Born White Zulu Bred: A Memoir of a Third World Child

By GG Alcock

You may have read GG Alcock's books about the kasi economy; now follow his journey to the dynamic world of KasiNomics and learn about the tribal forces that shaped him.
Born White Zulu Bred is the story of a white child and his brother raised in poverty in a Zulu community in rural South Africa during the apartheid era. His extraordinary parents, Creina and Neil Alcock, gave up lives of comfort and privilege to live and work among the destitute people of Msinga, whose material and social well-being became their mission.
But more than that, this is a story about life in South Africa today which, through GG's unique perspective, explores the huge diversity of the country's people – from tribal Zulu warriors to sophisticated urban black township entrepreneurs. A journey from the arid wastes of Msinga into the thriving informal economies of urban townships.
GG's view is that we do not live in a black and white world but in a world of contrast and diversity, one which he wants South Africans, and a world audience, to see for what it is without descending into racial and historical clichés. He takes us through the mazes of township marketplaces, shacks and crowded streets to reveal the proud and dignified world of township entrepreneurs who are transforming South Africa's economy. This is the world that he moves in today as a successful businessman, still walking those spaces and celebrating the vibrant informal economies that are taking part in the KasiNomic Revolution.
GG's story is about being truly African, even as a white person, and it draws on the adventures, the cultural challenges, the informal spaces and the future possibilities of South Africa.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tracey McDonald Publishers
• Release date: Apr 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781998958702

Book preview

RIDING BACK

I duck as I try to avoid a large puddle and escape the clutches of a thorn tree at the same time. I am thrown off balance and my tyres slide into the mud, the weight of my huge motorbike squishing into the muddy red earth and skidding crazily out from under my legs. My hand inadvertently gives the throttle a rev causing the tyres to spin and increasing the speed of my now rapid and helpless descent into the blood-red mud.

My brother Khonya rides off on that twenty-year-old fucking 500R which is seemingly invincible while I curse and start cleaning the mud off myself. The bike is lying in the puddle next to me like a dead animal, the red earth resembling its oozing lifeblood. By the time Khonya returns I have wiped enough mud off my hands to attempt to lift the bike with his help. Then I follow Khonya down the rocky road swearing at the easy way he putters along perched like a six-foot-four praying mantis on his little red Honda.

My bike bucks and rattles on the stony ground as we pass the places of my youth, memories flashing through my mind as I ride past the once familiar landmarks. The ride has been a hard and exciting one for this skinny white kid. I’m definitely not a Zulu, not until I open my mouth, that is, or when I think; like Khonya, I think in Zulu, and when I can’t find the English words I say it in Zulu, the language of my upbringing, a poetic, humour-filled language of warriors.

Fire bursts around me, the flames flickering light and shadow in a black and red dance, soft crying comes from the hut as the fire seems to envelop it. A man lies very still on the ground, his blood a dark stain in the mud, his eyes open in death. The only life is the fluttering reflection of the flames.

I slow down the memory flashing through my mind as I pass the stone grave where this happened, and the rebuilt huts. The rear tyre slides aggressively as I stand and power the bike around the corner, stones, like memories, scattering into the past.

Khonya has stopped. I pull up next to him and he points up towards Darkest Africa, the marula and tamboti trees and acacia thorn bush are impenetrable and their dark vegetation rises vertically up a volcanic-like peak. I can see why they called this farm what they did. A young girl runs up to Khonya and half kneels, gazing down, not at him, and claps her hands.

‘Buthi omkhulu,’ she says. Big brother. ‘Umalume, uncle, Masoka said ibandla.’ The elders need you to come to a meeting at the umncaka, the red ivory tree.

The young girl glances at me as I remove my helmet, then surprise lights up her red ochre painted face, so at odds with her sexy Nike top. ‘Buthi omdala, ubuyile?’ she smiles. Older brother, you are back?

Khonya chats to the girl while I gaze curiously at the new Zulu homesteads dotting the hills below Darkest Africa’s highest peak. We could never have imagined black people living here again during the bleak times when we fought for their rights to this land.

On we ride. We pass a tree which serves as a taxi stop, a scattered pile of red boulders used as benches. There an old granny sits, or a group of chattering school kids, maybe a flashily dressed young man fresh from eGoli, the City of Gold. They wave and shout greetings, dogs yapping at our dust, their voices light and distant as we pass. ‘Bafana bakanumzaan, buthi omkhulu, MaKhonya niyaphi?’ Numzaan’s boys, big brother Khonya, where are you going?

