WILLIAM BARNEY RAMOATSE NGAKANE

South Africa and the Ahab Streak

by

William Barney Ramoatse Ngakane

(Interviewed by Mothobi Mutloatse)

‘The Black man in South Africa has no opinion. Instead, other races have an opinion of him. There was this Afrikaner magistrate or commissioner who said it was not necessary for him to ask the Black man for his opinion on this or that for “I know the Black man”’.

It was from this premise that one of the last remaining veterans of African nationalism in South Africa, W. B. Ngakane, related his own story, and the contribution he has made, and still does from his farm at Groot Marico in the Western Transvaal, albeit on a different level from his previous one in Johannesburg.

Now, interviewing daddy Ngakane was just too good to be true, for it was like walking through history, or rather, being led through some of the highlights of Black history by the hand. And also made not only to visualize our national struggle, but also to actually feel it!

Another thing, daddy Ngakane had rather too many significant aspects of Black history to tell, if I had not been strict with our interview chaos would have reigned, with everything and everybody being thrown into the interview. So, what appears below is but a condensed version and one hopes that this pioneer of our struggle will eventually complete his memoirs, which, incidentally he’s been writing down himself in long hand.

Be that as it may, meet William Barney Ramoatse Ngakane . . . He was named after Ramoatse, a brave man who fought and killed a lion barehanded near a koppie in the Potchefstroom district. For this valiant act Ramoatse received both praises and curses from two different quarters---the local chief slaughtered a beast in Ramoatse’s honour while on the other hand, some of the jealous village men plotted to kill him for that! So he had to flee to Meyerton where he was hired out as a farmhand. There his father sent him his first wife. His second wife later bore a girl---daddy Ngakane’s grandmother who was closely related to Chief Mathibe of the Monagengs.

Then there was the paternal grandfather known as Ou Wildebees, an acquaintance of president Paul Kruger, and given that nickname because of his ‘wild tantrums’. Ou Wildebees used to accompany Paul Kruger on a number of expeditions, and one of his own sons was present when Kruger’s thumb was shot off in one of his fights. For his services Kruger allowed Our Wildebees to own a gun.

And yet, on the other hand Marcus, daddy Ngakane’s father, fought on the side of the English in the 1902 Anglo-Boer War.

This prompts daddy Ngakane to comment, ‘And I’m fighting for myself’.

Why I ask him sheepishly. ‘Because I’m a nationalist neither for the English nor the Afrikaners as did my grandparents, but for the African/Black cause’.

‘My father was a scout (sentinel) in the Anglo-Boer War for the English, and told us about many stories to escape and death among the Black scouts. One of the stories remains vividly in my mind, is about the man called Ramodikela. I know most Afrikaners won’t like this bit, because they just don’t like history. Ramodikela was also a first class scout, and managed to do his job without ever being identified by the Boers. At one time, this is the story, he was out scouting near the banks of the Vaal River in the Vereeniging district where I was born.

‘Later in the afternoon he saw a small commando of Burgher soldiers obviously preparing to settle down for the night on the banks of the koppie. Ramodikela watched them---alone---ultillate in the evening. When their fires went out, he had by then concluded that they were asleep, he attacked them. Speaking in English to give the impression he was an English soldier and not understanding. English themselves, the Boers believed their attacker was English.

‘Ramodikela succeeded in driving them together, isolating them from their rifles, and drove them through the night to the English in the Potchefstroom district. Somewhere near dawn one of the Boers looked back and saw him---and realized that their attacker was a Black man, and shouted to his mates. ‘Ou Here, ons is gevang van ‘n kaffer. Ramodikela replied in Afrikaans. ‘Sê nog ‘n word en dan sit ek ‘n koeël deur jou kop’.

Ramodikela’s prisoners’ were in the region of 120. There are other episodes concerning Ramodikela which daddy Ngakane feels have never been recorded . . .

W. B. Ngakane was born in Vereeniging in 1902, at the end of the third year of the war between the republican forces of Paul Kruger and the imperialist forces of Her Majesty Queen Victoria of Britain.

‘As a young child I have vivid memories of British soldiers in their red jackets riding past our home, drawing their cannons. Though the war was over, there still were pockets of Afrikaner die-hards who would not accept defeat. These British soldiers riding past our home moved about clearing these pockets (eliminating them). One of the memories of my home of birth is a big cemetery fenced off with white stones. It is said that there were thousands of graves of Black infants who had died as a result of various child diseases like dysentery and diarrhea. I’ve often wondered if there is a record or document in either Vereeniging or Heidelberg, then the seat of administration of the area, of these deaths. Many years later, as the town of Vereeniging expanded, these graves were removed from their traditional homes. Where these graves were taken to, I cannot guess. The only grave in that massive graveyard that had a tombstone was that of Francis Ngakane, otherwise known as Ou Wildebees. I believe all the other graves were dumped in one grave, and my grandpa’s tombstone was placed above the remains. I still don’t know where this combined grave is.

