Childhood: South Africans recall their past
edited by Adrian Hadland
(Penguin Books)
My life as a young South African was smooth, marked by the joy of major celebrations, and the warmth and friendship, the sense of community, of small town life,” wrote Ahmed Kathrada in his autobiography Memoirs. This is the kind of story you will read in Childhood; stories of South Africa’s past told through the biographies and autobiographies of prominent South Africans.
Personages in this book are from diverse backgrounds; there is the master entrepreneur Raymond Acker-man, writer and academic Mbulelo Vizikhungo Mzamane, singer Miriam Makeba and footballer Stephen “Kalamazoo” Mokone. They are young and old. For instance, Zazah Khuzwayo, who tells the story of unpre-cedented domestic abuse, was in her twenties when her story was written. Usual suspects are the Mandelas, Winnie and Nelson. This book would have not been complete without them. Yet, Desmond Tutu is conspicuously missing. The stories tell of hope and the triumph of human spirit, even though they emanate from an era filled with anguish, pain and loss. They tell of human love and cruelty at the same time.
The reader is offered a glimpse into various biographies and autobiographies, taking us back by up to 200 years. The source is stated at the end of each chapter for additional reading.
An extract from E’skia Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue provides a picture of Pretoria when Marabastad was still a lively township, before the implementation of the infamous Group Areas Act resulted in forced removals. Mphahlele tells a simple but captivating story of being a witness to crime and other social ills and alcohol abuse as a child. He also takes us back to the time of bioscopes and the origins of Marabi music in Marabastad.
Then there is the story of Dugmore Boetie from Familiarity is the Kingdom of the Lost, an autobiography edited by Barney Simon. This is a painful story of a vagabond, a thief and a survivor. Dugmore Boetie was born in Johannesburg in the 1930s and survived through a life of begging, borrowing and stealing. This is a no-holds-barred account of life in the harsh streets of Johannesburg and Cape Town, and entrances to and exits from reformatories.
In Never Been At Home, Zazah Khuzwayo writes of unprecedented abuse at the hands of her father during her childhood. Her story is similar to many untold stories of women, young and old, who face abuse daily in their homes.
Stories are told with as much accuracy as the human memory can preserve. Only Miriam Makeba’s story sounds more like fiction. In fact, in the introduction, the editor gives a lecture about the psychology of human memory; a well-balanced and researched piece on the advantages and shortcomings of relying on human memory to tell history. But, by the editor’s admission, “Memory is unreliable. Images grow dim.”
In this book, South Africa’s past is given human faces. Biographies and autobiographies have some magic in them; they reduce masses of people to individuals and eras to days. This bittersweet, and sometimes hilarious, account of our nation’s past is as painful as it is important. One cannot help but remember Desmond Tutu’s words when he said, upon handing over the Truth and Reconciliation Report to then president Nelson Mandela in 1998, “The nation that forgets where it comes from is bound to go back there.”
Sabata-Mpho Mokae is a literary critic on Kaya FM. He is on air with Buyile Mdladla every Monday between 11am and noon