The Diary

There was a vine outside the window of the bedroom of my maternal grandmother’s home in Alexandria. I never knew my maternal grandfather Papa Pondo and only remember uMha after she had suffered a stroke, as a bedridden form shape in a bedroom made perpetually dark by the huge vine outside.
The vine yielded succulent green grapes. It was also the home of fat green worms the size of adult fingers, which we children were afraid of. During unauthorised raids, the worms had a knack of falling inside one’s collar and as one slid down your back with you vigorously shaking your dress to let it fall; the adults would be alerted to your whereabouts by the attendant screams.
I also remember that Ffor more than fifteen years my mother tried to transplant part of that vine in order to grow it in East London. Each time we visited her ancestral home we would be reminded to bring back a stalk, and each time the stalks refused to grow roots. Mama loved grapes and I have grown to love them too. I have never known whether she wanted a grape tree or was trying to bring her childhood Johannesburg to East London, her adult home.
Years after my grandmother had died, WHEN? following a long night of ‘New Year’s eve’ celebrations with male friends, the grape vine became the shelter of our disgrace as three cousins and I almost vomited our lungs out after our first encounter with alcohol. The four of us were aged thirteen to sixteen, but had demolished a bottle of brandy, a bottle of gin and one of whiskey.
Growing up in the proverbial dusty and stony streets of East London and in Durban, I had few ties with the Transkei, my father’s ancestral home.
My birthplace, Alexandra, was to become my home. I simply decided to bury my umbilical cord amidst the acrid smells of my mother’s home, Alexandra. A place whose lingering bad odour of human and animal excrement, continues to assail my memory nostalgically, once in a while.
Whenever I alight from a taxi or a bus at the Pan Africa Bus Rank and walk down First Avenue; past the Indian traders; past the amaShangane women selling vegetables, roasted peanuts and the seasonal roasted mielies and spinach; escaping puddles of water and recklessly driven taxis; absorbing the loud music coming simultaneously from different quarters; inhaling the familiar smells of atchar on hot chips and fish, perhaps and listening to the cackle of different languages including: ngena bhuti, ngena sisi from the shop assistants, begging brothers and sisters to come into their shops and buy – an overwhelming warmness envelopes me.
It is like a welcome return to the womb. Not until the abattoir on First Avenue and the bucket latrines were phased out, did Alexandra rid herself of the physical staleness, NOT? typical only of this township. Her shacks, overcrowding, high levels of unemployment and crime as well as the endemic poverty, however, have led her to being referred to as ‘manure to the mink’ of the nearby ultra-rich white suburb of Sandton.
That was where I was born. Alex.

xxxx

Somewhere around my eleventh birthday, my father taught me the praise songs of my clan. [ideal place to conjure up a visual image of the father and daughter standing together – where were they? what motivated him to do this? I know I was the only one among my siblings and the only girl to receive this privilege normally reserved for boys:
OoXaba, ooNomjoli, ooNonkosi
OoShwabada abashwabadel’ iinkomo neempondo!
Amangelengele – iintak’ezisuka kade kukusindwa sisisila!
Umfaz’ omabele made owakhab’ udaka kwavel’ amanzi!
Apho kungasavalwa ngemivalo kuvalwa ngeentloko zamadoda!

