It was when they went in to Durban that there was trouble: ‘It was hurtful. I used to be stunned. It was like a blow to you. I just felt as if I’d been hit with something hard.
‘Old ladies in an arcade would stare at us, for example. One would draw the other’s attention. You could see her expression change – shock, as if something nasty had dropped out of the sky. Then they’d stare after us till we disappeared.
‘Claudette ignored it. She didn’t seem to worry. I never said anything but it worried me a lot. It irritated me, made me angry.
‘Maybe I developed a complex. I became self-conscious. Walking in town with her became an ordeal. I realise maybe I was going out with Claudette because she looks white, and now this was drawing attention to, you know … because next to her I wasn’t white, and seeing us together in Durban, the whites didn’t like it.
‘Men would deliberately go out of their way to bump into me. I never retaliated. Only afterwards I’d think – I should have hit that guy. At first, though, I’d be shocked and hurt, then angry.
‘Claudette noticed, but she knew it was best to be quiet. She was a peacemaker. After five minutes it would blow over, but I’d feel disappointed that I hadn’t retaliated. They were only jostling and bumping me because of my colour. Sometimes there’d be sniggers. I used to worry – am I doing the right thing in walking away?’
Despite these indignities, Robert pressed ahead with his quest for acceptance in the white world. The next step was to join a sports club. One of the top white rugby clubs in Natal was Northlands, later renamed Durban Crusaders, and they had opened their doors to a couple of non-white players without asking too many questions. Robert signed up.
The club was situated along the coast three or so kilometres to the north of the city, past the Durban Country Club, the Windsor Park golf course and over the Blue Lagoon, in the comfortable white suburb of Broadway. An imposing, white-pillared entrance led down the curving, palm-lined driveway to a spacious modern club-house.
It was effortlessly poised and unruffled: the gentle whirr of a lawnmower, the trilling of birds and from behind a tall hedge entwined with pink hibiscus, a faint clack of bowls. Elderly white folk, with leathery faces and impeccably dressed in white, crouched intently at their leisurely game, with muted cries of, ‘Well done, sir,’ and, ‘Nice one, Reg!’ In front of the club-house, surveyed from its wide terrace, were two immaculately maintained rugby pitches with floodlights.
The idyll did not last long. For a while Robert managed to keep the fact he had joined a white rugby club from his father, but when Derrick found out, he was angry and contemptuous. He wanted him to resign, and when Robert tried to convince his father that he merely wished to see the way whites lived and understand the way they thought, Derrick warned his son that he would regret it, and kept repeating his mocking nostrum: ‘Never trust a white man.’
Doris felt differently about these escapist ambitions, says Robert: ‘Mother was happy I was playing for white. My father was not. My mother is also a little mixed up about what she is because she has got a white skin and a black brain.’
Because of his chunky build and strength, Robert played in the lock forward position, and at first he was selected for the B squad. He suspected he was good enough for the first team and he wondered if he was being kept down on account of being different. After training or a match, instead of socialising with the other white players, Robert would pack up his kit and head straight back for Wentworth, where his father would be expecting him to give a hand in the workshop. Derrick’s disgust for his son’s social goal was quite open. ‘It’ll come to no good,’ he warned. ‘Those whites will turn on you.’
There were occasional snide remarks from opposition teams. During one match against the police, an opposition player – a lieutenant – got into an argument with Robert and ended it loudly, for all to hear, by dismissing him as a Hottentot.
Then Robert became aware of some of his own team-mates casting sly aspersions behind his back. He ignored them. But the strain between the two worlds – the gaunt reality of Wentworth and the white figment of his hopes – could not be reconciled.
While he had been unable to cope with the university, and the anxiety generated by accompanying Claudette into white areas was intense, it was the hypocrisy encountered at the rugby club which ultimately forced the break. This compelled Robert to acknowledge that he was striving for an illusion.
He might be a member, but that didn’t mean acceptance. Robert had hoped to find a certain image of himself in the response of these white sportsmen – and all he saw in the mirror of their attitudes was that he was not white.
So he became the opposite.
There was a decisive moment for this conversion. It came when he was finally picked for the A team. In the changing room Robert overheard another player commiserating with the dejected lock forward who had been dropped to make way for him. ‘Garry, don’t worry about it,’ said one white sportsman to the other, ‘Robert is just a bushie.’
5
Pietermaritzburg lies in a wooded hollow of the green hills of the Natal Midlands. It is a compact, sedate, rather Victorian town, which prides itself on its azaleas and its Englishness. In the suburbs are expansive avenues, and orderly sports fields where white schoolboys in immaculate white flannels play cricket, watched by others in purple blazers and straw boaters. In the city centre, lawyers maintain cramped offices in the warren of narrow alleyways round Chancery Lane and Gray’s Inn, alongside the boutiques selling chintzy floral dresses and colourful African trinkets.
Pietermaritzburg was founded by the Voortrekkers, dreaming of an independent Boer state. They declared the short-lived Republic of Natalia (which resolved to ‘drive all blacks not working for the whites beyond the Umtamvuna River’). In 1842 it was occupied by the British and became a garrison town. Today it remains the provincial capital and is still dominated by the tall red-brick tower of the ornate Victorian City Hall. There is a cult of preservation and restoration which occasionally strays into caricature, like the Victoria Club, a glum imitation of a London gentleman’s club, crankily flying the Union Jack. On the whole Pietermaritzburg slyly plays up to this old world affectation and settler nostalgia. It is trim, quiet and composed: a contented echo of British colonial sensibility.
Gordon Webster became aware of the true consequences of his colour when, at fourteen, he left the protective wilderness of New Hanover and was sent as a boarder to the Haythorne High School for Coloureds in Pietermaritzburg. It was a severe shock. As his elder brother George had found: ‘You left home and you realised there was apartheid. You were suddenly “Coloured”. At the small Indian school you were just one of the pupils, but now you were something to be kept separate, like a special, second-class caste.
‘On the bus to Pietermaritzburg, the front was reserved for whites only. We hadn’t been prepared for this total segregation of facilities. We hadn’t really been exposed to whites. Then suddenly we were exposed to apartheid, and you realised you didn’t belong here. There were so many divisions, a hierarchy of prejudice, from different shop entrances for Europeans and non-Europeans, to things like Coloureds being able to drink in their own pubs or buy alcohol, whereas Africans couldn’t even buy a drink unless they got an exemption from a magistrate … .
‘Coloureds also had their own segregations, and you soon learned that at school. A lot of Coloureds, because of their sense of inferiority, take pride in their white ancestry. They are very aware of the colour of skin and the texture of hair. Even some of the teachers discriminated, being softer on lighter-skinned