Czytaj książkę: «For The People»

Black South Africans: descendants of the many African tribes in South Africa, each with its own culture, language and traditions going back several thousand years. The most prominent of these are the Xhosa and Zulu people.

White South Africans: descendants of the Europeans who settled in South Africa from the mid-seventeenth century, notably the Dutch and the British. White South Africans fall primarily into two groups based on their native language: English or Afrikaans.

Coloured South Africans: people of mixed race with some African ancestry, usually combined with one or more lineages including European, Indonesian, Madagascan and Malay. Mainly Afrikaans-speaking, they’re also known as ‘bruinmense’ (‘brown people’).

Prologue

1984

They call her Nobantu, but that wasn’t always her name.

While it is true that she was given that name in a church, it was far from a traditional christening. The church in question was little more than a shack; no spire, no bell, no stained-glass windows. Just a simple room with walls of corrugated iron. On the outside, those walls were painted red, the earthy terracotta of Klein Karoo dust. And so it was known as the Rooi Kerk – the Red Church – in the township called Flenterlokasie: location in tatters.

There were twenty-two women in the church that day. Twenty-two black faces under colourful headscarves, twenty-two bosoms squeezed into their smartest dresses (mostly hand-me-downs from their white madams). Strapped onto some of their backs were babies whose innocent faces peered out from under tightly knotted shawls, unaware of the hardship they’d been born into.

There were men, too, four of them, dressed respectfully in worn but neat suits.

They were the township committees, those men and women. Representing the townships to the west of Knysna was the Thembalethu committee, Thembalethu meaning ‘our trust’. And from the other side of town came the committee called Vulindlela, meaning ‘open the road’.

And that was how they arranged themselves in the Red Church that day: Thembalethu on the one side, Vulindlela on the other, twenty-two women and four men sitting on plastic chairs in their place of worship.

But they were not there to worship their God, not that day. They were there to honour a white woman.

For two years, that woman had been coming to their homes and changing their lives. She was the one who helped to start a crèche when she realised their children hadn’t held a pencil by the time they went to school. She was the one who took those children to the beach for the first time in their lives. She was the one who taught the local women to sew, when their only skill until then had been cleaning white people’s houses. She was the one who fought for their right to have more than one water tap serving an entire community.

For all of that they were honouring her that day, in a way reserved only for those who earned the respect and the love of the people. They were to give her a Xhosa name: a name they could use to greet her, to welcome her, and to call to her when they needed her.

The two committees had each chosen a name, which they wrote on a scrap of paper and placed on a table at the front of the church.

On the left, ‘Nobantu’: for the people. On the right, ‘Noluthandu’: the one with the love.

And then they began to sing.

They sang songs of joy and songs of hope, and as they sang the twenty-two women and four men formed a line and danced, single file, shuffling towards the tables.

And they reached into their pockets and into their bosoms, and on the name they felt most worthy of the woman, they placed their crumpled notes and sweaty coins – one rand, two rand, five rand, even ten. However much they had to give, they gave.

And they danced and they sang until all twenty-two women and four men had voted with their hearts and their pockets.

The money was counted, counted again. A decision was reached.

The woman was to be known as Nobantu. ‘For the people.’

They gave her the crumpled notes and the sweaty coins, one hundred and three rand in total – more than two months’ income for most of them. And, despite her protests, they insisted that the money, like the name, was hers.

In the four years that followed, the woman continued to fight for the rights of the people through times of unrest and protest, discontent and violence. During the national state of emergency in 1986, she drove through police barricades and past armoured Casspirs, around burning tyres and past angry youths who were ready to launch bottles and stones at the first white driver they saw. But when she approached, they lowered their bottles and dropped their stones to wave her through. She was Nobantu. She was there for the people.

But it was becoming increasingly dangerous.

The youths were being influenced by their more radical peers from surrounding areas, and eventually the hands holding those bottles and stones were no longer familiar.

