Mother to Mother, Page 6

  Inside the house, Mama Mandila sat on a little wooden bunk. Next to her, on the floor, a big pan, silver shiny as new, sat plonk on a Primus stove that purred softly, stirring the pond of oil in the pan. Like ships on choppy seas, golden-brown peaked-shaped balls bobbed cheerfully in the turbulent oil. Now and then, Mama Mandila deftly turned one of these over with a fork, making the oil leap up and sizzle and gurgle, singing itself hoarse.

  At the sight of the vetkoek, the watering inside my mouth become quite unruly, the swallowing noisy. I could hardly get the words out of my mouth. ‘Ten cent’s worth, please, Mama Mandila.’

  Mama Mandila not only gave me the ten vetkoekies my ten cents bought, but an extra one just for me. An extra one she did not put with the others in the brown bag but handed directly to me.

  ‘Here’s one for my little good customer!’ she said, smiling.

  ‘Thank you, Mama,’ I said, brown bag at my feet, freeing my hands to cup in humble acceptance. Those days, it was the height of rudeness for a child to take from an adult. A child accepted, with both hands cupped, when given anything by anyone older.

  Good intentions are one thing, a warm, soft vetkoek in one’s hand, just begging to be swallowed, quite another. The water had not only boiled by the time I reached home but Mama, pouring out her second cup of tea, was waiting impatiently for her vetkoek.

  ‘Ah, I see,’ she said, looking at the tell-tale oily hands. ‘I hope my vetkoeks are still as hot,’ she added as she put two on a small plate. ‘Good,’ she said, munching on a vetkoek and chasing it down with her tea. ‘Good!’ her eyes closed, she nodded. I could see that she was enjoying Mama Mandila’s vetkoek.

  ‘Don’t tell me you want another one?’ Mama teased, looking at me with one eye, the corresponding eyebrow raised.

  ‘Yes, Mama,’ I said, hoping I was right that she was only teasing me. I would not have put it past Mama to turn around and tell me one vetkoek was enough for me, with supper coming shortly. ‘Yes, I’d like one very much, if I may’ I told her in my sweetest voice.

  After tea, it was back to the endless Friday chores. Fortunately, Mama made sure that most of these were done in the morning. After she’d seen to it that the house was tidied up in readiness for Friday’s business, Mama soaked the laundry while I strained and bottled the ginger beer which was the family business.

  Now, refreshed, we went out to attack the laundry. Mama did the washing while I rinsed the clothes and hung them up. When we were done, I took the used soapy water and scrubbed the floor. Then it was time for Mama’s last cup of tea before the workers came home.

  Early that evening, as was usual during the summer, a group of men, money in their pockets because Friday was Pay Day, came to cool themselves and wash away the cares of the work week with Mama’s ginger beer. I helped her serve them and then went off to play.

  ‘Mandisa!’ Mama called out a while later.

  ‘Mama,’ I answered, galloping back into the house. I prayed that whatever she wanted me for, would take so little time that I’d be able to go out to play again.

  ‘Get the empties from outside and put two bottles out for Nonjayikhali,’ said Mama. ‘He’s already paid for them,’ she added.

  I grabbed two bottles from the forest of ginger-beer bottles under the table flush against the wall on which stood our pail of water, the Primus stove on which Mama cooked, and a few other sundries besides, and hurried outside.

  ‘Here, Tata,’ I said, putting the bottles in front of Tat’ uNonjayikhali, right between his feet planted on the gray-black sand.

  ‘Enkosi, Ntomb’ am, Thank you, My Daughter,’ he said, giving me a whole five cents piece. Tat’uNonjayikhali was easily the most generous of Mama’s customers. All the children in Blouvlei knew how warm-handed he was and were eager that he send them to the shop, especially Fridays.

  Thus encouraged in my duties, I proceeded to gather the empty bottles scattered around the semi-circle of men and took them inside. This brought me endless praise from the mostly be-overalled workers, lunch pails beside them. I would keep a very good house when I grew up, they said, making me beam from ear to ear, as the compliments soaked through to the marrow in my bones.

  Tat’uNonjayikhali left, his bottles of ginger beer, heads together, held firmly in the grip of one hand. The other men grumbled playfully that he was leaving them dry-throated, going away with their drink.

