Читать книгу Colour Me Yellow - Thuli Nhlapo - Страница 5

no kid asked to be born

Even though no one called me by my name when I was a young child, I do have different sets of names. My real name is Khabonina. I’m told that’s the name Mother’s parents gave me when I was born. ‘Khabo’ means ‘home’ and ‘nina’ means ‘mother’. It’s an appropriate name given the circumstances under which I was born. Mother wasn’t married when I was born so that made me an illegitimate child. I was born before the era of moral degeneration, in the days when girls remained virgins until they were married, especially farm girls. Having a child out of wedlock – like some of us do these days without losing any sleep over it – was unusual back in the 1970s.

‘I cried daily when I was pregnant with you because I hated it.’

Mother never missed an opportunity to share this crucial piece of information with me. I was born when I wasn’t supposed to have been born. And she wasn’t thrilled. Even though she’s never given reasons for her disclosure, I gathered that she wanted to make sure I didn’t forget.

As a result of my having been born ‘too early’, my youngest aunt on Mother’s side still doesn’t like me very much. Apparently, she had to sacrifice her share of cow’s milk because Maternal Grandpa made sure I was well fed, even if it meant his last-born daughter had to be weaned off cow’s milk a bit early. Why fight over cow’s milk? Anyway, why was I not breast-fed?

Had my birth been registered in Standerton or Bethal soon after I was born, you might know me as Khabonina Mtsweni. Mtsweni is Maternal Grandpa’s surname, which he was willing to give me. Even during his last days on earth he had no qualms about sharing his surname with me – all he wanted was for my ‘parents’ to tell me the whole truth in front of him. Unfortunately, the ‘parents’ didn’t think it was necessary. Since God has recalled Maternal Grandpa, I can’t have his surname even if I were to cry for it daily. Who would sign the affidavit to give me permission to use it? That’s what our Home Affairs Department would want – an affidavit from those who own the surname.

I’m known as Thuli – which is short for Thulisile. That’s the name on my birth certificate and on my identity document. Since there are few things that are known for certain about my childhood, circumstances surrounding my acquiring the name are also different. It all depends on who is telling the story and what their motives are, which is mainly to be polite and not hurt my feelings.

One version is that lobola was paid for my mother before I was born, so the family of Father (her husband) was supposed to give me their name but they didn’t.

A second version, which is as creative as the first, makes it more difficult to decide which is the accurate one. It is said I left Maternal Grandpa’s home where I was born on a farm known as Khabonina but when I joined Paternal Grandmother’s home near Pretoria, she decided not to endure further embarrassment by keeping a name that would raise questions. Paternal Grandmother changed my name from Khabonina to Thulisile after revisiting the events surrounding my birth.

She was told I had been quiet all day in my mother’s womb, showing no signs of being ready to emerge, but all of a sudden I was born without problems but in total silence. I understand Mother’s agitation about the fact that her husband’s sisters came all the way from Pretoria by train to see her before I was born with only one basin of baby clothes. This was another factor contributing to Mother’s dislike of me because there she was, a pretty new bride having given birth to a so-called first-born child with the greatest womaniser in a small town and his family didn’t share the excitement. Had Mother known better, she would have run away from the marriage because those were troubling signs. But, as they always claim, love is blind.

The third version about my naming sounds plausible, but the others also seem true and believable, which is why I just choose whichever one I want, depending on the weather and my mood. It was said that in naming me Thulisile, Paternal Grandmother was giving me the name of one of her daughters. Apparently Thulisile was the name of one of the aunts, the second from last, who turned out to be Mother’s main competitor in spending her husband’s money and in child bearing.

In an African way, it is said that a name follows a child, which is why care and thought are applied when naming a baby. Even though you meet Matlakala (dirt), Nthofela (a thing), Tlhoriso (suffering), Goodknows and Guilty at shopping malls and in soccer grandstands, those African names mean something to those children. Someone added that the names follow those children if, and only if, the children themselves believe them.

