This is the story of Jabu Nyembe. Jabu was born and raised in Zola, Soweto, just as the 1960s were coming to an end.
He lived an interesting life. Especially for one who died when he was only 15. Jabu was my cousin. He was also a thug. The streets gave him the name Mgedla. He always was a problem child. Before he was 10, he had quit school and he returned many times.
He sold coal from a horse-drawn cart and broke into many of the homes of his maternal and paternal families’ neighbours in Zola and Dobsonville.
He was feared. Because of Jabu, my other cousin — his younger brother — and I could walk the streets of Zola in the knowledge that we were izintwana ziga Mgedla (Mgedla’s kid brothers). The normal habit of demanding money from a stranger on the basis that they were in the ”wrong” neighbourhood did not apply to us. Those who made the mistake often learned the hard way and usually had the scars to remind them of their indiscretions.
Naturally we loved him and basked in his glory. He was as (in)famous in his immediate neighbourhood. Even older boys feared him.
It helped his case (and ours) that he was the youngest person we knew to have bought and worn the much-coveted 225 — a pair of FootJoy shoes, so named because of their price, a handsome figure in the early 1980s.
No one within our immediate family ever asked him how he was able to afford such style. We all knew uJabu beka phanda. He was a hustler.
Among other things he sold deodorants, perfumes, fruit and peanuts on trains running between Naledi and Johannesburg. And, as required of that trade, he was a master ”staff rider”, able to throw his wares through one window and jump into the fast-moving train at the next door.
It did not take long before older thugs recruited him to be part of their criminal enterprises. I think if he were still alive he would either be in jail or one of the masters of the cash-in-transit heists.
A neighbour stabbed him to death after a street quarrel.
Some of my family members are proud that, after being stabbed, he ran to his grandmother’s house, bleeding from the wound, got his own knife, returned to the scene and stabbed his attacker. They died next to each other.
The point of all this? Mfundo Ntshangase, the King Edward High School learner who was stabbed to death by boys from a rival school at a party in northern Johannesburg.
Last week Johannesburg newsÂÂpapers ran stories about the tragedy and radio stations were abuzz about violence in school and what should be done to eradicate it. The Gauteng education minister stirred the hornet’s nest by saying African children were always the common denominator in schoolyard misbehaviour.
A common response has been that schools are part of society, schoolyards a microcosm of society and therefore violence ought to be expected. I have no arguments with this theory.
Mfundo was clearly not Jabu. He was, by all accounts, a good boy whose life was stolen unfairly from him when he was trying to make peace. I don’t know his killers’ profiles, so I will not even try to suggest that they are latter-day Jabus.
As Jabu’s life and death show, young men have always lived in the shadow of violence. Society has all but accepted this as normal. By accepting the status quo, we condemn our boys to a life that, for the rest of society, ended when man left the cave. A brief but brutish life.
Plenty of people have diagnosed why there is so much violence. Some blame absent father figures. Others say that historically we have always settled our arguments using brawn rather than brains.
But, whatever happens, we dare not give up on our boys.
There must have been a reason — beyond parting a youngster with the redundant skin on his penis — for the ancients to make time to seclude those who would be men and teach them about the journey they would soon take. We should revisit those reasons.
If anything comes from the sad end to Mfundo’s life, let it be that we can no longer pretend that all we need to do is take the girl-child to work and assume that the boy-child is catered for. He is clearly not.
Without being alarmist or apologists for the loutish behaviour of those boys at that ill-fated party, we should accept that the world is as unforgiving for boys as it has always been. That is why many of them still think that violence and conspicuous consumption are the only way to prove their manhood.
We need to create a world where youngsters know another world, one free of violence and anger, is possible. And that their heroes need not be their cousins who earn respect by instilling fear in others.