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Robert McBride: The Struggle Continues. Bryan Rostron
Читать онлайн.Название Robert McBride: The Struggle Continues
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780624089155
Автор произведения Bryan Rostron
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
Robert and Gordon spent much of their time together discussing these developments. ‘We agreed on a lot,’ says Robert. ‘We realised singing and symbolism was not enough. We were not people who could go to a meeting and feel easy about putting our fist in the air, or toyi-toying. We did not just want to talk.’
Robert was still strongly influenced by Black Consciousness, which held that blacks needed to free themselves psychologically and shed their slave mentality, that blacks could only be liberated by themselves and therefore whites should be excluded from their struggle. Gordon, on the other hand, was profoundly influenced by reading the Freedom Charter, the declaration that had been drawn up by the Congress of the People at Kliptown in 1955, and which had been adopted by the African National Congress. It called for a multi-racial front against racial oppression, declaring in its preamble, ‘That South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people.’
Unlike Derrick McBride, Gordon did not hate whites, yet when discussing violence he used a phrase reminiscent of Robert’s father: ‘The only way to speak to them is to use their own language.’
The question he constantly put to himself, and repeatedly asked Robert, was, ‘Can I live with myself and do nothing, when every day I am insulted by my life?’
While he was at college Gordon lived with his eldest brother George and his family in the Coloured district of Sydenham, which was divided from the white area of Sherwood by a buffer zone of tall grass and bush. Sydenham was more respectable and middle class than Wentworth, where Trevor Webster lived. Gordon definitely did not want to live in Wentworth. After they had left home, his older brothers had all been forcibly removed to Wentworth and settled in a rough former barracks known as Ack-ack Camp. Gordon had visited Ack-ack as a boy and been shocked by the squalor and violence.
George Webster had finally qualified as an attorney after a long, arduous struggle – or as he says, by ‘sheer lunacy’. He owned a small, neat villa in Sydenham facing the buffer zone. Gordon was almost as much of an enigma to his own brothers and their families as he was to everyone else. He would seldom join in and voice an opinion; usually he retreated to his room and kept to himself. Gordon was so elusive that his image is even absent from photographs. When the Websters search among their family snaps, they are astonished to find that Gordon fails to appear in family groupings, even when they remember him being present on those occasions. He had almost succeeded in making himself invisible.
George’s wife Lucy used to worry: ‘How will this timid boy ever be a teacher?’ Her sister Moira, says Lucy, used to get furious with Gordon. ‘What sort of teacher are you going to be?’ she’d demand. ‘You don’t express an opinion, you’re not interested in politics, you never go to any meetings.’
When people came to visit, Gordon usually hid in his room, but one evening during his first year at college Moira and her friends came round for a party and they insisted on taking Gordon dancing. In fact he was thrilled, so they took him with them into Durban to an ‘open’, racially mixed disco. It was the first time Gordon had seen blacks and whites mix freely or seen whites dance. When he returned Lucy wanted to know what he thought. Gordon smiled and said, ‘Whites have no sense of rhythm.’
Gordon was painfully shy with girls. His mother had imparted a strict sexual code to him, insisting on no physical relationship outside marriage. Once at school when he was fourteen he had been caught petting with a girl and had been severely punished. For a while he’d also had a girl pen-friend in Zimbabwe, but that, as far as George and Lucy could make out, was as far as his shyness would allow him to go.
After a while, however, they discovered that when Gordon was not out with Robert he was seeing a girl. He never brought her home or talked about her, so all they knew was that her name was Anne and that she worked as a nurse for the local dentist, Dr Adams. Anne was African, a Xhosa from the Transkei, whose mother was a domestic servant in Durban. Anne herself, they discovered, lived nearby in the white area of Sherwood in servants’ quarters; but, as with everything else, Gordon kept that side of his life to himself.
Whenever he could Gordon returned to visit his mother in New Hanover. He was much more relaxed about his relationship with her, for he now understood her severity and rigid discipline as a mother’s desire for her children to escape her rural poverty. But he was also increasingly anti-religious. Agnes had become a Presbyterian and Gordon believed that his mother used religion as a shield against reality and as a way of denying the political enormity that surrounded them. He said, ‘I was impressed when the minister spoke about us humans being made in the image of God, and that all human beings are the same in His eyes. But I was quite baffled by this because in reality this was not so.’
He maintained that religion, soccer and music were the opium of his people. His childhood friend Bheki Ngubane had no interest in politics at all; he was soccer mad. By now Bheki was working as a driver for an electrical firm in Pietermaritzburg, though he, too, came back to New Hanover to visit Agnes at every opportunity. Bheki’s elder brother Ndaba had become a policeman, and at first Gordon avoided him; he told Bheki the reason was that Ndaba was a ‘gattas’ (urban African slang for cop). However by the end of his year at Bechet, Gordon felt this was unfair, accepting that Ndaba was not as bright as Bheki, and that with the high unemployment that prevailed he simply needed a job.
Under Gordon’s steadying influence Robert was developing a more coherent political outlook. At the end of their first year at college he was elected to the Students’ Representative Council, and at the beginning of the following year he opted for the full four-year course of a Higher Education diploma. Robert’s optimism and long-term confidence were not echoed by Gordon, who was increasingly pessimistic and weighed down by political events.
In 1984 black youths and students were once again in the forefront of protest marches and demonstrations, but violence was on the increase and Gordon felt they were engaged in a fruitless venture.
‘There’s no point in protests and demonstrations,’ he concluded. ‘They are futile. The real patriot must act.’
Robert was aware of his friend’s gathering sense of desperation. The crisis came that August. It was the first election for the new tri-cameral parliament, where Coloureds were to have their own House of Representatives. Gordon felt this was not only a sham for Coloureds, but an insult to Africans, who were not even given this palliative. He would have a token vote, denied to both his mother and to Bheki Ngubane. A week before the elections he asked Robert, ‘What kind of law is it that makes my mother less human than me?’
Together with George and Lucy, he attended a protest meeting at St Anne’s, the local Catholic church. It was packed with Coloureds and Indians; the crowd was so large that people had to stand outside. ‘On the way back in the car Gordon was very quiet,’ said Lucy. ‘He asked, how could anyone vote on a colour basis – and when our black brothers have no vote?’ Gordon felt that all talk of reform was utterly empty. The government had responded to the new wave of civil unrest by sending in the military to help the police. All he was being offered was a vote in a token election which excluded even his own mother. That decided him. He told Robert of his decision first, and then he told his girlfriend Anne: he was going into exile to join the African National Congress.
‘He wanted to talk to someone,’ said Robert. ‘He was very hurt. It was not an intellectual thing, but something he felt – we both felt – very deeply. Activists were having to run away, not people who preached violence or anything, just people who demonstrated and organised, and we felt that was no good. They couldn’t even sleep at home. We didn’t want to run. We wanted to do something, get involved. I started thinking, we must hit back! I understood how Gordon felt. I put myself in the victim’s shoes. I understood his pain, I began to feel the pain with him.
‘He wanted me to go with him, but I felt I couldn’t. He knew I had responsibilities at home. Also, I didn’t want to