Since I have many names, at least my choice is not limited – I can choose which one I like any day and certainly which one to live up to. There seems to be more than one name that was passed over. The aunt I’m supposed to be named after also shares a name with Mother. Mother Johanna and Aunt Johanna. It seems it was written in the stars that those two would be lifelong competitors. But that’s where similarities between us end. She has three children, two boys and a girl – all out of wedlock and all from different fathers, and she didn’t know either their families or surnames. After a string of failed relationships and failed attempts to appease ancestors, she was growing older as a single woman.

I have been told that during the old system in South Africa every person had to have two names, a traditional name and a Christian name. That meant I wasn’t going to be just Thulisile, I had to have a Christian name. To that effect, Paternal Grandmother gave me her own name, Ennie – perhaps pretending that this yellow little thing was now a full member of her family with Nhlapo as her surname. I was legitimate in the eyes of all and on paper – the problem was that the Nhlapo family refused to accept me in their hearts. No matter how hard I tried to belong, they made sure I remained an outsider.

I grew up feeling that I was always an intruder, first in Mother’s womb, then in her decent family home, and later in the family of Mother’s in-laws. After years of trying to extract bits of information about myself from Mother dearest with minimal success, I’ve concluded that if a mother didn’t want to be pregnant with a child, she would make a concerted effort either to forget everything about that child or to bury the information deep down in a place that she knows she won’t ever visit. The unwanted child, even if it was born alive, ceased to exist in its mother’s mind the day she made up her mind not to want it.

What has taken me a very long time to grasp is that no matter how hard the unwanted child tries to be good in life, his or her efforts have very little or no impact at all on the mother’s feelings or actions. In the mother’s mind, an unwanted baby remains an unwanted problem, something to be swept under the carpet and hidden from the eyes of society.

Some say that women are born nurturers. Our societies want us to believe that when a mother sees her baby for the first time, even if she didn’t want it, some instinct kicks in and she’s immediately filled with this flowing and amazing love. It might have happened sometime in history but not in my life. And, having met other unwanted babies, I’m convinced we could form Unwanted Babies Anonymous with no difficulty at all. At our meetings, where I’d make sure I was voted founder and president, we won’t refer to ourselves as unwanted adults because what was unwanted was the babies that we were. These babies need to heal before growing up into happy and wanted adults. In some low-budget American movies I’ve seen, some unwanted babies do turn out to be loved by their mothers in the end – but then that’s a movie. The ending always has to be positive so as not to upset viewers.

As someone with ambitions of establishing Unwanted Babies Anonymous, I can tell you that Mother may be in her happiest mood, but let me walk through the door or try to take part in the conversation and her mood changes so quickly you’d swear I’d got the control button to her emotions. Unless there’re people from the church visiting, my appearance signals the end of Mother’s happiness. If you have a mother like that, you learn to walk on eggshells all the time because you have no idea what’s going to trigger her irritation with you. It becomes even worse if her husband has a short fuse because you then believe that it’s your sole duty and responsibility to fix everything and everyone and try to ensure there’s peace in the home. Sadly, in the process of making peace, you learn to forget about yourself.

You learn to move on when you are a young adult facing life’s deeper questions that only more mature adults can help you answer, but none is willing. You try to move the puzzles in your life in such a way so that the pieces all fit in; crooked as they may appear, you try to fit them in to look nice and orderly. The only challenge you face is that, deep down, the longing persists. It’s like someone inside you keeps reminding you of what’s missing. Nevertheless, to keep the peace and live a normal life as expected by society, you carry on with your inside void properly concealed from the outside world.

* * *

I must have been a peculiar child because I do not have any recollection of events from the time I was born up to the time I started school. There is no picture of me as a baby anywhere in the family archives. So not only did I not know what happened in the first six years of my life, I don’t even know what I looked like! No matter how hard I’ve strained my imagination, I can’t remember what games I played or where I lived or with whom. The only memories I have of my early life begin in grade one when I started formal schooling.

My memory lapse about some parts of my childhood can’t be blamed on not trying to remember because I’ve tried most methods of treatment, from an ancient Chinese method to nearly having my brain ‘shocked’. I was willing to try having wires placed in my brain until it was properly explained that the procedure would help me to forget some stuff – to remove it, not to remember it.

