‘Mother-of-Lunga,’ Dwadwa said grumpily on my return this time. ‘You’re humming these tuneless songs of yours instead of giving us our food because, once more, this Long-Foot of yours is not home?’
‘Siziwe, go and see whether both boys are in the hokkie,’ I said.
‘Don’t waste the child’s time,’ Dwadwa retorted. ‘You know full well Mxolisi is not here. Don’t send the poor girl on a wild goose chase.’
‘Why d’you say that?’
‘You think if Long-bowel were here, he’d have kept his snout from the meat this long?’ Dwadwa scowled. ‘You know his throat is a magnet, where meat is concerned.’
I took myself to the kitchen. Dwadwa’s portrayal of Mxolisi was accurate enough. But the boy’s greed, his love of meat, all this did not concern me right now. What did, and did so with painful urgency, were his whereabouts.
I dished up and we ate in silence. I could hardly swallow a single spoonful of that food. The thought of Mxolisi about on a night such as this was too upsetting for words. It unsettled me all right.
As I got ready for bed, heavy was my heart with the knowledge that horror and abomination had taken place a stone’s throw away from my home. Not just because of the violence. For years . . . many, many years, we have lived with violence. This was nothing new to us. What was new was that this time, the victim was white. A white person killed in Guguletu, a black township. Killed, from all accounts, for no reason at all. Killed, in fact, while doing good. . . helping the people of the township. But then again, even that was not totally new, was it?
Hayi, ilishwa, eMonti!
Hayi, ilishwa, eMonti!
Hayi, ilishwa, eMonti, eMonti, eMonti!
But that was so long ago, that misfortune in East London. So long, long ago. In a far-away town I had never seen.
Nearer home. In 1960 we saw how little difference it made to black people that some whites were sympathetic to their cause. Three young nurses, new in the country, heard of the atrocities the police and army were inflicting on the African people in Langa. No doubt, thinking the presence of outsiders might act as a deterrent, they came to bear witness. Near the Flats, where ‘bachelors’ were housed, a group of African men, bearing sticks and God only knows what else, came upon them. And beat them. Three defenceless, unarmed women. Beaten by a troop of men. One suffered a broken jaw. Another, several deep cuts at the back of her head. The third, a sprinter, twisted an ankle. As soon as those poor women were discharged from hospital, they left the country. Back to Belgium.
The night is quiet, punctuated now and then by the sound of gun fire. Nothing unusual about that these days, not in Guguletu. At last, Dwadwa asks, ‘Where is this boy?’
‘Which boy?’ I know perfectly well he means Mxolisi.
Dwadwa harrumphs and says not a word more. But the question he has asked and which I’ve dodged answering hangs between us as thick as a curtain.
‘I don’t know whether he’s come in or not,’ I venture at last, uneasy with the pregnant silence.
‘Mmmh-mmhh,’ Dwadwa clears his throat. That lets me know he is about to tell me something he believes is important. He wants me to pay attention. I tense, an invisible hand squishing everything inside my stomach.
‘Be careful,’ says my husband in the dark, for we’ve already blown the candle out. ‘This child, always vagabonding in the middle of the night . . . I tell you, Mother of Siziwe, mark my words, he will bring you a big trouble one day.’ With that, he turns and faces the wall, giving me his stiff back.
I do not like Mxolisi’s gallivanting up and down the township like a sow that’s littered during a drought, any more than Dwadwa does. I do not like the secretiveness that has crept into his manner, of late. But here I find myself defending him, ‘All the children are like that, these days.’
In a shot, Dwadwa sits up as though a snake is writhing beneath him. Then, he appears to change his mind and remains silent . . . deep in thought. A minute or so later, he sighs, goes back under the blankets and says, ‘Hey, Mother of Siziwe, do you hear yourself? Do you hear what you’re saying?’
‘Let me tell you something, wife of mine,’ says he quietly. Very quietly. ‘That is not the answer of a wise mother.’
I am stung to retort, ‘What do you think I should do? He is no small boy, you know?’
‘You are still his mother.’
