Mother to Mother, Page 3

  ‘Mandy!’ Mrs Nelson screams.

  That is what the white woman I work for calls me: Mandy. She says she can’t say my name. Says she can’t say any of our native names because of the clicks. My name is Mandisa. MA-NDI-SA. Do you see any click in that?

  Anyway, this day, here she comes, her eyes on stalks. ‘Grab your bag, I’m taking you to the station,’ she says. Now it is my turn to be astonished. What has come into her head?

  ‘But, Madam,’ I say, ‘I’m still cooking.’ I am not a little surprised, I can tell you. After all, this is Wednesday, a day on which I do not get to leave this place till as late as eight o’clock most times. I cannot imagine what has come over her, for her to tell me I should leave work early. On Wednesday, too. Usually, on this day she makes sure I not only cook and serve dinner but wash the last desert spoon before I can leave. Be that as it may, I am not complaining, though. In some ways, this is also the best day of my work week.

  Wednesday’s my mlungu woman’s ‘day off’, if you can imagine that. A woman gets a day off when she never does any work around this house. But I’m not complaining. Indeed, I look forward to her day off almost as much as I welcome mine on Sunday. Wednesday, I can breathe instead of having Mrs Nelson breathing down my neck every minute of the blessed day: Mandy, do this! Mandy, do that! Mandy, come here! Mandy, go there!

  However, on Wednesdays, all morning long I am free as air. First, she goes to the gym. She says it’s a big hall where everybody jumps up and down so they will not get old or sick or fat. Madam’s very scared of getting old. And she thinks she can stop old coming to her. She doesn’t know it comes quietly, when she’s fast asleep, or when she’s busy eating all those zimuncumuncu that she likes so much.

  She doesn’t even take the two girls to school. Mrs Thompson from up the road does that, and brings them back after school. Madam does the same for her on Fridays. I guess that’s Mrs Thompson’s day off.

  Madam tells me that after all that jumping up and down and her running, she gets so hungry she could eat a horse. So what does she do? This person who is so afraid of getting fat? Why, she has breakfast with her best friend, Miss Joan, who never married. Miss Joan is just the same as the no-marry women of the church, the nuns.

  But, ag shame, it’s so sad about Miss Joan. So sad. Madam told me how Miss Joan’s young man got killed in the war of the Boers. On the last day too, the poor thing. So Miss Joan stayed Miss Joan even though all her hair is goat-hair white, like she’s put it in Jik or Javel, the stuff you use to bleach your whites snow white. And she has a restaurant all her own. A nice one too, Madam says. Of course, I wouldn’t know anything about that. How could I? Unless we work there, we never go to restaurants or hotels or any nice places like that. But the food in Miss Joan’s restaurant must be nice. Very good. Look how fat Miss Joan is and look how happily unhappy the food makes my mlungu woman.

  One day I told her she must get nice and fat like Miss Joan. Madam was so angry she stamped her foot. ‘Mandy!’ she said, ‘I will never get that fat!’ That is when she told me about the young man Miss Joan was going to marry but who was killed in the war.

  After breakfast, Madam and her friends meet and go shopping. They have lunch, and play bridge when they’re done with that. That is her day off. She never sees her home that whole long day. That is also where her day off and mine are alike.

  By the time she gets home, it is dinner time. ‘Wheew!’ she will say, throwing herself down on the living-room sofa, ‘Am I exhausted!’ Always, she comes back exhausted from her day off. Always. Me? I just give a grunt, shrug my shoulders, and go on with the real and exhausting work I have to do. If she wants to see exhausted, she should see me on my day off. Indeed, on my day off, I think I work hardest and longest of all week.

  This Wednesday, however, here is Mrs Nelson butting in with her strange and silly talk of my going home just as I am busy laying the dinner table. Fresh flowers from the garden: ‘It makes the house cheerful,’ she always says. And a man comes twice a week to do nothing but the garden. It is practice that I put a fresh vase on the dining-room table even if all there is in that vase is leaves.

  I’m almost done cooking. Dinner is at six sharp, rain or shine. Going to the cupboard for the raisins, I look at the grey-faced clock on the wall and think: Master should be back any minute now. Then Madam will come puffing and huffing, flustered, just before dinner. She’s always late from her bridge. Except today.

