previous century, the Victorian era during which the fabulous golden reefs of the Witwatersrand had first been discovered close by.
The old section was a maze of lanes and alleys and higgledy-piggledy buildings, shacks and shanties of unburnt brick and cracked plaster, of corrugated-iron roofs painted all the shades of an artist's palette. Most of the original colours had faded and were running with the red leprosy of rust.
The narrow streets were rutted and studded with potholes and puddles of indeterminate liquid. Scrawny chickens scurried and scratched in the litter of rubbish. A huge sow with a pink hide that looked as though it had been parboiled wallowed in one of the puddles and grunted irritably as the van passed. The stink was wondrous. The sour stench of ripening garbage mingled with that of the 2W open drains and the earthen toilets that stood like sentryboxes behind each of the hovels.
The government health inspector had long ago abandoned all hope of ever regulating the old section of Drake's Farm. One day the bulldozers would arrive and the Mail would run front-page photographs of the distraught black families crouching on the pathetic piles of their worldly possessions, watching the brutal machines demolishing their homes. A white civil servant in a dark suit would make a statement on the state television network about 'this festering health hazard making way for comfortable modem bungalows'. The anticipation of that day made Michael angry all over again.
The blue van bumped and weaved over the rutted lanes, passing the dismal shebeens and whorehouses, and then crossed the invisible line from the old into the new section that the same civil servant would describe as comfortable modem bungalows. Thousands of identical brick boxes with grey corrugated-asbestos roofs stood in endless lines upon the treeless veld.
They reminded Michael of the rows of white wooden crosses that he had seen in the military cemeteries of France.
Yet, somehow, the black residents had managed to imprint their character and individuality upon this forbidding townscape. Here and there a house had been repainted a startling colour in the monotonous grubby white lines.
Pink or sky blue or vivid orange, they bore witness to the African love of bright colour. Michael noticed one that had been beautifully decorated in the traditional geometric designs of the Ndebele tribe from the north.
The tiny front gardens were a mirror of the personal style of the occupants. One was a square of dusty bare earth; another was planted with rows of maize plants and had a milking goat tethered at the front door; yet another boasted a garden of straggly geranium plants in old five-gallon paint- tins; while still another was fenced with high barbed wire and the weed-clogged yard was patrolled by a bony but ferocious mongrel guard-dog.
2.Some of the plots were separated from each other by ornamental walls of concrete breeze blocks or old truck tyres painted gaudy colours and half-buried in the brickhard earth. Most of the cottages had extraneous additions tacked on to them, usually a lean-to of salvaged lumber and rusty corrugated iron into which a family of the owners' relatives had overflowed. There were abandoned motorvehicles, sans engine or wheels, parked at the kerb. Hillocks of old mattresses, disintegrating cardboard boxes and other discarded rubbish which the refuse removal service had overlooked stood on the street- corners.
Across this stage moved the people of the townships. These were the people whom Michael loved more than his own race or class, the people with whom he empathized and for whom he agonized. They delighted him endlessly. They amazed him endlessly with their strength and fortitude and will to survive.
The children were everywhere he looked, the crawlers and totterers and squawkers who rolled and roistered in the streets like litters of glossy black Labrador puppies or rode high, strapped to their mothers' backs in the traditional style. The older children played their simple games with wire and empty beer-cans which they had fashioned into toy automobiles. The little girls played with skippingropes in the middle of the road, or imitated the games of hopscotch and catch that they had seen the white children play. They were tardy and reluctant to give way and clear the roadway when the driver of the blue van hooted at them.
When they saw Michael's white face they danced beside the slow- moving van with cries of 'Sweetie! Sweetiep Michael had come prepared and he tossed them the hard sugar candy with which he had stuffed his pockets.
Though most of the adult population had made the long daily journey to their work-place in the city, the mothers and the old people and the unemployed had been left behind.
