MAMPHELA RAMPHELE
* * *
A Passion for Freedom
TAFELBERG
To my late parents,
my sons
and my grandchildren
Preface
ONE IS ALWAYS AMBIVALENT ABOUT TELLING ONE’S STORY. Critics may charge that one is being self-seeking or ask whether one is as true to one’s demons as to one’s angels. The issue of selective memory also rears its head: it is so easy to rewrite history for one’s own benefit.
Among those who originally inspired me to tell my story was Mrs Albertina Sisulu. She has said: ‘We are required to walk our own road – and then stop, assess what we have learned and share it with others. It is only in this way that the next generation can learn from those who have walked before them . . . We can do no more than tell our story. They must do with it what they will.’1
Storytelling is a historical imperative. We cannot successfully navigate uncharted waters without some script to guide us. This is particularly so for women, especially black women. Women have to find a script, a narrative to live by, because all other scripts are likely to depict them in roles that fit the conventional stereotypes.
Storytelling is also an urgent project for black women in South Africa where so much forgetfulness is willed upon people. It is much more convenient to forget the past than to recall its ugly face. Today hardly anyone is willing to acknowledge the support once given to the iniquitous system of apartheid, which caused so much pain to so many. With the formal death of apartheid, its former supporters have disappeared.
All the same, the temerity of writing one’s biography still needs to be explained. It is a foolish act by any description. Why should one make oneself so vulnerable? There are mitigating factors for this foolish act. I believe that growing up under apartheid promoted premature ageing. One’s childhood, adolescence and young adulthood were knocked out of one very rudely. One either grew up and survived, or was destroyed along the way.
I have other inspirations for my storytelling. The important women in my life have shaped my life through texts that have come my way in the form of praise poetry (some of which is captured in my narrative). They chanted and ululated at occasions where celebration was called for, and also had the courage to sing the praises of fallen heroes. I cannot match their elegance, but in transforming their stories into the written word, I am paying my dues for the rich milk I drank from them.
I have other more pressing reasons to tell my story. It is a story of loss. The many losses I have suffered in my short lifespan have forced me into greater self-reflection. Other people’s stories have also aided my own personal growth and made me more conscious of the interconnectedness of pain and human suffering. The loss of country, the loss of innocence, of space for creativity, personal freedom and one’s loved ones are important themes in this book. Storytelling is part of the struggle to transcend loss. This struggle for transcendence is a major theme of my narrative, as well as a historical imperative for our deeply wounded society. The past cannot be undone: it has to be transcended.
I must also acknowledge my hope that if I make myself vulnerable in this narrative there will be less reason for women in general to be seen as ‘transgressives’. If this story helps to make women feel good about who they are, and turns what is seen as abnormal for women into everyday practice, then I would have managed to intimate another possible female destiny2 – a destiny worth living and dying for. But greater will be my joy when the sons and daughters of South Africa see this alternative female destiny as mainstream and desirable. Only then shall we be truly free to reach for the sky.
1 C. Villa-Vicencio, The Spirit of Hope (Johannesburg, 1993), p. 259.
2 C. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life (New York, 1988).
Chapter 1: One hot afternoon in December
HELEN FRANTZ HOSPITAL IN THE BOCHUM DISTRICT OF what was then northern Transvaal – now Limpopo Province – was a desolate set of buildings, most of which are hidden from the lazy gaze of passing motorists by thornbush. A lethargic stream which more often than not struggled to justify its status because of the perennial droughts, trickled across the road under a narrow bridge, a few metres from the hospital. It was here that I was born at two o’clock on the afternoon of 28 December 1947, having inconvenienced my mother in no small measure.
A pregnancy in the summer heat was no small feat. The Bochum district has a harsh climate and only hardy species survive. The vegetation tells the story of repeated long droughts. Sparse thornbush and an abundance of morula trees cover the flat countryside, and villages provide the only relief from the monotony of the landscape, which stretches all the way towards the Botswana border. There is hardly a wild animal that thrives there: only occasionally would one see a frightened hare scurry across the gravel road at night. Temperatures range from the upper thirties at the height of summer to the lower teens in mid-winter. Late December and January present the greatest challenges.
My mother had more than simply the burden of pregnancy to deal with. For a woman to be able to deliver in Helen Frantz Hospital during those days of poor transport and communication, she had to book in as an expectant mother and manage under difficult conditions, catering for herself in the antenatal section for a few weeks until she went into labour. My mother had to forgo Christmas celebrations to ensure the safe delivery in hospital of her third child.
Both my parents were primary school teachers – a position of relative privilege in their social environment at the time, which placed me in a better position to survive and thrive than most of my contemporaries. My mother had no reason to anticipate the problems which lay ahead. The midwife who attended to her at my birth was, according to my mother, most unhelpful. She disparaged any request from my mother for help during labour as the cry of a spoilt schoolteacher seeking special attention. As a result my mother delivered me without any assistance from the midwife. She only came in later to cut the umbilical cord, heaping more scorn as she tidied up. I was to bleed heavily from the improperly tied stump of cord that night and, according to my mother, nearly died over the next few days from a combination of neonatal jaundice and the aftereffects of blood loss.
But my mother was not an ordinary schoolteacher. Born on 19 February 1919, the third in a family of nine, she leaned more towards her own mother in both looks and personality. Her father, Sethiba Michael Mahlaela, born in 1885, was a tobacco and corn farmer who was also an evangelist of the Dutch Reformed Church. He was a short, gentle man with soft, keen eyes and a sharp intellect. His wife Matlala Aletta, born Masekela in 1887, was a remarkable woman, tall and beautiful with an incredible intellect. She was better known by her praise name, Mamphela.3
Mamphela was a teacher before her marriage. Her extraordinary memory was an asset to the largely illiterate people among whom she lived, for in those days births and deaths were not registered by any authority. She was a mobile archive for the region. She could recall most birthdays, deaths and other important events in the life of the people of her village and surrounding areas. Children born in the locality used to come to her to find out when they were born, before going to register at school. She would enquire who their parents were, where they lived, and would make a connection
