Vuyo loves his boys, but unfortunately for the babymamas, this was not enough reason for him to marry either one of them. Not long after he and Siz got hitched, the ghetto-fabs dumped their brood on Siz’s doorstep. Siz tolerates having Vuyo 2 and 3 around because, jealous chick that she is, she prefers to have her man home with her than visiting babymamas.
In spite of her issues, Siz has got to be one of the staunchest friends any person could have. She is one of those people who loves and hates with such passionate fervour that I feel lucky to be on the love side of her coin. This is not to say that we always agree. We had some big fights in college, which almost always began with her complaining about the guy she was dating. I, foolishly, would play my ‘leave-him’ Sis Dolly role and shake my head derisively when she did not. I now know not to give my opinions, because she will repeat them to her man, and when they are back in honeymoon mode they will end up blaming me for all their problems. I tell you, our friendship is working out much better because I am no longer a busybody.
Siz is a shopaholic and her wardrobe hangs like the who’s who of Milan Fashion Week. This girl will travel to Paris just to buy clothes. She never takes heed when I tell her that clothes don’t maketh the woman, my philosophy being, ‘I don’t walk around with the price tag out so why buy one outfit for four grand when I can buy twenty for the same amount at Mr Price?’ I once asked her why she insists on going to London, Paris and New York to shop for designer wear when our homegrown Sun God’dess’ are just as good? ‘Girl please,’ (insert eye-roll) ‘until I hear Halle on Oscar’s red carpet saying, “It’s a Sun God’dess”, I am not buying. I ply my trade back home and not overseas, that’s all the Proudly South African I need. So you and your folks at Nedlac can continue with your local designers.’
Aside from her misguided clothes budget allocation, Siz is a very generous soul and is always giving. In fact, whenever she goes to Europe on a shopping stint, she makes sure she brings all of us something – she is the one who introduced me to my one designer weakness: my Mahnolos.
With her warm and giving nature, Siz recently made a gesture that is typically her by going home – ‘home’ to me and her being anywhere in the Eastern Cape – and taking some distant cousin from Zwelitsha, with no livelihood and three children, to come and live with her and help take care of her stepsons. Siz has actually taken time to enrol this distant cousin, Pertunia, in weekly sewing classes which she pays for. She drops Pertunia off and picks her up again on Saturdays, while she spends the day with the step-children whose existence she detests – a true sacrifice. Considering that Sisi Pertunia is a very distant relative – a relation by clan name only – this is really big of Siz.
Lauren asked her about this. ‘Honestly Siz, doesn’t getting a maid and training her for something better defeat the whole purpose of hiring help? Just when she is getting used to all your bad habits, she’ll be telling you she is leaving. Hello!’
I am in agreement with Lauren on this but Siz was not buying it. She merely put her palm in our faces and said, ‘Y’all talk to the white ’cause this black ain’t listening.’
This social consciousness is admirable, but even her mother, ‘Madam Negativity’, told her she was going to regret it, because ‘darkies always bite the hand that feeds them’. Nosizwe responded that so long as those darkies’ stomachs were full, she was happy. (But she said it to me – saying it to her mother would result in one of those meaningless curses that affect one’s psyche so much that any time anything goes wrong you assume it is because of the curse.)
Finally, Nosizwe is my son’s official godmother. While neither Mandla nor I are religious, we were both raised by staunch Catholic mothers. It happened then that one day, about a month after Hintsa was born, I took him to visit his doting grandmother in Soweto. She summoned me into the living room, sat me down and, in the manner of mothers-in-law who have something serious to talk about, asked me when was the last time I attended church.
Now, I havn’t been to church since I was sixteen. Mandla and I got married at a registry office and we both still avoid funerals due to our aversion to organised religion. So I found myself lying that it was a few weeks ago. She smiled the smile of mothers-in-law who know you are lying but plan to just let it pass, and bluntly ordered me to get the child baptised.
This meant having to attend mass regularly and paying church dues so Mandla and I could seem like devout members of the congregation. But I did not mind as much as I thought I would; Mandla and I saw the positive side of the whole thing in two words: Catholic education. Having both benefited from it, we agreed that a Catholic education is probably the greatest weapon you can arm a child with, in spite of the bad rap that the good Church has taken in recent years.
This being the case, the boy was baptised. Siz was made godmother and that was the last time either Mandla, Hintsa’s godmother or I set foot in a church. When the priest asked us to affirm our faith by vowing to raise the child as a Catholic and promising to ‘conquer Satan and all his works’ we all felt no guilt in saying ‘aye’. I suppose, should guilt nag us in our golden years, we will all go to confession and say so many Hail Marys. Siz being godmother to my son means nothing more to her or Hintsa than that she buys him a present every time she makes a business trip to France. But that’s between Siz and her godson.
2. Rule Brittania
Chapter 2
Rule Brittania
If Nosizwe was born with a beaded silver spoon, Lauren was born with a wooden one. Her father, old imperial British stock, inherited a Stellenbosch vineyard and within five years of his marriage to Lauren’s mother had drunk the profits away and mismanaged the farm so spectacularly that they had to sell it to a nouveau riche Afrikaner.
Not wanting to put a white man out to pasture (and maybe to push some Boer-English buttons while doing it), the Afrikaner farmer gave Lauren’s father a managerial position on the farm which had originally belonged to him, and Lauren grew up as an Anglo plaasmeisie, without the plaas. Her mother had, apparently, never forgiven her father for pitching them into poverty and Lauren grew up with a mother who whined about how things could have been and a father who would drink too much and then beat her mother up. Ostensibly for ‘blaming him’ for their unfortunate position.
Lauren went to school with the farmer’s children and when she finished high school, she got a scholarship to Wits and never looked back.
‘You know Thandi, when I left Stellenbosch I told myself I would never go back there,’ she once confided, ‘I wouldn’t even go to my father’s funeral if he died. The man is a bastard. I don’t only hate him for the way he drinks and beats my mother; I can’t get over the fact that he drank away my trust fund and I had to apply for a scholarship to university.’
It could be a sign of her Electra Complex (thank you Dr Freud – although why she should want to possess her father is beyond me) that Lauren ended up marrying a man who also tends to drink a little too much. Fortunately for Lauren, her husband Michael is a lamb. Save for moments of possessiveness and ordering her about when he is drunk, he’s a needy child to Lauren’s big mama character.
When I first got to know her, Lauren told me that to escape the abuse drama, her mother would often reminisce about how British royal blood coursed through their veins – whatever colour that was in that inbred monarchy. Thus began Lauren’s love affair with The Royal Family and royal memorabilia. A love affair she now shares with another royalist who acts like she came from African aristocratic stock – Siz’s mother.
As if her Anglophilia were not laughable enough, Lauren has to make it more comical. Just last week she was bragging to Siz and me that she had enrolled her eldest daughter, Elizabeth (yes, named
