Virginia Teaching Roundup

< 1975. Teaching Staff. Mark Esslemont, wearing a tie, middle row.

Natal was hard-up for white teachers, so Poms were encouraged to immigrate. A shrieker lady Pom amused us. I taught her daughter. Geordie became Senior-Assistant teacher, teaching William the Conqueror, 1066 and all that, ignoring the Voortrekker Great Trek. SADF never conscripted Geordie, who read a BA at Natal University, and married a Durban girl.

Mevrou Graunch retired to everyone's relief. Dirty Mr. Scouse became VP, and his BO repulsed us. He returned to England to everyone's relief. He wasn't the first or last Pom to work in SA (protected by unwilling conscripts like me), who scuttled back to England during the 70s and 80s when SA got nasty. Mr Boop retired to everyone's sorrow. Mr. Ranter succeeded him to everyone's discontent.

Mr. Ranter stopped my Sunday tennis sessions, which I'd enjoyed for years. By the time we tennis players were in our 40s, I'd married, gone deaf and emigrated. Charlie emigrated to UK and married a nurse. Fraser became a bachelor banker, had a motor accident, and lived in a lunatic asylum. The other four married: two stayed in Durban, two including PP, went to the Cape, and divorced as they were moffies. All except Fraser fathered children.

Non-conscript Mr. Ranter skittered around school, forgetting Geordie and I were his only sports-coaching male staff. NED paid Mr. Ranter to spend taxpayers' money, but he neglected school cleaning and maintenance, although Zulu "boys" and Schools' Building Services did the work. Mr. Ranter neglected pupil discipline and allocated resources unfairly. Instead of improving teachers' classroom resources, Mr. Ranter hung curtains on corridor windows.

Over four years' teaching, I learnt that Journal and Daily Forecast (in my case Monthly Retrospect) record-keeping were time-wasters for me, and window-dressing for shloopy, white, male inspectors. After 2 years I knew the syllabi so well, I taught without prep. When my varsity exam-swotting clashed with my Virginia science exam-marking, I didn't mark my science exams. Instead I cooked science marks from my mark book, as I always had a positive correlation between my averaged test marks and my exam marks. Mr. Boop and Mr. Ranter never moderated my science exams, nor queried my marks. I expect those unmarked science exams are still archived in brown paper bundles.

As Virginia was a desirable white school, I had to mentor many college and varsity students when they did block-teaching. Management never acknowledged my mentoring expertise, nor paid me for my time-consuming mentoring. In other NED schools, I'd experience similar mentoring ripoffs: Principals took credit for mentoring student teachers, but mentor teachers got no credit.


Pompies and I were the only varsity Speech and Drama, part-time students who did professional acting, but actor pay was crap. Most part-time students were fat, white women, incapable of professional acting, but they all got their degrees.

My Speech and Drama major wasn't accepted by NED for salary increase, until I'd finished my degree. When I finished my BA, I decided to read my Speech and Drama Honours degree full-time, which would give me a masters degree teacher's salary. I would have seven years' tertiary education, including sciences and humanities majors - rare high school teaching combinations.

Hugh offered me an Edgewood drama lecturer post, which I declined.

Fraser and I dumped Paul's death mask in a telcon on Umgeni River bank, by Ellis Brown Viaduct. Months later, we told mom what we'd done with Paul's mask.

Angola Wars and Cantabile Singers

< 1975. Cantabile Singers at Llangollen, Wales. Con beside the drum. (Star Journal)

Portuguese colonial unrest: In 1974, the Portuguese army deposed the Portuguese Premier. (Marion Kaplan, Focus Africa, Elm Tree Books, London, 1983). In 1975, Mozambique and Angolan governments collapsed. Colonials fled to Portugal and SA. Frelimo communist Machel became Mozambique president.

In Angola, communist troops fought UNITA's warlord Savimbi and SADF support troops. Generaals griped, "Kommunis het gekom!" During the late 70s, troopies invaded and retreated from Angola several times. Two months before I married in 1978, SAAF Canberra and Buccaneer jets bombed Cassinga camp, killing 7oo refugees. (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, Vol. 2, Macmillan, London, 1999).

SA state censored information about destabilization and USA proxy-wars in neighbouring states. When conscripts completed their "bit on the border," they dispersed home throughout SA. A Thornville farmer's son we knew was blinded by a landmine. A Hillary family we knew had two sons killed.


PP's bother-in-law, a farmer, was shot by tsotsis on his farm near PE. The farmer's wife saw the murder, and ran away through bush to a neighbour.

PP and I joined ol' toppie Constance Munro's Cantabile Singers. There were English and Afrikaners in Con's white choir, but no Zulus, despite us singing Zulu songs at choir practices in Con's Manning Road home, while rehearsing for the Llangollen choir festival. While men sang in the back row in Con's lounge, PP and I ogled white girls' bottoms before us. Each week, Leah (17) won our Lucky Legs competition. We sang carols in churches and hospitals, including Entabeni, Addington, Marion Hill Monastery. Cantabile sang black resistance songs Nkosi Sikeleli Africa and Shosholoza...

"Leah's not at home (giggle)... Leah's not at home (giggle)..." said Leah's 20 year old, identical twin sisters, Bebs and Jay, when I knocked on Leah's front door. Leah and I dined at Mike and Janet's Restaurant, got tiddly on champagne, then danced at Dorian's Disco at The Edward hotel, talking non-stop, beginning a life-long romance.


Con wrote excuse letters, enabling PP and me to postpone our 1975 call-ups.

Llangollen choir festival: Nightly, after rehearsals, PP and I boozed with our Welsh hosts. Cantabile excelled at the festival, by singing Zulu and Afrikaner songs: Shosholoza; Bayandoyika; Uyangithanda, Somagwaza; Daar's n hoender wat n eier nie kan le... We performed on TV, were photographed, and signed autographs for thousands of spectators mingling with singers and dancers. We wandered about in volkspele costumes, or African kaftans and square-toed shoes.

After the festival, in London I saw Schofield's Prospero in The Tempest. Opening scene: White sail blowing in the breeze...

On a European Combi trek with Con, PP, others, seeing countries in my dad's stamp books, we camped in Switzerland beside a lake. A tempest blew up a valley, flattening our tents. Tree branches speared into caravans. I grabbed my collapsed tent, and ran to the Combi. I ran back to fetch a key from PP. People wallowed beneath wet tents. Wind howled, while PP screamed, "My pole's still up Mark..."

Back in Durbs, I introduced PP to my neighbour's daughter. PP married her, fathering four daughters. Twenty five years later, PP's wife divorced him.

Unrest: Cape Town skollies murdered mom's niece Moya, an architect student. Moya's brother, medical student, found her corpse in a morgue. As kids, we'd played together in their 'Maritzburg home. We'd scoffed delicious monsters, growing in their garden. Year's later, Moya's family emigrated to Northern Ireland.

Durban White Teaching and LM Trek

< 1974. One of Mark Esslemont's standard 5 classes, Durban North. (Mumby)

During my last two Virginia years, I taught in the main school building, teaching standards 4 and 5, science, two Afrikaans classes, and sport. A Pom music teacher, non Afrikaans speaking, taught my maths classes. A mother complained to Mr. Boop about my disciplining her daughter. Mr. Boop allowed the parent to berate me in a corridor, while he hid in his office mouthing, "She's a bitch..." Later Mr. Boop quoted AS Neill, "There is never a problem child. There is only a problem parent..."

Virginia flew sports teams to Jo'burg. Staff got drunk at after-sports functions, while parents billeted school kids. Male staff chatted up female staff. After a champagne-razzle, I accompanied a busload of kids all the way to Pretoria. Other staff trekked by car. Screaming kids didn't help my champagne-beer-brandy-babbelaas.

Back in Durbs, I watched a soccer match at Kingsmead soccer stadium, the crowd mainly Zulus and Indians. Whites sat on their grandstand separate from outcasts. At match-end, from the top of the grandstand, I watched Zulus flood from the stadium. A glass bottle flew up, crashing at my feet. It could've been a Molotov cocktail.

Mr. Boop gave me his geography notes, and I taught standard 5 geography. Mr. Boop went on long leave to Japan. VP, Mevrou Graunch, acted as principal, but did no ECA. She stole my English teaching-aids, when I was on study-leave. I sent a kid to fetch them from her. I marked books in an empty class, forgetting to teach Mevrou Graunch's standard 5 geography class. Mevrou Graunch complained to Ranter, "Why mus' ah sacrrifice mah frree perriods batting forr Marrk whenee mus' teach mah class?" Silent Ranter. I set a dictation for standard 5 classes, then gave my class the test. Mevrou Graunch hauled me into Mr. Boop's office. "Why've yous given da test wivvout mah perrmission? Standarrd five dictation tests should've been done togevva."

"I'll reset the test."


Red-haired Jane, Donna's Scottish friend, had small breasts and hairy legs. Jane and I drove to Swaziland in mom's brown Mini. At Mbabane, we swam in the mixed-race Casino Spa pool, and camped nearby...

We bounced along a dirt road to Piggs Peak, then followed Havelock Mine overhead-haulage-cableway over the mountains to Barbeton, back in SA... Beyond Sabie and Pilgrims Rest, Jane hit a rock in the middle of the road...

At Blyde River Canyon lookout, an oil-trail spoored mom's Mini. Cracked sump - empty. I asked a white motorist to call Graskop AA to send a tow-truck. Jane and I looked at Three Rondavels mountain. AA tow truck didn't arrive...

We coasted to a holiday-resort, where an Afrikaner manager put us up, free. At a whites-only restaurant, Jane flirted with a Swazi waiter. "Don't get starry-eyed with blacks," I said. "They're not like Europeans or Poms. You could be raped."

"Don't be a Twit."

I mended the sump with Pratleys Putty, then we drifted down Abel Erasmus Pass, beyond north-end of the Drakensberg into lowveld. By the time we reached stifling Phalaborwa, I'd been called, "Twit," six times. Jane hadn't washed since Swaziland.

In whites-only Kruger Park we viewed wildlife... The Mini grated. "Watch out for lions!" I said, stopping the Mini, and looking at the engine. "An engine-mounting has broken." Jane peered at the bush, while I hammered a wooden tent-peg between radiator and bodywork. The peg supported the engine, lessening grating.

At multi-racial Lourenco Marques, Jane showered at our cheap hotel, and slept in our double-bed. I slept on the floor. Next morning Jane asked, "Why didn't you sleep with me? - Twit!" What a pain! Jane was too naive to realize I could've dumped her anywhere in Zululand, Swaziland, Eastern Transvaal or Mozambique.

At a pavement cafe, Jane eyeballed Portuguese Rogerio, who flirted with Jane, before we saw her off at the airport.

At a bullfight in LM Bullring, horses galloped round the ring, tiring Bull, riders stabbing spears into Bull's shoulders. Eight Portuguese men stood in line, behind each other, Big Bloke in front, shouting at Bull. Bull charged. Just before impact, Big Bloke leapt onto Bull's head, between horns, grabbing Bull round its neck, his team grabbing Bull by the tail, slowing it down. Bull charged repeatedly, and eight men reprised. Crowd roared. Bull snorted, hoofing sand.

A black Matador, in dandy-dress like the rest, tight-arsed about, waving his cape, while Bull reprised. Crowd roared. Bull snorted, dripping saliva, snot, blood. Matador stabbed more spears into Bull's shoulders. When tongue-lolling Bull stopped: Matador stabbed Bull between Bull's shoulders, with a curved sword. Bull wasn't killed as in Spanish fights, and trotted from the ring with oxen, to be butchered afterwards. Crowd applauded, throwing flowers, hankies, hats into the ring. Bloody African afternoon, while Portuguese conscripts killed Frelimo terrorists in the north.

Rogerio, mechanic, fixed my Mini.

At Pretoria I visited lance-corporal Fraser, training as a white, conscript cook at Voortrekkerhoogte, his arms blistered by oven-burns.

At white Alberton Hotel, the receptionist winked at me, saying, "I'll put you up in my flat." His lounge had a statue of Michaelangelo's David. He handed me a drink, and returned to reception. Having driven from LM that day, I toilet-flushed my drink, then hopped into his double-bed, leaving my underrods on.

The receptionist slipped into bed, sliding his hand up my leg, trying to gryp. I turned onto my stomach, bugger didn't get the hint, tossing and turning, prostrate pas-de-deux. Annoyed at his arrogance I "woke up," pulling on my clothes, saying, "What the hell's going on man? You said you'd flat me, and you're in bed with me! I'll report you to the cops man!"

See Kruger National Park.


1974. One of Mark Esslemont's many soccer teams. Boy on Mark's left later worked with Mark at Kleinzee. Captain on Mark's right later became SA soccer captain. (Mumby)

Umzinto Commando Camp and UK Trek

Conscripts working a civvie "Key Position" were excused army call-ups. My teacher job wasn't a "Key Position." Many conscripts were students, or men establishing careers, reluctant to waste holidays playing troopies. SADF's solution during the seventies: increase commando basic to nine months; from 1972, increased to a year, Commandos then had to complete camps. After 1976 Soweto Riots, from 1977 Citizen Force troopies had to do two year's basic, then do eight camps. Volk and Vaderland, so-called privileged-white, apartheid beneficiaries paid with their time, some with their lives, while racist, exploitative parents wept. While this occurred, SA's economy boomed, and white immigrants (non-conscripts) poured into SA.

After basic, some graduate troopies' skills were used by SADF. Charlie finished his conscription by doing "camps" as an accountant. Sleeping at home, he worked at Natal Command while wearing commando uniform during "camp:" just cheap labour.

Younger schoolmates arrived at Umzinto bush camp, wearing officer shoulder-pips. Slapgat subversives like me thought army was crap. New RSM, PP called out those with "long hair." An army barber sheared us. Next day, top-brass had a tribunal, where 50 "criminals" sweltered. Kaptein, Majoor and Commandant lolled on their arses in a hot tent. PP ordered "criminals" in, one by one, and gave his list to friendly Pikkie, ordering us to sign our name on the list. After sweating hours in the sun, playing Dumb Troopie, I marched into the tribunal tent, bumping into the metal table, shaking top-brass from their catatonia. I saluted, staring into Commandant's eyes. "Plead!" he ordered.

"Not guilty."

"Why?" asked Kaptein.

"I had a crew-cut before camp."

"Guilty," said Majoor. "A fine will be deducted from your pay."

Commandant nodded. Bugger the troops. I saluted, about-turned, with a mighty boot-stamp, marching into the table on my way out. "Who's that soldier?" asked Commandant. (I wasn't ordered to act as lance-corporal at Umzinto).

PP asked Pikkie, "Where's my list?"

"What list?" Top-brass had lost troopies' respect.

Training was the same as other camps: rifle drills, marching, leopard-crawling, bush-patrols, ambushing, D formation, night-patrols, temporary bases, idiots shouting at their betters. We fired blanks with bren guns, and fired our new issue R1, 7.62 automatic rifles. While attacking "terrorists," Pikkie running behind me, fell into a hole. His rifle fired, peppering my right hand with brown-plastic-splinters. A live round would've severed my hand. Troopies gathered round, admiring the bloody damage a blank round did at close range. "My fok!" said Pikkie. Shocked, he handed me a tweezer, asking, "Fuckin' sore man?"

"Stront man!"

Majoor drove me to Natal Command, ordering me to wait for him. Doctor picked out more plastic splinters, then bandaged my hand. I waited hours in the sweltering heat, then AWOLled, by sauntering past the guard at Natal Command gate. Great security. I hitched home and showered, then mom drove me back to Umzinto. "You're in deep shit," Pikkie said. "Majoor searched for you just now."

Majoor shat me out, dismissing me, "Don' fokken do that again hey?" No DB.

Over the years, I picked out splinters rising to my skin surface.

One night-patrol, platoons ambushed a valley, waiting for "terrorists." Ambush-formation was capital H: along the lengths of the H, troopies lay along valley walls. I, with troopies lying across the valley in the middle of the H, wriggled into my sleeping bag, with my "wife" beside me. We pulled string, warning troopies, if we saw "terrorists." Brens hammering blanks from valley walls woke me, flames sprouting from barrels. "Terrorists" drank from my water-bottle. "Terrorists" removed bolts from our rifles: "killing" us. We would've been killed either by real terrorists or by troopies in crossfire.

Pikkie worked as a civvie blacksmith in Durban railway workshops. He'd soldiered in Ovamboland: "I drove a Jeep wivva 0.5 Brownin' machine-gun on top," he said. "Lekker powerful gun man! We set up a vehicle-ambush in a no-go area in the dark. Lights switched off, we waited..."

"When we heard someone walkin' through fokken whatchamacalls, we fired our machine-guns. I killed a kaffir-girl, an' 'er baby on 'er back, for sure. I know I shot 'em, as Brownin' bullets make lekker scorch -marks on flesh. No one else fired fokken whatchamacalls that night." Pikkie exemplified Dumb Troopies I'd met who'd fought kaffirs, kommuniste, terroriste - inner and outer enemies. Apartheid enabled Pikkie to boast about murdering blacks.

Cook didn't patrol, rose early, staggered about pissed, retired late: "'Ere's your kos yous okes." Cook ladled lumps into our dixies. "Enjoys your foods hey? I put bluestones in your koffies. Stops yous wanking hey?"

"Hey fokken cook!" complained Pikkie, "Fokken cheese I fokken jerk off while wanking by fokken railway forges, tastes better than this fokken stront man!"

One supper, we lined up with our dixies in the mess-tent. Cook had gas-cooked our steaks in paraffin, thinking he'd used cooking oil. No one ate steaks.


In December, at our Nairobi Airport stopover, a Kikuyu tribesman begged beside a toilet door... Mom, Fraser and I flew on to UK...

At Birmingham, dad's spinster-sister Wee Jean organized a silver-service meal at a hotel: wines served every course. My dad's UK family were Scots, full of medical and agricultural degrees. My engineer dad had left England for India and SA, married twice, and produced five children in SA. His three siblings had produced five kids amongst them. When Wee Jean asked Fraser about dad's stamps, Fraser said, "Dunno."

At Wrexham, we found dad's birthplace at Clayton Villas Stansty, then we drove around Britain.

In London, Fraser and I bought Soho strip-club tickets. A runner walked us through crowds, dumping us in a basement night-club, with a bar serving dear drinks and delicious dames. We sat on dirty chairs below a dingy stage. To music, girls stripped, and sat before us opening thighs and wet labia in our faces.

Sin Street, Lourenco Marques

< 1973. Mom's last year teaching at Durban North Primary. (Mumby)

Mozambique unrest: From 1964, in the north a civil war was fought between Portuguese colonists and Marxist Frelimo, Mozambique Liberation Front freedom-fighters, wanting independence from Portugal.

In mid 70s, Renamo, Mozambiquan National Resitance, was formed by the Rhodesian army to fight Frelimo during the Bush War, as Frelimo allowed terrorist training in Northern Mozambique, and terrorist raids on Rhodies from Mozambique. Frelimo fought Portuguese troops for eleven years, before gaining independence in 1975. Many Portuguese fled to Europe in 1975, after Frelimo gave them 48 hours to leave, with only 5 suitcases permitted per person. (Lisa St Aubin de Teran, Mozambique Mysteries, Virago Press, London, 2007).

Renamo continued civil war into the 1980s, fighting Frelimo government troops. After the Rhodie Bush War, SADF supported Renamo fighting in Mozambique. SADF Renamo HQ was at Phalaborwa, which I passed en route to Kruger National Park. SA destabilized Mozambique, as Frelimo allowed ANC bases in Mozambique. During 1980s, SADF and Renamo killed hundreds of thousands of Mozambiquans, either by war, or by causing famine. (Sean Moroney, Africa Volumes 1, 2, Facts on File, New York, 1989). Millions fled their kraals to beaches, cities and nearby countries. (Karl Meier, Into the House of the Ancestors, Inside the New South Africa, John Wiley and Sons, Inc., New York, 1998). SATV showed refugees fleeing to SA. Electric border-fences were built to stop black refugees. Some refugees were housed in camps, and repatriated. After 25 war years, Mozambique was one of the world's poorest countries.


In July 1973, slip-slopping along Durban Western Freeway, I hitched to Joeys. Gambler in a Chev picked me up. Gambler tried passing a meandering truck driven by Grinning Kaffir. Gambler swerved past on the gravel shoulder, then forced GK to stop behind us. Gambler ambled over to GK, grabbed his arm through the cab window, and donnered his face. Gambler ambled back to his Chev, grinning. Doing the ton over Van Reenens Pass, Gambler pulled down his sun-visor. A pistol fell on his lap. He waved his pistol saying, "Ja-nee. I need protection..."

At Jo'burg, I woke in the dark, looked through my window, and saw sparks by the Chev's front wheel. "Don' worry man," Gambler grinned, "My brakes are goin'..."