‘And you?’ The minute the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them. Dwadwa is good to my children . . . to all three children. It is not his fault that Mxolisi is so disobedient. He does not treat him any differently from the other two. The boys can accuse him of being overly strict, stingy, or anything else, but in all honesty, they cannot say that he treats them in any way different from how he treats his own child, Siziwe. After my outburst, we fell into an uneasy silence.
I could not bring myself to apologize. I could only imagine what was going on in his mind. But where was Mxolisi? What was he doing wherever he was? Why had he not come home? Why did he stay out so late, despite the numerous talking-to’s we had given him? These questions dogged me all night, and they raced through my mind as I lay wide-eyed with sleeplessness.
When I was in school, by the year’s end one had not yet learnt the names of all the children in the class. That’s how rife overcrowding was in our schools, how bad the education of the African child was even way back then. This is what happened one year during the annual visit of the school inspectors:
‘Who were the taller, the Hottentots or the Bushmen?’ asked our teacher, standing behind the school inspector, sitting at the teacher’s table.
Our hands flew up, even Mehlo, the class dullard, had his hands up.
‘Yes?’ said Miss Mabanga, pointing to one of the pupils.
‘The Hottentots!’ came the answer.
The inspector left the classroom and we all breathed a sigh of relief that the ordeal was over.
How clever of the teacher to show us the answer, raising her arms up in the air as she said the word Hottentots and lowering the arms on Bushmen.
With the passage of time, our schools only grew worse. In 1976, students rose in revolt and, before long, Bantu Education had completely collapsed. It had become education in name only.
My son, Mxolisi, is twenty. Yet he is still in Standard 6. Standard 6! As though he were twelve or thirteen years old. But then, he is not alone, neither is he the oldest student in his class. Twenty. And still in Standard 6. And I am not saying he is the brightest pupil in his class either.
Boycotts, strikes and indifference have plagued the schools in the last two decades. Our children have paid the price.
And your daughter, did she not go to school? Couldn’t she see all the signs telling her this is a place where only black people live? Add to that, where was her natural sense of unease? Did she not feel awkward, a fish out of water, here? That should have been a warning to her . . . a warning to stay out. Telling her the place was not for her. It was not safe for the likes of her. Oh, why did she not stay out? Why? Why did she not keep off?
Lying in bed, contemplating the events of the day, as much as I understood them, I was amazed at how an ordinary day can turn topsy-turvy with no warning at all.
I’d had no nightmare, no premonition, no foreboding the night before. No prescience that morning. No foresight whatsoever throughout that day . . . a Wednesday. In fact, until Madams unexpected return, all was well with my little world. Until she came and dragged me out of the kitchen and to the train station to get my bus home, driving as though the devil himself were after her. Yes, till then, it had been an ordinary day — ordinary, in the context of our lives that have become quite complex and far from ordinary.
Look now. Look what the children have done! Poor, poor child. The one who is dead. Poor child. And her parents. I feel for her parents. For the parents of this poor child, killed by our children. My heart sorrows for them. For her mother.
The havoc our children are visiting upon our homes has made hell-holes of these houses in which they live with the adults who brought them into this world. Intolerable. The children, in their new-found wisdom and glory, have decided that all parents carry sawdust where their brains used to be. In this new world of confusion compounded, the children are aided and abetted by adults we call leaders. Leaders of the community. Women and men we all look up to . . . or should. People whose word and deed we emulate . . . follow without question.
‘Make the country ungovernable!’ So said the leaders. I don’t know about the government now. Whether or not it is coping with the task of ruling the country, I cannot say. But I do know that we, parents, have become toothless dogs whose bark no one heeds.
How did it all start? How did it begin? Where were we when the problem first cut tooth? When it first appeared in our midst?
The answer to that is very easy. What is not, are the whys and wherefores behind it. But even that, yes, even that we can answer.
First, our children stoned cars. We cheered them on. The cars were not our cars, they were not the cars of our neighbours or our friends, they were the cars of white people.
Hayi, ilishwa, eMonti!
