Amongst the Zulus
Those early years growing up on a farm in Zululand, South Africa, were happy sun-filled days of adventure and discovery. Bare-headed and barefooted, wearing only a pair of khaki shorts and a shirt, my two brothers and I spent each day exploring the magic of the bush and swamplands that surrounded our sugar farm on the banks of the Umfolozi River. Released after breakfast by our mother, we bolted off with our friends and the farm dogs hunting birds, rodents and monkeys … fishing, riding horses and bicycles, climbing trees, building tree houses and racing home-made go-carts. Every night, the sun would set fiery red on the horizon and flock upon flock of duck and geese would fly over, heading into the setting sun and towards the lakes inland from us. As darkness enveloped our home, the bullfrogs would start up with a distant roar and the nightjars would begin to sing their haunting, echoing, melody.
My heritage is Anglo-Saxon, I am ‘white’ and English-speaking. Our nursemaids were black Zulu women and our friends were the ‘Picannins’ (a Zulu term for the young herd-boys who tended the cattle), the sons of the Zulus who were the cane cutters on the farm. It is no surprise that we spoke Zulu before we could speak English. Most evenings we were lulled to sleep by our nursemaids with deliciously terrifying Zulu folklore for our bedside stories, where the hyena was invariably the bad guy and the witch was the evil witch doctor.
And then at six years old … school. The local government school for whites only. My Picannin friends had to walk twelve miles to school every day across the farm and over the Umfolozi River, while my brothers and I were driven twenty miles in the opposite direction to the local village, Kwambonambi. For the first few weeks at school, I hobbled around like a cripple. I had hardly ever worn shoes up to that point in my life, and as my feet were covered in warts (an affliction I was told I had got from frogs on the farm), my shoes nearly killed me. Afternoons and weekends … freedom. Back out on the farm and rivers, the swamps and the bush, being seen only for meals and tea. Wonderful, carefree times with our only worry being not to get bitten by snakes or be taken by the crocodiles that lurked unsuspectingly on the riverbanks.
Hunting trips at an early age.
Hunting with the Zulus and their dogs.
Me (right) with my two elder brothers. I am looking none too enamoured about the prospect of boarding school.
After two years of ‘day school’, I was packed off to a boarding school over a day’s drive away, crammed in the back of the car with two brothers and all a mass of luggage. Halfway there we had to endure agonising shopping sessions with my mother in the city of Durban for all our school kit. Excellent private schools though they were, it was confinement … ten years of it. I would daydream in class, worrying if my horses, dogs and cats were safe, wondering how my Picannin friends were doing, and wishing I was fishing in the river or forcing my way through the reeds alongside the Umfolozi River, a gun in hand and our farm dogs at my heels. Being let loose for our holidays was a huge release, with the only looming shadow being the day that we would have to go back to boarding school – a thought I would cram away into the back of my mind.
As I grew older, my Picannin friends and I grew steadily apart with the differences in our lives becoming increasingly apparent. I was born into a life of privilege, with my parents owning the farm we lived on and being white, I was fed into the political system of privileged ‘Whites’ Only’ schools, universities, restaurants and beaches. My Picannin friends on the other hand, were born to be labourers, their families splintered by the political system as their homes were in distant ‘native homelands’ or ‘reserves’, even though they lived and worked on the farm. They went to second-rate, black-only schools which few of them stuck out to the end. Most ended up getting work on the farms at an early age as either cane cutters or tractor drivers. By the time I was a teenager, we had very little in common and our conversations were both uncomfortable and stilted. And my Zulu didn’t progress much further than that of a seven-year-old boy who lived for fishing, hunting and horse riding on a Zululand farm.
In my senior school years I became increasingly aware of the racial divide, of the difference between being black or white, and of the politics that characterised living in South Africa in the mid-1970s. Even though the majority of the population was black, they had no political rights and no vote in mainstream South Africa. The minority white population controlled the country politically and economically, whilst the blacks lived in ‘homelands’, commuting to work in the white areas. They would travel home to their families in the homelands, on long weekends and for their annual holidays. The Afrikaans term for the political system was ‘Apartheid’ or ‘separate living’. This apparently gave blacks a certain degree of control in their ‘homelands’, with the whites overseeing these homelands and controlling the rest of the country. Apartheid was a system supposedly designed to avoid what had happened in the rest of Africa. With each country’s independence from their colonial masters, the Africans had (with a few exceptions) embraced communism and nationalised their countries assets, with the almost immediate result of complete economic chaos and the emergence of a self-declared dictator; invariably appointed, ‘President-for-life’. So true democracy with one-man-one vote in South Africa would mean the black man would take power, and we were convinced that our country would therefore follow the rest of Africa.
Wading up the Umfolozi River.
As the best farmlands were reserved for whites, the blacks were largely excluded from participation in the mainstream economy. This naturally ensured an affront to their dignity amongst other things, and they began to take increasing exception to the system of Apartheid, as did the rest of the world.
It was a powder keg ready to explode. Even the flocks of duck and geese that flew over our house in the evenings had largely disappeared, and the bullfrogs had fallen silent … as if in anticipation of a terrible storm that was gathering on the horizon. It was only the nightjars that still sang their beautiful melody, now seeming to cry out, ‘Good Lord … deliver us’.