Roots of Outrage. John Davis Gordon
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partners in crime now that both were banned: the ANC relied on the communist’s cell structure and experience in underground survival. And Krombrink was dead wrong when he called Drum’s writers crap, but he was right when he called them heavy drinkers.
Mahoney could hold his booze but those Drum guys had livers like steelworks. Hard living was part of the job at Drum, part of its black mystique: ‘Work hard, play hard, die young and leave a good-looking corpse.’ The ambience and prose at Drum was styled on the tough American journalism of the fifties, the rough scribes with hats tilted, ties loose, cigarette hanging out of the corner of the mouth, a hip-flask to hand, pounding out flash, hard-hitting copy on their beat-up Remingtons before sallying out once more into the tough, dangerous, fun world of gangsters, shebeens, cops, jazz, politics, injustice, flash cars and fast women. Most mornings Mahoney stayed at home studying for his law degree: at lunchtime he hit the streets of Johannesburg and Soweto, the courtrooms and the copshops and the mortuaries, looking for copy, chasing blood-and-guts stories. When he got to the office for the editorial meeting the boys were already getting along with the booze as they bashed out their prose; it was against the law for blacks to drink anything but kaffir beer, but Mahoney and the boss bought it for them, or they got it illegally at the Indian and Chinese fast-food joints that did a roaring trade servicing the black workers in downtown Johannesburg because they weren’t allowed into bars and restaurants. The editorial meetings were very stimulating, a barrel of laughs, ideas flowing as fast as the wine and whisky and brandy as the boss kicked around subjects with his scribes and dished out assignments. It was at one of these meetings that he tossed a letter on the desk.
‘An application for a job from a friend of yours, Luke. Justin Nkomo, says he was your garden boy. Know him?’
‘Justin? Sure! Good guy. Where is he?’
‘Transkei. Says he’s done a teacher’s diploma but wants to try his hand at journalism. Suggests he can be our education columnist. I’m embarrassed to tell him we haven’t got an education desk, none of you guys are educated enough.’
‘I’m educated,’ Mike Moshane said. ‘C-O-A-T spells JACKET. How’s that?’
Mahoney said: ‘He was bloody good at English. And a marvel at cricket. Best batsman I’ve ever seen. Hit anything.’
‘Cricket?’ the boss said.
‘I swear, if he were white he’d be a Springbok cricketer. No bowler can get him out. Even if he uses a baseball bat.’
‘Baseball?’ The boss looked up at the ceiling for a moment. ‘Now there’s an angle: “Apartheid Foils Brilliant Sportsman.” If he’s as good as you say we could blow it up into a big story, make the government look silly. Now, how do we test him?’
Mahoney said: ‘Take him to a private cricket pitch. Like Wits University, they’d turn a blind eye for a few hours. Get their best bowlers to turn out. I guarantee he’ll knock ’em for six. Invite some sportswriters from the dailies to watch.’
‘Then?’
‘Then,’ Mahoney said, ‘you invite some baseball league people along. Give Justin a baseball bat, let their best pitchers have a go at him. Invite the American Chamber of Commerce, maybe. Maybe Justin’ll get a scholarship to some Yank university.’
The editor nodded pensively at the ceiling. ‘Now this bears thinking about. I’ll invite him to drop round, tell him to write me a piece, take it from there.’ Then he tossed a second letter on the desk. ‘And, you’ve got one other friend, Luke – nice letter from Patti Gandhi thanking us for your “excellent, witty, and sympathetic story” about her trial.’
The room resounded to ribald remarks about bearing the Immorality Act in mind when he crawled on his hands and knees to thank her for her nice thank-you letter. Then Willy Thembu said: ‘Why doesn’t Luke do a full-length feature on her, her whole history, a sort of “Day in the Death of an Indian Beauty under Apartheid”? Hey – why doesn’t he talk her into screwing a few top-cops, and then we blow the story?’
‘Hey, how about that …’
The boss grinned. ‘But we’d be sued – and Miss Gandhi would go to jail.’
‘But so would the politicians and the top-cops!’ Butch Molofo said happily. ‘The Afrikaner establishment would have egg all over their faces! We’d make a sort of Mata Hari out of her – a love-nest spy. I bet that girl would go for it, she’s a trouble-maker. And I bet she’s in the thick of the ANC’s underground – I bet she knows what this guy Nelson Mandela’s up to …’
But the boss shook his head. ‘We’re trouble-shooters, not troublemakers, and we don’t make ourselves accomplices to crime. Anyway, Miss Gandhi’s been over-written lately.’ (Mahoney was very disappointed.) ‘But what we should do is start building a profile on this guy Nelson Mandela – to be ready for the day he does something dramatic. Luke – you start on that, between other stories. Start in the newspaper cuttings; look up every reference to him and his wife, Winnie. And you’re a law student – maybe it’s time you wrote us a nice piece on that ridiculous Treason Trial that Mandela was involved in. “What is treason in this land of ours?” Reminding us how the cops broke up the Congress of the people at Kliptown when the Freedom Charter was formed, arrested thousands, put a hundred and fifty-six on trial for treason, how five years later there were only thirty-one accused left because the government had withdrawn charges against the rest due to lack of any real evidence of treason. Explain to us what treason now means in our poor benighted country under our new draconian legislation. Can do?’
‘Can do,’ Luke said. ‘I’ll get my father to check me on the law.’
‘Good.’ The boss looked around the table. ‘So what else is happening out there?’
Fred Kalanga took his feet off the desk to pour himself another shot of brandy. ‘Talking about Nelson Mandela, I’ve heard a bit of talk in the shebeens that we’re going to start seeing a few bangs from him soon. Something about the ANC changing its policy of non-violence.’
There were some cheers. The boss said: ‘Doesn’t surprise me – the ANC has got to resort to violence sometime soon if it’s going to retain credibility with the blacks. But Drum doesn’t publish rumours …’
Two weeks later Justin Nkomo came to work for Drum, on probation. Mahoney was delighted to see him again but he soon concluded that Justin was not going to fit in: he was too serious and bookish. Sure, he drank, but not enough. He wrote good prose, but not flip enough. He wanted to enjoy life but he was not flash enough for Soweto. Sure, he loved women but he was not hip enough. ‘Our intellectual’ they called him at Drum.
It was a month after his arrival that Drum staged their debut of Our Black Springbok. Justin had been sufficiently tested at nets to convince the publisher he was on to a winner of a story. Now he persuaded the Witwatersrand University first cricket team to turn out, and the first baseball team, he invited the sportswriters of the daily newspapers to come along, and several members of the British and United States consulates in the hopes that Justin might be offered a scholarship.
‘I hope to God he doesn’t let us down after all this.’
Mahoney was worried too – this had been his idea. Please God … he prayed as Justin walked out onto the university cricket pitch.
It was not, of course, to be a cricket match: it was an exhibition, and a wager. The publisher had offered five hundred rands to the university cricket club if Justin failed to score a century. And what an exhibition of slugging it was! The university team were astounded – and so were the sportswriters.
‘They did not know what hit them,’ the Star reported. ‘There at the crease stood this gangly young black man, holding his bat like a caveman’s club, smashing the university’s best bowlers to all corners of the field as if swatting flies. Having reached his century in record time – thus winning the wager for his sponsor, Drum – the batsman, armed now with