could make her even more fertile. Nomkhitha dreaded the opprobrium each new pregnancy seemed to bring. Some neighbours made innuendoes about her being an ignorant country girl; others were more forthright and demanded to know why she just didn’t get an abortion. But Nomkhitha had seen the injuries, and death, caused by the illegal procedure and feared endangering her health. Years later, she would speak proudly of the courage it took to resist the pressure: ‘I never miscarried, never aborted,’ she said, ‘so I could live and die in peace.’
Nomkhitha and Joseph, by necessity, became consumed with providing for their children. In his endless quest to earn more money, Joseph obtained a driver’s licence and went to work at a brewery. His job was to drive salesmen around the Eastern Transvaal. Joseph left home on Monday morning and returned on Friday, sleeping in a different place every night. He was not allowed to stay in the hotels with his salesman; they were only for whites. Instead, Joseph was relegated to the drivers’ rooms: filthy, cramped places filled with all kinds of winged and horned creatures. If the room were not too horrible, Joseph would spend the night there in a sleeping bag. He usually found it unbearable, though, and wound up sleeping in the car. Still, Joseph liked the job. His territory was beautiful, verdant country: here were the open spaces, the cattle, sheep, goats, and the infinite fields of maize that he had left behind. Here he could breathe again.
Joseph stayed at the job for several years, then switched to driving for a construction company – a position that allowed him to work in town, returning home every night. And the salary was better. But he never seemed to have enough money for his ever-expanding family. Joseph often regretted not having continued his education so he could get better-paying jobs. While working at the medical school, he had attended classes three nights a week in the hope of obtaining a junior-high school certificate; his employer offered the study sessions for free. But Joseph was exhausted after a full day’s work and by the amount of studying required for the certificate. After two years, he gave up.
While Joseph and Nomkhitha struggled to provide for their family, remarkable political events were happening around them. The African National Congress, the country’s oldest black liberation movement, led thousands of people throughout the 1950s in campaigns to defy the apartheid laws. In 1955 it had convened a two-day, outdoor mass-meeting in Kliptown to adopt a set of democratic principles. The ANC solicited suggestions from across South Africa; their request produced an overwhelming response. Members of trade unions, clubs, schools, women’s groups, church organizations and cultural associations heeded the call, sending their ideas on everything from brown paper bags to scraps of foolscap. The Freedom Charter, as the final version was called, eloquently proclaimed: ‘. . . That South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people . . .’. It was a revolutionary document. The government thought it treasonous: 156 leaders and activists who participated in its adoption were arrested a year later and put on trial.
In the meantime, a group of dissident members was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the ANC. Known as Africanists, they believed that whites had come to dominate the ANC; in their view, white involvement only furthered the black dependency that apartheid created. The Africanists also objected to what they saw as the excessive influence of the outlawed South African Communist Party on the ANC. The proof, they said, could be found in a section of the Freedom Charter demanding that ‘the mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole’. The Africanists were essentially correct: the two organizations had become inextricably intertwined. To purge themselves of these undesirable elements, the dissidents abandoned the ANC in 1959 and formed their own organization, the Pan Africanist Congress.
Disaster struck soon after. To compete with a similar ANC plan, the PAC called for a day of mass demonstrations the following year on March 21. Blacks were to march in protest against the much-hated passes – an ill-advised public show that was sure to lead to confrontation. Several thousand demonstrators gathered outside the police station in Sharpeville, a small township south of Johannesburg; the crowd was unarmed and generally calm. Suddenly, with no discernible provocation, the police who had been guarding the building opened fire on the protesters. They continued to shoot as the panicked people turned and fled. When it was over, sixty-nine Africans were dead – most of them shot in the back. One hundred and eighty-six people lay wounded.
The massacre provoked outrage and condemnations outside the country. The South African government was unperturbed: it declared a state of emergency, allowing the police to detain thousands of activists without charge or trial. Ten days later, it banned both the ANC and the PAC. The government had effectively ended all means of quasi-legal protest; efforts to defeat apartheid would now take a violent turn.
Nomkhitha followed these events closely. She ran to the shops every evening to buy the newspapers, then pored over the stories. Nomkhitha admired the ANC greatly, but was sceptical: how could these young people ever change things? She tried to engage Joseph in political discussions, much as Daniel had done in their house when she was young. But Joseph wouldn’t countenance such talk. He had no reason to believe that things would ever be different; no one he knew owned a shop or a farm. Such aspirations were a waste of time. Joseph’s only hope was to earn enough money to educate his children; that was the way, in his opinion, to a better life.
But it was a difficult path. After several years of trying to manage on one salary, Nomkhitha had little choice but to get a job. She found a position as a machinist in a factory that produced women’s clothes. The factory was downtown; one of Joseph’s relatives worked there and had told her of the job. She sewed side seams in dresses and hems in skirts with about sixty other women. The pay was meagre but much needed; Nomkhitha could barely afford to take time off to give birth to a new baby. She worked until a week before the delivery date, then stayed at home for a month afterwards – less than half the time allowed for maternity leave under South African law. Nomkhitha found it cheaper to hire a babysitter. One of the neighbourhood’s old women – aunties, they were called – would accost Nomkhitha on the street during her pregnancy and, jabbing a finger into her burgeoning belly, announce, ‘This one is mine. I’m going to look after him.’ And when the children were three years old, Nomkhitha could leave them at a nearby crèche.
Joseph and Nomkhitha still barely managed. The family rarely ate meat; Nomkhitha served pap (a stiff maize-meal porridge) and cabbage, or pap and onions and tomatoes instead. A kindly butcher saved good beef bones for her, which she added to the stew to make it more savoury. There was no money for emergencies: if one of the children became ill, a visit to the local clinic ate up half of Nomkhitha’s weekly pay. Joseph used his Christmas bonus each year to buy the children one set of clothes and one new school uniform. Despite the hardships, Nomkhitha tried not to despair. She had been raised to believe that God never imposed a burden on a person he could not bear; on bad days, Nomkhitha reminded herself that many people in Soweto could not even afford to eat. She took heart from the fact that her children never went to bed hungry.
It was a far cry from the privilege and status she had known as a girl and expected to continue into adulthood. That world had virtually disappeared. Daniel had died soon after Nomkhitha’s wedding, and her half-siblings immediately began fighting over the division of his estate. In the meantime, the government passed the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act, which established eight, ethnically based Bantustans. Under the law, blacks – who comprised about 73 per cent of the population – were allocated 13 per cent of the country’s most underdeveloped land. Although the majority of Africans resided in ‘white’ areas, they were to become citizens of their own ‘tribal homeland’; in this way, blacks could forever be deprived of political rights inside South Africa itself. Transkei was the first to be so transformed. In 1963, the government’s Transkei Constitution Act turned it into a semi-autonomous ‘homeland’. Daniel’s lands were confiscated by the new regime, his stone house knocked down. All was lost.
Reduced to penury, Olive moved to Johannesburg. She searched in vain for a teaching position and was eventually forced to take
