The Ocotillo Review Summer 2019

Featured in our World Music edition is a short story by Sandra Jackson-Opoku set in South Africa during the Apartheid movement. We hope you enjoy Sophiatown. If you write check out our Summer Writing Contests for short fiction and poetry. They each have a $1000 prize for first place.

Sophiatown

How did a disreputable old African like me come to be rummaging around New York City? Ha! That’s a longer story than I have time to tell. The bigger question is why I left home in the first place.
Sophie Kofifi was a high-strung cherie who left me bruised and battered. I had no choice but to get out of Dodge. Broken hearts are known to be fatal. I never really left her though. When I close my eyes at night to rest this old bag of bones, I don’t go to sleep but fall awake. The years melt away like ice and I emerge from exile. I’ve been to South Africa every night for the last forty years.
I never dream myself as I am now. I see myself young and sturdy, blindly in love. Kimberly was my diamond-studded childhood sweetheart but a hot-blooded moll in golden earrings would snatch me from her arms.
The name is Kingsley Mugwagwa, if you please. I was always called Choirmaster, even when I played the shebeens and brothels of Sophiatown. Faint praise being known as “master” with so many of my fellows gone to their graves. I even outlived those who said I had no right to the music I helped put on the map.
I am not a South African native, you know. I am Shangaan in origin, born in the British colony of Southern Rhodesia before it became Zimbabwe. To those who remember the old days—and very few do—I am a marabi man, one of the last survivors of a dying breed. If it hadn’t been for the lure of diamonds my family might never have left Rhodesia. I would be there now, doing that jit and chimurenga style the Zim musicians loved to play. That’s what I was born into but not what I grew with.
I was young when my father left us to work the diamond mines in Kimberly. He sent money home for years then suddenly the cheques stopped coming. So my mother sold his cattle, took his five sons in hand and set out to find him. If we hadn’t come south maybe we’d still be at home waiting for a word. They never sent news that he had died in a mining accident. Just another kaffir dead, cheaper to replace than to repair.
I can understand why Ma Winston had us stay on in South Africa. There was nothing left for us back in the countryside, no cattle waiting for our return. She wanted to be near our father’s resting place, though we never knew where he was buried.
In Southern Africa mothers are known by the name of their first born son, so Letitia was Ma Winston to everyone, including her children. She wouldn’t brew native beer like so many African women did to make a living. Ma Winston settled us in a township outside of Kimberly and began hawking petty foodstuffs, baking the fat cakes and milk tarts we couldn’t afford to eat ourselves.
No insurance, no pension, no social services. How she managed to feed and clothe five boys on the sale of sweet reed and Boer biscuits, I’ll never know. Maybe because she lived so close to God.
What I remember most about childhood is hunger, struggle and the Anglican Church. It was the Brit-style of religion we knew from Southern Rhodesia and Ma Winston sought out the familiar. The Anglican school headmaster was a step below the priest, who answered to the bishop, who was the next in line to the Almighty himself. We always had our lunch at school. It might be mielies (which your kind calls corn), or maybe a pap corn porridge and sauce with a few stingy strings of meat. Sometimes it was the only food we ate all day. Even if they hadn’t fed us a morsel, Ma Winston would never let us miss school. “You can wait to fill your belly, boys. Better you fill your heads.”
Education was our way out of the life our father lived and the kind of death he died. Ma Winston met a similar fate. I believe she worked herself to death making a way for her boys in a land infected with racism.
I have lived through two dreadful plagues. You hear of the Black Death and think of Europe in the Middle Ages. Yet I can remember when bubonic plague went raging through the townships. Ma Winston would bundle us off to church to bargain with God. We’d sink to our knees, praying that the Black Death would spare us yet again.
But apartheid was a new kind of infection spreading across the land and into the law books. This was a White Death even Ma Winston couldn’t pray away. It followed us right into the church, sliding under the doors, sitting in the pews, ruffling the pages of our hymnbooks.
I started out like most South African musicians singing makwaya at the mission school. Have you heard of St. Albans Boys School? Our choir was quite famous. I can see myself now, a little boykie in blazer and Oxford bag trousers.
I used to sing like a sugar bird, you know. I was said to have the sweetest voice of any boy soprano in all Kimberly. I was the top soloist of my age group and St. Albans won nearly every choral competition we entered.
So what happened? Adolescence, my friend. The sugar bird became a vuvuzela horn. A bullfrog came to live in my throat, leaving me with the croak I have now. So ended my singing career, but I played piano throughout my school days, staying on to become Choirmaster.
Back in those days I was a good church man, as blissful as anyone can be with the flames of apartheid licking up his backside. I might still be a choirmaster in Kimberly if two things hadn’t happened both at once. Ma Winston died and World War II broke out.