There were issues closer to home, too. The security police branded the woman an instigator. Why else would she sympathise with those people? And so she was blacklisted, her family’s phone tapped in an attempt by the security police to find the evidence they needed to implicate her in the growing unrest.

Fearing for the safety of her family – not her own – the woman left the people in 1988.

But the people remember.

And even today when the woman walks down the street, she still hears the cry, ‘Nobantu!’ from grown men and women; black men and women who were once children she’d taken to the beach when they’d never seen the sea.

They call her Nobantu.

I call her Mother.

Introduction

I was born into apartheid. From 1978 until Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990, it was the only reality I knew.

My parents had grown up with it too. When the National Party came into power in 1948, both my mother and father were four years old.

The National Party government introduced a system of racial segregation that would become known as apartheid – ‘separateness’ – enforced by a series of acts and laws. Land was separated into homogenous areas for white, coloured and black. Children of different races were forced to go to different schools. It became illegal for white people to marry people of other races – or, under the ‘Immorality Act’, even to have sex with them.

As our country became scorned, sanctioned and boycotted by the rest of the world, it became ever more insular, our press heavily censored by the apartheid government.

I knew very little of this history before 2007, when I started working on this book.

Growing up in a small town in South Africa, I never questioned apartheid. It was just the way it was – a refrain I’ve heard from many white South Africans since.

I was twelve years old when Nelson Mandela was released. Preoccupied with school and boys, I was only vaguely aware of what was going on.

Many white adults were nervous about what might happen at the time. Some of the more right wing stockpiled food and guns in anticipation of what was surely an inevitable civil war as apartheid laws were abolished and black people’s voting rights reinstated.

At sixteen, I was too young to vote in South Africa’s first democratic election, which saw the African National Congress, or ANC – for years treated as a terrorist organisation – become our new government, and Nelson Mandela our new president.

To everyone’s relief, the worst fears were unfounded. Where the apartheid government enforced segregation and oppression, Mandela encouraged forgiveness and reconciliation.

The most unifying gesture of all was his appearance at the 1995 Rugby World Cup, wearing the green and gold of our national team, the Springboks.

In our living room, I cheered with my family and the rest of the country when he lifted that cup with white rugby captain Francois Pienaar.

Everything was going to be OK.

Things changed quickly. National service was abolished so soon after the election that my brother, who’d simply assumed he’d go to the army straight after school, still went despite being one of the first generation of white boys who didn’t have to. He simply didn’t have a plan B.

He was one of very few people in the army that year who weren’t coloured or black.

When I finished high school in 1995, I applied for a scholarship to an advertising school in Cape Town, as the tuition fees were more than my parents could afford. I was told my skin was the wrong colour. I still went, after my parents remortgaged their house to pay for it.

One of the upsides of our new democracy was that the world opened up to us in a way it never had before. As a result, a new wanderlust broke out among young white South Africans. My oldest brother was the first in our family to leave, just two years after Mandela’s release, to go backpacking around Europe. Having had a taste of the world, he came back to South Africa just long enough to get a qualification before returning to Europe, where he settled in the UK and eventually married a British woman.

When my family went to London for the wedding, my mother got her first-ever passport at the age of fifty-three. My father and I already had passports, but only because we’d both been to Namibia – my father on a one-off fishing trip, and me for a week of canoeing the year before.

In London, I was amazed to share the Tube with well-dressed black people who spoke not in African accents but British ones.

Having had a taste of the world beyond South Africa, the travel bug bit me too and in 1999 I left, aged twenty-one and armed with a working holiday visa for the UK.

Those of us who left were criticised by the government for creating a ‘brain drain’ in the country at a time when it was hard at work rebuilding itself. While it’s true that many people left because of the limited job prospects for white people in a country that was hastily redressing its race balance, my own motivations were more personal. I was in an enforced break in my copywriting career after losing my job at an ad agency. And I had fallen for a man in London during the trip for my brother’s wedding. The relationship didn’t last, but I never went back to live in South Africa.

