corrected him. “Primary school, high school and a University of Masakeng.”
If they were not building magnificent castles in the air, Khutso would skip school and together the three of them would load one of Leruo’s six-cubic-metre tipper trucks for fifteen cents per load. While they worked they would sing songs composed on demand, songs whose beats were derived from the rhythm of their shovels as they were shoved into the river sand. It always made the work easier.
These songs always carried strong messages, but somehow they never listened to the messages, or maybe they just chose not to.
QUESTION: Heh! Ngwan’Zo, what is your problem? Why aren’t you going to school?
CHORUS: Because I beat my very own teacher. I beat him up, I beat him up.
QUESTION: Why did you beat him up? Do you know what you did to your future?
RESPONSE: No. I can’t tell you until the case has been resolved in the High Court.
CHORUS: Because I beat my very own teacher. I beat him up, I beat him up.
RESPONSE: My future is as good as what I do in a pit toilet: fucked-up shit.
CHORUS: Because I beat my very own teacher. I beat him up, I beat him up.
Ngwan’Zo had composed the song himself and he liked it more than any other, and, in fact, it became so popular that when the initiates were coming out of komeng that year it was the song they sang.
* * *
Leruo was a source of hope to Khutso and his friends because he always made them believe that they could be whatever they wanted to be in life, even though, like a responsible adult, he tried to show them the light. “So your time to bunk school has come,” he said to Khutso when it became clear that he had given up on education. “But something beats me about you, you always went to school like a model pupil, then you just sort of lost interest. Why?”
“There is no money at school,” Khutso said, uninterestedly.
Leruo looked at him with a strange smile, then he looked into the distance.
“Tell him,” Ngwan’Zo said. “Tell him that whoever needs money has to work hard for it.”
“I need people to work for me,” Leruo finally replied, “but I am still going to tell you to go to school. We are not all cut out to be rich people, but education will make you a better human being. And you will be thankful that you got an education when you had the time to.”
“Leruo, everybody is always preaching that we should go to school,” Ngwan’Zo said, “but most of them didn’t go to school themselves.”
“Do you want to know why?” Leruo asked him.
“Why?”
“It’s because they had the chance to go to school, and like you they didn’t take the opportunity. Now they are feeling the disadvantages of not having an education.”
“Why do you think they didn’t take the opportunity?”
“Because they thought that they knew better, just like you.”
“That’s a lie,” Ngwan’Zo said. “If that were true they would go to adult education classes and get educated.”
“Well, I am always thinking that I should go back to university,” Leruo said, “but I can’t afford to leave my businesses and go and study again. That part of my life is over.”
Khutso forgot about the conversation until one night when his mother cornered him.
“Khutso,” she said, looking at her last-born son, “I have always wanted you to go to university and be a doctor, and I have worked hard so that you can go to school, so I am going to give you another chance, the same as I gave all your brothers and sisters.”
His mother had never been able to give her children the opportunities that Leruo’s father had given his sons and daughters, but she had always made sure that whatever else had happened they had always gone to school.
“Don’t you think that your brothers and sisters are crying when they think how much of my energy they have wasted, how much of my hard-earned money they have thrown away?” his mother asked Khutso. “They know that I am poor. They know I wanted better things for them. They know, and yet still your sisters keep dumping their children on me, still your brothers keep asking me for money.” Tears filled the old woman’s eyes as she looked at Khutso. “They say that you can take a horse to the water but you can’t make it drink,” she went on, wiping away her tears. “But I am telling you, Khutso, to use this chance. Don’t throw it away like your brothers and sisters did before you.”
Khutso’s mother could not bring herself to disown her own children; she had always given them one more chance, and they had always disappointed her. Khutso’s eldest brother had just quit school one day, deciding that he wanted to become a taxi driver. But after his mother had sacrificed to get him a driver’s licence and saved enough for a deposit on a taxi, he had disappointed her – he never brought anything home. Three years later he had run the taxi into the ground, so he sold it and arrived home after a few months with nothing at all. “This is your home, you are welcome to stay,” Khutso’s mother had told him, “but please don’t ever ask for anything again.”
A few months later he got a job as a taxi driver in the big city and moved out. They hadn’t seen him again, but sometimes he would send a letter asking for money.
Khutso’s four sisters kept bringing home fatherless children. His mother tried again and again to put them back in school, but it was never long before they arrived home with yet another baby. And to top it all they never got married; they just moved in with their boyfriends. This was a source of great pain to Khutso’s mother, because she couldn’t visit them or recognise her extended families as they had never been introduced in the traditional way.
* * *
That night Khutso lay in his bed thinking of all the things that his mother had done for his brothers and sisters, for his sisters’ children and for him. He thought about what Leruo had said to Ngwan’Zo, and then he thought about all the things that his teachers had said to him. Finally, he thought about all the money that he and his friends had made shifting sand. The most they had ever moved in a day was eight loads, and although it was good money – that day they had celebrated by buying sardines, baked beans, spaghetti, atchar and a litre of soft drink – they had always smoked and drunk the rest of whatever they had earned over the following weekend. The money that Leruo paid them was always spent in the shebeen. He had never done anything good with it.
Khutso thought about the people in the community that he considered happy, and concluded that they were happy because they had money. He saw that money could buy you everything in this world – respect, love and happiness. I have to make money, he told himself. If I want to have friends, have the freshest-looking face, and be respected left, right and centre, I have to make money. And Khutso wanted to be respected and adored. He dreamed of it. And he wanted to have friends. That’s all he ever wanted.
Then Khutso looked at the options that he had, and after pondering them all he came up with a way out: school. It was the only solution he was sure about. He had never really been the brightest, but with some hard work he was sure he could succeed. School is like a railway line, he thought to himself.
