Roots of Outrage. John Davis Gordon
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the beginning. Childhood. Family life. Schooling. Your defiance campaign. Miss South Africa. What it’s like to live under apartheid. Every detail to rouse public sympathy …’
That first night he only took notes, looking for angles. It was going to be a long story and, by the time he had wrung every tear and jeer out of it, a good one. The beautiful, dutiful Indian girl, great-niece of one of the most important leaders of our time, Mahatma Gandhi, the man who started the disintegration of the mighty British Empire. The highly intelligent Indian girl who always came top of her class, who started learning the family trade at age seven, working on the cutting-room floor so that one day she could take over. The defiant schoolgirl who made such a nuisance of herself she had to leave town and go to live with her relatives in Natal. The girl who continued to defy apartheid, walked into the public library in Durban and sat down to read and went to jail after telling the magistrate she ‘only wanted to learn, like other children, Your Worship’. The girl who, when she was released four days later, walked straight back into the public library and got arrested again. The girl who climbed into a whites-only railway coach and padlocked herself to the stanchion. The girl who walked into the Dutch Reformed church, sat in the front pew and waited, reading a prayer book, for the dominee to enter, as worshippers stormed out until the police came in: ‘I only wanted to worship, Your Worship. I wasn’t disturbing the peace.’
‘You’re a trouble-maker,’ His Worship said.
‘All I did was study the prayer book. I think it’s the government who’s making the trouble, Your Worship.’
‘You’re a Hindu,’ His Worship said, ‘you have your own temples.’
‘But I’m very interested in Christianity, this being a Christian country, and this being my country, where I was born – and anyway we all worship the same God, don’t we? There’s only one God, the Christians say, and I just wanted to worship Him, I’m sure that as a Christian you understand, Your Worship.’
‘And what did the magistrate do?’
‘He was in a cleft stick, wasn’t he? The press were there, in force. And not even this government – yet – has been so stupid as to forbid multi-racial worship – though don’t bank on that. I was charged with disturbing the peace.’ She laughed. ‘Oh boy. The peace? By silently reading the Afrikaans prayer book, Your Worship? If the other churchgoers are so un-Christian that they refuse to worship God in my presence and call the police to haul me out of their Christian church, they are disturbing the peace, surely, God’s peace, Your Worship, making Him jolly angry, I bet. Remember how angry the Lord got about the moneychangers in the temple, Your Worship, how He threw them out, and quite rightly too? But I was only reading the prayer book, Your Worship, I’m quite sure the Lord wouldn’t have thrown me out for that.’
Mahoney was furiously making notes. ‘Lovely stuff,’ he murmured, ‘And … ?’
‘And the magistrate had to acquit me. But not without having the stupidity to warn me not to do it again and make a public nuisance of myself. Public nuisance … ! Can you imagine what the press did with that gaffe? “Magistrate warns Indian not to bother God”! “Worshipper is a nuisance, His Worship says”!’ She grinned. ‘They called me the “God-Botherer” after that …’
And after that, many things. The beautiful Indian girl who shamelessly walked into the public whites-only toilet, put a penny in the slot before the white attendant could stop her, pulled down her knickers and had a pee while the press waited gleefully. ‘Don’t you dare come in here, you perverts …’ she shrieked at the police. And when the woman-constable finally led her away she beamed at the cameras and said: ‘What’s a girl to do? When you gotta go, you gotta go!’
Mahoney grinned. ‘And … ?’
‘No option of a fine, this time, with my criminal record. A straight fifteen days.’
Fifteen days. And, when she was released from prison that time, not only were the press there to meet her but her father.
‘But what did your parents think of you?’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘you know what parents are like … My family was very conservative in that they’d come up the hard way, and even though they were bitter about apartheid they didn’t want to rock the boat. When their darling daughter started rocking the boat they were so worried – for me. They wanted the best for me, to finish school and take over the business and get married to a nice high-caste Indian boy, and here I was, sixteen years old and seven criminal convictions behind my name. Not good. So, when the God-Botherer waltzed out of prison the last time, beaming for the pressmen’s cameras, there was my father with an air ticket to England, to finish my schooling there.’
‘And how did you feel?’
‘At sixteen? With my eyes full of stars about thrashing the apartheid system? I’d already spent over thirty days in jail for my various offences – I was becoming an old hand at it, and I was something of a celebrity with the local press. I wanted to carry on. There were all these other apartheid laws I hadn’t defied yet. I still hadn’t booked a room in a white hotel. I hadn’t gone to a white cinema or played tennis on a white court. I still hadn’t gone into the Orange Free State where Indians are forbidden to set foot even in transit. And,’ she grinned, ‘I still hadn’t screwed a white Afrikaner policeman.’
‘Did you really intend to do that?’
‘Well, I was still a virgin. But I thought it was a bloody good idea in principle – hoist the bastards on their own petard. And I had a few chances, by the way. Anyway, although my parents were generally very supportive, they’d had enough – particularly my poor mother. So, off to England I was sent to finish my education.’
Patti Gandhi, head prefect in her final year, leading light in the debating club, victrix ludorum. And, oh, she loved it in England. Not denied buses, tea rooms, cinemas, restaurants, hotels, not told to stand in another queue at the post office or bank or railway station. ‘What a novelty! I was like a kid in a candy store. Just being treated like an ordinary person.’ But, ah yes, an exotic one: there were advantages to being a non-white in lily-white England, standing out in a crowd: the head-turns, the wolf-whistles. ‘I felt like a million bucks for a change, knowing I could date any boy who asked me, dance with anybody, hold his hand legally – kiss him goodnight! And the girls were all super to me, invited me home for weekends, and in the summer we went on coach tours of Europe and to villas by the sea – and the Europeans seemed to go out of their way to be nice to me. And the fact that I’d been to jail for defying apartheid? Oh boy, that made me a heroine in the girls’ eyes.’
It made her a heroine in Mahoney’s eyes too. South Africa had plenty of liberals who said apartheid was cruel, economically unfair, and so on, but who did nothing about it – all talk and no action, as Patti said: but here was a sixteen year-old Indian girl who did, and did her talking in court: it took a hell of a lot of courage to take on the South African system. And when she went on to university she was even more of a hero – and belle of all the balls. God, you’re beautiful, Mahoney thought as he looked at her photograph albums of those days: Patti Gandhi being punted down the river; Patti yelling her head off at the Oxford-Cambridge boat race; Patti in a bikini on the French Riviera; Patti in ski-gear in the Austrian Alps; Patti in her graduation gown.
But when she returned to South Africa, she wasn’t a heroine anymore, she was a criminal. As the sergeant from BOSS, who was waiting for her at the airport, warned her: ‘Don’t think you can come back here with your fancy English ideas, hey, jus’ remember this is a white man’s country, hey, and we’ll be waiting for you before you make any more bleddy trouble, hey!’
‘And what did you say?’
‘Just smiled sweetly and said it was lovely to be home – what else can you say to an oaf like that, his English is too poor.’
‘But why had you come back? You must have been able to get a good job overseas.’
‘To make trouble