At the age of 102, Sholipi Mbutu has outlived all but one of her children, writes Swapna Prabhakaran
Not many people remember Sholipi Mbutu’s name. At 102, she’s been an old woman for so long, everyone calls her Gogo.
Mbutu lives with her daughter in a tiny house 40km from the coastal town of Kwambonambi, in northern KwaZulu-Natal.
Her great age has shrunk her, and as she walks through her food garden, she stands little over 1,3m. But she is fiercely independent and won’t let anyone touch her, not even her great- grandchildren.
The mielies she has planted tower high over her head and she looks remarkably thin and frail. From a distance, it would be easy to mistake her silhouette for that of a young girl. She gets around the garden on her own by leaning heavily on a wooden stick and shuffling forwards, slowly but without hesitation.
Mbutu says she often feels sad and lonely. For decades now she has had no contemporaries, and she spends much of her time “talking to the ancestors”, holding conversations with voices only she can hear.
Mbutu’s own voice is low and liquid as she recollects stories from the past, but her memory is selective.
She can’t remember the two world wars, but she recalls a fight a farmer over the hill once had with his wife. She is not sure exactly what changes there have been in government over her lifetime, but remembers her husband used to dutifully pay R2 to the tax collector more than 50 years ago.
Mbutu’s proud of the fact that she registered to vote two weeks ago. Her granddaughter, Angel, took her to the registration booth and helped her fill in the forms. She looks solemn as she shows off the sticker in her identity book.
She recently heard of another 102-year- old woman from Mathubathuba, who was told by Independent Electoral Commission volunteers that she was technically too young to vote. The computers had registered her as being two years old, thanks to a mistake in her identity book, which gave her year of birth as 1996 instead of 1896.
The story doesn’t make Mbutu smile. Instead, she grows silent and after a long pause begins talking rapidly of her childhood.
She never met her father, she says. He died before she was born, and her earliest clear memory is of her mother’s sudden death.
“I remember I was very ill. I had been taken to the traditional healer, and I saw somebody – a man wearing a crown. He came to me in a dream and told me he was my father. When I looked around for my mother, she had disappeared.
“I thought she had run away, but she had died. In those days they didn’t believe in telling children that the mother had died. Instead they told me she had gone to live underground with the moles and rabbits.
“For many years I would look inside all the holes in the ground, looking for my mother. I wanted to live underground with her too.”
Now Mbutu smiles, with no trace of bitterness. All this happened more than 90 years ago, and the sting has gone out of the memory.
Mbutu was raised by her mother’s family and was married at a very young age to Mdini Mbutu, a farmhand on a sugar farm, who was much older than her.
She had met him when the king of the region had grouped them together.
“The king had named us all Pondo- indlovu. I married within my own group,” she remembers. Every few minutes as she talks, a little tremble racks her ancient frame, as if invisible hands were shaking her by the shoulders. She takes a deep pinch of snuff.
And then with a sudden giggle she starts talking about her wedding night. “I was a virgin when I got married, and I was still a young woman,” she says.
Her daughter, Rosalina, is obviously embarrassed by her mother’s revelations. She looks away, and shortly afterwards leaves the room to go for a walk in the evening sun. Rosalina is nearly 70, and the only one of Mbutu’s seven children who lived past 30.
In all her stories, her major preoccupation is with death and the dead ancestors. Not surprising, when she has outlived almost everyone in her immediate family – she’s buried a husband, six of her own children, and several grandchildren too.
Yet she is not scared of death. She does have fears of being mugged and robbed by hooligans, and she keeps her home-made beer under lock and key. She also fears lightning, she says, as it comes so suddenly without warning out of the sky.