In midnight Joubert Park, I sat in a dwaal thinking, "Now what?" Joller weaved by, waving a dumpie, stopped, then invited me to his squat. I fingered my Toledo steel paper-knife in my underrods, and followed Joller, who offered a zoll. I declined, but dossed at his squat.

Offering a caravan at her Sabie farm, an Englishwoman said, "Eastern Transvaal's exshilly bootiful..."

On the road east Dronkie Shangaan said, "Put ya pack in da backa mah bakkie!" He offered a swig from his Castle Lager can. "Ah'm dronk Baashie. Drave me ta Komatipoort sho ah kin shober up. Drave me! Eef copsch ketch me dey'll geev me 'ell." Intermittently eastwards... "Shtop Baashie! Shtop! Ah needa pish. Pish!" At roadside stalls, Dronkie chatted up black-birds, while bumming fruit. We separated at Komatipoort: I to the white side of the passport-control building, Dronkie to the black side.

Outside Lourenco Marques's Eiffel-designed station stood a WW1 granite-statue of a heroic woman with bare boobs. I was gyppoed after drinking Krokodil River lowveld water. Station toilets were smelly with shit-sprayed seats and drums fulla kak-papier. Flies buzzed, while I stood spraying, below Eiffel's iron-roof dome.

I bought a beer in a Sin Street bar. Mixed-race couples flirted. A pretty, leggy coloured breasted over saying, "D'yo-wonno-fok?"

"No thanks."

"Koop moya bier." I bought her one, gulped mine and skedaddled.

Portuguese cops stood with black truncheons in Sin street. I strolled into a noisy bar and bought another beer. Fly-blown bulbs hung from a dirty ceiling. Sailors chaffed chicks, negotiating prices. Black whores took escudos up-front before leaving with men.

Whores returned, open for more clients. I didn't want to know them. A whore stuffed escudos in her bra, while I tried to separate her from a Portuguese guy, clawing his money back. A wig flew. Men laughed. Girls screamed. Grim faced cops wielded truncheons.

At a quieter bar, I ordered another beer and a basket of deep-fried prawns. I peeled crisp skins, ate flesh, legs, antennae. Sucked skins. Burped. Licked my fingers. Slurped another beer. Bliss.

At a street-market, I bought naartjies, bananas and bread from black ladies. SA white cities weren't like that. Two decades later, Mandela's people would squash apartheid, putting pavement-stalls on city streets. Sitting in sand, I watched two brown and white cocks fight in a cage, leaping over each other, stabbing with sharp spurs.

At an Esplanade table before Polana Hotel, I shared prawns with a Portuguese poof, practising his English. We drank wine, and the drunker he became, the more he rhapsodied LM Radio, LM Museum, Delegoa Bay, the white sandy beach before us. When he offered to manicure my nails, I left.

At dusk I jogged towards the airport, getting lost in a squatter camp. I sprinted past shanties. Candles and paraffin lamps flickered through windows. The air was charged with menace. Shadows scuttled from hut to hut. A brindled kaffir-dog fucked a skinny bitch. I splashed through stinking alleys, through shit, puddles, rubbish. On such a night, a whitey could be hacked to bits for muti. Airport lights guided me out, then I jogged through white suburbs back to my doss-house.

I was impressed by boxy Honda cars dodging around LM. Honda motorbikes were in SA, but no Honda cars. Decades later, I'd buy my own Honda runabout in NZ.

At Nelspruit a Boer said, "Jy praat goeie Afrikaans vir 'n Nataller." A Carolina English farmer hosted me. We fought a veld-fire hitting flames with green wattle-branches. The fire burnt out on the roadside. Next morning I saw scorched earth.

See LM Radio.

Transkei, Hindu Festivals and May Street Removals

1973. Indian Fire Walking, Cato Manor, Durban. >

On a January 1973 Transkei trek, I drove Fraser along a dirt road in mom's brown Mini to Holy Cross Mission, Bizana. Tambo and Winnie Mandela came from Bizana. Tambo was schooled at Holy Cross Mission. (Martin Meredith, Nelson Mandela A Biography, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1997). On the way, the car exhaust fell off. We reattached it with coat-hanger wire. Outcast piccanins raced from kraals, thrusting outstretched hands, calling, "Bonsella Baasie!... We had no sweets to give to the beggars.

The Anglican mission brick-church was cool inside. Red choirboy cassocks hung on hooks at the back of the dark nave. The church and sweltering hospital smelt African, a combination of wood-smoke, Nivea cream, Vicks Vaporub, disinfectant, sick-sweaty-bodies, despair. As Fraser had been SCA chairman at Northlands BH, he volunteered a year as hospital-orderly for outcast blacks: then was conscripted for privileged whites. SADF wasted over two years of Fraser's life.

Returning to Durbs, mom's Mini broke down in darkest Pondoland, the exhaust having cooked the boot battery, as we'd incorrectly reattached the exhaust-pipe alongside the battery-cable, running from boot to engine. I asked a passing black motorist to call a garage. A Pondo man brought a battery. "I've no money to pay," I said.

"Don' worry. Sen' me a check when you get beck to Debs. Don' worry!"


Rosie: "Come ta Indian Kavadi festival at Umgeni Road Temple Mak. Aai-yai-yai-yai-yaaai!" Rosie acculturated me her outcast Hindu way.

Sweaty, staring, half-naked Indian men and saried women danced entranced round the temple. Helpers caught falling devotees slipping into trance. Helpers forced skewers through devotees' tongues, cheeks, forehead skins. Shouting, chanting helpers struggled to shove hooks through skins of devotees' arms, chests, backs. Limes hung from back and chest hooks, like green dug layers. No blood. Staring, chanting, drooling, groaning devotees: clapping hands, clashing cymbals, thumping tambourines, banging tabla-drums. Singing helpers syncopate-processed round the temple. "Iinya-iinya-iinya -iinyaaa!..." chanted Rosie.

Priests thumbed ash-dots on devotees' foreheads. Hooks pierced a sweaty devotee's back, and the cart he pulled was attached to the hooks by ropes. One devotee trudged around the temple wearing six-inch-nail, wooden sandals. Camphor smoke and incense melded with smells of coconuts, bananas, mangoes, ripe fruit. On their shoulders, chanting devotees carried wooden kavadis, filled with fruit and garlanded with marigolds. Kavadi fruit was placed on a shrine in the temple. Priests hammered coconuts, offering coconut-milk and flesh to the stone idol Ganesha, elephant-headed god, and other stone gods.

Rosie: "Before kavadi an' fire-walkin' festivals, devotees purify dere bodies, by abstainin' from sex an' meat, an' all, mortifying dere bodies, hoping gods will notice dere devotion an ' spirituality an' all, indubitably blessing devotees an' families an' all."

Rosie: "Come ta Indian fire-walkin' festivals at Cato Manor an' Jacobs Temples Mak. Aai-yai-yai-yai-yaaai!..." Like outcast blacks in Joburg's Sophiatown and outcast coloureds in Cape Town's District Six, outcast Indians were forced-moved from Cato Manor black spot, according to Verwoerd's Group Areas dispossession laws. Cato Manor was bigger than Sophiatown and District Six. My maternal-grandfather's first wife, Jenny Cato's family had first owned Cato Manor.

During the 70s, whenever I drove along Bellair Road through Cato Manor, the Hindu crematorium still cremated Indians, although few Indians lived in Cato Manor anymore. I smelt corpses burning before reaching the crematorium, and the smell stayed after passing the wood-an'-iron Hindu Temple at the roadside, and long after passing the crematorium. During the 60s, 70s and 80s, Cato Manor remained wasteland, coveted by whiteys, as it was valuable Berea real-estate.

At the Hindu Temple near Wakesleigh Road, Indian assistants burnt logs forming a pit of hot, raked coals. Before fire-walking at Cato Manor, a skin-hooked, rope-pulling Indian devotee, pulled a wooden cart, with his hooked-skin wrenched from his back in a series of brown dugs. Dancing, chanting, clapping, drumming, cymbal -clashing Indians followed him from a stream. Fire-walkers, worshipping in trance, danced barefoot over coals. Women garlanded in marigolds, carried bronze pots on their heads. At the end of the smoldering pit, devotees splashed through a water trough, cooling their feet. No blisters, no pain. "How do devotees so it?" I asked Rosie.

"It'sa Tamil custom Mak. It'sa karma."

When karma of the 1950 Group Areas Act expelled Rosie from May Street black spot, she cackled, "It'sa heeeeluva t'ing Mak! We mus' renta concrete-block, double-storey Chatsworth 'ouse - one family on top, one below; or stay with family elsewhere. A helluva t'ing!" Jimmy built a room at his Gum Tree Road shanty in Jacobs, and Rosie squatted with Jimmy, his three wives and kids, and Shorty and Sita. Drunken Maharaj and his wife and kids had already been cast out to Chatsworth.

May Street Indian community was bulldozed. Only the mosque remained, as Dutchmen left worship places alone. It was the second outcast Indian community I witnessed destroyed by apartheid. As kids, Paul, Fraser and I had had sixpenny haircuts at the Indian barber opposite Rosie's slum house. We were the only white customers amongst black hair and Brylcreem. May Street Indian community wouldn't've been a slum, if there was no Group Areas removal threat. Rosie and her Indian neighbours had lived on valuable "white" CBD land.

Later, new Durban Station was built off Umgeni Road, near where Rosie's house once stood. Joshua Doore Furniture Mart and shopping mall was built, trapping station trade. In the 90s, the wasteland where Rosie's house once stood, was occupied by outcast Zulus, squatting in filth, under plastic sheets, cardboard and corrugated-iron: while white punters cavorted at Greyville Racecourse nearby.

May Street slum for Rosie and her extended family had been close to Umgeni Road buses, West Street white CBD and Grey Street outcast Indian CBD. Gum Tree Road squatter camp, Jacobs, put Rosie's outcast family far from jobs, increasing commuting times and costs.

Decrepit Rosie slept in our enclosed back porch - a sunny room. Rosie refused our khaya. We flouted the Group Areas Act for years, as Rosie was supposed to doss in our khaya. On warm afternoons, after work, I sat in Rosie's room, while Rosie reminisced... Rosie's room was close to our neighbour's house. He was a privileged whitey lawyer: arrogant, ignorant Northlands OB.

During weekends, I drove Rosie across town to visit outcast Jimmy. Pompies came once - from white, middle-class comfort, to enforced Indian degradation. I warned Pompies he must accept Jimmy's hospitality, no matter how full he felt. We ate a hot curry, while Jimmy, his three wives and kids watched us scoff every mouthful, under their hot iron roof. They smiled, rocking their heads, while we munched our meal. It was the second time I saw Pompies silenced out.

See Cato Manor Riots.

South West Africa Hitching

In December 1972, I hitched to South West Africa. After Upington, an Afrikaner lady picked me up, while her mampara son, result of desert inbreeding, sat between us. She asked me to drive west, as she'd driven all day and was tired. As it was my first desert visit, she insisted I stay in Karasburg with her. "It's impossible to hitch on Sundays," she said. It was my first experience of Afrikaner hospitality from a stranger.

A Boer dropped me off under a kameeldoringboom, saying, "If youz don' getta lif' juz'-now, youz muz walk along my dirrt rroad to my karrrakul skaap plaaz." He was bang I'd die of thirst.

An Englishman muttering, "You're mad!..." took me to Fish River Canyon, reputed to be the second biggest canyon in the world, after USA's Grand Canyon.

At Seeheim, we sank beers with a German taverner. "You're my last patrons," he said. "I'm retiring after thirty years in the desert."

At Keetmanshoop school rifle-butts, noisy natives scared me at dusk, so I slipped out of town and slept in the veld.

Billy, driving a Combi north, picked me up. On New Year's Eve, Billy and I pub-crawled Windhoek. I drank whiskey and soda, glad that Billy drove, as his body absorbed alcohol better. We trekked west via Mount Hakos over the Namib. Near Walvis Bay, we slid down giant coastal dunes. At Swakopmund, we poisoned ourselves with vrot hamburgers, and our projectile-puking coloured motel walls.

On the road north to Tsumeb, I wedged myself amongst three Ovambo men in their truck, sitting on top of the metal engine-cover. They didn't speak English nor Afrikaans. The afternoon was hot, the engine hotter. Ovambos offered me beer. I wondered if they were gun-runners. At stifling Tsumeb, a white poof tried picking me up in a hotel. "Ja-nee," I said. "My hairy arse was already burnt today."

Near Tsumeb, for decades, thousands of conscript troopies were brutalized, courtesy of Azanian taxpayers, at Grootfontein; Ondangwa; Rundu on the Kavango River; Katima Malilo on the Zambezi in the Caprivi Strip; proxy war in Angola.

After weermag army basic, Fraser would do three month border duties at Grootfontein and Rundu. He swam the crocodile-infested Kavango River, never seeing terrorists. He saw Ovambos and Bushmen trackers. I still have the carved Af face in a palm dish, Fraser brought home from the border. Some weermag conscripts had SWAPO Ovambo terrorist contacts, and during and after 1975, contacts with Cubans and Russians in Angola.

Two Afrikaner train-drivers drove me past Windhoek and Rehoboth baster-dorp. We braaied in the middle of the tarred-road beneath the Southern Cross. At Mariental, my chummies snored like diesel-units in their car, while I slept on the ground. Back at Keetmanshoop, it was futile hitching on Sundays. I waited for hours, carving my name in sweet-thorn bark, while traffic slouched by.

At Karasburg junction, a Swiss hitching to Cairo said, "I've hitched three days from Cape Town to Karasburg." He was over-dressed, had a larney rucksack, and didn't blend in. I hitched with a light pack, and covered my attached sleeping bag with a ground-sheet. Using white shoe-polish, I painted number-plate-symbols on my groundsheet, which drivers could see. I tried to look young and non-threatening, but hid mom's Toledo steel paper-knife in my underrods for protection.

A white Volksie-Beetle driver, a white student trekking from Windhoek to Cape Town, sped me south, across the Orange River, through Namaqualand...

At Paarl, I trekked through vineyards, as I wanted to get on the N1 to Bloem. An Indian businessman picked me up saying, "I don' usually pick up white hitchers, as the las' white ou I picked up asked, 'Why'd ya have a swanky Mercedes? Coolies aren't supposed ta have 'em...'"

Speeding north through the Karoo, seeing veld, koppies, horizon and sky, I sang, "Ringing out from our blue heavens..."

"Uit die blou van onse hemel..." cannoned the Indian.

At Three Sisters Junction, I waited till dusk. A donkey wagon rattled past - smooth tyres wobbling on a car back-axle; wooden crate on a car chassis. A coloured, migrant sheep-shearer sjambokked two plodding donkeys. His family, Hotnot wife with four snotkoppe, sat on belongings, trekking the Hottentot, migrant-Springbok way...

I searched for a safe doss-plek. Snake holes were everywhere. "Karoo's a helluva big pozzie..." I thought. "Snakes sliding into my sleeping bag...I could sommer vanish. No one'll find my bones..."

Next day, I hitched to Bloem, showered at aunt Dorothy's, and backspoored to Durbs. During my early teaching years, I hitched to many unknown parts of SA, as I couldn't afford holiday petrol-costs while driving mom's brown Mini.

See Fish River Canyon.

Natal University Drama

I shared cricket with Mr. Boop, who taught me leadership by example. Smarmy Ranter gave up national soccer refereeing to teach woodwork, and boss Zulu "boys" preparing sports-fields, by supervising grass-cutting, pitch-preparation, liming white lines. Ranter taught me soccer coaching, calling kids, "Meat Heads" and "Lame Brains." Coaching boys' sport bored me, as my Saturdays were stolen, watching schoolboy soccer, and umpiring schoolboy cricket. Besides directing drama skits, I coached swimming, and was swimming and athletics house-master, organizing training, heats, and events allocation. After four Virginia years, I was tired of school sports. Mr Boop allowed me and friends to play Sunday tennis on Virginia's new courts.

"Ngena! Hlala panzi!" said umnumzaan Mzolo, my varsity Zulu lecturer, when I knocked on his door. Mzolo lectured in English, explaining intricacies of inflected Zulu grammar and vocabulary. Most students knew amabele meant corn, but no student knew its other meaning. Mzolo grabbed his tits, saying, "Amabele." Outcast Zulus were few at Natal University. Their inferior bush-varsity was in KwaZulu.

Puppet Universities: Verwoerd had legalized racially separated universities. (Martin Meredith, Nelson Mandela, A Biography, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1997). Fort Hare University in Eastern Cape stayed a restless, black university. Tambo, Mandela, Hani were alumni. Other non-white, puppet universities were: Zululand (Zulus), which I passed en route to game reserves; Durban-Westville (Indians), where I watched some shows; Transkei (Xhosa), which I often passed in later years; Western Cape (coloureds) - a graduate would later teach my youngest son music; North (northern and southern Sotho). During my varsity years, later ANC luminaries Chikane and Ramaphosa studied at Turfloop, University of the North. Later, I'd have dealings with the QwaQwa southern branch. Vista University had black correspondence students.

Non-whites were allowed enrolment at white universities, only if courses, like English Speech and Drama, were unavailable at their separate universities. White universities were: Orange Free State (OFS); Rand Afrikaans; Pochefstroom; Witwatersrand (Wits); Natal; Rhodes; Port Elizabeth (PE); Stellenbosch; Cape Town. UNISA was a correspondence university open to all races. Later I'd work with white, black and coloured graduates from white and non-white universities.

At Natal University, Gillian Hurst taught us Martha Graham movement and Laban movement-notation. Prof. Scholtz, play director, eventually married Gillian. Mom's friend, drama-doyenne, Prof. Sneddon, lectured Shakespeare and Greek classics, emphasizing immutable laws: "Civilization's based on trust. Isn't it?...." Ol' ballie Joan Little called everyone, "Dear..." and drilled linguistics. She battled her new-fangled overhead projector, sometimes projecting transparencies onto the ceiling.

I acted in plays with prof. Scholtz, Pommie and Herrington. Pommie, my age, taught us Theatre Arts, and toured Central and South America for drama ideas, like Aztec, Inca, Maya civilizations. Herrington's video-studio videoed our magazine-programmes and plays. I saw a performance of Herrington's Ulster of the Southern Cross. Students got white, affirmative-action TV jobs after Herrington's video-production courses. When state-controlled SATV began at Auckland Park in 1976, TV was censored. Media contraventions got one gaoled, banned, banished, deported, silenced out. Years later the SATV Baas got an irate phone-call from Groot krokodil, President Botha.

At ol' toppie, Prof. Sneddon's Durban Theatre Workshop Company, Aliwal Street, I professionally played servant Klaas in Kom Ons Trek Tou, Scholtz's Boer War adaptation of Arms And The Man. I liked Shaw's soldier carrying chocolates instead of ammo. I excelled at playing Fools, and enjoyed comedy roles. I played dual-roles Militia Man and Lager Jew in The Representative, punching a fellow actor (one of my tutors Ian Steadman, playing a Jewish role opposite Dorothy Gould). Each performance, I seated a German Officer (Pommie) on a chair, and shaved him using a cut-throat razor. One champagne -pissed performance, I applied my razor to Pommie's throat. Eyes popping, Pommie leapt from the chair, spluttering shaving-cream, and wiping his face with a towel.

Mom retired early, after another nervous break-down. In Addington, she had ovarian cysts removed. I suspected melleril tablets, which mom's psychiatrist had prescribed for years, had caused mom's fatness. She'd thrown away her useless corsets and step-ins. Whenever mom had sat down, cyst weight had splayed her thighs. After the operation, I phoned the surgeon, asking for a prognosis. "Grave," he said. "She's got cancer. I excised most of her liver. She's got six months to a year to live." Fraser and I didn't tell mom, as we believed cancer knowledge would kill her. We knew radiation burning and chemotherapy poisoning were inadequate. Mom went into remission.

Privately, I played Ezeekial Cheever in The Crucible, directed by Hugh at Edgewood. I played a chorus-line part for Westville Theatre Club's Guys and Dolls. I shagged a woman in The Reeve's Tale for Q Players at Greyville Race Course, near Rosie's May Street slum.

My script intermittently changed in my fantasy life and my real life. I played Lancelot Gobbo opposite Pommie's Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice, while Prof. Scholtz played Shylock. Lancelot's words, "'Conscience,' say I 'you counsel well.' 'Fiend,' say I 'you counsel well,...'" summarized apartheid's moral dilemma we faced. Wearing a Fool's wicker-hat with a wiggly ping-pong ball on top, I stole the show, as white, teenager groupies enjoyed my acting. Pommie was peeved when I, "a student," took curtain-calls with him and Ian Steadman, my age. Ian became a Wits lecturer.

Pommie helped us part-timers, by telling us what not to learn for Theatre Arts exams. Pommie (never conscripted) sent his Natal wife to USA to have their baby, then re-emigrated, after benefitting from apartheid, becoming a USA drama professor.

