Southern Road

By Anthony John Moore

This document is a social history of South Africa from the mid-fifties to the middle seventies, written from the viewpoint of a young English-speaking male living in the predominantly Afrikaans-speaking society. In particular, its a nostalgic meander down the streets of conservative Pretoria and the much more hip Johannesburg, from the perspective of someone who lived in both of these cities during this revolutionary period, while also touching on events that helped shape the history of the world, such as the Vietnam war and the liberalization of the African continent from its former colonial powers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Jun 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9781499097009

Anthony John Moore

Anthony Moore was born in the small town of Wellington in South Africa in 1949. He grew up on a smallholding between Pretoria and Johannesburg, with his parents and three sisters. This was during all those turbulent years leading up to the birth of democracy in South Africa. This coincided with the world-wide sexual revolution and other momentous events over the twenty years from the 1950’s through to the 1970’s. He has been working in the South African film industry as a cinematographer since 1970. He and his wife, Christel, still live in South Africa and have two children and three grandchildren.

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Copyright © 2015 by Anthony John Moore.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-4990-9699-6

                eBook           978-1-4990-9700-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date: 05/28/2015

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Contents

Chapter 1 where was I?

Chapter 2 ducktails

Chapter 3 a related history

Chapter 4 the ethnic evolution

Chapter 5 shake, rattle & roll

Chapter 6 beatniks

Chapter 7 local sounds

Chapter 8 1960 into stormy waters

Chapter 9 incidental history

Chapter 10 the green, green grass of home

Chapter 11 1961 we become a republic

Chapter 12 hey! let’s twist!

Chapter 13 1962 into aquarius

Chapter 14 jacaranda time

Chapter 15 american folk music & how close we came

Chapter 16 1963 an arrest, a speech & an assassination

Chapter 17 an astonishing discovery

Chapter 18 1964 fashion to the fore

Chapter 19 1965 the mini skirt & dylan plugs in

Chapter 20 1966 ‘mother’s little helpers’

Chapter 21 1967 local rhetoric & a war

Chapter 22 the flower children

Chapter 23 local hippies, a wedding & a new heart

Chapter 24 1968 anecdotes & into the army

Chapter 25 1969 of rhomular & madmen

Chapter 26 mini skirts, pettiness & a festival

Chapter 27 1970 new laws, madness & murder

Chapter 28 another festival & suck

Chapter 29 1971 starship

Chapter 30 the end of the rebel radio station

Chapter 31 1972 new fashions, harleys & a madman

Chapter 32 toad & a road trip

Chapter 33 1973 the carnival is over

Chapter 34 beatrix street

Chapter 35 1974 – 1975 in conclusion

Bibliography

This is for my wife, Christel, who long ago said,

‘Stop talking about it and write the damn thing!’ Well, here it is!

Thank you for your invaluable input and support.

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‘it is in change

that we find purpose’

Heraclitus of Ephesus.

Greek philosopher.

(535 BC – 475 BC)

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Acknowledgements.

Firstly I would like to thank my editor, Brenda George for her tireless effort in helping me to get this book published. She was the only one who was prepared to muddle through the tangled and chaotic manuscript I first presented to her. Thank you Brenda for all your help and encouragement.

To my wife, Christel, thank you for your patience, encouragement and essential input.

To my sister Heather, thank you for preserving a hard copy of this manuscript, it was invaluable when I lost all in a computer crash.

To all the people mentioned in this book, and even those not mentioned, thank you for the experiences that made up my life.

Lastly I have to say thanks to Google and all those that contribute to the World Wide Web, for all the information and free pictures, I sourced from the Pixabay.com web site.

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Foreword

This document is a social history of South Africa, from the mid-fifties to the mid-seventies, written from the viewpoint of a young English-speaking male, living in a predominantly Afrikaans-speaking society. In particular, it is a nostalgic meander down the streets of conservative Pretoria and the more hip Jo’burg, from the perspective of somebody who lived in both of those cities during this revolutionary period, while touching on events that helped shape the history of the world, such as the Vietnam war and the liberalization of the African continent, from its former colonial powers.