  It is just as I pour out a cup of raisins over the rice in the colander, telling myself that Master will be here any minute now, that the clang-clang! of the gate as Madam’s car goes over the iron grate hits my ears. The raisins spill onto the counter. Quickly, I gather up the strays and stuff them in my apron pocket. She hates waste. But did I hear right? Is that her car? I’m quite surprised at this. Both her coming back before Master and the hurry the grate’s cry betrays. Ordinarily, she lets the car glide easily over it. Not today. Today, she is positively flying. One would think someone told her the house was on fire. But before I have finished that thought, hasty footsteps beat a staccato on the long wood-floor passage leading to the kitchen. This is another surprise, for I did not hear the car door close. Next thing I know, Mrs Nelson comes sailing into the kitchen. And she does not ask about the children. She always asks about them. Did Mrs Thompson bring them over? Are they all right? Is everything all right? She always asks about the children first — before anything else. Even before she asks about her telephone messages, she asks about the children or goes to them first. Not today. It is then that I notice that the engine of the car is still running. My, I think, my, she sure is in one big hurry . . . she sure is . . . not to even turn the car engine off.

  Now, no doubt, seeing the look of utter stupefaction that has painted itself on my face at these goings on, Madam nods her head several times and rather vigorously. Then she puffs:

  ‘Trouble in Guguletu, my girl! I think you’d better go.’ Even as she is saying that, she is already turning around and making for the door.

  ‘Come!’ she says, striding along the passage, her shoes going klap-klop! klap-klop! on the wooden floor. ‘I’ll run you down to the station!’

  Now all doubt leaves me. I know there must be big, big trouble, for madam is not complaining at all. Not about how much food she ate. Or how tired she is. Or all the work I’m leaving her with. On her day off too.

  ‘What trouble, Madam?’ My voice sounds strange to my ears. Too high. Squeaky. My mouth is bone dry. But she is calling out to the children. ‘Hey, Gang!’ she shouts. She does not wait for their reply or appearance, however, but scoots to the car.

  In a matter of minutes, she has bundled me into the Kombi. ‘Tell your father I’ve taken Mandy to the station,’ she yells as she reverses the car down the driveway, over the grate, out of the gate. I hope the children heard her.

  It is a grim-faced woman sitting behind the wheel. I watch her: a small marble is playing hide and seek along her jawline. I’ve never seen Madam quite like this. She is upset each time something happens in Guguletu. And these days, something is always happening in Guguletu. Or in Langa. Or Nyanga. Since the schoolchildren started boycotting classes, way back in ’76, when the riots in Soweto came down to Cape Town. August of ’76.

  Madam is not taking me to Guguletu, the township where I live. She never takes me to Guguletu. White people are not allowed to go there. We reach the bus terminus near the station and find pandemonium king.

  The queues were gigantic columns of ants disturbed into disarray. In a frenzy, people pushed and shoved, trying every which way to make their way into the buses. The very activity revealed a desperation, a deep distrust on the part of those waiting on the bus lines. They did not believe they would be adequately served. Or served timeously. Or served at all. The queue was a messy affair, not unlike the intestines of a pig that children are roasting over an open fire: jumbled and confused and everywhere all at once. Snatches of conversations conveyed the same anxiety and restlessne
ss. The woman next to whom I was standing, a tall, large woman, black-skinned and small-eyed, yellow turban on her head, turned to me and, slowly shaking her head, volunteered, ‘Bekuse kukudala kakade! Two whole weeks with no trouble in Guguletu.’

  ‘What has happened, now?’ I returned, fishing for information. She might know more than I did, which was next to nothing. Madam’s ‘Something’s happened in Guguletu!’ was hardly a news bulletin.

  ‘I don’t know,’ the woman said and added that people getting off the Guguletu buses, who’d just come from there, said the schoolchildren were rioting.

  So, what’s new? The thought plopped itself into my mind. Haven’t we lived with these children’s riots since ‘76? What are they rioting for now? I was not a little upset. And angry. More angry than upset, if truth be known. These tyrants our children have become, power crazed, at the drop of a hat, they make these often absurd demands on us, their parents.