Most part-timers were busy teachers, attending evening lectures. Some outcasts attended part-time varsity with me. Mrs. Africa and Nick, an Indian schools' inspector, read drama with me. Nick also read English, French and Zulu with me. We called each other "umnumzaan" - gentleman. I seconded Nick when he ran his first Comrades. Nick emigrated to NZ, but returned. Post-apartheid, Nick was carjack-murdered in Durban.

Pompies, whitey student, taught at Jewish Carmel College (which closed past-apartheid for want of pupils). One night, a white lady student invited Pompies and me to her Berea home for tea. She tearfully told us her husband was screwing an Indian employee. Skande! Her husband breached the Immorality Act, making criminals of her whitey husband and Indian lover. Pompies and I silenced out, as she was setting us up as accomplices to her shame.

Pompies played squash and the piano, and his Light My Fire mobile-disco played the latest hits. Before exams, we revised together at his Yarningdale flat. After studies, we pub-crawled Marine Parade. After graduating, Pompies read his teacher's diploma at London University, then led drama, science and sports at Northlands BH.

As a young teacher earning an m-plus-3 salary (matric plus 3 years' training), dating girls was expensive. I had little money to impress non-Dutch-going girls. During early teaching years, I dated girls whom I met at schools, church, varsity, and through friends and family. No-one lasted, as we had little in common, and I was busy with varsity and teaching. Some of us part-time varsity students socialized at restaurants, movies, discos, balls, pubs, parties and theatre shows. I admired NAPAC's production of As You Like It, especially Jaque's "seven ages" speech. I knew I'd played many parts, and in future I'd play more unknown parts.

After engineering in Umlazi for years, and lecturing in Rhodesia, Donna's dad emigrated to England with his new family, eventually settling in Canada. Donna married her fundamentalist engineer at a teetotal wedding. There, I drank Coke and Fanta. When I quaffed Mountain Dew and Hubbly Bubbly I was maudlin.

See Virginia Preparatory (Primary) School.

Virginia Primary School Teacher

1972. Mark Esslemont's first standard 4 class, Durban North. (Mumby) "Mark you!" >

White Virginia Primary would be my hottest donkey wagon ride. Virginia had 7 class levels - class one to standard five (year 7): 21 classes, about 30 pupils per class. Annual enrolment: about 630 pupils. I began white teaching with white staff, who'd begun careers before apartheid, like mom. Ol' toppie headmaster, Mr. Boop had been a businessman before resuming teaching. His black leather shoes had a military shine. He'd fought in Italy during WW2. He raised Southern Cross funds for Boys on the Border. Virginia overlooked N2 freeway, Virginia Airport, Indian Ocean, a bushy valley on the south border. White suburbs sprawled northwards to sugarcane fields.

Mr. Boop led Virginia with wisdom, unashamed to weep at an assembly when announcing a wall had fallen on children at a nearby school, after heavy rains, killing them. He kept golden pheasants, and renovated his upper Durban North home. Mr. Boop was executive president of Natal Teachers Society, and negotiated better wages for white teachers. Mr Boop helped buy NTS Florida Road HQ, and re-varnished Victorian banisters there. He got a bank overdraft, built a school pool, tennis courts and prefabs, which accommodated growing enrolment. NED bureaucrats complained, as they disliked Mr. Boop's financial acumen.

"Go buy science equipment!" said Mr. Boop. At Protea Holdings and Baird and Tatlock, I bought equipment and chemicals to last for years. In my hot science prefab, my standard four (year 6) pupils were "problem pupils" experienced teachers had rejected.

Ranter, woodwork-master, ranted to me: "Two boys failed, who shouldn't've failed!"

Bumtiddy, their former teacher, slack, menopausal male, who chanted, "Bum-tiddy-bum-tiddy-bum-bum-bum..." to himself in the corridors, had failed the boys, who'd languished most of the previous year outside Bumtiddy's class. Ranter wanted me to battle Mr. Boop to pass the boys belatedly. I let it pass, and Mr. Boop early-retired Bumtiddy.

A girl was raped by her father, smelt of urine, and disturbed other girls. Another girl's father was jailed for embezzlement. A one-armed boy dolphined in the school pool during PT, and played one armed cricket.

Another boy was hairier than me. A girl's nanny had saved her during the Congo Simba Rebellion in Stanleyville, by hiding her in a barrel, then ghosting her away. I had a termagant Jewess, and the rest were slow learners with fidgety, defiant behaviours. I hadn't heard of ADHD, or ODD, or Specific Learning Disabilities, the labels weren't used yet, but ADHD pupils. ODD pupils and bozos jolled in my class. A freckle-faced boy sometimes flailed his arms, saying, "Thir I need a pith!"

When my class failed exams Mr. Boop complained, so I dropped my high-school-trained expectations, passing every pupil at year's end. As no teacher wanted my class the next year, I taught the same pupils - a Danish educational idea. I grew with my pupils. All passed standard 5, prepared for high school. Parents appreciated my efforts with gifts.

After three years' biology teacher training, my salary was about 200 Rand net per month. Men weren't attracted to teaching. I paid monthly pension contributions, which NED would repay with low interest, should I resign. I paid into the Public Servants Medical Aid Association scheme, which didn't benefit me, as I never took sick-leave during my ten NED teaching years. I didn't get a housing subsidy. Most of my salary went to mom for lodging. The rest went on travel, car maintenance, varsity expenses. I took paid study-leave for varsity exams. Durban white schools were similar in physical and academic standards to first-world schools I later saw during my overseas treks.

Non-white teaching perks were less than white teaching perks. Non-white schools had overcrowded classes. Before apartheid, some blacks were well educated in mission-schools, which degraded during apartheid, due to poor state funding. Mandela and Tambo were mission-school generation. Thereafter, Verwoerd's Bantu Education splintered blacks into degraded education, qualifying them for menial jobs. Deja vu: During WW2, Nazi Himmler had wanted defeated Poles to have degraded labourer education. (Laurence Rees, Auschwitz, A New History, BBC Books, Britain, 1999). Black pupils started school older than white kids. Black Bantustan boys often did herd-boy duties, as cattle-wealth was used as lobola to buy wives. Mandela had herded cattle at Qunu, before starting mission-school. In the 70s, some black pupils were 20 years old, or older. When I began teaching, some blacks my age, or older, were finishing inferior studies in black high schools.

Affirmative-action white principals were paid according to qualifications, experience, school size. Principal's pensions were calculated according to pupil roll during the last years of a principal's tenure. Most white principals and teachers retired aged 65. If sick, they were boarded earlier. In NED white schools, teaching and secretarial staff were white, but Zulu male staff, living in a school khaya, were employed as cleaners, gardeners, groundsmen, Gestetner operators, messenger "boys." Mr. Boop sacked two Zulus caught buggering in a school kitchen by a school secretary. Apartheid zeitgeist forced migrant-labour, black men, lucky to be employed in white areas, to exist in small khayas, or overcrowded hostels. Their outcast families were forced to exist on the "farm," in degraded, overcrowded homelands.

Fraser (18) was in Northlands matric. We trained for Comrades Marathon by running 10-milers thrice weekly, and doing longer weekend runs. Dad had left his stamp on Fraser and me: assertive young men, softened by the women in our lives. At Durban City Hall, 1180 runners began Comrades Marathon. Mom drove her Mini along the course, carrying refreshments, while Charlie seconded. Fraser and I ran until we hit Inchanga wall, then walked every hill thereafter. I developed egg-sized blisters, and wouldn't've finished, if I didn't have a pair of old takkies in mom's Mini. I hobbled up Polly Shorts. Fraser ran ahead: placed 673rd in 10 hours 6 minutes. My place: 722nd in 10 hours 13 minutes. Mike Orton had won in 5 hours 48 minutes. (Morris Alexander, The Comrades Marathon Story, Juta, Cape Town, 1976.)

See Mandela's 1957 Opinion on Bantu Education.

Rhodesia Trek

On my Christmas Combi trek to Rhodesia with Joe, Botswanan roads were corrugated dirt. Botswana was a big cattle ranch with poor Tswana herdsman. At Gaberone, a Tswana cop detained Joe in front of a store: "Yo' hev pukked on a yello' line seh!"

"What yellow line?" Asked Joe. Cop scuffed his foot on the only tar strip in Gaberone main road, exposing a faded yellow line below dust. Off we went to the cop-shop, cop walking, Joe driving behind cop. At the cop-shop, wanting to pay the fine, we argued with four gesticulating cops. "We must be at Victoria Falls on Monday," said Joe. "We must pay our fine now!"

"No seh! Yo' mus' wet fo' de megistret who comes to de court on Mondey. Mondey!" Maybe they wanted a bribe...

Near Francistown, we slept on the roadside. In my sleeping bag, I thought of Shona and Matabele terrorists...I drove a long, dusty trek to the Botswana-South West Africa-Zambia-Rhodesia border. Along the way, Tswana road-workers sjambokked oxen-teams pulling chopped-down acacia trees over corrugations to flatten the road surface. Road-graders were non-existent: an indictment of former British control. Later, roads were tarred when USA funded improvements of the BotZam Road, and when De Beers and Botswana state ran Orapa, Jwaneng and other diamond mines. (Guy Arnold, Africa A Modern History, Atlantic Books, London, 2005).

We looked at Mosi-oa-Tunya, Victoria Falls, and chucked stones into the Boiling Pot from Vic. Falls Bridge. At Wankie Game Reserve, we looked for elephants, but saw none. Eastern Matabele bush would witness massacres during the 70s Bush War, and afterwards during the 80s, when thousands of Matabele were killed by Mugabe's Shona 5th Brigade, trained by North Korean, commie minions. After Bulawayo, Khami Ruins, Motopos Hills, Zimbabwe Ruins, eastern game parks, Salisbury, we trekked to Durbs, via Zululand game parks, where we swiped two rhino skulls lying in the bushveld: good teaching aids.

See Victoria Falls from Zambia.

Dokkies Roundup

1971. Mark Esslemont playing The Little Prince in 'The Stolen Prince'. (Burge) >

I cancelled my extra-maths classes and bunked Dokkies lectures to swot for varsity exams. Meneer Arend phoned: "Meneer Ezzlemont, why'rrre youz nottat kollege?"

"I'm swotting for varsity exams."

"Youz muz' rreturrn ta kollege an' atten' alla lekshiz!" Broeder Bul betrayal? On our last lecture day, Meneer Arend swooped into our class, to disingenuously present each of his last Engelse studente with a big English-Afrikaans dictionary. Pity Zulu wasn't taught at Dokkies, as Natal's population was mostly Zulu. Portuguese and German, spoken in Mozambique and South West Africa, would also have been useful. Rosie's Hindustani would've been very useful.

Our psychology lecturers had sometimes quoted from Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa. I failed to relate my coming of age amongst Zulus, Indians and Afrikaners with Pacific Samoans. Although communism was the "threat" of my generation, Dokkies psycho-lecturers espoused Pavlov, amongst other learning theorists, so Afrikaner studente were classically-conditioned to salivate over signals of volk, taal, kerk, kultuur, rugby, conscription, paternalism: the rewards being privilege and superiority of the volk over outcasts.

I passed varsity exams well. As I had one week's swotting time for Dokkies work, I stayed at Donna's pozzie, where we swotted biology. Lert tablets were useless, so I bought dexidrine tablets from my Broadway chemist to keep me awake. Donna tried a few, and had a fit at supper. Her step-mom shat me out.

My Dokkies diploma was my donkey wagon dompas. I qualified as a biology fundi, aged 20 years 3 months. We applied to 'Maritzburg Head Office for white teaching posts, expecting to have our white school choices ignored. We expected to be sent to Babanango, Zululand, or elsewhere. Most new teachers were posted away from Durban. I was posted to white Virginia Primary, Durban North. Principal Mr. Boop had coached me extra-maths before I matriculated. He needed sports-balls on his staff, as he had too many sports-slack lady teachers. I'd live at home and continue part-time varsity. During the next two decades, I'd teach in six white state schools in Natal and the Cape, none of which would expect me to attend job interviews.

After our graduation ceremony, students gathered around Meneer Duifie's desk, jostling to receive exam-results certificates. I farted like a honey badger, then wandered off, returning my locker key to Broeder Bul, who became NED biology inspector. Later, Meneer Duifie cooed, "Meneer Ezzlemon,' youz teachirrz muz' get dizziplin' hey?" Meneer Duifie's son became 'Maritzburg College principal, then NED English inspector. I was the last English student to leave Afrikaner Dokkies.

At Dokkies and in the army, I'd met good and bad English and Afrikaners. I'd broken away from Durban North and the "Durban North smell." I'd survived conscription. I'd learnt about travel, sciences and arts, but was skeptical about Afrikaner domination. My deceased father and maternal-grandfather were Poms. I'd visited England. Although I spoke English, I wasn't English. I wasn't an Afrikaner, although mom's Hendrikz blood flowed in my veins. Dokkies studente and troopies had 1920s Broederbond brainwashing, like volk, taal, kultuur kerk. (RW Johnson, South Africa, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2004). I found some Afrikaners easily led, selfish, brutal, hypocritical, anti-English, belittling.

Apartheid separations had succeeded with me. Only contacts I'd had with outcasts were on a master-servant basis. I knew no educated blacks, coloureds, Indians. I had no non-white friends. I was schooled in English-medium white schools, and had led white students. I'd graduated as a white biology teacher, with zoology distinction, from a white, dual-medium teachers' training college. I spoke English, satisfactory Afrikaans and a bit of Zulu. Donna was so impressed with our slack lecturers, she wanted to be a lecturer.

I was repelled by Dokkies's Afrikaner kultuur, including conscription, tyrannical Afrikaans, and apartheid affirmative-action for minority whites. Exclusive pseudo-intellectual Afrikaners I knew at Dokkies, differed from my loving, inclusive Hendrikz tannies at Somerset East. For twelve years, at Durban schools and Dokkies, I'd had compulsory Afrikaner brainwashing. Enough was enough! Compulsory English and compulsory Afrikaans were the two subjects I'd done most so far. I'd travel further with English. At varsity I had choice.

An expat Rhodie had dropped out of Natal varsity, battled to learn Afrikaans, but acted in Hugh's plays and completed his Dokkies diploma with me. He avoided both Rhodesian and SA conscription, and later became a white school principal.

I'd ridden the donkey wagon for three years at Dokkies, and would ride it for another ten years in Durban white schools. Dokkies had failed me by not training me as a sports coach. Not all students did PT training. Halfwit lecturers, far from ,"the classroom situation," didn't tell us that new teachers would have to carry experienced, slack teachers, by doing extra ECA, which would waste our evenings, weekends and holidays. That vital "volunteer" aspect of teaching was never explained at Dokkies. Neither did lecturers inform us that conscript teachers would have to coach cadets.

I didn't believe in Verwoerd's crappy Bantu Education turning out rubbish blacks, which was also never discussed at Dokkies. I didn't believe in Calvinist, Christian-National-Education (splintered white education) although I'd teach in white apartheid schools, turning out militarized, racist whites. I didn't believe in minority Afrikaner domination, forcing me to belong to the Natal, white, English tribe, Durban North clan, teaching faction, separated from outcasts. My conscience options were stirring; family destruction; jail; exile; swimming with the rip, rather than against it. I did the first and the last.

Another 19 years of brutal apartheid would pass, before non-whites would be educated in state, white schools, and the five separate English, Afrikaner, Indian, coloured and black education systems would be abolished. I was a Natalian - a white man, despised by Afrikaners for being Natal Engels en Rooinek, and loathed by outcasts for being supremely white during apartheid, with all its privileges. I jogged the green, middel-mannetjie track, between the stony tracks of minority white nationalism / fascism, and majority black nationalism / tribalism. My ocean - Indian; my river - Umgeni; my hill - Berea, where my ancestors rested; my totem: "Haha-ha-ha-haaa..."

Post apartheid, Dokkies became dual-medium again for English and Afrikaners.

See Broederbond 1918-1965.

Eston Commando Camp

Durban North Commando parades were switch-off kit-inspections at Old Fort Road Drill Hall. The mad idea was that troopies could accumulate parade attendances instead of "holiday camps." We had shooting parades at Umgeni Estuary rifle-range, another switch-off. We shot bren-guns, sten-guns, R1s and .303s. In rifle-butts we manipulated targets, then listened to rounds hitting targets. Playing Dumb Troopie, I avoided parades: not the only avoider. Troopies received a written-order switch-off: "Store Emergency-Rations at home, in case of Emergency call-up!" I stored rations under my bed, until I realized the idea was stupid. An oil pipeline burst into a canal near Durban Harbour. Emergency! I wasn't at home. Next parade, PP, recently promoted to RSM, asked, "Where were you when the pipeline burst?"

"Screwing my chick." Parades soon fizzled.

I got a call-up for PP's NCO course, run during weekends, another switch-off. We patrolled sweet-thorn bush and wattle plantations near 'Maritzburg with .303s and brens. We did leopard -crawling; temporary bases; radio procedures; signalling. We leapt in and out of a hovering Puma helicopter, which flew over Durban beachfront back to Natal Command. Taxpayers paid a fortune for Dumb Troopies playing soldiers. PP ordered me into a Drill Hall office, saying, "You failed my course. You're not NCO material."

"I failed as I AWOLled most of your course, and because I didn't lick your fat arse." PP glared. We were both 19 years old. We were schooled in Durban North, had attended Dokkies together, rock climbed together, acted on stage together, did basic together. PP had fixed my moped. Apartheid splintered us as friends or enemies.

Durban North Command HQ, originally on Soldiers Way opposite Durban Station, later moved to Mount Edgecombe. Older, non conscript men, escaping families, volunteered for camps to play Dumb Troopies. At Eston bush camp, PP and other brainwashed troopies, who'd finished NCO courses, ordered old school-mates around. Officers, captains and majors also ordered troopies around. Promotions came quickly to toadying troopies. Durban North Command, supposedly English, included Engelse-Dutchmen, Afrikaners, Jews and other European troopies, a mixed bunch of whites all obeying call-ups. Not a non-white, nor female in sight. Commands were in English and Afrikaans.

One dawn, RSM PP and his brother, promoted to sergeant, strode amongst tents: "Opstaan! Wakey! Wakey! Rise and shine!" ordered PP. "I'm ordering you to be acting lance-corporal for your section!" I acted as lance-corporal at Eston camp, detesting it: just a messenger boy and bren-gun carrier.

One dusk, PP swayed on a mess table, lecturing troopies about, "Terrishtsh." What did pissed PP know? He'd never met a terrorist.

One evening, I hitched with a carload of volunteers AWOLling to Durbs, as there were no passes from camp. The driver lurched along the freeway, while his connection slashed from an open door. They left me at Tollgate Bridge. I strolled to Joe's flat on Ridge Road, showered for the first time that week, then Joe drove me back to Eston, where gate-guard Charlie asked, "Where've you been man?"

"Strolling." Charlie didn't report me. He thought like me: "Fuck the army!"

Training, the same as other camps included ambushing drills. We night-marched to Cato Ridge rifle-range, while top brass trekked in PP's Bedford. I staggered over roots and rocks in the dark, blindly clutching Charlie in front. 03:00 We arrived, tired and disorderly. I didn't bother to shoot, as my rifle would need cleaning afterwards.

Back home, I stowed my rifle in dad's oak-cupboard, and decided not to use my .303 again. I reckoned if Broederbonders wanted conscripts to use WW1 and WW2 .303s against commie AK-47s, then, "Stuff them!" Years later, when I returned my .303 to the Old Fort Road tiffy, he nearly had a stroke. Thick rust stopped him seeing the light through my .303 barrel. Thereafter, I was issued with an R1 automatic rifle only for the duration of camps. I wondered why other Dumb Troopies and I got away with slackness at Durban North Command. Perhaps conscripted officers' hearts weren't into punishment and patriotism, or civil war against outcasts. Perhaps keen troopies like PP secretly destroyed mates' bad records in administration. Perhaps Durban North Command, newly formed after my 1967 conscription, just silenced out.

Natal University Versus Dokkies

1971. Mark Esslemont playing Charlies Aunt in 'Charlies Aunt'.

Back in Durban Charlie, who'd begun BCom at Natal University, had stolen Ursula. I silenced them out for a year.

I registered at Natal University, for whites, to read my part-time BA. I'd ride the varsity donkey wagon for six years. Dokkies and varsity were infested with BOSS spies: English and Afrikaner students paid by security -police to betray classmates. I was careful what I said to suspect informers. For years, whenever I used our home phone, I heard, "Click-click-click..." and eavesdropped conversations. Who'd tapped our phone?

Those were days of house-arrest, detention without trial, passport confiscation, deporting, banning, banishment for those agin' the government. Once, I saw Ursula's sister pumping Black-Power salutes, singing, "We Shall Overcome..." at a Gardiner Street Cenotaph demonstration. "What idiots!" I thought. Their photos would've been snapped by security-police. After the protest, white students all went home.

