There is a shebeen yard where the people have gone mysteriously mad.
Number 17, Marshall Street, Ferreirastown, Johannesburg, is just about the craziest address I've met. So many people who have lived there have gone mad, even as so many other people have stood in the slummy yard drinking that poisonous brew of shebeen invention—Barberton. There is an obvious connection. But the startling fact is that four of these people lived and went mad in the same room.
A South African neurologist has just sent a paper to America on Barberton. He has found that it does drive certain people mad.
In the 1940s, they say, a Coloured woman living in this yard and selling Barberton, thought that her neighbours might want to take away from her her profitable trade in shebeen liquor. So in the dead of night she decided to ‘put the jinx’ on this room, and here and there in the yard, by planting magic. Not long after this people began to behave strangely.
That's their story of how it all started, but the facts of what happened subsequently are hardly less startling. At about this time there lived in the fatal room, Chris Tyssen, his wife and Willem Tyssen, his brother. Chris just suddenly found out that his wife was unhappy with him. They were always quarrelling and fighting, until one day she just deserted him to go and live in Pretoria. This affected Chris so badly that he became very ill, and sometimes would mutter delirious nonsense. Then suddenly his brother, Willem, started to act crazy. This was more serious than Chris's condition which was described as having had ‘just a touch’. Willem did mad things like collecting bits of paper, old tins, rubbish. Then suddenly he vanished. People looked for him everywhere. Not a sign of him. Not a sound about him. For over two months. Then came the rumour that an unidentified body had been found at Germiston. He had been drowned in a lake. The police did not suspect foul play, but his friends are still uneasy. He was given a pauper's funeral.
Chris was ejected from the room, but he still stays in the yard, sleeping outside on a miserable mattress with the stars for a blanket. He wanders in and out like a lost, bewildered animal.
Just opposite this notorious room is the Fourie room. Here lived Willie ‘Oom Johnnie’ Fourie and his wife, Maria. Unlike many of the other victims, Oom Johnnie did not get ill at all. He was completely healthy on the night of March 17, 1957, when he suddenly got it into his head that he wanted to make a speech. He stripped himself stark naked, grabbed an axe and jumped on to the table to deliver his great oration. He made a magnificent figure standing there in his innocence and the light casting an enormous, distorted shadow on the wall and roof.
The people rushed out and sent for the Flying Squad. He was removed and taken to the ‘mad cells’ at Newlands Police Station where he was duly garbed in a blanket and left among the other mixed-ups. His wife, Maria, went to see him on the following Thursday. He seemed all right. But when she went to see him again, she heard that he had died.
Whom God would destroy He first sends mad.
The wife has been so distracted by the death of Oom Johnnie, that she's now a thin edge away herself from daylight clear level-headedness. She moves about in a daze and mumbles, ‘Me, I don't want to talk. I don't want to talk. I don't want to talk.’
But the yard in which she lives has become the talk of Malay Camp (Ferreirastown). And in that Doom Room, now occupied by two brothers, it looks like violence plans to strike again. Now, these two brothers are very fond of each other. The other day they had been having a brotherly drink together. They got a little high. When they got home the elder brother just suddenly attacked his kid brother. They had a wild fight, throwing in everything they could lay hands on, kicking, biting, fisting. They smashed two of the large window panes of the Doom Room. By the following day when I got there they had contracted a sulky truce, and it was obvious there was no longer as much bad blood between them. But the people in the yard intimated to me in hushed whispers that they knew it was the jinx over the room striking again.
I think, however, there is a much simpler explanation. Next to Maria Fourie's room there's another room whose role in this business is much more ominous than people realize. This is the room where they sell Barberton in a big way. African men come from the neighbouring mines, the town, and industrial concerns for their mugful of Mbamba. But Barberton is a poison made in such a way as to give a quick kick. It is made of bread, yeast and sugar. Its main characteristic is that it is ‘raw’ (swiftly prepared) liquor. One of its commonest effects is upon the skin which it peels off and sallows. People get red lips and purulent black pimples on the face. But it has made those who have drunk it for a long time raging madmen, especially in fights. Here then may lie the answer to the mystery of the yard of lunatics. Some people have fed too long, and too much on a poisonous concoction. It has made them sick and driven them mad.