We suffered that war down in Africa, pulled into the fray by our different colonial masters. Rhodesian Blacks fought for Britain, Ethiopians were pressed into service by the Italians, Germans tried to muster up forces in Southwest Africa. Any random European squatting on our land would make us their toy soldiers.
Whenever they wanted fresh recruits they came raiding the townships and rounding up whichever young men they found in the streets. Two of my own brothers were taken that way. One returned with shrapnel in his leg and nightmares in his head. One never returned at all.
Me, I had no intention of becoming any European’s target practice. My mother was gone and nothing was holding me. When the khaki boss came to Kimberly looking for Kingsley Mugwagwa they wouldn’t find him waiting around. To lose myself in the big city, that was my plan.
I packed my bag and took the train to Johannesburg, the city of gold. People came to Jo’burg to be transformed. I didn’t know it then but marabi was my fog at the end of the day, to drink and forget about the suffocating loneliness underground.
Yes, it was lively in Kimberly but not enough to pull me from my mother’s apron strings or out of orbit with the Anglican church. It took a woman west of Jo’burg to change Kingsley Mugwagwa from a choirmaster to a jazz man. Sophie, my Kofifi. If I could have, I would have married that cherie.
I came to Sophiatown in her prime. They had already evicted Blacks from the yards of Doornfontein, burning down their houses so they couldn’t come back. Off they fled to an old sewage pit that became the Harlem of South Africa.
Sophie was one raging trollop of a township, burning with a jiveliness Kimberly couldn’t match in all her wildest dreams. Gold is hotter than diamonds, after all.
All kinds of ingredients got thrown into the cookpot, stirred up into breyani, a thick and hearty stew. Blacks and Coloreds, Indians and Chinese, a healthy sprinkling of renegade Whites. Doctors and gamblers, writers and churchgoers. Slumyard shacks and palatial mansions, all lined up side by side.
And yes, hooch. Yebo! The alcohol flowed in and out of Sophiatown like a river and none of it was legal. I had never tasted fire water in all my life. Ma Winston wasn’t there to object so I plunged in with both feet.
There was the dark beer that women brewed and served by the bucket. Those of us who thought ourselves clever, we were too good for all that. We wanted to taste the little white lie and were willing to pay the price.
It was bottled European hooch for the hipsters: whiskey and rum, gin and ale. Or it was moonshine so noxious it made the skin peel, illegally made and sold. Boer brandy and witblits. Manpower, Tears of the Queen, and Kill Me Quick. Shebeen queens knew that the prettiest women, the jiveliest dancers and best-paying customers followed the piano-players. Hooch, women and song, all in one place? Fun-loving men and women doing their thing in the back bedrooms, emerging now and then to drink, dance, sing along, call out requests.
If you didn’t make them happy the crowds could turn ugly. Respectable performers looked down on us but shebeen musicians were the real virtuosos on the scene. You had to play a bit of everything from ragtime to marabi, tula n’divile to kwela. Where were you going to find sheet music for all that? Even guys like me who could read, we learned and played these tunes by ear. The things I saw there, they could fill a book.
I would be lying if I said that Sophie wasn’t a roughneck moll. Ja, man we had our tsotsis, the zoot-suiters making out like American gangsters. They called themselves Gestapo, the Vultures, the Dead-end Kids.
There were pickpockets and drug takers, the juvenile delinquents bluming in doorways all night long, hanging out and giving people the hard eye. Sophie was a dirty dame, I cannot deny it. But she also knew how to enjoy.
Marabi dancehalls jived all night long, people doing the tsaba-tsaba and pata-pata. The corner cafés were open day and night and the brothels served any flavor you fancied—White, Black and in between. There were fah fe Chinese gambling dives and opium dens. We even had our football team, the African Morning Stars and a university on every corner.
To make it in Sophiatown you had to be wiete, able to speak the language of the streets. First lesson in tsotsitaal: the university was no place like your precious Harvard, which has ruined more Africans than fire water. Our universities were where you went to feed your head with White man’s hooch.
It’s a funny thing, that. All those pubs I frequented in London, I can recall but a single one. But the universities in Sophiatown fifty years ago, I remember like yesterday. Back o’ the Moon, Fattie’s Bar, The House on Telegraph Hill. Yes, these were the early days of apartheid but there was never a better time to be a South African musician. We lived outside of apartheid, in one of the only free spaces in the damned country. We lived in jive time, Sophia-style.
There were those who said I wasn’t a real South African, that I had no right to play this music. They called me a Makwankie from Rhodesia. They claimed my sound wasn’t pure, that I was polluting the music with my foreign influences. I had been in South Africa since I was ten years old. What foreign influences could I still remember? What difference did it make, anyway?
