Ashwin Desai's Wentworth is a thought-provoking narrative of a long, and ongoing, struggle by Coloureds to build community on a miserable and toxic patch of Durban. Many of the central characters were dislocated and relocated by the Group Areas Act in the apartheid era; they are devotees and aficionados of soccer and have used the sport to carve meaning and joy in their lives and those of their children. An evocative tale of ‘sacrifice’ and ‘mission’ (1), Wentworth also offers profound insights into the concepts of place and identity, and the politics of transformation in South Africa.
Desai presents Wentworth as a ‘group biography’ based on the oral testimonies of those with intimate connections to three of the location's soccer teams: Leeds United, Cherrians and Young Cavaliers. Desai underpins his narrative by juxtaposing space and place. Bordering petrochemical refineries that ‘emit a constant plume of greyish white smoke’ and ‘a sulphurous stench’ that penetrates ‘deep into the lungs’ (5), the space known as Wentworth is among the most polluted in South Africa. Visitors to Wentworth know they have arrived when their eyes begin watering and their noses start running. As well as approving this space for human habitation and ignoring the inevitable health problems (e.g. extreme levels of asthma and sinusitis, high numbers of babies born with defects, and elevated rates of cancer), the apartheid state further sentenced many residents to dormitories—‘long squat rows of concrete coops with flat asbestos roofs’ (7). Dormitory residents shared bathrooms, toilets and a scullery, and received a ration of ‘hot water at four o’clock in the afternoon’ (149). This Wentworth quickly degenerated into an alienating space of poverty, drug taking and gangs.
Yet, Wentworth also became a place, a community of skilled artisans, small business operators, religious faithful, musicians, writers and soccer enthusiasts who forged friendships, fostered neighbourliness, and practised philanthropy. During research in Wentworth, Desai uncovered numerous instances of upliftment and hope including a lad who developed a flower garden, and a youth group that turned rubbish dumps into gardens. But Leeds United wins Desai's title for embodying Wentworth the place. Founded in the 1960s, Leeds relished a halcyon period in the mid-1970s, winning their league and multiple cups and tournaments.
Wentworth, and Leeds United, structurally benefited from the racial hierarchy of apartheid which afforded Coloureds access to skilled labour as sheet metal workers, boilermakers, welders, plumbers, and fitters and turners. However, not everyone had the capacity, or the desire, to envision, and then build, a collective identity. In the cases of Leeds United, Cherrians and Young Cavaliers, Desai identifies less than a score of individuals over 50 years with these attributes. Through their biographies we find evidence of individuals using sport to instil some sense of structure, meaning, identity, joy and hope in poverty impaired and dysfunctional lives. For example, Lorna Richardson, sister of star Leeds United player Dennis Petersen and a ‘lifelong Leeds supporter’ (153), uses Young Cavaliers, a club that she owns, to uplift youth and provide them with some love:
We try to find jobs for them. We help some of them to get their driver's licences. I pay rent for the two Ghanaian players every month. And I give them a little stipend every month. We look after their daily needs. And the Ghanaians, we see to their food completely – their groceries, their meat and their vegetables. (158)
The meagre socioeconomic benefits once bestowed by a Coloured classification have all but evaporated in the post-apartheid era. Today, Coloured men compete with Africans and Indians for trades jobs that were once their preserve; Coloured women who held privileged status in the retail sector now compete with Africans. Coloured women, moreover, who previously found employment in the ‘clothing and textile factories in nearby Clairwood have seen jobs disappear as South Africa has opened its doors to Chinese imports’ (170). These new material conditions exacerbate the lack of opportunities. Substantial numbers of Wentonians have no income whatsoever, while many survive on social welfare, pensions and state grants. Not surprisingly, the sense of place is also eroding. ‘All over Wentworth’, Desai writes, ‘Coloured youth hang around the bottom of stairs that lead to cramped apartments’ (170), some of which house three generations, and ‘new generations’ are being ‘sucked into old feuds and wounds that refuse to heal’ (164).
