Johannesburg (Part 1)

After moving from Pretoria, I bought a house in Hunter St, Yeoville. I gradually got more and more work in shows and studio sessions, though I was nobody’s first choice. That was and will always be because for that type of work, time is money. In the gap of some fifteen years between my hot sighting reading in teenage, I lost that skill by my thirties. Though never regaining the hot-shot sight-reading that session work often demanded, I somehow got by.

After democracy, my session bookings were from specialists like Hugh Masekela and Jonas Gwangwa, who wanted someone who could play the right feel. In three albums we recorded for Hugh Masekela, I can remember written parts for only the last album. I had followed news on the grapevine about both Hugh and Jonas since 1961. We would get a word here and there. I can’t even remember who my informant(s) were. Most likely it was the “Swing Inc” guys, or perhaps the Shange brothers. There was absolutely no way that I could have foreseen that I would one day perform and record with them both.

20 Hopkins Street

Other people have written about it my sister’s house at 20 Hopkins Stree, Yeoville. Apart from this house being remembered by hundreds as a place of fun, (it was), it is important in my story, because my sister, Colleen Taylor and I were very close. It also became an apartheid safe house, and a de facto conference centre for unions, international jurists, advocates, lawyers and an overnight haven for people visiting ‘politicals’ in jail. I lived there from time to time, when other arrangements (like marriage) faltered.

Colleen persuaded me to return to SA from England in 1971. It was one of those Before/After pairings, a milestone along the way. Her point was that I was washed up in England without papers allowing me to stay, but more to the point, there was work to be done in SA, and she felt I was of the right stuff. Even more so, because it was terribly hard to trust anyone in the high noon of apartheid, and she frankly needed an ally. “I need an ally”, as will be seen elsewhere in my story is not a cry that I can resist.

Even with my fertile imagination, I have no idea of how life would have panned out if I had stayed in England. I would have been allowed to stay: anyone who had lived in England, even without papers, was at that time allowed to stay on if s/he did not have a police record. The four years residence, however, did not count in one’s favour when wanting British Citizenship and a passport: from the time I presented myself as wanting to remain there, I still had to wait another five years to get both. I could not see myself sitting it out. My brother Allen, who was allowed into Britain on a UN travel document, did sit it out, and duly got his passport. It was a big moment for them, and they even got South African passports again, after the changes.

In a sadly typical South African imperative, his passport was again confiscated on a later visit to SA, though this time by officials working in the new government. A law had been passed requiring people to apply if they wanted to hold passports from one or more other countries outside of SA. How he was supposed to know about this law while living in Canada, I don’t know, but they came with the usual ‘ignorance is no excuse’. Bureaucrats have a special brand of insanity all of their own.

The PC Revolution

I used some savings to enroll in a computer course at Control Data Centre in Eloff Street, Johannesburg. It felt a tad familiar, since I had taken an aptitude test in London, but the reality was that the course was poorly run. The COBOL course was unaffordable, so I took one in BASIC, thinking “You have to start somewhere”. I don’t regret it: I learnt enough to get myself started in what turned out a better way, but I dropped out of this expensive BASIC course because the CDC in-house college was mean about books. Computer books were hugely expensive, and difficult to find under sanctions, and they just did not have enough copies for the number of students in the course. Assignments were text-book dependant, so I found myself waiting up to three weeks for a book, for assignment that took a single day to finish. I was literally getting nowhere. That frustration was too much, I needed to earn money again: I was at early stages of the the course, scheduled for four months, after four months, and my savings ran out.

Turbo Pascal

Instead, I spent the last of my money on a Kaypro II PC and on a CP/M copy of Turbo Pascal, being version 1.0, and that changed everything. Night after night, I pored over the manual, trying the examples. I had no idea, before I started, even what “compiling” a program meant, since BASIC, an interpreted language, did not have a compiler.

It was very, very hard at first. My eyes were constantly bloodshot from reading and peering closely at a green text on black cathode ray tube. The Kaypro had a 9 inch screen. Right now I am working on both a 20 inch on the left and a 24 inch to the right. After several months of eyestrain, headaches and try, try again, things began to fall into place.

