Читать книгу Mamphela Ramphele: A Passion for Freedom - Mamphela Ramphele - Страница 8

MY INTRODUCTION TO POLITICS WAS A SILENT ONE. I remember my parents discussing politics in hushed tones, particularly after my aunt Ramadimetsa’s husband had been detained under the 90-days detention clause which the Nationalist government introduced to deal with rebellion against their authoritarian rule. At this time the anti-pass campaign organised by the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), and later strengthened by the involvement of the African National Congress (ANC), was gaining momentum on the Witwatersrand and farther afield. My uncle Solly Mogomotsi was a member of the ANC and had been a member of the South African Communist Party (SACP) before it was banned in 1950. The SACP affiliation could be traced back to his active union membership in the boiler-making industry. My aunt spent many anxious weeks searching for her husband while he was detained, with no assistance from the authorities.

My own elder sister, Mashadi, was expelled from high school in her matriculation year because she had participated in a demonstration against the celebrations of South Africa’s becoming a republic in 1961. All schoolchildren were handed miniature South African flags, which we carried high as we paraded around the school under the watchful eyes of our teachers. I remember the day vividly, though we did not know what the occasion was about. I wonder how much of the symbolic weight of that day impinged on the teachers, and how much, if any, discussion took place about the significance of the day’s events.

My sister and her classmates refused to celebrate what they understood to be a worsening situation of oppression for black South Africans. They were summarily expelled, and put on homebound trains with the help of police. It was a bitter disappointment for my father, who was a strong believer in education as an essential part of a child’s development and an escape route out of poverty. He was, however, wise enough not to make my sister feel too guilty about her stance. He took it in his stride and expected everybody else to do so. It was not a matter for discussion with us children. We understood that we were not to ask any questions about it.

My sister’s expulsion was not an uncomplicated event for my father as principal of Stephanus Hofmeyer School, which was also part of Afrikaner hegemony. My father was expected to be an active member of the local Dutch Reformed Church: conducting Sunday school, being a church warden, the church choirmaster, as well as interpreter for the local dominee. The Reverend Lukas van der Merwe was certainly not an easy person to work with. He was a bully, a racist, a chauvinist of the worst kind. It is difficult to remember a redeeming feature in him. His wife was a gentle woman who endured many abuses, some of them public, from her ill-tempered husband. She was a kindly woman who was a source of great comfort and assistance to many local women, especially in matters of health. She saved many lives in a place far from medical facilities and with poor means of transport. According to my mother, I owe my own life to her. I contracted severe whooping cough at the age of three months. It was the advice given by Mrs Van der Merwe, together with the remedies she brought from Louis Trichardt to dampen the cough, which my mother is convinced saved my life.

As pupils from the local school, one of our responsibilities was to keep the dominee’s house and yard clean. This entailed sweeping the open spaces between the fruit trees around his house with makeshift brooms fashioned from local bushes. We were not allowed to touch any of the delicious-looking fruit on the trees. It took extraordinary discipline for children our age to do so, but the alternative was too ghastly to contemplate. The dominee was a merciless man.

He ruled his congregation at the Kranspoort Mission Station like a farmer presiding over his property. He took over the communal mission fruit farm, employed his parishioners at starvation wages and denigrated them in the most racist way. He had a peculiar sense of morality which he applied to blacks under his charge. They were not to drink alcohol of any kind, on pain of expulsion from the mission, or suspension from the church sacraments for three months. This prohibition was a puritanical version of the liquor laws of the time, which prohibited Africans from buying and consuming ‘European’ alcohol. He also decreed that any unmarried woman who became pregnant faced immediate expulsion from the mission – being given a trekpas (dismissal) as the practice was referred to, no different from the sanctions racist farmers used against ‘stubborn natives’. He was himself not a teetotaller, nor did we know enough about his morality to be convinced that he was the puritan he insisted others should be.

A particularly painful memory I have is of a classmate who fell pregnant during her first year at boarding school at the age of about fourteen. She had one of those ‘one-night affairs’ with an older boy from the village whose father was a trusted assistant to the dominee as the chief koster (church bell-ringer and usher). She came from one of the poorest families. Her mother had been abandoned by her father, who married another woman and left her without any means of support except charity from locals. The girl was cast out in her pathetic pregnant state. After giving birth to a sickly child, she was not allowed to come home to whatever emotional support her mother could have provided. The death of her miserable child almost a year later released her from her agony. She came back to the village and was assisted by her elder sister to return to high school, and later qualified as a primary school teacher.