  No Going to Work!

  No School!

  Stay Away from the Grocery Shops!

  Don’t drink white man’s liquor!

  Don’t buy red meat!

  I, for one, have had it up to here, with all this nonsense.

  Pressed and pushed from all sides, I allowed the crowd to propel me forward, my feet hardly touching the ground. As I rode on tight-packed bodies, the feet scuffed unknown and unmatched ankles. Hands grabbed others’ elbows and dug into unfriendly shoulders. They were scoured by sweaty beards smelling of Lion Lager beer, greasy and matted hair, the roughened surfaces of threadbare coats. They were cold-slimed by the unwiped noses of little children on the backs of mothers. Thus did I slide my way forward. Passed along from bodies to bodies, with no volition or direction on my part. On and on I went, floating and bumping my way forward and nearer and nearer to the bus. Inch by bumpy inch. I clutched my bag tight against my bosom. Hugged it as though it were a new-born babe. Or a lover newly returned from a long stint in the gold mines of Johannesburg. If, in the pandemonium, the bag should fall, I might as well kiss it goodbye.

  Finally, I gained the bus. Was hurtled, headlong, onto the doorway. With my right hand, I grabbed the pole at the door for support, my bag flat against my chest still, the left arm securely stapling it there.

  The long narrow passage between the two rows of seats had become a tube, a giant sausage casing and we, minced meat, stuffed piecemeal down it. Shoved to the back. Shoved against the knees and elbows sticking out of those who, miraculously, had managed to find themselves ensconced in seats. Down the passage we staggered the best we could. We definitely were no smooth stuffing: lumpy, irritable, hard-edged and scowling at one another. A distinctly uneasy mix.

  Everywhere but everywhere, something takes up room, fills the gaps, arrests all circulation. Elbows, far flung from their bodies, heads that appear similarly grotesquely dislocated, tired and torn plastic bags from which protrude and spill sundry items of groceries: hard-edged bars of soap, bottles of cooking oil, packets of candles that are now broken and caking and flaking and crumbling so that the thin white wick in the middle is revealed dangling, limp and lifeless, packets of beans and stamped mealies rain out and onto the floor. On the rare occasion I can move a foot, the shoe scrunches on granules on the floor of the bus. Sugar? No, bigger. Samp? Can’t be, much smoother. Amazing how much one can tell . . . just from feeling the surface of things beneath one’s be-shod foot. Clever they are, aren’t they? The feet, I mean. Never knew they could tell me so much. Never realized so much could be conveyed in this manner.

  Mxolisi’s eggs! My heart sank. In the flurry of my leaving, I’d clean forgotten my promise of the morning. Just as well. Where would these eggs be in this mess?

  The packed bus groans under the weight of all these sweaty bodies.

  ‘They say Guguletu is completely surrounded . . . Saracens everywhere!’ The bus driver yells above the din of discordant voices. Does he really hope to be heard? But he is persistent and, indeed, soon gets results. There is a lull in the buzz and many faces strain in his direction.

  ‘When did all this start?’ asks a faceless man in that crowd.

  ‘When we left, just now,’ says the driver, ‘the police were at every entrance in Guguletu . . . Big trouble there, I tell you.’

  The driver’s words brought back madam’s ‘. . . trouble in Guguletu, my girl.’ Trouble is, there is always trouble in Guguletu . . . of one kind or another . . . since the government uprooted us from all over the show: all around Cape Town’s locations, suburbs, and other of its environs, and dumped us on the arid, windswept, sandy Flats. My first impressions of the place are still vivid in my mind, etched inside my eyelids, fresh today as they were all those many years ago when I was still but a child, not even ten . . .

  No big, smiling sign welcomes the stranger to Guguletu. I guess even accomplished liars do have some limits. This place is like a tin of sardines but the people who built it for us called it Guguletu, Our Pride. The people who live in ‘Our Pride’ call it Gugulabo – Their Pride. Who would have any gugu about a place like this?

  It was early morning when my family got here, early in 1968. How my eyes were assaulted by the pandemonium. People choking the morning streets. People everywhere you looked. Stray dogs. Peddlers. Children roaming the streets aimlessly even in that early hour. And then the forest of houses. A grey, unending mass of squatting structures. Ugly. Impersonal. Cold to the eye. Most with their doors closed. Afraid.