Cooking the Books

I met a man named Terry Hamilton, probably through Osborn Lindsay, whom we were both likely “stringing” for. Terry was a salesman, a very smart guy, and had likewise got himself a copy of Turbo Pascal. By the time I met him, we were both working on IBM clones, and were up to Turbo Pascal 3.0.

One night, while we were living on a smallholding in Chartwell, Terry phoned, asking for advice. He was writing a bookkeeping package. We were both amused, because he knew nothing about books. I had recently taken a bookkeeping course, and he thought I would, with my fresh knowledge, be able to help. I was, but he ended up doing all the user interface and I was called only when there was glitch that was not easily solved. I helped with screen handling (the dreaded “Abort, Retry, Fail” message scrolled the entire screen). I came up with an interrupt driven routine adapted from C code I had found in Dr Dobbs Journal), and from then on Terry called me only when troubled by similar OS-level “funnies”. He named the package “Personal Assistant”, and it was a little wonder, running off a pair of floppy disks. He sold three hundred copies, enough to eventually pack up his entire family and return to Australia.

He left me the source code and the right to sell it when he left, a generous gesture that brought in some money for a few months, until the market began to change. Within years, Windows 1.0 was about, and the carefree free lance coding jobs dried up.

Labour Law

Things enter and leave one’s life. I had an early brush with labour law in the Durban dock strikes of 1973, a time coined by Tony Morphet as the “Durban Moment”. I had known Tony since Maritzburg days. He married Cathy Shallis a few years after I met them, and we kept in touch. The docks strikes of course ended in me being fired from my warehouse manager job in Maydon Wharf, Durban, as related in the Durban chapter. Little did I know back in Durban, that the strikes had actually begun in Claremont Township near Pinetown, in a textile factory, part of the “Frame Group”, a large textile company run by “Tiny” Frame. An Applied Law student, Halton Cheadle, was one of a team organising workers in Pinetown, and I was to come into Halton’s ken in Johburg.

He, Clive Thompson and “Fink” Haysom started a law firm working out of CALS (Centre for Applied Legal Studies) in Wits University, and they recruited my sister Colleen from the Legal Resources Centre to run the practice admin. Eventually, they opened an office on the corner of Bertha St, Braamfontein, where we “had a blast”. See “Bomb #4” in chapter of that name.

I was pretty passionate about the coming PC revolution. The lawyers were not that impressed, but in time I persuaded them to (instead of paying R20k back then for a dedicated NBI or Wang word processor) invest in three Olivetti M24 PCs, known back then as “Windows Compatible”. Working alongside them, I had trained (as far as I could) my sister Colleen, and Meg Jordi and Pam Gardiner, on MultiMate, a DOS word processor popular back then. It was an improvement on dedicated word processors because we could print one file while typing another, something that the Wangs still could not. As a result of this bump in productivity, CTH (Cheadle, Thompson, Haysom) began winning cases.

This was a lot to do with software allowing both Search and Replace as well as Cut and paste, which left the old clattering IBM golf ball typewriters in the dust when changes had to be made to a document, and also to do with spelling checkers. The main reason for documentation being rejected by Judges back then was technical errors like miss-spelling of names, or applying the incorrect Magisterial area. Things like that could be instantly corrected in a word processor, where a golfball meant retyping the entire document.

Those were some high pressure times. They won many famous cases. Some that come to mind were “the boy on the bicycle”, the “Wendy Orr” case, and biggest of the lot, numerically, was a strike by the SARHWU (South African Railways and Harbours Workers Union), concerning a mass firing of workers by the railways, of 14 thousand workers. Three thousand of them were also kicked out of their homes, along with families. It is scarcely believable today to think back on how appalling the complete lack of humnanity of the then government (railways was overtly government in those days, not dressed up in unaccountable listed company clothes as now) could be.

One problem with these strikes was proving jurisdiction. The union with the largest count of members was awarded that. There were a few unions, but one in particular always claimed jurisdiction, though everybody knew that it fewer members than SARHWU. That had to be proved, and that particular union was well run, just as Afriforum and Soldariteit are today.

SARHWU was not. For two different strikes prior to this big one, I had brought together data capture teams who had captured membership to prove jurisdiction. You would think that the union would keep its membership lists up to date, but, although they had PCs and printers donated, nobody used them. They gathered dust in union offices, and money had to be spent on recapturing each time. This large 14 thousand worker strike was the third in succession and the largest.

