distance. Also in the neighbourhood that I grew up in, I was surrounded by relatives and friends I’d known from since I was born. Daveyton was home. It was a safe, comfortable place where I felt I belonged. All of a sudden, I was in the Transkei, hundreds of kilometres away. In the village we did not have running water and the river, or stream rather, from which we fetched our water was not clean. You had to sift out the tadpoles before you drank it or used it for cooking. I was not used to that. There was also a shortage of food. When it was available, the food was of a poor quality. The bread we ate always smelled of paraffin. We wondered why – until we discovered that the van that transported food also carried lots of paraffin drums, for the school and neighbouring homesteads. As the lorry rattled along the rutted dirt roads from the town to the village, paraffin would spill out of the drums, soaking our bread. It was horrible.
I wrote numerous letters home, complaining about this sorry state of affairs. Because of the poor quality of water, my body broke out in sores. I had fainting spells and endless nightmares. One of the nightmares, I soon realised, harked back to an incident from my early childhood.
I must have been around four or five years old because we still lived in our house on Shongwe Street, in the Xhosa section of Daveyton, when this incident happened. The family had a cat, but I personally had a very close relationship with this animal. I used to feed it, talk to it and pet it. One day I woke up and realised that the cat had not appeared in the bedroom I slept in as was the norm. I went through all the rooms in the house, calling out the cat’s name. No cat. Finally, I decided to go and look outside. I went around the yard, checking under trees. Finally, I found the cat. It was alive. But its eyes had been gouged out. I screamed and screamed. And I think I fainted. Someone had to kill the poor cat. Now, years later, at the age of thirteen, I was in a strange place called Nzimankulu being haunted by nightmares involving my cat. The fainting spells became more frequent. It was later established that I had actually had a nervous breakdown. I was very unhappy and unhealthy in Nzimankulu, and I said as much in the letters I dispatched on a regular basis to my parents back in Daveyton.
My parents sympathised with me. But they had sent me to the Transkei to protect me from what was about to happen. They didn’t say it in so many words, but my parents had, through intuition perhaps, heeded Kente’s message that something horrible was about to happen in Soweto and other black townships in what was then called the Transvaal (Gauteng province today). It was through radio that I followed the tragedy of 1976 and its aftermath. Then, when the embers of 1976 had long faded, something else happened that would change my life forever.
*
A custom that is religiously observed among Zulus is called ‘ukweshela’. Ukweshela is the process whereby a Zulu man encounters a complete stranger and professes his love for her; and he asks the stranger to reciprocate. I know it exists in many parts of Africa, under different names. I know you are wondering how can you profess love to a stranger. Well, the people in Europe call it ‘love at first sight’. Italians, according to Mario Puzo in The Godfather, have another term for it – the ‘lightning strike’. This is because when this thing strikes you, this bolt of realisation that you have these feelings for a person, it hits you with such force that you can’t help but do something about it. You see now, the African man is not a brute by stopping a woman in the street and proceeding to profess undying love to her. The African man is in tune with the mores of civilisation!
At any rate, to continue with the story …
By 1979 I had transferred from that horrible, horrible boarding school in Nzimankulu to St John’s College in Mthatha, Transkei. St John’s College was a real boarding school as I’d imagined it. In fact, it surpassed my expectations. The dormitories were splendid and the entire school equipped with modern amenities. The school attracted children from all over the country, the offspring of the crème de la crème of black society, some of whose parents were academics with multiple degrees, top businessmen, and high-ranking officials in the newly independent homeland of Transkei.
Academically, I triumphed. My health improved. My love for the theatre had not diminished and I joined the school’s drama society. I’d long realised that I would never be an actress, but I knew I could be a useful cog in the big wheel of theatre. I became the drama society’s treasurer and I was also charged with the responsibility of organising theatrical performances. Whenever there was a play in town, I was one of the first to know. I would then approach the authorities for school trips to be organised to local halls. There were no theatres. It was in this context then, when I saw banners advertising the arrival of Gibson Kente’s show Mama and the Load, that my schoolmates and I went to the boarding mistress to ask for permission to go and see the play. It was being performed at one of the local halls. Permission was given. We watched the show and enjoyed it, happy to be reunited with ‘home’ – Johannesburg. There’s a gem of a memory that stands out about Mama and the Load. Mary Twala, Somizi Mhlongo’s mother, was in the play. Somizi was maybe three years old. He was mostly backstage, but tjatjarag as he was even back then, he would slip beneath the curtain and make an appearance on stage before being whisked backstage as if this was all part of the act.
After the show there was what young people would today call an after-party. We had been smart to ask for weekend passes, otherwise we would have been in trouble with the authorities at school. At seventeen I was still very young and naive. I was shocked at what I was seeing – members of the Kente cast, both young men and women, were drinking heavily and smoking. One of the actors, Mbongeni Ngema, was making moves on me. Meanwhile, Ngema’s friend, Percy Mtwa, was interested in my older sister, Mpumi. So Mbongeni started ‘shelling’ me. I was not rude to him, but I gently told him I was still too young and not interested in this jolling thing he was proposing. The night ended uneventfully. We went back to Ngangelizwe township, where my sister was staying.
At the end of the year, my sister Mpumi and I asked for permission from our parents not to come home early for the December holidays. They were okay with that, mainly because the political situation was still dicey. Children our age were being detained for this or the other reason. Mpumi and I then visited Grahamstown. It so happened that Mama and the Load was on in Grahamstown at around the same time! So, off we went to the show. Again, we loved it. After the show Percy Mtwa, the guy who had made moves on my sister a few months earlier, started shelling me! And, I kid you not, Mbongeni Ngema, who had expressed undying love to me a few short months before, was singing his poetry to my friend Ntuthu. Smiling and playing along, we listened to them.
In 1980 I was in matric, my final year. Mpumi had left school. I now had no big sister to look after me or, more precisely, no big sister to worry about. I was on my own. Free and independent. It was during my year-end break that I visited home in Daveyton. I was walking down the street one Saturday afternoon when I bumped into him again. Yes, Mbongeni Ngema was walking down my street! Using his charming smile and words, he stopped and asked to have a word me. When he saw that I was in no hurry to abandon him on that street, he started shelling me: if you agree to be mine, I’ll buy you an aeroplane and a train and the whole ocean, if you want … You know the exaggeration of the Zulu men when they are shelling.
It soon dawned on me that the bugger didn’t even recognise me! But it did not really surprise me. He was, after all, a star, who had women falling for him wherever he went. At any rate, I let him go on a bit with his poetry because he was such an entertainer. Having grown up in Daveyton, I was used to being shelled repeatedly by boys. It was a long-established tradition that when a man encountered a girl or a woman, he was obliged to say something complimentary to her. I am even made to believe that Zulu women of earlier generations used to take umbrage when a man passed them without saying a thing. After such an encounter the woman would go and complain to her friends or sisters: ‘Girls, what do you think is wrong with me? Just tell me. Am I too ugly, or is my dress sense a turn-off to men? I mean, here I am walking down the street, and not a single man stops me to say a word or two to me; to engage in verbal sparring with me. What is wrong with me? My dear God! I am like umgodi onganukwa nja!’ A hole which even the dogs shun. Umgodi onganukwa nja. Men, like dogs, are always
