Читать книгу A Burning Hunger - Lynda Schuster - Страница 11

Prologue

On 4 August 1990, Tsietsi Mashinini finally came home.

Few were accorded the welcome given the young man. And rightly so: despite all his years in exile, Tsietsi remained a legend among South Africa’s black youth. He led the 1976 Soweto uprising, in which thousands of students rebelled against the white-minority government – and hundreds died. Tsietsi’s ability to elude the police, as one of South Africa’s most wanted men, had made him a legend. He was spotted dressed as a stylish girl here, a workman there, a priest on the other side of Soweto, the vast black township. Then, just when the police seemed on the verge of capturing him, Tsietsi escaped over the border.

And so on that brilliant winter morning, hundreds of his admirers descended on Jan Smuts International Airport to await Tsietsi’s return. They jammed the cavernous arrival hall: chanting his name; singing liberation songs; doing the toyi-toyi, the war dance imported from Zimbabwean guerrilla camps that made them look as though they were running in place. Suddenly, a shout went up. Through the doors that led to the cargo area, the youths saw the pallbearers emerge, carrying the coffin. They saw the hearse pull up to the curb outside to receive it. They saw the family huddle around the vehicle, weeping. And they knew that Tsietsi Mashinini had finally come home.

This was not the way it was supposed to have happened. Like so many Africans, Nomkhitha, his mother, believed in the voices of the ancestors. Her long-dead father had appeared to her in a dream to say Tsietsi would return one day to rule South Africa; Nomkhitha had clung to that promise during all the years of her son’s exile. But then came the telephone call telling of Tsietsi’s sudden and inexplicable death in an obscure West African country. So instead of a triumphal return by a conquering hero, a funeral procession of family and followers bore Tsietsi back to the city of his birth.

It was the end of a story that had, in one way or another, entangled all the Mashininis. For Tsietsi set in motion a series of events that would forever define his family. From the time of the Soweto uprising, the Mashinini name became a magical thing among black South Africans – and a thing of infamy among whites. Many of Tsietsi’s twelve siblings and even his parents, heretofore mostly apolitical observers of the country’s gross inequities, were inexorably drawn into the fight against apartheid.

His oldest brother rose through the ranks of the outlawed African National Congress’ army to command ‘freedom fighters’, guerrillas who infiltrated South Africa from neighbouring countries and blew up military installations. Another was twice arrested for his political activities, brutally tortured, tried for treason, released – only to go on to help orchestrate the insurrection that rocked the nation from 1984–86 and ultimately brought the white government to its knees. Yet another fled the country when he was only fifteen, was educated by the ANC in Egypt and Tanzania, and became a senior official in the ANC’s exiled diplomatic service. Even Nomkhitha, the family matriarch, spent 197 days in solitary confinement in a South African prison.

Yet these are not members of a political elite. Like so many black South Africans, the Mashininis were ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances. Their tale is that of perhaps every other family in the townships: impoverished, law-abiding citizens who got sucked into the anti-apartheid struggle by the involvement of a child or sibling – and whose lives changed irrevocably as a result. They became the foot soldiers in the fight for liberation. Mostly unnoticed and often with little publicity, these families made huge sacrifices that, in the end, proved essential in bringing down the white-minority government.

But the Mashininis are unique. Because of its size, the family embraces just about every facet of the anti-apartheid struggle: from the drama of the 1976 Soweto uprising to the township upheavals a decade later; from the desolation of political exile to that of imprisonment; from the exclusionary black-power doctrines of Steve Biko to the all-encompassing non-racialism of Nelson Mandela. Thus, the Mashininis’ story is that of black South Africa, in microcosm.

And it is a story that must be told, for apartheid clearly ranks as one of the horrors of our times. Like the Holocaust, its tales are powerful morality plays of the most compelling and universal sort. The Mashininis’ saga isn’t only about their imprisonment, torture, exile, separation, loss; it is also about the dignity, courage and strength they somehow managed to conjure up – in the face of almost unthinkable adversity – to hold the family together. Theirs is a timeless testimony to the resilience of the human spirit.

I first met the Mashininis in the late 1980s, an American journalist newly arrived to cover the dying days of apartheid. It was a grim time of bannings, detentions and death squads; President P.W. Botha was not about to go without a fight. Desperate to start making contact with black ‘comrades’ in the townships, I begged a well-connected friend to let me accompany him to Soweto. He finally relented.

So, on a sleepy Sunday morning, my friend took me to meet Mpho Mashinini, the fourth-born son. (There were eleven boys and two girls in the family.) I was immediately drawn to his vibrant, raucous clan with their stories of growing up in Soweto. Home was an airless ‘matchbox’ house: four tiny rooms inside, a pit latrine and cold-water tap outside. To bathe, the family boiled water on a coal-burning stove. At bedtime, Joseph and Nomkhitha, the parents, had to stack the furniture in one corner of the house, then squeeze the children together on the floor in the living room, the kitchen, wherever they could find space.

Mired in a dreary existence of poverty and political repression, the Mashinini parents cared about only two things: the Methodist Church and education. Joseph insisted that the children sing in the choir; any time spent in church, he figured, was time spent off the streets and out of trouble. For her part, Nomkhitha became positively fanatical on the subject of schooling. She believed it to be the greatest gift she could give her children – and their only hope for a marginally better future. Even after a full day’s work in a clothing factory, then cooking and cleaning and washing at home, Nomkhitha made the children sit with her around the dining-room table to do their lessons; under her tutelage, they knew how to read before beginning school.

Thus, books and grades and God dominated conversation in the Mashinini household, not politics. How did such a home produce guerrilla fighters and revolutionary leaders? To me, it seemed the quintessential story, the story of modern South Africa itself. But Joseph and Nomkhitha refused to talk about the family and its history; with four boys still in exile, they were terrified the government would seek retribution. Besides, the security police – who knew everything that occurred in the Mashinini house – would never have countenanced such a project.

It took apartheid’s demise to be able to tell the Mashininis’ tale. I returned to Southern Africa several years later, this time as the wife of a diplomat. The decades of civil unrest and economic sanctions had finally succeeded: the white government was no more. Nelson Mandela had been elected president, South Africa transformed into a fully democratic nation, the exiles allowed to come home. The Mashininis were now ready to remember.

One caveat: this book is not intended as a definitive history of the anti-apartheid struggle; that is for a South African to write. Rather, it is one family’s rendering of that fight, retold from a great remove of time and distance. I have tried, wherever possible, to corroborate the Mashininis’ recollections with newspaper clippings, trial records, other contemporary accounts and documents, and by extensively interviewing their colleagues, friends and relatives. A few characters are not named for reasons of political sensitivity. Other names have been forgotten with the passage of time. Some dialogue has been re-created from memory and thus not given direct quotation. All this I have attempted to weave into a narrative whose shortcomings, whatever they may be, are entirely my own.