Diary of a Soweto Mother part 1

The Diary of a Soweto Mother

by

Tembeka C Mbobo


Book 1

My Childhood

On 20 January 1969, at the age of 14, I boarded the Windsor Castle, a passenger ship from East London, on my way to my new boarding school in Durban. Travelling by ship was a novelty and an overnight journey of wonder and splendour. There was also no segregation on board – a surprising and unexpected revelation to me.
It was also a more welcome journey than the three days it took to travel from East London, my home town, to Durban by train. Ships coming in from England used to call at every South African port from Cape Town to Port Elizabeth and to East London before finally docking in Durban. The fare was low too, although that meant being booked in the bottom D- or C-decks.
The ship left East London, a river port on the banks of the Buffalo River, in the afternoon. We would reach Durban at dawn on Monday. Together with two or three of my schoolmates, we joined the throngs of European passengers waving goodbye to friends and relatives below. Someone had suggested that we should carry white handkerchiefs.
My mother and Uncle Frans, Auntie Thokie’s husband, were among the well-wishers. Looking at all the white handkerchiefs blowing around my face, I knew deep inside me that I was leaving East London for good. As wWe sailed down the river towards the open sea as the town receded and eventually, in my imagination, merged with the water. A watery grave for a town I hated.
There was nothing I wished to remember about her.

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My name is Cynthis Meraulton or . . . Cynthis Vincent or . . . Cynthis Victor or . . . Cynthis McBob . . . No, not really, I’m actually Cynthis Meraulton . . . or . . . I could have been, had my father agreed to my nine-year- old idea of a name change.
You see, I wanted to move from a Bantu to a ‘coloured’ school. I wanted to be a ‘coloured’ person. Perhaps not really, I simply wanted to assume a coloured way of life so that I could get a better education and, later, a better job. With my Xhosa name and surname I knew that no matter how good my English and Afrikaans were, I would not be considered a ‘coloured’ and would not be admitted to one of their schools.
Among my plus points though, I was lighter-skinned than most African people. I was perhaps, even more light-skinned than the ‘coloureds’ called ‘The Other Coloureds’. I also had long hair whose kinkiness had been untangled by years of plaiting. I slept in a stocking to flatten my hair further and if some bits of frizzy hair sneaked out, I would simply pin those bits down with one of my mother’s many hairgrips and -pins. My nose was also sharp, although but not as sharp as my father’s or my sister Mfumfu’s.
Although I spoke little Afrikaans at the time, my English was better. In fact it was good, better than that spoken by any coloured child from Parkside to Braeside, including the old West Bank.
In 1954 the South African government had introduced the Bantu Education Act[1] which ushered in an inferior education for black children. Many African teachers and educationists fled the country while the rich and able, sent their children to schools in the British Protectorates of Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana. Since my father had chosen to remain in the country, I pleaded with him to send me to a better school.
Many people, like my parents’ friend Dr. N, had changed their children’s surnames to their first names. Mr. M., a man who had served articles under my father and was then a good lawyer in his own right, had also changed the surname of his children to his first name Louis. I suggested the surnames Victor, Vincent and McBob, but Papa laughed off my suggestions. I even suggested a direct translation of our surname Mbobo (meaning ‘pipe’) into English, but that, too, would not do.
“My middle name is Cynthis,” I argued, “why can’t I be called Cynthis Meraulton like my namesake?”
In his more cheerful moods, which usually followed a few drinks, Papa had told me that he had found my name in a Peter Cheyney novel. Although he could not remember or would not give me the title of the book I spent many of my adolescent years in second-hand bookshops, at church bazaars and in book exchange shops trying to find Peter Cheyney’s books. I hoped to get a clue from the character whose name I bore, why my father had chosen the name.
Cynthis Meraulton sounded posh although it was going to be a strange surname in a coloured school. McBob sounded more familiar and more acceptable. I even suggested that the whole family could change to McBob. Many black families had done so at the time, including my own Uncle Jerry Stoffel, whose surname had once been Sitofile, a Xhosa name.
When I eventually found Peter Cheyney’s The Urgent Hangman, I was pleased to note that ‘she was tall, slim and supple, but curved in all the right places. She had an air. . . . She wore an expensive, supremely cut black frock of heavy silk marocain – evening frock, caught over the shoulder with crossed straps of the same material, each of which bore a diamond fleur de lys. Her hair was dead black and her eyes . . . were violet. Her high-heeled black shoes peeped attractively from beneath the edge of her frock.’[2]
I could also imagine myself growing into a similarly tall and slim thing provided I attended school in a coloured area. My long hair was black already although I did not know what ‘dead black’ meant.
Like all children in African families we had meaningful names that pointed towards our parents’ aspirations. My sister Mfumfu’s full name is Nomfundo Lovedalia – mother of learning. Sis’ Mpumi is Nompumelelo Maureen – mother of success. My brother Vido is Vuyisile Dennis – bringer of happiness. Lusco is Lungelwa Lorraine – one for whom everything should come right, and my name Tembeka means ‘one who should be trusted’. Lexy, short for Alexandrina, had an Ndebele name, Hlanganaphi or- ‘where did they meet’, which she hated and had abandoned as a child.
We all had an English name as well, but nNone of us were given Biblical middle names; something we all appeared to be grateful for. We were either named after film stars or characters from novels my parents had read. My younger brother Boy was named Pozisile – the healer; Paul – for my grandfather Paul Pondo Mahlangu; and Wam – meaning ‘mine’, a possessive meant to differentiate him from my sister’s child, born out of wedlock, ALSO NAMED BOY?.
Papa would not listen to my arguments in favour of a name change. Instead, he listed the virtues of Duncan Village Higher Primary – a school that had produced its own leaders, doctors, nurses, teachers and policemen. He also listed the credentials of the school’s teachers, most of whom might have shared a drink with him at one time. I was still not convinced because by sending me there he was not removing me from speaking and learning isiXhosa.