Reading Wentworth one quickly becomes aware of Desai's skills as an ethnographer, social scientist and oral historian. He is well aware, for example, that Wentworth's storytellers ‘mix fact and fiction, myth and truth, tomorrow with yesterday’ (116). Of course, in the absence of museums and historical societies, Wentworth relies on oral history for access to the past. Desai employs care and sensitivity in using oral testimony to present a perceptive narrative of the location, its residents and change.
The subtitle of Wentworth includes the phrase The Beautiful Game which is a well-known moniker for soccer and a metaphor for hope. Desai is a fan of the sport but Wentworth is no panegyric. Desai is acutely aware that sport is a limited tool for social advancement. Alluding to the juxtaposition of space and place, he observes that ‘it is one thing to wax lyrical about the power of soccer to create opportunities for young people. But what about those young men with hoods pulled low, hanging on the corners of flats and streets’ (165). Here we find a realistic assessment of sport as a vehicle of social development which stands in sharp contrast to that offered by the mainstream right and left. While right wingers tend to deem sport a social panacea, leftists generally view sport as trivial and socially irrelevant. Desai illustrates that well-planned and led sport programmes can at least facilitate some opportunities for participation and positive experiences for young people in impoverished communities.
Desai, directly citing first Pierre Bourdieu and then Loïc Wacquant in the following two quotes, also fully understands that ‘many of the most intimate dramas, the deepest malaises, [and] the most singular suffering’ that play out in Wentworth have ‘their roots in the objective contradictions, constraints and double binds inscribed in the structures of the labour and housing markets, in the merciless sanctions of the school system, or in the mechanisms of economic and social inheritance’ (220). Objective constraints have not receded in post-apartheid Wentworth because, as Desai explains, the ‘first reaction’ of the new economically mobile is to ‘flee’ to the ‘nearby hills of the Bluff’ and attempt to ‘“fit” into a white society, which for decades rejected their mothers and fathers’. Critically, ‘very few … of those who have made it economically … give back’ (198). Thus, one of the paradoxes of post-apartheid South Africa is that when people escape undesirable spaces they compound local problems by reducing the potential to transform them into fully fledged supportive communities. Desai adds further to our understanding of objective constraints in contemporary South Africa in his comments regarding the unwillingness of different elements to abandon racial naming; racial identities continue to have ‘meaning in social and political organisation and human action’ (4) in the post-apartheid era.
Desai usefully finds two principal forms of transformative politics operating in Wentworth. The first, following Manuel Torini, is ‘intimate activism’. This form of politics includes ‘surviving’ and ‘coping’ as well as resistance, and constitutes a ‘rehearsal of new social projects in the face of suffering’ (225). Intimate activism appears in Desai's discussions of Rodney Roskruge's writing circles, Doreen Houghton's vegetable patch and Lorna Richardson's boarding house. The second, and arguably more significant form of transformative politics, has been the organisation of sporting teams. The founders of these teams, which include Bernie Whitby (Leeds United), Bugsy Singh (Cherrians) and Lorna Richardson (Young Cavaliers), are unquestionably community leaders; they warrant the title hero. As Desai puts it, ‘talking to people like Whitby you begin to realise how a space became a place, stitched together by sacrifice, vision and a bit of old-style, top-down leadership’ (52). Indeed, Whitby is crystal clear about his goals for soccer: ‘I was trying to uplift Coloureds. I wanted to uplift Wentworth into something to be proud of. To not only build a soccer team but nurture families and inspire the generations to come’ (54).
Irrespective of whether one reads Wentworth as a tale of hopelessness or hope, one notable lesson emerges: throughout the apartheid and post-apartheid eras the state, in some cases with corporate connivance, has neglected large swathes of urban and peri-urban space and denied many of its inhabitants the wherewithal to produce vibrant, healthy places. In these spaces, survival depends solely on ‘networks of support’ (222). Desai tells this lesson with insight, passion and respect.