His teachers remember him as a conscientious and able pupil, but shy, lonely and withdrawn. He was darker than most pupils and his features were distinctly African, for which he was teased. Some pupils also mocked him for the faint trace of an Indian accent he had acquired at his primary school.
Gordon hid from the school that his mother was an African and he did not let on to his classmates that his mother tongue was Zulu. One day when Agnes came to the school, the principal said in front of Gordon, ‘What does this girl want?’
There was something feline, almost demure, about Gordon. With his fresh, round babyish face and slim body, he was sensitive and inordinately timid. In addition, he had begun to wear thick-rimmed glasses for his near-sightedness.
There was one boy who was particularly picked on. He, too, was from a rural area and looked and sounded African. Gordon got dragged into several fights for objecting to other pupils calling his friend ‘kaffir’.
In Pietermaritzburg, Gordon was at last able to make some comparisons concerning the conditions of his own life: it was immediately apparent that the white schools were incomparably better off. They had swimming pools, tennis courts, sporting facilities, good buildings and smaller classes. At Haythorne there was no school hall, no library, one soccer pitch and up to 45 pupils in a class.
Gordon played soccer, and took up boxing and weight-lifting. But gradually he retreated into contemplation and passivity. The shy reserve which had been apparent at home became an unsettling solitude at school. He confided his thoughts only to his diary, a black hardbacked school notebook, which he completed diligently every day, attempting to make sense of his adolescent confusion.
A recurring theme of this diary was his mother’s severity. She still continued to beat him, even for trifling misdemeanours. Agnes’s one aim was to ensure that her son should follow her other children and rise well above the subsistence level of a rural peasant. Gordon’s nephew Godfred remembers how Agnes began to have to chase after Gordon to beat him.
But there were also happy times at home. His friendship with Bheki Ngubane was as strong as ever. Bheki and his brother Ndaba continued going to the African farm school. Bheki and Gordon shared a passion for soccer and they supported Kaizer Chiefs, a black Soweto team. At night they would play reggae records on the ‘gumba-gumba’, an old-fashioned gramophone. Gordon spent much of his holidays reading, particularly Westerns.
One vacation, the boys had a secret drinking party, and Gordon got drunk for the first time. ‘He was so unruly,’ says Godfred. ‘He became noisy and happy. He announced he was going to be a doctor.’
Gordon had always told his mother that when he grew up he wanted to be a doctor; she had never had the heart to tell him what an improbable ambition that was. Agnes was concerned that he should escape from their rural poverty, but that he should also understand his station and ‘learn the ways of the Lord’. But if Gordon ever introduced the subject of politics at home Agnes would dismiss it by saying, ‘White is white and black is black. It is our fate. It is retribution and there is nothing we can do about it.’
Gordon was eventually appointed a prefect. This was not because he showed any distinctive leadership abilities. The school authorities, on the contrary, seem to have perceived him as compliant and submissive, and therefore a malleable agent. Certainly he did not appear to threaten authority in any way.
In 1980 came the school boycotts. Although a prefect, Gordon did not organise or lead these protests at Haythorne. He merely followed, swept along with the strike action against their inadequate facilities and emasculated education. His mother was appalled. Agnes came to the school and insisted Gordon return to his classes.
She pleaded with the principal to let her son back in. Agnes and the school principal came to an agreement: Gordon would be permitted to rejoin on condition that the principal should administer a sound thrashing. Gordon was dismayed that his mother should have been party to such a deal, yet he was not sufficiently sure of himself to either repudiate her authority or stick with his political protest. He bowed to the humiliation.
Behind that veneer of obedience, however, Gordon was beginning to resolve his personal confusion. He had a clear idea of his own sense of justice. He now felt his school reflected the misrepresentations of apartheid. He did not make an outright challenge, but as a prefect he avoided administering punishments for traditional misdemeanours. Unobtrusively Gordon attempted to ameliorate the effects of discrimination, both by teachers against their own pupils and among the pupils themselves. He understood how insidiously prejudice can undermine those it is practised against. Gordon wished to find a way in life that would help counter such distorted experience. By the time he was due to leave Pietermaritzburg, he had decided to become a teacher.
Robert McBride was working as a welder. He joined a Durban firm and after a year’s apprenticeship as an instrument fitter, he went to work for Sasol, the state oil-from-coal corporation.
Here he experienced the full effects of job discrimination, with incompetent white immigrants often lording it over more experienced African workers. Robert’s outlook was now transformed: rejected by the white world, he had retreated badly hurt. He put away his ‘white’ suit, and cut off his white friends. ‘After the incident at rugby,’ he said, ‘I suppose I changed to the other side.’ The white way of life, which he had previously so desired to embrace, was now reviled. He dressed in what he considered to be a more African fashion, with bright, bold colours and chequered tops. He allowed his hair to grow long again and combed it out into an Afro. He spent as much time as he could in the sun. He wanted to be darker. ‘I became,’ he says, ‘more African than the Africans – a radical black.’
Robert started making enquiries about his black ancestry. Derrick was delighted that his son had renounced the white world as it had been a source of considerable antagonism between them. ‘Derrick just didn’t like Robert trying to be on the white side,’ says Doris. ‘He didn’t care who they were or what they were doing, he just didn’t like Robert mixing with them.
‘Of course it was a feather in Derrick’s cap, this change. He said, “I told you so, I told you about associating with them.”’
Robert and Derrick were now completely reconciled; in May 1982 Robert agreed to work full-time with his father and returned to live with his parents at Hardy Place. While working, particularly when away from Durban at the Secunda Sasol plant, Robert had given most of his earnings to his mother. That same year Doris finally resigned her job as a remedial teacher and opened up a take-away. The family were still desperately trying to improve their financial position.
The Day ‘n’ Nite Take-Away was right opposite Derrick’s workshop, eighteen metres across a concrete forecourt, in a small enclosed area of a dozen or so other workshops. This unit was called Factorama, situated on the edge of the Jacobs Industrial estate, near the Police Training College for Indians and opposite the Wentworth youth community centre, whose premises had previously been prison cells for the old military camp. Like all the workshops in Factorama, the take-away was a red-brick block with corrugated-iron roofing.
The shop was open from six a.m. till eleven p.m., and the licence required them to stay open even later if any of the workshops at Factorama were working late. All the family were involved, including cousins. Doris did the cooking and operated the till, while Bronwyn and Gwyneth helped serve the customers. They provided cooldrinks, fish and chips, pies and bunny chows – a Wentworth speciality consisting of half a loaf of white bread stuffed with curry.
It was exhausting, but the family enjoyed being in such close proximity; Derrick and Robert were able to pop over for their meals, or to give a hand if necessary. From across the courtyard they kept a wary eye on the shop in case of trouble. ‘There were a lot of incidents at the shop, people who were drunk or trying to steal,’ says Robert. ‘My father and I were often there, and at night we used to serve through the hatch because it was so dangerous.
‘There’d be things like this drunk pissing in the front of the shop. My father