In London, I quickly got out of touch with what was going on back home. I went over to see my parents every eighteen months or so, but with only two weeks there at a time, I became a tourist in my own country.

It was on a writing retreat in Spain that I first started questioning the way things were back home. By then I was a British Citizen through naturalisation, having lived in England long enough to get a British passport. South Africa felt very far away.

But when I interviewed a local farmer in Aracena called Alfonso Perez, I suddenly felt myself drawn back to my homeland. Alfonso told us one story after another of the Spanish Civil War and how it had divided his country, with friends and even family finding themselves on opposite sides of a violent struggle.

I couldn’t help drawing comparisons with South Africa, and faint memories started flickering in my mind. Pieced together from several phone calls to my mother in South Africa, one of those memories became a short story.

I never thought it would become the prologue to a book. My then husband, a Brit and also a writer, put the idea in my head on my return to London. ‘There’s a book here,’ he said. ‘And only you can write it.’

At first I laughed it off: I didn’t have a book in me.

But then the memories started coming back: snippets of stories my parents had told me when I was growing up of my mother’s work in the townships.

I became curious, wanting to know more about those stories and the stories behind them.

At first my mother hated the idea.

‘I was just doing my job,’ she said.

But she was keen to encourage my writing and eventually gave in. Just three months after my time in Spain, I used a Christmas trip to South Africa to start doing some research.

It was a frustrating process. My mother’s memory was sketchy in places, leaving big gaps in the story. Many of the places that might have kept official records from that time were closed for the holiday season. And without a clear contextual framework or timeline, the few interviews I did made little sense to me.

I realised if I was going to do this, I had to do it properly.

A year and a half later, I took three months off work and went back to South Africa armed with a laptop, a Dictaphone and a crash course in interviewing from my boss, an ex-investigative journalist.

This time I wanted to hear not just my mother’s side of the story. I wanted to speak to the people who lived in the townships, and the authorities who’d built them. I wanted to speak to the people who’d worked for the apartheid government then, and the people who work for the ANC government now. I wanted to speak to the rioters who’d stood up for their human rights, and the policemen who’d arrested them.

This is what I found.

Chapter 1

Going home

My mother is in the passenger seat in front of me, my father next to her, driving. I’m in the back of the Volkswagen Jetta with a bright-pink gift bag of treats on my lap.

‘Just a little something to snack on till we get home,’ says my mother.

There’s dried mango and guava, and big, fat raisins still on their stems. My hands reach first for the biltong and drywors, the dried meat and sausage that I crave in London every time I feel homesick.

I’m not really hungry, just tired. It took an eleven-hour flight from London, a six-hour stopover in Johannesburg and a two-hour domestic flight to get to George, the nearest airport to Knysna. But Knysna isn’t our next stop. My mother, as always, has managed to squeeze some work into the day. While she was going to be in George anyway, she thought she’d get a radio interview out of the way for Epilepsy Week, a major event on the Epilepsy South Africa calendar.

My mother has been a social worker at the Knysna branch of Epilepsy South Africa for twenty years now. When she first joined it was called the South African National Epilepsy League, or SANEL. For most people in Knysna it will always be SANEL and the people who live there, most of whom have brain damage from epilepsy, will always be ‘Sanellers’. A big part of my mother’s job is raising awareness of the condition, hence the stop at Eden FM.

My father and I listen to the interview in the car outside the radio station as my mother reassures Eden’s audience that people with epilepsy can live normal lives. She sounds confident as she answers the questions she scripted for the DJ last night, but her answers are very much unscripted.

‘People can tell when you’re just reading it,’ she said before she went in. ‘It sounds insincere.’

My mother’s smiling, alto voice works well on the radio. These days I’m more used to hearing it over faint phone lines to the UK, so it’s strange to hear it resonating through the stereo speakers in the back doors of the car. She sounds younger than sixty-four.