Marabi itself wasn’t pure. It was African, it was jazz. It was modern, it was traditional. We had our city sounds, the church music and melodies from the countryside. Even the Afrikaaner vastrap found its way into the mix. We listened to our brothers from across the way, the American jazzmen blowing that big band sound. Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie. Put it into the stewpot and stirred it up.
I figure it this way: There is a public music and a private music. One comes from a deep, sacred place, the ritual life of our people. That music needs to be protected from outside eyes, and not just for those who create it.
Me, I never touch the stuff. In the wrong hands, it can be downright combustible. You play the wrong phrase, a certain combination of chords, you’ll wind up conjuring the devil himself. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you leave it alone. Then there is the public music that everybody gets to hear and dance, that anyone with skills can play. Nobody owns the music. It is a natural resource like water and air. I never let anyone stop me, I couldn’t afford to. I might have perished of thirst or suffocated to death. I drank the water and I breathed the air. I played my marabi jazz, I arranged for other artists, I composed original work.
I had my own group back then, Kingsley Mugwagwa and the Marabi Kings. We backed the great singers of the day. Miriam Makeba when she was young. Homegirl Dorothy Masuka, a Rhodie like me. Dolly Rathabane, our first South African movie star, wailing that lowdown blues and wearing that sexy little bikini on the cover of Drum Magazine.
By the mid 1950’s everything was changing. The Bantu Education Boycotts, The Pound-a-Day Workers’ Strike, the women’s anti-pass marches, the High Treason Trials that sent Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela to prison. The police were raiding the shebeens every Saturday night. You walk out in Kofifi on a Sunday morning, all you smell is native beer rotting in the gutters.
I wasn’t out there striking and marching, doing the toyi-toyi war dance. I was playing my piano. But that didn’t help me in the end. To those in charge, one kaffir is as good as another.
Oh, we had all kinds of tricks to get around the police. Sometimes we’d rehearse on high on a koppie, a hilltop where we could see the gata coming. If they did, we’d grab our instruments and scramble down the other side. It was hard for any Black man in South Africa to make it through life without doing some jail time. Jesus himself would have been thrown into detention for being a radical activist. You lose your night pass, you break curfew, you’re strolling Softown singing drunk or puffing a little daga. If the gata didn’t raid the dancehall that night they would be waiting outside in kwela-kwelas, their police wagons.
“Kom in, kom in, fokken blackie. In with you now, blerry kaffir bastard.”
Like everybody else I had to do my share of jail time. A night here, a weekend there. But it came to the point where every other night I’d be hauled away. I was afraid my pass would be revoked and I’d be sent back to Southern Rhodesia, a land that was a stranger to me now.
I didn’t know it yet, but this was Sophie’s last stand. They had already started demolishing the houses and bulldozing the universities. It was like watching a woman you love being amputated, limb by limb.
One day I passed a family in Gerty Street, fighting to keep the Boers from pulling down their home. I was standing there watching when a Boer policeman picked me out of the crowd, pushed me to the ground and marched across my hands with his big jack boots.
It took months to recover from those fractured fingers. I was a middle-aged man who didn’t know anything but music. If they succeeded in wrecking my hands, I wouldn’t have that.
I believe that is why now I have such crippling arthritis in my fingers. Even today it pains me to play. Every stroke on the keyboard is like pressing on the blade of a rusty panga.
I never saw Sophiatown breathe her dying breath. When they finally broke her down and turned her into a white suburb called Triumph, I was on tour with King Kong, the famous jazz musical about a South African boxer. I left my second home and never looked back. It was a terrible thing going into exile, knowing you couldn’t return. You worried about what you left behind, the people suffering back home. You knew you wouldn’t return to all that even if you could. Once the show closed in London no one wanted to hear the music I was playing. Winters were cold and the women weren’t friendly.
I will say it to anyone reading these words that I became a desperate drunk. Hooch was my steady companion for many a long and lonely year. I had even stopped playing music. Thank God in heaven that Ma Winston wasn’t alive to see what had become of her middle son.
I should never have turned my back on native beer, thick and brown like soup. Sorghum brew was never as bad as hard hooch. That’s what a Black man is meant to drink. You consume it by the bowlful, by the bucket. If I hadn’t spoiled my constitution with the White man’s spirits, it’s what I’d be drinking right now.
You even get a different kind of intoxication from it. African beer makes you warm and jolly. The drunkenness of European liquor is much more desperate sort. Yet that was my life in London, drinking gin like water, calling those brutal European spirits down on my head. I actually believe I was possessed.
