father left South Africa in 1970 to join Umkhonto we Sizwe in Tanzania and that is where he met my mother. I was born in Dar es Salaam, where my father was undergoing military training and my mother had every woman’s dream job (at that time), the highly-esteemed role of typist.
My paternal grandfather was a Scotsman who had an affair with his former maid, my grandmother. The result of this union was my father. I grew up with an aversion towards white men as my father had told me that my grandmother was raped.
Whether it was that my father read too many Malcolm X speeches or simply a sign of the times in which he grew up, my father tended to exaggerate. It was only when I came back home as a young adult that I realised that my Makhulu could never have been raped. Her boss was definitely guilty of sexual exploitation, but the grandmother I knew, who spoke her mind to one and all, would never have been forced into sex. Even the white sergeants at Orlando Police Station knew not to mess with her.
My take on it, after knowing her, is that perhaps she thought she would be able to do a coup d’etat on the Missus but when the Missus found out, she got fired and became a liquor trader on the alternative market (also known as the black market!) which is how she put my father through school. If my father wants to justify the fact that he is strongly anti-white by stating that his mother was raped, I let him be. (What surprises me is that he chose the ANC as a political home, as opposed to the blacker and, back then, more militant Pan-Africanist Congress.)
It may have been to fit in with his comrades that my father used his mother’s last name, acted blacker than the blackest, and instilled in me the same values. One thing I applaud my father for is that he has never (as a few other so-called ‘coloureds’ have done) claimed to have Khoisan heritage in order to take advantage of the special allowances reserved for those very indigenous people. He states that the Khoisan are disadvantaged enough without him having to jump on the bandwagon. He is just a black man – and he speaks all the local languages as though he was born and bred in every province of this great country.
Unlike my father, my mother never lied about her heritage. She told me her grandfather was an Englishman who came to South Africa, met a good-time girl in my grandmother (she was a singer), and shagged her to prove that he was liberal (and maybe deep down inside, to see whether it was true what they said about black women and their sexuality).
Of course there had never been a chance that he would marry her but after he left, with promises to return, my grandmother didn’t ever have any serious relationships. Thus she was detested by many men in Kofifi for thinking she was too good for them. Without their support, her music career went nowhere but, like many women before and after her, she kept on singing ‘Waiting for my man’.
He never came back, and she died a solitary figure in Soweto’s Orlando West after the resettlement. My mother’s self-imposed exile was, therefore, less for political reasons than that she hoped for better opportunities and had nothing to stay in South Africa for.
She met my father in Tanzania and I like to think that it was love at first sight because my parents’ relationship is what I strive for in my marriage to Mandla. My late mother told me they had hoped to have a brood of children, but after she gave birth to me, three miscarriages and doctor’s warnings made it such that I was an only child. I am not complaining. While it is true that I did not get everything I wanted, I sure did get everything I needed and, in retrospect, I could not have asked for anything more.
Although my parents loved me deeply, I was always on the periphery of their love for each other and, without meaning to I am sure, sometimes they made me feel like ‘the other’ in the equation that was our family. When my father came home – wherever home was at the time – he’d put a Temptations album on the record player and start singing ‘My Girl’ to my mother, like she was the only girl in the room.
It used to make me lonely, but it was also a testament to their love, how they would waltz together as though they were one, and how at parties they only had eyes for each other. My father and mother had an unspoken language; they knew what the other wanted to say before it was said just by looking into each other’s eyes. If they fought, I am sure it occurred only in their bedroom because I never saw them exchanging angry words.
When I was twelve, my parents sent me to high school in the United Kingdom courtesy of the liberation movement. Thus began my love-hate relationship with that little island with a population whose teeth were so messed up prior to the National Health Service that many of them looked as though they grew up on a diet of snoek. I was in boarding school but spent many holidays with numerous exile aunts and uncles while my parents pursued the liberation cause.
My very first experience of ‘home’, therefore, occurred only after the unbanning of the political parties. Fortunately for me, my parents had educated me enough to cherish my culture and I spoke Xhosa relatively well. Granted, it was with a bit of an English lilt, but in those days of a xenophobic pre-independence black populace, excusing my accent as the result of a life in exile guaranteed that I got the cutest boys, and that my friends’ parents made allowances for misdeeds that in an ‘in-zile’ would have been considered a no-no.
After putting the ANC in power with my vote, I buried my mother who died of cancer. Her daughter and husband were drawn closer by their shared sorrow; I became the best friend that my mother had been to him and he became the confidante that his wife had been to me.
I cried a few tears of blood to get my father to allow me to study in Hawaii and, never having been the father who could say no to his perfect child, he consented. When he enquired why I wanted to go to Hawaii I lied, straight faced, that I was curious to learn about the culture and history of its indigenous people. The truth of the matter was that the land of the Kanaka Maolis, poi and ka’awa was the sole place where I knew that my father did not have any eyes and ears, and that made it FREEDOMLAND.
Just before my senior year, while on summer vacation in New York, I met Mandla at a party at Lizwe’s Manhattan flat. He had driven all the way from DC to attend the party with a few other South African gatecrashers, but all of us were homesick and any South African passport was welcome.
The world did not stop turning, there were no sparks in the air, images did not start moving in slow motion; rather we chatted for a bit, exchanged numbers and became friends. We talked regularly and when we returned home, I suppose for lack of choice – I jest! – Mandla and I gravitated towards each other and here we are, seven years later with a five-year-old son and a six-year-old marriage.
When Mandla proposed, there was no picnic basket in the park, no jet flying overhead scripting, ‘Thandile, will you marry me?’ It was more a realisation as we loaded the trunk of his car after a joint grocery-shopping excursion that moving from one apartment to another each week was getting ridiculous. As he got into the car he said to me, ‘Babes, buying the same groceries for two places is absurd, why don’t we just get married?’ Sure, it was hardly romantic, but I said yes. After all, Mandla was intelligent, he had a great career ahead of him, he loved me and he was a great shag. So he needed a little help in the romance department, but I had a whole lifetime to work on that. And I flatter myself that I was not a bad catch for him either, otherwise he would not have wanted to, as they say, ‘buy the restaurant when he was getting free meals’.
Those who know me refer to me as black, because that is what I am. But many who do not know me refer to me, maybe due to my caramel complexion and none-too-fro Afro, as coloured. I honestly hate the term and I recall getting into a bit of conflict with another so-called coloured who told me I did not have pride in my heritage. Now with all due respect, I cannot very well celebrate my European ancestors who never loved enough to acknowledge their offspring. My African ancestors, on the other hand, have always loved unstintingly and supported unconditionally, so why celebrate those who did not love? Besides, anyone who has travelled knows if ‘you got a drop of black blood, you’s just a nigger and you
