Embrace (39 page)

Like the Senior Choir for Israel in June, we were fitted with khaki safari suits to wear with our bush hats. The Seniors had returned from the Tel Aviv International Festival of Choirs with the winning gold medal. The media had it that we were now the world’s premier mus’ic and choir school. We had surpassed the Vienna Boys, an achievement that brought an enormous responsibility: we Secondaries, and the Juniors who would be touring Rhodesia, had to keep the school’s name in lights. A single poor performance, a spiteful or vigilant reviewer, could destroy the reputation so painstakingly worked for. Before we departed, Mr Roelofse brought us a review from an Israeli newspaper:
‘The choir of the Drakensberg Boys Music School was last night awarded the gold medal at the Tel Aviv International Festival of Choirs. During an open-air peiformance of extracts of Verdi’s
Requiem,
as the choir’s crescendos and diminuendos filled the quiet night air, hundreds of frogs from a fountain behind the stage must have heard the choir’s heavenly range. With each rise and fall of volume, the frogs too let their croaking rise and fall. What supernatural choir is this, that even nature emulates its magnificent voice?

Mr Roelofse wanted us to sing like that in Malawi: like a choir that nature would emulate. He told us that the Malawi tour would be our ambassadorial debut for South Africa — our country that had beenturned into an international pariah as a result of propaganda. That the Senior Choir had achieved its feat in spite of international opinion, against incredible odds, was to serve as our inspiration. ‘We are going,’ Roelofse told us to remember, ‘into a black country, Africa’s one and only black democracy in an ocean of communism. And it is our responsibility to show those people what we were made of. Music,’ he concluded, ‘is a universal language.’ In Malawi we were at all times to be at our most exemplary behaviour. Our every move would take place as if under a magnifying glass and we had to behave respectfully when there may be an occasional black person in the audience. If we spoke — even casually — about the president, we were to refer to him as
His Excellency the Life President of the Republic of Malawi
Dr Z.
Khumuzo Banda.
Other than South Africa, Rhodesia, SouthWest Africa and Botswana, Malawi was the only other country in Africa where we were welcome. We were to afford its black president our sincerest respects. Dr Banda was a man of enormous moral stature, who refused to allow the territory of Malawi to be used by the terrorist forces attempting to infiltrate Rhodesia, South-West Africa and South Africa. His people were loyal to him almost to the man. Amongst ourselves we joked about what it would be like if some of us were placed with a black family in a hut. This would not happen as we’d be staying with only white host families and most of our audiences would be predominantly white expatriates. Together with Mr Roelofse, the tour’s supervisory staff would be Uncle Charlie, Mr Mathison and Miss Sanders. Or Ma’am, as we were now told to call her. Ma’am’s strictness had long reached mythic proportions from the Standard Sixes, and we didn’t much look forward to having her with us. But, to me, ultimately, the thought of Malawi, of flying there by plane, of having almost as many days off as performance days, superseded the slight damper anticipated due to the presence of the upright Ma’am. Bennie argued that her going along was a great opportunity for us to check out the chinks in her armour in anticipation of her being our Standard Six teacher. All talk of Standard Six I ignored. While never articulating my thoughts even to Dominic, I had no intention of returning to the Berg.

Before departure from school, Uncle Charlie spray-painted a single yellow identification spot onto our suitcases — also as precaution against luggage loss once our baggage would be loaded onto Air Malawi along with that of other passengers. Most of my clothing remained in the big lockers beside the F Dorm bathrooms. I imagined Beauty’s hands — sometime in January — going through the rack marked De Man, neatly packing jeans, bush jackets, gum boots, T-shirts, black jerseys, underpants, long johns, raincoat and socks into a cardboard box to be sealed, addressed and mailed to me in Amanzimtoti. I was not coming back. There lodged in the back of my mind the thought that I would never see the school again. After Christmas, when we got back from Malawi, I would find an excuse, I would find a way, come hell or high water, to convince Bok and Bokkie not to send me back.

Driving off to Johannesburg in the school’s Mercedes-Benz bus, I did not look back at the buildings. Nor at the stables or mountains I had in some way come to love. I had cleared my locker; my suitcase was jam-packed with each thing I owned including the Paris T-shirt, everything except for the stuff in the communal cupboards. On the inside of my suitcase, hidden in my two black Bata performance shoes and inside my two veldskoens, lay the orange-covered metal weights.

Before and after the
Kraaines
TV recordings in Aucklandpark, we stayed near Jan Smuts Airport in accommodation provided by Jurgens Caravans. The owners of Jurgens were friends of Dominic’s parents.