The road twists and turns through narrow rocky passes, along great muddy rivers and among idyllic Zulu kraals, two white boys in a sea of Zulus, but we are riding the paths of home, our ancestors and their ancestors rest together now. This hard brutal place is home.

And what a ride it’s been since I first arrived in this valley with my family. The land through which I ride today is hard and unrelenting. Twisted and torn as if by a whirlwind, it is no accident that it’s called Msinga, the vortex, the whirlpool. To survive, Khonya and I had to forfeit the privileges and pleasures of other white boys in South Africa, circumstances and a harsh Zulu society demanding that we develop an inner steel, a calmness in times of danger, and bonds of brotherhood with our Zulu brethren forged in shared poverty and life with the Mthembu and Mchunu tribes.

Like the Tugela River valley which splits the hills in two in an angry gash, so do my brother and I live in a world of black people and white people who inhabit separate and opposite spaces. It is our birthright that we pass like silent shadows from a white to a brown world, blending from one to the other with the ease of chameleons. These two worlds, their conflicts, their warm embraces, and their battles to the death have shaped us as surely as the river shaped the valley we call home.

I rode to this place as a kid, a really small kid on a really small Shetland pony with bright blue eyes. My brother and I were white boys in Africa, long blond hair, bright blue eyes, fair skin so at odds with this forbidding land. But we grew up hard and strong, physically and mentally, part of and surviving in a tough Zulu warrior society, and holding up our middle fingers in the face of white racism. As a young boy I was soft, sweet and gentle and like any other kid I just wanted to be carefree, to play, to throw caution to the winds, and then as night fell to run home to mommy and daddy and a warm comfortable home. But the Africa I was bred in had no such comforts.

Unlike other white boys in Africa we belonged neither to the ruling Afrikaner class nor to the privileged English South African aristocracy with their private schools and old school ties. We grew up early and we grew up fast, and became a curiosity to our adopted Zulu brothers and treacherous sell-outs to our genetic white brothers. If we hide behind a curtain no man can tell that we are not Zulu and if we emerge from behind that curtain no man can believe that we are white.

So I ride the whirlwind of the circumstances of my birth; I don’t glide effortlessly, but flap madly at times, and at others soar skywards on powerful winds of change. I seem always to have ridden something, a horse, a wild river, a gentle paraglider, a wild wet kayak, and today my rumbling motorbike. It has most certainly been quite a ride …

This is the story of my world or, more accurately, the worlds in which I live. It is the story of my memories and it does not pretend to be a history lesson or a news article. It is the story in my head which bursts out in flashes of memory, although sometimes the stories hide and refuse to exit, their horror shrouded in the shadows. As I ride through this land my vision is a kaleidoscope of memories of a life in a valley and a time far away.

THE RIDE BEGINS

RIDING INTO THE WHIRLPOOL

I don’t know exactly how young I was but in my memories I was always riding, my father first leading and later galloping alongside, teaching us the riding style of the Basotho, tribal horsemen of the rugged mountain kingdom of Lesotho. Long before we even thought of riding our big machines Khonya and I rode little Fluff and Duff, tough Shetland Ponies a long way from the British Isles.

I was born in 1968 in a Catholic hospital perched on the hill overlooking Ladysmith, a town in the province that was then called Natal. Ladysmith is surrounded by battlefields where Boers and Brits surged back and forth fighting the bloody battles and bitter sieges of the Boer Wars. Does the blood and bitterness of the place of your birth seep into the pores of your future?

I spent my early years on a Catholic mission station, a ramshackle bunch of buildings nestled under a high brooding mountain. Our home had once been the old wine cellar and was filled with nooks and crannies, funny stairs from one level to another and beautiful old oak wine barrels which became our clothes cupboards.

In the custom of the Zulu people a man is named after an event or a character trait. So it was that my brother was named Khonya, the bull bellower, his baby cries evoking the bellows of a bull, later his personality evoking the power of a bull. And I was named after an event. On the day of my birth the GG trucks arrived to remove the people from the land; it was a time of anger, terror, a time of loss and dispossession, the time of GG.

Apartheid meant that the land must be whitened, verblanking the Afrikaners called it. To make it white meant to bulldoze, beat and break down whole communities, loading them protesting and weeping into the GG (Government Garage) licensed trucks and dumping them and their meagre and pathetic possessions in what the government called the homelands. The homelands of course were chosen for being arid, useless scrubby places which no one wanted, but an official had drawn a line on a map and these places became KwaZulu, Transkei, Bophuthatswana, the so-called homelands of the Zulu, Xhosa and Tswana people. These places had been chosen for their lack of agricultural potential and infrastructure, and for their remoteness, away from view and hidden from hope. To halt this terrible tearing of people from their land the only defence was media exposure and court battles; physical resistance was futile, the state’s machinery violent.