It is a narrative about the effect of the Calvinistic regime on the emerging liberal whites of the time, illustrating the Nationalist government’s efforts to suppress all influences, both inside and out, that they felt threatened their highly conservative lifestyles, and how they failed in this due to the never-ending tide of books, films, music and fashions that expressed the new sexual freedom, brought about by the New Order.

It is also a documentary about the growth and history of contemporary music in South Africa, both black and white. I would like to mention here that my views on the evolution of black music were gained through research, and by having conversations with people from black townships, rather than first-hand knowledge.

The narrative includes social comment, autobiographical cameos, and all the socio-politics of the time. I examine the ducktails, the beatniks, the hippies, the music – foreign, local and ethnic – the sexual freedom afforded by The Pill, and, of course, the dope! This was, after all, the age of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll! The introduction to the mind-blowing, soul-stirring Age of Aquarius!

Chapter 1

where was I?

So, anyway – I landed up with my folks and three older sisters, Heather, Sue and Sally, on a large plot, on the South African Highveld, ten miles south of Pretoria on the Old Jo’burg Road. I was three and yet to find out how pagan and animist this country still was. My folks came here from England just after the war. Dad was a printer in Jo’burg and my mother opened boarding and breeding kennels, specializing in wire-haired fox terriers.

We were surrounded by farms and smallholdings. With plenty of odd groups of workers huts dotting the neighbourhood, and if you happened to look into any of them, you’d find the legs of all the beds, elevated by stacks of at least three bricks apiece – serious Tokoloshe (malevolent African spirit being) country this.

Summers were long and hot and buzzed with insects, birds and farm animals in those early years. Startled guinea fowl flew up from mielie fields (corn fields) as we went walking, and I watched, as blue crane, shrikes and other birds stepped and flitted gingerly, out front of a slow-moving veld-fire, ready to catch the odd rodent or insect trapped by the blaze – out of the fire and into the fowl.

The occasional widow bird flew over, dragging its tail a yard or so, above the long swishing Highveld grass. Tractors chuggled away in the mornings, when I caught the bus to school. While afternoon thunderstorms drove clouds of flying ants from their colonies, causing all the birds to hang around for a whooping and swooping and diving feast that took them deep into the night.

A couple of times a week, a flat, open, light-brown Bedford truck, affectionately known as "Polly Poep Truck", would trundle up the road with another load of chicken shit from the farm in the valley below. It smelled terrible, no matter which way the wind was blowing. Water came from a borehole, so there was a cranky infrastructure of pipes, water tanks, and leaky ponds about the place, that filled with tadpoles and frogs each summer. Every time there was a thunderstorm the lights went out, so we had to cook supper over a primus stove.

They told us in the papers when Sputnik 1 was going to pass over Pretoria, so we all went out and lay on blankets in the garden, to watch it carve its lonely path across the starry Transvaal sky.

Radio was our only source of communication with the world. So when I grew older, I spent a lot of time tuning our Telefunken, short and medium-wave radiogram, trying to pick up L.M. Radio (Lorenzo Marques Radio), because we really had a crappy radio signal out there.

At about the time when President Kennedy got assassinated, I was ripping my Levis on a high-wire fence after me and a buddy had pinched some peaches from someone’s orchard. I was sleeping over that night, and when we got back to his place, merrily munching our yellow clings, we heard the breaking news on South Africa’s new, all-night, radio station.

‘Hey’! I said, ‘They’ve shot the American president…’ I didn’t think too much about it, till I got home the next day and found my oldest sister Sally, in tears about it. She’d been living with an aunt in America for the last few years, and had only just recently returned home.

Kennedy’s assassination was to become one of those memorable events, like 9-11, that changed the mindset of the Western World. But this was Africa, I was fourteen in November 1963, and America was far, far, away.

Life was sheltered and warm around Pretoria. Nobody I knew that was looking for work ever hassled to find any. They were hiring at most of the many government offices and institutions in Pretoria, so things always seemed to be going along fine.