To make peace with the gaps in my memory, I’ve settled on a suitable explanation. If my Creator and my ancestors didn’t think it was necessary for me to remember some of the things in detail, I wouldn’t remember them. And, if they did not want me to remember, then they had a good reason that they won’t bother to share with me. Whenever people ask, as they always do, where was I born and where I grew up I always have to say that between my birth and the age of six or so I lived on a farm. Then from eight, nine or ten years I was either in Pretoria or in some rural village.

The place where Father lived near Pretoria was a brilliant choice for bringing up a child like me. It was also best for a large family who were enthusiastic churchgoers. It was not a township but it cannot be called a rural village – it was somewhere in between. I heard that because of the regulations in those days of segregation, Father didn’t qualify for a four-roomed government house in Mabopane or Soshanguve townships. For one to qualify for a house in those townships, one was supposed to have worked in Pretoria for fifteen years. Since Father worked in Newcastle and later in Germiston, he didn’t have a permit to look for a house in the two nearby townships.

Knowing Paternal Grandmother, I doubt whether Father would have been allowed to leave the family commune even if he had qualified for a house. Mother was barely twenty years old when she got married to the man who had to leave her with his family in order to work as a long-distance truck driver. The fact that Mother arrived with a baby further complicated the honeymoon. I later discovered that there were strict instructions from Father that his wife was not allowed to pick up a handbag and go out to work like other women did. Father prided himself on being a good provider for his family, which initially included his extended family, and notably his mother. And to give credit where it is due, Father was a good provider because the family wasn’t poor. We were among the very few who owned more than one car, bought watermelons and bags of oranges and at least half a lamb and plenty of boerewors just for a weekend.

While Father didn’t miss an opportunity to announce his financial muscle, his mother told anyone who cared to listen that God gave her only two sons while five girls followed. They were the golden boys who were to maintain her financially, as well as her daughters and her daughters’ children.

‘I only have two boys, no miscarriage, no stillborn. These two are what God gave me. Their father died when they were still young and I brought them up alone. My boys listen to me. They will always do what I tell them to do.’

That was Paternal Grandmother’s mantra. At the time I thought it was hers only, but later in life I discovered that many older black women sang the same mantra. Those old women controlled their sons to the extent that they decided who they would marry, how they got married and how many times they could get ‘it’ up with their wives.

Even though we didn’t live in the dark ages, the family had a set of rules and customs that is very difficult to understand these days. One of the customs was that when a new bride arrived, according to the family tradition, she had to cook in Paternal Grandmother’s kitchen until she decided to set her free to go and cook in her own kitchen in her own home (ukukotiza). Her sons could not just move into their own homes with their brides. Paternal Grandmother was the one who made the decision as to when the bride was ready to move to her own house.

The strange thing about this custom is that I still don’t know whether it belonged to Zulus, Swatis or Sothos or to just any oppressive black family. A new bride could not get her hands on her husband’s salary or wages. In our case, Mother’s husband saved all his pay envelopes for the months he was away to hand over to his mother, Paternal Grandmother, when he returned home. Mother wasn’t allowed to accept money from her husband. She had to kneel before her mother-in-law every time she needed to buy anything, from pantyhose to toothpaste or even clothes for her baby (me at that time). From infancy, I became used to surviving with only essential clothing – nothing fancy and nothing much.

I still don’t understand what made everyone, including me, terrified of Paternal Grandmother. She got everything she wanted – no matter what. I was told that during the time that new brides still cooked in her kitchen, she used to sit on a chair and watch them trying to iron her sons’ clothes. Should she feel that a shirt wasn’t being ironed properly, she didn’t waste time. She tugged at it with her walking stick and threw it to the floor.

‘That’s not how you iron my son’s shirt,’ said Paternal Grandmother in her deep voice. ‘I’ll do it myself because you don’t know how to.’

* * *

Since I don’t remember what happened in my formative years, I’ll have to start the story of my life from grade one. I was between five and six years old and at that time I can safely say that Paternal Grandmother’s practice of leaning very hard on her two sons benefited her family financially. For the standards of that time, and the place where we lived, the family was well off because the sons provided for everyone financially. Because I was still very young, I can’t remember how often the two sons returned home. As long-distance truck drivers they were not often around – especially Father because his employers were outside Pretoria.

