single-room house contained a sizeable double bed, a wooden table and chairs. Cutlery was brought into daily use only when my father was home.
This rural tranquillity was shattered briefly and our village and the neighbouring communities put on edge by a murder in one of the local forests. Fortunately for all concerned, a citizen’s arrest brought welcome relief. A story spread throughout the village to the effect that the murderer, whose identity remained a mystery, had been tied to a tree until police from Sibasa arrived to fetch him. For some time after this incident I remained fearful at night because there were only the two of us, my mother and me, at our home.
Well before I went to high school, my father had decided, like so many African men in those days, to marry a second wife. She was my mother’s niece. It was not long before there were consequences for the four of us. Instead of maintaining only the one home that he had so successfully supported in Mavambe, he joined the increasing millions of African migrant workers who were making the cities and towns of the Witwatersrand their second home. My father moved out of the single-sex hostel in which he had lived for many years to find a bed in a shared, single, all-purpose room in Sixth Avenue in the bustling Johannesburg township of Alexandra. At one stage in the mid-1950s two couples and a boy my age lived in the room.
My father must have known that he would struggle to support two families – he was biting off more than he could chew. No matter how well intentioned he was, the wife in Mavambe was going to play second fiddle to the one who spent most nights with him in Johannesburg. Remarkably, he made sure he had a job to wake up to throughout his working life, but it took several years of living in single rooms in Alexandra township and in Sun Valley in Pimville, Soweto, before he qualified for a cramped, three-room, semi-detached house in Zone 5, Diepkloof. On the few occasions that I visited him in Johannesburg, I was struck by the unfamiliar signs of naked poverty that surrounded the place in Soweto that we called home. The solid wooden furniture, double bed, crockery and cutlery of my youth in Mavambe were a thing of the past. It took me some years to gain an understanding of our family’s plight as well as of the levels of poverty which had overtaken our people in the cities and the countryside.
Regrettably, I took a very long time to accept and understand the troubles that had befallen our family. The easy way out was to blame my father for his decisions. By the time he died, in 1981 in Soweto, he was effectively left with one wife – the one with whom he had continued to live in Johannesburg. My mother had moved to a cottage I had built for her next to her sister’s home in Olifantshoek, near Giyani in Limpopo.
It was only during my participation in the Second Carnegie Inquiry into Poverty and Development in Southern Africa in the 1980s that I gained a better understanding of our fate as black South Africans as the apartheid racial utopia took shape in town and countryside during the late 1950s and 1960s. I had innocently decided that my contribution to the inquiry would take the form of an essay titled ‘The Worst of Times: A Migrant Worker’s Autobiography’, which focused on the working life of a labour migrant from Limpopo.7
I researched the life history of my mother’s elder sister’s husband, Chipa Hlengani Mkhabela. Like my father, he spent the major part of his life working in Johannesburg. For him, too, life had been good in the early years of his career as a migrant. I had seen him back home at times, at a place called Barota in Limpopo, when my mother and I visited her sister. There were no alarm bells then about hunger and poverty. Yet, by the time of the inquiry I was compelled to describe his life as one of misery and struggle. Excerpts from the Carnegie paper provide some interesting insights into a migrant’s dilemma with regard to some of the most pressing problems of those days.
What I discovered during my conversations with him was that in the course of his protracted working life between the 1930s and 1983, when ill health compelled him to stop working, the conditions of his life had changed dramatically. Now, at 70, Mkhabela, like my father and thousands of his contemporaries, lived what I described in the essay as the ‘marginal life of the seasoned but permanent migrant who is neither a townsman (proletarian) nor a village peasant’. Like millions of his African compatriots, he had been compelled by our country’s racist laws to move back and forth between his home in the Northern Transvaal countryside and the urban residential ghettoes known as hostels in Johannesburg.
As though that were not enough suffering for one lifetime, his family and tribe back home were faced with government-enforced migrations from one part of the Northern Transvaal to another, mandated in the interests of Afrikaner farmers as well as to achieve the ethnic segregation of black people in the rural areas. Sadly, I concluded after my conversations with him that his life and work history illustrate the kind of social alienation, displacement and rampant impoverishment that accompanied the roll-out of the everyday practical applications of Verwoerd’s policy of separate development. Indeed, the conditions of his life and work were so onerous that it became increasingly difficult for him to support himself and his family in the countryside.
Revisiting Chipa Hlengani Mkhabela’s life story still makes me indignant. In it I recognise a replay of the life story of my father and the cruel fate that our family endured as separate development policies took hold throughout South Africa. I now appreciate more clearly than I ever did during the early 1980s the impact of the lifetime employment of men such as my father and his brother-in-law in South Africa’s cities on their lives and those of their families. For me, participation in the second Carnegie investigation opened up wounds that had been festering in my heart and mind for many years.
What made the situation more distressing for me was the fact that my father had died early in 1981. I was left imagining how I might have asked him for understanding and forgiveness for my youthful ignorance and the ruthlessness with which I had judged him. It had been difficult for me to understand how the caring, family-oriented, self-respecting man of my childhood years could have changed into what we called in Shangaan a ‘kholwa’, or one who never returns to the rural areas from the cities. Now I understand that the burden of black migrant male workers during the second half of the twentieth century was simply too onerous for anyone to carry with any dignity. Men such as my father and his brother-in-law had known self-respect and a sense of self-worth before the unrelenting claims of urban and rural poverty left them with an unmistakeable sense of shame, silent anger and regret.
In my juvenile lack of understanding in the late 1960s and 1970s, I failed to appreciate the fact that my father had managed, through what on occasion must have been intolerable sacrifices, to pay my school fees at Douglas Laing Smit, the high school section of a mission boarding school called Lemana, a short driving distance from the small provincial town of Louis Trichardt. I attended Lemana for four years between 1956 and 1959, when I completed matric.8 Unlike Mphaphuli High, Lemana, a combined teacher-training and secondary school co-educational institution, was a boarding school. On the male campus on which I lived during my student days, each of us was allocated to a house. Each house was named after an outstanding figure (one was Seretse Khama of Botswana). I lived in Livingstone House.
Like many other celebrated African schools in the late 1950s, Lemana was invaded by crusaders of what was to become known as Bantu Education and was educationally vandalised through the introduction of that iniquitous system by the Afrikaner emissaries who formed the advance teams dispatched by the apartheid government to take over the management and administration of African schools. Like St Peter’s in Johannesburg and many other notable schools throughout our country, Lemana was ultimately closed down and literally abandoned to the elements, a fate which must stand out as one of the most shameful wastes of educational infrastructure in South Africa’s history.
On a Saturday morning in 2010 I paid a lone and nostalgic visit to my alma mater. I was greeted by an eerie silence as I walked along the unpaved pathways and roads from the male housing complex and around the ornate dull-brown chapel that had looked so much bigger during my school days. Then followed a slow walk down the cascading slope from what used to be the teacher-training part of the campus to the old Douglas Laing Smit Secondary School at the brow of the hill. I could not help thinking
