Derrick and Doris were fearful about the prospects of bringing up their children in the harsh, unnatural conditions of Wentworth. Unemployment was high, with many families living below subsistence level. Over a third of all children were illegitimate and alcoholism was chronic. The despair among the young was endemic and most young men saw no point in finishing their schooling, attaching themselves instead to the wild youth gangs which could murder a rival from another area simply for stepping into their territory. Wentworth was regarded as one of the most violent communities in South Africa.
Derrick felt a particular sense of foreboding for his son’s future. The government policy to separate the races in all spheres of life was being pushed ahead fast and all opposition to these policies was ruthlessly suppressed. In May 1963, two months before Robert was born, the government had introduced the General Law Amendment Act, which gave the minister of Justice the power to detain anybody in solitary confinement without trial for 90 days, and thereafter for further periods of 90 days – again and again, according to the minister, ‘until this side of eternity’.
This crack-down, and the increasing pace of apartheid legislation, was greeted by sporadic and sometimes amateur acts of sabotage, culminating in 1964 when a young white man placed a time bomb in the main concourse of Johannesburg railway station, severely injuring several people and killing one elderly woman. White opinion was outraged and by 1965 the minister of Justice had extended the period of detention without trial to 180 days.
It fell to Doris to teach her son the practical ins and outs of where he could legally go or not go. ‘It all depends,’ she explained to Robert, ‘on the colour of your skin.’ The world was divided into two simple categories. On park benches, playgrounds, buses, in post office queues, or on the beach, the sign SLEGS BLANKES meant that he was not allowed. It meant ‘Whites Only’. The sign Robert had to look for was NIE-BLANKES. That meant ‘Non-Whites’.
Robert was a quiet, reflective boy, and at an early age he kept asking why he couldn’t do certain things. Doris found herself having to explain the situation again and again.
‘It’s very sad,’ she says. ‘You don’t know how to explain it to your children. You have to find a way to say, “You’re different.” It was usually left to me to explain. Robert was always wanting to know. Derrick would give me a look. So you’d try to find a way to answer that didn’t make him feel inferior. It was painful. Sometimes I’d lie.
‘Once we were walking along the beach and we came to a paddling pool with white kids playing in it. Robert wanted to jump in. I said, “You can’t – you’ll drown.” Robert couldn’t understand why he wasn’t allowed to join in. “But I can swim better than them,” he said. “I won’t drown.” In the end it always came down to simply saying, “You’re not white.”’
The first racial incident that Robert can remember occurred when he was nine years old. He and two of his friends from Wentworth went down to a floodwater channel which ran out to sea, where they would trawl for small fish with old sacks employed as makeshift fishing nets. White children played down at the floodwater channel too, and they always got along well with the Wentworth boys until one day a white man came along and, without any warning whatsoever, kicked Robert and began shouting at him in Afrikaans that he should not be there.
Robert was holding an old jam jar, full of water, in which they had put some of the guppies they had caught, and the red-faced white man snatched the jar out of his hands and smashed it on the concrete causeway. Robert burst into tears and the three Wentworth boys fled home as fast as they could.
After that, whenever they returned to the same floodwater channel to fish, the white children jeered at them and tried to chase them away.
The second racial incident took place a year later when Robert was ten years old. His family had gone on a trip up to Johannesburg and one afternoon they visited Zoo Lake. Robert and his sister Bronwyn wandered off and came across a gang of small children all roughly his age who were crowded round some buckets. In these buckets were goldfish and the other children were looking at them and twirling their fingers in the water. Robert joined this little knot of children, and after a while he too began to dangle his fingers in a bucket.
Suddenly a large Afrikaner youth raced over and kicked Robert from behind, right between the legs. The youth shouted furiously, ‘You can’t do that, you little bastard!’
Robert stood there stunned and in pain. Unable to speak, he pointed to the other children, then burst into tears. The young Afrikaner was shaking with rage: ‘Voetsek,’ he yelled. ‘You are not allowed here. You’re not white.’
It was Robert’s first experience of real hatred, and ever afterward this episode remained his own private symbol of injustice. Racial prejudice, arbitrary and inexplicable, seemed like a savage kick from behind.
The racial divide for Robert McBride, however, was not that simple; he was not white, yet neither was he black. In the ‘Book of Life’, the popular term for the 49-page identity document the South African government was attempting to issue to everyone, he was classified as Coloured.
This referred to a person of mixed race. Originally the term Coloured lumped together anyone who was not European or African, with several sub-divisions, which in Proclamation 46 of 1959 were defined as Cape Coloured, Cape Malay, Griqua, Indian, Chinese, ‘other Asiatic’ and ‘other Coloured’. The Japanese, after much soul searching, were exempted and granted honorary white status as their country had so much trade with South Africa, and subsequently Indians were hived off and officially designated as a separate group. These distinctions were very important for they determined almost everything in life, from where a person could live, to what job they were allowed to do, and whom they could legally marry.
The rigidity of this racial classification, however, was made extremely tricky by families like the McBrides. Doris McBride’s father was a white municipal worker of Scottish extraction, while her mother had been the daughter of an Irish father and an African mother. Derrick McBride, on the other hand, had Irish and Malay ancestry.
This sort of elaborate mosaic led to numerous subsequent amendments to the Population Registration Act. Proclamation number 46 was declared void in 1967 by a judge of the Cape Town Supreme Court on the grounds of vagueness, and later that same year the Population Registration Act, number 64, was introduced in an attempt to plug those gaps. It made a determined effort to clear up the exact criteria to be used for racial classification, declaring a white person to be someone who: (1) In appearance obviously is a white person and who is not generally accepted as a Coloured person; or (2) Is generally accepted as a white person and is not in appearance obviously not a white person.
To keep these lines clearly demarcated, and to mop up the truants and anomalies, the adjudication was done by the Race Classification Board. This was the final arbitrator. Where the question of a person’s skin colour was not clear the board investigated, evaluated and passed definitive judgement. Fingernails were examined, the shape of a nose scrutinised, or a comb pulled through the hair. A man’s barber could be summoned to give evidence, or a strand of hair examined by the police laboratories.
It was the Race Classification Board’s prerogative to re-classify a person’s colour. Every year an average of over a thousand people officially changed colour: Coloureds became white, some whites became Coloured. There were Coloureds that became black, Indian or Malay, Griquas or Chinese. There were Malays that became Indian and Indians that became Malay and Malays that became African and Africans that became Indian.
Blacks, however, did not become whites.
If this confused anyone as to where all that left the Coloured group, the wife of South Africa’s future state president, Marike de Klerk, spelled it out in 1983: ‘You know, the Coloureds are a negative group. The definition of a Coloured in the population register is someone that is not black, and is not white and not an Indian. In other words, a non-person. They are the leftovers.’
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