LITMIR.BIZ

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with names like Coronation Road and Chestnut Avenue, despite the subtropical abundance of the vegetation and the hot evening breeze that blew in off the Indian Ocean.

      In town, alongside high-rise air-conditioned office blocks were the remnants of the colonial past, unlikely alien landmarks in the sticky heat. In the main square a plump statue of Queen Victoria, erected by public subscription for those volunteers who fell in the Boer War, faced a Baroque Revival City Hall with field cannons standing ceremonial guard alongside tall palms on its trim lawns. Europe jostled uneasily with Africa, as if perpetually anxious that classical order and precision might be swamped by tropical excess.

      Hidden among the palms were other stone memorials to frock-coated dignitaries in stiff collars. These exemplars of European civic rectitude stared sternly into the distance, searching far beyond the horizon for their inspiration, perhaps far away to the Motherland or even ancient Greece, resolutely ignoring the immediate sultry reality of shrieking Indian mynah birds which perched in the surrounding palms by night, or African workers from nearby offices and building sites who rested in their shade by day.

      The city was full of Africans and Indians by day; at night they vanished, whisked away after sunset to their own racially exclusive locations.

      Durban was a vigorous, modern city with the largest port in Africa, but its pride was the expansive beachfront of luxury hotels, the wide span of pure-grained sand and a shimmering aquamarine ocean warm enough to swim in all year round: a nirvana for sun-worshippers and surfers.

      These beaches were reserved exclusively for whites, and in summer they were saturated with huddled droves of bronzed, oil-glistening bodies.

      Along this stretch, bounded on one side by Addington Hospital where Robert McBride was born, and at the northern end by the snake park, were cafés, bars, restaurants and nightclubs: the playground of white South Africa on holiday, known as the Golden Mile.

      Further south, on the other side of the busy docks and the landlocked Bay of Natal, was a promontory the shape of a finger. Here facing the ocean was a diminutive range of hills known as The Bluff, a luxurious white suburb with large gardens, swimming pools and double garages. Beyond that was a wide no man’s land, comprising first a bird sanctuary, then a small swampy lake and finally a patch of scrubby bush. This acted as a buffer to Wentworth, a non-white residential area. Most of the racial arenas were divided by buffer zones.

      The McBrides lived in Wentworth. Hemmed in on one side by an industrial estate and on the other by the Mobil oil refinery, it sprawled over several lilliputian hills. Wentworth was eleven kilometres from Durban city centre, just off the freeway on the route to exotic South Coast holiday resorts like Amanzimtoti and Umtentweni. There was nothing exotic about Wentworth.

      The main approach was up Quality Street, past the gloomy Girassol Café and at the crest of the hill the dour, decaying Palm Springs Hotel. The sandy roads were rutted and uneven, often strewn with building rubble and household rubbish, and after a sudden tropical downpour the craters in the road would form small lakes. Packs of dogs roamed the dusty streets and children played in the open storm drains.

      The houses were mostly cramped, identical red-brick units, or mean corrugated-iron shanties, with dusty backyards piled high with discarded tyres, rusty fridges and disused car parts.

      And everywhere alongside this urban dereliction was a lush riot of tropical fecundity: mango trees, pawpaw, guava, banana, avocado and the brilliant flowering of the pink and purple tibouchina tree.

      At night the Mobil oil refinery glowed with a thousand pinpricks of light in the velvety dark, and its slender, 50-foot chimneys belched out vivid flames like some vast starship from outer space. The refinery was heavily fortified with tall barbed-wire fences, concrete walls and commanding watchtowers with spyholes.

      It had once been attacked, in one of the few military actions in that area, by an African National Congress unit armed with rocket launchers, but the police soon winkled the unit out of their strategic position on the hill and gave chase to the guerrillas right through Wentworth, finally pinning them down in a paint factory in Hime Street, where all four insurgents were shot dead.

      By day the oil refinery emitted a constant plume of greyish-white smoke and sometimes by evening a sulphurous stench hung over Wentworth. It was a cloying, acrid smell that bit deep into the lungs, and if the weather was particularly humid (often before one of those sharp summer squalls) there would be a pall of pollution so palpable it was like a dust storm or a very fine drizzle. Sometimes on the darkest nights the chemical haze enveloped the whole ghetto like a light shroud of mist.

      Wentworth was a ‘Coloured’ area, and white people never came near it. To young Robert, that seemed perfectly normal and he never gave it a thought. Most people in Wentworth didn’t have any work and the main social activity was drinking. To Robert that was quite normal too. He didn’t think there was anything odd about it for a long, long time.

      That was the way things were.

      Robert McBride was born on July 6, 1963. His parents Derrick and Doris were both teachers. Robert was a much wanted child, for the McBrides had been married five years and had previously lost a daughter at birth.

      They had moved to Wentworth while Doris was heavily pregnant with Robert. This had not been a voluntary transfer: under the Group Areas Act, which stipulated in which area each racial group could live, all those whose classification was Coloured were forced out of the city centre and its immediate suburbs. As Derrick and Doris McBride were Coloured, they had to relocate.

      For those being evicted, the municipality had set aside a zone which occupied approximately two square kilometres, officially called the Austerville Government Village, although everyone knew it as Wentworth.

      It had been built as a Second World War military transit camp. There were drab rows of identical red-brick barracks, while most streets had no names or any form of lighting.

      The camp was laid out on a grid system, divided into sections named after British naval heroes like Drake, Frobisher and Hardy, although this echo of imperial grandeur was not reflected in the bleak surroundings. There were no facilities such as schools or shops, so when the displaced new community first moved in they had to convert the existing military buildings. The old cinema became the Anglican Church of St Gabriel and the block houses in Drake, which had been the kitchens, were transformed into homes, often housing families of ten or more in one-bedroom units.

      The McBrides were assigned to Flat B, previously a First Aid clinic, in a road with no name in an area called Lower Assegai. It was not the home they had been promised, but it was clean and neat and there were burglar-bars on the windows. It had a kitchen and lounge as well as a bedroom, so they had more room than many of their neighbours, and outside there was a small grass yard where Doris immediately began planting shrubs and herbs. Eleven months after Robert’s arrival, their second child, Bronwyn, was born.

      When Robert was a baby the family used to call him ‘Pepe’, after an animated cartoon Doris had seen with her younger sister, Girly, at the bioscope (as they called the cinema). The cartoon had a theme song that went, ‘Face as funny as Pepe, smile as funny as Pepe,’ and when Girly first saw Robert she shrieked, ‘Pepe!’

      Round-faced and smiling, with his large ears and puckish mouth, he had a deceptively mischievous appearance. Yet for a child in such turbulent surroundings, Robert was uncommonly tranquil and obedient. He was a skinny little boy and quite solitary, although he spent a remarkable amount of time with his father. He had an even, light brown complexion and close, curly dark hair. Doris was livid when a neighbour called him kroeskop (woollyhead).

      Doris was a big strong woman with a soft creamy tan complexion. Derrick on the other hand was dark; he had a long, animated face with strong, aquiline features, and he gesticulated energetically with his hands, constantly pushing back his thick-rimmed glasses. He was slim, and his wiry frame twitched with an anxious, edgy compulsion, the complete opposite to Doris’s calm stoicism. Derrick was so zipped up that he was in constant motion, even finding it difficult to sit still for an entire meal. Words poured out of him in an assertive cascade and in conversation he ricocheted from subject to subject with demonic energy. The family nicknamed

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