  Guguletu is both big and small. The place sprawls as far as eye can see. It is vast. That jumps right at you when you see Guguletu for the first time. All that space. But even as you look you suddenly realize that it will be hard for you to find any place where you can put your foot down. Congested.

  As far as eye can see. Hundreds and hundreds of houses. Rows and rows, ceaselessly breathing on each other. Tiny houses huddled close together. Leaning against each other, pushing at each other. Sad small houses crowned with gray and flat unsmiling roofs. Low as though trained never to dream high dreams. Oppressed by all that surrounds them . . . by all that is stuffed into them . . . by the very manner of their conception. And, in turn, pressing down hard on those whom, shameless pretence stated, they were to protect and shelter.

  The streets are narrow, debris-filled, full of gullies alive with flies, mosquitoes, and sundry vermin thriving in the pools of stagnant water that are about the only thing that never dries up and never vanishes in Guguletu. From morning till night, ragged-clothed children wade these pools, playing in them, muddying each other, dredging them for precious treasure, the toys of the children of the streets: bottles, cans, the pits and peels of fruit and vegetable, scraps of food and anything else they can lay their hands on. For most, this is their only school, their playground.

  From the very first days in this place, how different everything appeared. Different from how we had been in Blouvlei, how we had done things in that beloved place we called home. Here, everything changed. It was not as if people didn’t try. But how can one welcome a neighbour and show her the ways of a place when one is also new there? That was part of the problem: this throwing together of so many, many people, all at once, into a new place. All of them new in the place. All of them still grieving, yearning for the places they were forced to leave. All of them with no heart for the new place, having left their hearts in their erstwhile homes: Blouvlei; Vrygrond; Addersvlei; Windermere; Simonstown; Steenberg; District Six; as well as many pockets of real suburbs, where predominantly white people lived. From now on, only white people would live in those places, places from which Africans and Coloureds and Indians had been driven off. The government had decided that residential areas would be segregated, strictly so, and by law. Nonetheless, people tried to follow the rules by which they had lived before coming to this place. At least, in the beginning they did. It was hard though.

  When we arrived here, it was to find that not enough houses had been built. Many families had to put up shacks on the white, white sand that said the sea had with
drawn from this area only yesterday. Bleak. Unable to hold down anything, not even wild grass. In no uncertain terms, the coarse, unfriendly sand told us nothing would ever grow in such a place. It would take a hundred years of people living on it to ground the sand and trample some life into it so that it would support plant and animal.

  My family was among the many, many unfortunates, people from whose shacks nothing could be salvaged. At the first touch of hammer, our shack had simply disintegrated, just turned to rubble. Unusable rubble which the trucks of the government continued to flatten like so many birds’ nests torn off bough and flung down by a tornado.

  You will eat what I eat and sleep where I sleep, so say our people, making the stranger feel he is never burdensome to the family. Saddest of all was Vuyo’s mother, Sis’ Lulu. On the day of the move she had given birth to twins and her husband was away, at sea. Sis’ Lulu’s little family had to be split as she had nowhere to stay. I was very happy that Mama took her son, Vuyo, to stay with us. It was like having a little brother. Tat’ uNonjayikhali, who had neither wife nor children, agreed to give his bed up for Sis’ Lulu and the little twin boys, so she stayed in his shack. Meanwhile, her furniture and other things she didn’t need as a matter of urgency, were divided among several people, all her former neighbours. They would keep them for her till she could build her own shack or she got a Council house, whichever came first.

  And where were people supposed to build those shacks for themselves? Where?

  Here, said the government pointing to the periphery of the new concrete township, where in its building the Council workers had dumped refuse and surplus matter. Here, it said, put up your shacks and wait in them until more houses have been built for you.

  The authorities had underestimated the numbers of Africans in Cape Town and the resulting housing shortage aggravated an already untenable situation. Of course, the government was not paying for the folly of its miscalculation. That, and the hope of an early escape ensured that the hastily-built shacks would be even more rickety than those we had left . . . forced to leave. Who would invest his hard-earned wages in the building of a shack the government would soon force him to tear down?