‘Another time a guy sent my father to make a bunny chow and when Derrick went out the back, he came through the window to get at the till. It set off the alarm. I was outside and I blocked his way out of the window. He took out a knife – my father grabbed his hand and burned it on the oven. The guy dropped his knife and Derrick knocked him unconscious.
‘One afternoon three men came to the shop, causing trouble, and two of them attacked my father. My mother started shouting, so I ran up. One guy kicked me – I’d been eating bread and began to choke. Another ran for the car to get a gun and my father hit him with a bin. There was a five-minute fight and then we overpowered them. We called the cops, and that’s when we found out these guys were themselves cops.
‘The police charged us, but the magistrate threw it out. One of them came back later, with another cop, and pulled out a gun. He threatened us but then backed down. The cops always gave us a lot of trouble. The fact is they didn’t like my father.’
Father and son had re-established that striking rapport people had noticed between them when Robert was a boy. Robert recognised this affinity: ‘The way we think about things is very similar. Politics was our hobby together. Both of us knew, without debating, that we stood in the same position.
‘Something I particularly admired was that he never backed down from what he believed, even when the odds were totally against him. I mean, in business you should not be politically inclined because you can’t be too fussy about getting contracts, there’s all sorts of graft involved – and Derrick would never get caught up in that. He’s very proud and I’ve inherited a lot of that. Our experiences, in many ways, are very similar.’
One predicament both endured was the hostility of whites when they saw them with what they assumed to be white women. According to Doris, ‘It happened quite a lot to Derrick and me. They’d say “Sies” as they passed, or crude things in Afrikaans. You know, “She prefers a black man …” “… or a whatnot.” That’s what they call Coloured people, whatnots and Hottentots. If they didn’t say anything to you they’d look, stare in such a way that would make you feel like a heap of dirt. Once the police came to my home. My father opened the door and they told him, “Do you know your daughter is going out with a black man?” My father said, “What black man?” The policeman said, “Kaffirs and Hottentots.” I was married at that time. My father said, “She’s a Hottentot herself, so what must she do?” The policeman felt so small, he just turned red.’
Robert began to see the absurd, pitiable side of all his attempts to align himself with whites. One evening he went into Durban to collect Claudette after work. He was sitting on a marble flower pot on the pavement, right next to a lorry with a squad of black labourers on the back. When Claudette crossed the street to join him, he became aware of the black labourers’ approving attention. ‘They were talking loudly, commending me. They were happy I had a “white” woman.’
He found it impossible to accept himself as a Coloured; he thought the term itself to be derogatory, a dirty word. At this point his friend André Koopman introduced him to the philosophy of Black Consciousness. André was older than Robert, and had been detained by the police for six months in 1977, at a time when all black opposition movement and organisations were being banned or forced underground. He also exposed Robert to a whole range of radical black writers and black musicians.
Robert seized upon this black literature and music: ‘Mentally, I suppose, I commenced resisting. I began taking an interest in the struggle, and I paid a lot of attention to what had happened in Zimbabwe. I felt very anti-white. I was angry. I’d say things like, if a black child gets killed, a white child should be killed. I was very bitter.’
Robert’s greatest passion, however, was reggae music, particularly that of Bob Marley. It gave voice to his sense of a universal racial iniquity, as well as his search for personal identity. He particularly liked ‘Zimbabwe’:
So arm in arms, with arms
We will fight this little struggle ‘Cos that’s the only way
We can overcome our little trouble.
It was purely rhetorical for Robert, for his involvement in politics was still no more than discussion and denunciation. He listened obsessively to the music, as if the words and the sound alone would bring the walls of Jericho tumbling down. It did not propel Robert to take any action, but it drew him out of his insecure sense of isolation. ‘It’s you, it’s you, it’s you I’m talking to …’ It gave him a renewed confidence in himself and the possibility of change. ‘Slave driver, the table is turned/Catch your fire … you gonna get burned.’ There was an optimism in reggae, a driving, infectious faith that there was indeed a Kingdom of Justice, and it was at hand:
Now the fire is burning …
Ride, natty, ride
Go deh dready, go deh
Robert responded to this yearning expressed by Bob Marley, an apocalyptic desire for an end to exploitation, the millennial dream that the meek may inherit the earth:
Let righteousness cover the earth
Like water cover the sea …
Marley was a devout Rastafarian, venerating Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, as the Messiah, the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, the Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah. He believed that his people had been taken into captivity, like the Jews to Babylon, and that Ethiopia was the Promised Land:
We’re leaving Babylon
Into our Father’s land …
Robert was not influenced by the Rastafarian belief that there was a Promised Land somewhere else on earth – just as some black Christian sects promised their followers a kingdom in the hereafter for their suffering here below. But for Robert, Babylon came to be the symbol for all evil, a powerful image of everything that weighed people down and oppressed them, as in his favourite Bob Marley record ‘Babylon System’:
Babylon System is the vampire
Sucking the blood of the sufferers …
For all his talk about how he wanted to ‘destroy the sickness’ in his society, Robert had done nothing at all. He extended his excitable interest in politics, which he discussed avidly with his father, but he had still taken no active steps to oppose apartheid, other than to continue to dress ‘black’ and listen to reggae.
However, he was bored as a welder. He was restless, inquisitive, frustrated, hemmed in by all the restrictions that cramped his life. In 1983 Robert finally elected to follow in his parents’ footsteps. He decided, like Gordon Webster, to become a teacher: he would go to a Coloured training college where he would be taught by Coloured staff to become a Coloured teacher for Coloured pupils. It seemed, after all, that Robert was not going to demolish Babylon. He was going to try and make the best of a bad world.
PART TWO
Spear of the Nation
6
Robert McBride and Gordon Webster met on their first day at the Bechet College of Education. Robert soon established that Gordon was the younger brother of Trevor Webster, who also lived in Wentworth. Robert went straight up to Gordon and said, ‘Your brother saved my life.’
Robert explained that three years previously, during his last year at school, he had been playing soccer in the school grounds when some local gangsters bust up the game and took the ball. Robert had challenged the leader who pulled a knife on him. Unknown to Robert, Trevor Webster had been watching. He came up quietly behind the gangster, clouted him over the head and disarmed him.
Robert and Gordon were both