Wandile Kasibe
Cape Town - It was in the unforgiving cold winter of 1958 that William Bloke Modisane wrote the following words in his compelling account, Blame Me on History: “Something in me died, a piece of me died, with the dying of Sophiatown.”
Blame Me on History is one of the most insightful and evocative accounts that capture with precision the poignancy of the socio-political zeitgeist that made up the tapestry of the colourful life and “spirit” of Sophiatown.
In a revealing and compelling way, Modisane takes us through the zenith and sudden demise of the only place he knew since he was a child, Sophiatown.
With his indignation against the myth of white supremacy and its oppressive symbolism, Modisane delivers us to a historic and melancholic moment that left many residents of Sophiatown with shattered dreams when it was demolished by the apartheid government on that fateful day.
As a direct victim of this legislated violence, he put his laments on paper at a time when the apartheid system was at its prime in its mission to dehumanise and reduce the black majority to animal status through arbitrary forced removals to create a perpetual state of landlessness among them.
His direct encounter with this degrading hegemony becomes an important point of departure into understanding the effects that forced removals have had on the psyche of the victims of this human rights violation.
Standing in the rubble of what was once Sophiatown, Modisane gazes upon permanent scars that had been gored into this mecca of jazz and the sounds of penny whistles that echo through the layers of time and generations.
His is a story of huge loss and despair, the kind of loss that pierces through the inner core of one’s soul to carve out a kind of indestructible monster that devours its enemies at will.
That very moment of anguish and sadness becomes the point at which Modisane further writes: “The pride of having grown up with Sophiatown shrivelled inside me; I had failed my children as my father and my forefathers and the ancestral gods of my fathers had failed me.
“I stood over the ruins of the house where I was born in Bertha Street and knew that I would never say to my children: this is the house where I was born.”
To Modisane, this was the end of his life in South Africa, and nothing, and not even his own mother, could bring solace to the brokenness of his spirit.
Sophiatown was gone, and gone for good. If a place is defined by its people, then we must accept the argument that, in fact, Modisane and his contemporaries were Sophiatown, and Sophiatown was them as their lives were an embodiment of a place signified by the nakedness of its plethora of extremes.
The one that, on the one hand, gave rhythm to life, while on the other, it devoured its own children. It is probably this paradox that further prompted him to write: “A complex paradox which attracted opposites; the ring of joy, the sound of laughter, was interposed with the growl and the smell of insult; we sang our sad happy song, were carried away by our erotic dances, we whistled and shouted, got drunk and killed each other.”
On that fateful day in 1958, he recounts: “In the name of slum clearance, they had brought the bulldozers and gored into her body, and for a brief moment, looking down Good Street, Sophiatown was like one of its own many victims; a man gored by the knives of Sophiatown, laying in the open gutters, a raisin in the smelling drains, dying of multiple stab wounds, gaping wells gushing forth blood; the look of shock and bewilderment, of horror and incredulity, on the face of the dying man.”
It is the poignancy of this description marked by the passing of time that Modisane embeds in all of us to demonstrate the fragile balance between the past and present. It is the fragility of this balance that later forced Modisane into self-imposed exile as he withdrew into his dark room, contemplating ways in which to leave the country.
He ruminates: “I had become unaware of the progress of time, sitting in my little room which had become a piece of the darkness that had settled about and above the rooftops of Sophiatown ... I could not see the scars and feel the wounds of my life which Sophiatown and South Africa had gored into my body.”
These are the words of a man who had reached the point of no return, pushed to the limits by a system that sought to expunge him and people of his kind. But who was William Bloke Modisane?
Modisane was born in August 1923, the year in which the 1923 Natives (Urban Areas) Act was passed to reduce the access of black people into the cities and also to regulate their movement in the urban areas.
His parents, Joseph and Ma-Willie Modisane, would have been subjected to this act when Bloke was born in 1923.
Just like any black child who grew up in the township under apartheid, it would be naive of us not to suspect that his life was exposed to the vibrancy of both the township and the political system at the time.
As a Drum magazine journalist, actor and critic, Modisane joined the likes of Lewis Nkosi, Can Themba, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Henry Nxumalo, and many others in telling the story of black people.
I argue that his story is a sine qua non and the missing puzzle in South Africa’s grand narrative of the dead black diaspora that must be repatriated from exile.
His last words to his mother and parting words with South Africa in 1959 still haunt us today: “Mama, I’m not going there to die ... soon our country will be right, all will be well, and I will come back.”
And little did he know that in fact he would die in exile, far away from the land of his birth, and be forgotten by his people.
For more than two decades, Modisane’s remains were beneath the ground on foreign land, waiting to be returned to the country that had once rejected him.
Let me address you now, Bra Bloke, because your pain has caught up with me. South Africa has finally become a democratic state, where black people also have the right to vote, but sadly things have not changed for the majority.
The ANC has sold us out on the issue of land as we are still landless and pariahs in the land of our birth, Bra Bloke. You foresaw this when you burnt your membership card of the ANC Youth League in the early 1950s and “retreated into a political wilderness”.
You were there, Bra Bloke, when “Mangaliso Sokukwe was critical of the dilly-dallying and the racial ganging-up against Africans by the powered minority group inside the alliance”.
The land is still in the hands of the white minority, and the gap between the rich and poor is widening at an alarming speed, Bra Bloke.
Government officials are getting richer and richer through state contracts while the majority of our people die of poverty and malnutrition.
The country’s president was implicated in the events that led up to the Marikana massacre, in which mine workers were killed in 2012 to protect white business interests, and today, he has been accused of money laundering involving millions of US dollars hidden in mattresses on his Phala Phala farm.
Billions of rand that were meant to save lives at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic were squandered under his presidency, Bra Bloke.
The country is being sold to private owners little by little. We spend millions of rand on flags while your mortal remains and others like yourself still languish on foreign soil.
I am mentioning these things to you, Bra Bloke, so that you know the kind of country you will be returning to when your mortal remains finally return home. In the midst of this political miasma, I also wish to make it known to you, Bra Bloke, that there is a new political party that was born in July 2013, destined to restore the dignity of our people, not just in South Africa but also on the continent as a whole, and that is the EFF.
It is led by one of the finest sons of the soil, the giant of the South, Julius Sello Malema, who is poised to become one of the greatest leaders of our time.
He speaks truth to power, Bra Bloke, and inspires confidence in the lives of our people in South Africa,
Africa and the diaspora. It is he who, when he speaks, the whole nation and nations move with him, and as an expression of our respect for the calibre of leadership that he exudes, we have come to call him Zweliyashukuma, Aah Zweliyashukuma!
It is the EFF that recognises the fact that political freedom without economic freedom is no freedom at all, but a neo-colonial arrangement that seeks to recycle the same colonial violence that has for the longest time been emitted against our people.
The day of your return will be the day our country and the continent will restore her pride and dignity in the triumph of the human spirit over the evils of apartheid you so detested in your lifetime.
Young people will know your name as it will be re- enshrined once again in the pages of history and echoed in the lecture halls, corridors of power and on the streets of our beloved country.
We will all shout with one accord, “Bloke Modisane has returned.”
Dr Kasibe is the EFF Western Cape communications and liaison officer and holds a PhD in sociology from UCT. He writes in his personal capacity.
Cape Times