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I also did not want to move from East London’s Duncan Village (HAD THIS BEEN DESIGNATED A COLOURED AREA ALREADY AT THIS TIME?) to the far-off Mdantsane Township, outside East London, where black people were being re-located. My mother did not want to move as she would be more than 20 kilometres from the municipal clinic where she worked as a nurse. To avoid moving, each time our turn came she would seek out families that wanted to move immediately and exchanged places with then. Some families were living in inadequate one-roomed hovels where the idea of modesty was a joke. For them, Mdantsane with two bedrooms, a kitchen, dining/living room, sometimes an inside toilet with running water and a tap per family, was heaven.
It was easy for Mama to swop because the clinic was adjacent to the municipal housing office where she could easily meet people who had come to apply to be moved.
We were being moved from our homes, neighbours, friends and relatives in order to fulfil the government’s Slums Clearance Act of 1934. This was strange to me because not all of Duncan Village was a slum. The council houses, like the one in which we lived, were made of solid bricks and asbestos roofs – although we had to fit in the ceilings in ourselves. At least, my mother and most of our neighbours did.
[Our lives were governed also by the Group Areas Act of 1950 where some areas were established or set aside for people classified as white, Indian, coloured or natives. The natives later became Bantus, then Plurals, then Africans, then blacks and are now South Africans – new South Africans, just like everybody else.
Then there was the Population Registration Act, 1950, which classified people according to their skin colour, descent and language. Everyone was required to be classified according to these categories in a population register. People also had to carry identity cards with these classifications, besides other personal data, at all times. Too much telling! Sounds like information for the benefit of non-South Africans. The same information should be given in a more indirect, natural way.
I wish to record my birth as having occurred somewhere between Alexandra Township near Johannesburg and a place, any place, out there in the wide expanse of the barren plains of Transkei. Perhaps, up to the foot of the mighty Ukhahlamba (Drakensberg) Mountains, generally known as the . Drakensberg.
My maternal grandfather, Pondo Paul Mahlangu, a man of Ndebele origins, married my grandmother, Ntombi Ellen Pika, a Xhosa woman from Cala in the Transkei. My maternal grandfather was uMntungwa, iSrudla Samaja[3] and my grandmother was of the Dlamini clan, iZizikazi. They established a home in Alexandra, where my grandfather owned a general- dealer store and some properties. WHEN WAS THIS?
Family legend has it that grandfather Pondo was not only handsome, but also was a bit of a ladies’ man. And He was also a skinflint. Their only surviving daughter, my 83-year-old aunt, tells us that her father would fish and sift coins in the depths of his trouser pockets, and come out with the exact amount whenever he was asked for money. Not for him the generous emptying of pockets and public counting of the bread or milk money. He would sometimes also neglect to provide for some basic necessities and there would be no food for supper.
My grandmother, a teacher by profession, would be forced to dig out of the depths of her nooks and crevices any hidden wealth to help feed her five children. U-Mha, as we all called her, was an equally enterprising person, I’m told. During the December to January peach season, she would purchase barrels of the fruit from orchards in the outskirts of Johannesburg, pile up huge enamel dishes and command her children to hawk.
Once, when Papa Pondo had left no money for meat for the evening meal, uMha decided to cook a huge and sumptuous meal in the afternoon, quite a while before suppertime, for her children and herself. After the meal she asked the girls to clean up while the boys put out the fire in the huge coal stove dominating the kitchen. When Papa Pondo arrived later he was greeted by an unusually cold house with neither a fire nor steam.
In an uncanny reversal about twenty-five years after my grandparents’ marriage, their eldest daughter Ivy Cecilia Pasiwe Mahlangu, an Ndebele girl, met and married my father, a young Xhosa man from the Transkei. They met in Alice where Pasiwe was a student nurse at Victoria Hospital and Tamsanqa a BA Law student at the University College of Fort Hare.
They bore seven children. I am the youngest.
[1] Before the introduction of the Bantu Education Act of 1954 by the apartheid government; 90% of black South African schools were state-aided mission schools. The Act demanded that all such schools register with the state, and removed control of African education from the churches and provincial authorities. This control was centralized in the Bantu Education Department, a body dedicated to keeping it separate and inferior. Almost all the mission schools closed down. The Roman Catholic Church was largely alone in its attempt to keep its schools going without state aid. The 1953 Act also separated the financing of education for Africans from general state spending and linked it to direct tax paid by Africans themselves, with the result that far less was spent on black children than on white children.
[2] Peter Cheyney, 1938, The Urgent Hangman, Fontana/ Collins, pp11-12
[3] A family name or honour or a name of the ancestor or stock from which a clan or tribe is descended, used as an exclamation by members of that clan or tribe. The clan name is considered to be more important than a surname as it is the strongest way of identifying someone, even stronger than a father’s or grandfather’s surname because it identifies a person’s whole family group and forebears.