The world of the whites, so different from the ghetto life of Wentworth, not smelling of the oil refinery, beckoned over the horizon, like the Golden Mile seafront.
Robert decided to try the other side.
3
Gordon Webster was born the same year as Robert McBride, on November 29, 1963, on an isolated smallholding lost in the lonely rolling grasslands of Natal’s high interior plateau, set right at the edge of the silent gum and wattle forests of the district of New Hanover. His family were very poor and far from any medical amenities. Gordon was the last of ten children; he was born at home, without the help of a midwife. Eighteen months later his father died.
The family homestead consisted of two plain mud and cement whitewashed shacks with grey corrugated-iron roofs, and a smaller stone outhouse. Across the rough dirt courtyard was a rondavel, the circular mud hut with a conical thatched roof in traditional African style. Chickens scavenged in the yard, roosted on the rusted van in the corner and stalked beneath the lines of washing hung out on the dilapidated veranda of the larger, three-roomed building. There was no electricity or running water and their meagre settlement was enclosed by a thorny hedge.
It was a small agricultural holding and the family chiefly subsisted off the two-acre patch at the back, planted with mealies, sweet potatoes and vegetables. They had tried to grow other crops, including nuts, but the monkeys had plundered them: the forest loomed over their precarious homestead, only eighteen metres away on the other side of the furrowed dirt track that led up to their rickety wire gate.
Gordon’s mother Agnes was a Zulu, and her maiden name had been Xuma, while Gordon’s father, Artie Webster, had been half Irish, half Zulu. Gordon’s grandfather John Webster arrived as a child from Ireland in the 1870s. By the turn of the century John Webster was running a transport business with three or four wagons hauling goods up from the port of Durban to the newly discovered gold-rush town of Johannesburg. This was a gruelling trek that could take weeks, even months, over the steep passes of the Drakensberg mountains. John courted a Zulu woman, Nohlela Ndlela, who, after marriage, took the Christian name Jane. They settled in New Hanover in the hamlet of York, about 30 kilometres from the town of Pietermaritzburg, where John established the modest family homestead.
There are only two decorations on the bare walls of the candlelit rooms in the Webster home. They are oval, sepia-tinted photographs behind glass. In one, Gordon’s grandmother, Jane, a striking African woman dressed completely in black, stands alone in a field; in the other, a handsome European gentleman poses stiff and erect in sombre suit and tie – her husband.
Their son Artie inherited the smallholding and continued the transport business, eventually swapping the wagons for a truck, with which he transported timber from the forests around New Hanover. Artie met Agnes, a domestic worker, in 1941 and their seven sons and three daughters were all classified Coloured. Artie had been registered at birth as white, though later he was demoted to Coloured, while Agnes was of course classified African.
Gordon, their youngest child, had a gentle, moon-round face, a satiny, light brown complexion, and large, luminously dark, almost feminine eyes, as well as his mother’s handsome African features.
At home the family spoke Zulu. It was a struggle to get by after Artie’s death, and Agnes supplemented their meagre resources by selling any extra produce, as well as eggs, milk and cheese, to neighbouring timber plantations. The Websters were better off than the few African families working on these plantations who were paid pitiful wages; if the husband died the entire family was usually expelled from their home immediately. The Websters also had a dozen or so cattle which the children were expected to herd in the nearby pastures.
Agnes was over-protective of her youngest and even when he had grown up she persisted in referring to him as ‘my child’. Gordon was breastfed till he was five years old and he was known as Gugwane, the favourite.
His mother was a devout Methodist. She was also a ferociously strict disciplinarian. She beat her children for the smallest misdemeanour, taking a rough sprig from the hedge, making the miscreants lie down on a wooden bench and thrashing them, often till they cried.
There were two churches in the district, but both were for whites. A few kilometres down the rutted path which cut a ribbon through the forest there was St John’s, a low grey slate church with a neat graveyard, built by the first English and Irish settlers to arrive in New Hanover in the 1870s. Then there was the Methodist church, which Agnes used to clean. Even though she kept the keys of this church in her home, she was not allowed to attend services there. Instead, a minister visited the Websters once a fortnight to conduct a makeshift private ceremony in the sparse, dark stone outhouse.
There were three other families in that area: one white, one Indian, another African, and in this rural backwater the children used to play together, unaffected by the racial obsessions that gripped the rest of the country. They fished and swam in the small stream less than half a kilometre down the valley, hunted birds and played ‘cowboys and crooks’ in the forest, or soccer with an old tennis ball in the surrounding meadows.
The Webster children were never invited to their white friends’ home, but they continued their companionship till they were about ten, when suddenly the white boys didn’t come over any more. They stayed away, without a word. After that, the white teenagers went off to boarding schools, and in later years they would be embarrassed if they met the Websters. They didn’t have anything to say to them. They’d wave and pass by quickly.
The African family, the Ngubanes, worked on a nearby farm and Bheki Ngubane was Gordon’s best friend. When Bheki’s parents separated, the mother was anxious her two sons would not grow up to become virtual serfs as farm labourers, so she asked Agnes if she would look after them. The Websters had always taken in or helped anyone less fortunate than themselves, despite their own poverty, so Bheki and his older brother Ndaba became part of the extended Webster household.
Bheki, or Beh’ as they called him, was seven at the time, exactly the same age as Gordon, and the two were inseparable. Ndaba was three years older and an extrovert, whereas Bheki was as reserved and shy as Gordon. They were like brothers, except that Bheki, as a Zulu, was able to attend the tiny farm school for Africans only a mile away, while the Websters were barred because they were Coloured. There was no school for Coloureds in the district, so at an early age the children attended an Indian primary school in New Hanover. Gordon and his sister Margaret walked the sixteen-kilometre round trip barefoot every day in all weathers.
It took them an hour, setting out at six forty-five a.m., on the narrow strip of gravel that disappeared into the blue distance towards New Hanover, winding among the mealie fields and undulating fertile pastures that stretched away to the hazy wooded hills on the empty horizon. There were clumps of dense woodland on one side of the track and sometimes they would surprise a buck, which would crash away into the bush through the long grass. Otherwise there were just lonesome vistas and silence.
Each child had three sets of clothes: one for home, one for school and one for Sundays when the minister came. The financial position eased a bit as the older children departed to find work and began sending home a portion of their wages. By this time, some of Agnes’s grandchildren were also living at the crowded smallholding, and they used to walk miles to raid white farmers’ orchards for apples and peaches, or sugar cane from their vast plantations.
Gordon and Bheki were expected to herd the family’s cattle to a meadow, which was about five kilometres away, before and after school. Sometimes Gordon would tell his young nephew, Godfred, ‘Tell Ma I’m going to fetch the cows,’ and he’d run off with Bheki to play. If he had any money he liked to go to the Indian store and buy bread and tinned spaghetti; then he and Bheki would go into the forest and have a feast. Sometimes he stole an egg from the chicken run, though if his mother discovered it she’d thrash him.
His sister Margaret remembers coming home from school on a number of occasions and encountering a bunch of white children by the