I was busy with Dokkies and varsity studies, and teaching extra-maths lessons, paying mom back my travel loan. I remember posters on varsity notice boards: "Vote Charles Nupen for SRC President." Nupen later became a labour mediator. His political-science lecturer was Richard Turner, who was banned for years. Later in 1978, my marriage year, Turner was shot dead in his Durban Bellair home. (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, Vols. 2 & 3 Macmillan, London, 1999).

Other posters: "NUSAS - Emergency Student Body Meeting;" "Vote SASO." Dokkies never had emergency student body meetings. Biko, reading medicine at Umbilo medical faculty, formed the SA Student Organization. Biko's black exclusiveness sounded similar to Afrikaner nationalism. I wondered what Biko's Africanists offered SA? Later in 1977, Biko was arrested near Grahamstown, beaten by security -police, transported naked in a police-van from Port Elizabeth to Pretoria, where Biko died. Biko was buried at black Bisho, near white King Williams Town. (Martin Meredith, Nelson Mandela, A Biography, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1997).

Over the years, I majored in English and Speech and Drama, easy varsity majors improving my teacher's wage. In 1970, Prof. Sneddon and Prof. Scholtz of the varsity drama department had helped Msomi produce his black Umabatha - Macbeth, which was performed in London, and world toured. In May 1994, Msomi managed President Mandela's inauguration at Pretoria Union Buildings. Sneddon and Scholtz weren't the only whiteys using Zulus in plays. In 1960, post Sharpeville massacre, Alan Paton had used Zulus in his Mkhumbane musical in Durban City Hall. (Alan Paton, Journey Continued, Oxford University Press, Cape Town, 1988.)

Varsity student called Dokkies, "The Funny Farm." Hugh, promoted to head of Edgewood's drama department, directed Charlies Aunt at Dokkies, "where the nuts come from." I played Lord Fancourt Babberley.

For two years, I'd listened to Donna's boyfriend woes, and endured her jabbering about religion, academics and menstruation. Sometimes at Dokkies, Donna asked me to check the back of her dress for blood-spots. When we studied "Reproduction," the Afrikaner lady lecturer asked me for a sperm sample. I refused, while Donna and Katie giggled. The next day, we didn't ask where the lecturer's sample came from.

Donna's dad, WW2 veteran, had threatened to castrate Donna's boyfriend, so Donna and I dated, mainly because I drove mom's new, brown Mini, and Donna was tired of bussing. Three years older than me, Donna and I studied erotica in Broeder Bul's lab, Burman Bush, Mitchell Park, other places. We lumbered at The Graduate movie, starring Hoffman. Donna's parents encouraged my good influence on Donna, as Donna had repeated first-year. We had candle-lit meals at their Morningside home, served by Gladys their Zulu maid.

< 1971. Mark Esslemont in Valmai Esslemont's brown Mini, 22 Chelsea Drive, Durban North.


One afternoon, Gladys and another maid fought in the street, ripping off clothes and wigs, scratching faces, then Gladys sat on her rival's belly, keening and thumping her head on the road. I separated them, ordering Gladys into my car. Gladys adjusted her clothes, while her rival scuttled off. A white man, who'd watched the fight, strolled over saying, "Servants must sit at the back!" I glared at the moron, and drove Gladys home.

For a zoology bone-project, Donna and I killed two rabbits, by forcing them into buckets with chloroform inside, then sitting on the bucket -lids, until the squealing, bouncing rabbits expired. We dissected the rabbits, boiled the bones, chemically bleached the bones, then mounted the bones on wood as a skeleton-model. After I began teaching, my Zulu and Indian lab assistants killed rabbits, frogs, mice and rats for dissections.

Donna was depressed by her parents' divorce. She played the piano, soothing her nerves. Our romance didn't last, as Donna dated a Christian fundamentalist, engineering student (Natal's Bishop Colenso had refuted fundamentalism in the 1860s). Donna then tried persuading me that Darwin's evolution theory was wrong.

Dokkies cherries wore mini-skirts, and Skelm followed cherries upstairs, while a Zulu cleaner wanked in a broom cupboard below. I dated Katie, who'd dumped her Engelse-Dutchman boyfriend, my SRC rival. Katie flicked her brown hair over her shoulder, her mini-skirted legs more alluring than English lectures. After dates, late at night, Katie's ma glared at me, in her nightgown, while Katie and I chatted over coffee in her lounge. On her 21st birthday, Katie's pa presented Katie her funeral insurance policy. Katie did a fourth year's study at Nokkies, then married Nokkies SRC president.

Our Dokkies English head was an alcoholic, his daughter, fellow student, was anorexic. A Pom, an Irishman and a South African dying of cancer, were English staff, whose English literature was ineffective against Afrikaner domination. Hugh, directing English and Afrikaner students in English and Afrikaans plays, was most tolerant. I watched an Afrikaans choral-verse rehearsal, done by the Afrikaans department, where studente ranted about Boer War konsentrasie kampe. The Boer War had ended 70 years before, but Afrikaners never forgave Brits for destroying their women and children in camps. Afrikaner students were brainwashed by Afrikaner lecturers with historical grievances, soiling Afrikaner-English student relations, and brainwashing new Afrikaner teachers to indoctrinate the next Afrikaner generation against Engelse.

Late one night, when I arrived home, lights blazed, while white cops left. Deaf mom sat on her sofa. A Zulu thief had smashed the glass of our front door, sneaked through our home, striking matches and putting on my clothes. He stole my only suit and Bata Toughees. Mom was woken by the kaffir, illuminated by a match at her bedside. "MARK! FRASER!" yelled mom. Kaffir fled. Mom burglar-guarded the door, and replaced our hedge with a concrete wall, making our bungalow a Boer War blockhouse. Mom bought a .22 Astra automatic pistol, which she kept by her bedside for the rest of her life.

See Steve Biko.

Britain and Europe Trek

During my Johannesburg flight I wrote to Durban North Command, requesting a call-up deferment, and posted my Dumb Troopie letter at Jan Smuts Airport. Call-up deferment was easy, If I posted a letter for a lackey to file. Camp absentees were called-up for later camps. AWOLlers were visited by MPs.

The Organization of African Unity prevented SAA landing rights in some African countries. (Roger Childs, Divide and Rule, Macmillan, Auckland, 1990). At Luanda, black and white Portuguese soldiers made us walk a Kalashnikov gauntlet to the airport. Pricks!

We flew round West Africa to England, origin of dad's stamps. London dustmen were striking, so we waded through heaps of black-plastic rubbish-bags on dirty streets. In London and Paris we saw art and dog shit. Soho night-clubs and the Moulin Rouge interested Skelm and me. We bussed through Belgium, toured Rotterdam, and drifted to Delft. In Amsterdam we saw art and dog shit, and visited Anne Frank Huis, but no Afrikaners related it to SA racism. Sex shops in the red-light district sold porn books, magazines, sex dolls, dildos, love potions and creams. Penis candles stood by shop windows. Some whores leaned against wet walls. Others sat on couches, before shop windows, spreading wares. Men in dark coats prowled streets, hunting sex. Katie giggled with Skelm and me.

Our trek-group was mostly cherries, led by Meneer Arend and Meneer Duifie, accompanied by their families. Shopping by cherries was interrupted by kultuur. Photo-shy Meneer Duifie hid his face in group-photos, and asked me to snap his legs when he entered buses. His drama scripts later achieved SATV, white, affirmative-action fame.

On our Rhine cruise, we drank a hang of a lot of red champagne...


1970. Hofbrauhaus Mug, Munchen, Germany

After a Munchen Hofbrauhaus piss-up, I stole my mug and another for Katie. We toured newly built Munchen Olympic Village. Tobogganing in a park, Meneer Duifie told Katie to lie face-down on a toboggan, then pushed her. A stone stopped her toboggan's descent. Katie flew on cawing, "Eina!..."

At an Interlaken pub, we drank New Year champagne. Faces swam around...Up-down-up... Kissing mouths, moist lips...I scraped vomit from my bedroom hand-basin, and hurled a bag full from my window onto snow: my first time motherless pissed.

Breakfast headache...Nausea..."You rode a lift, kissing girls," cawed Katie.

Mount Rigi: Bouncy cable-car...

Bus trek: Innsbruck, over Brenner Pass to Venice, Pisa, Florence...

Rome: Katie's Afrikaner room-mate ran along a corridor, pleading, "Katie's in dat rroom wivva man. Help asseblief!" I knocked on the door. Katie lay on a bed, her glass dribbling brandy on her thighs. Skelm said, "Katie's with us!"

Pompei, and old bones...Sorrento...Capri, where cherries bought junk.

Greece: Art and monuments - Delphi, where the oracle had gassed herself, conning supplicants; Corinth, where our tour guide was cute; Gigantic Mycenae, where Schliemann had found shaft- graves; Epidavros, where my interest in drama increased; Sparta...My dad's stamps had included every European country we'd trekked, but dad's stamps didn't show that UK and Europe were vrekking cold in winter.

On our last night in Athens, a Greek asked Skelm and me, "Ya wan' some nice girls?" Skelm and I followed Greek to a bar, where Greek presented two cherries. Skelm groped in a corner, while I fondled my cherrie's mini-skirted legs. She had herpes lips. Skelm and I drank beer, while the cherries soberly drank whisky.

After arguing with Greek over our bill, Skelm and Greek walked to our hotel to fetch more money. Held hostage, I inspected the toilet, but a window was too small for me to escape. Greek returned, angry that Skelm had punched him, escaping into our hotel. I drank dregs of the girls' whisky - cold tea! More arguing: then me Pied-Pipering Greek, pimps, bouncers and thugs to the hotel, where the night-manager fixed finances.

"Why'd you drop me?" I asked Skelm.

"Jislaaik! I thought you'd escape. Baba-baba-boo!" In future overseas trips, I'd visit many unknown parts of Britain, Europe and Israel.

Dokkies Dropouts and Driving

< 1970. Mark Esslemont playing Stage Manager in 'Our Town'. Hugh on Mark's right. (Burge)


Male students faded from Dokkies, becoming businessmen. One became a world famous motor-cyclist. One who'd done army basic with me sold insurance, and killed Border Ovambos as a Commando. PP became a municipal health inspector, inspecting septic tanks. PP did a Commando sergeants course, which went to his arrogant head. After PP left Dokkies, I walked behind meneer Arend and Meneer Duifie in a corridor, overhearing Meneer Arend screeching about cheeky PP: "PP was parmantig..."

Skelm ran Dokkies Climbing Club, and I chaired a Biology Club. We raised club funds by showing English flicks to Afrikaner hostel students, like Midnight Cowboy starring Hoffman and Voight. Carry On flicks were popular. I stopped rock-climbing, after peeling at Gerrys G climb, and seeing Skelm crack his skull peeling from Gerrys G. Skelm later led Drakensberg climbs with varsity students, like Shannon, who still had freckled legs. Some of Skelm's climbing connections fell to their deaths.

Meneer Duifie had halitosis, and couldn't understand why students sat at sides of his language lab, while he lectured from his wooden lectern. Meneer Duifie tried hard to make Skelm and me bilingual. He succeeded with Skelm. I bunked lectures.

I got my driver's licence in mom's new, brown Mini, and drove up Chelsea Drive dip to our home, against a one-way sign below the umdoni tree: my contempt for apartheid signs. For years, I criss-crossed the ancient dune Berea, where friends and relatives lived. Trekking to Dokkies, I drove across Umgeni Road and up Goble Road to Trematon Drive, along Ridge Road, crossing Berea Road, to Natal University, down Queen Mary Avenue to Dokkies, beyond which lay verkrampte south Durbs.

I often drove up Innes Road where I was born, crossing Windermere Road, where in 1988 Fraser would doss in a halfway-house, and get pissed on Florida Road. Donna's mom flatted on Montpelier Road. Some of mom's lady friends lived on Sydenham Road, near Musgrave Road, where my granny Rosa had died. I drove along Nicolson Road where I'd teach, and Manning Road where I'd meet my wife. I banked at Brand Road. Berea Road python hissed me over the Berea to N3 Western Freeway - away from Natal.

Homelands and Hindu Wedding

< Mark Esslemont having a Ball.


1960-1970. Over 1500 000 people had already been forcibly -removed. (Africa Volumes 1,2, Facts on File, New York, 1989).

The 1970 Bantu Homeland Citizenship Act forced tribal blacks to become homeland outcasts, deprived of SA citizenship. There'd be ten puppet homelands: KwaZulu, QwaQwa, Lebowa, Gazankulu, KaNgwane, KwaNdebele were supposed to be self-governing, but Pretoria would fund restless homelands, with their own puppet parliaments, capitals, civil servants, police, military, airports and border controls. Puppet Transkei, Ciskei, Venda, Bophuthatswana chose to be "independent" states, but no country recognised them, except SA.

Puppet homelands were marginalized, unworkable and impoverished, as few industries evolved, and "border industries" were risible, cheap labour exploitations. Big industries were already established in white urban areas, supported by the migrant-labour system, functioning before apartheid, where mostly black men worked in white urban areas, while most black women and children stayed in tribal Bantustans. Urban blacks were forced back to their homelands when work expired, or when they had no passbooks. Homeland work was minimal, services were poor, and blacks starved. Crime was the only job left.

Jood and I saw white strip-shows at Smugglers Inn. We toured white Cosmo Club, Umgeni Road; white Rob E. Lee, Musgrave Road; white night-clubs overlooking the harbour; white Killarney Hotel near beaches, all served by excellent Indian waiters. At a white night-club in Smith Street used-car sales area, a drunk cherrie slid her tits over. She wore emerald eye make-up and batted her false eyelashes at Jood, who squirmed. Clutching Jood's thigh, she peered at me. "D'ya wanna buya ladya drink?..." Jood dropped out of varsity, faded from my life, borrowing money from friends, then managing a Golden Egg restaurant in Rhodesia during the Bush War.

Rosie had saved for years, and although Shorty her grandson was a man, Rosie arranged Shorty's marriage. Shorty worked night-shift receptionist at a white Berea Hotel, and while Rosie worked in the day for us, Shorty slept in her May Street Indian slum bed.

Jimmy, Rosie's nephew, illiterate carpenter, had three wives, who looked after his kids. The youngest wife did Jimmy's book-keeping. Jimmy built a room for Shorty and his fiance Sita at Jimmy's Gum Tree Road shanty in Jacobs.

Jimmy erected a marquee at his shanty. Mom, Fraser and I were the only whites at Shorty's wedding. As guests of honour we sat facing Indian guests. Shorty wore a grey suit, and Sita wore a white Sari embroidered with gold thread. Both were garlanded in marigolds. A Hindu priest lit camphor cubes, said holy words, thumbed ash on Shorty's and Sita's foreheads, then thumbed a red tilik on Sita's forehead. Afterwards we feasted on chilli-bites, samoosas and curries.

< 1970. Shorty Naidoo's Wedding, Gum Tree Road, Jacobs, Durban. Esslemonts & Rosie Naidoo backdrop.


Rosie grew chillis in mom's garden, and cooked curries for us. Rosie sucked toothache-easing cloves. I didn't mind Rosie ordering me about: "Buy me snuff at Riverside bus-rank Mak!" Rosie was addicted to snuff, which she sniffed up her nostrils, and rubbed on her gums, making her eyes water. Mom paid for Rosie's rotten teeth to be extracted, then paid for Rosie's new false-teeth.

Rosie smaaked cane-spirits: "Buy me a nippa cane Mak!" Although mom had signed the pledge, mom sometimes drank sherry for medicinal purposes. Using her fingers, in our kitchen, Rosie ate curries off her enamel plate, and drank sweet Joko tea from her enamel mug.

As Rosie refused using our khaya shower, Rosie stripped off her blouse and petticoat after work, and washed herself at the outside tap by our kitchen. Rosie left work dressed in her sari, always wearing her gold-trinket wealth hanging on a yellow cord tucked in her bosom, and her snuff-tin-money-bag tucked in her sari at her waist. Although her husband was dead, Rosie wore a gold wedding-ring, and wore silver toe-rings on two toes. Rosie worked barefoot, but wore shoes in cars, buses and on special occasions, like Shorty's wedding, and visiting Umgeni Road Hindu Temple.


See Effects of Apartheid on the Status of Women in SA.

College and Comrades

1969-1970 Old and New SRCs trying not to look pissed. "What a piece of work is a man!" >


My second Dokkies year: We got crapulent on champagne at our first SRC meeting. At meetings, mainly Afrikaners debated trivia, like miniskirt length, or "Should studente be allowed to wear college blazers [a privilege] if they bunked assemblies?" Most students didn't wear blazers, due to Durban's humidity. I sat in silent protest next to my SRC wannabe, reminding him that I'd won more SRC votes as a first-year student than he'd got as a second-year student; I taught myself typing, operated the SRC Gestetner printer, and distributed SRC notices; I organized volunteers to street-collect charity money; I roster-read SRC messages at assemblies, while Afrikaners sat docile, and PP, Skelm and other English students fidgeted and mocked. My SRC experience inculcated a dislike for committees, manipulative management and patronizing Afrikaner politics.

I sometimes arrived late at lectures as my moped broke down. I wrote no exams, as we were continuously assessed. Hugh directed Our Town. I played Stage Manager. Later, I played juvenile lead opposite Katie in Gelukkige Dae, adapted from the Happiest Days of Our Life. When cross, Hugh bashed chairs, throwing them down aisles. Big act: "Meneer Duifie! Stop acting like a baboon!" said Hugh.

"Ah'm notta ba-boon. Ah'm a lecherrerr." Meneer Arend broke up the squabble.

Takkie-shod training for Comrades Marathon, I ran 10 milers thrice weekly from home, crossing Umgeni River near Athlone Hotel, re-crossing Umgeni near Blue Lagoon, running along N2 freeway to Virginia Airport, up the hill past Virginia Primary to the water-tower, along the Ridge, down Northway and back home. I ran 14 milers to Natal University and back along Ridge Road, past Burman Bush, over Umgeni, up Northway back home. Cool evenings, early mornings and warm summer rains were best running times. I sometimes ran with Skelm, running from Durban North to Ballito Bay.

Before dawn, I greeted Clover Dairies Zulu milkmen, while they delivered milk bottles with aluminium seals. They wore white uniforms, car tyre sandals, and pushed white hand-carts. Their pierced ear lobes had metal rings or wooden cotton reels attached, causing their lobes to wobble while they ran.

Before Comrades, I soaked my feet in meths, hardening them. I prepared chocolate and sarmie snacks. Carbo-loading hadn't been favoured yet. I enjoyed apple-slices sprinkled with salt, preventing cramps. Runners had various corpse-revivers. Mine was whiskey. Skelm said, "Jislaaik! Run like a kaffir!"

30/05/70. 06:00. 759 runners lined up in the dark at Durban City Hall. Trimborn cock-crowed while we ran off. I was one of 25 novices. We had 11 hours to reach 'Maritzburg, over 80 kays away. Mom drove her Morris, while she and Jood seconded me. I passed Skelm on Fields Hill. Skelm dropped out. After I hit the wall at Inchanga, Jood lost me. Incensed, I bummed oranges till Camperdown...

Jood gave me whiskey on Polly Shorts. I jogged past sweet-thorns into 'Maritzburg, finishing 284th in 9 hours 8 minutes. Hallelujah! Dave Bagshaw won in 5 hours 51 minutes. I won a silver medal. In later years, competitors increased thousand-fold, seconds were abolished and silver medals became harder to win. I hated up-hills, but on down-hills I flew like a fish eagle, singing, "Kaaa! Ka-ka-ka -ka-kaaaa!..." (Morris Alexander, The Comrades Marathon Story, Juta, Cape Town, 1976.)

Unrest: SA had been banned from competing in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. 1970. SA was banned indefinitely from Olympics until SA abandoned apartheid. International cultural, sports and business boycotts were silencing out my whitey generation. (Roger Childs, Divide and Rule, Macmillan, Auckland, 1990.)

See Zulu Kingdom: KwaZulu-Natal

1970 Mark Esslemont's first Comrades, near Cato Ridge >

Fynnlands, Jacobs and Bluff Commando Guards

At Durban Bluff Fynnlands barracks, Lootie, lieutenant, my age, paraded us yelling, "Yous'll guard oil tanks, Blubb Big-Gun magazines an' Jacobs militawy warehouses. Dere'll be no Chwistmas passes!"

We hefted our balsacs onto the barracks roof, to hose mud off our webbing. "Whadda-buckya-doin'?" yelled Lootie. I swung round, squirting Lootie's face. "Gedya bull-webbin'-and wible! Weporta- guardgate! ON-DA-DOUBLE!"

