Stadium; or he treated himself to an orgy of potato chips, sodas and candies.
Mpho occasionally went to work in town on the weekends, washing the cars of white people. Nomkhitha didn’t like him doing this because it kept him in Johannesburg all day – a forbidding thing for a child. But Mpho had virtually no knowledge of whites; the car-washing forays provided his only contact with them. And so he eagerly looked forward to the treks into town. To him, whites weren’t actually people; they were rich other-beings who lived somewhere beyond his range of vision.
Being a Mashinini, Mpho was diligent at attending school. He and the other children arose before dawn; Nomkhitha, who departed at six o’clock, lit the fire and left water warming on the stove so they could wash. Joseph used it first, then the others, according to age. After gulping down a mug of tea Joseph prepared for him, Mpho walked to school. His class consisted of about fifty students and one teacher. The children sat two or three at a desk. The rest of the school was equally overcrowded and operated on a staggered schedule: Mpho’s grade spent half the day inside a classroom, the other half sitting under a tree outside. When it rained, the two shifts had to squeeze inside the sultry, suffocating room.
Learning brought little joy to Mpho. The aim of Bantu education was, in the words of its Nationalist creator, Hendrik Verwoerd, ‘to prepare blacks for a status in life as hewers of wood and drawers of water’. Often Mpho’s beleaguered teacher seemed to go through the motions of teaching: thirty minutes spent on history; thirty on geography; and so on. Mpho saw these classes as something to be endured. His real education took place at night around the dining table: there his older brothers brought to life the dry, uninspiring stuff of school, stimulating him with their debates and drawing him into their world of books and ideas.
Unlike his older brothers, Lebakeng (or Dee, as he was called) was neither studious nor serious. As the fifth child, Dee saw himself as a kind of nexus between the older siblings and the younger ones. He nonetheless found his closest companionship in a cluster of school friends. He and four of his classmates formed the core of their school choir, where Dee sang first tenor. They dominated their school football team. They designed identical tunics out of old mealie bags and wore them as team uniforms. When they decided to skip their studies to play a match, they did so en masse. (Dee’s love of football was such that Nomkhitha’s voice alone, wafting across the field and summoning him home, was the only thing that could stop him from playing. Even his sobriquet had football associations: it came from a player for the Moroka Swallows.)
Dee had a bit of the devil in him. His younger siblings saw him as an aggressive, flamboyant type, forever trying to arrange business deals. Dee befriended the children of neighbourhood shopkeepers and wheedled cold drinks and sweets from them. He gambled with fervour; his favourite game was to spin a coin, shouting out to anyone within earshot: Heads or tails? Heads or tails? Dee always managed to have money. Sometimes he appropriated the change his parents left for the children to buy bread and used it to gamble. On other occasions, Dee spent the coins intended for the church collection on vetkoeke (fat cakes): greasy, fried confections that could be had at a nearby café. He also rolled dice, but that stopped the day Dee noticed Joseph observing him from the back-yard. For a while, he carried a knife.
His siblings were of two minds about Dee. They often reported him to their parents for stealing the bread money and making them go hungry. Dee would receive a punishment that night, but by the next morning he was always so cheerful that his brothers felt a bit ashamed – until the next infraction. Even Nomkhitha was ambivalent. She knew him to be mischievous and disobedient, and yet he could be so helpful. ‘I’m going out now,’ he would say, struggling into his football clothes, ‘but if you need me, just stand at the door and call.’ And when Nomkhitha called him, he indeed came running.
Dee found school boring. He was dogged by the brilliant reputation of his older brothers. Like the others, he did his homework at the dining-room table at night by candlelight. (The house caught on fire three times because of the candles, a not uncommon occurrence in Soweto. Few, if any, homes had electricity. The fire usually started in a bedroom while the family was in another part of the house. Once, all the children’s clothes were destroyed.) Dee could not see the point of devoting much energy to his studies. Whites held all the power; blacks had none. When he finished school, he would work for the white man in some prescribed job. That was the way of the world.
Once, Dee and his classmates were taken on a trip to the Voortrekker Monument near Pretoria. A hulking granite structure, the Monument stood as a temple to the struggle between (white) civilization and (black) barbarism. It was constructed so that at noon on December 16, the day that Afrikaners commemorated the defeat of the Zulu warriors, a ray of light shining through the Monument’s dome would strike an inscription on a cenotaph. The symbolic tomb honoured Piet Retief, a Boer leader murdered by the Zulus. The purpose of the outing was to make history come alive for the students. But Dee didn’t need to gaze upon cold marble friezes to grasp the significance of white domination; under apartheid, he lived it.
A more quotidian lesson could be found in the constant police presence in Soweto. That, for Dee, was a live thing: the police were everywhere, rounding up men whose passes weren’t in order. Every day Dee saw long queues of transgressors, miserable and defeated, handcuffed together and sitting on the ground, waiting to be taken to jail. Policemen were the highest figures of authority in the township. It seemed natural that Dee would aspire to enter the profession when he grew up, perhaps as a traffic officer – they got to ride on motorcycles. Then again, maybe he would be a teacher – they dressed better than most of the adults Dee knew.
By the time of Tshepiso’s birth – he was the seventh child – Nomkhitha and Joseph were too burdened to lavish much attention on him. He was left mostly to his own devices. At a young age, Tshepiso developed a loathing for school: he despised the overcrowded classroom, the single, harassed teacher, the long list of supplementary reading his parents could not afford. He had to beg his friends to share their books with him. His teacher tormented him on the subject constantly. ‘Where is your book?’ she would demand in front of the class. Next week, Tshepiso always stammered, I promise I’ll buy it next week. But Joseph never had the money until much too late in the school year. The next week Tshepiso would be subjected to the same humiliating interrogation.
Despite his antipathy to school, Tshepiso – as was characteristic of Nomkhitha’s children – loved to read. Mpho supplied him with cast-off books. Tshepiso developed a reputation as the laziest of the siblings: he would stumble from his bed, search around the house for a book, then – instead of doing his chores – crawl back beneath the blankets to read. He spent hours engrossed in magazines, newspapers, paperbacks, any printed material he could find. Only Nomkhitha’s threats of retribution would rouse him from his reverie.
His ardour for reading notwithstanding, Tshepiso was, in other respects, a typical township boy. He excelled at removing the spokes from abandoned bicycle wheels and, using a wire as a kind of prod, conducting races through the streets of Soweto. He collected large pieces of scrap metal to make into sledges for the sandy hills that dotted the township. He created catapults from smashed bottles, arrows from sticks and bits of wire; these he employed in competitions among his younger siblings and friends to shoot down birds.
Tshepiso found it difficult being part of so large a family. He sucked his thumb until he was seven and was tortured by his older brothers for it – they smeared his thumb with chili peppers as a deterrent. In another act of dissuasion, they inflicted small cuts with a razor blade on the top of the digit. Tshepiso saw his siblings not only as tormentors, but as the cause of his poverty. His house felt suffocatingly crammed, especially at night when everyone was present. Joseph and Nomkhitha slept in one bedroom, the latest baby between them. The older children stayed in the dining room: they pushed the table to one side and pulled out a bed from underneath a sofa. The youngest ones – Tshepiso included – slept in the other bedroom, packed into beds, squeezed onto the floor. Tshepiso would dream that his house had miraculously expanded during the night; on waking, he peered around the room,
