baby brothers were in good hands.
In addition to Christmas and New Year, weddings were also wonderful occasions, and preparations for them were elaborate. Food and song were central to successful wedding feasts. There was often fierce competition between the bride’s and groom’s entourages in capturing the attention of the crowds through song and dance. White weddings were the norm. Wedding dresses were of varying degrees of sophistication depending on the means of the households involved. No expense was spared by parents on such occasions. It was an honour for young girls to be chosen as bridesmaids.
The wedding started with a procession to the church, for the marriage to be solemnised by the dominee. An even more vigorous parade with singing and dancing took place back to the bride’s home, where there would be more singing before the main meal was served to all the guests. After the meal the couple changed into another set of clothes, normally smart formal suits, and paraded along the street before retracing their steps back home. After an interval of an hour or two of continuous singing, the couple were seated in full view of the public in the household’s lapa where they were given advice about how to make their marriage a success, go laiwa. The parents of the bride or bridegroom, whichever was the case, started off the advice session, each pep talk being accompanied by a gift for the couple. After all the relatives had their turn, the general public joined in for their penny’s worth. These sessions often lasted into the late evening, with songs interspersed between the speeches.
The general tone of the advice was that marriage was difficult and that tolerance was the key to success. The woman was the focus for most of the advice. On her shoulders rested enormous responsibilities to create a new home, and to care for her husband and his family – indeed, to immerse herself in his family and to lose her maiden identity. Her child-bearing responsibilities were also stressed: heaven forbid that a woman should shun this duty or be unable to discharge it. It was not surprising that most brides spent the entire session sobbing uncontrollably. But it was also expected that the bride weep to show her sadness at having to leave the natal home, or else she was seen as being too eager for marriage. Such eagerness was regarded as a bad omen for the future of the couple. The groom’s family celebrated the marriage in a manner they saw fit, but in general the same ceremony was repeated.
7 Our family moved into this house in 1964.
Chapter 4: boSofasonke
MY INTRODUCTION TO POLITICS WAS A SILENT ONE. I remember my parents discussing politics in hushed tones, particularly after my aunt Ramadimetsa’s husband had been detained under the 90-days detention clause which the Nationalist government introduced to deal with rebellion against their authoritarian rule. At this time the anti-pass campaign organised by the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), and later strengthened by the involvement of the African National Congress (ANC), was gaining momentum on the Witwatersrand and farther afield. My uncle Solly Mogomotsi was a member of the ANC and had been a member of the South African Communist Party (SACP) before it was banned in 1950. The SACP affiliation could be traced back to his active union membership in the boiler-making industry. My aunt spent many anxious weeks searching for her husband while he was detained, with no assistance from the authorities.
My own elder sister, Mashadi, was expelled from high school in her matriculation year because she had participated in a demonstration against the celebrations of South Africa’s becoming a republic in 1961. All schoolchildren were handed miniature South African flags, which we carried high as we paraded around the school under the watchful eyes of our teachers. I remember the day vividly, though we did not know what the occasion was about. I wonder how much of the symbolic weight of that day impinged on the teachers, and how much, if any, discussion took place about the significance of the day’s events.
My sister and her classmates refused to celebrate what they understood to be a worsening situation of oppression for black South Africans. They were summarily expelled, and put on homebound trains with the help of police. It was a bitter disappointment for my father, who was a strong believer in education as an essential part of a child’s development and an escape route out of poverty. He was, however, wise enough not to make my sister feel too guilty about her stance. He took it in his stride and expected everybody else to do so. It was not a matter for discussion with us children. We understood that we were not to ask any questions about it.
My sister’s expulsion was not an uncomplicated event for my father as principal of Stephanus Hofmeyer School, which was also part of Afrikaner hegemony. My father was expected to be an active member of the local Dutch Reformed Church: conducting Sunday school, being a church warden, the church choirmaster, as well as interpreter for the local dominee. The Reverend Lukas van der Merwe was certainly not an easy person to work with. He was a bully, a racist, a chauvinist of the worst kind. It is difficult to remember a redeeming feature in him. His wife was a gentle woman who endured many abuses, some of them public, from her ill-tempered husband. She was a kindly woman who was a source of great comfort and assistance to many local women, especially in matters of health. She saved many lives in a place far from medical facilities and with poor means of transport. According to my mother, I owe my own life to her. I contracted severe whooping cough at the age of three months. It was the advice given by Mrs Van der Merwe, together with the remedies she brought from Louis Trichardt to dampen the cough, which my mother is convinced saved my life.
As pupils from the local school, one of our responsibilities was to keep the dominee’s house and yard clean. This entailed sweeping the open spaces between the fruit trees around his house with makeshift brooms fashioned from local bushes. We were not allowed to touch any of the delicious-looking fruit on the trees. It took extraordinary discipline for children our age to do so, but the alternative was too ghastly to contemplate. The dominee was a merciless man.
He ruled his congregation at the Kranspoort Mission Station like a farmer presiding over his property. He took over the communal mission fruit farm, employed his parishioners at starvation wages and denigrated them in the most racist way. He had a peculiar sense of morality which he applied to blacks under his charge. They were not to drink alcohol of any kind, on pain of expulsion from the mission, or suspension from the church sacraments for three months. This prohibition was a puritanical version of the liquor laws of the time, which prohibited Africans from buying and consuming ‘European’ alcohol. He also decreed that any unmarried woman who became pregnant faced immediate expulsion from the mission – being given a trekpas (dismissal) as the practice was referred to, no different from the sanctions racist farmers used against ‘stubborn natives’. He was himself not a teetotaller, nor did we know enough about his morality to be convinced that he was the puritan he insisted others should be.
A particularly painful memory I have is of a classmate who fell pregnant during her first year at boarding school at the age of about fourteen. She had one of those ‘one-night affairs’ with an older boy from the village whose father was a trusted assistant to the dominee as the chief koster (church bell-ringer and usher). She came from one of the poorest families. Her mother had been abandoned by her father, who married another woman and left her without any means of support except charity from locals. The girl was cast out in her pathetic pregnant state. After giving birth to a sickly child, she was not allowed to come home to whatever emotional support her mother could have provided. The death of her miserable child almost a year later released her from her agony. She came back to the village and was assisted by her elder sister to return to high school, and later qualified as a primary school teacher.
My father negotiated a fine line between obedience to and defiance of this racist tyrant. He understood that he was in the belly of the beast, but was not prepared to sacrifice his human dignity in the process of surviving. He enjoyed his beer and other alcoholic beverages with a ‘coloured’ friend of his, Mr Philip Bekker, who lived in a neighbouring ‘coloured’ village. The dominee knew all about this aspect of my father’s life, but never raised it. He probably sensed the limits which my father had set in their relations.
I