My parents were among those few white people who fought the injustices of the forced removals, my father facing down the bulldozers while my journalist mother banged out press releases begging a reluctant world to listen, to protest. Hours after my birth she was propped up in her bed while my father dictated the bitter misery of more removals. She wove her written magic on her cranky old typewriter, the joys of first motherhood shoved aside for a greater cause.

Wenzani UGG, aganagi noku naga … ‘What is GG doing, not caring at all, throwing my father’s house out into the wilderness’, went the Juluka song of the time. And while the huge Bedford trucks with the GG registration plates rumbled up and down carting their displaced human cargoes of misery I was named GG and it was this name that stuck, not the sweet Marc John I was christened, but the name of the conqueror, GG. Why don’t you care, GG, what have you done to my people, GG? The poetic ironies of my Zulu elders!

Maria Ratchitz Mission was a gentle place where the grass was long and rolling, where the sun was not very hot, just warm, and it rained often. My parents had built dams, sowed golden Eragrostis seeds in the fields and planted lovely curving willows along the streams. We rode our little ponies behind my dad’s tall graceful thoroughbred across this idyllic African grassland.

And then one day life was not so idyllic.

My parents were not religious people; they were humanitarians with a deep belief in the rights of black people in a land where they counted only as servants. They did not try to save the black people’s souls for God, or to recruit them for the selfish cause of a political party; they tried to give them hope, dignity and skills. ‘For the meek shall inherit the earth’, says the Book, but the meek on this earth and on this mission station stood only to inherit poverty. My parents somehow led people to recognise their own greatness but this did not fill the aisles of the mission church and so eventually, like the Lord threw Adam and Eve out of Eden, so also did the Catholic fathers throw my parents out to face the heathens.

Seven years after my birth and seven years after my mom and dad fought to halt the government’s forced removals, they themselves became victims of forced removals. And like the victims they had fought for, they loaded their scant possessions on old Land Rovers piled high like African buses – pots and pans banging, mattresses strapped on roofs, sheep and dogs tied precariously side by side and human bodies squeezed in among the bags – and moved to a land no one wanted.

They found a place called Msinga. The arsehole of the world, a friend called it, and that suited my dad fine. He was a man who traded in hope and where there was none he nurtured and fanned hope’s flames, igniting dreams in the human debris of apartheid. He wanted to be where wretched people could be raised up, although often he felt a boot-up worked better than a hand-up!

So like the great trek of my mother’s Afrikaner forefathers, our family began its great trek. The Land Rovers, laden like the wagons of old, our herd of cattle following behind in a dusty mooing column. Our great trek made its way down into a valley where there was no grass, where the dolerite rocks shone bright red and the heat radiated off the ground like waves off a furnace. We rode into the valley and the thorn trees and tall sharp aloes rose up to meet us, the red dust stirred up by our cattle choking us, and the locals watching the strangers’ fat cattle approach like hyenas circling a kill.

I worshipped my father and from the age of four I followed wherever he went, a little shadow trying desperately to keep up, to be part of it all. When fires burst out on the farms that stretched for kilometres across the landscape and threatened huge swathes of land, I followed my father, a four-year-old shadow jogging beside him, fighting alongside the South African Army who had been turned out to help, lying prone beside the men as the smoke overwhelmed us, and eventually falling asleep on the green plastic seats of our battered battleship-grey Land Rover. And so now, aged seven, as my father rode out ahead of our great herd of cattle I followed on my little blue-eyed Shetland pony. Like cowboys of old, our column of ten men (and little me) on horses set out, herding the cattle to our new range a hundred kilometres away.

We slept at night under the stars after my mother had driven to meet us with food and drink, my brother and me sleeping side by side in the open boot of the car while my parents slept on the ground alongside the horsemen and cattle herders. We were the original cowboys, living on our horses, sleeping beside them, sitting around the fire at night, the Zulus singing deep melodic songs of old, and then curling up in our blankets using our saddles as pillows. I of course rode bareback, so my pillow was my father’s sweaty rolled-up jersey.

I cannot remember how many days we rode, I just remember that the last day was the longest. We could smell home, the Tugela River rushed by alongside the road, white rapids sparkling in the moonlight, the smell of mud and water rising coldly around us. We rode through the sunset and into the rising full moon, the river reflecting like gold, Dad’s golden river.

