MTUTUZELI MATSHOBA

Registration for work is such an interesting example of a way of  killing a man’s pride that I cannot pass it by without mention. It was on Monday, after two weeks of unrewarded labour and persevereance, that Pieters gave me a letter which said I had beenemployed as a general labourer at his firm and which I was to take to the notorious 80 Albert Street. Monday is usually the busiest day there because everybody wakes up on this day determined to find a job. They end up dejected, crowding the labour office for ‘piece’ jobs.

That Monday I woke up elated, whistling all the way as I cleaned  the coal stove, made fire to warm the house for those who were still asleep, and took my toothbrush and washing rags to the tap outside the toilet. The cold water was revivifying as I splached it over my upper body. I greeted ‘Star’, also washing at the tap diagonally opposite my home. Then I took the washing basin, half-filled it with water and went into the lavatory to wash the rest of me. When I had finished washing and dressing I bade them goodbye at hoome and set out, swept into the torrent of workers rushing to the station. Somdale had reached the station first and we waited for our trains with the hundreds already on the platform. The guys from the location prefer to wait for trains on the station bridge. Many of them looked like children who did not want to go to school. I did not sympathise with them. The little time my brothers have to themselves, Saturday and Sunday, some of them spend worshipping Bacchus.

The train schedule was geared to the morning rush hour. From four in the morning the trains had rumbled in with precarious frequency. If you stay near the road to the hostel you are woken up by the shuffle of a myriad footfalls long before the first train. I have seen these people on my way home when the nocturnal bug has bitten me. All I can say is that an endless flow of resolute men hastening in the inky, misty morning down Mohale Street to the station is an awesome apparition.

I had arrived ten minutes early at the station. The ‘ninety-five’ to George Goch passed Mzimhlope while I was there. This train brought the free morning stuntman show. The dare-devils ran along the roof of the train, a few centimetres from the naked cable carrying thousands of electric volts, and ducked under every pylon. One mistimed step, a slip — and reflex action would send his hand clasping for support. No comment from any of us at the station. The train shows have been going on since time immemorial and have lost their magic.

My train to Faraday arrived, bursting along the seams with its load. The spaces between the adjacent coaches were filled with people. So the only way I could get on the train was by wedging myself among those hanging on perilously by hooking their fingers into the narrow tunnels along the top of the coaches, their feet on the door ledges. A slight wandering of the mind, a sudden swaying of the train as it switched lines, bringing the weight of the others on top of us, a lost grip and another labour unit would be abruptly terminated. We hung on for dear life until Faraday.

In Pieters’ office. Four automatic telephones, two scarlet and two orange coloured, two fancy ashtrays, a gilded ball-pen stand complete with gilded pen and chain, two flat plastic ashtrays and baskets, the one on the left marked IN and the other one OUT, all displayed on the poor bland face of a large highly polished desk. Under my feet a thick carpet that made me feel like a piece of dirt. On the soft opal green wall on my left a big framed ‘Desiderata’ and above me a ceiling of heavenly splendour. Behind the desk, wearing a short cream-white safari suit, leaning back in a regal flexible armchair, his hairy legs (the pale skin of which curiously made me think of a frog’s ventral side) balanced on the edge of the desk in the manner of a sheriff in an old-fashioned western, my blue-eyed, slightly bald, jackal-faced overlord.

‘You’ve got your pass?’

‘Yes, Mister Pieters.’ That one did not want to be called baas.

‘Let me see it. I hope it’s the right one. You got a permit to work in Johannesburg?’

‘I was born here, mister Pieters.’ My hands were respectfully behind me.

‘It doesn’t follow.’ He removed his legs from the edge of the table and opened a drawer. Out of it he took a small bundle of typed papers. He signed one of them and handed it to me. ‘Go to the pass office.  Don’t, spend two days there. Otherwise you come back and I’ve taken somebody else in your place.’

He squinted his eyes at me and wagged his tongue, trying to amuse me the way he would try to make a baby smile. That really amused me, his trying to amuse me the way he would a baby. I thought he had a baby’s mind.

‘Esibayeni’. Two storey red-brick building occupying a whole block. Address: 80 Albert Street, or simply ‘Pass Office’. Across the street, half the block (the remaining half a parking space and ‘home’ of the homeless methylated spirit drinkers of the city) taken up by another red-brick structure. Not offices this time, but ‘Esibayeni’ (at the kraal) itself. No question why it had been called that. The whole black population of Johannesburg above pass age knows that place.