  ‘You all have people to make you tea, in your homes,’ he replied laughingly. ‘This is my tea.’

  A moment later, as I was going back out, the hot clapping of hands beckoning, calling me to the game of ikula, I overheard Tat’uSikhwebu say:

  ‘Urhulumente, bonk’ abantw’ abamnyama kule ngingqi yeKapa, uza kubafudusela eNyanga. The Government is going to move all Africans in the Cape Town area to Nyanga!’

  ‘Wha-aat! What are you saying?’ said several voices, all at once. ‘How can such a thing be true?’

  ‘I heard this from someone we all trust,’ Tat’ uSikhwebu replied.

  ‘Ah,’ said one of men, ‘lies! lies! lies! All lies, if you ask me,’ I recognized the voice of Bhelekazi’s father, a neighbour.

  ‘You’re right, Bhele,’ said Rhadudu, also a neighbour. ‘Nothing like that can ever happen.’ He sounded quite convinced of what he said. He sounded quite convincing too. Then everybody started shouting. The voices were so many and so loud I couldn’t make out what was being said. I decided to go about my business; besides, the game of ikula was calling me outside.

  In any event, even had I continued listening, I would have gained but little. At that time, the words that were being thrown about, words that generated the heated debate, to me, merely registered as fantastic. To my bent-on-play mind, they were in the same category as all the other unfathomable mysteries of the adult world, like taxes, tikoloshes, gold in the mines and God in Heaven — nothing which had anything to do with me.

  However, a few days later, I heard the same rumour from other children. And one day, I even heard Tata, who seldom concerned himself with location talk, say something about it to Mama.

  When I told Khaya about the rumour that we were going to be moved to Nyanga, he replied that he knew all about that. He bragged he even knew who had started the rumor: ‘The unreliable Tat’ uNonjayikhali,’ he sneered.

  ‘It’s all over the location,’ brows raised, eyes half closed with a haughty knowing, he whispered.

  Everybody knew Tat’uNonjayikhali was not reliable. He didn’t even have a wife, to say nothing of children. Who could trust such a man? The people of Blouvlei would be crazy to do so, according to Khaya, the wise.

  Others, though, said the rumour was based on some truth and, although Nonjayikhali might have stretched that truth here and there, it was nonetheless still the truth. This group claimed he’d heard about this at his job, the big Post Office in Cape Town, where he worked. He’d mentioned it to his good friend, Tat’uSikhwebu, who’d whispered it to the ear of Mavuthengatshi, the store owner, who told his brother, the preacher, who passed it on to his son, the principal. From the principal, the rumor grew fast. Like wild fire, it spread. From person to person it went, with each embellishing it, stamping it with detailed individual whims and fears. Like the rollings of the dung beetle, merely passing it along carried within itself the mechanism for its own augmentation and it grew until it became the hoarse roar of a river greedily drinking down the first rains after a long, hard-hitting drought.

  The government is going to move all Africans to Nyanga.

  All? To the last one? Our parents laughed. Obviously, the government didn’t know what it was talking about.

  For several weeks thereafter, this was the favorite topic of the men who sat outside our house, evenings and weekends. As we were not the only family selling ginger beer, others selling even stronger fare, the scene outside my home was, in all probability, replicated over and over again, throughout the location. In similar scenarios or variations thereof — one thing all had in common, was people ref
uting the unpalatable.

  On upturned empty four-gallon paraffin tins, on the grimy dirt outside the houses, drinking ginger beer or beer and smoking their pipes, our fathers bared their teeth, stabbed the sand with long strong jets of tobacco spit, black-brown as tar, and shook their heads. Each little group of men — sitting as the horns of a bull, a friendly formation to lock the conversation within the breast — shared common, all too familiar, tales of the week-long ordeal at the places of their harness.

  Our mothers, to or from the communal water-tap that served the whole sprawling location, drums and big tins of water on their heads, clapped their hands and took them to chin and hip in gesture of incredulous amazement. Splotches of water from the buckets darkened uproariously giggling shoulders and stained the shawls wound around their waists like peplums. There were so many of us in Blouvlei, the tin-shack location where I grew up. Millions and millions. Where would the government start? Who could believe such a thing?