Fifteen minutes later, my mother is back. Just one more stop, she promises. My aunt, who lives in George, recorded the interview and we need to pick up the tape.

When we get to my aunt and uncle’s, I notice an electric gate where there was no gate, electric or otherwise, before. ‘They were burgled,’ my mother says matter-of-factly. ‘While they were in the house, sleeping. And all they’d left open was a small kitchen window.’

Had my aunt and uncle still had Snorretjies, their yappy little lapdog with his titular whiskers, the burglars might have been scared off. In South Africa, dogs are man’s best alarm system and as a result, most white families have at least one.

My parents’ last two dogs, Lulu and Nina, were what my father calls ‘township specials’. Drive through any township and you’ll see Lulus and Ninas everywhere: medium-sized mongrels with short, golden hair and white chests. My father’s theory is that this crossbreed of dog has developed in such dire conditions that it can withstand almost anything. ‘So your vet’s bills are lower,’ he says. ‘And your dog lives much longer than the neighbours’ pedigree Alsatians and Dobermans.’

Putting his theory to the test, my father got Lulu and Nina from the local townships where he took them off the hands of whichever family’s dog had delivered a litter that week.

Lulu and Nina are long dead now, and my parents haven’t bothered to get a new dog. They don’t have the time or the energy to walk a dog any more, they say. I’ve been nagging them to at least consider getting a little dog that wouldn’t need much exercise, but they won’t listen.

Finally we’re on the road to Knysna. I’m on the edge of the back seat, partly to hear my parents over the grumble of the car engine, partly from the usual anticipation I feel when I’m so almost home.

The sixty-kilometre drive from George to Knysna is a scenic journey through the Garden Route, as this coastal stretch of South Africa is known. Against a backdrop of mountains, forests, lakes and sea, the N2 highway winds and climbs, dips and falls.

The Jetta climbs one last hill and there it is, the momentary glimpse of water through an opening in the trees. Down the hill and… I’m home.

As we come round the final bend, the hillsides part to reveal the Knysna Lagoon. It’s not actually a lagoon, it’s an estuary, as my father told us time and time again when we were little. He was a biology teacher then, and he’s always been a stickler for detail.

Situated on the south coast of South Africa in the Western Cape, Knysna is ‘the heart of the Garden Route’ according to the brochures and websites, and ‘South Africa’s Favourite Town’ three years running.

The White Bridge – named as imaginatively as the nearby Red Bridge – carries us over the lagoon. To our left, the Knysna River feeds the lagoon with fresh water from the mountains, while in the distance to our right, two sandstone cliffs known as the Heads let through the sea.

I’m arriving in the run-up to the Oyster Festival, a two-week celebration of food, drink and sport cunningly designed to draw in tourists in July, the middle of the wetter winter months. In summer, there’s no need for such gimmicks. South Africans and foreigners drive here in droves to spend their rands, pounds, dollars and euros on lagoon cruises, seafood platters, quad-biking and abseiling. Or at least, they used to. My mother says they’re coming less and less.

As we drive through the centre of town, she points out all the restaurants and shops that are closing down. Even Jimmy’s Killer Prawns – eat as many prawns as you like – has gone under, but my mother doesn’t mind that one so much. Jimmy had taken over the vet’s old building and my mother always refused to go there as a result. How could she eat there, she argued, when it was where all our dogs were put down?

Thankfully, some things haven’t changed. After thirty-nine years in Knysna, my parents still live on the same street in the same house where I grew up. As we turn into the driveway, I notice that my parents – unlike my aunt and uncle in George or, indeed, most of my parents’ neighbours – still don’t have an electric gate or even a proper fence. I’m glad they feel safe enough not to cage themselves in like canned lions, but at the same time, it makes me uneasy. Crime has turned violent, even in Knysna. People don’t just get burgled any more, they get tied up, knifed, assaulted, raped.

