wagon came to rest in Bengu, a speck of a settlement. It sits at the end of a rock-strewn road that snakes for miles through the mountains from the white town of Lady Frere. A forlorn, wind-whipped place, Bengu has sweeping vistas of the land as it rolls gently towards the Great Kei river. Most of its inhabitants lived in shacks. Their floors were cold stone caked with dirt; they cooked on coal stoves that filled the tiny dwellings with acrid smoke; their meagre possessions were usually covered with a thick coating of flies.
Daniel’s house, as befitted his position, was Bengu’s grandest. Built of brown stone, it boasted three spacious rooms and several outhouses. He also owned a large tract of land. It was a rare thing for an African to own land; most blacks were tenant farmers, paying an annual rent to the government or to a white landlord. But Daniel had inherited part of the property from his father, with the rest bequeathed to him by the chief. He grew maize and wheat; in the orchard were peaches, apples, apricots and pomegranates. Daniel also raised goats, pigs, sheep, horses, cows, geese and shaggy-feathered chickens.
In this house, Olive gave birth to Virginia Nomkhitha – her name means ‘attractive’ in Xhosa – on 9 May 1935. A son, Mark, followed a couple of years later. The two children would soon become inseparable companions; by the time they started school, their half-siblings had all grown and moved to nearby villages. And so they did everything together: homework, play, household chores. (Neither was required to help in the fields or kraals, where the cattle were kept; hired hands did that work.) Their contrasting personalities complemented one another. Like Olive, Mark had a calm, gentle manner; Nomkhitha, on the other hand, emulated Daniel’s exuberance.
Theirs was an unconventional family for the times. Olive had to be away for most of the week; her teaching job in a village near Lady Frere was too distant for her to travel there and back every day. She would leave on Sunday night, riding her horse the fifteen miles to the school, and return on Friday. Much of the child rearing fell to Daniel. He came to favour Nomkhitha and Mark over his other children, but he still brought them up in strict African fashion.
Daniel woke before sunrise every morning to start a fire, then roused Nomkhitha and Mark with a hymn. They joined in the singing; the children knelt while their father prayed. Afterwards, Daniel shooed them outdoors to begin their chores. Bucket in hand, Nomkhitha and Mark had to fetch water from the river that meandered past the village. It was only a ten-minute walk to the riverbank, but the pail, once filled, felt unbearably heavy to a small, sleepy child. And the air could be achingly cold, especially in winter. Upon returning to the house, Nomkhitha and Mark had to sweep their room and dust the chairs. Only then would Daniel give them their breakfast of porridge, bread and tea.
On weekdays, Nomkhitha and Mark walked to school. Unlike many of their classmates, they had shoes, but they went barefoot when it rained to preserve them. After school finished in the early afternoon, Nomkhitha and Mark raced home to more chores. There was water to draw again, and laundry to be carried to the riverbank for washing. The children pounded the clothes on large rocks to get them clean and spread them across the tall grass; while waiting for the laundry to dry in the sun, Nomkhitha and Mark played. It was the best part of the day. They held running races, climbed the huge, overhanging trees, swam if the weather was warm. To dry off, Mark taught Nomkhitha different dance steps. He loved to sing too, although he hadn’t inherited Olive’s mellifluous voice; but he was a stunning dancer.
The children had to finish their homework by eight o’clock every evening. That was when they and Daniel (and Olive, when she was present) gathered in one room to pray. Then Daniel would read to Mark and Nomkhitha and regale them with stories of his travels or with intsomi, traditional Xhosa folktales that usually incorporated some sort of moral lesson.
Sundays were given over to church. Nomkhitha and Mark would jump the stone fence that separated their father’s property from the Methodist church next door; both liked attending the services, especially Mark, who was a server. Otherwise, Bengu offered little in the way of diversion. No one had a radio. Mail arrived weekly; newspapers came once a month, delivered by horse-drawn carriage. (The villagers learned of the outbreak of the Second World War only when white sugar suddenly disappeared from the shops and other foodstuffs became scarce.) The most valued entertainment was a visitor. The appearance of a traveller generated much excitement and extreme gestures of hospitality: water would be boiled, tea brewed, precious stores of biscuits brought out. And neighbours would crowd into the hot, dark room where the visitor was staying, eager for news of the outside.
Once a month, Daniel, Olive, Nomkhitha and Mark made the journey to Lady Frere. It was not a grand place: one dusty street filled with small shops and a scattering of churches. Still, it was a town; here you could buy things, catch up on gossip, feel a vitality and movement missing in Bengu. Nomkhitha and her family made a day of it. Dressed in their Sunday finery, they wandered from shop to shop, lingering over a bolt of fine cloth, admiring a stylish hat, exchanging pleasantries with a shopkeeper. (Olive, clearly an educated, Christian woman, was always treated courteously by the white shopkeepers.) When they had seen all that the town had to offer, Olive and Daniel purchased their stores of wheat, sorghum, mealie meal (ground corn) for the month, gathered up the children and began the long ride home.
Impelled by his religion and his position in the community, Daniel believed in sharing his wealth. If a man in the village died, Daniel slaughtered a cow to contribute to the ceremonies; for a child’s funeral, he gave a sheep. Every June, when little grew in the southern hemisphere winter and people were in the throes of what was called ‘the hungry season’, Daniel prepared a feast. He roasted a cow, brewed quantities of sorghum beer, and invited people from miles around. Many of the guests were ‘red people’, traditional Xhosas whose appellation came from the ochre clay they smeared on their bodies and faces. To Nomkhitha, the women were especially spectacular. They wore shawls folded in a square on their heads, skirts of animal skin, a piece of cloth tied around their breasts, and a sheepskin pouch in which to keep their inqawe, a wooden pipe, and tobacco. To complete their maquillage, some scraped out the sticky black ash from the inqawe with a twig and applied it to their lips or dotted it on their cheeks.
Although these festivities impressed Nomkhitha as a child, she was most taken with the rites of ancestor worship. African Christianity is overlaid with vestigial tribal rites; chief among them is belief in the ancestors. Daniel taught Nomkhitha to respect her forebears. They are your interlocutors with God, he explained, the link between the living and the Lord. They can intercede on your behalf. If you leave the house, for instance, you must say: I’m going out now, please protect me. If you talk to your ancestors, they will understand. But you must honour them. After hearing your prayers, they expect to be offered a pinch of snuff, a calabash of beer. These were lessons Nomkhitha would take with her into adulthood.
Daniel adhered strictly to the ways of the ancestors. He bought tombstones for deceased relatives and unveiled them with ceremony; if someone were not buried properly, he believed, one’s children could be visited by the restless soul. Daniel led his family on annual pilgrimages to the cemetery. It was a dry, solitary spot, littered with saguaros and thorn bushes; from here, Bengu could barely be discerned in the distance. The graves of Nomkhitha’s family dated back to the 1800s and were marked with simple stones, painted white, with names chiselled crudely on them. Daniel would pull out the weeds that had sprung up around the headstones. He also tested the stones to be sure they were firmly implanted; cattle liked to rub against them and often loosened or even knocked them down. To communicate with their ancestors, Daniel, Olive and the children would each spit on a small stone and gingerly place it near a headstone. Then they would pray.
These rituals gave definition to Nomkhitha’s life. But her identity, her sense of self, came from Daniel’s position as a praise singer – imbongi – and adviser at the chief’s court. Part socio-political commentator, part oral historian, the imbongi composed poems about past and present events. Only the most gifted poets became praise singers. Speaking in Xhosa, an extravagant, metaphorical language of clicks and pops, they combined acute political intuition with wit and