Lootie bunny-hopped me, my wible at high-port, over a sand dune. "Kak-ab-woob. ONE-TWO-ONE-TWO!..." When Lootie was hoarse, he marched me back to my barracks. Lootie didn't harass me again. Whenever we had a chase-parade or other "punishment," I stayed bone-faced and got on with it.

Night guard-duty was 6 hour shifts. Day-duty was 8 hour shifts. At Fynnlands and Jacobs, we stood in cylindrical, concrete guard -towers. Fynnlands guard-towers had glass windows, a stool and an iron hatch-cover. Jacobs guard-towers had no such luxuries. We 18 year olds were allowed a full water-bottle and 5 live rounds in a clip, separate from our .303 magazines: enough to commit suicide. Each guard-tower had a telephone. A guard-commander, often Lootie, phoned every half hour. If no reply, the guard-tower was raided. If found asleep, the guard got dune-PT. I slept most nights on my hatch at Fynnlands, slinging my rifle over the phone-cradle, so the receiver hung on the floor. Phone ringing woke me, then I lifted my rifle from the cradle, saying, "Alls well."

Guard-towers stood at perimeter-fence corners. Wandering around outside guard-towers was forbidden. I sneaked books and food into towers, relieving boredom. I remember spending hours crumbling one slice of bread, and chewing each morsel, meticulously. Alsation guard-dogs, chained to wires, patrolled inside Jacobs fences. Jood the Jew and I phoned each other, gossiping. Nights were muggy, so I slept outside Jacobs barracks on grass, with my WW2 greatcoat collar covering my ears, avoiding mozzies. "Aandag!" yelled dronkgat Lootie. We stood at attention beside our beds. "Yoush shtupit shmock!" Lootie yelled at Jood. "Yoush gotno gutsh!" No win. Jood couldn't hit Lootie. "I'll bayonet ya buckin' thwoat..." We stood at attention taking Lootie's crap, until he staggered to an office and fell asleep.

02:00 From our guard-towers, Jood and I heard a Bedford racing around the perimeter-fence, then a mighty CRASH and drunken oaths. Lootie had wrapped his Bedford round upright railway-lines at the end of a track. MPs arrived. Lootie stood at attention, pale, next to a seated MP. Jood witnessed, "I heard the crash just-now, but couldn't see the accident, as a warehouse made my view up to maggots." I confirmed Jood's view. Lootie was arrested for DB sorting out.

Prick!

Jood, PP and I guarded Number One Magazine at the end of Durban Bluff, near the lighthouse. We saw Durban harbour, Berea, Indian Ocean, white beaches stretching to Umhlanga Rocks. I imagined dad doing similar guard-duty 24 years before. We patrolled over grass-covered magazines. On New Years Eve, Jood and I climbed a radar-tower, when boat-horns bellowed New Year in.

"Open-dish-fuckin'-gate!" yelled the white-uniformed lighthouse -keeper. "Geddorf-dat-radar! Pull-finger-man!" We dropped off, sneaking round the Big Gun, hoping the dronkgat would vanish."Open-dish-fuckin'-gate-or-I'll-shootit-open!"

We approached the gate, bolting live rounds into our .303s. "We're not opening this gate against our orders," said Jood.

Pashop! I'm-gunna-phone-your'sh-Lootie-hey." I woke PP for the next watch. Not having a father while I grew up, mom expected me to be the man of our family, and aggro from authoritarian figures annoyed me. PP fell asleep, and while we all slept, leaving Guns unguarded, our New Lootie raided us and took our rifle-bolts. Back at Fynnlands, New Lootie chase-paraded us around the barracks, not minding us singing, "Buck-the-army! (x3) Thwoo-an'-thwoo!..." (Clementine tune).

Jood phoned the barracks, "A car-load of drunk coloureds is jolling outside my fence, chucking dumpies at my guard-tower now-now!"

Our squad boarded PP's Bedford and raced to the rescue. We leapt from the Bedford, fixed bayonets, lined up and advanced on the car. Our D formation riot-training hadn't prepared us for that. Outcast coloureds tried smashing into us, chanting, "Fokkof! Fokkof!..." Troopies scattered, and the car vanished.

PP dropped me off at the corner of Old Fort Road and Soldiers Way. At a white bus stop at the end of Umgeni Road, near a black spot, Green Mamba bus stop for non-whites, a Zulu isanusi (female witchdoctor) shuffled towards me, reeking of skokiaan and piss. Her wrinkled face was painted white, colour of ancestral shades of her underworld. Her hair was beaded white. "Bulala umlungu!" she shrieked. (Peter Magubane, Vanishing Cultures of South Africa, Struik, Cape Town, 1998).

Her breath stank.

"Suka isalukazi!" I said. She mumbled off towards Alice Street. I looked at non-whites waiting for buses: umfaans and Indian servants returning to their hovels, abafazi with laundry bundles at their feet. They avoided my eye-contact. An Indian newspaper boy yelling, "Daily News," stood on Alice Street corner. Post apartheid, by 2000, Zulu food-peddlers cooked cows' heads on Alice Street, by hacking off cows' craniums, then serving brains to Zulu customers.

I'd finished my basic. I shouldered my balsac, hefted my rifle, and boarded a red municipal bus, which belched fumes on outcasts' faces, still waiting. I'd learnt two jobs by the time I was eighteen: teaching and killing. I chose teaching. I resolved thereafter to play Dumb Troopie and avoid army callups.

See Lighthouses of South Africa, including Durban Bluff and Umhlanga Rocks Lighthouses.

Shongweni Commando Camp

Second Basic Camp, December 1969: New Durban North Command was called-up with South Coast Command at Shongweni bush camp. Sections of ten troopies slept in army tents. There were officers' and troopies' mess tents, adjutant's, cooks' and medics' tents. Our ol' toppie Commandant worked for the Department of Native Affairs. Ol' ballie, South Coast RSM was an Engelse-Dutchman with waxed moustache. He straight-arm-lifted a .303, barrel-end, ground to shoulder height. No else at camp could do that.

As there were few trained NCOs, sergeant and corporal stripes were given to keen troopies. PP grabbed sergeant stripes. I didn't volunteer. PP, after driving a Bedford in the veld, and reversing through two 44 gallon drums, got his army driver's licence. It rained for a week, and our officers stopped field-training. The quartermaster didn't have spades, so using our spoons, dixies and bayonets, we dug gutters around our tents and sleeping bags. Lying in our tents, we bullshitted, brewed tea and chomped dog-biscuits.

At night, we attended lectures in mess tents. RSM example: "Fokken Chairrman Mao's TanZam Rrailway will brring Culsherral Rrevolution an' fokken terroriste to our fokken borrderrs man!..." Construction began on the TanZam Railway in 1970 and ended in 1975. (Guy Arnold, Africa A Modern History, Atlantic Books, London, 2005). At night, I wore my poncho doing guard duty with PP, while most troopies slept. Some pissed in iron lilies, planted beyond tent lines. Steam rose in shadows.

Bored one rainy day, I climbed down a cliff to Mpumalanga Bantu Reserve, and walked in uniform through outcast Zulu kraals. "Sawubona. Kunjani? Usaphila na?" I greeted. "Uphi istolo?" At the store I bought snacks. Eighteen years later while apartheid collapsed, those Mpumalanga Zulus were embroiled in civil war between Inkatha impis and banned ANC / UDF strugglers. Mud huts were torched. Zulus murdered one another. Thousands of refugees fled to Durban and 'Maritzburg, where they stayed with their baases and madams, until it was safe to return to kraals.

After the rain, we learnt patrol drills, map-work, signalling, radio procedures. Night and day, we bush-patrolled, setting up ambushes and temporary bases, with all-round defence on high ground. We used bren guns, but blue-nosed blanks caused stoppages, so troopies avoided carrying heavy brens. We learnt D formation riot control drills, our only "urban training."

We did a stopper-and-sweep operation in a valley. I lay at the valley-head as one of the stopper group, while "terrorists" were swept up the valley. I imagined Boer War general Kitchener's British troops trying to trap outcast Boers in blockhouse stopper-and-sweep operations on the highveld. Boer generals De Wet, Smuts, Hertzog, De la Rey, Botha and Boers slipped through stopper barbed-wire fences. Boers harried Brits repeatedly.

Kitchener's drives, scorched-earth policy, and internment of Boer women and children in concentration camps demoralized Boers, leading to Vereeniging peace in 1902. Louis Botha admitted imprisoning Boer women and children protected them from kaffirs. Boers objected to British using kaffirs as combatants and blockhouse guards in a white men's war. (Rayne Kruger, Goodbye Dolly Gray, The Story of the Boer War, Book Club Association, Swindon, Pan, London, 1983). It left a legacy of Boer-British hatred which my generation felt 70 years later in places like SADF and Dokkies.

In the 1980s, SAP would use Inkatha Kits Konstabels to sweep ANC / UDF kraals in the day, then massacre Zulu inhabitants at night. (Refer to SAP Brian Mitchell's Trust Feeds Massacre, New Hanover).

Rock Climbing and Students Representative Council

1969. Mark Esslemont abseiling at Monteseel. (Burge) >

I rock-climbed Monteseel cliffs overlooking Valley-of-a -Thousand Hills. One night, for a dare, Skelm and I drove naked from Monteseel, past a cop-shop to Craiglee cliffs, where we yodelled, "I did an ol' lady too..." After decades of apartheid neglect, the Valley would become a graveyard for Zulu faction-fighters and thousands of Zulu Aids sufferers. After reading Dale le Vack's God's Golden Acre, I wondered why Zulu men fucked Zulu maidens during and after apartheid, as an Aids cure. (Dale le Vack, God's Golden Acre, Monarch Books, Oxford, 2005).

I stopped rugby after being stiff-arm head-tackled by a Natal under 20s Dutchman. I valued my life, so I played basketball.

One Saturday night, Dokkies rock-climbers raided Nokkies (Natal Training College, Pietermaritzburg) as a rev-up for our inter-college derby. We stained Nokkies swimming pool purple with a hang of a lot of potassium permanganate, stole hostel paintings, painted Dokkies slogans on Nokkies windows, and stole Nokkies college bell. We then stained Dokkies pool purple, stole hostel paintings, painted Nokkies slogans on windows, and wrecked Dokkies staffroom, by overturning furniture and shoe-shining graffiti everywhere. Poepol (PP) and Skelm went mad.

Skelm stuffed Dokkies electric bells with toilet paper, while the rest of us observed. While Skelm clung to a second floor wall, he nearly got assegaied and knobkerried by a Zulu night-watchman, but it was too dark for the Zulu to see Skelm. (I didn't know then, that for the next 25 years, school bells would ring my life away). The next Monday, Meneer Arend interrogated students. I wasn't questioned. Barry silenced out. If we were kaffirs and were caught, we could've been hung for sabotage. (T Bell, DB Ntsebeza, Unfinished Business, Verso, London, File 2, Chap 2).

Ursula and I danced at balls in Dokkies hall, with temp bar and college band: English double-bass player, English drummer. Bass guitar and concertina playing Afrikaners had spade-beards, imitating bible -thumping, rifle-toting voortrekker heroes. An Afrikaner cherrie sang English and Afrikaner hits, or Boeremusiek: ay-chikkalay-chikkalay... or tiekiedraai...Ursula and I jittered in circles, linking arms, while Skelm, PP and chicks fox-trotted and waltzed. Schmaltzy music like Sarie Marais made rugger-buggers tearful. Bridge Over Troubled Waters; Homeward Bound; Summer Time; Obladi Oblada; Those Were The Days my Friend; Last Waltz were popular.

Some Afrikaner studente were sentimental. A corridor in the science block was known as, "The Lumber Yard," as Afrikaner lovers, especially physical education studente, could sometimes be seen lumbering by concrete pillars.

PP suggested we become extra-maths teaching partners. I posted flyers in Durban North, and began teaching, charging one Rand per lesson. PP folded, so I had the Durban North market. I bought a 50 Rand, 50cc, Raleigh moped, which got me to Dokkies, sometimes late, due to misfiring spark-plugs.

Barry nominated me Students Representative Council candidate for the 1970 SRC, so I stuck up election-posters on walls. Skelm, who'd published photos of his bikini-clad chick in Scope magazine, penned tails on the "D" of VOTE DOEP STEM DOEP posters. Duplisani, with black bokbaard, black-rimmed glasses and black pipe became SRC president. Doep was a Broederbonder. I wasn't elected. Barry recounted votes, first counted by Afrikaners, and found a miscount, casting me, "die klein Engelsman," out of the new SRC. An Engelse- Dutchman, with ducktail hair, leather-jacket and flick-knife was "elected" in my place. Barry chirped to students and Meneer Arend, causing mutterings about a "vote-of-no-confidence" in the mainly Afrikaner SRC, before it began. Afrikaner "intellectuals," soon to be foisted on Natal pupils, sneakily pleaded with me: "Don' tell anybody hey?"

Meneer Arend assembly-screeched, "A new porrtfolio Liaizon Offizerr 'az evolved..." I was too naive to realize Afrikaner bigots had tried to silence me.

My first practical teaching was at Stellawood Primary, near white Stellawood Cemetery, my briefest donkey wagon ride. Dokkies tutors listened to my crit lessons, then advised...I did all my block-teaching at Beachwood BH, a trickier donkey wagon ride, as I was slightly older than my pupils. Charlie was a matric prefect, but we avoided each other. Joe, recent Dokkies graduate, was my mentor. I taught biology to form five (year 11) and general-science.

I'd find Natal, QwaQwa and Cape staffrooms seething with cliques; racists; screechers; eccentrics; squabblers; haters; ranters; boozers; nicotine and caffeine addicts. We taught white kids at the expense of black, coloured and Indian children's educations.

As a young adult, I could've risen in army, drama, or teaching careers, helped by apartheid and my white skin. Over 25 years, some military, drama and teaching jobs and promotions would tempt me, but I'd reject them. Sometimes I was disgusted by my peers grabbing jobs and promotions. Mom's Christianity had gifted me righteousness.

See Care and Use of Working Donkeys: Morgane James

Danie Theron Combat School

< 1969. Mark Esslemont, Commando Basic, Danie Theron Combat School, Kimberley. "Turbulent and dangerous lunacy."

Basic Camp, July 1969: My conscription, dogging my tertiary studies, wasn't credited to my future teacher's salary. Later, white male teachers got salary credits for conscription. White conscripts were called up from all over SA, and hundreds of Commando Roofs (scabs) and I (17) troop-train-trekked to Kimberley, where army Bedfords took us to Danie Theron Combat School. We were 17-18 year old child-soldiers, signing our lives away for Volk en Vaderland: Botha's throw-away troopies, conscripted to protect whiteys. Some of us weren't old enough to legally drink, drive, vote, but Broederbonders who'd never volunteered to go up north during WW2, deemed us old enough to die for SA. My rifleman number was 672050548. '67 was the year I'd registered.

Troopies were issued with WW2 surplus kit and most were billeted in warehouse barracks. Some were billeted in tents to freeze during highveld winter. Each troopie was allocated a metal storage-locker, metal bed, two sheets, two blankets, pillow, pillow-case. Some troopies, scared of messing their beds, slept on the linoleum covered floor. "Aaaandag!...Ateeeenshun Roofs!..." Conscript corporals crapped on us from dizzy heights: "Roer julle slapgatte fokken Roofies!...Kak af kerels!...Ons vat nie kak nie!..." Kak continued from frosty 4am till late, and civilizing influences were binned. If kit was stolen, one stole someone else's...

Conscript corporals taught us how to make our beds, pack our lockers, polish our boots and brass, clean our greasy .303 rifles for kit inspection, after frosty breakfast each morning. Our rifles were our wives, we went everywhere with them, even slept with them. Rudolf, Northlands old-boy, and Skelm bedded either side of me. Skelm whined about army life. Once Rudolf picked a fight with me, and Skelm said, "Fokkof poesface!" Toilets were the only private places in camp. At night, small troopies like me, wearing helmets, were swung around in blankets, polishing floors with our bums.

Drill-squads were 3 sections, 10 troopies per section. Three or four squads comprised a company. Drill-corporals drilled squads, and white-epauletted, nominated lance-corporals sang, "Lef-lef-lef -ri-leeeef!...Lik-juk-lik-juk-looooy!..." I would hear that song for the next 25 years. We wore varkpakke pig-suits, green berets, webbing, gaiters, boots bayonets in belt scabbards, while drilling with our rifles. We were forbidden to wear bayonets in the mess, where Jew troopies ate kosher meals, and other troopies used varkpanne dixies. On Sundays, while a chaplain church-paraded English troopies around a flag-pole, Afrikaner troopies marched off to their dominee.

Drill-sergeants Killer Smith, Killer Finlay, and Sar' major Gouws supervised conscript corporals, yelling, "LIK-JUK-LIK-JUK -LOOOOY!..." Conscript-corporals taught us how to shoot and bayonet kaffirs, communists, terrorists, and how to hit them with our rifle-butts. Once, Killer Smith chase-paraded us, marching us double-quick, till Skelm was dismissed, crying and limping. During smoke-break, Sar' major Gouws sorted out Skelm, "Fedch a leaf frrom dad bush ON DA DOUBLE!" When Skelm returned panting, Gouws ordered, "Noddad bush fokken Roof. Fedch a leaf frrom dad blerrie bush OVERR DEEEERRE!"

At the rifle-range, we sighted our rifles, and shot live snapshot and rapid-fire at targets. My .303 was for a right-hander. Left-handed, I bashed my wrist on the rifle-bolt when I ejected cartridges. Stoppages caused more shit. Permanent Force Instructors screamed themselves hoarse, while stopping us being shot. We were expected to defend apartheid against kaffirs, communists and terrorists, who our Instructors implied were all the same. But banned ANC and PAC freedom-fighters were supported by Soviet and Chinese commies respectively. (Sean Moroney Editor, Africa Volumes 1, 2, Facts On File, New York 1989).

At passing-out parade dress-rehearsal, we stood at attention in columns of 18. Skelm, three ranks ahead, shuffled into dressing. Those behind shuffled up. Killer Finlay strode up the ranks, past Skelm, yelling at me to impress the parade. Later, I apologized to Finlay amongst a bunch of troopies. Finlay looked cross. In future, I'd cross several white bosses.

A general inspected us, then saluted from a podium, while a troopie band played Boomalakka!... Oooompa!...then troopies marched past, in columns of 18.

At basic camp, some troopies were weaker than me. Bullies, thick okes and fools stuck to the army like shit to shoes. I didn't think spit-an'-polish would save my life during war. "Sick" Rudolf had lain in bed most of camp. He recovered the day before we backspoored to Durbs. After varsity graduation, he trekked overseas.

At Danie Theron, we were verbally, physically and mentally abused. SADF excelled at fucking up troopies' minds. There were no passes, and rifleman pay was risible. There was no esprit de corps. There was irritation, brainwashing, frosty-sleep-deprivation-torture, shitting -off. My future Durban North Command "holiday camps" would have no esprit de corps, as camps would be short, Commandos came from different work and home backgrounds, and conscripts considered camps a duty to be endured, as other options were exile, state harassment, or jail. Later, SADF would increase Commando basic to one year, with camps thereafter.

On our last morning, out of bed at frosty 4am, we huddled in sub-zero darkness, hurry-up-an'-waiting for Bedfords to convoy us to Kimberley Station. When I climbed onto my Bedford, ill-equipped to fight terrorists with my WW2 battledress, old .303 rifle and balsac bag, I thought, "Fuck this!"

During my conscription, I'd sleep or doze amongst strange men, in the Cape and KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) - in Kimberley and Durban; KZN bush-camp tents; the back of Bedford trucks; a Puma helicopter; trains; cars; Fynnlands barracks; Bluff Gun-magazine barracks, Natal Command rifle-ranges; Old Fort Road drill-hall; a Schmidtsdrif ruin; Jozini roadside; koppies; valleys; wattle and gum plantations; Zulu kraals; Pongola riverbank, and under bushveld starry nights. I'd endure men's smelly feet; snoring; farting; shitting; shaving; unwashed bodies - and men's boozing; joking; smoking; singing; swearing; dirty habits - and more.

See SADF History and Danie Theron Combat School.

Rectum and Acting

1969. Mark Esslemont, standing 5th left, playing Barnaby Tucker in 'The Matchmaker'. Hugh seated in front.

Ol' toppie, Meneer Arend, Afrikaner rector, called, "Rectum" by students, had a glass eye, goatee, Alsation cur, bunch of keys. Ol' ballie, deaf Meneer Duifie, lectured us Principles and Organization of Teaching and Afrikaans. Meneer Arend's and Meneer Duifie's disabilities symbolized white teacher training. "Therre'z many differrin' teachin' methidz az therre'z teachiz," cooed Meneer Duifie. "Youz muz become a phyzical-zcience teachirr, az therr'z a zhorrtige in Natal!"

"No thanks," I said. "I choose to be a biology teacher."

