Just Like It Had Been Then

For all that it mattered, the depression of the early thirties did not seem on the surface to add an ounce of pressure more to the poverty of the Black man.

We still had one tarred street for the police to patrol and for the white superintendent of the location to drive his sleek shining car along. There were still a few electric lights dotted about street corners and none in the houses; the smell from the sewerage centre in the plantation below us still came in a suffocating wave. Of course fewer of us went to the Dougall Hall bioscope because the market and the golf links were scantier and the white people didn't want to pay as much as they used to. They brought the price down from nine pence to six pence for carrying vegetables five miles to Sunnyside suburb. Children still squatted in the street to relieve themselves, chickens still came to peck at the stools with relish.

There was much less to eat at home, and boys and girls of our age group raided Indian hawkers' backyards for discarded fruits, bread and vegetables in garbage bins. But then we had always done that after school. We planned our strategy of entering through the back gate. Some of the hawkers were vicious with the sjambok, especially Cassim Hassim. Some of the women connived at our acts; others poured rice crust and water on us from the balconies, just to have a laugh. Often we looked up to the balconies and laughed with them while we shook down rice grains from out of our shirts. We returned to rummage again. Little Links and Danie, the noisiest boy down Second Avenue whom we could seldom trust to 'pull off a job' with a sense of duty becoming a Fox, raided one yard....

--From Down Second Avenue, by EZEKIEL MPHAHLELE

It has been a good ten or so years since I read Mphahlele's Down Second Avenue, an autobiography, often narrated in wry tone, about the eventful life of a poor boy growing up in a South African township. Despite the ever-present and ominous "shadow" of apartheid and its woeful effects on the lives of the black and colored people of South Africa, the reading usually feels breezy, and you are humored again and again. In this book, despair and humor collide, resulting in an excellent read for the heart--and, if you believe in its existence, the soul.

[Photo Source: UN]