Читать книгу Mamphela Ramphele: A Passion for Freedom - Mamphela Ramphele - Страница 11

THE DEATH OF MY FATHER ON 21 MAY 1967 INTRODUCED me to the reality of the pain of loss. The fact that he had been ill since 1963 with cancer of the oesophagus, and that he showed all the signs of suffering from an incurable illness, did not prevent me from praying for a miracle to heal him. I could not see why an omnipotent and loving God could refuse me. It was to be my third major disappointment with God.

Because my father had been a distant parent for most of my childhood, every intimate moment we shared was very special. Our last moment of closeness took place during the Easter holidays of 1967, a few weeks before his death, when I went to visit him at Baragwanath Hospital where he lay dying. My sister was one of the nurses in his ward, which made her pain worse in some ways, but gave her more time with him during his last days. I trimmed his fingernails as we chatted. I listened to him as he talked about his disappointment with his eldest son, Mathabatha, the apple of his eye, who had not once come to see him in hospital. But he still managed to retain his dry sense of humour. He listened with interest to my impressions of the University of the North. I also introduced him to my first serious boyfriend, Dick Mmabane, who was later to become my husband.

Dick was a gentle, stockily built man with a keen sense of humour and great generosity of spirit. He could not be described as handsome in the ordinary sense of the word, but his attractive personality made up for what he lacked in physical looks. He had been my classmate at Setotolwane High School, but our relationship had only developed at the tail end of our matric year. He became a great source of support during the difficult months ahead.

The sense of loss I felt when I heard the news of my father’s death from Mr Renoster, the Chief Warden of Residences at the University of the North, was immense. The train trip from Pietersburg to Mara later that night, the bus ride to Kranspoort the following day, and the sadness of having to deal with anxious questions about the meaning of death from my nine-year-old brother Thomas, who had been put by my mother in the care of a kind neighbour, all left me drained.

Dick generously sent me money by telegraph which I had to cash at the nearest post office, Mara, some fifteen kilometres away. The only form of transport available at the time was my father’s Raleigh bicycle. A young man from the local primary school gave me a ride on its frame to and from Mara. The physical discomfort was nowhere near the emotional pain at the death of my father. If anything, the fact that I had to rely on this primitive means of transport underlined what it meant to lose a provider.

The journey later that week to my father’s natal home in Uitkyk, where he was to be buried, was arranged by his old friend Mr Philip Bekker, who gave Thomas and me a lift in his van on Saturday morning – the day of the funeral. The sight of my grieving mother as she sat with other female relatives near my father’s coffin was a confirmation of the reality of the loss and the finality of death. My father was unreachable – he lay motionless in the coffin. My mother was also unreachable as a nurturing figure to share my grief – she was nursing her own wound and could not comfort even her own children. We had to deal with our pain in our own individual ways. Tears were an inadequate answer; I felt numb in between the streams of tears.

My mother had arrived on Friday evening in the hearse accompanied by a busload of relatives from Johannesburg. The evening service had been held in the large family courtyard, and many locals kept an all-night vigil with singing and preaching. An ox was slaughtered in accordance with custom, to signify the death of a male head of household, as well as to provide meat for the meal after the burial the following day.

The final farewell to my father took place in the local church, where we filed past his open coffin during the funeral service. Dominee Van der Merwe came from Kranspoort to conduct the funeral service – an uncharacteristically generous act much appreciated by my family. My father looked so emaciated from the long-drawn-out illness. His handsome face was but a shadow of its old self. My mother looked frail and was supported by my father’s aunt, Rakgadi Maria, and all seven children stood together. Molepo, the last born, then only six years old, was bewildered. He had travelled with my mother on the many visits to my father in hospital. Morongwa, my sister’s two-year-old daughter, who my mother was looking after at the time, was also confused by the funeral activities.

The material deprivation my mother suffered as a result of my father’s death greatly increased the sense of loss in our family. Her black mourning clothes, a mark of ritual pollution, signified her vulnerability. Her own mother, Koko Mamphela, went to live with her for three months in Kranspoort after the funeral to lend support and companionship. But the gap was too wide to be bridged even by maternal love.

The vulnerability of a widow often takes on concrete forms, which act as further insults to the wounded soul. At the beginning of 1968 my mother had to move out of the comfortable brick house allocated to my father as principal teacher of the local school. She then moved into a mud house on the edge of the village; this served only to increase her sense of marginalisation. She had to cope with not only emotional and material loss, but also the loss of status which she had derived from her spouse. All these she found too much to bear.

In 1969 she decided to return to Uitkyk in search of a better job and greater support from being closer to her family. She took up a teaching post at Ngoanamago School, which offered her a principalship, and thus a slightly higher income. This was the beginning of her wanderings from post to post seeking better prospects. She ended her teaching career at Maupje in February 1979 when she finally retired at the age of sixty.

