had succeeded in bringing all of their twelve children back to Cape Town. They lived in a cramped, makeshift shack in an area called Elsie’s River, on the outskirts of the city. But then, as per the Group Areas Act, Elsie’s River was declared a colored area. Colored people, who had been forced from their homes—many lovely houses near the sea were handed over to whites—were relocated to crime-ridden apartment blocks or shoddy little houses on the Cape Flats. In 1960, Melvin and his family, including thirteen-year-old Wowo, were loaded onto an open truck and driven five miles south, where they were unceremoniously dumped, with their belongings, on a vast field on the border of the preexisting township of Nyanga.
For two weeks, as they built a new shack by hand, they sheltered under a table and washed and drank from a single tap installed a mile away. Nearby sat rows of houses constructed for “bachelor” men, whose purpose was to provide labor to white industry. Those dumped on the field took to calling their new neighborhood “Elsie’s,” since they had all been rounded up there. But soon groups of removals came from elsewhere, and the government dubbed the area Nyanga West.
In 1962, the government saw that Nyanga West was growing, teeming with new arrivals rounded up throughout Cape Town, as well as the regular migrants from the Eastern Cape. They renamed the area “Gugulethu Emergency Camp,” and it would soon become the city’s third official township. Gugulethu means “our pride.”
“What did you do?” I once asked Wowo, as he recalled his displacement.
“You can’t complain. You keep quiet.”
“What did you think?”
“You can’t think nothing if you want to stay alive.”
The white Cape government favored coloreds, likely because Afrikaners and coloreds share a common ancestry, a language, and, often, a disdain for blacks. White people could not be expected to perform much of the menial work needed for the growing economy, and so the government’s plan was to eventually expel blacks from the Western Cape and use coloreds as their cheap labor. But the endeavor proved difficult. First, the colored workforce was not big enough to meet the demand for workers; second, blacks kept illegally sneaking in across the homeland borders, squatting in the bush, and begging for work in the cities. The government soon decided it would have to build more township houses to contain such people. After eight years of squatting in the emergency camp, Melvin’s name came up on the government’s wait list, and the Nofemelas were allowed to rent a small house on NY6. The next year, they were shuffled to a three-bedroom house on NY41; fourteen family members took up residence in the space, sharing a lone outhouse. This overcrowding was common and enduring: in 1978, in a township bordering Gugulethu, a single bed was designated, on average, for six people.
By 1980, Wowo was thirty-three and married to twenty-five-year-old Kiki. They had five children. The house on NY41 was overflowing, and relatives had built small tin shacks in the backyard. Even if they had been financially able, they could not legally purchase property in the Western Cape, since it was not a black homeland.
Finally, Wowo was granted his own place, a two-bedroom on NY111, where he remains today; he and Kiki took one room and their sons took the other. Kiki gave birth to her youngest soon after they moved in, and Wowo’s sister’s boy came to live with them—eventually seven boys were sleeping together on one big straw mattress. Since obtaining the house, Wowo had slowly extended it to the furthest edges of the property line; an overhang made of uneven cement blocks abutted the edge of the sidewalk, and a series of stand-alone brick rooms pressed against the far end of the backyard.
By 2013, Melvin’s grandchildren numbered fifty living souls—twenty men and thirty women, Easy among them. They were taxi drivers, clerks, housewives, hairdressers, insurance salesmen, postal workers, train conductors, cleaners, hospital workers, hotel room-service providers, supermarket checkout clerks, and employees of the South African Revenue Service. Ten were students. Five were unemployed. Nobody knew what two of them did with their days. One suffered from depression, one was disabled, and one was, according to her relatives, “a slow thinker from birth,” who’d been raped and who now had to be supervised twenty-four hours a day. Some lived in the Eastern Cape province—after apartheid, the country’s homelands were absorbed into the nine provinces of today—while most lived in the Western Cape, home to Gugulethu. Six had died. The number of great-grandchildren was climbing into the triple digits.
Though Melvin had no official political power, in his house, his word was law. The family considered Melvin as close to a god as they would find in this lifetime, and so as long as he was around, Wowo may have been a married father of seven, but he did not have the final say in his own household.
In the years since the first European missionary introduced Christianity to South Africa in 1737, many black preachers had taken over congregations and had created a particularly African brand of Christianity. Melvin and his wife Alice believed in Jesus Christ their Lord and Savior and in their Xhosa ancestors, who demanded animal sacrifices in return for protection. Everyone in the family followed suit, though at least one of their sons eventually disavowed traditional mores for conventional Christianity and was always grumbling about his relatives’ lost souls. Easy, for one, believed halfheartedly in Jesus and wholeheartedly in the powers of his ancestors, and the meeting of the two seemed natural to him.
Melvin, “short-tempered but peaceful,” according to Easy, encouraged prayer and was prone to beating disobedient kids. Alice supported this form of discipline.
“If she is angry, she get Father to beat you,” Wowo recalled fondly. “She’s a good wife. She like people, she like her children, but she is not funny, and if you make funny things, you make her cross.”
Melvin was wise and prescient. You had best pay attention to him, because he knew what he was talking about.
“My grandfather said to one my brothers: by the end of the day if you don’t want to listen you will result in prison and you will result in steal things,” Easy remembered. “My brother was in and out and in and out of prison, and he get sick and pass away. My grandfather propheted that.”
“Sick” in township parlance can often be a euphemism for HIV, which has a 19 percent prevalence rate among South African adults. And Easy was using the word “brother” in the black South African sense: when he said “brother” he meant “cousin.” Biological brothers and sisters are not differentiated from cousins; the family structure is such that uncles and aunts have power and responsibility equal to fathers and mothers, and any local adult can discipline or direct a child—a village to raise a baby, indeed. As a Xhosa person, if your sibling dies or falls ill or simply has too much on his plate, you are expected to take in his children and raise them as your own. In this way, Wowo lived in his uncle’s house from the age of three until the age of eleven, and in this way, he raised his sister’s child.
Xhosa people refer to complete strangers, too, as brother or sister—bhuti or sisi, respectively. An older man is tata; an older woman, mama. Nelson Mandela, father of the nation and the world’s most famous Xhosa, is referred to as Tata Mandela. Truly old men and women are addressed with great extravagance as tatomkhulu (grandfather, the term Easy and others used to address Peter Biehl) or makhulu (grandmother, the term Easy and others use to address Linda Biehl). Once, a young man addressed me as mama.
“No, call me sisi!” I said, and he looked at me blankly. I thought he was telling me that I was old, like when people stopped calling me “miss” and started calling me “ma’am.” But later I learned that “mama” was simply a term of honor and respect, and the man had been trying to flatter me. To be mama is to be held in high regard, though to be bhuti or sisi isn’t bad either. A Xhosa friend