Men students weren't attracted to teaching, as pay was poor. Many students had done O stream matric, which left A stream students, like myself, frustrated at the slow pace. Like mom, women teachers were paid less than men. Women teachers were therefore reluctant to do ECA, leaving men stressed with bigger sports commitments.

First-year biology students included Katie, who had brown hair, freckles, falsies, efficiency. Donna had red hair, sexy bod', giggles, low self esteem, as her parents were recently divorced. Her dad had remarried, producing three sons. Broeder Bul, biology lecturer, Broederbonder, tried brainwashing us, "Capitalizdz zay, 'Whad'z mine iz yourrz'. Communizdz zay, 'Whadz yourrz iz mine...'" Biology lecturers and physical science lecturers were sinecurists, as few students read sciences, leaving Verwoerd groaning in his grave. Most lecturers were bilingual, and biology lectures were dual-medium. Afrikaner students tried to improve their English. Some English students, deigning to improve their Afrikaans, were arrogant about English being a world language. I passed Hoer Taalbond Eksamen in my first year.

Mom, half-Afrikaner said, "Afrikaners have a national inferiority complex, as they lost the Boer War. There were many poor-white Afrikaners, white kaffirs, during the 1930s. They lived like kaffirs, competing with kaffirs for jobs..."

Hugh, my speech tutor, directed The Matchmaker. I played Barnaby Tucker, while Barry played Cornelius Hackle. Poepol (PP), Skelm (also first-years), Barry and I arrived poeg-eye at one rehearsal. "Why're you late?" asked Hugh.

"Onlya cuppla minitsh late," said Barry.

"That's no excuse. If ya wanna be actors arrive early at rehearsals." As Hello Dolly was running world-wide, based on The Matchmaker, which couldn't run simultaneously with the musical, we ran The Matchmaker free for private audiences. Overseas playwrights refused performances of their works in SA, part of the international cultural boycott. On opening night, the cast found champagne bottles in a backstage hand basin. We quaffed the lot. At interval Hugh yelled, "Who drank my champagne?" No-one owned up. Years later, when I directed plays I checked whether I could produce a modern play. Usually the play was forbidden, so I produced an older play.

Over the next three decades, I'd be involved with family, friends studies, work and travel. Reading, jogging, silence and switching off would show my detachment.

See Cultural Boycott in apartheid South Africa.

Dokkies Student Commando

I bussed across the Umgeni to Durban Teachers Training College (Dokkies), Queen Mary Avenue - my road from light to shadows. My class was the last English-speaking class to enrol, as white Edgewood College of Education was being built in Pinetown for English students. In the 60s, Edgewood had begun at Danville GH, Glenashley: first SRC president, Averil Wellbeloved. There were no non-white students at Dokkies nor Edgewood. White Nationalists were obsessed with separating people into skin-colour groups: separate black, coloured, Indian, white living areas; separate English, Afrikaner, coloured, Indian, black schools, colleges, technikons, universities; separate petty apartheid amenities with separate entrances like public toilets, trains, buses, parks, holiday areas, hotels, pubs, restaurants, theatres, bioscopes, queues, hospitals, churches.

The 1950 Group Areas Act had forced natives to live in tribal reserves, or urban locations, separate from Indian, coloured and European Group Areas, like Cape Town for Western Cape coloureds; Transkei for Xhosa; Zululand for Zulus. Descendants of Afrikaners who'd suffered British concentration camps during the Boer War, persecuted non-whites with racist 1950 Population Registration and Group Areas Acts. (Sean Moroney Editor, Africa Volumes 1, 2, Facts on File, New York, 1989). White Durban was bordered by restless non-white group areas: Zulu Kwa-Mashu (north); Indian Phoenix (north); Zulu Claremont (west); Zulu Inanda (further west); Zulu Umlazi (south); Indian Chatsworth (south-west); coloured Wentworth (east); Indian Isipingo (south-east). Non-whites spotted other suburbs where they'd bought free-hold land, called "black spots," which the Nationalist government tried to forcibly remove, and disguise with dissembling use of English.

Fear of swart gevaar ruled white Durban North, where Afrikaners, coloureds and Afrikaans were alien. Northway separated Durban North into lower and upper, the richest snobs luxuriating in upper Durban North. Zulu, or Hindi, or broken-English was spoken by Zulu or Indian servants, who either lived in khayas on white properties, or returned to their black spots (like Rosie), or locations after work. Rosie spoke coolie-English ek se, and Portuguese, having owned a laundry in Lourenco Marques, and understood Afrikaans. Rosie also spoke kitchen-kaffir derived from Zulu, and spoke fluent Hindi, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati. Mom said, "If Rosie wasn't illiterate, she'd be Phd in languages."

Separate bureaucracies maintained separate-development. Police (SAP), judiciary and municipalities brutally administered unjust laws. Petty apartheid signs separated people: like "Whites Only Beach;" "Bantu Toilet." North Beach, where I surfed, Dairy Beach, South Beach, Addington Beach were all white beaches. Non-white beaches stretched northwards along the coast. Umgeni Blue Lagoon and Sunkist Beach became Indian beaches. Black and coloured beaches were closer to town. Whites were cast out of those beaches, so I often hitched past. Sometimes I stopped for water at those beaches, and non-whites ignored me.

If I dated a Durbs Indian Mary, or flirted with Rosie's grand -daughters, I broke immorality laws. Law-breaking got one imprisoned without trial (as a terrorist maybe), banned, house -arrested, banished, harassed in many ways. Bureau Of State Security (BOSS) watched one. St. Martins curate was banned and house -arrested, in his vicarage behind the church. He preached, but confined to his home, he reported to SAP weekly.

On my first Dokkies day, Freshers Week baas, Broeder Bul bellowed, "Wearrin' plazdick zandalz iz aginzd ztudind rregilazhinz!" Broeder Bul hustled over 100 English and Afrikaner first-years into the hall, where we made name-tags; sang songs; learnt about senior students, lecturers, college rules; and Students Representative Council. Broeder Bul called me on-stage, "Sing klein Engelsman!"

"Baa-baa black sheep, have you any wool..." Broeder Bul didn't realize I mocked, while third-year English students giggled at the back of the hall. Some first-year men had finished their nine months Citizen Force basic, or had worked in business. Freshers Week tried to "remove the matric complex," belittle us, and prepare us for college. Third-year students took some of us to Makouvlei Bar, near Lyric Theatre. It was my first time in a bar, and my first beer. I wasn't thrown out. Afterwards, Barry the blonde SRC President drove me home in his white VW Beetle. In the weekend, Barry compered our Freshers Concert, where I found new cherries. We danced Hello Dolly numbers, and Barry and I sang, "Swing low sweet chariot..." and, "When the saints go marching in..."

See PM Vorster and Bureau Of State Security (BOSS).

Parties, School and Family Roundup

1967. Mark Esslemont playing the Fool in 'King Lear', Northlands BH. >

Fraser, Charlie, Skelm and I played badminton at St. Martins hall. We wysed before chicks, who wysed before us. I didn't have money to spend on chicks, but psychedelic parties were common. I smaaked small-boobed Ursula, but at parties I French-kissed a slim chick. We danced and groped. Her father once found us lumbering on wet grass. Boomalakka!... Oooompa!...Music taped from LPs or radio hit-parades was played in a lounge. The Beetles; Rolling Stones; Silence is Golden, Here Comes the Sun; Jeremy Taylor's Ag Pleeze Daddy; Simon and Garfunkel's The Sound of Silence were groovy. Another chick had big boobs, but she didn't allow boob fondling. House of the Rising Sun was tit-hot though.

Gatecrashers roamed streets, looking for rorts. Booze was available at Montfleury Hotel for boys who looked 18, the booze age restriction. I looked too young. Siblings or older friends also supplied booze. Band sessions, or discos were held at the Kensington Drive, Journeys End MOTH Hall. Boys whispered about zolls, illegally sold at the Indian Market. Boys lay paralytic in flower beds, or passed out in chairs. Pissed youths rorted till cops came.

The ol' lady's ol' flame Eddie invited us for a holiday at his Bathurst farm, after his wife died. With Eddie's two grandsons, Fraser and I shot pellets at turtles in a dam. We shot birds. Eddie shot a pied crow through the eyes from 25m away. We donned gloves and boxed Eddie's grandsons. Using a hand-line from a boat, I caught a grunter in the Kowie River. The ol' lady declined Eddie's marriage proposal, but later Eddie's son boarded with us. The ol' lady said, "A man keeps kaffir burglars away!"

Canadian Bernadette, tired of Forest Sanctuary, prevailed upon the ol' lady's generosity, by staying with us. Aunt Dorothy was aggrieved. Bernadette's body wobbled when she waddled. Her jowls wriggled, while she ate like a moray eel. She praised the Lord, warbling hymns day and night, until neighbours complained. Rosie cackled to the ol' lady, "Maram! Dat fat lady sleeps while you work. She does no 'ouse work, an' sleeps an' eats all day. She doesn' bath an' stinks. I 'ave ta wash 'er close. Terrible T'ing! Aai-yai-yai-yai-yaaaai!" Bernadette left for Montreal.

At Northlands, I bore a banner on stage in Macbeth, enjoying witches on the heath. I played King Lear's Fool, and Knight / Tempter in Murder in the Cathedral. While murderous "knights" of apartheid murdered, detained, banned, banished, and harassed troublesome anti-apartheid "priests," those "knights" would never, "clear the air, clean the sky, wash the wind, take stone from stone and wash them..." as Eliot's opening line cried. I was twice awarded half-colours for acting. In future I'd play many unknown parts.

Playing Toktokkie, Fraser and I knocked on neighbours' doors and ran away. Sometimes we put a piss-full bottle against a door, knocked and ran. We threw stones at street-lamps, needing many stones to break a street-lamp. One Guy Fawkes night, we wandered Durban North with Skelm, breaking letter-boxes, jumping over hedges, and chucking gates into swimming pools.

At Rosetta camp, I was polished by Trafalgar Sea Scouts. (The ol' lady was born on Trafalgar Day). Skelm caught a black and white, hooded rinkhals snake, and kept it in a tin. It spat at me, but missed. It could've blinded me. I hung hand-lines from willow branches and caught trout.

I did extra-maths lessons, threw away most of my matric history notes, and spotted questions. Afrikaans wasn't spoken in Durban North much. I wrote a "Terroris op die Grens" spot essay, and included it in "My Vakansie" matric exam opstel. I matriculated with A Stream university exemption. My Space Race school years had firm home and school boundaries, thanks to the ol' lady and teachers. School dux and most prefects were in my elite matric class. Skelm and others had accompanied me from class one to matric. Knowing I was fatherless, they'd protected me. A coloured school-mate had successfully "tried for white." Jewish school-mates had Jewish holidays, as well as Christian and school holidays. My rugby legacy was a broken nose - unfixed.

Fifteen white boys who'd begun standard 6 (year 8) with me, repeated a high school year or two, then matriculated after me. (Northlands journal The Knight 1969, 1970). I attributed that mainly to the A and O Streams, beginning in form 3 (year 9), which caused some bright boys to languish in O Stream, and some battlers to battle in A stream. The only escape from O Stream was to repeat a year. While I played chess with a matric mate, the tallest oke in the class, who'd repeated standard 9, willfully messed up our chess game. I thumped him. "I'll fuck you up!" he said. He never did. He later became a divorce lawyer.

Examples of white affirmative-actions during and after apartheid: In 1969, straight after matriculating, a Northlands mate of mine joined a Durban bank. In 2008, forty years later, he was still employed by the same Durban bank, and was still living in Durban North. He intended working for the bank for a few more years. Three matric classmates cheaply read engineering at Natal University Durban (no non-white competition), and four decades later were still living and engineering in Durban. A fellow actor cheaply read his MA at Natal University Durban (no non-white competition), then emigrated to England in the early 70s, to become a drama professor at London University.

By 2008, forty years after matriculation, of 28 boys in my class, 2 died young, most stayed in and around Durban, some scattered to Cape Town and Jo'burg regions, 7 emigrated: 1 to Canada; 3 to England (1 returned to Durbs after 2 decades); 1 sailed westwards to Brazil and beyond; 2 went east to NZ.

During my 12 years schooling in Durban North, I never heard of any "English" parents being detained, banned, banished, or harassed by apartheid "knights." I was at Northlands with the sons of influential, white, affirmative-action fathers with English, Scottish, Afrikaner, German, Norwegian, Jewish surnames, who were Durban City mayor, treasurer, engineer, and other influential professionals: all of whom played their parts in forcing Rosie to stay in her May Street black spot, and later forcing Rosie's eviction.

As the co-ed Afrikaanse Hoer Skool sucked pupils away from Northlands BH and Northlands GH, rolls decreased over the years, so in 1990 Northlands BH and Beachwood BH joined, becoming Northwood. Beachwood became a primary school.

The ol' lady opined, "We're not poor whites, we're not white kaffirs. You weren't brought up, you were dragged up. And we weren't murdered in our beds. If it wasn't for Rosie's help, you boys would've gone to Ethelbert Home."

In apartheid SA, servants were better off than unemployed non-whites. Rosie cackled, "I wanta work for Maram. I'm too ol' for udda work. Aai-yai-yai-yai-yaaai!" Rosie's pay was cash-in-hand - untaxed. She drew a state pension, supporting her drunken son Maharaj and many grandchildren.

The ol' lady ignored Rosie's stealing of groceries, and joked, "Rosie feeds half of May Street." Outcast Rosie mothered Fraser and me, cooking for us, making our beds, washing our clothes, ironing laundry, cleaning our house. Rosie and her extended Hindu family enriched our lives.

Most of our neighbours had little to do with us. One neighbour made his fortune manufacturing skin-lightening cream for blacks. One father had two daughters: we hardly saw them. One died of cancer. Once, while Fraser and I played tennis on Chelsea Drive, the father who hadn't spoken to us for years, rushed from his garden calling, "Stop playing in the street! This isn't a slum!..." His brother, former Durban City mayor, had embezzled council funds.

While Fraser and I grew up, the ol' lady had taught at Red Hill Primary, then for ten years, she'd arrived home exhausted, after teaching English and Afrikaans at Northlands GH. Before retiring, the ol' lady taught for years at Durban North Primary. Beginning with Paul and ending with the ol' lady, Esslemonts attended Durban North Primary for 21 consecutive years: 1952-1973.

I reckoned the ol' lady worked hard as a solo-parent. She had nervous breakdowns, and earned her own wealth, envied by many whiteys. Her pay was always less than white male teachers'. Apartheid guilt-bestowers, sometimes white expat journalists, begrudged the ol' lady her success, despite her being born in SA. Like many white immigrants, those privileged white journalists and their privileged white bosses benefitted from apartheid, and enhanced their careers by praising and adoring blacks, and criticizing and mocking whites, especially Afrikaners. I never heard of any privileged white journalists permanently living in black spots, locations or Bantustans. And they too had non-white servants.

As the ol' lady was going nerve-deaf, and had a forceful personality, Esslemonts entertained neighbours and any passing umfaan, nanny or Naidoo with shouted dialogue. Fraser and I told the ol' lady to move Paul's golden death-mask from the lounge to the top of Fraser's cupboard. "Only if you stop calling me 'the ol' lady!'" said mom. The mask looked down on us for several more years.


1968. Mark Esslemont playing Second Knight /Tempter in 'Murder in the Cathedral'. >

Conscription and Umfolozi Game Trail

1968. Matric, Northlands BH. (Mumby)

During the sixties, some boys were drafted into army training, some weren't. In 1967, my fifth form year, Nazi sympathizer PW Botha, defence minister of the Nat government, legislated that all white males, in their sixteenth year be conscripted. Fifteen year old child soldier me. During the next two decades, white boys would be conscripted and brutalized by apartheid. Slimy cadet training, by brainwashed white teachers like Kaydee, conditioned white boys and their parents that militarization was normal in SA.

Heavy SADF soldiers came to Northlands, registering us for national service in the PT change-rooms. Teachers had sold us out to apartheid slavery to protect whiteys. Boys dreaded the mythical cough test, where a military doctor ordered a boy to strip, then placed spoons beneath the boy's balls, and ordered the boy to cough, to check his balls. I never had a cough test, but pissing in a bottle caused comment. Boys dried up.

Some boys made sickness-excuses for conscription exemption. Those "sick" boys had done PT and sports for years. I didn't mention my Perthes hip, a good evasion.

Conscript options: Nine months Citizen Force training in the army, navy, airforce, doing annual camps thereafter; Basic Commando training, then annual camps for 16 years; Medical exemption; Flee SA to work and / or study overseas; Do tertiary education, then flee SA; Jail. Medical exemption, or exile were the only escapes. We were 69-89ers, PW Botha's white peril conscripts, warring for apartheid. I heard no protests about conscription from white, affirmative-action, Durban North parents, just comments like, "Army will make a man of you..."

Kaydee accompanied boys on an Umfolozi game trail. An armed white game-ranger led from the front. An armed Zulu game-warden trailed behind. We learnt spooring skills and wilderness wildlife. We camped below sycamore fig trees by Umfolozi River, checking our sleeping bags for snakes and our crotches for ticks. While I lay in my tent, Skelm threw a 10cm scorpion on my tent. "Fuck off!" I said.

"Stop fuckin' swearing!" said Kaydee. "Do the 2-4 o'clock watch tonight! Don' fall asleep hey? I've seen lion spoor."

On watch, I threw logs on our fire. I shone my torch into sweet-thorn shadows, and saw reflections of antelope eyes. A nagapie's scream skrikked me. Hippos grunted, wading from pools: lumbering shadows, shuffling past camp, tail-wagging dung. "Uuuuunnhh! Uuuuunnhh!..." roared a lion. More fire logs.

Down-wind we spoored a white rhino, dozing on the dry Umfolozi bed. Kaydee smacked rhino's belly. Short-sighted rhino jumped up. We stood single-file. Trees were 200 yards away. Rhino lowered its double horns at us, snorting. Stillness...Sweat...Silence...Rhino trotted to the Umfolozi bank, then pissed backwards on its grassy dung-heap marking its territory. In SA, white rhinos were almost extinct, while ferocious black rhinos charge anything that moved. Game-ranger Ian Player and others saved the rhino from extinction.

See Interview: Dr. Ian Player - Travel Africa Magazine.

Sports and Cadets

< 1967-1968. Mark Esslemont, Scrumhalf for third & fourth rugby teams , Northlands BH. (Bird & Leeney)

Charlie and I smaaked Kings Park rugby matches, sitting on the white stands, behind goal posts. Outcast non-whites sat on separate stand sections. We watched provincial matches and test matches, before international sports boycotts. I remember booing nasty French players booting fallen Boks. SATV didn't show such skullduggery yet. We persuaded a Zulu refreshment-seller that French for "Peanuts and Popcorn" was, "I'macuntcunt." Zulu then strode around Kings Park calling, "Peanuts! Popcorn! I'ma..."

I kept fit by running along Northway, across the old concrete-bridge, over a valley, and up Ellis Park Drive. Along the way, I saw umfaans sitting chatting on pavements, smoking thin hand-rolled cigarettes. Some played murabaraba in sand. I ran to Robina Stores, turned back along Northway, past S bends, back home. Ursula, St. Martins chick, lived along the way. I hoped she'd notice me. She never did. For years, I ran barefoot, until I stood on glass near the Umgeni. I ran home, and soaked my bleeding foot in bath water. "Jesus Christ!..." the ol' lady screeched, and rushed me to Addington, where a doctor stitched my foot without anaesthetic. Pain.

During school cross-countries, boys ran from Northlands to Beachwood, along the beach from Rocket Hut to Virginia Airport, back to school. I came tenth in my matric year (year 12). Adults and youths competed in Milk Marathons: walking races from town to Glenashley sugarcane fields and back to town. I again came tenth in my matric year.

We bought a fox terrier, Spartan, from SPCA. Spartan barked at kaffirs and coolies, and was a car-chaser. A neighbour walked his Dachshund and Alsation past our gate, causing trouble. Spartan ripped an ear off the Dachshund. The Alsation tore the skin off Spartan's tail. Wagging tail bones tapped thereafter. Another neighbour was Glenwood's headmaster, whose wife was paralysed. One night, he stood outside our dining-room shouting, "Spartan's barking keeps my wife awake. I'm gunna shoot him!..." Fraser and I watched him until he left. The ol' lady sniggered.

I played hooker for Northlands U15C team. We never won a match. I then played scrum-half for third and fourth teams, and we won some matches. I played some second team matches, but got thumped, as I was too small. Kaydee coached our first team, which never won a match. Northlands war cry didn't help:

"Brown and white. Chivalrous Knight.
Northland High will always fight.
N-O-R-T-H-L-A-N-D-S-!"

After refereeing matches, kinky Kaydee preened in showers, comparing his long cock with boys' cocks. Kaydee walked on his hands on sports fields and chatted up lady staff. Kaydee sent cadets trekking by slow milk-train to 'Maritzburg cadet camps, where we camped in army tents, ate army food, and threw bouncy meat. Cadets inspected pubic growth in communal showers, while lathering with Lifebuoy soap.

