From then

.. That's how I felt during my first few years in Johannesburg. I had travelled from Durban, over four hundred miles by train, to start working as a journalist. After work, I often slept on a desk at the office or stayed overnight when friends invited me to dinner in their homes.

This was not because of a Bohemian bent in me. Far from it. According to the law, 'native' bachelors are supposed to live in hostels in Johannesburg. I should have shared a dormitory with ten or more strange men. Some could have been office clerks, messengers, night-watchmen, road-diggers, school teachers or witch-doctors. We could each be at liberty to play our concertinas or strum guitars while others read books or brewed beer in the dormitory. 

Instead of this, I chose to be a wanderer. It would have been too difficult to get a hostel bed anyway. I remember trying once, just for the hell of it. I picked up the telephone and spoke in a faked Oxford accent. 'My name is Brokenshaw,' I said. 'Is there a vacant bed in your hostel by any chance?'

'Yes, we have some beds,' the voice at the other end answered. It must have been the white superintendent. 'But I must explain to you that we are only taking special boys now,' he added.

'What sort of boys are those?' I asked.

'Special boys,' he repeated, 'boys employed in the essential services; milk delivery boys, sanitation boys, and so on. Boys who have to be in town very early in the morning or till late at night.'

'Jolly good,' I said, 'my boy is actually quite special. He has to remain in town till quite late from time to time. He is a journalist.'

'Well, Mr Brokenshaw, I can't promise anything. You can send him along if you like. We'll have to deal with every case according to its merits.'

I didn't go to the superintendent. I didn't really want a hostel bed. Neither did I wish to switch from journalism to the essential services. Thus, for roughly eighteen months, on and off, I wandered about without a fixed home address. I determined to make the best of it. The idea was to regard complications of my relationship with Johannesburg as part of the incredible experiment. That way I could get on with the business of living without getting too depressed.

Fortunately, like most young men from the smaller towns in South Africa, I was thrilled by simply being in Johannesburg. While others made for their homes hurriedly at the end of the day, I took long leisurely walks from one end of the city to the other. On some nights I spent long hours reading London papers in the Rand Daily Mail library. Friends who invited me to their flats soon got used to me turning up for a bath in addition to dinner and a drink. 

At times I slept in the night-watchman's room on the top of our office block. The night-watchman was a tall, very dark man, always in blue overalls, and Zulu-speaking. He seemed to welcome my appearance and spoke a lot of politics with me. How long, he wanted to know once, did I think the white man would remain on top of us? Did I think the time would ever come when we would be on top? Bathin' abelungu manje? What are the whites saying now? 

Answering these questions made me feel I was earning the watchman's hospitality. He saw me as an interpreter of the white man's ways because some of my friends were white. In the suburbs, over a drink, people plied me with questions about Africans. These conversations often developed into dull tales about the effects of apartheid on Africans, with me giving a rather false picture of the 'latest developments'. I knew very little about the African townships. Like many other people, I could have lived illegally in the townships, but I wanted to be in town, not five or fifteen miles outside. 

I was especially fascinated with Johannesburg by night. Because of the curfew regulations, most Africans rushed out of town at the end of the day. Dozens of long brown trains whined out of town carrying thousands of Africans to their homes. By eleven o'clock, when the curfew regulations came into operation, almost all the faces in town would be white. 

By day, the city became a depressing mess. There were too many Africans sweating away on company bicycles or lingering on pavements in search of work. More depressing would be the newly-recruited 'mine boys', scores of black men from all over Africa. They walked through town with blankets on their shoulders and loaves of bread under their armpits, to be housed in the hostels of the gold mines. They looked like prisoners to me. Some had blank, innocent faces and gazed openly, longingly, at women passing by. Most of them, if not all, were illiterate and doomed to stay that way for the rest of their lives. I resented them because I felt a responsibility towards them and I was doing nothing about it. They spoiled my image of Johannesburg as the throbbing giant which threw up sophisticated gangsters, brave politicians and intellectuals who challenged white authority. 

This image of Johannesburg survived best at night. I shared a theory with a friend who also spent much of his time about town because of the housing problem. We believed that the best way to live with the colour bar in Johannesburg was to ignore it. 

The theory worked remarkably well at times. I remember one night when we went to drink coffee at the Texan, a coffee bar reserved for whites in Commissioner Street. The place was run by an American from Texas. He had the American flag in the bar as well as a portrait of President Eisenhower, wearing his famous grin. 

My friend and I perched on two stools at the counter and placed our order for two coffees. The Texan's son went to fetch the coffee, obviously expecting us to drink it on the pavement, anywhere outside the bar. Meanwhile, my friend and I began to talk loudly about President Eisenhower's portrait. 'Look at the bum,' my friend started, looking at the President's portrait, 'there is something seriously wrong with America's choice of its heroes. Imagine the millions of American children whose ambition is to grow into the grinning emptiness which Ike symbolizes! To think that there are eggheads who could be built up instead of fellows like this.'

By the time the Texan's son brought our coffee, his father was embroiled in violent argument with us, all about Ike. The Texan confessed that he didn't know much about politics but he knew a man of God when he saw one. The argument was still raging when we finished drinking the coffee and left. Nobody seemed to remember the colour bar. 

(from "Johannesburg, Johannesburg" by Nathaniel (Nat) Nakasa (1937 - 1965), a column first published in Drum magazine. Here's the full text: https://www.thejournalist.org.za/pioneers/nat-nakasa-johannesburg/ .)

