Sipho Vilakazi’s body has a
latent energy about it. He sits stern and cross-armed across from us, but five
minutes later, while recounting his memories of his karate training, his
gestures are expansive and his face is animated. He started his Goju Ryu
training in 1972 at the age of 12 in a community hall in Dobsonville in the
township of Soweto. He recalls sharing a portion of the hall with weightlifters
and boxers, one of them being the future South African Flyweight Boxing
Champion, Terror Mathebula. And, he remembers having to skip training on a
Friday because that is when the drum majorettes used the space.
His sensei, Stats Mgomezulu,
having migrated from Judo, to training Goju with James Rousseau, had started
the dojo at the hall. As he travelled for work, he taught them intermittently,
and it says a lot about the dedication of those youngsters, who continued their
training in his absence. And, in 1975 when Cecil Mokoena took over their
training, he was impressed enough with their level of expertise that he graded
them up a belt. Cecil Mokoena had already been training with James Rousseau for
quite a while and had been trying to establish a dojo at the Orlando High
School, when one of the karateka approached him and asked him to meet with the
twenty or so Dobsonville students. Sipho remembers, “When he came there he
found us training, we were white belts. The highest grade at the time was an
orange belt, but we trained and trained. Then he [Cecil] said, Okay, I’ll take
you guys for two weeks, and you will choose if I’m the right guy to train you,
and I will choose whether I’ll continue with you or not. That was the
agreement.” Two weeks later Cecil was satisfied that he had students who were
willing to accept him as their new sensei. After receiving Stats blessing, Cecil
offered to connect them with his Sensei, James Rousseau, at the Fox Street Dojo
in Johannesburg.
There was very little integration
between the races during the apartheid era. When asked whether black and white
students were allowed to train together, Sipho shook his head and said, “But
with Sensei James and Sensei Arnold it was different. Sensei James trained
Cecil alone, and he was a black guy. And, at that time, they [the police],
could go and check whether he was training a black guy. I think Sensei James
took a decision to say, no one is going to tell me what to do. He trained Cecil
alone, and it was not allowed. But as black people we had hindrances as to who
you could train with, especially when it comes to people of a different
colour.” Sensei James held mini gashukus exclusively for the black karateka,
and graded them at the Fox Street dojo. Although he did go to the Dobsonville
dojo, he felt it was important that they needed to know their Hombu. Several
Senseis like; Arnold de Beer, Johan Roodts, Roger Mahon, Pikkus Windell, and
others, trained Sipho there too.
The Apartheid ‘Pass laws’ also
hindered his training, as his freedom of movement was limited. “There was this
stability unit which was moving around. Those are the men who were arresting
people. But, I think that somewhere along the way they got tired, because we
would always go and come back. They would see that this is the bunch of people
with bags and gi’s, because we would show them. [They would ask] ‘Where are you
from?’ ‘Town.’ ‘Who are you training with?’ ‘So and so.’ ‘Is he allowed to
train you?’ ‘Yes.’ And that was the end of it. People had to make that
decision, if I am arrested, it is fine, but I am going to train. I was one of
them.” He remembers early morning bag searches when he was catching the train
to Johannesburg for the 6 am training sessions; and then again on his return.
“So we had these random problems, but after a while I was no longer worried. If
they came, here’s the bag, search. I knew they won’t find anything. They were just
frustrating themselves. We then found [out that] some of the police guys were
doing JKA. Maybe that helped as well, so that they started to know some of us,
because then some of them started to ask, ‘Who are you training with?’ ‘Oh,
ok.’ Then it was fine, you know. This guy is going to training, so it also
established relations in terms of us moving freely.”
When
“the splits” happened, it became a lot more difficult for the black students to
train, as they were allocated regions and Senseis. “The barrier was that we
couldn’t train wherever we wanted to because this thing of the West, South,
East, it was a problem. If you stayed in Dobsonville, and they saw you coming
from the other side, they (the police) would ask, ‘Why do you go and train
there, because in terms of the boundaries you are supposed to go to the West.’”
Sipho struggled to travel to Sensei Johan Roodts in Krugersdorp; he remembers
walking long distances as the only transport available at the time was the
train. And in 1979, he found that training with Sensei Roodts was no longer
practical. He started looking for a more convenient dojo, and decided to train
with Sensei Arnold de Beer instead. This decision was not one he made lightly,
as it came with a certain amount of risk. “To be quite honest, when Sensei
James left things fell apart. That’s where we had the problems, because now we
had this demarcation type of thing, where you belong to the West, you belong… then
Cecil left, but we remained. I said, ‘No man, if they arrest me, let it be.” It
was the right choice, as under Sensei Arnold’s mentorship Sipho travelled to
Okinawa, and was the first African black male to be taught by Ko Uehara at his
dojo. He also opened a successful dojo in Soweto in the eighties, and he still
assists at Sensei Arnold’s dojo today. He is the only remaining karateka from
the original 1970’s Dobsonville group.
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