I ask my parents whether it’s a good idea leaving the house so open.

‘Oh, Annie,’ says my mother. ‘What difference does it make?’

She tells me about a friend of hers who lives not far from here who was burgled recently. The friend was assaulted at knifepoint by one burglar while another emptied out her safe. ‘And she had a big gate and a dog,’ my mother says.

They’re after laptops and jewellery these days, she tells me. Gold, especially.

‘That’s why I don’t go around wearing fancy rings and things,’ she says, tugging at the ceramic beads around her neck. ‘Let’s face it, if they break into our house they’d be very disappointed.’ She laughs. I don’t. My hand tightens around the straps of my laptop bag.

My parents have never been materialistic. ‘Money is nice, but it’s not essential,’ is my mother’s motto. So although the house is big – five comfortable bedrooms over three floors and a pool in the back garden – it’s well lived-in, crammed full of trinkets and pictures and mementoes that have no real value beyond the sentimental.

Even the TV would be unlikely to appeal to a would-be burglar, being so old it doesn’t have a remote control. Not that it’s ever stopped my father changing channels or adjusting the volume from his armchair – ever inventive, he uses a metre-long dowel and some precision aiming to adjust the manual buttons and slide controls.

When I walk into the house, I feel the warm familiarity of home.

Greeting me in the kitchen is a rusty old fridge that used to be my grandmother’s. It’s covered in pictures and newspaper cuttings, even more than I remember. Now, alongside a photo of my grandfather in hospital before he died, there are pictures from my and my two brothers’ weddings in Knysna, London and Barcelona. Next to a faded, laminated poster of a pig (‘Those who indulge, bulge’) that’s been there for as long as I can remember, there’s a postcard of Picasso’s Weeping Woman that I sent my mother from Paris. And next to a fridge magnet of an Irish blessing is another carrying a bible verse: ‘Be strong. Be courageous.’

One new addition to the fridge gallery that catches my eye is a newspaper clipping. It’s a photo of a black man in a wheelchair, his arm and leg in plaster casts. He’s being pushed along by another black man on crutches, both his arms and one leg also in plaster.

Everywhere I look in the house, there are memories. In the dining room, the old upright Otto Bach piano on which I learned to play is now covered in candles, many of them gifts from family and friends around the world. My mother insists on burning those candles, all of them, when she and my father have guests over for dinner, and there are multicoloured dribbles and drops of wax all over the piano lid.

The wall opposite is a shrine to times gone by. Antique keys, medals, fob watches and hair curlers are stuck onto the wall with putty that has hardened into a cement-like bond after thirty-odd years. An old cast-iron meat grinder is stuffed full of porcupine quills and attached to a sturdy old cashier’s till. A wiry spectacle frame that has long since lost its lenses brings back memories of school plays.

But it’s a simply framed cheque that takes pride of place at the top of the wall: a cheque for one hundred and three rand, made out to ‘Nobantu’ and dated 15 October 1984.

On a white border around the cheque are two headings, ‘Vulindlela’ and ‘Thembalethu’, in my mother’s handwriting. Under each heading are the committee members’ signatures.

Some of the signatures are spidery, like my grandmother’s handwriting in the years before she died. Some are elegant and considered, others are childlike and laboured. One Thembalethu committee member started signing under the Vulindlela heading, realised her mistake halfway through her first name, scratched it out and started again. But they’re all there. All twenty-two women. All four men.

Elsewhere on the wall, there are more recent acknowledgements of my mother’s work. A Certificate of Merit from the Rotary Club of Knysna thanks her for ‘outstanding and invaluable services rendered in the community’. On another certificate, the Knysna Municipality names her a ‘Woman of Worth’.

But while those newer accolades are squeezed in between the bits of junk on the wall, the cheque to Nobantu from 1984 hangs above them all.