But on those weekends when they arrived home it was clear to all in the yard. On those occasions, I’d wake up to find Mother packing equal portions of meat into medium-sized white dishes and covering them with white or blue netting. We are talking here about a nicely cut lamb and boerewors for three households. Given that there were no children at Older Brother’s home, and as the so-called older daughter of the other provider, I was entrusted with the distribution of food to the other houses. I hated the task. I was tiny and sickly most of the time, although no one seemed to notice. To make sure I didn’t mess up, I’d deliver the meat dishes one at a time. The first was for Paternal Grandmother’s kitchen. The second was for our family – that is, when Mother was finally free to cook in her own kitchen.

The biggest problem was delivering the third dish to Second Aunt. My knees would be knocking against each other nervously and my little hand trembled when I knocked at her door. She wouldn’t respond by saying ‘come in’ even though she was already up. And she knew that I’d be coming with the provisions from her brother.

Second Aunt, bless her soul, never made any attempt to pretend she liked me – not even once. By then I knew the ploy of returning to Mother’s house claiming no one had answered the door wouldn’t work, because she’d simply send me back. So, I’d knock, and knock, and continue to knock, with that white dish firmly balanced on my head. I didn’t dare put it down because then she would accuse me of having dirtied the meat: ‘What do you think I am – a dog that must eat meat covered in dust?’ she once barked at me. The number of knocks and the time I spent waiting depended on her mood.

‘Good morning,’ I’d say when I eventually walked into her house, taking the dish off my head. Second Aunt never once responded to my greeting. All she did was grab the dish, take out the meat and then throw the dish back at me. I always had to guess in which direction the dish would be thrown because if I wasn’t careful it would hit my face.

Then there was another strange tradition. If the two sons arrived on a Friday night they would spend half the night with their mother and sisters while their wives were waiting in their houses. They didn’t take into account that the wives were still young, that their husbands spent much of their time working away from home and therefore they needed to bond. No, the brothers belonged to their mother and sisters until deep into the night.

Father’s family was odd indeed. I still have to laugh when I remember how they sabotaged his ambition. He owned a successful coal business and had a mind to open a coal yard selling sacks and buckets, which we called amagogogo, to the local community. A big truck would arrive to deliver a big load of small coals (we called them smokeless) and sometimes the big ones that smoked when they were burnt.

Because Father would be away at work, male cousins, their mothers and Paternal Grandmother did as they pleased, giving Mother a headache in the process. All the households in the yard had coal stoves and Second Aunt would make sure to keep her stove burning with free coal the whole weekend, both day and night, just to waste enough coal to make sure that Father’s profit suffered.

Imagine it, the boiling Pretoria sun and my aunt’s stove plates glowing red with free coal! Second Aunt would stand by the table holding a heavy iron. If she was ironing clothes it might have been understandable, but in order to keep the stove burning the whole day, this woman would even iron yellow dusters, floor cloths and anything that wouldn’t be burnt by her thick iron. Because her home faced the area where I played, from time to time I saw her coming out with her iron to rub it on the ground, which meant she’d burnt something and it was stuck underneath the iron.

It wasn’t possible to waste all the coal, so older cousins would make sure to steal the cash every time they served a customer and even went to the extent of walking straight into our house to liberate some of the money made from coal sales. Sooner rather than later, the business had to close down.

Despite being odd, Father’s family was an interesting one. There was hardly a dull moment when all the family members were around. I’m not supposed to know about the following event, but I do because not everyone in the family was as diplomatic as Mother. When Mother was pregnant with her second child – a boy – who would be the firstborn son and family heir, the sisters and Paternal Grandmother were not impressed. A bride having more babies meant less money for Paternal Grandmother and her daughters. To make sure Mother didn’t give birth to the child, the story goes that one day when she was just over seven months pregnant the aunts followed her to the well (we didn’t have taps – and wells were called amapitsi those days). Without any provocation, the aunts punched Mother’s big tummy, which led to her giving birth to a premature baby who died soon after birth.