A team of twelve young ladies, mostly dance and drama students, worked cheerfully in three shifts of four girls around the clock. I did all the database work after each shift, clearing out duplicates, checking “funnies” against the original A4 paper membership forms, sorting and printing, backing up on both floppies and hard disks and hiding the disks against possible “visits” from the Special Branch.

The “Branch”

I am so glad those days are over: few people alive today can know what it was like. Every time I exited a property, a flicking glance left and right would be me scanning the interiors of cars for heads and shoulders of watching people: special branch goons. I even found them “reading newspapers” in the dark sometimes. How dof can a goon be? But they got smarter, and with that harsher, in time.

By the time I got to helping Maeder on his Toverberg Indaba newespaper in Colesberg, they had upskilled themselves enough to break into where our PC was, and tampered with the hard drive.

It is a shock today to see how many killings still go on. I have read that we lose more people to violent deaths daily than are lost in the Russian-Ukraine war. In many parts of South Africa, people do not bother to lock doors. In others, the murder rate is so extreme as to skew the statistics such that the world believes SA is overwhelmingly violent. I see so many podcasts of people who come to SA fearing for their lives, only to leave achingly sorry at the friendship and warmth they experienced while staying here.

I also watched recently some others around South Africa: there are a lot of them. One was the story of a family who are now in America as part of the so-called refugee programme. They appear to be good enough people, enjoying their new life in America. The genocide story is for them a good playbook of course. I am not for a moment saying there have not been many farm murders in SA. Even one was too many, but genocide is a stretch. I happen to have met many people who are still around or are descended from people who were very cruel and harsh, and they have good reason to fear for their lives.

In the same way as our murder statistics are skewed by three main centres of violence loading the statistics for the rest of the country, I would like one day to see a breakdown of exactly how many farm murders there are, region by region, over the whole country. I am guessing the majority are perpetrated in regions that were once Boer Republics.

Now and Then

I enjoyed talking about this with Jefferson John Guy, because he learned and said that history was a two way thing: If a thing does not happen these days, then it probably did not happen in those days. We are talking about groupings of people mainly here, and whether, who, why or how they kill. Jeff was very deft out pointing out the similarities between historical and present day groupings. Many of what we were brought up to see in the news as “faction fights” were actually continued feuds, generations down the line pursuing the same vendettas, but they were not simple clan on clan: they were often Boers grouped with a clan, or English grouped with a clan, or whatever. It was rooted and complex, not riff-raff randomly fighting.

Anecdotally, there are few farm murders south of the Tugela River in KwaZulu. (I prefer the two letter version over what Bra Jonas Gwangwa used to annotate “Name, Surname: Kwazulu, Natal”). I do not know about the three Cape provinces, but I fear the statistics will show higher numbers in the old Free State and the various Transvaal provincial regions. Once again, this is anecdotal, but my experience of farmers in those areas were of far harsher treatment of labour than in others. That does not make anything right, but it does make it easier to understand retaliation, and the crazy component of torture inflicted in those attacks. You don’t grow up with the bitter memory of an uncle or father killed and then ploughed into a mielie field to destroy the evidence, and then not want to retaliate.

It was not only Afrikaners, of course. There were some heavy English speaker farmers, and other infamous racist groups. I farmed briefly in a little place named Zuurbekom near Westonaria. This was an area dotted about with smallholdings, on which mostly Portuguese descended smallholders had built expansive homes. I don’t know where most of them had come from, but I suspect they arrived from Mozambique during and after the Frelimo-Renamo wars. That country had a very heavy reputation to live down in terms of how harsh its police were on the local population, and when the changes came to SA in 1994, almost every last family in Zuurbekom loaded personal effects onto lorries and fled overnight.

It was weird seeing all those large Luso-tropical mansions, standing empty. In time they came naturally to be occupied by squatters, and I know from personal experience that banks were eventually happy to let the properties go for whatever little money was offered them.

The Special Branch had exactly the sort of reputation that Mozambican colonial police had. Their jails were like the ad campaign for an American ‘roach motel’: “They move in. They DON’T move out”.

