Derrick was a maverick, and it was uncharacteristic for him to consort with a policeman. He was an adversary of all authority and particularly disliked the police, whom the McBrides called ‘The Weedkillers’. The local community knew Derrick as an uncompromising political firebrand; the police kept a close watch on him and caused Derrick McBride as much aggravation as they possibly could.
Derrick was well educated and widely read. The McBrides’ small living room was stacked with books on history and politics. Derrick was deeply embittered about the mean and restricted life that being a Coloured forced upon him. He found it particularly difficult to stomach the task of training a new generation of young Coloureds for a life of menial tasks, where they could never hope to be more than the underlings of white men.
He hated whites. He used to say, ‘There’s never been an honest white man in history.’
Derrick saw absolutely no point in continuing as a teacher in these grubby conditions. His outspoken views had blighted his teaching career. Branded as a trouble-maker, he was moved from school to school in Wentworth. He had become disillusioned at seeing even his brightest pupils going out into the world with very little prospect of employment, and with absolutely nothing for them to do in the ghetto where they were legally obliged to live. Most took up a life of petty crime and drunkenness, smoked a lot of dope and joined gangs like the Hime Street Fat Cats, the Drain Rats, F-Section and the Young Destroyers.
For long periods his bitterness, resentment and disillusion found expression in drinking; it anaesthetised his disgust at the hopelessly inadequate, racially segregated schools. In 1975 Derrick finally resigned his teaching post and became a welder.
Derrick McBride looked to his son Robert to redeem all his unfulfilled hopes and ambitions.
Doris also had strong aspirations for her son, so in 1976, when he was thirteen, the McBrides decided to send Robert to a high school 800 kilometres away in Kimberley in the northern Cape, where Derrick himself had gone to school. This was partly to remove him from the gangland atmosphere of Wentworth, and to instil a sense of independence in this quiet, self-effacing boy. Robert was enrolled at the Florianville High School and it was arranged that he stay with friends of the family in the Coloured quarter outside town.
This was a dramatic year for all black schoolchildren in South Africa. The compulsory use of Afrikaans as a medium of teaching in schools, a language which was seen by black pupils as an instrument of oppression, had sparked rioting initially in Soweto, outside Johannesburg. The police responded by opening fire on the children; this triggered a wave of anger which swept through African townships across the country. The protest swelled into a general outburst of fury against apartheid. By the end of the year over a thousand blacks had been killed, more than five hundred of them children.
In Kimberley the pupils of Florianville High decided to boycott their classes in solidarity with the students of Soweto. Robert joined in, not because he had thought about it much, but because everyone else was doing it. Their demonstration consisted of walking around the courtyard during their lunch-break, with placards demanding equal education. After they had been marching round aimlessly for a while, a troop of riot police appeared. Through a loud-hailer the students were ordered to go back into their classrooms. The students responded by chanting slogans.
Suddenly the police fired tear gas at them and charged. The children screamed and ran. Robert found himself choking and blinded by the gas, and a policeman was laying into him with a sjambok. Then it was all over, but for the first time Robert had experienced the brutal response to peaceful protest that his father had always insisted was the white man’s way.
His second encounter came only a few months later when the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team, touring South Africa, visited Kimberley. Robert and a group of friends from school went to the hotel where the team were staying in the hope of catching a glimpse of them and perhaps getting some autographs. There was quite a crush of fans outside the hotel, and when they pressed forward the police beat the young Coloured boys back with their batons, allowing the white schoolchildren through.
Derrick told him, ‘These Afrikaners only understand the language of the gun.’
He gave Robert, aged thirteen, a book called Coloured: a Profile of Two Million South Africans, by Al J. Venter, which made a powerful impression on him. Venter, although a conservative white writer, claimed history had been rewritten to embellish an Afrikaner mythology. He maintained that many of the cardinal landmarks in this tradition, celebrated as quasi-religious rituals, were in fact as Coloured as they were white. For example, when the Zulu king Dingane killed the Boer leader Piet Retief – central to the Afrikaner sense of outrage and martyrdom – 30 of the 70 men who died with him were Coloured; while at the Boer victory over the Zulus at Blood River – the Day of the Covenant, venerated by Afrikaners as confirmation of their anointment as a chosen people – half of the ‘whites’ were in fact Coloured.
But what most affected Robert was the treatment by the early white settlers of the indigenous Khoikhoi and San peoples. The first commander of the Cape, Van Riebeeck, referred to the Khoi as ‘black stinking dogs’, while a few years later another settler wrote, ‘Although descended from our father Adam, they yet show so little humanity that truly they more resemble the unreasonable beasts than reasonable man.’ The settlers formed commandos to hunt them as if they were wild animals and they waged a war of extermination against the San.
Robert vividly remembers watching the then future president PW Botha giving a crudely belligerent display on television, stabbing his finger at the camera and denouncing his opponents in ferocious hyperbole, and Derrick saying, ‘You see, that is why we have to have the armed struggle – it’s the only language they understand.’
At the end of one year in Kimberley, Robert passed his Standard Six exam and returned to Wentworth to go to Fairvale High School. His Aunt Girly noticed a considerable change. He had lost weight and was pimply from a bad diet. Although he was very withdrawn for the first few days, she also felt Robby, as she called him, had matured remarkably.
Fairvale High was an old pre-fab school with up to 35 or more in a class. There was no playground, just a patch of open ground with a little grass and scattered bushes round the edge. For assembly, the thousand or so pupils would gather in the open on a concrete quad while the principal would stand on a makeshift wooden dais. Some of the classroom walls were so flimsy that chunks could simply be broken off and there were holes big enough for smaller pupils to crawl through. If it rained the walls would be damp for days and there were occasions when bits of ceiling caved in during the middle of a class. The school was infested with rats and cockroaches.
Robert was an excellent student, particularly at maths and science. He also began to shine at rugby, the South African national game, although the Wentworth teams had to play on makeshift and dusty grounds very dissimilar to the carefully tended green pitches available to their white counterparts. This discrepancy in sporting facilities incensed Robert, even if during his teenage years – despite his father’s influence – he was generally regarded as being fairly passive and apolitical.
Meanwhile, Wentworth had became a tougher, more unruly place. A whole generation had now grown up in the converted military barracks. Many of Robert’s contemporaries soon dropped out of school, having no hopes or expectations, and they joined the street packs. Some of the gang members were as young as ten years old. The gangs themselves had also become more vicious; territorial wars were fought with guns, knives, stones and broken bottles.
Every weekend there were murders. Funerals were held on Mondays and Tuesdays, when the solemn line of hearses would make its way to the cemetery on the other side of Quality Street. The cemetery is the largest expanse