Like I said, it was full on a Monday, full of wretched men with defeated eyes, sitting along the gutters on both sides of Albert Street, the whole pass office block, others grouped where the sun’s rays leaked through the skyscrapers and the rest milling about. When a car driven by a white man went up the street pandemonium broke loose as men, I mean dirty slovenly men, trotted behind it and fought to give their passes first. If the white person had not come for that purpose they cursed him until he went out of sight. Occasionally a truck or van would come to pick up labourers for a piece job. The clerk would shout out the number of men that were wanted for such and such a job, say forty, and double the number would be all over the truck before you could say ‘stop’. None of them would want to miss the cut, which caused quite some problems for the employer. A shrewd businesman would take all and simply divide the money he had laid out among the whole group, as it was left to him to decide how much to pay for a piece job. Everybody was satisfied in the end – the temporary employer having his work done in half the time he had bargained for, and each of the labourers with enough for a ticket back to the pass-office the following day, and maybe ten cents worth of dishwater and bread from the oily restaurants in the neighbourhood, for three days. Those who were smart and familiar with the ways of the pass-office handed their passes in with twenty and/or fifty-cent pieces between the pages. This gave them first preference of the better jobs.

The queue to ‘Esibayeni’ was moving slowly. It snaked about thirty metres around the corner of Polly Street. It had taken me more than an hour to reach the door. Inside the ten-feet high wall was an asphalt rectangle, longitudinal benches along the opposite wall in the shade of narrow tin ledges, filled with bored looking men, toilets on the lower side of the rectangle, facing wide bustling doors. It would take me another three hours to reach the clerks. If I finished there just before lunch-time, it meant that I would not be through with my registration by four in the afternoon when the pass office closed. Fortunately I had twenty cents and I knew that the blackjacks who worked there were nothing but starving leeches. One took me up the queue to four people who stood before a snarling white boy. Those whose places ahead of me in the queue had been usurped wasted their breath grumbling.

The man in front of me could not understand what was being bawled at him in Afrikaans. The clerk gave up explaining, not prepared to use any other language than his own. I felt that at his age, about twenty, he should be at RAU learning to speak other language. That way he wouldn’t burst a vein trying to explain everything in one tongue just because it was his. He was either bone-headed or downright lazy or else impatient to ‘rule the Bantus’.

He took a rubber stamp and banged it furiously on one of the pages of the man’s pass, and threw the book into the man’s face. ‘Go to the other building, stupid!’

The man said, ‘Thanks,’ and elbowed his way to the door.

‘Next! Wat soek jy?,’ he asked in a bellicose voice when my turn to be snarled at came. He had freckles all over his face, and a weak jaw.

I gave him the letter of employment and explained in Afrikaans that I wanted E and F cards. My talking in his tongue eased some of the tension out of him. He asked for my pass in a slightly calmer manner. I gave it to him and he paged through. ‘Good, you have permission to work in Johannesburg right enough.’ He took two cards from a pile in front of him and laboriously wrote my pass numbers on them. Again I thought that he should still be at school, learning to write properly. He stamped the cards and told me to go to room six in the other block. There were about twelve other clerks growling at people from behind a continuous U-shaped desk, and the space in front of the desk was overcrowded with people who made it difficult to get to the door.

Another blackjack barred the entrance to the building across the street. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’

‘Awu! What’s wrong with you? I’m going to room six to be registered. You’re wasting my time,’ I answered in an equally unfriendly way. His eyes were bloodshot, as big as a cow, and as stupid, his breath was fouled with ‘mai-mai‘, and his attitude was a long way from helpful.

He spat into his right hand, rubbed his palms together and grabbed a stick that was leaning against the wall near him. ‘Go in,’ he challenged, indicating with a tilt of his head, and dilating his gaping nostrils.

His behaviour perplexed me, more than angering or dismaying me. It might be that he was drunk; or was I supposed to produce something first, and was he so uncouth as not to tell me why he would not allow me to go in? Whatever the reason, I regretted that I could not kick some of the ‘mai-mai’ out of the sagging belly, and proceeded on my way. I turned to see if there was anyone else witnessing the unnecessary aggression.

‘No, mfo. You’ve got to wait for others who are also going to room six,’ explained a man with half his teeth missing, wearing a tattered overcoat and nothing to cover his large, parched feet. And, before I could say thanks: ‘Say, mnumzane, have you got a cigarette on you? Y’know, I haven’t had a single smoke since yesterday.’

I gave him the one shrivelled Lexington I had in my shirt-pocket. He indicated that he had no matches either. I searched myself and gave the box to him. His hands shook violently when he lit and shielded the flame. ‘Ei! Babalaz has me.’

‘Ya, neh,’ I said, for the sake of saying something. The man turned and walked away as if his feet were sore. I leaned against the wall and waited. When there were a good many of us waiting the gatekeeper grunted that we should follow him inside to another bustling ‘kraal’. That was where the black clerks shouted out the jobs at fifty cents apiece or more, depending on whether they were permanent or temporary. The men in there were fighting like mad to reach the row of windows where they could hand in their passes. We followed the blackjack up a sloping cement way rising to a green double door.

There was nowhere it wasn’t full at the pass-office. Here too it was full of the same miserable figures that were buzzing all over the place, but this time they stood in a series of queues at a long counter like the one across the street, only this one was L-shaped and the white clerks behind the brass grille wore ties. I decided that they were of a better class than the others, although there was no doubt that they also had the same rotten manners and arrogance. The blackjack left us with another one who told us which queues to join. Our cards were taken and handed to a lady filing clerk who went to look for our records.

