Memory Is the Weapon by Don Mattera

Author:Don Mattera [Mattera, Don]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Political, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9780992187576
Google: MGs8AwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 18432595
Publisher: African Perspectives Publishing
Published: 1987-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

chapter eight

Other Faces of Kofifi

A hideous face belonged to squalor or poverty or sickness or death. There was no real difference: the greater part of Sophiatown was a deplorable, sickening slum. Blacks had freehold rights and some houses were comparable to those of whites living in the adjoining suburbs, but Sophiatown was rotting at the core because the Johannesburg City Council did not accept full responsibility for its maintenance. Public amenities such as sports fields, recreational facilities? There wasn’t a single football field in the whole township!

Basketball and football were played in the school grounds and in the streets. Church halls, classrooms and zinc shacks became the boxing stables that produced many champions, and killers too. One such boxer was King Berry, who was hanged for brutally murdering his wife because of jealousy. The women composed a song which ran: ‘King Berry the champ, killed the only thing he loved. He must have been bewitched.’

But Sophiatown also had its beauty; picturesque and intimate like most ghettos. Double-storey mansions and quaint cottages, with attractive, well-tended gardens, stood side by side with rusty wood-and-iron shacks, locked in a fraternal embrace of filth and felony. Among the wealthy were African, Coloured, Indian and Chinese people.

One rich man, Mabuza, owned a double-storey house which he filled with the most expensive furniture, to the tune of about thirty-thousand pounds. Added to this was a three-storey building with a huge dairy and butchery on the ground floor, five bedrooms on the upper storey and a big restaurant sandwiched between. Mabuza, whose son Early became a famous jazz musician, owned another large restaurant on the outskirts of Johannesburg. In Sophiatown, no-one could choose their neighbours, so that alongside the wealthy Mabuzas or the Xumas or the Makhenes or the Rathebes lived the miserably poor and the wretched. All that the rich could do, at the time, was build high walls with broken glass cemented on top of them to keep out thieves.

The rich and the poor, the exploiters and the exploited, all knitted together in a colourful fabric that ignored race or class structures. The children mixed freely whether their families disagreed or not. Children in their innocence hardly recognised the differences. There were no separate bourgeois areas or elite concert halls, just long streets and thousands of people who moved over each other like restless, voracious insects: blacks exploiting blacks. And what needs the white authorities failed to provide in the way of social amenities, the Catholic and Anglican Churches met at great cost. The rich landlords, among them many whites and Indians, never channelled any part of their huge profits back into the township; it was a dog-eat-dog world, harsh and yet tender in a strange, paradoxical way.

Sophiatown had two Jewish-owned cinemas: the Picture Palace, also named Balanski after its owner, and the Odin owned by a man called Lakier. The Odin was said to be the largest cinema in the whole of Africa, with a seating capacity of about 1,100. It was also used

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