At the end of 1967, the year of my father’s death, I spent the summer vacation in Johannesburg with Dick Mmabane. During my stay at the house of my mother’s elder sister, Mamogolo Ramadimetsa, which had been my base during that holiday, I was rudely interrupted by a telegraphic message from Natal Medical School:

YOU HAVE BEEN ADMITTED STOP PLEASE REPORT TO MRS WHITBY AT THE REGISTRATION OFFICE NOT LATER THAN 11TH JANUARY 1968 STOP

I was dismayed. I could not make head or tail of it. It was my first encounter with a telegram. My anxiety about my admission to the medical school led me to read the STOPs as directives for me to stop entertaining the hope of being admitted to the school. I burst into tears. Fortunately Mamogolo Ramadimetsa was there to calm me down and reassure me. It was a rude initiation for a country bumpkin into the world of telegraphic language.

The level of material deprivation which I endured in the late 1960s and 1970s seems unbelievable even to me today, looking back. Train fare for a second-class return ticket was simply beyond the means of my family. My mother, the only breadwinner, was earning R86 per month as a teacher. I had to appeal to Mamogolo Ramadimetsa to lend me R55, which enabled me to buy a ticket from Johannesburg to Durban, shop for some provisions, and have a bit of pocket money to see me to the medical school doors. Dick Mmabane gave me some money as well, which helped. I had to take each challenge as it came. I refused to think about where the next block of money would come from.

I sat nervously in the train compartment, before being joined by Khoadi Molaba, from Alexandra township in Johannesburg, and later by Patrick Jwili and his mother, who joined us at Balfour Station. Mrs Jwili was clearly very proud of her son, who had earned a master’s degree from an American university after having completed his BSc at Fort Hare University in the Cape. She had misgivings about my intention of being in the same class as her son and Khoadi Molaba, who also had a Fort Hare BSc. She mercilessly set out to whittle away any remnant of self-confidence I had. How could I, a female and lacking as well the head start of a degree which the other two possessed, hope to make my way at medical school? Another vote of no confidence.

Patrick Jwili turned out to be a very amusing character who had acquired a fair number of Americanisms and unfortunately did not in the end make a success of his medical studies. He was excluded in third year. As things transpired, Mrs Jwili was partly right. My squeamish nature made my life very difficult. One of the compulsory experiments in physiology involved pithing a live frog (destroying the spinal cord by inserting a sharp needle into the spinal column), dissecting out its calf muscle, and running a series of tests to measure muscle function under different conditions. There were various stories at medical school of people whose careers had been frustrated by this particular experiment. One such person, Matsapola, was reported to have stabbed the frog in frustration and left it pinned to the experimental table, walking away never to be seen again at the medical school. The experiment acquired the nickname ‘Matsapola’ from this unfortunate incident.

Our physiology teacher tried in vain to desensitise me by encouraging me to play around with my hand in a bucket full of frogs. I simply could not stand the slimy creatures. In the final exam, by the time I eventually mustered enough courage to hold on to the frog (half an hour into experimental time), I was desperate. I squeezed all life out of the poor devil, and was so confused that I connected gas for use on the burner, instead of oxygen, to the muscle chamber, which killed off any prospect of muscle reaction. I was devastated. I sat down after wiping off tears of frustration and wrote about the theory behind the experiment in a desperate attempt to redeem myself. I was relieved to pass physiology in the end – never mind the third-class pass obtained.

Anatomy, another major second-year course, was much more interesting and better taught under the leadership of Professor Keen. Our first day in the dissecting room was marked by anxiety and fear of the unknown cadavers. How were you to overcome your sensibilities, and not only handle dead bodies but dissect them as well? Necessity triumphs over many barriers. The initial fear of the cadaver gradually gave way and with less than reverence some of the students started playing with body parts. It may well be that the unspoken and unacknowledged guilt about breaking an important taboo compelled you to be outrageous so as to be able to make light of the moment and live with yourself. We often had to be called to order by Professor Keen, who insisted on decorum in the dissecting room.

The blind faith of my high-school years, which urged me on to make the difficult career decision, paid off handsomely. My good matriculation grades and above-average performance in my premedical courses at the University of the North attracted the attention of the Medical School administrators. In addition to the full-cost grant from the Department of Bantu Education worth R450, which was then available to every African student, I won the 1968 South African Jewish Women’s Association Scholarship worth about R200 and the Sir Ernest Oppenheimer Bursary worth R150 annually for the rest of my medical school years.

For the first time in my life I was in the lap of luxury. I could not bear the thought of spending this considerable sum of money on myself alone, as many of my contemporaries did. They bought clothes, music systems, and sometimes even cars. I led a modest life and sent my mother about R50 every so many months. That support was crucial for my mother to educate my younger brothers.

The rest of my medical subjects became less and less interesting to me as extracurricular activities began to take centre stage. Mediocrity became the hallmark of my performance. I scraped through the remaining years at medical school, gaining second-class passes as the best grades. So low was my interest in my medical career that I did not even celebrate my final-year success or attend graduation. A career so hard fought for became less and less attractive the closer I came to attaining my goal.