Children were also sent around a lot. It seemed that some adults could not bear the sight of children playing happily – it was seen as idleness, which called for action. My father’s youngest brother was the worst offender on this score. He made us pick up gravel stones in the hot December sun and stash them along the fence around the large homestead. You were not expected to argue or question such instructions. After all, children were regarded as part of the family estate – property to be handled as you pleased. It did not take long for all of us to long for our own home.
The nuclear family home stood in sharp contrast to that of my extended family. My memory of my childhood goes back to a rainy day at the beginning of 1953 when we were moving house from one end of Kranspoort to another. We used a mule-drawn cart to transport the household furniture and personal effects. It was a confusing day for me as a little girl who could contribute nothing to the process, though I was made to understand very clearly that I had to keep out of the way of the busy adults. It was strange to sleep in a new house, which was to become my home for the next twelve years.
5 Praise songs are difficult, if not impossible, to translate. The substance of my grandmother’s words is given in the following pages.
6 H. Scheub, The Xhosa Ntsomi (Oxford, 1975), p. 1.
Chapter 3: The notion of home
THE NOTION OF HOME AS MORE THAN THE PHYSICAL structure one inhabits took on a special meaning for me as a little girl. Our new home was a mud-brick house with a mud floor which had to be smeared with cow dung at least once a fortnight by my mother. The floor itself had to be strengthened and smoothed over with specially prepared mud mixed with dung (go dila le go ritela) at least once a year. The house had three bedrooms, a kitchen, a pantry, and a living room which served both as a dining and a relaxation area. Children were explicitly discouraged from using the living-room. It was reserved for adult use, and had to be kept in good shape for the entertainment of visitors who dropped by quite often. There was a front stoep (veranda) and an enclosed mud-floored space (lapa) at the back of the house which was used most frequently by the family, particularly in the afternoons when the sun hid its hot rays behind the Soutpansberg. We often sat on floor mats made of goatskin and straw. The few chairs which we had were mainly used by visitors, and women and children deferred to men in this respect.
The house had a large garden with flowers in the front, and vegetables and fruit trees on the rest of the property. A pigsty and fowl run stood at the farthest end of our backyard next to a pit latrine. I can still remember the characteristic smells around our house – a mixture of fresh flowers, dry earth and a whiff of tobacco from my father’s pipe.
The village in which we lived was well planned with three main streets, Bloed, Mahomed and Church streets, as well as two semi-developed ones on the outskirts. Each street had an irrigation furrow which was used by residents to water their gardens in turn. There was one tap for the hundred or so households. Refuse removal was the responsibility of individual householders, as was the cleanliness of streets. Most households used the open veld on the other side of the gravel main road as a public toilet. This patch of veld (phomoshene, derived from the word ‘permission’) was polluted beyond description by human excreta, but it was strategically hidden away by thornbush.
Kranspoort was a tidy village. Villagers were proud owners of flower and vegetable gardens and numerous fruit trees. Great effort went into maintaining their houses. There were only two families other than the dominee’s with cement houses. One belonged to a well-to-do builder7 and the other to a teacher who headed a school in the Soekmekaar area. The teacher’s wife, Mrs Pauline Moshakga, was my mother’s great friend.
The laundry was done at the river every week. Huge bundles of laundry were carried on women’s heads to the river. Washing clothes provided an occasion for village women to meet and share the latest news and concerns. I picked up a lot from the unrestrained talk of the women, who treated us children as part of the open environment and spoke their minds quite frankly on many issues including troubled marriages, family feuds and general village politics.
I had hoped to start school in 1953, having turned five in December 1952. I found staying at home very boring. But I was given no choice by my parents, as I had to look after my younger brother, Phoshiwa, then seven months old. My great-grandmother was getting on in years and could not cope alone with a baby. I cried bitterly on the day school opened, but had to come to terms with the finality of the decision adults had made. I subsequently spent many happy days playing with my two baby brothers, Sethiba and Phoshiwa, in our house and yard, particularly among the fruit trees. I learnt to climb the orange trees which were closest to the house, but was discouraged from this activity by my great-grandmother, who feared for my safety. She also said that it was inappropriate for a girl to be climbing trees. I was later to pay the price of this adventurousness with an injury to the back of my right thigh, which left a permanent linear scar.
Our household in Kranspoort was organised for maximum efficiency by my mother, who had to juggle her roles as wife, mother to seven children and schoolteacher without the benefit of domestic help. She was a tough marshal and expected every one of us to make a contribution to the smooth running of the house. We woke up at set times and had specific tasks allocated to each of us which had to be done before and after school. There was a division of labour between the boys and the girls, but it was not rigid. My brothers had to fetch water from the village tap just as we did, but they had the benefit of using a wheelbarrow, which could carry two twenty-litre containers. They also shared in the making of endless cups of tea for my mother and her occasional guests. They made their own beds, and later when both my sister and I were away at boarding school or working, the younger ones learned to cook, bake, iron and so on. My mother was a pragmatist. Traditional gender roles were cast aside to make room for survival.
My father was a great provider for his family. We were the best-fed children in the area. He often came home unexpectedly with a goat or sheep for slaughter. If none of my brothers were home at the time, he would encourage me to help him slaughter the beast. Those were the most tender of our moments together. He never referred to me by name, except in class where he was my teacher. He always called me Mommy, because I was named after his mother-in-law. We had great fun skinning the beast and opening it up, and finally eating the liver roasted on the coals as a reward.
My father was also a generous man. He believed in sharing with those less fortunate than us. We always had children from needy families in the district living with us, so that they could attend school. Such decisions he would make on the spur of the moment whenever he identified a needy child, much to my mother’s frustration. We were not wealthy, but by local standards we were well off. We slept on floor-beds until the 1960s when we began to share beds in the children’s rooms. To make our floor-beds we spread either straw mats or goatskins on the mud floor with a blanket placed on top. My mother made soft feather pillows (from carefully selected and preserved chicken feathers) for each of us, and we had enough warm blankets to cover ourselves even during the cold winter months.
My mother was a strict disciplinarian. She was intolerant of any naughtiness on our part, and also ruthless in punishing any misdeed. I received many beatings for breaking things, which made me even more nervous and thus led to further losses. I remember an occasion in 1959 when she had gone to a Mothers’ Union church conference in Meadowlands Township in Soweto, and we had been left in the care of my father. It was dusk, and I was wiping the glass cover of our paraffin lamp, from which we derived reflected prestige, when it fell from my hands. What a disaster! I put the pieces together and knelt down and prayed: ‘God, nothing is impossible for you. Please put together what has been broken and save me from the inevitable.’ Disappointment awaited me when I opened my eyes. I hid the lamp away and lit a candle. My father, who was lying on his