It is really great to leave those horrible times behind: when a flash of light would hit me like a bomb going off - in instant grinding, teeth-clench for the blast, only to relax again, and breathe “escaped again”, realising it was just the glint of midday sun piercing one’s peripheral vision like a laser. Panic on, panic off, in the blink of an eye, like a transistor. Both the “Branch” and the bombs are gone: we do however still need eyes in the backs of our heads in most urban areas, because law and order enforcement is totally absent. I often ask foreign visitors how many police they have seen in the first three weeks in SA. Nearly always they rack their brains, trying to remember whether they saw even one. Of course, when they didn’t, and being me, I always ask:

“And so, do you feel more secure now?”.

Of course one needs eyes in the back of one’s head, with invisible policing. Is it better to fear bombs? Both times I was mugged, I was left alive, and both times, the louts left without taking anything. Luckily, for me, they were content to leave me a bit shaken and bruised.

It doesn’t always work that way: Ntemi Piliso once intervened outside his home, where he found a mugger holding a victim in a half-nelson and punching him in the face. The mugger stopped beating, and explained to Ntemi:

“Diė mogho het net ’n tiekie.”

Are there other countries in the world where a mugger mugs and then beats a person for being so poor s/he has only thruppence?

Bra Hugh used to say that our youth do crime because they have too much energy. People debate this sort of thing all day long. All I can say is: I would not want to be a policeman in SA today. They appear to have no support from their bosses, and it must be an ache to work for parliamentary and other bigwigs who get away with everything.

It is hard to figure out why people change once they have privilege. I used to take a shuttle to Cape Town airport. When booking my phone, the shuttle reservations person always asked if I were an MP. One day, I asked “No, but why should that make any difference”. The shuttle booker obliged with an explanation: it was their experience that lady MP’s booked shuttles from Parliament to the airport, and then would say “Just stop at So and So Mall first”. Then there would follow a long day of stopping at malls all over Cape Town. Late in the day, Honourable MP would say “I have cancelled my flight” or the like. Not even a ‘Sandton lady’ would think of that. I will leave you to guess which party the MP’s who conducted themselves like this are from. About 99% of the population will take sub-milliseconds to figure that old one out.

It is like “Yeoville Rent”. There was a sizeable number of people moving out of apartments three to five days before month end, every month in Yeoville. Note, I said “three to five” days before month end. Most people out on the last day of the month. Not “Yeoville Renters”. They, like rabbi-turned-comedian Jackie Mason, have “a soytan technique”. They crash on a couch here, another there, for the few nights straddling month end, then approach someone for help. The usual story goes like:

“I have just started a new job - do you have a bed for me, just until payday?”

We all want to help. We are good people. We say yes. They move in. The next part of the plot, in case you are a male hoping to get lucky, is that they have a different gender identity, resulting in very hard life in the face of a hostile society. You go very easy on them, until, on the third day of the month, they no longer seem to be getting up to go to work. Then, it is revealed that the job “didn’t really work out”, usually because of how unacceptable they are to society at large, but they are not too distressed, because they have “not yet run out of options”.

Around the 25th of the month, they say brightly “You know, I am so lucky” and they tell you they have another place. They would just like a lift with all their things to [another Yeoville address], where they have been so lucky to find a permanent place. That place is usually the currently consenting adult. It is a fine plan. They get him or her fresh into payday, and then on the 5th of the next month, the hunt is on again. “I just found this great job …”

Returning to MP’s and shuttles, those shuttles work on a fixed fee, so these MPs would use a shuttle vehicle all day long for their shopping trips, resulting in a huge net loss for the shuttle business. The MPs didn’t care. They found it much cheaper than their own cars, or ride hailers, and presumably a claimable expense, too. If you are a South African MP, or newly employed on the 5th of the month, in this great job) just know that the talk gets around. And now you now know why (apart from all the many other reasons) you enter a room to secretive sniggers. We have your numbers.