My father negotiated a fine line between obedience to and defiance of this racist tyrant. He understood that he was in the belly of the beast, but was not prepared to sacrifice his human dignity in the process of surviving. He enjoyed his beer and other alcoholic beverages with a ‘coloured’ friend of his, Mr Philip Bekker, who lived in a neighbouring ‘coloured’ village. The dominee knew all about this aspect of my father’s life, but never raised it. He probably sensed the limits which my father had set in their relations.

I remember my mother proudly relating to her friends how much the dominee respected my father, in spite of his racism. She said that whenever my father accompanied the dominee on district parish visits, they would be invited by his Afrikaner friends for lunch. They would set a separate table for my father in the same diningroom! That was an honour in the 1960s in rural racist South Africa.

The high-handedness of this man eventually led to a mass expulsion of two-thirds of the mission villagers between 1955 and 1956. The events were the product of local and national grievances coinciding and igniting into open rebellion. It was a significant development involving people who had been compliant and docile. Most of the men in the village were migrant workers, a significant proportion of whom were working as labourers on the Witwatersrand. The Defiance Campaign of the 1950s, the Kliptown Congress of the People of 1955, and the anti-­pass campaign triggered by the extension of the pass laws to women, kindled a rebellious spirit in many of these migrants, who in turn influenced their relatives in Kranspoort. It required only a small spark to set the mission village alight. This spark was provided by the dominee when he refused to allow an old woman, the mother of a resident of the village, to be buried in the mission graveyard, because she was a ‘heathen’ (someone who had not converted to Christianity). This old woman used to live on a farm in the mountains above the mission village and had been brought to her daughter’s home for nursing in the twilight of her life.

The battle for the right to have her buried was a fierce and sad one. I have only a vague recollection of it, because I was then only seven years old. I must rely on my mother’s recollection of the events. The village was divided between those who supported the dominee’s ruling, referred to as boDaza, and those defying it, the boSofasonke (We will die together). It is noteworthy that in the 1950s there was a strong following of the Sofasonke party in the poorest parts of Soweto, and some of the migrant workers may have brought the name back with them for this local struggle. The old woman was defiantly buried in the mission graveyard with the church bells rung by the rebels, who physically took control of the church grounds, Police were called in to protect the dominee. He was beside himself with anger after being humiliated by the public defiance, which included some militant women poking their fingers at his face and calling him ‘Lukas’ (his first name) instead of the usual respectful Moruti (Preacher).

The conflict raged for months after that episode. The rebellious residents were arrested under various excuses by security policemen and beaten. But they would not give in. A massive removal was then executed with the support of the police. People known to be part of the Sofasonke were given short notice to pack and go. There was no compensation for the property they lost. Many also lost household effects and personal clothing in the rush to leave before the deadline. They left their houses standing, some with furniture, which was later stolen or destroyed by the elements. Only about a third of the village residents remained. These were largely families of civil servants or other people who kept out of the conflict for fear of repercussions. There were bitter feuds between the two groups, and physical and other forms of violence were traded between them regularly.

My father in his usual quiet way successfully walked the tightrope between remaining a loyal civil servant and not antagonising those who were up in arms against the dominee. It was not easy. He took advantage of my mother’s eighth pregnancy to send the vulnerable members of his family away at the beginning of 1956 to his natal home in Uitkyk. My mother and my younger brother, Phoshiwa, went to live at my mother’s family home in Krantzplaas, where she could receive prenatal care from a nearby clinic. There were no clinics in Uitkyk at the time.

Sethiba, my younger brother, and I were left in the care of my paternal grandparents. My elder sister, Mashadi, was placed in the care of my mother’s cousin’s family, the Mahapas, while my elder brother, Matha­batha, remained at Kranspoort with my father. It was the first family separation, and it was not easy for us at all. The only reason I can now think of why all the children did not go with my mother was that my paternal grandparents would not have approved of ‘their grandchildren’ being looked after at my mother’s natal home. We were naturally not consulted in the matter. The separation from both parents for the sake of keeping the peace between the Rampheles and the Mahlaelas was traumatic for us. We resented it and cried a lot over it.