Little five-year-old Khonya had dismounted at sunset and gone ahead with Ma to the campsite on the cliffs above the Tugela where our new home lay, a few grubby scattered tents and a pile of boxed possessions. I refused to get off my pony, I had ridden with these Zulu brothers of mine into this unknown valley and I was not leaving them even if at each plod of my horse’s feet I started to nod off. I remember the moonlight, the soft protesting mooing of the cattle, the occasional calling of the men in the darkness, the crack of whips as they cajoled the cattle to cross the knee-deep Bushman’s River causeway, their weary hooves passing Darkest Africa … then the plodding of hooves was replaced by the rattling of a diesel Land Rover and the warm man smell of my dad as I lay beside him on the Land Rover seat, his jersey once more my pillow.

Bokidi, my father’s friend and right hand man, caught me as I slowly slid off my moving horse; strong black arms carried me to the Land Rover.

‘Eish u nenkani,’ said Bokidi.

Inkani: I guess that symbolised what I became. Zulu men have inkani, stubbornness and arrogance, a willingness to stand and fight against the odds. In the face of war the Zulus will shrug and say ayilime ibheke etjeni. The saying is built around the way a team of powerful oxen pulls a plough across stony fields. The oxen pull the plough and while it bucks and grinds in your hands, you should direct the plough around the rocks in the soil, but some men will say, plough for the rock, either the rock will move or your plough will smash and bend. Only when you do this will you know who is stronger, you will show your nkani. Ayilime ibheke etjeni – a challenge and a statement of fearlessness. It says: ‘I am a man, respect me, fear me!’

MSINGA

Remember him to his enemies

Recall to them their burning lands

We ma me

The swallows are dreaming of an old black bull

With mist in his eyes and moss on his horns

When he unsheathes his anger, the world is in flames

Red clouds cover a blood red moon

Dripping sorrow from the sky

Wenkosibomvu

From the album ‘Universal Men’, Juluka

In Msinga, the Zulu term for a vortex, the dust is red, blood red, dry and hot. Ochre – the first paint man ever used – stains the hills, the soil is ochre-red almost as if the blood of all the people who died fighting one another in these hills and valleys has coloured the soil. The great brown Tugela River winds its way, cutting deep and wild inaccessible valleys into the arid terrain. The heat is mind-blowing in summer, waves of it radiating off the ground, and all that manages to survive is scraggly thorn scrub and devil thorn and death-defying goats which long ago learnt to eat the thorn trees, both thorns and leaves, and also to chew on the branches.

Even the ants are aggressive, black biting ants which swarm on to your legs whenever you stop walking. Their bites are painful, leaving your skin raw and peeling. Stopping to talk to someone means leaping from foot to foot or perching precariously on a rock, until the ants crawl up there and the leaping begins again.

Even today, the people who live here are tribal, tough and beautiful, shrugging off modern ways with disdain and inkani. The women walk effortlessly across the rocks and dongas with water drums or large piles of firewood impossibly perched on their bright red ochre headdresses. This is the land of the royals; the tribal colours are ochre red, royal purple or sky blue, in stark contrast to the arid environment. The women, topless, wear their cloaks Roman-like, tied in a knot at the neck and then flowing out behind them, the tribal velvet and royal reds waving regally in the hot breezes, their ear lobes pierced, cut and then stretched crazily over bright wooden discs the size of a polish tin. On their heads float huge headdresses made of their own hair stretched taut over a wire frame the size of a steering wheel, ochre and animal fat painted over it.

Msinga in the 1970s was one of the most violent places in Africa, a place of dagga-growers, corrupt police, and tribal warriors well armed with automatic weapons who regularly burnt one another’s homes and savagely murdered their tribal brethren. I remember early on hearing the thunder of R1, AK 47 and .303 rifles in the hills, watching tracer rounds arcing overhead while we sat on the floor and ate our supper, casually commenting on what calibre rifle we could hear. No man who was a man did not own a gun.

Legend and a fair amount of history has it that the Zulu King Shaka sent his feared and supposedly invincible impis to subdue these tribes in 1820, only to be thoroughly thrashed by the impis of the Mthembu and sent home licking their wounds. The impis of Msinga are proud of their forebears’ ability to repel the armies of this powerful king who had tried to force them to bow down to the Zulu royal house. Tribal gatherings around the clay beer pots and the sacrificial bulls are filled with stories of martial splendour, drunken old men swaggering with pride as they recall the wars of their ancestors. Even today, the Zulus of Msinga have a special place in modern folklore, even among other Zulus, a grudging respect, a little fear, but also mockery at their disdain for modernity.