The only media around to let us know anything about the world out there was our local press, and one or two locally produced magazines, available from the nearest corner café. Springbok Radio had three news bulletins a day, and when we went to a flick at a bioscope, we’d see newsreels of world events presented by British Movietone News, Pathé, or African Mirror.

Our family was lucky, I think. Ever since I can remember, our household received, from relatives in England, an omnibus of the whole past month’s Daily Mirror newspapers, so we got to know quicker than most other people, what was going on in the world.

I made myself a Ban the Bomb sign on a white plastic badge my mother got at a dog show somewhere – only to feel a complete idiot later on, when I found out that some people thought it was a Diners Club badge – ha ha – klunk.

You see you couldn’t buy a badge of any sort in our shops at the time. There was nothing. You couldn’t even get a white tee-shirt like James Dean wore in Rebel Without a Cause – no shit!

South Africa was being governed by a nation that had its origins way back in the Cape Colony. They were made up of descendants from English, French and mainly Dutch settlers, and had even developed their own language, Afrikaans. Growing tired of British dominance in their lives, they left the Cape and trekked into the interior. They became known as the Voortrekkers (pioneers). The trek across a very rugged Africa, in ox-wagons, and constantly having to face, and in some cases fight, hostile black forces, made them a tough, self-reliant and very resilient people. These hardships moulded them into a spiritual and conservative nation, called Afrikaners, with The Dutch Reformed Church, or in Afrikaans, Die Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk (N.G.Kerk), as their principal religious institution.

It wasn’t until the reunited National Party dislodged Jan Smuts in 1948, with promises of preserving white power, that they finally rid themselves of British rule. A policy of separateness was put into practice, which was designed to ensure that the interests of the Afrikaner remained dominant in a parliament, representing the white minority. Elections gave the vague impression of a Western-style democracy. Mixed marriages were prohibited, separate amenities instituted, and coloureds were removed from the voter’s roll. Blacks were never on the roll.

Seven years later, on 26 June 1955, one of the most important documents of 20th- century South Africa, was adopted by about 3000 delegates, of all races, at the Congress of the People, in Kliptown, Soweto.

The Freedom Charter stated that South Africa belonged to all its inhabitants – black, brown and white. That no government can justly exercise authority, save by the will of all the people. It encouraged the creation of a non-racial democracy, with equal rights and protection before the law, equal job and education opportunities for all, a redistribution of land, and the nationalization of mines, banks and heavy industry.

The document was signed by the African National Congress (ANC), the (white) Congress of Democrats, the South African Indian Congress and the South African Coloured People’s Congress. It was later endorsed by the United Democratic Front (UDF), the Congress of South African Students (COSAS), the Azanian Students Organization, (AZASO), and the Cape Professional Teachers Association.

Although it was communistic in tone, the Freedom Charter did advocate a colour-blind approach to the country’s problems. Which was not enough to placate radical groups like the Black Consciousness Movement and the National Forum Committee. They adopted the rival Manifesto of the Azanian People, which described the most important political issue as a racial class struggle, in which the whites were regarded as capitalists, and the blacks as workers.

On August 9th, a year later, some 20,000 women of all races marched on the Union Buildings in Pretoria, to present a petition, to Mr. J.G.Strijdom the then Prime Minister of South Africa. They were protesting against the carrying of passes by black women.

This is the backdrop of this story, none of which made much difference to me, one way or the other, for many years. The Road in the title, Southern Road, symbolizes South Africa’s road to democracy, and my personal journey, during these times of social change, struggle and protest.

The Pretoria I grew up in had none of these underlying social issues, or so it seemed to me. The city centre was full of old and very drab government, and mean-looking military, buildings. Lord Milner called them ‘German architecture of the Bismarckian era at its worst’. So to me, slouching along those city streets with my school bag, to collect a parcel from the post office on the Square, or something, they always looked somewhat formidable. Military police guarded some of their entrances, and there was a continual movement of top brass about the place, while the streets were a never-ending procession of green army cars, and three-ton Bedford trucks.