Try asking Mother what actually happened and she’ll curse you for digging up old ‘stuff’ before lying to you by saying she tripped and fell into the well and didn’t receive proper medical attention afterwards. The truth was that that incident had a negative impact on Mother, who struggled to conceive another baby afterwards. No matter how hard it is for me to understand that I was an unwanted baby, I do understand the love that Mother had for her other children, especially the one who was born long after her premature baby boy died. To drive the point home, Mother named her little girl Hope because she said Hope had kept her alive. The other name goes something like Ngibadelisile, ‘I’ve shown them’, and that’s what came into Mother’s mind when she first held her little girl: ‘My in-laws thought they had sorted me out, that I’d never conceive again but here she is – I’ve proved them wrong.’

As if to prove another point Mother conceived another baby soon after the darling of the family was born. The problem was that it was a boy and once again Paternal Grandmother didn’t take kindly to the fact. As a result of Paternal Grandmother’s angry ‘black’ heart, the elders said, the baby cried non-stop. When the problem persisted, Mother was forced to take the newborn to different doctors but nothing helped. No medical practitioner was able to tell her what was wrong with the baby and no amount of medication helped to calm the little boy down. In desperation, Mother packed her bags and headed to her father’s house with her sick baby. Maternal Grandpa was a praying man, deeply spiritual, truthful and honest, and he didn’t believe in mixing his Jesus with the ancestors. When Mother arrived with the crying baby, Maternal Grandpa took one look at it and his Spirit told him what to do.

‘I am sending you back to fetch your mother-in-law because I want to talk to her,’ he said.

When Mother returned she was accompanied by her mother-in-law who had been summoned by Maternal Grandpa. That was how he resolved issues until the day he died – he never went behind anyone’s back.

Maternal Grandpa didn’t say too many things to Paternal Grandmother.

‘This baby is not sick,’ he said. ‘You know in your heart what’s wrong. So, take your makoti and the baby back to your home and sort them out.’ Those were wise words from Maternal Grandpa who then said a prayer and set the Nhlapo family free to go and get their house in order.

I was told that when Paternal Grandmother returned home, she took the child close to the place where the family threw coal ashes and mumbled some angry words to the ancestors. As from that night, the baby didn’t cry and he never got sick – not until after his twenty-first birthday when he had a cold and missed a few days at work. Because Older Brother was childless and the first boy was born prematurely after some unfortunate events, the one whom Maternal Grandpa rescued from the grave was the family’s only boy and the apple of Mother’s eye.

Again, I might not like Mother’s husband very much but I knew he was a good father to his own children and in his own way he loved them dearly. In fact, Father would climb mountains to meet his children’s needs, but then he’d also climb Mount Kilimanjaro to make sure I remained in bondage, under his spell and as miserable as possible.

It’s something he started doing when I was a child. I remember one Sunday when we were coming back from the NG Kerk in Klipgat. I was wearing my nice white socks and lovely Sunday shoes and a beautiful girlie dress. He was driving his white Ford Fairlane, which was a big long car. While we were used to riding in his car to and from church, that particular Sunday was different because instead of parking the car inside the yard, Father left the car outside, just a little way from the gate. After the other passengers had gone into the house and I was about to open the door, he gave me one of his killer looks before ordering me to come to the front seat. Mother was sitting in the passenger seat but she made way as if to allow me to occupy the seat. But she didn’t have to move because apparently that was not what her husband had in mind. After shouting that I was stupid, he dragged me to the driver’s seat and Mother got out and made her way to the gate.

‘I’ll only say it once so you better listen very carefully, you fool,’ he barked at me because I was distracted and my eyes were following Mother. ‘This is the clutch, the brake and the accelerator. Look at these things, you stupid thing. You press the clutch down with your stupid foot then put your other stupid foot slightly on the accelerator. Slowly, you release the foot on the clutch and press the accelerator, then the car moves. It’s as simple as that.’

That was a good lesson for a short, barely seven-year-old girl who was in no way fit to move such a big car. In my mind I was thinking that as an adult I’d try to remember the lesson when suddenly Father grabbed me with considerable force and helped my small feet on to the pedals he had told me about.

Before I knew what was happening, he continued, ‘You’re going to move this car into the yard. If you dare, I repeat, dare to mess up my car, you’re dead.’

Only then did it dawn on me that he expected me to drive the car into the yard. I hesitated and he slapped my hand so hard I made the mistake of pushing hard on the accelerator.