The men are strong and tough, retaining a warrior culture and the nkani Zulus pride in themselves and in men who are their equals. I wondered if it was the toughness of the arid rocky terrain, the jagged rocks and the sharp thorn trees, or the intense poverty, which moulded men into this, or whether they were born this way. These men knew how to fight and how to kill – something they invariably did. I remember watching ‘Braveheart’ and thinking these were the men of home; there was no single William Wallace here but a tribe of them!

The men of Msinga are still fighters today and from time to time the hills echo with gunfire and blood splatters the rocks bright as the ochre red headdresses. Taxi bosses fighting turf wars, armed hold-up gangs and even political rivals will employ Zulus from Msinga as hitmen, strong-arm enforcers, gunmen or security guards. Still today I smile when I read the names in the newspapers of those wanted, in court, sentenced or in a shoot-out – Mvelase, Mchunu, Mabaso, Dladla … just using their childhood skills, I muse.

Msinga was the dumping ground of the GG trucks – an arid but fertile valley invaded relentlessly by truckload after truckload of displaced people. Waving Themeda – the red grass grazing lands – and rich riverside fields of maize and mabele (sorghum) became homestead yards; ancient bushveld hard woods became firewood or building poles. Soon the brown fields of sorghum and the red grass pastures were replaced by small circles of thorn scrub protecting fields of dagga. Dagga became Msinga’s finest cash crop – and its most potent, the heat of the valley producing the dagga prized as Durban Poison. And with dagga came currency to buy guns, and with guns came war. Little wonder that war was almost always about land or tribal boundaries. Msinga in the 1970s was one of the most violent places in Africa. And we rode right into it …

As wars flared and flickered around us, I grew up with a perpetual sense of loss, of how short life was, each week the gunshots echoing over the beautiful rocky valleys, and then the numb widow at the gate with the strong silent men, here to tell Numzaan of the latest cruel death. Mourning, like death, is silent in Msinga, the expectation and acceptance of death a daily ritual.

White men are addressed as baas, nkosana by black people – boss or little lord. Numzaan means sir, family head or leader and is a term of respect. Dad, Neil, was the only white man I knew who was called that and it was how I thought of him, Dad at home, but the rest of the time Khonya and I were just another pair of Zulu kids and he was Numzaan.

In Msinga white people were in short supply, even shorter supply than hope. And when you found them you tilled their fields, or you were arrested and beaten by them, or their kids set their dogs on you. On one side we had the little frontier village of Tugela Ferry, a hospital, a police station, the rough and tough shack settlement of Mshayazafe (‘beat him till he dies’) and the firearm squad … I mean, what town in South Africa had a squad dedicated to recovering thousands and thousands of weapons? Not that they actually did this; they just solicited bribes and tortured the shit out of those who didn’t cough up. Msinga was the only district in the country with a full-time firearm squad; set up in 1955 it finally moved out in 2002. On the other side we had the small town of Weenen, the place of weeping. This was where the Zulu impis slaughtered the Boers, their spears fresh from the blood of Piet Retief; the Boers casually awaiting their leader’s triumphant return from the court of the Zulu King Dingaan. It was now a place where the only weeping was tears rolling down black faces. How poignant the irony; Weenen, ‘the place of weeping’ the whites called it, Kwanobamba, ‘the place of catching’ the blacks called it.

Two extremes of racial and historical posturing, and in the centre of this were my parents: my mother tall, blonde and beautiful, model looks, so impossibly placed in this hell’s Eden, and my father, inspiring and giving hope and trying to create a non-racial reality, a rural economy where the poorest of the poor could make a living from the land, and where he fought, charged and taunted the police and the farmers and the co-opted black authorities for every wrong step, every blow struck, every bribe taken and every injustice committed. And in a land of injustice this man gathered followers and enemies in equal measure and passion.

Dad, Numzaan, was tall and strong, a lean hard body and a quiet voice which somehow attracted and commanded in one. Men followed him, these Zulu men, accustomed to following no one and listening to no one, found themselves drawn to this man who spoke Zulu better than they did. In a land devoid of hope and filled with suffering, pain was the sacred chalice he shared, and hope the balm to dull their pain.

Dad had been brought up by his maid because of a mother who was startled by what childbearing really entailed. She had handed him immediately, in his squawking helpless baby-ness, to the maid. She, a Zulu servant but a mother with the deep maternal compassion of the women of Africa, had held him to her breast like her own child. Later, as a man, and lost in