‘It is in Vereeniging where I learned to know the white man. I often accompanied my mother to carry washing or go to the shops. I enjoyed the sweets which she bought for me from the shops. I remember at the time how all the white people called me picannin, though at the time I did not know what they meant. I also learned at an early age that the white man was a “superman” from the obsequious manner in which all Black men greeted him. They took off their hats---even from the distance of a hundred yards. And I too, learned to do this. And because we little ones did not have hats, we held the tufts of our hairs on our foreheads, and greeted ‘die baas’. One of the incidentshelped create my attitude towards white people in those days, occurred while we were herding cattle one day. We were swimming in the river when some white men on a horse-drawn cart, approached. At that time my father had lost nearly all his animals in the war, and had begun collecting a few cattle, and among them was a beautiful Afrikander cow called Kleintjie. When one of the white men saw it, he pulled thereins, drew the cart to a stop, and went to KLeintjie, and examined it very closely, after which he called us to him. He asked whose cow it was, and we told him it belonged to my father. He ordered us not to move away as he was going to town and would soon return to meet my dad, concerning this cow.

‘He duly returned in the afternoon, and we took him to my father, to whom he offered to buy the cow. My father told him that he was not selling any cow, and this farmer went away. The following week this white man returned to tell my father that unless he changed his mind about Kleintjie, he (the father) would steal it, and my father would have no redress anywhere. So, dad decided to sell Kleintjie to him, reluctantly. My father was surprised when he took Kleintjie to this white man’s farm to find that the man owned a number of cattle. This was obviously a case of Ahab and Naboth’s vineyard. What happened to my father has been happening throughout my eighty years to Black people.

‘The Black man has been disinherited of his property by the white people, without any qualms of conscience. The massive removals today are a repetition on a vast scale of what happened to our family. They (whites) robbed us of one cow, now today we are being robbed of land we have occupied and owned for centuries. I’ve often wondered whether the Ahab streak is inherent in the character of the white people.

‘Somewhere about 1908 I saw the first signs of rationalized farming after the company of Marks and Lewis took over the farm on which we lived.’

The manager, Maclaren, used a steam-engine for ploughing which consumed a lot of coal. One late afternoon daddy Ngakane’s father came home sad and dejected to report to the family that they had to seek another farm. Eventually they settled on another farm about 40km west of Vereeniging. This is where daddy Ngakane grew up. 

‘My parents and my father’s cousins and brothers all settled on this farm. And from my point of view, we had an Afrikaner landlord who knew his economics, unlike most farmers of today, for he allowed seven Black families to settle on a section of his farm, and other seven white families to occupy the other half of the farm. At the end of the harvest every year, the white families together could not produce as much crop as one family of Black farmers. This landlord, Stefans Cronje, could sit at the table with his Black tenants and treat them in every way like human beings. He even allowed a school to be established on his farm for Black children. During those days ox-trunction was used for ploughing, but the average crop for the seven Black farmers was nine hundred bags of maize annually. And the bywoner families together, could not produce what one Black farmer produced. This caused the local white farmers to regard the situation on our farm disfavourably.

‘In 1912 the Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, General Louis Botha,addressed a meeting of local white farmers next to our farm, Vlakplaas. At the end of the meeting, one of the neighboring farmers asked the Prime Minister, ‘Meneer President, is dit regverdig dat daar kaffers moes wee swat gerieflik lewe terwyl daar wit-mense wat onder omstandighede van armoede leve’. The result of that question, and I believe similar questions, in other places, was the enactment of a law known as the Native Land Act of 1913, which outlawed the crops share tenancy system. The white people were opposed to any sign of advancement on the part of the Black man. Thousands of African families were in consequence uprooted from the farms, of whom many went to live at places like Evaton, Sophiatown and Alexandra.

‘In those days we had the same curriculum for Black and white children, and the same inspectorate. It appeared that one day the white inspector first visited the Black school on the farm, before going to the white school on the same farm. He was so impressed by the work of the Black teacher that he told the white teacher of the white school that in terms of quality in teaching he should have been the ‘kaffir teacher’, and the ‘kaffir teacher’ should have been the white teacher. The man in question was Mr. E. D. Mashabane. The upshot of that was that our little village school was closed down, and most of my fellow-pupils never saw the inside of a school again. I was one of Mr. Mashabane’s pupils.

‘Mr. Cronje used to call me ‘Klein Engelsman’ because every year after harvest when he came to share the crops, he would call upon me to do his secretarial work, though I was not yet thirteen. When the closed down, I and a few other pupils followed Mr. Mashabane to Evaton, where he was transferred by the Methodist Church. That’s how I was able to get some education. At the same time though, Mr. Cronje was obliged to change the conditions of tenancy for the Black farmers: They either had to sell all their so-called surplus cattle or share calves with Mr. Cronje.

‘In their confusion the Black tenants met some city slicker who advised them that a Black man could buy a farm. That fellow came to us like an angel. He then took the Black tenants to Dr. P. ka [Isaka] Seme, who was one of the first two Black barristers in Johannesburg. In this way the seven Black families, together with another group of seven Black families of relatives, bought themselves a farm---among the first Blacks to do so in the Transvaal---at Boons, in the district of Ventersdorp.