Polishing was rife. Skelm said, "Jislaaik! My cock's small, as it was accidently severed, then doctors sewed it back on." On our return trek to Durbs, Skelm wysed, "While AWOLling, I shagged three cherries. Baba-baba-boo!"

I became bugler staff sergeant, then warrant officer, coached bugle playing to juniors, yelled at them to bone their boots and polish their brass, swing their arms shoulder height, and keep their dressing. We continued to come last at band competitions. DHS continued to win, followed by Newcastle and Glenwood. In my matric year, when we came second to last, we cheered.

See Boycott of Apartheid Sport.




< 1968. Mark Esslemont, Milk Marathon, Durban.

RC and Saint Martins

< 1966. Esslemont Brothers as St Martins Choir Boys, Chelsea Drive.


RC considered prefects in our elite form 5 (year 11) class, but often stayed in his office instead of teaching us English. With his cane, RC flogged Nigger of the Narcissus and grammar into us. "Do get my cane boy!" inspired a miscreant's shuffling to RC's office. Several classes flinched while cuts struck in the corridor. RC was a good golfer. He taught us every use of the comma. Closet-Romantic RC made us learn Pied Beauty.

Despite Durban's humidity, RC never removed his jacket. He prowled corridors, glaring at boys and staff, while black "boys" polished floors. "Do get along there!" blasted RC, and boys and "boys" scuttled. If RC caught bad boys, he flourished a wand from his sleeve, caning boys' bums. Once teachers bunked assembly, while listening to test cricket, broadcast by Springbok Radio. RC delayed assembly, while teachers herded in to the amusement of 7oo boys. Later when I was a teacher, one of my mean and arrogant headmasters compared his mean discipline with RC's firm discipline. From my schoolboy viewpoint, RC was firm but not mean and arrogant.

RC's POW story: "You know boys, in camps we ate cheese made from coal." Silence. "S'true. Some Afrikaners didn't like the taste, so gave us their share."

"Stupid Hairy-Backs!" I blurted.

"Who said that?" I raised my hand while boys sniggered. "You're a Hairy-Back!" RC was at varsity with the ol' lady, so knew my maternal Hendrikz background. RC didn't accept school fees from the ol' lady, nor other solo-parents. RC made me write thank you letters to sponsors.

On Guy Fawkes nights, bad boys sorted out RC, by roaring past his home on motor bikes, lobbing fireworks into his garden. RC never took issue with that. RC's home was next to Beachwood Boys High principal's home. RC resented baby-boomer Beachwood, calling it "that school down the road." We played no sports with Beachwood boys, who if they'd all gone to Northlands, enrolment would've doubled, thus increasing RC's salary and pension.

The ol' lady became a confirmed Anglican. Aunt Dorothy was aggrieved. Fraser and I became confirmed Anglicans and joined St Martin's choir, enjoying sermons, liturgy, cassocks, anthems, plainchant. Choir boys' duties included singing near the booming, wailing, mewling organ; lighting and snuffing altar candles; tidying stalls music; receiving choir collections; reading scriptures from a wooden lectern; leading processions holding a wooden cross.

Sometimes we sneaked up the belfry to spy on a choir chick lumbering her boyfriend below. "Klank-Klank!..." We rang the cracked bell, and skedaddled. Boyfriend later became Beachwood headmaster, then a so-called opposition, Progressive Party MP.

It was illegal for natives to worship in European churches. (Martin Meredith, Nelson Mandela, A Biography, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1997). Zulu Manyanos women wearing red blouses and black skirts worshipped at separate services. I never saw Zulu men, nor any Indians, nor any coloureds worshipping at Durban North white English churches. But I did see Zulu Zionist Church priests wandering Durban in long, flowing robes, and Zionist priests baptising followers in the Indian Ocean at South Beach, while I surfed there. I also saw Zulu Sangoma herbalists and witch-doctors wandering Durbs wearing skins, bladders, beads and other witch-doctor garb. They sold their muti at the central Durbs Indian Market, which later mysteriously burnt down.

Charlie, Beachwood boy, also sang in the choir. Like the ol' man, Charlie's ol' toppies were Poms, apartheid beneficiaries. Immigrants kept their foreign nationality, or became SA citizens, unlike natives carrying passes, restricting movement, and forcing them to live in locations and Bantustans. Immigrants increased the white population against swart gevaar, and stayed silent about apartheid benefits, while Rosie bussed from May Street Indian "black spot" to Durban North Indian "black spot" to work for us privileged whiteys.

Surfing

< 1966. Esslemont Brothers as white Trafalgar Sea Scouts, Chelsea Drive.

For years, while southwesters rattled banana leaves, bren guns, sten guns, R1s and .303s crackled at Umgeni estuary rifle-range near home. For years, barefoot and wearing baggies and T shirt, on summer days I hitched to whites only north beach on Marine Parade, according to the 1953 Separate Amenities Act, and body-surfed there, gliding along solar energy transferred deep in the Indian Ocean. Skelm and I caught a tan, then wysed on the whites only beach, checking new hair in our armpits and on our legs. We pulled in our stomachs, checking white chicks' bikini boobs, but were too shy to chat-up white chicks. Indian waiters, receiving orders for whites only Cuban Hat take-away, wandered North beach, calling, "Peanuts, Popcorn, Toffee apoo..."

On easterly days, Skelm and I checked graffiti on whites only Beach Baths lav walls. Sauntering along whites only Lower Marine Parade, we checked white chicks; played pinball in Mr. Ball's whites only pinball alley; then checked white Ghost Train riders. We haggled with pavement Zulu women selling beads and trinkets. We sat on SLEGS BLANKES WHITES ONLY benches; paddled in whites only Paddling Pools, then checked whites only dodgem cars. We strolled past the whites only aquarium, then checked whites only South Beach surf and white chicks. We played table-soccer in a Greek's tearoom, and when Greek shooed our whoops away, we sat on a whites only stone wall near XL tearoom, checking ocean yacht races near the harbour pier, and white chicks bouncing up-down-up...in bikinis while trampolining.

Near Addington Hospital, Ndlamu stamp-dancing competitions were held by Zulu men's teams from beach-front hotels and businesses. Teams jogged onto the field, singing a Zulu war-song, with a drummer banging a hide drum, and a leader blowing a whistle. Dancers wore shorts, their bodies glistening sweat; some wore ankle-rattles. Hip-to-hip dancers stamped, flourishing cattle-hide shields with their left hand, and fighting sticks, or knobkerries, or assegais with their right hands. A leader stamped solo, followed by his team: Stamp-Stamp-Stamp...A whistle blew and dancers jogged away. (Laurie Levine, The DrumCafe's Traditional Music of South Africa, Jacana, Johannesburg, 2005).

Sometimes we rickshaw-rode back to whites only North beach. Zulu men pulling rickshaws wore white-beaded tunics, garish horned -helmets and car-tyre, rubber sandals. Indian and Zulu rickshaw pullers worked in town near the station and Grey Street Indian CBD, pulling heavy loads, then at dusk parked their rickshaws at an Umgeni Road depot near Rosie's May Street slum.

North Beach lifesavers blew whistles, when out-of-depth Vaalie holiday-makers washed out to sea, having to be rescued. Body -surfers and board-surfers used groyne rip-currents to get beyond breakers. Onshore, surfers smoked fags, or zoll, and chatted up chicks, showing off peroxided hair and perspex-surfboard necklaces. Some board-surfers paddled out to shark- nets, stealing netting for nylon-bangles.

Unrest: I was at St. Martins when I heard that PM Verwoerd was assassinated by Mozambiquan born coloured Tsafendas, who'd stabbed Verwoerd in parliament. Vorster succeeded Verwoerd as PM. (Simon Adams, et al, The Illustrated History of the 20th Century, DK - Dorling Kindersley, London, 1997).

From standard 8 (year 10) I failed boring maths, despite rarity and arrogance of maths teachers who followed Verwoerd's racial edicts, forcing white boys to do maths. Skelm plucked his ball-hairs and measured them. Ol' ballie Energy, Australian science teacher, wanked test tubes, mixing chemicals. Ol' toppie Flash, biology teacher, called us "Pinheads," and for four years shocked "Location, Structure, Function..." into us with electric wires and hand-generator. The human skeleton's skull in Flash's lab was sometimes stuffed with schoolboy "cigarettes."

Kaydee, Afrikaans teacher, swaggered around school, lashing boys with his swagger-cane, calling us "Kaffir-dogs." Our history teacher tweeted about European and Japanese history, flashing her underrods when sliding off her desktop.

Dr. Barnard did the world's first heart-transplant in Cape Town white hospital, while the Terrorism Act was promulgated by the state to detain "terrorists" indefinitely without trial. Anyone could be a "terrorist," even me, if cops decided so. PM Vorster's Christian Nationalist fascist death-heads needed brain transplants. Nazi -Sympathizer Vorster had been detained at Koffiefontein during WW2. (Roger Childs, Divide and Rule, Macmillan, Auckland, 1990).

See Durban Beaches.

Stutterheim and Cadets

1967. Northlands BH Cadet Band.

Worrier mom had a nervous breakdown at Forest Sanctuary, then admitted herself to Queenstown Komani Hospital. Fraser and I stayed at Forest Sanctuary, and went to Stutterheim School where we had brief donkey wagon rides. The Eastern Cape form 3 (year 9) curriculum was backward, as most subject content, except book-keeping, I'd already done at Northlands. Winston Churchill died. We listened to a Springbok Radio broadcast of his funeral. SA didn't have TV yet. Besides English and Afrikaner pupils, some Stutterheim pupils had German ancestors. Herman, in my class, shoved Fraser around in the playground. I sneaked up yelling, "Los my boet!"

"Mind your own blerri business! Fraser called me Afrikaner-vrot-banana!" Herman backed off. "Rooinek soutpiel!"

Fraser and I visited mom: Shock-treatment had stuffed up mom's memory, and garbled her speech. She had scabrous temples, where electrodes had been attached. She showed us the ward where she'd been electro-shocked.

Back at Forest Sanctuary, Fraser and I stayed in a rondavel, where we watched coloured men re-thatch rondavel roofs, completing one roof a week. Outside Forest Sanctuary lounge, I saw a puffadder sliding along a gutter. I called Xhosa gardeners, who hit the snake with knobkerries. We kept our school books in a potty-cupboard. While chatting to the lady manager, my hand lay on top of the potty-cupboard door. "Snake! In your cupboard!" shrieked the manager. I skrikked, slamming the door.

Gardeners poked the door open with a knobkerrie. Another puffadder flicked its tongue, its head raised to strike. Gardeners clubbed the puffadder - longer than the snake they'd killed earlier. Our school books were blood spattered. Ancestors called.

Every school day, Fraser and I were driven to school by a farmer's wife, who picked up local kids and drove along a dirt road to Stutterheim. One evening, too young to die, I woke in Stutterheim Hospital, concussed, retching into a kidney-dish. Fraser, in the bed next to me, with a sprained ankle, explained, "A tyre blew out, our lady driver lost control, rolling her car down a bank: we flew from her car - a write-off."

I had dizzy spells for years.

Mom drove us back to Durbs and resumed teaching. Mom regularly visited a lady psychiatrist, who fixed-up mom with melleril tablets, keeping mom stable. "My depression's like having a huge weight pressing on my head," said mom.

July holiday: Ol' ballie Mr. Russel's Rosetta scout camp was one of the coldest places in Natal. On our last camp night, a polishing-gang searched tents for victims. Our young scout-master, powerless to stop assaults, wandered about the hell-in. I escaped into the veld. Skelm, Fraser and others were polished. I hid in the sick-tent and escaped polishing.

Back at Northlands, RC reprimanded me for misbehaving. He thought I'd had polio during the 50s polio scare. I didn't bother to explain about my Perthes hip. Ol' ballie Blobjob, English teacher, battled to control our class. I tape-recorded Blobjob's rowdy lesson. Afterwards, boys crowded round my desk, listening to the tape.

Ol' toppie VP, Nobbie walked in. "What's in that desk?" asked Nobby. Boys slipped from class. "If I haven't heard what's in that desk by lunch-break, this class stays in after school..."

I owned up. Peer pressure. RC, former POW, interrogated me in his office: "Rat!...Strip your tape!...Throw your tape in the bin!...Put your recorder in my storeroom!...Choose a cane from my shelf!...Bend down!...Touch your toes!..." I had bum-stripes for weeks. My classmates were ashamed.

Cadet-master Kaydee played the tuba in a military band and walked with a backward lean. I became bugler in Kaydee's cadet-band, which had a side-drummer rank; a rank with two tenor-drummers, cymbalist and bass-drummer; trumpeter rank; and bugler ranks. Preparing for band competitions, we practised before, during and after school: marching, left-wheel, right-wheel, counter-marching, figure-marching, music. Blowing my guts out, I liked Aida March. Neighbours complained when I practised Last Post and Come to the Cookhouse Door Boys after midnight. Our drum-major threw his silver mace, and yelled at band-players. I, smallest band-player, wearing the smallest boned army boots, swaggered next to wyser Skelm.

Aged fourteen, at my first band competition, and proudly wearing my khaki cadet uniform, with green beret, gaiters and boned brown boots, when Northlands band marched onto the field the crowd laughed. We came last, and Durban High School won. For years I paradiddled to "Boomalakka!...Ooompapa!..Eh! Kwa! Dammit!" For three decades in the land of my birth, I'd witness militarization, including SA producing nuclear weapons. (John Pilger, Freedom Next Time, Bantam Press, London, 2006).

At school, I learnt my lessons of involvement and detachment, which would characterize me. I was involved with family, friends, rugby, cadets, choirs, drama and some lessons. I detached from other lessons, like maths, and my hours of swotting, reading, hitching, surfing and jogging detached me.

Unrest: 1965. Rhodesia. Smith's white government declared Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain. (Glen Lyndon Dodds, The Zulus and Matabele Warrior Nations, Arms and Armour, London, 1998). Rhodesian white conscripts would fight a ten year Bush War against Mugabe's Shona terrorists and Nkomo's Matabele terrorists. "Kaaa! Ka-ka-ka-ka-kaaaa!..."

Christmas Eve: Tapping woke me. Tokoloshe? I prowled outside our house, and crouched between our hedge and yesterday-today- tomorrow bushes. "Mina shaya wena!" I shouted. Tapping stopped. "Thieves!"

Christmas: I found bicycles chained together on the verge outside our home.

New Year: Mom chopped down our dying avocado tree. As Paul's death-mask had become dusty, mom cleaned it and painted it gold.

1965. Northlands BH Cadet Band, Durban North. (Bird)


See SA Nuclear Weapons.

Durban North Indians

Skelm and I smaaked Durban North Rocket Hut Beach, a fishing spot for Indian and white fishermen, a beach where skates parked their cars to booze and smoke dagga. Homos went there. Skelm and I hunted shaggers in tickberry bushes. When we heard panting and squealing, we lobbed sticks and clods on blankets. A head or two popped out, and if we were lucky we saw bare numbis. Once, a big man chased us to hell-an'-gone, caught Skelm and clouted him.

Durban North whiteys had a dirty secret: Indians living near them, and indifference to their fate. Once, when hitching along N2 freeway, north of the Umgeni River, Skelm and I threw clods at outcast Indian boys, running from "black spot" shacks, where flags on top of bamboo poles advertised marriageable Hindu maidens. Indians chucked clods at us, tuning, "What yous cheeky whitey lighties doin' by da 'ouse ek se? 'Ave yous gotta skyf ek se?"

"Jislaaik!" said Skelm. "Pull out Coolie! Don' tune us skraal!"

One bad hitching day, when Skelm and I sweated past shacks, an Indian asked, "Why yous uncles sending it so fa' an' all?"

"We're goin' surfin' an' you thievin' charras aren't allowed on Europeans' North Beach." We ran along the freeway calling, "Coolie- Coolie-Coolie!..."

Outcast Indian market-gardeners sold crops at Warrick Avenue Indian market. Sammy Naidoo strode from Riverside slum carrying a bamboo pole over his shoulders. Two wicker baskets filled with produce hung from the pole. Once a week, Sammy knocked on our back door, calling, "Fruit an' vege-tables maram. Wachu smaak?" Sammy eventually bought a truck, and drove about Durban North selling vegetables and fruit. After Sammy's truck stopped at our gate, Rosie haggled prices on our back stoep. Sammy barefoot-stomped on scuttling cockroaches, leaving smeared fat on our concrete floor and gunge between his toes.

According to the 1950 Group Areas Act, Durban North Riverside and Red Hill Indians were cast out to Chatsworth, south of Durban, splintered from the white CBD and Grey Street Indian CBD. Some Indians remained in freehold brick-and-tile homes, until they too were forcibly moved to a separate Indian location, like Phoenix, north of Durban. Bulldozers rubbled... Mango trees and ruins remained. The Indian school, renamed Phoenix School, became a special school for whites with learning disabilities. Durban North whites were splintered from swart gevaar by the Indian Ocean, poorer Red Hill westwards, and a coloured area across North Coast Road, over the hill from Greenwood Park. Nor'westwards, beyond sugarcane fields lurked natives' KwaMashu.

To splinter the English vote, government built an Afrikaanse Hoer Skool near the Hindu temple on Umgeni River north bank. Post-apartheid the hoer skool was re-named Durban North College. Former Durban North Indian residents, Indian devotees came from afar to worship at the temple. A white primary school was built on cleared slum-land. Umgeni Road Tent Crusader built a Living Waters Church where Durban North Indians once slummed. Happy-clappy, "I love you Jesus...praise the Lord," whiteys worshipped there, no love lost for former Indian residents. A Pick 'n Pay hypermarket, new houses and retirement cottages for rich whiteys were built where Indians once slummed. Durban North Indian slum became part of whitey Durban North, smothered by urban sprawl.

I never heard protest about the Group Areas Act splintering the Indian community, from English-speaking Durban North whiteys, or Greenwood Park, Red Hill, Virginia and Glenashley whitey suburbs, all north of the Umgeni. I never heard whiteys protest about Durban North Indian forced removals. I never heard protests from complicit Durban North Methodist, nor complicit Saint Martins Anglican pulpits. Durban North was a whitey "United Party" suburb (no Indians nor other non-whites allowed), and later whitey "Progressive Party" suburb. Sometimes, a few whitey Black Sash ladies stood silently protesting on Northway near Robina Stores, watching passing cars.

Durban municipality landscaped a Japanese Garden on part of the old Indian slum. Thousands of outcast Indians visited, especially during weekends. Apartheid splintered Durban North Indian community, one of many Durban Indian communities obliterated by apartheid. "It'sa helluva t'ing Mak," cackled Rosie, "a heeeelluva t'ing!"

See Grey Street, Durban.

Northlands Lightie

< 1964. Mark Esslemont in standard 6 at Northlands BH.


According to Verwoerd's 1953 Bantu Education Act, blacks' schooling became inferior to whites,' coloureds' and Indians' schooling. Schools were racially separated, except for some high fee-paying private and church schools. Mom sent Fraser and me to white Northlands Boys High for more donkey wagon rides. Northlands was further from home than newly built Beachwood Boys High off Broadway. Some Beachwood white boys lived closer to Northlands. Apartheid separation of white schools (and other race schools) displaced Durban North high school pupils, according to ol' toppie choices. Black, Indian, or coloured kids, perhaps illegally living on white properties with their servant parents, had no choices. Outcasts had to be schooled in locations or Bantustans.

I began standard 6 (year 8), smallest lightie at Northlands BH. Ol' ballie music teacher, Strauss played the piano, teaching us songs in the school hall. Strauss sang operatic-baritone, sometimes singing with us, mangling our merriment. His music was naf to pop-singing boys. Strauss made us sing old songs like, "At six o'clock of a shining morn we start our little day..." When we mocked Strauss, ol' toppie headmaster RC stood glaring at us at the back of the hall. We silenced, as RC commanded respect. Before my voice broke to lyrical-tenor, I joined Strauss's choir, singing at prize-givings.

Ol' toppie class teacher, Pop was the only (yawn) maths and science teacher who inspired me. They were scarce. Pop sometimes said, "It's as easy as falling off a log...Hell's teeth! You're sailing for it boy!" When Pop said, "I've got an itchy hand!" we knew we were, "Sailing close to the wind!" If that failed, Pop slapped our backs.

While school buses returned from sports matches, senior Northlands boys grabbed lighties, whose balls were polished with shoe polish, or toothpaste, or stinging wintergreen, then polished lighties were wysed through bus windows to motorists. I avoided polishings, as I didn't play ball sports, due to my Perthes hip.

During weekends, Ndlovu painted our house, and gardened for mom. Once, after I cycled home from school, Ndlovu stood keening by our house wall. He wailed, "Woza lapha tokoloshe! May mudda died tokoloshe! May mudda died..."

