died having her youngest child, to whom she gave birth alone while working as a maid; her boss returned home an hour later to find Kiki and the baby clinging to life in a pool of blood. Then there was an adopted son, the child of Wowo’s sister, who was raised as one of the brood, too, bringing the grand total in the Nofemela household to seven boys.
Other young cousins came to stay for weeks or even years, sent to Gugulethu from the rural parts of the country, or from other townships. They lay their blankets on the floor and helped with the washing and ate the dinners of samp, a cornmeal mush, boiled together with sugar beans and onions; meat on a good day; potatoes on a bad day; and pap, the pale cornmeal staple cooked into a porridge, for nearly every meal. Everyone drank their tea weak, made instant coffee with lukewarm water, and took three tablespoons of sugar, at least.
The seven brothers, and eventually their children, remained the center of Kiki and Wowo’s world. The main decor in the house was a framed, poster-sized collage of family photos, compiled with glue and cardboard by Wowo, a neat and precise retired gardener who also liked to sketch. In the middle, he had pasted a portrait of a young Wowo and Kiki, a sturdy and handsome pair in formal wear, staring out, unsmiling in the way of those unaccustomed to being the subject of a picture. Below, he pasted a large print of his own late parents and his wizened grandmother standing in a row on a tile floor, decades of hard labor and loss and crappy mattresses etched on their faces. Next to them, Wowo pasted a snapshot of Kiki’s late mother, glowing and vigorous, smiling next to a birthday sheet cake. Wowo inserted, wherever there was space, baby pictures of various grandchildren, often propped up on couches.
Then Wowo made a border around the photos, using large, rectangular grade-school portraits of each of his sons. They wore their V-neck sweaters and finest collared shirts and posed against blue backgrounds. Xola, the adopted cousin-brother, stands out against the rest, with his broad distinctive face and upturned nose. But the other six Nofemela boys, the genetic melding of Wowo and Kiki, are indistinguishable: dainty, light-skinned faces, little noses, almond eyes, full lips. The first time I saw the collage, I studied it, trying to pick out this boy from that. It proved impossible. It didn’t seem relevant to me then that I couldn’t distinguish one from the next, but it would become so later on.
Today, in their thirties and forties, the brothers all look different, adulthood having stretched and molded them into unique physical specimens. Easy is the shortest and most childlike, Martin the roundest, Vusumzi, the eldest and most imposing, Misiya the tallest, Gagi the most refined. And Mongezi—Monks, for short—is the most beautiful, with a smooth movie-star face, high cheekbones, and straight white teeth, punctuated with a single gold cap on the incisor. It is hard to tell his build or his height because he was paralyzed in 2009, thrown from a minivan taxi in the early morning hours, vertebra C4 injured.
These days, Monks often reclined in a stationary Ford sedan in front of the house. He had a compulsive fear of “fever,” though I later realized he was in fact terrified of contracting pneumonia, a common secondary ailment in paralyzed people, whose lungs are already compromised. He didn’t know why, but he sweat constantly, and he was concerned that the combination of damp sweat and a gust of cold air could cause him illness. Everyone was convinced that Monks could outwit pneumonia by staying very hot at all times, and so the rooms in which he convalesced were outfitted with heaters, and he was constantly shuttled between a sweltering bedroom, a sweltering TV room, and a sweltering automobile, parked in the noon sun. During much of the shuttling, everyone despaired of Monks, who was always making demands and barking orders. Wowo and all the brothers pulled out their backs monthly carrying Monks from bed to couch to car. Once, Easy had said to me, unaware of the reference to the song, “He is my brother, and he is so heavy.”
But back then, before they were marked by the ravages of time, those two Nofemela boys, Easy and Monks, looked just like each other. Months after our first conversations, for reasons I’ll probably never know, Easy gave me a photograph of the two of them that eventually helped me unravel a shred of the truth about what happened on that August day in 1993, the day of Amy’s death.
During Easy’s childhood, there were always too many people in a small space. There were two chocolates for ten kids, one shirt mended and handed down for twelve years, shared shoes and toothbrushes. The seven brothers were almost one organism, separated only by the corporal borders of flesh and bone. They slept together on a hay-filled sack, a pleasant experience of fraternal intimacy that had one big problem, according to Easy. Time and again, an unknown miscreant was “deep, deep dreaming that he is in the toilet.”
“Before we go to sleep, we talk, laughing, feeling great. But in the middle of the night, somebody is going to give you a dam of water.”
“So who was the culprit?” I asked.
“We wake up and we’re all suspects.”
Easy was not a star student, having started school at age seven. This, he claimed, was due to an inexplicable rule that I have never found in official literature, but that has been mentioned to me several times by black men who entered the education system in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as a Nigerian friend who attended school in Nigeria during the same time: in some instances, to start attending classes, black boys had to be able to reach their right arm over their head and clutch their entire left ear, with their necks stick-straight. This, for whatever reason, meant they were ready to go to kindergarten. Easy, small of stature and short of limb, couldn’t manage to grab his ear until he was nine, but, after watching kids in uniform march past his house for years, he stormed the school and announced to the principal that he wished to study.
“My only problem is my elbow,” he argued, and the principal relented. Once he was there, he was taken with mathematics, physics, and geometry.
“Everything about maths is tricking people,” he said.
In the mornings, Kiki made home-baked Sotho bread—sugary, dense, and steamy. The boys drank a mixture of fruit-flavored corn syrup and water, or, near the end of the month, simply water. Their favorite TV show was Knight Rider. Wowo coached a local soccer team, Harmony United, and taught his own kids to kick around a soccer ball as soon as they could walk. Easy played the game competitively and later somehow convinced journalists to refer to him as a “former soccer star.” In reality, he wasn’t half bad, but he was irritating to play with because no matter how crushing his team’s defeat, if Easy had scored a single goal, he’d celebrate for hours.
“I am a hero!” he’d exclaim, running around with his arms in the air, while the others glared at him.
In the Xhosa tradition, the family elders ruled the roost, and the Nofemela household was run by Melvin Nofemela. Melvin Nofemela was Wowo’s father and Easy’s grandfather. He was born in 1910 in a rural Eastern Cape village and died in 1997 in Gugulethu. He navigated a lifetime marked by massive historical changes, his suffering and his struggles engineered by a succession of distant white politicians and their loyal followers, and his liberation brought about three years before his death by a party of black freedom fighters who remain in power still, their glory days marred by persistent corruption and double-dealings.
In the century before Melvin’s birth, the land of his ancestors had become a battleground. Then, as in South Africa today, the fighting came down to the issue of land ownership. As white people encroached deeper into the nameless sweep of country, its borders yet drawn, wars erupted between the whites and the threatened African tribes with which they made contact. Melvin’s people, the Xhosas, fought the British and colonial forces in the border wars, but by 1860, the once prosperous farmers had been shattered, concentrated in small “native” areas, and stripped of their cattle.
Meanwhile, a new wave of Dutch pioneers, infuriated by British policies in the Cape Colony,
