was fascinated: ‘Once my uncle Leslie saw Spuddy’s daughters in the street with their white friends, in their school dresses and straw boaters. They walked away, pretending not to know him. They didn’t want to be seen with a Coloured relative.
‘At first, listening to my father, I felt quite condescending towards my cousins. But later I was jealous of them, because they were going to a white school and all our relations talked a lot about them.’
It was an enticement: ‘I felt they were different. You know, in another world.’
No one could tell Robert where the McBrides had actually acquired their surname. There were two family legends locating the origin with Derrick’s unknown great-grandfather, but details of this European inheritance remained an exotic rumour. Doris had once heard talk of two drunken Scots brothers jumping ship in Durban at the turn of the century, but that was as much as she knew, and the story fizzled out.
The other version traced the lineage, via a misspelling, to an Irishman named John MacBride who had fought in the Boer War on the side of the Boers. MacBride, from Westport in County Mayo, was a Fennian, a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, dedicated to the expulsion of the English from Ireland. Forced to leave Ireland for political reasons, he arrived in 1896 in Johannesburg, where he worked on the mines.
In the summer of 1899, as the British were trying to provoke a war against the Boers, MacBride issued an appeal ‘to Irishmen to remember England’s manifold infamies against their own country, and on this account to volunteer the more readily to fight against a common enemy for the defence of Boer freedom.’
MacBride helped form and lead the Irish Brigade and was given the rank of major. They fought at Colenso, Spion Kop and Ladysmith, and Major MacBride was wounded at the Battle of Tugela Heights. After the British occupied Johannesburg the Irish Brigade fought a ferocious rearguard action to keep the road to Pretoria open. Finally, as the Boers resorted to a desperate guerrilla war, suitable only for those who knew the veld, the Irish Brigade disbanded and MacBride left South Africa via Delagoa Bay in 1900. But according to McBride family lore, during his stay the major had a liaison with a Malay woman, who bore him an illegitimate child, thus abandoning in South Africa both progeny and a bastardised version of his name.
MacBride was a small, wiry, unattractive man with red hair and skin burnt brick-red by the South African sun. He continued to style himself ‘Major’ for the rest of his life. Unable to return to Ireland, he settled in Paris, where he married the Irish actress and revolutionary Maud Gonne. The poet WB Yeats had unsuccessfully proposed to Maud Gonne and Yeats wrote that from the moment he met this beautiful woman, ‘the troubling of my life began’.
The troubling of Maude and Major John’s lives began shortly after they married in 1903. He drank, beat her, and following the birth of a son, Sean, they parted. He was later allowed to return to Ireland, where he became a water bailiff for the Dublin municipality.
The end came when MacBride took part in the uprising of Easter 1916. For five days a small band of Republicans held key points in Dublin and the ‘Major’, returning from a wedding, joined up with a group that took over Jacobs Biscuit factory. After the surrender, MacBride was among those executed, refusing the customary blindfold.
In his elegy, Easter 1916, Yeats refers to MacBride as, A drunken, vain glorious lout, He had done most bitter wrong / To some who are near my heart, but concludes,
Yet I number him in the song …
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Whiteness, in the theology of apartheid, was the Holy Grail: venerated, sought after, source of myths and tribal longings for purity and salvation. To some, whose genealogy gave them a tenuous link to this elusive Grail, it became a state of mind. Robert was proud of his European ancestry, and says, ‘I spoke about it openly and proudly whenever I got the chance.’ The symbol of all those aspirations, the ‘Open Sesame’ to a decent life, was just visible on clear days from Wentworth. To the north on a distant hill like a shadowy obelisk, he could just make out the tall central tower of the university.
Robert did so well in his final school exams that he was accepted into the University of Natal, Durban campus, in the faculty of Engineering. This was the different world – a largely white world.
The campus stood high on a ridge above Durban: spacious, tranquil, landscaped, privileged. Approached by steep, tree-lined avenues with names like King George V, Bowes-Lyon, Princess Anne and Queen Elizabeth, it had an expansive colonial graciousness. At the top, looking down at the remote docks, a statue of King George in his Garter robes was surrounded by flowering shrubs, palms, cacti and green shaded trees with tropical birds. Behind the university were lush rolling foothills, the beginning of the Valley of a Thousand Hills which stretched away to the Drakensberg mountains.
White youths wandered between classrooms in multi-coloured shorts and T-shirts as if they had just come in from surfing. There were some Indian and African students, but Robert preferred to keep the company of white students. ‘I was leading a false life,’ he said later, ‘forcing my company on white people.’
There was no transport from Wentworth so Robert had to walk, getting up at four in the morning if he had an eight a.m. lecture. Doris would see him sometimes standing at the bottom of the hill at the shabby intersection of Quality Street, hoping for a lift. ‘It was so discouraging because there was nothing you could do to help. He’d have a big bag with all his books, and if it was raining he’d get soaking wet.’
Although he was trying to ingratiate himself with the white students, Robert was aware of odd looks and comments behind his back and overheard remarks such as, ‘He looks like he’s just come out of the trees.’ He compensated by trying to act and dress more white than the white students. He had his curly hair cropped very short. No white student ever said anything to his face. Instead, those who resented the presence of ‘non-whites’ on their campus expressed their unambiguous feelings in graffiti on the toilet walls: BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL BUT IT LOOKS LIKE SHIT ON A KAFFIR.
Doris remembers Robert describing this disparaging closet dialectic. ‘One would start on top of the wall as high as he could and say something about black people, then there would be a reply from a black student under that about white people.’ Robert said he could stand reading for hours in the toilet. ‘I thought it was funny, because when I was a teacher you would catch little guys scribbling – they’d take a chance and write dirty things on the wall and run away. But university students?’
Robert, like his father, had actually wanted to study medicine, but Derrick had insisted that he enrol in engineering. It was not a subject Robert enjoyed. After five months, the exhaustion brought on by walking to the campus and back, as well as having to work in his father’s workshop when he returned home, meant that Robert dropped out.
By now Robert had a girlfriend, Claudette, who was very fair, with a pretty, freckled face and red hair. She worked in town as a secretary for an insurance company, and although she was classified as Coloured and lived in Wentworth, white people in Durban simply assumed she was white. Her little brother called her ‘White Spook’. Claudette was a simple, uncomplicated girl, with no interest in politics, and the family nicknamed her ‘The Cat’. Doris thought she was a sweet girl but a bit silly; and quite clearly she was besotted with Robert.
He says, ‘Claudette was an extrovert. We never had a serious conversation. She was happy. She wasn’t ambitious. She wanted to be a housewife and have lots of children. She liked dressing up and looking smart. She liked going to the movies, the drive-in. She loved dancing – I don’t, and sometimes