Читать книгу To Survive and Succeed - Mkhuseli Jack - Страница 7

A home, and school, at last!

We arrived at my grandfather’s house to a warm and noisy welcome. He was surrounded by an army of his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. There was such joy and I honestly thought we were being welcomed by the whole local community! The homestead consisted of three separate houses. My grandfather worked for Mr Henry Potgieter, who had agreed that we could stay as long as we didn’t turn the place into a ‘lokasie’ (the Afrikaans version of ‘location’, the place where blacks live in the cities; the name has racial undertones).

My grandfather’s house was far from the farmer’s house, or any other farmer’s house for that matter. We had space. We were free from harassment by the white farmers for making a noise or any of the other transgressions labourers were accused of. There must have been close to sixteen children of my age group – around seven or eight years old – and scores of older children living at my grandfather’s place. It wasn’t a novelty to me and my siblings to be at the sea: we were all born less than two kilometres from where the Gamtoos River mouth meets the Indian Ocean. But it was fun to live close enough to play in the rock pools.

I loved the smell of the sea, the crashing of the giant waves, the feel of the soft white sand as we ran on the beach and explored the dunes where we gorged ourselves on duine bessies (dune berries), goggoms (sour figs) and isiphingo (cat-thorn berries).

All in all, there were probably about 40 of us at my grandfather’s homestead. One of them was an old man in his eighties, Mntlane – who we children also called grandfather – from the amaNtlane clan. His origins were a mystery, at least to the youngsters – Xhosa children are not encouraged to be inquisitive about issues relating to older people. Mntlane was a strongly traditional man. He did not want anything to do with the Church and, when anything biblical came into a conversation, he didn’t take part. He smoked and chewed tobacco and was a wonderful storyteller. He was also a favourite among the children because he kept sweets in his animal-skin bags and dished them out one by one as a reward for any good deed he deemed needed to be recognised, or simply as encouragement.

I was fascinated by Mntlane’s bags because they were made from the skins of buck such as impunzi (duiker), ingxungxu (grysbok) and imbabala (bushbuck). He even had one made of monkey skin. He also kept his pipe, tobacco and chewing tobacco in those bags, as well as herbs and roots for medicinal use. He wore the bags diagonally across his chest and the long straps meant they hung around his hips.

We were all disappointed when Mntlane’s children, who lived in Port Elizabeth, came and took him away. He was much more approachable than our grandfather Kholisile, who was actually my mother’s uncle – her mother’s brother. He was known to us as Tamkhulu (grandfather) because my mother had grown up in his household. He had a number of children of his own and those we got to know particularly well, such as Uncle Oudenks, were born to his second wife, Grandma Mbombo.

Grandpa was a strict disciplinarian who controlled everything under his roof. He was a strong-willed, stubborn character who showed his displeasure and directed his fury towards anyone who dared contradict his wishes and instructions. Curious kids like me were not his favourite. Apparently I was too inquisitive and was therefore seen as a ‘problem’ child.

He was one of the black men drafted to fight alongside British King George VI’s troops during World War II, but I couldn’t get any information about this war from him: he had no clue where he’d gone to fight – he could have been drafted to Egypt – or on whose side, or who the enemy was. His grumpiness when talking about this war might have arisen from the fact that he was poorly rewarded for his service with just a brown coat, a bicycle and a dysfunctional rifle.

Despite his gruffness, family was very important to Grandpa. His household continued to swell with the birth of more great-grandchildren and eventually it became too much, a bit of a nightmare in fact. Once again, the adults were making plans to find alternative accommodation for us. We had been there for eight relatively glorious months.

In early 1965, a place was found for us nearby on Klipdrift farm – today the site of Oyster Bay Lodge. Mr Schuldeman Nortje owned the farm, which he had bought to rear and run cattle on. He was actually a rooibos-tea farmer and lived on his main farm near the little town of Kareedouw in the Langkloof area. Nortje never set any conditions for our stay on his farm, never demanded that we do anything for him in return – in fact, he did not worry about us at all.

I realised this when he came to the farm during the hunting season. It was as if we did not bother him in the least. He let us build our mud house, even grow our own vegetables. For that, I respected Schuldeman Nortje, and I still do, as does my entire family. In the years of freedom, if there is one person to whom we, as a family, owe huge gratitude, it is this Nortje farmer. The day we get our land restitution as a result of our land claim, he will be the first to get inkabi enkomo (an ox).

While we were living on this farm, my mother’s mother, who lived in Kirkwood, visited us a number of times. Although my memory of her visits is vague, I know that she was never close to me, nor to any of my siblings. The only one who knew her well was my sister Thandiwe, who was being brought up by our grandmother as was customary: in Xhosa culture, at least one or more children would be brought up by their grandparents.

Our granny was a traditional Xhosa woman through and through: her face was always painted with red and white clay, she wore beads and a big black doek on her head. She would sit on a reed mat with both legs stretched out in front of her and smoke her long pipe, called umbhekaphesheya.

My mother never shed light on why our granny was so aloof and never had time for us, but much later I heard one explanation in a conversation with a cousin who told me that granny was igqirakazi, a traditional healer.

* * *

I longed to learn to read and write, but there was no school close enough for me to walk to without wheezing badly. My asthma was so bad that when my chest was tight I could not walk 50 metres before I had to take a break and try to ease the panic. You could say that out of all my siblings, I was the weak one. My asthma attacks started when I was six and grew ever more frequent as I got to ten and then twelve years old. My mother tried everything, including modern medicine and traditional healers. I don’t think there was any remedy she did not apply or make me ingest. At one point I was being treated with dried porcupine guts! We were told that it served as uzifozonke (literally translated as something ‘to treat all illnesses’) – I guess something like a broad-spectrum antibiotic.