‘In 1960 the government appropriated our community farm and gave us another one in Bophuthatswana. Somewhere about 1930, diamond was found on our farm, and, in terms of the laws of the country, the owner of the farm was entitled to a certain number of claims when the place was proclaimed as a public digging. Now our community was entitled to 35 claims but, ironically, whilst they owned the diamonds they were forbidden by law to handle them. So it meant employing a white man to sell their diamonds to other white men. My dad saw through this and instead of digging for the diamonds themselves, he advised the community to sell the claims for the price of stones rights in the claims, and not all the minerals. It meant that if the whites found gold they had to leave it like that. My dad was a very wide-awake man. They later sold this farm situated in the Lichtenberg district’.

In 1966 daddy Ngakane completed his primary school education and went to train as a teacher. In those days there was no higher standard than Standard Four in the Transvaal, but he was fortunate to be taught privately by his teacher to tackle the Standard Five curriculum. Where the teacher got the curriculum from, is still a mystery. He passed Standard Five and proceeded to Standard Six, being the only pupil at the Evaton School. The inspector had promised to examine the only pupil, which he did, twice. Daddy Ngakane then went to Kilnerton Training Institution, where he qualified as a teacher, being the youngest in the class. Age was his handicap as many felt he was still too young (not yet 18) to teach, but he was subsequently allowed to teach at Kilnerton, wearing shorts.

‘I would have proceeded to do high school education, but my mother felt that I was still too young to go to the Cape alone. So I missed my opportunity for I believe I would have proceeded right up to Fort Hare College, which had just been started in 1916, for a degree course’.

During the first two years he taught at Kilnerton Secondary School under the principalship of the Rev. A. Bolani there were only two pupils, one of whom became the first Black woman to qualify as a doctor. She was Mary Xakane, neé Malahlele.

‘As a young man my dad took me to a meeting of the African National Congress, especially to meet Solomon Plaatje. My father himself was an organizer of the ANC for the Western Transvaal, and my mother was chairman of the local branch of the Women’s League, started by Mrs. Charlotte Maxeke, neé Manye. It was then that I became interested in the ANC. I read the newspaper Abantu-Batho from which I got most of my inspiration. It was during this period when I was a teacher in a lonely school near Piet Retief, that I wrote what I called the Black Man’s creed. I gave it to one of the leaders and never got it back. I was nineteen then. I encouraged the people at the Driefontein holdings to take a live interest in the ANC.

‘In 1921the Transvaal Provincial Council imposed a levy of ten shillings on the Africans. The ANC took this issue to court, questioning the right of the council, and advised the Swazis there at Piet Retief, not to pay this tax when the native commissioner came, as the court decision was pending. The Transvaal ANC won the case, and the people did not pay this tax as I had advised them. Since then I’ve always been interested in the Black struggle.

‘When I resigned from teaching in 1936, I accepted an appointment of superintendent of an institution for delinquent lads at Orlando, and later at Gompo (for boys and girls) and found this rehabilitation of the youth the most rewarding work. I ran my institutions along unusual lines because I believed that however bad a child was, somewhere there was a sense of honour lurking. And, as a social worker it was my duty to find this button of self-honour. Press this button and you have got the boy rehabilitated. I emphasized individual treatment of the boy, because I regarded each boy as an individual. It was while working here that I discovered that basically the cause of a child’s abberation arose from the political situation in the country.

‘To continue attempting to reform children within the South African situation was, to me, like pouring water into a basket without a bottom. So, I threw myself into African politics.

‘At the same time when the ANC was outlawed by the Government I had just been elected president of the Transvaal ANC. During the Emergency of 1960 I spent five months in detention at the Fort Prison in Johannesburg, and also at Pretoria Central Prison. After my release I was arrested in connection with the Pietermaritzburg conference of the ANC, together with Duma Nokwe and others. We were acquitted. This was before the ANC was banned. I was placed under banning orders which were not renewed in 1972’.

Student Uprising.

‘In 1976 I was detained for 21 days at John Vorster Square, and I knew what it was like to be in hell.

‘Some of my interrogators were obviously illiterate and could hardly write. While undergoing interrogation (at the age of 75), I was reminded of the biblical story of Daniel in the den of lions. I went to read this story after my release, and understood it better’.

Philosophy.

‘The Black man is entitled to self-determination, not in the present fragmented form of Bantu homelands, but as a Black nation, to which we were evolving, and which we had set as our goal. I regard the present spawning of political parties in South Africa as the handwriting on the wall, as being indicative of the measure of the white man’s political confusion. At the moment the Black people of South Africa have no leader as all their leaders have either been placed in detention, or banned or left the country. Some of the people who have assumed leadership are either opportunists, stooges or belly-crawlers. Africa, South Africa in particular, is in travail, and we are awaiting the birth of our leaders.

“If such a leader does not emerge from present day youth who, fortunately since 1976 have become politically conscious, the question is not how long the white people can continue to hold down this lid of the pot before explosion, but rather, how long they’ll prevent an explosion on a national scale’.

Source: Umhlaba Wethu (1987), Mothobi Mutloase (editor).