Translated literally, this means: we are the descendants of Xaba; of Nomjoli; of Nonkosi, of Shwabada (the one who swallowed cattle along with their horns); of amaNgelengele (the birds that take long to fly because of their heavy bottoms); of the woman with long breasts who kicked mud and produced water; of the courageous people who do not use doors but secure entrances with the heads of living men.
Beyond my paternal grandfather’s clan name – Xaba, uShwabada, iNgelengele – I have found it difficult to trace my origins. My paternal grandfather, Eckford Jarvis Abraham (Mona) Mbobo, was a teacher who owned huge herds of cattle and followed astronomy as a hobby. My grandmother, Cornelia Elizabeth, born Dada (uMaNkwali, uMkhwanazi, uShamase) was also a teacher and the one who had ‘brought the brains’ to the Mbobo family, as my sister Mfumfu would say, quoting our father. Both came from the Transkei. It was my grandmother who saw to it that all the children in the extended Mbobo family got an education instead of herding sheep and cattle.
According to my eldest sister, my grandfather, whom they called Papa, was born on October 10 in 1886 to parents of Hlubi and French ancestry. His parents were of the Fura Mission Society. His wife and our grandmother, uMaNkwali, on the other hand, had a German father, a Missionary of the Moravian Society. My grandparents spoke German, High Dutch, French, English, Sesotho and isiXhosa. My sister tells me that Papa and grandmother sometimes communicated in German to each other, especially when they did not want to be understood.
I might yet make it my mission to investigate all the Wesleyan (Fura) and Moravian Missionaries who served in South Africa in the 19th century. I have been made to understand that I could trace my German great-grandfather by consulting the book: Werner Schmidt, Deutsche Wanderung nach Südafrika im 19. Jahrhundert, Berlin, 1955. I still have to find a source that will lead me to my French great-grandmother as well.
Concerning my African roots, however, it has always been claimed that amaHlubi were originally from KwaZulu and spoke isiZulu and that they were assimilated and became amaXhosa after settling around the mountains south of Lesotho and Griqualand East, a predominantly Xhosa area. Without answers though, I consulted historical accounts.
I learned that the great AmaHlubi, under Chief Langalibalele I, were originally from Natal. They had however, been scattered southwards and across Ukhahlamba and Maluti Mountains into Lesotho and the neighbouring areas of Matatiele, Mount Fletcher, Herschel and Sterkspruit ostensibly by King Mpande’s forces or, more suspiciously, by Theophilus Shepstone who wanted to usurp their land. Shepstone was the son of a stonemason, the Reverend J William Shepstone, who came to Africa as a settler in 1820.
My grandparents’ graves, to which I have yet to visit to pay my respects, lie under three giant gum trees on a hilltop in a village called eZingcuka (the place of the hyenas) in Mount Fletcher. I never knew them.The location of the graves was pointed out to me by my late brother, Bandile in 1998 as we drove through Mount Fletcher to attend his mother-in-law’s funeral in a nearby village called Khethekhethe. It was the first time I had set foot in the land of my ancestors.
Today, under a post-apartheid government, the name Mount Fletcher is no more. The town, which was named after a Reverend John Fletcher of the British Methodists, who founded a mission in the area inhabited by amaHlubi in 1882, is now called Elundini Local Municipality in the District Municipality of Ukhahlamba.

xxxx

My father, Victor Vigneaux (Vincent) Tamsanqa, was born on 2 May 1912, eight years after his parents’ marriage. He had a younger brother and a sister, my Aunt Virginia Dadobawo, who died three weeks after her wedding in Cato Manor, Durban – her new husband’s home. My Uncle Theo, who also died young, had three children: two girls and my brother Bandile.
Mama, on the other hand had two younger brothers and two younger sisters. My uncles died early in their lives as well. Grandfather Pondo had another son though, my Uncle Boy. We first met him when we were already adults.
Like my forbears, my family never created deep enough roots to call any particular place home. The location of ancestral graves is usually important to African families as it marks one’s lineage. Not so with us; my father never attached much significance to this notion. As a result I know very little about his family, including his only brother and sister – whose graves I also wish to visit some day. This, unfortunately, is information I could easily have gathered from village elders had my father taken us on regular visits to Mount Fletcher
My parents and my brother Vido are buried in East London, the town my sisters and I have now deserted. And, scattered as we are across South Africa and the world, I have made a point of taking my children there – to pay their respects.
Papa and Mama had five children of their own: my eldest sister Mfumfu, my second eldest sister Mpumi, my brother Vido, my older sister Lusco and I. On top of this lot they took in Kaygo, one of my Uncle Theo’s daughters, and Lexy, a daughter born to one of my maternal uncles.
These were the seven siblings who screamed and shouted for joy when they heard me utter my first complete sentence. I have repeatedly been told that I went across our veranda and knocked at the door across. When asked who was at the door I replied: ‘NguTembi wankqonkqoza Tat’ uPolisa’ –‘ It is I, Tembi who is knocking, father policeman’.
’These were also the seven siblings I woke up to when I first met me and got to know myself and my world between the ages of five to ten. This is the time when I really got to know myself as a human being, with an effect on others and affected by those others. Me, with all five senses, ready to confront the world.As I grew older I grew closer to Uncle Theo’s son Bandile (BOY?), hence my reference to one and then to two brothers.
In my family we don’t differentiate much between biological siblings and first cousins. The relationships also became tighter as we grew up under the same roof. In my grandmother’s home in Alexandra Township, my mother was known as the older mother (uMamkhulu) while her younger sisters were known as oMamncane or the younger mothers. While this can be confusing to outsiders: within my family I can refer to an aunt’s daughter as my sister from my ‘younger mother’. When our children are born, they also are enfolded in this wide network of relatives.
A noted belief among us is that if we were to slaughter a cow we could eat and finish it, including the head and hooves, with ease and without inviting a single neighbour or friend to help us.
We are that many!

xxxx