I was right! The clerks were, at bottom, all the same. When I reached the counter I pushed my pass under the grille. The man who took it had close-cropped hair and a thin sharp face. He went through my pass checking it against a photostat record and with my name scrawled on top in a handwriting that I did not know.

‘Where have you been from January until now, September?’ he said in a cold voice, looking at me from behind the grille like a god about to admonish a sinner.

I have heard some funny tales, from many tellers, when it come to answering that question. See if you can recognise this one:

CLERK: Heer, man. Waar was jy al die tyd, jong? (Lord, man. Where have you been all the time, bud?)
MAN: I … I was mad, baas.
CLERK: Mad!? You think I’m, your uncle, kaffer?
KAFFER: No baas, I was mad.
CLERK: Jy … jy dink … (and the white man’s mouth drops open with no words coming out.)
KAFFER: (Coming to the rescue of the bass with an explanation.) At home they tell me that I was mad all along, baas. ‘Strue.
CLERK: Where are the doctor’s papers? You must have been to hospital if you were mad! (With annoyance.)
KAFFER: I was treated by a witch-doctor, baas. Now I am better and have found a job.

Such answers serve them right. job. If it is their aim to harass the poor people with impossible questions, then they should expect equivalent answers. I did not, however, say something out of the way. I told the truth, ‘looking for work.’

‘Looking for work, who?’

‘Baas.’

‘That’s right. And what have you been living on all along?’ he asked, like a god.

‘Scrounging, and looking for work.’ Perhaps he did not know that among us blacks a man is never thrown to the dogs.

‘Stealing, huh? You should have been caught before you found this job. Do you know that you have contravened section two, nine, for nine months? Do you know that you would have gone to jail for two years if you had been caught, tsotsi? These policemen are not doing their job anymore,’ he said, turning his attention to the stamps and papers in front of him.

I had wanted to tell him that if I had had a chance to steal, I would not have hesitated to do so, but I stopped myself. It was the wise thing to act timid in the circumstances. He gave me the pass after stampting it. The blackjack told me which corridor to follow. I found men sitting on benches alongside one wall and stood at the end of the queue. The man in front of me shifted and I sat on the edge. This time the queue was reasonably fast. We moved forward on the seats of our pants. If you wanted to prevent them shining you had to stand up and sit, stand up and sit. You could not follow the line standing. The patrolling blackjack made you sit in an embarrassing way. Halfway to the door we were approaching, the man next to me removed his upper clothes. All the others nearer to the door had their clothes bundled under their armpits. I did the same.

We were all vaccinated in the first room and moved on to the next one where we were X-rayed by some impatient black technicians. The snaking line of black bodies reminded me of prisoners being searched. That was what 80 Albert Street was all about.

The last part of the medical examination was the most disgraceful. I don’t know whether it was designed to save expense or on some other ground of expediency, but on me it had the effect of dishonour. After being X-rayed we could put on our shirts and cross the corridor to the doctor’s cubicle. Outside were people of both sexes waiting to settle their own affairs. You passed them before entering the cubicle, inside which sat a fat white man in a white dust-coat with a face like an owl, behind a simple desk. The man who had gone in ahead of me was zipping up his fly. I unzipped mine and stood facing the owl behind the desk, holding my trousers with both bands. He tilted his fat face to right and left twice or thrice. ‘Ja. Your pass.’

I hitched my trousers up while he harried me to give him the pass before I could zip my trousers. I straightened myself at leisure, in spite of his ‘Gou, gou, gou!’ My pride had been hurt enough by exposing myself to him, with the man behind me preparing to do so and the one in front of me having done the same; a row of men of different ages parading themselves before a bored owl. When I finished dressing I gave him the pass. He put a little maroon stamp somewhere in amongst the last pages. It must have meant that I was fit to work.

The medical examination was over and the women on the benches outside pretended they did not know. The young white ladies clicking their heels up and down the passages showed you they knew. You held yourself together as best as you could until you vanished from their sight, and you never told anybody else about it. 

This excerpt from To Kill a Man’s Pride was published in the February 1980 issue of the South African literary magazine Staffrider. The publishers of Staffrider, Ravan Press, announced at that time that the full text would appear in Forced Landing, a new collection of contemporary black South African writings edited by Mothobi Mutloatse. The next issue of Staffrider (June 1980) carried a notice that Forced Landing had been banned. All three titles in the Ravan Press ‘Staffrider Series’ of contemporary South African writings were banned. The other two titles (banned in 1979) are Africa My Beginning by Ingoapele Madingoane and Call Me Not a Man, a collection of stories by Mtutuzeli Matshoba. Re-publication in herri with kind permission of the author. The illustration on this page is by Muziwakhe Nhlabatsi and is published in herri with kind permission of the artist.