19 1957 – 1959: Living at Torbeth Lodge, and then at Wonynge
19 <> 1957 – 1959: Living at Torbeth Lodge, and then at Wonynge
I saw in the paper one day an advert for a Zulu linguist required to work in the Bantu Administration Department of the Durban Municipality. The job offered a bit more salary than I was getting as a shipping clerk. Having grown up with Zulus as my playmates, I could speak the language quite well so I applied and got the job. The position was in the Influx Control section of the department which, as the name implies, was to regulate the entry of black men into the urban areas in terms of the Urban Areas Act (women were not subject to control). The office was staffed by the Influx Control Officer and eight or nine clerks. There was also a man stationed outside to marshal the crowds and one ‘runner’ who fetched record cards from the Labour Bureau in an adjacent building.
In my position I did not at first interface directly with the people coming to the office seeking permission to enter Durban as work-seekers or visitors; it was rather to screen the hundreds of application forms, in triplicate, arriving weekly in the mail from Magistrate’s Courts in the rural areas. The screening was to ensure that employment opportunities were offered first to suitably qualified persons born and bred in the urban area before allowing further workers into the urban area.
In time, the Influx Control Officer was promoted (he applied for the position) into the Labour Bureau section and his post was duly advertised. I applied and became the Influx Control Officer in Durban. The incumbent was always known as ‘Zinti’, meaning ‘sticks’ which was the nickname given to the first incumbent who had very thin legs, or so I was told, and the office itself was known as ‘kwaZinti’, the place of Sticks. So I was Zinti. Apart from being in charge of the office, most of my day was taken up interviewing people arriving in Durban without that necessary piece of paper, obtainable through a Magistrate in the work-seeker’s home district, permitting him to take up a job in Durban. Those applicants who had the necessary permission from their Magistrate’s office were directed by the man marshaling the crowds outside to clerks seated at four service windows facing outside. Those without the necessary piece of paper were directed to the queue at the door leading to the row of desks inside. Inevitably those were the harder decisions where permission to take up employment had to be denied unless the applicant was coming into Durban accompanying an employer for whom he was already working outside the urban area. Unfortunately there was no shortage of labour already in Durban so permission more often than not had to be denied. I decided I wanted to leave the Influx Control Office the day I had to refuse permission for my old friend Bhegindlela from the butcher shop in Seven Oaks.
I must tell you about the day I was ‘poisoned’ ! One morning traveling to the office, I suddenly had the most excruciating pain low down in my stomach, so much so that I stopped the car beside the road, got out and literally rolled on the grass verge! It passed eventually and I continued to the office. Having grown up with Zulus in rural Natal among whom talk of ‘mthakati’ (witchcraft) and poisoning was common place, I thought I may have been poisoned for some unknown reason — I had no enemies that I was aware of ! DorothyAnne was very sceptical and rather amused by my credulity, but then she was born and bred in England where such events are read about only in novels. I saw our doctor, probably the next day — and it turned out to be a kidney stone! (During the same investigation the doctor also discovered that I had at some time had bilharzia. As a child I had once passed a clot of blood in my urine, something which had alarmed me but about which I never told my mother. The Umvoti River where we used to swim was known to be infested with the parasitic flatworm that causes bilharzia.)
I had the same painful experience a short time later but it was only when we went to live in Cape Town several years later (in 1971) that I passed the troublesome stone. On that occasion I writhed in agony on the floor in our apartment — and then when I saw the doctor he merely advised me to drink lots and lots of fluid (which I did and have done ever since). The stone eventually passed through the system of its own accord. The pain it causes, both when blocking the ‘works’ and when passing down the narrow passage, is absolutely as bad as people say it is!
I was given a way out of the Influx Control Office when an Assistant Township Manager was required for Kwa Mashu, the new township being built on the outskirts of the city. The position was to manage Site C. the third area newly opened for occupation by families removing from the Cato Manor shack area. I applied for and got the appointment.
