The Trucks and the Vultures were the biggest gangs and the most hostile rivals, the dividing line between them being Austerville Drive, the main road through Wentworth, and at the height of their feud it was known as the Cassandra Crossing. The Trucks controlled the Drake and Frobisher districts, the Heartbreakers ruled in Ogle Road, while between Alabama and Dromedaris Road – known as Dooms Island because of the drinking problems – the F-Section held sway. Nearby, on the other side of Fairvale High School and just along from the Mobil oil refinery, the 88s lorded it over the most dismal area in Wentworth – long squat rows of concrete coops with flat asbestos roofs, bluntly designated as blocks A, B, C and D, but known by everyone as Rainbow Chicken, after the battery company.
Sometimes alliances were formed, as when the Young Destroyers teamed up with the Weekend Spoilers against the Drain Rats and F-Section. But generally each gang held to its own turf, expecting all young men within it to join up and if necessary defend their domain to the death.
No one gang controlled Collingwood, where the McBrides lived, so there was lively competition among the gangs to recruit the youngsters in that area. There was tremendous pressure on all teenagers to join an ‘outfit’, and every day on his way home from school Robert faced a torrent of abuse and sarcasm from groups of loitering youths. Most of the time they just hung around in the street, bored, frustrated and angry, looking for something – anything – to happen. Robert was an easy target. He was different: light-skinned, soft-spoken, a quiet boy, known as a good student. Most of all, though, he was considered to be different because he refused to join a gang.
Robert knew he was regarded as an alien. To defend himself, Derrick taught Robert jujitsu and sent him to karate lessons. Under his father’s guidance, Robert began to see this violence as a political fact: Derrick argued that these young men were victims of a political system that denied them any room for hope or improvement. Instead, trapped in their own ghetto, they turned their hopelessness and anger upon themselves and their own people.
Derrick gave his teenage son books on politics and history. He tried to give Robert a perspective which would save him from the cycle of self-destruction that condemned most of the inhabitants of Wentworth. Derrick talked about politics endlessly. Robert’s friends used to relish these discussions with the quixotic Mr McBride, but Robert often got bored with his father’s obsessions. Derrick’s theme was always the same: ‘Don’t trust whites. There’s never been an honest white man in history.’
Elsewhere in South Africa, others were beginning to strike back. In 1978 the chief of the Security Police, Brigadier Zietsman, estimated that four thousand black South Africans had gone abroad to Angola, Zambia and Tanzania for guerrilla training. Many of these had been the young Soweto schoolboys who had fled into exile after the mass uprising of 1976. Brigadier Zietsman warned the public they could be expected to return soon – equipped with arms and explosives.
In March 1978, two bombs went off in the coastal city of Port Elizabeth, leaving two dead and three injured. In October, two guerrillas were shot dead by a police patrol near the Botswana border. In November, a guerrilla band entered the northern Transvaal from Botswana, and in an ambush on a remote farm in the Louis Trichardt district a policeman was wounded. But underground resistance was sporadic and often haphazard. The security police, with its huge network of paid informers in the townships, always appeared to be one step ahead. Hundreds of activists were arrested and held without trial. Nevertheless there continued to be isolated outbreaks of urban violence. In November 1979 a bomb exploded in the Cape Town Supreme Court without any casualties. These incidents were beginning to mount up and the whites were having to take notice; some on the extreme right were getting so rattled they decided to take the law into their own hands, and vigilante attacks on blacks began to increase. The whites were becoming uneasy.
The standard of living among white South Africans, which had always been among the highest in the world, flourished and prospered. The earnings from gold rose enormously, investment poured into the country and there was an unprecedented property boom. Consumer spending had never been so high.
By now the McBrides’ home was too small. In 1979 they’d had another daughter, Gwyneth, and at sixteen Robert felt he was too big to share a room with his two sisters, and was unable to get much schoolwork done at home. Doris applied for a larger house and was told to walk around Wentworth in search of a vacancy. Eventually she found a family who were moving out of Hardy Place.
This was another area with no street names or lighting. The McBrides’ new home, 29a, was a small, square brick block with a tin roof, surrounded by a three-metre-wide grass yard and cordoned off from the uneven dirt road by a slatted wooden fence, an exact replica of all the other houses in the vicinity except for the lordly avocado tree outside the front door. In the days of the military camp, 29a had been a laundry.
It had three cramped bedrooms, a tiny bathroom and kitchen. The gloomy living room had dark cream, pitted walls and a threadbare brown matting carpet curling at the edges. The McBrides regarded 29a as a temporary address; they always hoped they might be allowed to own their own home.
For the next seven years, Derrick wrote constantly to the department of Community Development and Doris badgered them with visits. In their aspirations to better themselves, the McBrides were essentially middle-class people trapped in a slum. Doris was never happy with Hardy Place, and some of the neighbours used to say to her, ‘Who do you think you are?’ The McBrides were forced to remain as tenants in 29a (a consequence, they believed, of Derrick’s belligerent opinions) yet they did not relinquish their efforts to escape to a better neighbourhood. As a result, they never bothered much with decorating. The furnishings remained sparse and there were few embellishments. In the shadowy living room there was a calendar with a picture of an angelically blond Jesus and a copper clock in the shape of hands at prayer, while on a dark brown sideboard was a small plastic replica of Michelangelo’s David with the head missing.
Robert’s bedroom was painted a pale lilac colour in an unsuccessful attempt to gloss over the uneven red-brick walls, and the smudgy outcome was cruelly highlighted by the single bare light hanging from the middle of the white hardboard ceiling, decorated with limply dangling remnants of brown fly-paper. Through a hole in the corner a naked electric cable ran down to the floor, which was covered in a mahogany brown linoleum. There were no curtains at the window, only flimsy white netting. Robert’s sense of a lack of privacy resonated from the graffiti he’d scrawled over the wall opposite his narrow bed: THE LOVABLE QUALITY OF A NOSE IS NOT ITS LENGTH, BUT ITS ABILITY TO KEEP OUT OF OTHER PEOPLE’S BUSINESS.
At 29a, Robert had even more trouble from the local adolescent mob; at first simply because he was a new face, and then because he wouldn’t join their troupe. The faction that controlled Hardy were the Drain Rats. They took their names from the open storm drains by the side of the road where they had played as children, and as young men often simply sat with their friends, feet in the drains, because they had nowhere else to go.
The Rats used to kick him or throw things, and he was hurt badly when a brick hit him on the head. At one time the pressure on Robert was so intense that he was sent away for a while to stay with his godmother. Mostly, however, he kept his eyes down and hurried past, trying not to respond to the taunts, but sometimes a confrontation was unavoidable. Robert had many fights with these street corner gangsters. He was stabbed twice.
In 1980 there was once again a formidable boycott campaign in ‘non-white’ schools throughout South Africa. These protests were milder than those of four years previously; they were peaceful and concentrated on demanding a better standard of education and an end to the massive discrepancy between what the government spent on white and ‘non-white’ pupils.
Robert helped organise the demonstrations at Fairvale High. He hated his inferior schooling, and was particularly angered by the history syllabus which he felt glorified white victories over Africans. He could not respect his teachers either, for he believed they were academically inadequate, some of them knowing even less than himself, and – unlike his own father – prepared to co-operate with a system which was expressly