Survival and Winning Theme Analysis

I was the youngest in the school by two years, and I spoke only English, the infected tongue that had spread like a plague into the sacred land and contaminated the pure, sweet waters of Afrikanerdom.

The Boer War had created great malevolent feelings against the English, who were called rooineks. It was a hate that had entered the Afrikaner bloodstream and pocked the hearts and minds of the next generation. To the boys at school, I was the first live example of the congenital hate they carried for my kind.

I spoke the language that had pronounced the sentences that had killed their grandfathers and sent their grandmothers to the world’s first concentration camps, where they had died like flies from dysentery, malaria, and blackwater fever. To the bitter Calvinist farmers, the sins of the fathers had been visited upon the sons, unto the third generation. I was infected.

Mediocrity is the best camouflage known to man. Our teacher, Miss du Plessis, wasn’t anxious for a five-year-old rooinek to shine in a class of knot-headed Boers. She was happy enough to put by poor results down to my inability to grasp the subtlety of the Afrikaans language as well as to my being the youngest in the class, whereas I already spoke Zulu and Shangaan and, like most small kids, I found learning a new language simple enough.

It became increasingly hard for the other kids to think of me as being different when no visible or audible differences separated us. Except, of course, for my hatless snake; but even this, like a kid with a birthmark or a little finger missing, started to go unnoticed. I was becoming the perfect stick insect.

Slowly I looked up at the giant with his foot resting on my shoulder. High above him I could see a milky moon hanging in the afternoon sky. We had gotten so close, Granpa Chook and I had gotten so close to making it through to the end. Just a few more hours.

I suddenly spat at him. “You’re dog shit! Your ma is a whore!”

He pushed violently downward with his foot, sending me sprawling. Then he let out a howl, a mixture of anger and anguish. “Why won’t you cry, you fucking bastard?” he sobbed and started to kick blindly at me.

The storm troopers rushed in to restrain him, pulling him from me. The Judge allowed himself to be led away, and Granpa Chook and I were left alone behind the shithouses under a white moon set in a flawless blue sky.

“Boxing is the greatest sport in the world,” Hoppie began, “even greater than rugby.” He looked up, ready to defend his last statement if necessary, but saw that I was prepared to accept his premise. “The art of self-defense is the greatest art of al, and boxing is the greatest art of self-defense. Take me, a natural welterweight, there isn’t any man I have to be afraid of, not even a big animal like a front-row forward. I’m fast and I can hit hard and in a street fight a little bloke like me can take on any big gorilla.” He jabbed once or twice into the air in front of him to demonstrate his lightning speed.

“How little can beat how big?” I asked, getting excited.

“Big as anything, man, if you’ve got the speed to move and can throw a big punch as you’re moving away.”

I was distressed at having left the best friend after Granpa Chook and Nanny that I had ever had, without so much as a good-bye. Hoppie had passed briefly through my life, like a train passing in the night. I had known him a little over twenty-four hours, yet he had managed to change my life. He had given me the power of one—one idea, one heart, one mind, one plan, one determination. Hoppie had sensed my need to grow, my need to be assured that the world around me had not been specially arranged to bring about my undoing. He gave me a defense system, and with it he gave me hope.

Occasionally a Boer boy of roughly my size would cross the lines to challenge me, and after school the back of the bioscope building would be packed with kids, the Boer kids on one side and the English on the other with my opponent and myself sandwiched in between. The prison guys formed a clique of their own, not sure where they belonged but seemingly glad when I won. Geel Piet was a good coach, and as I was never matched with one of the prison kids, my superior boxing skill allowed me to win. Whereupon a bigger Boer kid would challenge one of the English boys of roughly the same size and usually manage to beat him, which restored the racial status quo.

Lieutenant Borman rose to his full height. He was a big man […] and he was used to looking down at people, but Doc’s six foot seven left him five inches short as the two men stared at each other. The lieutenant was the first to drop his eyes […] “You think I don’t blery know things is going on? You think I’m a blery fool or something, hey? […]” He picked up the cane then brought it fast and down hard against the open lid of my piano stool, the blow knocking the lid back into place. […] He turned slowly to face Doc again and pointed the cane at Doc so that it touched him lightly on the breastbone as though it were a rapier. “Next time you try to be cheeky, you come off secon’ bes’. I’m telling you now, you bastard, I’m finish’ an’ klaar with you both!”

Then a leader would take up a chant, which might go something like this: “He is the chief who comes in our dream time, the caster of spells and the bringer of wisdom.”

Onoshobishobi Ingelosi!” the People would chorus in reply.

“He can dance in the dew without leaving footprints and stalk the wind until it howls to be free.”

“Onoshobishobi Ingelosi!”

“His blows are like the summer thunder and his lightning strikes his foes!”

“Onosobishobi Ingelosi!”

“For cunning he matches the thin moon and for wisdom the full, for is he not Lord of the dark and the light, the day and the night?”

“Onoshobishobi Ingelosi!”

He will win for the People, he will win for all the people, in all the tribes, the People are his glory!”

“He will win, he will win, he will win for the People, Onoshobishobi Ingelosi! Onoshobishobi Ingelosi! Onoshobishobi Ingelosi!”

I was seldom concerned with winning a particular fight; instead I was cultivating the habit of winning. Winning is a state of mind that embraces everything you do, so I found I won in other things as well.

While I told myself that each win was a small deposit on the ultimate ownership of the world welterweight crown, the enormous need in me to win touched on a whole heap of other responses a fourteen-year-old can’t really work out. It had something to do with rejecting the Lord, with my mother, the judge, being surrounded by guys who came from wealthy homes, even my headless snake. While I didn’t think of it as camouflage, I now know that it was, that I kept myself protected by being out in front. Too far in front to be an easy mark.

Doc and Mrs. Boxall had taught me to think.

Solly ran his gym color-blind, the way gyms are run the world over. His only concession to apartheid was a locker room for non-Europeans. The rest depended on your skill as a boxer. The Johannesburg police turned a blind eye to Solly’s personal racial integration program. The police commissioner, Kruger, was a boxing man, and to boxing men black isn’t black in the ring. Too many great black boxers existed in the world, and a man jabbing a pair of twelve-ounce gloves into your face wasn’t a dirty kaffir, he was a boxer, if only for the duration of the fight.

While I longed to be rid of the concept involving the Tadpole Angel, it was quite impossible for me to bring myself to the point where I would throw the fight. I had steeled myself to win so often that, in my mind, a single loss int eh ring would have meant that I would not become the welterweight champion of the world. A childish preoccupation, but nonetheless one that was bound with steel wire through my resolve. I had even taught myself never to consider the consequences of losing a fight. Too much cross-referencing of consequences robs the will of its single-minded concentration to win. While this fanatical resolve never to be beaten may have been a sign of immaturity, in later years I was to see the sophistication I had brought to the task of winning adopted by sports psychiatrists throughout the world.

Once I had recovered from my fear, I found the snake an entirely appropriate, perhaps even magnificent, symbol. The black mamba, the most deadly snake in the world, takes one partner for life. If its partner is killed the second snake will often wait for the killer to return, prepared to die in order to take revenge. Not naturally aggressive, it will nevertheless defend its young, raising itself onto the last few inches of its tail and striking sideways in a whipping action. As most humans instinctively raise their arms in panic to defend their eyes, the mamba fangs most often strike into the top of the upper arm. The journey to the heart is swift and the outcome deadly certain.