I had come to believe that I would never make it to school. But eventually, aged ten, I started attending Slangrivier Bantu Primary School that was four kilometres from home on Mr Freddy Bellingham’s farm. The building, a mud structure topped with corrugated-zinc sheeting, served as both church and school. On Sundays it was used by worshippers of the Anglican Church. It was one room only, no partitions. On Monday, a white cloth covered the pulpit where the priest or his lay preachers stood. It was the ‘holy’ part of the building and was not accessible to us. We were consistently warned that any transgression would be followed by dire consequences from a world never seen by anybody.

There were not enough desks for everyone and newcomers, such as me, had to sit on the floor. On hot days the room baked, on rainy days we froze our backsides off.

The school, which ranged from Sub A to Standard 4 (now Grades 1 to 6) had a total of 60 pupils. All the grades were taught by one teacher. Mr Thembile Msizi was everything – principal, administrator, teacher, sports master, and sometimes taxi driver or translator when there was a communication breakdown between labourers and farmers. Mr Msizi was a neatly dressed, highly dignified man who treated his work with utmost seriousness and passion. On the days that I managed to walk fast and arrive on time he would be standing in front of the children leading them in scripture reading and prayers at the morning assembly point.

Mr Msizi’s wife, who was also a teacher, replaced him as the head of the school when he was promoted to a high school. By the time she took over, all my older brothers had abandoned school to work as farm labourers in the potato fields of the Langkloof area. My older sister was a domestic worker for one of the farm owners.

I enjoyed learning to draw circles, to count and later to read and write in isiXhosa. We had no books at home, but I had always enjoyed stories. I particularly liked the biblical stories we were taught at school – stories of Abraham who was willing to sacrifice his son for his belief in God, and Moses who was born into slavery and grew up in the oppressive Pharaoh’s palace, but ended up leading his people to the land of milk and honey. In my first four years of schooling the biblical stories were more appealing to me than all the other lessons.

I started attending church only when I was thirteen. It was an Anglican Church and I used to watch the boys who were servers with great envy. The sermon that stood out for me was about two men, one wealthy, the other poor – Dives and Lazarus. The essence of the preacher’s sermon was that God is capable of hearing our pain and can bring our suffering to an end out of His love and mercy. The message I got was that there was something wrong with the situation we were facing as black people in our land.

On one occasion I accompanied my mother to the Anglican Church when an invitation was extended to the women in the surrounding farming community. It was said that a certain woman from the city was going to address them. I did not know her name, title, or the organisation she represented – I was just curious to see her and listen to her. My mother insisted that I was not invited – the invitation was only for women. I pleaded with her to let me tag along and promised I would behave and she reluctantly agreed.

The woman arrived driving a car. A black woman driving a car! That was a first for me. I wanted to touch her, but I could not as I had promised to behave myself. The women who were assigned to meet her greeted her first. I saw them talking to her and they started to escort her towards the other women to whom she was introduced, one by one. As she came closer to my mother I decided to put on my best face and was so proud of my mother when she was also appropriately introduced to a person who definitely, in my little world, was of high class. The woman touched my head and asked my name. When I told her, she smiled and said: ‘We need a lot of Mkhuselis in this troubled country of ours.’ I loved the attention but did not understand what her comment meant.

During her address, she told the Bible story of a certain King Ahab, his wife Jezebel, and a vineyard owned by Naboth, the king’s subject. Apparently the king wanted Naboth’s vineyard for his personal use. He offered Naboth money or a vineyard somewhere else, but Naboth told the king: ‘I inherited this vineyard from my ancestors. The Lord forbids that I should let you have it.’ The king became very angry. His wife told him that she was going to organise people to deal with Naboth. Stories were spread that Naboth had insulted the king and God and finally he was stoned to death. When Jezebel got the news that he was dead she told the king to take possession of the vineyard.

Our important visitor said God did not like what the king and his wife had done. By the time she reached the point where a prophet was telling the king what would happen to him and his children, my mind was lit up and my imagination had wandered far away. I was suddenly filled with sorrow. I looked up at my mother but she did not respond to my gaze. The realisation hit me – a boy of fourteen – that the Bible was saying that taking somebody’s land was a sin. The only consolation was that we were still alive. We had not been stoned like Naboth because a greedy king coveted land Naboth had inherited from his ancestors.

This story had a lasting impact on me. Before we went to Oyster Bay to squat on other people’s land we used to have land we called our own. Before we were evicted we had limitless access to vast grazing and arable land. It was my understanding that this had been the land of our kinsmen for generations.

As the woman was driving home her point about the unacceptable behaviour of the king and his wife, I recalled our tears of despair and pleas for help after being made homeless and landless. The message that my brothers and sisters kept repeating to us – that we were ‘reasonably prosperous’ before we were uprooted from the farm – was ringing in my ears, and it did not go away.

I was impressed by what the speaker was saying, and by her appearance. She was neatly dressed and was wearing a nice perfume. Her skin was smooth, without a single blemish or any sign of hardship as was the case with the farm women. She was of the same class of women that we called iNgesikazi, meaning an English woman. This Ngesikazi meant that she was of a higher class than our missuses, that is, the wives of the farmers. The farmers’ wives were always simply and cheaply dressed compared with those who were regarded as classy English women.

The English classy woman we used as a benchmark was Mrs Phoebe van Tonder. We nicknamed her Nomgcikilwane, describing her slender, elegant figure. Nomgcikilwane was always dressed as if she was off to attend a high-class social function in Johannesburg where, the rumour said, she had come from. She was dressed like that even when she was instructing us to dig a hole for a new tip for rubbish, or to level the gravel roads after heavy rain. You could smell her perfume even when she was out of sight. Her nails and high-heeled shoes were always perfectly polished and she was never without her make-up and bright red lipstick.