I went inside our lounge, and mom said, "Give Ndlovu twenty Rand train fare to shut him up! Tell him to pay me back!" Mom expected me to be, "the man of the family." Ndlovu never paid us back.

Unrest: July 1964. Johannesburg Station was bombed. (Alan Paton, Journey Continued, Oxford University Press, Cape Town, 1988).

See Northlands Boys High, now Northwood School.

Thieves and Religion

1960s. One of Mom's Northlands GH classes. (Mumby) >

On another Bloemfontein holiday, a kwaaitannie shopkeeper, whose shop was near aunt Dorothy's home, caught Fraser and me stealing: "Why're yous two Engelse stealing my comics? Pasop Hey!" Fraser and I gave the comics back, and ran like mad. During the rest of the holiday we climbed Signal Hill, then climbed Naval Hill to look at the observatory and zebra. We looked at zoo ligers and swam in the municipal pool.

Back at Durban North Astra Cafe, a Greek lady caught me stealing a war comic: "Ya've come 'ere for yearz. 'Aveyabin stealin' alliz time?"

"Ag nah! It'sa first time."

"What'zyaname? Where'dyalive?" Silence. I ran home.

Aunt Dorothy phoned mom: "Yoiks! Your delinquent sons stole money and a magnet from my friend's bedroom."

Mom rushed me to Meyric Bennet Centre, Berea, where psychiatrists sorted out problem kids. I did easy block-tests, played games, then ol' ballie Psycho-lady asked, "Ever stolen anything?"

"Money and tinned food from mom," I said. "Money and a magnet from my aunt's Bloem friend."

Psycho-lady said to mom, "Mark's quite normal. He needs pocket-money. As Mark will attend high school next year, he needs sex education." I read her sex book on her couch, staring at drawings and long words, differing from playground whisperings.

I became an authority on love matters when Skelm asked, "Do okes piss in chicks?" I told him to check library books. Saturday flicks were grope-flicks at Broadway's Rex Cinema. I learnt more about chicks' bodies at Rex Cinema, town Roxy Bioscope, and parties than any books. Fraser also spent his pocket-money at Rex Cinema.

Mom sent me to piano lessons: Ol' toppie Tinkle taught me, while her Beethoven bust jiggled on top of her piano. She was a sweaty Pom, so I left her for ol' toppie Twang. Spit dried at corners of his slobbery mouth. He wanted me to practise a polka an hour a day for his annual concert. I left, as I didn't smaak being forced.

Mom studied Scientology, and Bible-bashed Fraser and me to stop us stealing. After threatening everlasting hell, Billy Graham saved me at a Kings Park Crusade: "Come forward! Be born again!..." Smiling savers watched me cry, patted my back, gave me Bible tracts, then sent me home to be a good boy. We heard Brother Mandus, who'd preached in Delhi, then preached in Durban Central Methodist Church. We attended Umgeni Road Tent Crusades. Mom sat Fraser and me in the front row. Preacher yelled, "Hallelujah!..." He mopped his brow, while the crowd waved above their heads calling, "We love you Jesus!... Praise the Lord!..." Preacher hit his Bible, and ranted at Fraser and me, "Are you saved?" I nodded. "Praise the Lord!"

Priests laid hands on us at Musgrave Road Methodist Church healing services. After church mom asked, "Did you feel the power of priests' hands?" I felt nothing. Mom befriended a Pom priest, who ran Kearsney Mental Home, near Stanger. An inmate said, "I'm Queen Victoria. I own all the land from Stanger to Gilletts." Another inmate carried photos in a cardboard box, and no one was allowed to touch her photos.

During Christmas holidays, we went to Camps Farthest Out, at Forest Sanctuary, near Stutterheim. Fraser and I eyed chicks; spoored crowned-cranes in a vlei; and hiked to Kubusi Forest waterfall. Playing hide-an'-seek, I ran into a tree, saw a strange light, and woke up with a cut on the back of my head. We studied the Bible, listened to sermons, and sang choruses. Ol' ballie Bernadette, a blubbery Canadian, amused us, when reciting Albert and the Lion, and The Man with the Single Hair. Bernadette's coloratura warbling dominated choruses, like: How Great Thou Art; He's got the Whole World in His Hands; Zipperdidodah, Zipperdiday...

A priest preached a First Corinthians sermon on, "faith, hope and charity." He hugged women and shook hands with their husbands. He fondled mom's leg, leering, jabbering about love. (Years later his wife divorced him). Fraser and I enjoyed socializing, but fervour was a switch-off.

Driving through the Vrystaat, mom drove onto a one-way bridge crossing a river. A Boer in a bakkie drove onto the bridge from the opposite bank. Mom stopped. Boer stopped and roared, "Mevrou! Move your car!"

"Pass me a naartjie Mark," said mom. She chucked peels into the river.

Boer dressed in khaki shirt, shorts, socks, veldskoene and felt hat with leopard skin sweatband, got out his bakkie and snarled at mom, "Mevrou! Move your car!"

"I was on this bridge before you," said mom. "See all the cars behind me." Although mom suffered anxiety, she never showed fear. Boer backed off.

When we visited Bloemfontein, aunt Dorothy said, "Yoiks! Valmai, you're leaving the Methodist Church! Our father will be spinning in his grave!"

"Let him spin! Look what he did to my mother!" Aunt Dorothy shut up. She was clueless about Fraser and me growing up. Whenever we visited, she gave us a tin of buttons to play with. Aunt Dorothy tolerated Fraser and me, and posted us each one Rand for our birthday and Christmas presents. She loved her fat dogs and cats, feeding them diced fillet steaks. Her pets were better fed than location piccanins.

Ol' toppie Rosie loved Fraser and me, never scolding us. At May Street, every morning she woke at 05:30, commuted by Indian bus along Umgeni Road to Durban North Indian bus rank in the Indian slum, by Gopals Store, where we bought fireworks. Rosie then walked barefoot, crossing the sweet-thorn valley off Old Mill Way, to our Chelsea Drive home. Rosie never missed a day's work in the 1960s. During that time, Durban North rubbish-removal / street-sweeping jobs were reserved for Indian men only.

Mom, Fraser and I went to Wilkie Circus performances, and enjoyed animals, trapeze artists, tight-rope-walkers and Tickey and Stompie clowns. We went to Drive-In flicks: "When you leave, please replace your speakers," was announced at the end of each flick. Mom enjoyed NAPAC ballet at Alhambra Theatre, choral singing like Vienna Boys Choir, Passion Plays with David Horner as Christ, and Marcel Marceau. Every year, we trekked to 'Maritzburg Royal Agricultural Show, and mom honked her varsity song, "O 'Maritzburg, happy land, happy land..."

See Boswell Wilkie Circus website.

Elandspruit and Holidays

< 1960. Esslemont Brothers, Durban.


We holidayed at Elandspruit farm, where us kids swam in the dam. We looked at pigs and fowls, and collected eggs. We helped aunty Esme in her garden. We dried squash, pumpkins and onions in the stone cool-room. At the dairy, we watched uncle Chum bossing Zulu umfaans and men hand-milking Jersey cows. The bull had a brass ring through its wet nose. We fed pails of milk to calves, which sucked our milky fingers. We turned a separator handle, then stored milk, cream and butter in an old paraffin fueled fridge. We scoffed apartheid amasi with breakfast cereal. After meals, aunty Esme called her Zulu maid, "Letha iteye Intombi!" Intombi brought tea for us. Aunty Esme then placed a big bowl of milk for her cats outside the kitchen door, and called, "Kitty!-Kitty!-Kitty!..."

Sometimes, a mad munt stripped off his tatty clothes, doing a Zulu war dance, stamping his coarse feet in dung, his penis eeling sideways. Zulus grabbed him, dressed him, and led him raving back to his wattle-an'-daub thatched rondavel.

Shannon and I helped munts load mealies from fields into a trailer. In a silo we pelted each other with sugary silage. We collected mielie-cobs from the barn, and stored stove-fuel cobs in a shed outside aunty Esme's kitchen. We wrestled in an itchy haystack. In a shed, we climbed onto an old, red tractor, and talked on and old, wooden wagon.

We played hide-an'-seek in the barn. At night we shone torchlight into rats' red eyes in the barn roof, and watched uncle Chum shoot rats. We scraped our muddy feet on a metal scraper by the door, near agapanthus blooms.

Mom said to aunty Esme, "Siobahn's a domineering sponger with an Irish temper!" Aunty Esme smiled.

Back in Durban, Rosie cackled, "Maram! I 'ave allis extra bread-buying from Bakers Bread lorry, an' bunny-chow cooking! Terrible t'ing! Aai-yai-yai-yai-yaaai!"

We holidayed at aunt Dorothy's Bloemfontein home. "Yoiks! Get that Irish woman out of your house!" hissed aunt Dorothy, while soothing her nerves, raking gravel paths around her house. "Crunch-crunch..." was a good burglar alarm.

Near the Basutoland border, we visited uncle Lesley's Clarens farm. We saw Mushroom Rock on a red cave-sandstone cliff-top, amidst Golden Gate koppies. Uncle Lesley's sunburnt hands were crippled with rheumatoid arthritis. He showed us Bushman paintings in caves - from Bushmen to blogs ne? He showed us his collection of Bushman stone thumbnail-cutters, axeheads, circular digging-stones with a hole in the middle for a sharpened digging-stick, grindstones, ostrich egg shells with a hole in the top for water storage.

Basutho owned cattle and goats overgrazed slopes, causing donga erosion in steep Malutis. We holidayed at Caledon Poort Christian guest farm near the Caledon River, where Shannon and I swam in the sepia Caledon, threw mud, collected jasper, agate and moss-agate from the riverbed. We played tennis, rode horses, swam in the pool, and climbed eastern Free State flat-topped koppies. We played Monopoly, Scrabble, ping-pong, cards, and watched thunderstorms over the Malutis: "Boomalakkawa!..."

We holidayed at Southport MOTH beach-cottages, as dad was a former soldier. Shannon and I picked red num-nums from spiny bushes, and sucked tart sweetness. We put coins on the railway-line, and watched steam-trains squashing them.

While changing in a cottage, when Shannon wriggled into her Speedo, I checked her cherry. She checked my knob. While crossing the railway-line, Shannon and I held hands. I smaaked her moist palms. We walked under whispering casaurina trees and clattering banana trees. We scoffed bananas under silver-oaks, while sand burnt our feet.

We swam in rock pools and Southport beach-pool, then lying on our towels we caught a tan. Shannon lowered her Speedo top, so her flat titties caught a freckled tan. We folded our towels into points, dipping the tips into water, then we flicked our legs, leaving red wheals. Wind blew stinging sand, which dried on our skins. We looked for cowrie shells and seaweed, and popped bluebottles on the shore. Our eyes were bluebottle blue.

Back home, mom told Siobahn to leave, and was enraged when Siobahn said, "You're a sucker!"

I was glad to return to my porch, as an oil painting had hung there all my life: a mouse swam around in a bowl of cats' cream, with six hungry cats looking on. Fraser and mom slept in their own bedrooms. Toby returned to the kitchen. Rosie cackled, "Aai-yai-yai- yai-yaaai!..."

Ndlovu's and "boys'" families lived in Zululand. After school, it was scary sneaking past out-of-bounds Ndlovu's school khaya, as khaya walls and ceilings were blackened by soot from cooking fires on concrete floors. Electric bulbs hung broken and flyblown. Sour stench of urine, stale putu, munt-sweat hit my nostrils.

From my porch window in our Chelsea Drive dip home, I could see Brooklands Crescent; flower seller Mrs. Porteous's flower-plot; and the spire of St. Martins Anglican Church. Late at night, I pissed through burglar-guards into hydrangeas. If I strained hard, aiming for St. Martin's steeple. I could reach our couch-grass lawn.

1961. Mark Esslemont in standard 3, Durban North Primary. (Mumby)

Irish Friends

1959. Mark Esslemont in Durban. >

Divorced Siobahn, mom's Irish Methodist friend had nursed through the London Blitz, and in 1963 taught at a Berea girls' school. Boarding with us, Sally and Anne, Siobahn's teenage daughters, slept in my enclosed front porch, and I slept in the Wendy House. Siobahn and Shannon, youngest daughter my age, slept in mom's bedroom, while mom and Fraser slept in the other bedroom.

Domineering Siobahn, six foot tall, banished our dog Toby to sleep outside. Toby used to guard us inside our home. Siobahn chivvied us kids to do our homework before playing, and insisted we were in bed by 19:30. Fraser and I resented being ordered about. Siobahn cowed Rosie, who cackled to mom, "Maram! I 'ave allis extra Wed-nes-day washing an' cleaning. Terrible t'ing! Aai-yai-yai-yai-yaaai!"

We swam in the Durban North Primary pool in black speedos. After a swim, Fraser and I padded into our lounge and saw nude Sally, who'd forgotten to close her porch curtain. Springbok Radio blared hits in our lounge, and Fraser and I gawped while Sally towelled her blonde hair, her white tits wobbling. Anne giggled. Sally shrieked, yanking her curtain closed.

The Immorality Act ruled that only white boykies could smaak white chicks. So pasop umfaans and Indian boys!

We grazed high teas, using mom's silver tea-service, under our cassia tree, while semen-scented pods hung from the tree. Siobahn invited Irish expat ladies to our home, and we played sweaty summer charades, cards, hide-an'-seek. Mom played the piano while we danced Hokey Pokey. And Fraser and I ogled bouncy-bosoms.

At parties chicks sang, "On top of Old Smokey..." and, "She'll be coming round the mountain..." Twisting in our lounge, Fraser and I tried not to look pathetic, while mom's wooden radiogram wailed Jailhouse Rock and Summer Holiday. Twisting chicks trilled, "Ooh that's spastic!...Ooh that's fab!...Ooh that's divine!...''

Our avocado tree overhung our garage and house. If we climbed to the top, we could see as far as Durban Bluff - about 10 miles away. (Durban definition: All Bluff till you come to the Point). Our avo tree grew huge pears, which broke roof-tiles when falling. We picked pears at the ends of our avo kingdom. One way of climbing onto our garage roof was to shin up a drainpipe. I held the pipe for Shannon, and while Shannon climbed I saw her freckled legs and white broekies.

Our avo tree trunk was hard to climb, and once when Sally got stuck, Shannon and I sang, "Oh the grand ol' duke of York..."

"Sally slide down!" ordered Siobahn, "Or I'll call the fire brigade!" Sally slid sown howling, as bark chafed her arms and thighs.

Once, Fraser fell from our tree-house, breaking a roof tile. Once, I fell from a branch onto the garage roof, hurting my ankle. Once, Shannon fell about 10 feet, but branches caught her, stopping her hitting the concrete driveway.

Mom bought a corrugated-iron swimming pool, which we rolled over our hedge into our garden. Shannon, Fraser and I filled it with water and swam round and round. Jumping up and down we made waves. When water slimed we siphoned it into our garden, scrubbed the pool and refilled. We dived from the Wendy House roof into our pool. During afternoons, we did homework in my Wendy House, and played and talked.

Sometimes at night, I listened to umfaans' hullabaloo, while they jogged past our hedge, returning from stick-fights in the valley off Old Mill Way. Sometimes, Zulu "boys" sang while strolling along Chelsea Drive. Sometimes, a "boy" played a concertina, or harmonica, or Jew's harp, or penny-whistle, or strummed a homemade guitar. "Boys'" music was repetitive, swelling and thinning down the road. After gardening each day, a grizzled Zulu man sat on the verge by our home, playing his piano accordion.

See Immorality Act 1950 and other apartheid laws.




< 1964. Durban beachfront. Mark Esslemont 's first play-acting. "There's a worm at the bottom of the garden..."(Barett)

Fire and Drama

< 1959. Rosie, Esslemont Brothers & Sandy, May Street, Durban.

Fraser and I burnt leaves behind our garage, causing garage eaves to burn. Rosie saw flames and called, "Maram! Cheeky rogues burning garage! Aai-yai-yai-yai-yaaai!"

Mom bounding from our house: "Jesus Christ! What've you done? Fetch the hose and squirt the roof!" Mom tore the wooden garage door off its trolley rail, then heaved the door back on. Mom was strong for her five foot half an inch height. Mom always emphasized the half inch. Mom reversed her Morris into the street, wrenched the hose from my hands, and doused the fire.

Mom replaced the garage door with a Lazyman metal door, which opened from ground level. Concrete side-weights, on pulleys, pulled the door open. After a weight came off its pulley-wheel, Fraser held the weight from below. I levered the cable back on, but the cable slipped from the pulley-wheel, the weight smashing Fraser's big toe. Fraser stood shocked. I jumped off the ladder, easing the weight off Fraser's bloody toe. Fraser screamed his face purple. "Stay there!" I yelled, running on my Perthes hip leg, "Mom! Fraser's toe's squashed."

Mom bandaged Fraser's toe, then drove him to Addington, where a doctor put 25 stitches in Fraser's toe, saying, "Take him home, keep his leg up, see if it heals!" Fraser's toe healed, safe-like-a-skyf.

Our Methodist Sunday School teacher chastised Skelm and me for telling, "Knock-knock who's there?..." jokes, instead of praying. At Friday afternoon Church Club, after choruses and bible study, games included Open Gates, K-I-N-G and Catchers. Kids loved Rev. Bellis's ham-acting, "There was an old woman who swallowed a fly. I think she'll die..."

Rev. Boraine, succeeding Rev. Bellis, went into antiapartheid politics. After April 1996, Rev. Boraine was deputy at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Tutu.

Outside the Methodist church and Broadway shops, thousands of Indian mynahs roosted in umdoni trees. At dawn and dusk, we heard mynahs cackling in umdoni trees and purple-shatting on congregants' and shoppers' cars.

Durban North Methodists and Chelsea Drive Saint Martins' Anglicans were English-speakers, protected by apartheid. My ol' toppies' generation benefited most from apartheid. Some worked in colour-bar jobs their whole careers, not competing with non-whites, living bourgeois lives - in big houses, served by Indian or native domestics. Some Europeans had big swimming pools and drove big cars. Some were closet-Nationalists, indifferent to the plight of non-Europeans.

Once, we sat in Saint Martins, Europeans-only church, listening to a sermon. A drunken Zulu man stood at the back door, shouting and swearing. Congregants froze, ignoring the racket, until the minister said, "It's unrealistic for me to continue. Will someone sort out that man?" Only then did a sidesman rise from his pew, hushing him.

X-rays showed my hip improvement. I was allowed walking, but no running, as jarring would damage my Perthes hip, which prevented me playing ball-sports for five years. I was left with a right-legged-limp, which changed my spoor.

Skelm was Oliver in the musical Oliver at Lyric Theatre, Umbilo. I joined the Junior Methodist Choir, singing at morning services. At a choral service, I stood next to Skelm singing on stage. I
thought if I could out-sing Skelm I'd be noticed. "Jislaaik!" hissed Skelm. "Stop wysing! You're singing too loudly. Baba-baba-boo!" The congregation was amused. Mom was on-like-scone proud.

In addition to my recitations at Professor Sneddon's annual Speech and Drama Festivals at Little Theatre, Acutt Street, I acted in a Durban North Methodist show, Cafe Continental, my first play performance. I wore a rabbit suit and sang, "There's a worm at the bottom of the garden, and his name is Wiggley Woo..." Skelm sang, "I like to dance and tap my feet, but they wont keep in rhythm..." Adults sang The Lily of Laguna; Anything you can do I can do better...; Finiculi Finicula... Pretty ladies danced a cancan.

As marble partners, I horded Skelm's and my winnings in a cloth flour-bag. In playground red sand we set up stalls, calling boys to throw marbles: "Roll-up four allies!...Roll-up ten allies!... Roll-up a sixpenny!...Roll-up an ironey!..." We played Follows and Holey. Boys fought when we scragzzed our marbles.

Hula-hoops, yo-yos, scooby-doos, tops, charms, jacks and skipping-ropes were intermittently fashionable, the latter three girls-only, until teachers banned them. Boys loved Stingers with a tennis ball, Bok Bok and Open Gates. Swimming, cricket, netball, tennis, soccer were official school sports. Skelm was in the school soccer team, and had a habit of clutching his balls. "Rort!..." was the rallying cry for playground fights, when spectators gathered. Skelm once strangled a boy, until his face went blue. A duty teacher broke it up.

After school, by the Chelsea Drive school gate, a sweaty Zulu man sold Clover Dairies ice-creams from a cool-box attached above the front wheel of his bike. He rang his bell, while we Banana Boys searched through dry-ice for ice-creams. I paid for my Eskimo Pies with dosh stolen from mom.

See Saint Martins in the Fields, Chelsea Drive, Durban North website.




< Esslemont Brothers & Rosie's Granddaughter, illegally at 87 Reitz Straat, Bloemfontein.