Hayi, ilishwa, eMonti!
Hayi, ilishwa! EMonti, eMonti, eMonti!
Bamtshis’ uSista! EMonti!
Bamtshis’ uSista! EMonti!
Bamtshis’ uSista! EMonti, eMonti, eMonti!
Oh, what abominable misfortune — in East London!
They burnt a nun — in East London!
I was very young when the teachers made us sing that song. Seems so long ago now. I can’t remember how we heard about the event that inspired it, though. Now we have radio and television, but how did news travel back then? Travel such distances too? East London is a good one thousand kilometres away from Cape Town.
I think I know how we must have heard. In all probability, the news came to us via some maid or other type of servant, people employed in white homes. They would have been told by their employers. It would have been an event of which the mlungu woman or the mlungu man would have felt compelled to inform her or his servant. See what those natives (I believe that was the term then) have gone and done? Just see what they have done! Murdering a poor, defenceless woman, a woman of God. And what was she trying to do? Help them, for crying out aloud.
But, in our school, we sang the song of the nun who was killed by black people, Africans, in far-away East London. Sang the song when not one of the teachers had taken the trouble of explaining to us that the people of East London should not have done that.
AmaBhulu, azizinja! Today’s youth have been singing a different song. Whites are dogs! Not a new thought, by any means. We had said that all along. As far back as I can remember. Someone would come back from work fuming: amaBhulu azizinja, because of some unfairness they believed had been meted out to them that day. A slap. A kick. Deduction from wages. A deduction, neither discussed nor explained. Unless, a gruff — YOU ALWAYS LATE! or YOU BROKE MY PLATE! or YOU NOT VERY NICE TO MY MOTHER! qualifies as explanation. So, yes, our children grew up in our homes, where we called white people dogs as a matter of idiom . . . heart-felt idiom, I can tell you. Based on bitter experience.
AmaBhulu, azizinja! they sang. And went and burnt down their schools. That’s uncalled for, a few of us mumbled beneath our breath. Well beneath. Even so, we were quickly reprimanded. There was a war on. Besides, those ramshackle, barren things were no schools. No learning took place there.
But swiftly, our children graduated from stoning cars, white people’s cars. They graduated from that and from burning buildings. Unoccupied buildings. Public buildings. Now, they started stoning black people’s cars. And burning black people’s houses.
We reasoned that those black people to whom such a thing happened deserved what they got. The children were punishing them for one or another misdeed. Or, indeed, some misdeeds. They had collaborated with the repressive apartheid government. Iimpimpi, informers, we labelled the whole miserable lot. People on whom the students’ righteous and wrathful acts fell. They deserved all they got. And then, some more. Iimpimpi, we called them. We called them that, without tangible reason on our part. Had the students, our children, not told us that? By burning their cars? Why would they single them out for such treatment if it were not for their guilt? We saw no parallel between the actions of the children and the witchdoctor’s smelling out of a mthakathi, a witch.
Our children made our homes the target of their wrath and visited untold devastation on them. A few of us gasped. Privately. Safely. In the comforting isolation of our homes. What were we so afraid of? Why didn’t we ask those questions buzzing in our heads? Loud in our hearts? Demanding our attention. Demanding answers. From us. From our parents, our children, our leaders . . . the one and the same? Why didn’t we ask those questions. Ask them out loud?
Oh, what faith we had in the integrity of the court of public opinion. The majority of us, believing ourselves safe and sound, wearing the thin shield of our innocence, wondered how our erstwhile friends had fooled us for so long. Of course, they were sell-outs. Wasn’t that what the students said? Wasn’t that why they had burnt their houses down?
The Young Lions! We praised them. Praised our children. Down with all iimpimpi! We echoed the slogans their mouths spewed, the slogans that had become their gospel.
The Young Lions. From near and far, admiration fell on their already swollen heads. They had tackled the much-feared enemy, the big gogga that had for so long trampled on their parents and on the parents of those parents. And theirs before them.