Uncle Charlie handled all passports. Through immigration we bobbed, wearing our safari suits, sandals, bush hats and cameras. Inside the Air Malawi plane we compared notes on who had flown most often. Mervyn, whose parents owned the Cessna, was automatically disqualified from the discussion. I had flown eight times. The first time at seven — when I was the page boy and Lynette flower girlat Aunt Lena and Uncle Joe’s wedding. Then six more flights over the three vacations the girls and I had gone from Durban to visit Aunt Lena and Uncle Joe. To Malawi was Bennie’s first. Going through turbulence we told him we were going to fall. Mock nervously gasped that the trip was going to turn into the movie
Airport.
The Malawi flight was one of the rare times I recall seeing Bennie terrified. While we joked about crash-landing in some vast unnamed African lake — Kariba, perhaps, which I knew full well we would not be crossing — I drifted into thought about the drama of the crash, how I would swim into the wreckage, pulling my friends to safety. I wished we would crash; I’d be a hero, my face — maybe with long hair that had grown in the months we’d spent on a lost island — on the front pages of newspapers all over the world.

The black air hostesses — the first I’d ever seen — wore little red caps with leopard-skin inlays and Dominic told me to pose for a photograph in the aisle beside the one who served us. She placed her hand on my shoulder. Mervyn pulled a disgusted face and I just laughed and dusted off my shoulder. Dominic and Mervyn seemed to have limitless supplies of film. They were perpetually looking through camera lenses, snapping even the most informal events and gatherings. I saved my twenty-four exposures for the fourteen-day tour: I was going to photograph Malawi and Tanzania on the other side of the lake.

Mid-flight, Uncle Charlie came to where Dominic, Steven and I were seated a row in front of Mervy, Bennie and Lukas. He leant across the seats and showed me my passport. He pointed at my place of birth,
Arusha
,
Tanganyika.
Dominic and Steven inspected the inscription. I laughed and said it was so long ago I had forgotten. Then he showed us Almeida’s passport, which had
Luanda
,
Angola
written in it. From behind us, Bennie, Mervy and Lukas rose in their seats. Uncle Charlie teased that Steven and I came from darkest Africa. Soon word spread and for the rest of the flight we heard from everyone except Dominic that Almeida and I came from kaffir-countries.

When Dominic asked about Tanganyika, I said I had been no more than a baby when we came out and that we never even spoke about it at home. South Africa was our country and, besides, both my mother and father, as far as I knew, I lied, were born in the Transvaal. In truth three generations of De Mans were born in East Africa with me being the last. But there was no way I was going to go into that. Two boys in the Senior Choir, Sullivan from Rhodesia and Viviers from South-West Africa, were also from outside, but those countries were different. They were run by whites. There seemed something shameful in the loss of our land and our citizenship to blacks. Added to that, perhaps more than that, I felt an unconscious awareness that to say my father and grandparents had been born in East Africa would, again, set me apart from an airplane-load of people who were born in places like Alberton, Benoni, Cape Town, Durban, Evander, Florida, Genadendal, Heidelberg, Indwe, Johannesburg, Kroonstad, Loeriesfontein, Malmesbury, Newcastle, Oudtshoorn, Pinetown, Queensburgh, Rouxville, Somerset West, Tulbagh, Uitenhage, Verwoerdburg, Worcester — was anyone born in a place beginning with X? — Yellowwood Park, Zastron. Once, in our first year, when questions of place of birth had arisen, I had simply lied and said: Durban. Now, mercifully, no one seemed to remember.

At Lilongwe we were prohibited from taking photographs of the airport. Our bags were opened and searched by the black hands of uniformed guards. The rest of Communist Africa, so Uncle Charlie said, was trying to overthrow
His Excellency the Life President of Malawi
and the soldiers couldn’t take chances that we had been used as innocent couriers of explosive devices or anti-Banda propagandist materials.

On the bus, along narrow tarmac roads, through villages, I kept my eyes on the countryside. It was, I could see from every bend in the road through the windows, just like the Tanzania of the slides and cines. Baobab trees, tall green grass, sugar-cane fields around mudhuts dotting the hillsides, red dust roads, goats standing on hind legs chomping from the lowest branches of thorn trees, women vendors by the roadside, dressed in colourful wraps frequently adorned with the face of President Banda. Lilongwe proper reminded me of a bigger version of Matubatuba. I wondered whether this was perhaps what Arusha looked like; Arusha at the foot of Meru, just on the other side of a lake we were to see within a matter of days.