  The sea of tin shacks lying lazily in the flats, surrounded by gentle white hills, sandy hills dotted with scrub, gave us (all of us, parents and children alike) such a fantastic sense of security we could not conceive of its ever ceasing to exist. Thus, convinced of the inviolability offered by our tremendous numbers, the size of our settlement, the belief that our dwelling places, our homes, and our burial places were sacred, we laughed at the absurdity of the rumour.

  ‘The afterbirths of our children are deep in this ground. So are the foreskins of our boys and the bleached bones of our long dead,’ Grandfather Mxube, the location elder, told Mama one day, when they were discussing, once again, this very same question of forced removals. Blouvlei was going nowhere, he said. ‘Going nowhere,’ he reiterated, right fist beating hard against palm of the other hand.

  How his words reassured me. This was home, they said. Home. Always had been. Always would be. HOME.

  After a while, the whole move rumour thing became more of a joke than anything else. Our parents laughed at the absurdity of the rumour of the removal of Africans, all Africans, to a common area set aside only for them. A corral.

  But the government was not laughing. The government never showed its smiling teeth when dealing with any matter in connection with Africans.

  The year rolled on. I forgot the rumour. Or it paled . . . like the memory of a nightmare in the bold, unlying, evidence-inducing sun of day. The rumour paled, in time, it was all but forgotten. Forgotten, I dare say, by everybody, including Tat’ uNonjayikhali, who had brought it to the location, in the first place. If such was true.

  Then one day, the rumour, all grown and bearded, armed with the stamp of the government, returned. It was not smiling. Like its authors, it had learnt to bury its sense of humour when dealing with the African problem.

  The day was a Sunday. Sunday afternoon, I still remember. Tata, Mama, Khaya and I had been to church. Upon return, as usual, I helped Mama cook. The family sat down to the highlight of the week, the special Sunday lunch: meat and rice. With potatoes, carrots and cabbage. Sunday. The only day of the week we ever saw meat . . . and vegetable, instead of umngqusho or stamp-en-stoot, as our broken-corn-with-bean meal was sometimes called. As usual, my brother had escaped as soon as we’d finished eating. I washed the dishes and while the grownups, dozing, chatted, made good my escape.

  Up the hill and down the other side, and there I found my friends, who were overjoyed to see me. They’d been waiting forever for my appearance. My brother and I were among a small group of children in Blouvlei cursed with parents who not only went to church but had the hardened hearts to insist on their children going too. Not content with that form of torture, my parents put other impediments between us and carefree play: homework and the setting sun. Mama and Tata seemed to have no idea whatsoever that the Sunday sun was stingy as a young widow with a dozen little children to feed. So even as we played, now and then I threw anxious glances at the vicinity of my home. It was no accident that my friends and I chose to play on yonder side of the hill. If we played on the side nearer home, Mama seemed to think I was begging to be called home for the most insignificant reasons. She would come out of the house, stand by the door, and holler in her loudest voice, calling me back home so that I could do my homework, make her tea or, indeed, for no reason at all except that the sun was setting.

  Within minutes of my joining my friends, the play my arrival had interrupted resumed. Dress skirts stuffed in bloomers to avoid their getting soiled or tearing, we ran up and down the hill, chasing galloping goats and squealing pigs, chasing stubborn, bleating sheep. We picked wild berries from the thorny intlokot-shane bushes and scratchy-leafed ibhosisi vines, built sand castles, played hide and seek among overgrown evergreen thickets. We were completely absorbed in our play; giving it our best because, with the sun going home, our friends feared Mama’s voice would soon be calling me home, hauling me there long before the group was ready for the ordeal of separation. Khaya, because he was a boy, didn’t suffer from restrictions as I did.

  Suddenly, a deafening roar overhead stopped us in our tracks. All sense of play fled, heads jerked up, eyes pulled to the furiously bleeding sky.

  An aeroplane. Flying so low, my friends and I could see the people in it. See their pink-pink skins and the colours of the clothes they wore . . . see too the dark glasses hiding their coloured eyes.

  The phenomenon was that unusual, we forgot the ritual:

  Eropleyni!