I was rotting away in an East London slum, wearing several overcoats by then. That’s tsotsitaal lingo for a down and out vagabond. I would pick up the dole check on Fridays then have a weekend binge. Monday morning usually found me puking in some gutter or jail cell.
I happened upon my sobriety in the most unexpected way. I’d been wandering London in the dead of night when the effigy of an African above a doorway seemed to wink at me from the nameplate of the Moor’s Head Pub.
Welcome, Kingsley Mugwagwa. Welcome home again.
I pushed my way inside. Reggae music played on the jukebox. A Jamaican chap was wiping down the bar. I would later learn his name was Hugo Crowley. I tottered over and eased myself onto a stool.
“Closing soon,” he warned me. “Order fast and drink up.”
“A wee one for the road then I’m on my way.”
Hugo gave me the hard eye. “Not ‘til I see the color of your money.”
“I have a bargain to propose.”
Hugo leaned across the bar. “I won’t have you in here begging like a tramp.”
“Not begging, only bartering. Just call me Tommy Tucker. I sing for my supper. A piano solo for a drink, hoezit?”
Hugo felt for something behind the bar. He kept a weapon back there, a thick wooden truncheon he called “the rod of correction.” He pointed it toward the exit.
“You see the door there, mate? Use it.”
I ignored him, lumbering over to an old upright in the corner of the stage. I lowered myself onto the bench, folded back the fallboard and lay my hands against the keys. A jazzy burst of music blew up like a sudden breeze.
The notes seemed to rouse me from my craving for a drink but I couldn’t follow through. My hands trembled, crashing down. The notes were so unsettling, I almost got up and left.But I didn’t budge until Hugo had turned out the lights and ordered me out. I came back the next night, intent on freeing the music frozen in my hands. No more gin, I promised myself, until I could play again. I came again and again.
By the time I could finish a song from beginning to end, I had lost my taste for fire water. Whenever the urge revisited I’d trek down to the Moor’s Head. That African winking at me above the doorway hadn’t lied. He routed out those demons that had set up housekeeping in my head. These days of now people get locked away to make themselves stop drinking. For me, an East London pub was the site of my sobriety.
I pushed past my feeble starts, the faltering notes. I had been drinking so heavily for so many years, it took awhile to get my hands in order. Soon enough the patrons stopped complaining about the noise and started listening to the music. Playing for an audience lit a fire in this old show pony. I wanted the muscian’s life again, backing singers on stages, having my music danced to, taking the dog from the yard and set it loose in the world.
One night the keyboard man in the house band overdosed on heroin. He went into hospital and from there to rehab. The next day Hugo asked me to take his place and I played it like I knew it. Township jive, cheries and gents. Laid it on like butter and the crowd went wild. All the rest is history.
Soon I was arranging and composing new music, never bothering to put my name on it. Were some of those numbers taken? Well, I wouldn’t really call it stealing. That is what we musicians do. We drink from the same well, we eat from the same bowl. We riff, we borrow. Take a familiar song, explore that song then expand it. That is how South Africans created marabi and mbaqanga, kwela and township jazz, how Americans invented your spirituals and blues. Should we give the Europeans back their notes and chords, the musical instruments we borrowed?
I came of age in apartheid South Africa so I know a thing about exploitation. I never owned the rights to any of my songs. Before we organized the Union Artists, it was a routine thing. You wrote your song, took it to the studio, recorded and collected your fifty dollars. No royalties, no rights. Everything stayed with the record label.
Now just for the sake of argument let us say that a British boy may have taken some songs, changed them a bit and put his name down. If it hadn’t been for the Moor’s Head I would be long dead from bad hooch and hard living. Those songs wouldn’t exist.
I don’t think I could live in South Africa now. Sophietown is gone, marabi forgotten. No one there wants to hear an old man playing antiquated music. Now that things have opened up a bit at home, the international acts have taken over. Rap, hiphop, Top 40 pop is what they dance in the clubs, sing along with on radio. Marabi and township jazz are things of the past.
If it’s all the same, I’ll stick around and nibble at the Apple. You may wonder how I’m still limping along at eighty. Though it pains me to play it, that piano keeps me alive.
I will never stop making music. Even when they drag this old fool off to the grave, I’ll be playing township jive in the heavenly choir. And if I find myself in the other place? Haa! Let’s hope they have a marabi band down there too.
I’m down and out in New York, wearing several overcoats once again. I’ve been down before and struggled back to my feet. I’m a battered old bull but I’m still kicking, cheries and gents.
I’m still here.

-Sandra Jackson-Opoku

Sandra Jackson-Opoku (Chicago, IL) is an award-winning novelist, poet, playwright and journalist. Her work appears in New Daughters of Africa (an anthology), Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Kweli Journal, the Literary Traveler and many other outlets.