funerals
Nomboniso Gasa recalls the days when people turned their rage at apartheid against themselves
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report has captured the worst horrors of the apartheid era. Not all but most. But what we have not really seen are the everyday horrors, the systemic violence of apartheid.
In 1985, when I was a teenage activist, our comrade Bathandwa Ndondo came back from a visit to Cape Town. In a tiny room in Cala, he told us what he had seen. In a quiet but passionate voice he said: “Cape Town is burning. Children are confronting the soldiers with dustbin lids as their shields. They are armed with nothing, but their desire for freedom.”
Bathandwa taught us a new song he had heard in Cape Town: “Z’thulele mama/Noma ngifile mina/Seng’fele lona/Izwe lakithi, izwe loMzants’Afrika [Hush Mama/Do not cry/Even if I die/I will have died for our country, for South Africa].”
Shortly after that, when I was in detention, I was shown a picture of Bathandwa’s slain body. He lay face down, his body tattered by bullets. “Hush Mama even if I die, I will have died for South Africa,” people sang at his funeral.
Perhaps we were too young to be involved in politics. Perhaps we should have gone on with the business of “being young”, learning, enjoying ourselves, flirting, playing and just being. Others say the children in Cape Town should have left pushing the soldiers out of the townships to their parents.
But what “youth” could they have, when the floodlights were on their faces all the time? What youth, when R-1 rifles stared at them as they kicked balls at NY116 stadium in Gugulethu? What youth could Bathandwa and others have when everywhere they turned they saw brutality?
What does this have to do with the TRC report? Everything.
In 1988, a Western Cape leader in his sixties was arrested one morning at his house. After months on the run and in hiding, eating whatever he could, he decided to go home and have some nice warm sour porridge for breakfast. He wanted to hug his little girl. They took him that morning.
A friend of mine, Mcebisi, told me about this incident, porridge and all. Sitting on campus, self-righteous university students, eating of course what took our fancy, we condemned the comrade. What is this insanity? “Hayi suka, amaqabane ayadlala, ungabanjelw’isidudu, man [Ha, comrades are playing. How can you risk arrest just for porridge]?” Indeed!
Of the “boers” who took him we said nothing. It did not occur to us as we sat munching greasy toasted cheese-and-egg sandwiches that the old man had been running, fighting and hiding even before we were born. It did not occur to us that wanting to see your little girl is the best thing any parent can want. That parents should not be made to choose causes over their children. It did not occur to us that every man and woman has a right to eat breakfast in their homes. All these things became luxuries in the context of our struggle.
That is what apartheid did to people. Apartheid became the norm. Apartheid normality was brutality.
In the same period, whenever people were arrested there was suspicion. For months in and after detention comrades wondered “Nguban’ impimpi? [Who is the informer]?” Unfortunately, this paranoia was not unfounded. We have heard this in the TRC process.
The frustration, the exhaustion from it all, made people look for scapegoats. Apartheid was being resisted, people fought heroically, but in the most insidious ways it was getting to us. Mistrust was common.
People were burnt out, young and old. In the struggle there was no time-out, no breaks. People did not go away to charge their batteries. They fought every day of their lives. They went to jail and re- emerged only to go immediately back into the struggle. At times we turned on each other. The enemy was too big. Often we hurt each other and some of the wounds will take a long time to heal.
The young black children in Gugulethu, Langa, Soweto, Mlungisi, Kwazakhele who had nothing but their desire for freedom were most susceptible. The campaigns they organised, the bus boycotts, consumer boycotts gave them something, their identity. Instead of being useless black children they were comrades. Their communities had a role for them.
But those who broke the boycotts were seen as breaking the unity of the people. In their anger against apartheid, people turned on each other. They killed others, including their own neighbours.
Should they have torched people to death? No. No. No.
Many young men and women left South Africa to join the African National Congress and its military wing Umkhonto weSizwe. My cousin also left in the early 1980s. A beautiful, brave and generous young man.
When he returned in 1991, he had lost his innocence. The twinkle in his eye had gone. He had touched blood. He had closed the eyes of dear comrades as they died and cried in despair. He knew the taste of fear. Probably he also had killed. But he was a hero and heroes do not cry.
Late at night, I heard his muffled cries. I went to him and we talked. So many stories he told. As he recounted them, the fear came into his voice. Naked fear. I heard it as he talked, touched it with him as tears rolled down our cheeks. I did not know what to do. My instinct was to look away, to tell him to shut up. But he was always very dear to me. So I listened.
He told of spies sent to poison whole camps of people, of crawling, crawling away from Unita and South African Defence Force troops. He whispered one word, “Umdlembwe [Traitor].” There was no anger in his voice as he whispered this word, shaking his head.
Late at night or in the early hours of morning, when no one could hear us, he whispered, “Umdlwembe” in an incredulous tone.
The fear was justified. A lot of these stories have come out in TRC. We know them. But we have not seen the fear, nor touched it. Many of us have never experienced having to live with the fear of betrayal by our brothers and sisters. We have never had to live with the fear that the one we hug today could be the one sent to kill us.
I was once asked to describe “the black experience” in South Africa. Where could I begin to describe the ways in which apartheid chipped away at our dignity? How could I describe the humiliation of seeing our fathers fit their hats in their fists when encountering white people
How could I talk about the humiliation in our mothers’ eyes as they cast them down, a humiliation which as their children we copied? What about the lifetime struggle for many of us to feel proud and not feel like impostors? There are many ways of dying.
As a young woman in the burning 1970s and 1980s, the ANC and United Democratic Front gave me a lifeline: it helped me wash away that shame. I learnt to straighten my back, raise my head and look folks in the eye, black or white. I could imagine a different South Africa, and fight for it. That is part of our heritage.