Meanwhile, at the beginning of 1958 I had yet another go at getting myself educated. I signed up for a BA degree part-time course, choosing subjects available at the City Campus of Natal University. The Campus was on the way home from the Influx Control Office so it should have worked all right, but lectures on one of the subjects was withdrawn from there and could be attended only at Howard College. I gave up, and that should have been the end of my pursuit of further education, but it wasn’t. Inspired by Johnny Fosteras, and much to DorothyAnne’s dismay though she said nothing (she was keenly aware of my dismal study record), I signed up for a Company Secretary Diploma course with Rapid Results College. It seemed that a position as Company Secretary would be just the career for me. We paid the fee, the carton of lecture notes arrived, and the new study phase commenced. It may have lasted a month, if as much as that, and then the lecture notes stood unused in a corner. We eventually dumped them somewhere along the way.
It was during this time at Torbeth Lodge that I had the strangest of dreams, a dream which I have never forgotten. In my dream I was sitting on my bed in a room that I shared with another person. I somehow knew that he was Jewish, something which had no significance for me at the time. He was standing next to his bed waving something in his hand that looked like a couple of floppy egg-beaters, each one a handle with a loop of the floppy substance. “What are those?” I asked. He said: “These are instruments for taking off one’s skin. I will show you”, and with that he proceeded to wield the instruments until his skin was off and he stood there with his flesh, sinews and veins all exposed. Then he reached over to hand me the instruments saying: “Here you are, you have a turn”. I think that at that moment I woke up for I don’t remember that I took off my skin! I remember it all so clearly and hope that one day I may still figure out what was on my mind to let me dream such a weird thing as that.
Round about the time of that dream, and I think just after it, I discovered for the first time that Dad was Jewish. It was DorothyAnne who prompted the question to Dad when she asked me out of the blue, “Is your dad Jewish?” This was because of a resemblance Dad had to some Jewish people that DorothyAnne had seen in England — the gene is strong! On a visit to Dad with her, I asked Dad: “Are you Jewish?” He may have paused for a while, but then replied, “My father was a synagogue Jew”, meaning, of course, a practicing Jew rather than merely nominal. With that knowledge, a lot of things from the past fell into place, for instance, the reason why my uncle Bonnie always called me ‘Jewboytjie’ (adding the Afrikaans diminutive for little boy).
Analyzing it now, it occurs to me that the dream may have occurred somewhere between DorothyAnne asking me the question and me putting it to Dad.
Now the kwaMashu experience.
But, before I write about that, something more about the Influx Control Office. The white staffers working with me came and went, but the black staff members were constant (as a black man, if you had a good job you stuck to it because, if you left and found yourself jobless after a two-weeks’ permission to find another, you would be ordered out of the city unless you were actually a legitimate resident in one of the townships). I remember most of the black members of staff — Godfrey Zulu (a member of the Royal family), Mr. Khubeka, William Zondo (who was studying part-time or by correspondence for a degree), Bernard Ntuli, and a Mr. Zungu. I also had as a frequent visitor at the office another member of the Zulu royal family with whom I had becomes friends at Howard College where he ran the kitchen: he also had a motorbike which is really what brought us together. He used to pop into the office to see me and have a chat every now and then. What I appreciated was that he never asked me for any favours for friends or relatives wanting to work in Durban. It would have been extremely embarrassing to have to turn him down. He himself, as a close member of the Royal family, had a green passbook which entitled him to unrestricted entry, stay and employment in any urban area. He enjoyed profound respect from all the Zulu staff members in the office.
It was at the Influx Control Office that I met Graham Smale, Tom Roche and Tony Tapson, all of whom, with their wives Carole, Jeanette and Sheila, became firm friends of ours. Graham was in the Inspectorate section of the department, Tom in the Welfare section, and Tony was with me for a while in the Influx Control office. I think it was later while I was at kwaMashu that Tony left to work for Woolworths in Durban where his future father-in-law, Sheila’s dad, was the store manager. It was through Tony that I later also joined Woolworths.
Tom and Jeanette lived in Overport not far from us and we regularly spent Thursday evenings with them listening to ‘The Hits Of The Week from Mozambique’ on Lorenço Marques Radio, and “No Place To Hide” (a space travel adventure serial) on Springbok Radio. Tom was a really good photographer; he did the composite photo of our four children which hangs on our wall and in a hundred years time will be one of those heirloom photos preserved and found in antique shops. Tom put their son through University with money made from photographing weddings.
Our motorbike gave out on us sometime in the middle of 1957 — the rear sprocket wore out allowing the chain to slip over the teeth on any uphill. A new sprocket was not available so we sold the bike. Boet bought it and manufactured himself a sprocket from a generator casing!!
