he was still alive: “Education is for foolish people, you teach them and examine them on what you have taught them, and then, when they pass the exam, they feel that opportunities will come their way, respect and all . . .”
He made opportunities come his way in another way – he became a striker for Pirates, a career that lasted nearly three seasons – and everything was milk and honey until his name was called. His family’s hopes had died with him. Khutso had arrived two months after he was buried, and his mother had named him Khutso because that was what he brought to her: peace. She was left all alone to scrabble together a life for her big family – she had given birth to seven healthy children before the age of twenty-five – so she took her family from Soweto and came back to Masakeng, where her husband had been building them a house. There they lived in it as it stood – unfinished.
* * *
After what his mother had told him, Khutso began the next school year filled with determination fuelled by anger – he wanted to be educated so that he could have new clothes at Christmas and parties at his house. “My son,” his mother told him on the first day of the new term, “I, your mother, want you to be educated because: One, your mother didn’t go past Standard One. And, two, because I want you to be a man within this community. I want you to be a man within this nation. Then you can have your own cars, and throw your own parties, and have a wardrobe so big that you don’t have to wash your clothes for a whole year. Khutso, promise me that you will go to school.”
“I promise.”
“I want you to become an educated man,” she said. “Promise that you will become a doctor.”
“I promise.”
Khutso’s mother didn’t have money for many things, but from that day on, because of his promise, she always paid his school fees on time, and she made sure that he had school shoes and a uniform, that he washed every night before sleeping and that in the morning he had soft porridge or yesterday’s leftovers before he went to class.
Chapter 3
In primary school Khutso never bunked once, even though Thabakgolo Primary School was a nine kilometres’ walk from his home, but after a couple of years at Lehlasedi High School his sporadic attendance began to worry his teachers. He always started the new school year in the same way – with a deep desire to go to school – but by the time the first school holidays came around, being at school had drained his energy. School is boring, he would think to himself. But in Standard Eight Khutso and his friends started smoking dagga, and after the first holidays – when his willpower was at its weakest – he began bunking school.
It started with him failing to submit his homework. After that he didn’t attend the subjects in which he still had to complete his work. Then he began to bunk school every Friday, telling himself that he would make up the lost days later in the term. But he never did and so he was behind in all his subjects. His teachers, who really believed in him, tried to understand what was wrong, but Khutso would just promise to attend class and they quickly came to learn that he never kept his promises.
Khutso bunked the whole of the second and third school terms that year and only came back to school a month into the final term. Unsurprisingly, to the disappointment of his mother, he failed Standard Eight.
* * *
The greatest influence and inspiration in the community was Leruo, the son of the local businessman. They said that his father had had no formal schooling and that he had taught himself to read and write. Whatever the truth, everyone knew that Leruo’s father had worked in the city of gold for a long time before coming back home to the village to open the café and hardware store.
Leruo, like all his siblings, had been to the most exclusive schools. And just like his brothers and sisters he had dropped out of university, but his father hadn’t minded at all. “Education can do nothing for you, which is why I left school. In this life you don’t need education to live, you only need brains,” he’d said to his son.
Leruo’s father had worked hard and made enough money to build the only double-storey house in the dusty community, the only house with a borehole, and although all his children had dropped out of university, he was sure that they would live far better lives than he and his father had lived.
“Look at the people teaching you . . .” he’d said to his son. “If education improves people’s lives, then why aren’t their lives improved in any way? They are slaves to the government. And look at those who have retired, people who have educated others for years and years, they are still poor.”
Leruo continued from where his old man had hung up. He had a fleet of taxis and a brick-manufacturing company, had more than thirty people working for him, but despite his wealth he was still a man of the people.
Usually, when the well-educated came back from university they behaved like strangers in the community. They thought of themselves as better than everyone else, and would quickly start to complain about how boring the place was. It was obvious to everyone that they were only home to show people how successful they had become. But Leruo was different. He talked to people in the community, and would always help if his hand was wanted.
However, Leruo was also part of Khutso’s problem. He loved temporary labour and paid cash at the end of the working day. By bunking school and working for Leruo, Khutso could feed his new-found hobbies – smoking and drinking. His money was the main reason that Khutso began bunking school.
* * *
Khutso thought he knew everything, thought that he had everything under control, that with his friends, Ngwan’Zo and Maoto, he was invincible. To him it was as if they were one. These were the boys that he had learned everything with: They were the boys that he had played with since he had started to walk. They had started at primary school and continued high school together. They had gone to komeng together and had come out of komeng – as men – together. They had shared their first bottle of alcohol together. They had learned to smoke together. But in their third year at high school things changed. In the first quarter of the new school year, Ngwan’Zo quit school after beating up his class teacher. The teacher had slapped him in the face and he had retaliated, then the cops were called and even though the governors of the school tried to intervene, they couldn’t stop Ngwan’Zo quitting school.
Maoto followed in his footsteps two months later. He got into a fight with the same teacher his friend had fought with, and as it was with his friend so it was with him. People in the know believed that Khutso would end up fighting the teacher as well, and also quit school, but Khutso respected all his teachers and they never failed to try to lead him in the right direction. In fact, Khutso even tried to convince his friends that they should come back to school. “You should apologise,” he told them. “Then we could go through high school together. It’s boring without you.” But they never listened to him.
* * *
When they were high, Khutso and his friends used to tell each other that they were going to have the greatest law firm in the world. They told each other that their law firm’s headquarters would be in their own village; that they would pack the village’s poverty into a container and export it to foreign lands. Then they would pave every road and every footpath. “Not construct new footpaths,” Ngwan’Zo said, exhaling smoke and looking at it as it disappeared into the air, “but pave the existing footpaths, keeping them the way our life here has engineered them.”
“And we won’t name the streets,” Khutso added. “They should remain as nameless as they are.”
Maoto laughed