Our children fast descended into barbarism. With impunity, they broke with old tradition and crossed the boundary between that which separates human beings from beasts. Humaneness, ubuntu, took flight. It had been sorely violated. It went and buried itself where none of us would easily find it again.
Then, a man was stoned. A black man from Guguletu. A man — not a car. He was stoned and kicked and punched and knifed. Senseless. Punched blind, he reeled, fumbling his way. The children put a garland around his neck, an old, worn tyre. Then, into the tyre they poured some liquid. The fumes hit the man’s nostrils. He gagged.
A hiss and a flash. WH-H-HOO-OO-OSHH!
In a flaming heap, the man fell to the ground.
Cheers rose from the crowd. The children drew nearer and nearer. Nearer to the figure writhing on the ground. Grotesque, smouldering magnet. The spectators were positively mesmerized, dazzled by the brilliance of their handiwork. Drunk with power.
Click-click! Would you believe human beings have the capacity to stand still long enough to take aim and shoot such a horrific, marrow-chilling scene? Take pictures? Instead of setting the poor person out of his misery? Click-click! went the cameramen — several from various newspapers — from all around Cape Town. The beautiful city of Cape Town. Click-Click! They jostled each other for better positions, a better angle.
THE NECKLACE. A new phrase was coined. Verb: To necklace. Necklacing. Necklaces. Necklaced. A new phrase was born. Shiny brand new — necklace. More deadly than gun. The necklace. That is what we chose to call our guillotine. Necklace. What an innocent-sounding noun. Who could imagine its new meaning? Just as we kept on calling, insisted on calling, the people who did the necklacing ‘children’ ‘students’ ‘comrades’, we called a barbaric act the necklace, protecting our ears from a reality too gruesome to hear; clothing satanic deeds with innocent apparel.
Not many of our leaders came out and actually condemned the deed. Indeed, there were those who actually applauded the method, the innovative manner of killing a human being, of doing away with those with whom one was in disagreement. They said it would lead us to freedom. However, to this day, I have never heard it said that even one of the oppressors was necklaced. I had not known that it was our own people who stood in the way of the freedom we all said we desired.
Meanwhile, soon others were similarly garlanded. All those singled out
for this form of execution, were thus adorned with the quick, flaming and caressing colours. Without benefit of trial, with neither judge nor jury. No due process. No recourse to defence or appeal. Human beings were summarily murdered — No, necklaced. Quite different that is to saying someone has been murdered or killed. Necklaced. Is it more palatable?
The mighty police appeared impotent. They did nothing about the necklacing, or did so little as to make no difference. Justice was on holiday. Or busy with more deserving matters: terrorists who, at the instigation of foreign meddlers, especially communists, were planning to overthrow the government. And, of course, always there were the pass offences.
A war was going on, the children said. They were fighting the apartheid government.
6
4 am — Thursday 26 August 1993
The shiny green arms of the alarm clock next to the bed say it is half-past-three. Long before my wake-up time. But I’m wide-eyed up. I’ll call it up although Lord only knows if I ever was down. This night just past, Dwadwa and I finally fell into an exhausted, nerve-racked and sullen silence. It wasn’t long thereafter, and I heard him snore. Typical.
I blew the candle out and watched the dying glow of the taper. When it finally breathed its last, it seemed to give birth to a thickening in the air. In the dark, the smell of burning wax wafted slowly till it hit the bed. Imagining its aerial travel, in the gloom, I stared at shapes cavorting through the room, my fantasy working overtime.
I guess some time between then and now I must have caught some sleep. From the way I feel, however, numbness more than sleep is what must have come over me — eventually. My eyes smart as though I’d spent the night cooking over an open fire in a windowless hut — using wood that I’d left out in the rain. The muscles supporting the neck tell me I’ve been standing on my head throughout the night. By the pale light of the moon, the room is cast in the thin gloom of almost-there light.
What woke me up? Even the birds have not yet begun their morning chirping and twittering. In the foggy recesses of my mind, there is a hazy groping, a reaching, a searching for something that flits and slips further and away, always just out of my grasp. What woke me up? Dream or something real? What? What?