Gangs of street-youths stared at him expressionlessly as 2,he passed, gathered in idle groups on the littered streetcomers. Though he knew that these teenagers were the jackals of the townships who preyed upon their own kind, Michael's sympathy went out to them. He understood their despair. He knew that even before they had fairly embarked on life's journey they were aware that it held nothing for them, no expectation or hope of better. things or kinder times.
Then there were the women at their chores, hanging the long lines of laundry to dry like prayer-flags on the breeze; or stooped over the black three-legged pots in the backyards, cooking the staple maize porridge of their diet over open fires in the traditional way, preferring that to the iron stoves in the tiny cottage kitchens. The smoke of the fires mingled with the blown dust to form the perpetual cloud that hung over the township.
The illegal hawkers or spouzas, who had eluded the Afrikaner government's passion for regulations and licensing, wheeled their barrows and shouted their wares in the busy streets. The housewives bartered with them for a single potato or cigarette or orange or slice of white bread, depending on their circumstances.
Despite these dreary surroundings and all the evidence of poverty and neglect, Michael heard in every street and at every corner they turned the sound of laughter and music. The laughter was spontaneous and merry. Their shouted greetings and repartee were carefree. Wherever he looked were those lovely African smiles that filled his heart and then squeezed it to the point of pain.
The music rang and echoed from the bleak little cottages and, in the streets, from the transistor radios that men and women carried in hand or balanced on their heads as they walked.,The children played their penny whistles and banjos made from paraffin-tins and wood and pieces of wire.
They danced and they sang in a spontaneous expression of the sheer joy of living, even in these most insalubrious circumstances.
For Michael the laughter and the music depicted the indomitable spirit of the black African in the face of all hardship. For him there could not be another race on earth quite like them. Michael loved them, every one of them, no matter what age or sex or tribe or condition. He was of Africa, and these were his people.
'What can I do for you, my brothers?' he whispered. 'What can I do to help you? I wish I knew. Everything I have attempted so far has failed. All my efforts have died like a hopeless shout upon the desert air. If only I could find the way.' Then abruptly he was distracted. They topped a rise in the gently undulating veld and Michael straightened in his seat.
Eleven years ago when last he had passed this way there had been nothing but open grassland here, with a few scrawny goats grazing amongst the red wounds with which erosion and neglect had raked the earth.
'Nobs Hill.' The driver of the van chuckled at his surprise. 'Beautiful, hey?' Such is the determination and fortitude of men that even in the face of the most adverse circumstances there are those few who will not only survive, but who with courage and ingenuity far beyond the average will flourish and rise high above the obstacles and pitfalls with which their path is strewn.
Along the low ridge of ground, standing above the huddled shacks and cottages of Drake's Farm, were the homes of the black dlite. There were a hundred or so of these successful men set apart from all the million inhabitants of Drake's Farm. Through business acumen and natural ability and hard work they had wrested material success from the hands of their white political masters, from those who had attempted to dictate their fate through the monumental framework of interlocking laws and regulations which was the Verwoerd-inspired policy of apartheid in action.
Yet their victory over circumstances was hollow. No matter that they could afford to make their home in any part of this land, they were constrained by the Group Areas 2oe Act to live only in these areas which those architects of apartheid had set aside for them. The homes that these black businessmen and doctors and lawyers and successful criminals had built for themselves would have graced the elegant suburbs of Sandton or La Lucia or Constantia where their white counterparts lived.
'See!' the driver of the van pointed proudly. 'The pink house with big windows. It is the home of Josia Nrubu, the famous witchdoctor. He sells his charms and potions and spells by mail order all over Africa, even to Nigeria and Kenya. He sells a charm to make all men and women love you, and lion bones to give you success in business and money matters. He can give you the fat of vultures for your eyesight and another potion made from the hymen of a virgin that will make your meat-plough hard as granite and tireless as a war assegai. He has four new Cadillac motor-cars and his sons go to university in America.' 'I'll take the lion bones,' Michael chuckled. The Golden City Mail had run at a loss for the last four years, much to the chagrin of Nana and Garry.
'See! The house with the green roof and the high wall. There lives Peter Ngonyama. His tribe grows the weed that we call dagga or boom and which you whites call
