Degas' Dust. Carnie Matisonn
a good entry point to me into the world of academia. At the back of my mind was the thought that, if only in the absence of anything better to do, it might make sense to follow it all up later with a law degree.
So, fortunately, in my first year I also included a major in legal theory along with registering for courses in English, Afrikaans and politics. My plan was to spend the first three years as a full-time student on the Wits campus but appearing for only a few hours a day to attend about half the required number of lectures. Despite this, I was still able to enjoy a taste of university life.
Although I did not have the money to buy tickets to the debutantes’ ball to witness the crowning of the rag queen, I managed to take part in some of the float building. Building floats for the rag procession had a certain appeal, but I ended up with the challenge of trying to find more innovative ideas to raise money for charities that would benefit from the rag.
Ster-Kinekor was publicising the impending opening of the film spectacular Sodom and Gomorrah, which was trying to cash in on the success of earlier biblical epics like Ben-Hur. I marched into the Ster-Kinekor general manager’s office and offered to promote the movie on condition I could also use some of their money to advertise our forthcoming rag procession and raise funds for charities I believed in. After a short negotiation, the company agreed to give me a horse and chariot at peak hour on Saturday morning. I knew a good number of theatrical personalities and phoned Morrie Blake, a well-known compère and stage and radio personality, to ask if he would be willing to conduct a mock auction of my “slave girls”.
Morrie jumped at the opportunity to have his name in the newspapers and do his bit for a worthy cause.
With the support of my handful of friends, I convinced all ten rag-queen finalists to trail behind the chariot while dressed in white sheets torn into rags with their hands tied behind their backs, joined together with ropes in the style of persecuted slaves. At about 11am, I took my place as the charioteer in full Roman battledress, gave a nod to the pretty young women behind me and set off on a slow walk, dictated by the pace of the horse, in the direction of the Herman Wald statue in Joubert Street. To add to the lustre of the occasion, I had negotiated the loan of a seven-ton truck from OK Bazaars, which I parked in Joubert Street between President and Market streets. I sourced electricity from an apartment on the first floor of a nearby building and plugged in a sound system borrowed from the university music department to amplify the guitars and brass instruments for an all-girl band.
The plan was to ride the chariot through the city to the Oppenheimer Fountain with all these attractive, sparsely clad slaves in tow. Hordes of people followed us in amazement, with no idea of what was going on, other than the Sodom and Gomorrah posters on the sides of the chariot and the messages about the rag procession. At our destination, my slaves and I climbed on to the back of the truck. The band launched into what many at the time referred to as the “music of the devil” and the slave girls started to gyrate in rhythm.
I had arranged for four heavyweight wrestlers to be in the crowd as security, because I had a vague idea things might get out of hand.
Before the bidding, we let Morrie the “auctioneer” introduce each objet d’art, highlighting her individual characteristics, while emphasising the enormous prestige a successful bidder could enjoy by claiming her. Foolishly, but in the spirit of fun, he said it would be “a fight” for whose bid would be accepted for the most beautiful damsel of all. Little did I know this would set the trend among the spectators – many of whom seriously seemed to believe they could whisk these girls away as genuine slaves for their private entertainment.
The auctioneer initially coaxed bids from members of the public who good-naturedly threw money on to the platform, most of them aware they were donating to charity.
But the festivity fast degenerated into a brawl when one of Johannesburg’s most well-known heavyweight wrestlers, apparently “planted by me”, according to the police and the Sunday Times, made a bid for the most beautiful maiden and was challenged by a notorious ex-convict, who claimed to have outbid him and promptly pulled the poor child off the truck in an attempt to abduct her.
As the bidding disintegrated into a fight between the wrestlers and the crowd, which was soon totally out of control, the police descended. But not before hundreds of coins had been thrown into the back of the truck.
Once everything had calmed down and order was restored, the police decided to track down the man behind all the madness.
“Does you got a permit?” asked the head honcho of the local constabulary, flanked by three subordinates.
“I’m sure I must have one,” I told him.
“You give me the permit or I lock you up,” came the response.
I could only shrug.
“Did you got it or don’t you?”
“Well I don’t exactly have it on me – and this is a charitable event,” I muttered.
“You call this charitable when you got a whole lot of naked women here that you are selling into prostitution and causing a riot in the streets of Johannesburg?”
“I wouldn’t call them prostitutes,” I objected. “Especially since–”
“You can see they prostitutes, man. They don’t got no clothes underneath them!” he spluttered. “I’m not going to waste my time with you. Lock him up!” he ordered.
And with that, the heavy hands of the law landed on each of my shoulders and marched me off to the nearest police van. Two cops sat in the front and one in the back with me, insisting on getting a “confession” from me about where I had found my collection of “strumpets for sale”.
I knew when I eventually arrived at the police station someone surely would have heard the words “rag”, “jool”, “charity” or even “student”.
I was released almost as soon as I arrived. The arresting officers were instructed to drive me back to the place where they had arrested me, but not without a stern warning that I had contravened the Riotous Assemblies Act of 1956 by holding a public meeting without the written permission of the commissioner of police or his deputy.
I soon found myself back on the street, where we had successfully raised a large amount of money. The Sunday papers featured our photographs as Morrius Blakius, Carnius Matisonius, Flavius Orulus, Suzanikus Orpheus and a few other parodies of Roman names.
I found university life wonderful. I had no money, precious little food and very few set-work books, but I considered myself lucky to be part of a large and inspiring group of intellectual and musical friends and acquaintances. Although there were masses of students in some of the classes I attended, most of the lecturers knew me by name, either by virtue of the fact that I achieved high marks or – the far more common reason – through having read articles in the papers about my riotous rag procession.
The story followed me around so doggedly that even on the first day of my third year I had the pleasure of Professor Scholtens, my lecturer in Roman Law, throwing me out of his class. He repeated this gesture on the first day of each subsequent term for various offences, such as asking me what my thoughts were on his ramblings in Latin, which nobody understood, and which I “translated” as humorously as I could.
Before one of our classes, I wrote on the blackboard that I had calculated that he was covering two lines of Latin per minute, meaning that if the class read the English translation at double that speed they could fall asleep for the remaining half of each of Scholtens’ lectures.
Needless to say, he threw me out for that too.
Chapter 8
Aged eighteen, well into my first year of university and while still enjoying the homely atmosphere of Mrs K’s pantry, I took a part-time job as a salesman at Map Centre. I figured it might allow me a bit more time to focus on studying and other jobs, and there was the promise it might be better paid than anything I had tried before.
Untruthfully, I claimed in the application form that I owned a car,