African Jazz Pioneers

One night, my then wife Lyneve and I went to Jamesons, a venue in downtown Johannesburg, to hear the African Jazz Pioneers — a great, vibey, heaving evening, as always. The last time we had heard them performing, their trombonist was a very young Jannie “Hanepoot” van Tonder. Also in the band at that time was Stompie Manana, whom I had met some years before at the O’Jays rehearsals. I asked about Jannie. Stompie said:

“Hy’s ’n boertjie boy. Hy speel mooi!”¹

More than a year before that, I had seen them with “Big Mickey” Vilakazi on trombone. It turned out that Mickey, whom I often found busking on alto sax at Fontana in Hillbrow, had moved on to the Afro-pop group “Mango Groove”. They eventually got a huge amount of airplay on his number “Hellfire”, and Mickey stayed with them until his death. (Some Pioneers made the trip to Marabastad for Mickey’s funeral. Our trumpeters could not make it. They were working on that day, so I took along my trumpet. Mango Groove’s trumpeter, Bra Banza Kgasoane, joined me as the AJP brass line-up: two trumpets and no trombone. John Leyden, leader of Mango Groove, did a little double-take at that sight, but we did just fine as a trumpet duo, fitting in well with the sax frontline.)

After the Pioneers had wrapped, I approached the bandleader, Ntemi Piliso, thanked him for the beautiful music, and asked, “Why no Jannie?”. I don’t remember Ntemi’s exact reply. It was to the effect that Jannie had moved on. I was surprised. Jannie is a classy trombonist. He had some help in his Durban years from a symphony trombonist, Mario Monterosso, and it shows to this day in the sense that Jannie is easily the most powerful trombonist I have ever heard, and I have heard many, not least the incredible Gary Valente.

Valente was on first chair in Carla Bley’s Very Big Band. I was lucky enough to catch them one night in Paris at Club New Morning. Valente was the loudest trombonist I had ever heard, reminiscent of Wallace Davenport, who was the loudest trumpeter I had ever heard. Mario Monterosso was that sort of power player, so it is no surprise now that “Hanepoot” is the current King of the Decibels. Sitting on third chair in the Bley Very Big Band was the wonderful Annie Whitehead, who lit up the stage so many times in the Chris McGregor bands, particularly the Brotherhood of Breath.

Lyneve and I were about to go home, when I asked her to hang for a minute.

About a year earlier, I had resigned from “Sounds Exciting”, an excellent dance band in Pretoria, saying to her, “I can’t do this any more. I am sick with longing to return to the music I grew up with”. I had spent eight happy years with Willie Boshoff in Sounds Exciting, and did very well with that great and successful dance band. Through the years we (Willie Boshoff, Danie Gerber, Mike Erasmus, Greg Brown) had made a lot of good music, and had a truckload of laughs. It was a wrench to leave.

I had told Lyneve about starting out in 1959 with a band named “Swing Inc”, playing out of Natal University, Pietermaritzburg, playing a mix of swing and marabi. Lyneve had seen some photographs. This 1961 one of our “brass section” (all two of us) shows Roy Gwala taking a solo during a gig in the Main Hall at UNP.

Resigning from Sounds Exciting without moving to another band meant we took a financial hit, but she hated to see me frustrated, and went along with the life change. I suffer terribly from shyness, and am the world’s worst self-promoter, but I was so sick with longing for the music pumping in me and through me all these years, all the while performing covers and dance hits, that it felt like my heart would burst if I did not at least try what felt like the opportunity I was waiting for.

Returning to Ntemi: I explained that I was a trombonist, and asked if I could audition for the Pioneers. He gave me the number of the band manager, Queeneth Ndaba. Some days later, I met Queeneth Ndaba in her Dorkay House office.

Years later I heard she looked after Dorkay House for the owners, the Kotze brothers, who were said to be farmers in the Rustenburg district. Queeneth had asked me to be there at 2pm in the afternoon. As things turned out, I sat there alone for hours until Sam Tshabangu, Phaladi Madumo, Sechaba “Shep” Ntsamai, Timothy Ndaba, Ntemi Piliso and others trickled in after 5pm. That was the pattern. Queeneth believed that telling musicians to arrive at 5pm was to invite them to arrive at 8pm, by which time they in any case would want to be long home. Transport from the city in apartheid times was a tough issue. So, the game was to set the start time at 2pm, in the hope that we would arrive by 5pm, and rehearse for at least an hour or two before the apartheid panic to flee the city became too compelling.