Sethiba was then in Sub A, and attended a nearby local school which catered for only Sub A and B. I had to go to G. H. Frantz Secondary School, some three kilometres from my grandparents’ home. Fortunately an older cousin of mine, Mbatha, attended secondary school there and could give me a lift on his bicycle. But I had to walk home from school on those occasions when he had afternoon activities. I found that hard, not only because of the long distance for my eight-year-old frame, but particularly because hunger was a constant companion. There was no lunch packed for me nor was I given pocket money to buy snacks from the village shop. I was regularly rescued by my mother’s cousin, who was teaching at the same school and living near by. She would give me food during the school break.

Breakfast in my grandparents’ household was mainly tea and dry stale bread bought from the local store. There was often no food waiting for us when we got home after school. We would then have to make do with whatever leftovers were available from the previous day’s supper. Sethiba was even more miserable. He was expected to herd my grandfather’s sheep and goats after school, often without any food in his stomach. He also bore the full brunt of my grandfather’s authoritarianism and harsh approach to child-rearing. His six-year-old body was subjected to hunger and hard work for most of the nine months of our stay there. I was protected by the relative gentleness with which both my grandparents treated me. My tears, which flowed very readily each time I was hurt or miserable, were a useful lever for obtaining greater and gentler care. In contrast, Sethiba was under pressure to respond to my father’s edict that moshimane ke draad, ga a lle ge a e kwa bohloko (a boy is like a piece of wire and should not cry).

I saw my parents only once during the entire nine-month period. Given the distances involved, my father could only afford to come and see us during the June school holidays, and later took us to visit my mother. We had to be torn away from her at the end of the visit. Release came one Sunday morning in September while we were waiting with my grandmother to depart on a church trip to another parish twenty kilometres away. Someone came to tell my grandmother that my mother had just arrived with her new baby. I jumped for joy and ran all the way home. Sethiba could hardly recognise his mother. As she got off the donkey cart that brought her, he thought to himself: That woman with the baby looks like my mother. But he was not sure until my mother called out to him and hugged him. The joy of reunion was indescribable for the two of us. We giggled and danced to the music within our deprived hearts. Our family was finally reunited.

* * *

We moved back to Kranspoort where things had calmed down. The innocence of my childhood was brought to an abrupt end one Wednesday evening late in 1960 just before I went to the weekly evening prayer service. I was twelve years old. I ran to the toilet to relieve myself, only to be confronted by a bloody panty. I had no idea what was happening to me. I quickly changed and ran to church. My special prayer was for the Lord to make the blood go back to where it came from. It was one of my many unsuccessful pleas for God to intervene directly in my life. The blood continued to flow for four or five days.

Fortunately, Miriam Mokgadi Kutumela, one of the many young people who used to stay with us, noticed my bewilderment and offered advice and practical suggestions about appropriate hygienic measures. She also explained what it meant in terms of the development of my sexuality, pregnancy and matters relating to childbirth. She had got to know all these ‘facts of life’ from the initiation she underwent at puberty in her village. Ironically, the embracing of ‘Christian ways’ deprived us of such an exposure, while not creating other mechanisms to provide information about human development for young people. One had the worst of all worlds in this regard.

It never occurred to me to tell my mother even though I was close to her in many other ways. The silence which existed between children and adults around sexuality was absolute. I sensed that this was not a matter to raise with her. It took my mother almost a year before she found out that I had reached puberty. Even then she did not talk to me directly about it. She asked her best friend, Mrs Moshakga, to speak to me. Mrs Moshakga was in turn very indirect in her explanation of what puberty was about and said very little which satisfied my curiosity. She simply said, ‘This monthly flow of blood signals that you are now a woman. You should not sleep with boys, because you will then have a baby.’ But how could I be a woman at the age of twelve? What did sleeping with boys mean? And what was the connection between that and babies? I had to rely on Miriam to respond in detail to my questions, and to interpret some of the innuendoes. My father’s encyclopaedias also came in handy: I could read and follow the biological explanations with the aid of the diagrams.

It is interesting how little the discourse of sexuality between parents and their children has changed over the years, particularly among working-class people. In my work with adolescents in the Western Cape townships I came across the same silences, and the unwillingness of parents to be open to their children about sexuality and their growing bodies. Many young people still have to rely on friends for information about this vital area of life. It is a measure of how deeply entrenched are the mystique of the human body and the ambivalences we seem to have about sexuality. Some researchers have suggested that the incest taboo may have something to do with this silence. Talking about sex may itself be regarded as a sexual activity.