I got my car driver’s licence (I was taught to drive by Basil Fosteras, Johnny’s brother) and we invested in a car. It was a Fiat 500 Cub, second-hand, of course, paying a fifty-pound deposit and with two-hundred pounds left to pay in monthly installents. It was a cute little car but it soon started using oil. The dealer had sold us a pup! The trouble first showed up not many days after we drove the car out of the dealer’s showroom but the aggravation for us peaked on our way to Gwen’s and Brian’s wedding in Greytown — we never got there! We got as far as New Hanover to find all the oil gone. I decided to fill up with new oil and return to Durban, much to DorothyAnne’s disappointment even to this day. It was foolish of me because there was no reason why we could not have pushed through, with further toppings up of the sump oil. We would have enjoyed seeing Gwen and Brian get married, slept at Boet’s place (or, rather, his grandparents’ place) and returned to Durban the next day. But I suppose all I could think about was getting the car back to Durban as quickly as possible. We went back to the dealer (a very prominent firm in Natal) and pointed out the defect in the car — it needed a rebore and new pistons — but they would only take it back if we forfeited the deposit of fifty pounds (a lot of money to us in those days). We had no option because we had no money for the rebore so we left the car with them and walked away with nothing. As soon as we had enough money saved for a further deposit, we bought a second-hand Ford Popular. That car still had a new car smell and proved to be a really good buy which served us well for several years.
The job at kwaMashu was slightly more tenable than the Influx Control office — slightly more! Apart from duties in the office seeing to residents’ requests and sorting out problems, I also had to ‘police’ Site C to see that householders towed the line, an aspect to the job which I found distasteful. There was, for instance, one man that used his house as a motorbike repair shop, something strictly not permitted. I should have shut him down but I never had the heart to do it because he was making for himself a reasonable living. I admonished him and told him to desist. He didn’t, and I took it no further. He was really rendering a service to a people who could not afford the usual garages and repair shops and was hurting no one. I couldn’t carry out my duty. The Township Manager told me I was too soft. I had to agree. I couldn’t change and knew I should go.
But I must go back a little. While I was still in the Influx Control position, DorothyAnne had quit her job and acquired a puppy — which we named Puddles for obvious reasons! She was a small, shaggy dog the size of a Maltese Poodle. We had also moved to a bigger flat in Torbeth Lodge which gave us a separate bedroom (in the first one our bed was on the enclosed balcony fully open to the living room). We were nicely settled when someone in the building complained about us keeping a dog in the flat (strictly against the terms of the lease but she was such a small dog and never made a noise!). We were given notice to go. Graham Smale told me about a vacant flat in their block, Wonynge, in Essenwood Road. We went to see it (that was when we met Carole, Graham’s wife, for the first time). The agents were willing for us to have the dog there so we signed the lease and moved in. It was a very pleasant flat, at a ‘good address’ as my Dad commented (referring to Essenwood Road).
Two events impress Wonynge on my memory.
In moving there, we had hired a small Furniture Mover who, when they arrived, consisted of an old man and a teenager in a bakkie. The old man was simply too frail to get the fridge downstairs so I assisted the teenager — and injured my back. In the new flat, I was laid up on doctor’s orders on our mattress placed on the floor to make it more rigid. It was hot, so I was in my altogether when I had to cross the passageway to the bathroom, but DorothyAnne had the door open. When I noticed that I was exposed to anyone outside (there was fortunately no one there), acting instinctively, I leaped across to the bathroom without thought to my back! DorothyAnne was most amused but did shut the door to allow me back across the passage.
The other thing was a problem with the plumbing in the building — we were on the ground floor and when the sewer pipes blocked below us, everything from the two flats directly above us ended up in our bath and kitchen sink! Appeals to those above not to flush or drain sinks and baths until the blockage was cleared was to little avail and we sat with a real problem until the plumbers arrived.
We and the Smales became friends. After a while, Graham and Carole bought a house in Westville North which, in those days, was really in the ‘bundu’ (country). They moved there, and then sometime early in 1960 when our twelve-months’ lease on the flat expired, we also moved to a house in Blair Atholl Heights, a new area opening up in Westville North.
