Recently I went on a 10-hour road trip with my uncle. I was nervous about travelling alone with him over such a long distance. I have never had an adult conversation with my uncle, or, as it turns out, any other older uncle-like relative. In my family, old men and young women don’t usually sojourn together.
As a child, I remember him as a tremendously affectionate man, generous with his love for his own and everybody else’s children. He was always grabbing an oblivious kid and the child would squeal with pleasure while being hoisted swiftly on to my uncle’s narrow shoulders. His complexion is dark as the night sky, with teeth white and bright like shining lights. That is how I spotted him from the crowds when I went to pick him up at OR Tambo airport.
As soon as we saw each other we embraced and launched effortlessly into conversation. Stories pour out of him like wine from a decanter. The next day we hit the road early in the morning. I didn’t feel the distance as he retold stories of his days as a general in the Pan African Congress’s Azanian People’s Liberation Army, how his mission at that point in his life was to kill white people. He told me of his time in jail in the Transkei and how he went on a hunger strike for 21 days because he wanted to study rather than sit in solitary confinement for 23-and-a-half hours a day. On the 15th day, they gave him a Bible.
He explained to me how alien the concept of employment must have seemed to black Africans, who had never needed to work for money before colonisation. Everything made sense as he taught me history infused with life experience.
He is from Clarkebury Village, a missionary college town that was once the pride of the Transkei because of its palatial colonial structures and institutions of education.
Nelson Mandela attended school there, as did my mother and other family members. He loved his life there and enjoyed the discipline instilled by the missionaries, as well as the fact that the village shone in comparison to others. Today Clarkebury is a barren trough, lacking in structural development. I was there in 2010 and it looked the same as it had looked during my childhood — a formerly glorious place. The luscious green hills and fertile soil of the Transkei remain, spotted with mud huts and square houses and hectares of land waiting to be farmed.
My uncle has a cattle farm and has simple and clever ideas for redeveloping this and rural villages by encouraging people to be producers and not just consumers of commodities such as cooking oil, fruit, bread, uniforms and timber products.
It was wonderful to encounter a person who, in his mature years, has kept alive spirit and ambition. I hope harsh reality won’t dull the spark, as it has done to so many beautiful dreamers.