Mosdy only a pair of us went with host families. Dom and I were lucky enough to regularly be together except when the overeager local tour organisers had already divided us to stay alphabetically. As Dominic was almost at the other end of the alphabet from me, I sometimes ended up with the wimpish Niklaas Bruin. Narrowly I missed being with Steven Almeida, separated as he was from me by only Belfore and Bruin. In one Blantyre suburb, Bruin and I lived with a family who had a black child. I couldn’t make out which of our hosts may be black as neither looked particularly dark. One afternoon after we ate at a table with the girl — the first time I had been seated at table with a black — I asked Bruin whether he thought she was adopted. Bruin said it wasn’t important and that people were people and what did it matter what colour they were? I said I wasn’t saying that the coloured child wasn’t a person, I merely wanted to know how our hosts could have produced a black child if both of them were so clearly white. Next day, Lukas reminded us of how Miss Roos had said that even if there was a hint of black blood four generations back in one partner, a couple could still
throw a black.
Or, even worse, a pink. An albino. Best, Miss Roos said, to check your family history and your wife’s family history with a fine comb before you have a child. One drop of black blood and a distant acquaintance of Miss Roos had thrown a black. The class was horrified. We teased Almeida with his smoky complexion that he’d better make doubly sure. In our Malawian hosts home, the thought of
throwing a black
now terrified me and I undertook to check our family tree again with Ouma De Man the moment I saw her after our return.

Lilongwe, Blantyre and Zomba. Lilongwe — no longer Zomba as I had read in one of the library books — was now the capital. We were taken around buildings and sights financed by money from the South African government. ‘My father’s taxes,’ Dom said. For the first time, ever, we had numbers of black people, smartly dressed, in the audience. Near Kasungu we visited a cigarette factory processing local tobacco. After warnings about any ideas we might have of smoking, we were allowed to accept cartons full of Malawian cigarettes as gifts for our parents. Mr Roelofse and Ma’am, who both smoked, tried the cigarettes and said they were terrible, but who were we to look a gift horse in the mouth? I took four: one each for Bok, Uncle Michael, Aunt Siobhain and Stephanie, who had also started smoking. Bokkie had recently quit after smoking for fifteen years: I just tell myself I never smoked, she wrote, whenever there’s the urge to light up. You never smoked, Katie, I say to myself, why would you want to start the silly habit now?

We sang in cathedrals, school halls and visited monuments to wars in places I could not even then name, let alone now try and recall. As a goodwill gesture we were scheduled to sing for an audience of Malawian schoolchildren. Before the afternoon concert, Mr Roelofse said we’d better be good because these piccaninnies, like all blacks, knew music. They had been born with the rhythm of drums in their bones. When the audience, seated on the floor of the little school hall, seemed unmoved by anything we sang or occasionally clapped in the wrong places, Mr Roelofse rolled his eyes at us and whispered: ‘Bushwhacked.’We giggled and he formed a shhh with his lips, motioning us to control ourselves. Even the Zulu and Sotho songs, with their rhythmical charm, left the audience unexcited. The concert was a dismal failure. Mr Roelofse said it was the first and last time he’d allow us to sing to an audience of musical unalfabetes. Someone suggested we should have let Almeida do ‘Oktobermaand’. Maybe that would have moved the audience as it had the pavilion in Paarl. ‘Jissis,’ Mr Roelofse said, ‘Ashierdie kaffirs nie eers vir ‘n Zulu liedjie kan klap nie, waar sal hulle kan klap vir ‘n Portegans wat in Afrikaans Oktobermaand probeer sing!’

Off afternoons, when not expected to be sleeping before concerts, we roamed the streets of Blantyre and Lilongwe shopping with our Kwacha for gifts from the markets and street vendors. Made from wood I didn’t know the names of, there was a vast assortment of masks, statues of human figures and animals, small tables, beaded jewellery and cotton crochet work. With extra tour pocket money Dominic and I went to an Indian tailor who made two shirts for me of batik. I would give one to Bernice. I bought salad spoons for Aunt Siobhain and beadwork for Bokkie and bracelets for Lena even though I knew she would never wear them. For Bok I got a wooden letter-opener. Much of the art was different from the crafts Bok sold, and I wished I had money to take home samples of things that might sell well in South Africa. I photographed a long-necked giraffe carved from a single piece of wood that stood as tall as me. Perhaps Bok could commission the Zulus to make those, give them the photograph to copy. We could, I was sure, become rich from tall wooden giraffes.