‘You damn fool,’ he said as he moved to stand inside the gate. ‘You damage any part of my car, you fix it. Now move the car, I don’t have the whole day.’

His eyes were blood red and his mouth was trembling and I knew I was in trouble. Tears rolled down my cheeks. At the speed of lightning, he managed to slap me at least three times before returning to the spot where he could watch me drive his car into the yard. Perhaps he could see the tip of my head inside the car but I couldn’t see anything except the dashboard. I was shaking and in the process I wet myself. The more I tried to move the car, the more it continued to make a loud noise. I prayed because he was on his way back to me again and that meant another round of slaps. Before he could reach me I tried so hard to move it that the car jumped. He also jumped aside and Mother came out of the door.

‘Just move the car,’ she said. ‘What can be difficult about that?’ And she disappeared into the house.

Now, let me state clearly that Mother had never attempted to drive a car and she never ever bothered to try. Once again, I was on my own and I had to make a plan either to smash Father’s car and face being killed, or move the car into the yard after one driving lesson and still survive to tell the story. Nothing enraged Father as much as a crying child. He hated it when he slapped, insulted or shouted at you and you wept. Somehow, in between the tears and the urine all mixed together, I calmly moved the car inside the gate without even seeing where I was going because I was too short.

All I could hear was Father shouting, ‘Stop, fool! Do you want to climb the stoep?’

I was relieved. Miraculously, I had done it. True to her nature, Mother did not come to my rescue but, as always, stood by her husband. To avoid being brutalised again for the urine on the seat, I immediately rubbed my dress on the seat and when father opened the door, I left the car and ran into the house and straight to my room.

Because Mother was serving tea to her good husband, no one noticed that I had changed my clothes and my wet panties. Upon my reappearance, there we were, a happy family waiting to have a big lunch on Paternal Grandmother’s veranda as though nothing unusual had happened. Because the cousins and aunts were watching through the window, probably happy to see that the boesman and the yellow thing was put to shame once again, I had to survive unwelcome giggles, knowing looks and nudges during the entire delicious lunch. For some reason I didn’t feel like eating, so I emptied my plate onto one of my cousins’.

Father didn’t travel to work in the Ford Fairlane – he left it under the tree in the yard. There were other cars in the garage. I celebrated a small victory when the Fairlane broke down. Driving wasn’t the only task I had to carry out on that car. As an ambitious mechanic, Father always wore an overall when he worked underneath the car. On those occasions, I had to play his assistant mechanic. I knew the spanners by name, the bobbejan, number 12, shifting – you name it, I knew what every tool inside his tool box was called. Memorising the names and knowing the tools didn’t mean I was intelligent – I was just scared shitless. While he was under the car, he called out the names of what he wanted and I had to give them to him as quickly as possible. Failure to do so would mean that I’d risk seeing him come out from under the car to perform mechanic duties on my body. And he wouldn’t go to the house to get his belt or his sjambok, he would use the very tool I had forgotten the name of to discipline me and to make sure that the next time I didn’t forget it. If there’s one thing I’ll thank Second Aunt for, it was for pouring sugar into the petrol tank thereby damaging the engine beyond repair. But she wasn’t doing me a favour, she was being mean, just being a Nhlapo and merely following family tradition. But her action meant a lot to me.

The madness could have continued forever in Paternal Grandmother’s yard but one night I noticed that Mother was packing goods inside boxes and wrapping fragile stuff such as glasses in newspaper. Before I knew it, a big red lorry was standing in front of our house. We were moving away from Paternal Grandmother’s family. At the time it didn’t matter where we were going – the happy news was that we were leaving the yard, leaving the other houses behind. And, yes, we were leaving everyone else behind. It was just Father, Mother and us – the three kids – who were leaving.

I prayed that we were moving to a place where I would be able to play with other children. In my mind I imagined some of them might also be boesman and yellow but we all played together and we were happy. I couldn’t understand that whenever I dreamed of being happy and playing with other kids, I’d imagine the father that I didn’t know playing with my hair and I’d bury my face in his chest. Those days I’d wake up smiling and feeling very light, only to realise that it was just a dream and I didn’t remember what my daddy looked like. I didn’t know him. It was only in my dreams that we were happy together.