Ferial Haffajee
If Anna Stoffberg lives for another year, she will earn the rare distinction of seeing in the start of two centuries. “I am a hundred-and- something,” says the wizened woman from her bed in a tiny council flat in Eldorado Park, a former coloured township near Johannesburg.
The flat is home to 10 people, and three generations sleep in the double bed where Stoffberg has spent the past three years. Every night her granddaughter, Doreen Rossouw, and great-granddaughter, Patricia, bed down next to the old lady, who will be 107 on her next birthday.
Stoffberg slips in and out of lucidity but when jogged, her memories flood back. She’s reached the age where sleep comes easily and another world beckons. Rossouw must occasionally remind her to keep her eyes open.
She has lived through two world wars as well as the rise and fall of apartheid, but the battle she remembers best is the Battle of Blood River.
During the battle, she and her family trekked with a boer from Port Elizabeth, her birthplace, to Zeerust where she worked for his family.
Stoffberg came to Johannesburg during World War I with her husband Japie. They lived in Kliptown and had nine children.
“Tell them how he [Japie] landed up in the army,” coaxes Rossouw. And the story Stoffberg relates begins to give one an inkling of the strength of the woman – a strength hidden by her shrunken frame.
Japie was a would-be draft dodger but his wife would have none of it. When army officials came to collect her husband, she remembers, amid hoarse giggles, how she “pulled him from the washing machine. He was small and I was cheeky.”
Stoffberg’s fingers are long and young, and have defied the passage of time. She points out things with the fingers which coaxed many babies from their mother’s wombs.
With no formal education or a nursing degree, “Ouma Stoffberg” is an Eldorado Park icon. Besides the bevy of grandchildren she delivered, there are many other children the old woman calls her own as she helped bring them into the world.
Her midwifery skills were passed on to two grandchildren whose services are still in demand in poor parts of the township.
In the past three years, Stoffberg’s limbs have succumbed to time’s ravages. “I can’t sleep on my side,” she says. She can no longer walk, although her grandchildren recall that she was familiar sight on Eldorado Park’s streets until she was 103 years old.
She has outlived all her children except her youngest son, who is partly paralysed and lives elsewhere.
Ouma Stoffberg is a matriarch. The children and grandchildren who crowd around her are full of tales. “She could slaughter a sheep on her own,” says one, while another chips in that “She could swim a dam”.
Eldorado Park and many other parts of South Africa survive on the strength of women like Stoffberg who keep families together.
Rossouw has taken over her grandmother’s role in the family. A television set and a crystal-clear fish tank are the only luxuries.
Money – or the absence thereof – has always been a part of this family’s life. And while Stoffberg remembers President Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment and his release, she also remembers the apartheid years because they were so cheap. “A pair of stockings was a shilling. Ten cents for meat, and coffee was a tiekie.”
Although never a political activist, Stoffberg had an apartheid brush with the law. “Ek het ‘n boervrou geklap [I hit an Afrikaans woman].” The story has faded with time and telling, but the version the family pieces together is that a white woman on a horse-buggy apparently instructed Stoffberg to get out of her way and then hit her with a riding staff. The feisty woman was having none of it and slapped her.
“I told the magistrate: `The first slap was hers and the second was mine.'” She got off with only a fine.
Today, Stoffberg is also embroiled in a legal wrangle. She and Rossouw are trying to get a distant relative evicted from Stoffberg’s council house.
The woman took over the house when Stoffberg was ill. Says Rossouw: “She wants to die in her house.” She is at the age where she knows that her date with death can come at any time. Prayer is a constant occupation.
“In the morning I thank the Lord for sparing me for the night. I ask him to keep me through the day,” says Stoffberg, adding, “I want nothing from the world, just Jesus.”