It looks simple and sparkling, this new black journalism in South Africa, but it was not. And underlying its high spirits are chasms, the depression that is kept at bay, the colour bar that eats away even if one boldly ignores it -- in theory. 

Towards the end of the 1950s, Lewis Nkosi and Nat Nakasa joined the Drum team. The writers used the language of American writers and movies, and created a fast, slangy street talk that few have been able to imitate. Nakasa later established a literary magazine called The Classic and won a Nieman Fellowship to study journalism in the United States. He left South Africa on an exit permit and was unable to return home. Isolated from his home country, he committed suicide a little more than a year later. [In 1965, when he was 28.]

 (Source: https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/drum-magazine .)

That is the simple story: Nat Nakasa as exemplary martyr, victim of the apartheid regime that refused him a passport. That story is true, but it isn't the whole truth. 

http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0259-01902011000100004

This fascinating and disturbing essay by Ryan Lenora Brown digs deeper into the context of Nakasa's career, his necessary compromises, the involvement of both RSA and USA security forces, his loss of confidence, isolation, and descent into despair. His generation were pioneers of putting black experience out there, but they were skating on the thinnest of ice, and they didn't tend to last very long. Brown compares the early deaths of  Nakasa's Drum colleagues Can Themba and Todd Matshikiza, also in exile. South Africa always moved to exile or suppress "communist" voices. That was a smear word they applied to anyone who was considered to provoke discontent with apartheid. Ironic because, as it appears from the passage I've quoted, Nakasa was actually politically pretty moderate compared to the revolutionary activists of the time; that's how come he could be, for instance, the first black reporter on the Rand Daily Mail.  

*

I encountered "Johannesburg, Johannesburg" in Stories from Central and Southern Africa, ed. Paul A. Scanlon (1983).

An anthology of 22 stories from southern Africa during the apartheid era. I don't think it's misleading to describe it like that, though the geographical range is much broader than just the Union or Republic of South Africa; one or two of the stories predate apartheid, and some have little connection with it, or even none at all. For all that, the enormity of apartheid seems to lie on the book's chest like an incubus, focussing its broader themes of colonialism, multiculturalism, prejudice, pride, isolation...

A number of the other authors in this anthology also published in Drum: for instance Ezekiel (later Es'kia) Mphahlele and Richard Rive. But I'll end with an extract from the story by Daniel Canodoise "Can" Themba (1924 - 1967): 

... But life in Johannesburg was such that he did not find much time to look after his family. He was not exactly the delinquent father, but there was just not the time or the room for a man to become truly family-bound. Then suddenly, crash! He died in a motor-car accident, and his unprovided-for wife had to make do. 

His daughter, Maria, grew up in the streets of Alexandra. The spectre of poverty was always looming over her life; and at the age of fourteen she left school to work in the white man's kitchens. It helped, at first, to alleviate the grim want, the ever-empty larder at home. But soon she got caught up in the froth of Johannesburg's titillating nether life. She had a boyfriend who came pretty regularly to sleep in her room at the back of her place of employment; she had other boyfriends in the city, in the townships, with whom she often slept. And of the billions of human seed so recklessly strewn, one was bound sometime to strike target. 

When her condition became obvious, Maria nominated the boy she liked best, the swankiest, handsomest, most romantic and most moneyed swain in her repertoire. But he was a dangerous tsotsi, and when she told him of what he had wrought, he threatened to beat the living spit out of her. She fondly, foolishly persisted; and he assaulted her savagely. The real boyfriend -- the one who slept in her room -- felt bitter that she had indicated another. Had he not already boasted to his friends that he had 'bumped' her? Now the whole world judged that he had been cuckolded.

Poor Maria tried the somersault and turned to him, but by then he would have none of it. He effectively told the Native Commissioner, 'I am this girl's second opinion. She does not know who is responsible for her condition. There she stands, now too scared to nominate the man she first fancied, so she looks for a scapegoat, me.'

The commissioner had some biting things to say to Maria and concluded that he could not, in all conscience, find this man guilty of her seduction. As they say, he threw out the case. 

So Sekgametse Daphne Lorraine was born without a father: an event in Alexandra, in Johannesburg, in all the urban areas of our times, that excites no surprise whatsoever.

First, Maria shed all her love -- that is, the anguish and pain she suffered, the bitterness, the humiliation, the sense of desolation and collapse of her tinsel world -- upon this infant. But people either perish or recover from wounds; even the worst afflictions do not gnaw at you forever. Maria recovered. She went back to her domestic work, leaving the baby with her mother. She would come home every Thursday -- Sheila's Day -- the day off for all the domestics in Johannesburg. She came to her baby, bringing clothing, blankets, pampering little goodies and smothering treacly love. 

But she was young still, and the blood burst inside her once she recovered. Johannesburg was outside there calling, calling, first wooingly, alluringly, then more and more stridently, irresistibly. She came home less often, but remorsefully, and would crush the child to her in those brief moments. Even as she hugged the rose, the thorns tore at her feet. Then suddenly she came home no more . . .

(From "Kwashiorkor" by Can Themba, collected posthumously in The Will To Die (1972).)

*

Drum Magazine (1951-1961): And The Works Of Black South African Writers Associated With It. 

That's the title of David Rabkin's PhD thesis (University of Leeds, 1975). It's available online and is well worth a look:

https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/2323/2/uk_bl_ethos_537912.pdf .