  ‘Zundiphathel’ iorenji!

  ‘Zundiphathel’ ipesika!

  Don’t ask me why we persisted in asking the aeroplanes for these goodies when the silly things were either deaf or stingier than Ntshangase. Not one of us had ever been rewarded for all our efforts. On this day, however, the manner of its appearance, so close to the ground, so close to us, put this wonder on the same level as the burning bush, the water-sprouting rock and talking serpents of the Bible. It completely stole our tongues. Indeed, the phenomenon was so unusual, the noise so loud, that it hauled even the adults out of the houses and jolted those drinking beer outside onto their feet, heads upturned, hands capping eyes, open-mouthed staring skyward.

  Then, where a moment before, we’d been struck dumb, now a new concern smote us and restored our voices.

  ‘Uza kuwa! Uza kuwa!’ Wide-eyed with fear, we cried out. So did some of the grownups, especially the mothers. But through it all, our eyes stayed glued to the very sight that sent our hearts plummeting to our stomachs. Even as we recoiled from the horror, we felt compelled to watch . . . to look on . . . witness: Why was the man bending forward, out of the door or window of the aeroplane? ‘He’s going to fall!’ we screamed. ‘He will fall!’

  But the man did not fall out. Instead, the aeroplane threw up. It emitted a big, fluttering white cloud.

  ‘Bhasopha! Bhasopha!’ Harum-scarum, we scattered, running as fast as our legs could carry us. ‘Watch out! Watch out!’ we hollered, fleeing for the safety of our homes, the same from which we’d but so lately stolen away, the same to which we were so loath to return, just moments before. Even as we ran for safety, the frightened voices of our mothers rang out, calling us children home.

  Gasping more from fright than the unexpected sprint, we cleared the danger zone. Eyes once more turned to sky. Despite the noise still ringing in our ears, the aeroplane was already a small blot way over there. The cloud it had left behind was even then still disintegrating. Even as we looked, the cloud revealed itself as thin, flat birds, learning to fly. Wobbly, most did not make it, and came drifting down to earth. As some fluttered gently off and away, most spiralled downward and ever downward until, carried by the soft and playful waves and currents of the air, they’d danced their way to the very sand on which we’d been playing. Soon, the sand was carpeted with the flat birds that could not fly . . . or had lost their inborn fearfulness to come nesting on the dun-colored surface that was dimpled, pitted and pimpled with our footsteps, moats and castles. There they lay, as silent as the plane that had brought them had be
en noisy.

  In little clusters in front of our homes, children and parents huddled together as against a foe. Our eyes raked the sky. But whether the tiny black speck on the far horizon was our plane or a large bird returning home for the night, we couldn’t say.

  Meanwhile, the strange birds the plane had birthed lay there, all over the place, right in front of our eyes. A few brave souls, mostly boys, ventured forth. Cautiously, they approached the birds. Here and there, some of the birds fluttered and hopped at their approach and made as though they would take off. . .but instead hovered a heartbeat or two into the air, just above the ground, and then fluttering still, fluttering, settled back on the sand, a few centimetres or so from where they had been before.

  Greatly encouraged by the realization that all the birds wanted was a place of rest, that they meant us no harm, a few more from our numbers stepped out of the safety of our homes.

  ‘It’s only paper!’ shouted Lumko, one of the bigger boys. ‘Look! Look!’ he said, holding up several loose leaflets. ‘Look! It’s paper, that’s all!’ In a frenzy, willy-nilly, he grabbed an armful more of the papers.

  At that, we all scrambled back to our abandoned playfield and scooped up armfuls of the ‘birds’, now that we knew they would not bite, would not strangle or knife us.

  ‘Saphani, sibone! Saphani, sibone! Bring that here and let us see! Here, let us see!’ screamed some of the parents. A trace of fear still laced their voices.

  But even as the parents called the children to bring them the silent birds the plane had dropped, the demeanour of the older children abruptly sobered. For long moments, they stared at the paper. Looked at it . . . pushed their faces right close to it, earnestly examining it as though it were the prettiest face in all of Blouvlei. Their action made the rest of us nervous — what was the matter now? What, about the paper, was so mesmerizing?