Paris

I shared with many guys over the years. Most were easy, but in Paris, I was sharing with a percussionist. On waking on the first morning in our Pigalle hotel room—we had no gig that day—I was surprised to find him sitting in an armchair in our hotel room, in a pinstriped suit, his shoes boned like mirrors. The armchair was under the TV, so that he could not actually watch it. I wanted to sleep more, and asked him to switch the TV off. He refused, saying, “I will get lonely with it off. Are you not also far away from your home?” Oh… kay. Later that week, he woke screaming, night after night. Quite gently, one morning, I asked him why he screamed in his sleep. He got very angry, telling me he knew “what I was up to,” trying to make out that he was mad by telling people he was screaming. Later, when he screamed again, there were knocks on the door. He still denied screaming.

“Someone else, somewhere else,” he said to them, with a sweep of his hand indicating elsewhere in the hotel.

After breakfast that morning, he took up his position in the armchair under the TV once more, and then asked, very seriously, “Tell me, is this the centre of Paris?”

I told him I didn’t really know, but I thought if he meant the centre as in the most important part of Paris, then I could not say, but if he meant the hotel was geographically the centre of Paris, I thought it was close enough. He got very angry again.

“So, they accommodate us in a place that is not in the centre of Paris?” he ranted. “How can they do this to us? Is it because we are black?”

I took a leaf out of Queeneth’s book and looked at him wordlessly. He was furious. In time, he closed his eyes and dozed off. He did not last the entire tour, soon asking for his ticket. No one objected as he left the hotel, the band, and the tour, and flew back alone to Johannesburg. I heard later that he was believed to have “fried his brain” with too many drugs as a youth, and felt very sorry for him.

My pattern of sharing with the guy no one else would want to share with ended when Jennifer Klot joined the band. As a female, she was given a room to herself, and it became the norm for me to be placed in a room on my own. Probably no one wanted to share with me either!

The Manhattan Transfer

On our first Paris tour, I was lucky enough to get back to my hotel thanks to the sweet-natured Manhattan Transfer members. I had wandered from act to act at Les Halles, wide-eyed and wide-eared, totally lost to the time. When I returned to our dressing room, the Pioneers had left. We were sharing with the wonderful Manhattan Transfer: they were at the far end of the rooms, and I wandered through, finding a lady ironing a costume, both she and her daughter jiving together while singing Birdland.

Boy, was I transfixed? I did not even reveal my presence while I listened and watched as their members criss-crossed the dressing room, ironing, hanging, folding, pausing to dab make-up in a mirror, all of them grooving away on Weather Report’s famous Joe Zawinul composition, with the most amazing tight harmonies. Eventually the lady with the daughter saw me. “Oh, yeah, they left. It’s ok, I told them we’ll get you back to the hotel”. Huge relief. I had no idea how to get to Pigalle from Les Halles, nor did I even remember the name of the hotel.

That band was so kindly. I watched out their act, and it squarely blew my socks off. The Pioneers, at breakfast, when I questioned them leaving me behind, said what they always said:

“You are smart. You will always be ok”.

Well, they said that. But I had no French money on me, had no idea how to work a French pay-phone - “Numerotez” - what’s that? Nor did I even yet know a single person to phone in Paris. There were no cellphones around. Manhattan Transfer did me a great favour, but they also made it into such a memorable pleasure.

Hotel Méridien Étoile

We performed at the Lionel Hampton Room in this hotel for a week. On arrival, the maître d’ in charge of the venue told us we were expected to play two 90-minute sets. It was strange that the promoter had not raised this. We had specified two 45-minute sets from the start of our tour. We didn’t know if we even had enough rehearsed material for three hours, accustomed as we were to playing two 45-minute sets. Bra Ntemi explained that at seventy-two years of age, he felt he was entitled to play for only two 45-minute sets.

The maître d’ then said, “Lionel Hampton has just played here. He is ninety years old, and played two 90-minute sets.”

Well, we were not going to let down The Hamp. It was a hectically tiring gig, but we coped. A highlight of this week in Paris was some exiled South African visitors who pitched for a few nights running: Trevor Manuel, Pallo Jordan and another (possibly Mike Mnisi). They were somewhat penniless in exile, and we were delighted to see them and share our drinks tray with them.