North of Church Square the buildings were smaller, and if you went as far as Boom Street, you’d find the whole road lined with Chinese, Indian and African shops. Most of them without electricity, so they always looked somewhat creepy inside. The pavements of these streets were filled with black hawkers. Fat black women sold boiled mielies, with their leaves still on. They looked rather unappetizing, but were probably quite fine. Some sold muti (African medicine) in the form of powders and bits of bark or leaves, which they laid out on the pavements, in little punnets made of empty cigarette boxes. Others sold matches, shoe heels or shoelaces.

Just outside the main gate of the Pretoria Zoo, some very big fish thrashed and splashed in the obviously too-small pond, and bead sellers laid out their bead-work for inspection, by the passing trade. Other black women walked down the streets, carrying bundles of grass brooms or baskets, on top of their heads. There was music in these streets too. Kwela and jazz was pumping out of wind-up gramophones, that were chained to chairs, which were chained to the doors of every third or fourth shop.

The road from the Pretoria Zoo, and up to the hospital, was always filled with slap (big) American cars, all of them filled to capacity, parking, picking up passengers, and dropping them off, with such audacity that it prompted shouts of ‘Fucking black taxis’ and lots of rude finger waving from other drivers. I’ve since been to Kliptown in Soweto, and found a line of shops there that looked exactly like those old Pretoria shops. A movie-set period piece location, if ever there was one.

East, down Church Street, brought you to the old market place, where the Metro Cycle House and more Indian shops were situated. The Indians were always loitering outside their shops, and accosted you as you passed, saying, ‘Hey! You wanting some Levis an-all?’ These were the only shops in town where you could buy Levis, because of a growing anti-blue jeans lobby.

But these Indians – you could bargain with them. They would start; ‘How much you pay for deese you got on…? What size you’? Anything to get you into their shop, then, all the other assistants would chip in with, ‘How’s dis flick-knife – see – stilettos…knuckledusters? I got five-fingers, pei-yong-tong…’ This was ubiquitous with all the Indian shops in Pretoria.

The produce market outside, covering a whole city block, was a churning mass of humanity. There were endless rows of stalls, people pushing barrows, stacking boxes, or just milling around. There were tubs and tents and barrels and crates, filled to overflowing with fresh farm produce, being moved in or out of the place. Shouts and car hooters filled the air. Sacks of this and sacks of that. And inside all the chaos, presenting me with an unlimited source of fascination, was a pet shop, with a big, squawking, white parrot, sitting on top of its cage at the door. The shop itself smelt of dog doo, hamsters and white rats. A constant chattering and twittering came from cages of canaries, manikins, and strawberry finches on the one side. The windows were lined with tanks of tropical fish, and they even had silkworms in spring.

The city of Pretoria had a good many established bioscopes (cinemas), by the late 1950’s. Ushers with torches showed you to your seats and sometimes sold copies of Stage and Cinema. There was the Plaza, down a small street just east of Church Square, with a long alleyway leading to the ticket office. The Opera House, just around the corner, was full of statuettes and pillars that inhibited some of the viewing. The Capitol, on the other side of the Square, had a high dark-blue ceiling, to represent a night sky, from which hundreds of small lights blinked down like stars. It was the only bioscope with a Saturday morning show, where we swapped comics in the aisles during the intervals, as usherettes came around with trays slung around their necks, selling anything from cigarettes to ice lollies, chocolate bars or popcorn. We watched serials about Cowboys and Crooks and Cops and Robbers, which always ended their episodes on a thrilling note, like a damsel being tied up on a railway line with a steam train catapulting towards her, or the hero about to be shot, so you’d want to come back the next Saturday to see the outcome. There were also cartoons and a newsreel before the main flick.

The 20th Century, north of the Square, was brand new when I saw White Fang and Flaming Star, and then they built the Monte Carlo in Hatfield.

There were also two military bioscopes in Voortrekkerhoogte. The 1 A.D. (number 1 Air Depot) and the Garrison, about a block away. The 1 A.D. had high-backed green canvas seats they’d taken from old aircraft.