Dear Mama
It’s me, your broken son.
Although the earth’s sorrows have dimmed your light for us, I trust heaven has awarded you the glory and dignity you deserve. You and I last spoke in February 2005, five days before you passed away. When you succumbed to your illness — which remains a mystery to this day — I was only 13. I not only had to adjust to a new school, but also to the reality that you would never live to relate any more intriguing tales of your childhood.
While we are learning a new language, Karl Marx said, we keep translating it back into our mother tongue. But to truly assimilate it and express ourselves freely, we must let our mother tongue go. Your eternal departure from the world meant I had to learn the new language of living without you. At first it was almost impossible to lead a motherless life in our complex family structure. It was difficult to forget and move on unfettered by the traditions of the dead generations to which you now belong; traditions which, as Marx remarked, weigh like a nightmare on the minds of the living.
A decade has passed, yet I have heard from you only once. You appeared in a dream to reprimand us for begging, an approach we adopted shortly after we laid you for your final rest. In that dream I was on my way back from Makeneng, the distant village where aunt Kunu had sent me to ask for maize meal from a family not revealed in the dream. Your usual peacefulness was disturbed, irked by our inability to forget the past and assimilate the new language of our lives. You questioned our manners and told us to stop scattering far and wide in search of food.
Since then you have never reappeared. Not even when our aunt abandoned me and Maitse in Sekgutlong. I feared you would send a warning as I again fell to begging to survive that most harsh period of my life. When I lay in bed after a day of knocking on doors with a begging bowl, explaining in all honesty that we had been left to fend for ourselves, I expected a word from you — a repeat of that dream. But you remained silent. How I panted for a few droplets of guidance from you when Maitse succumbed to the defeatism of our village. During that volatile period, when my dreams were often nightmares, my aunt was fighting for her life at the hands of her abusive boyfriend. With no senior person at home, he could do as he pleased. He was scared of no one. Like an oversized rat that devours all other rats and thrives on poison as its favourite delicacy, he delighted in terrorising us. By that time all false layers of family protection had been peeled away, exposing our fragility. Life was punishing us for being the descendants of a broken family that had failed to provide us with uncles, cousins, grandparents or even a resident father.
We had no one to hold our hands and assure us that everything would be okay. There was no veteran at the helm to steer our lives. We were immersed in a whole new language, stammering beginners surrounded by other beginners. Veterans never ridicule beginners; they support and encourage them. Only beginners themselves disparage one another. How I hankered for the presence of a veteran, not necessarily in age but in psychological strength. But there was none. Even the adults behaved like beginners.
When your coffin was lowered into that hollow grave, I lost my anchor. God made no sense anymore. Hope was a meaningless word. The future was an unaffordable flight of imagination. As everything broke down, there was no one to help us piece it back together. More and more I hungered for some word from you. Until at last I decided to be strong for the sake of my future. I had to write you off to survive the onslaught and find a way to express myself in the new language. I began to avoid every thought of you, cautioning myself against translating my new reality back into my mother tongue: the days when you were alive. I stopped caring how things might have been if death had not torn you from my life. I needed to suppress my subjectivity, to deal objectively with the punches life was throwing at me.
My philosophy for self-protection was to handle everything with logic, not emotion. I began to approach life from a rational point of view. Denying my feelings allowed me to protect the fragility of my heart. I fixed my concentration on defying my history by finishing school and going to university. I was tired of living with a false sense of family. I needed to work hard so I could start my own family, throw off the reigning curse and set a new generational trend. I was inspired by the ideal of giving my children the fatherly love I had never had, of loving my wife as I wished my father had, if he had only stayed to love you.
Since then, this vision of family renaissance has driven all my thoughts and actions. Propelled by this dream, I walked through fire and endured the flames. Anyone who had been at the centre of the family politics of my childhood would dream the same dream. Any kid who has never known a normal family home will make it his mission to create a new family. I was that kid. I have never known how it feels to sit at a table with you and my father, to eat together, watch TV together, pray together, live together. For the 24 years of my life I have lived like a refugee with no place I could really call home.
But I do not accuse you of failing us, your children. You were a wonderful mother. You denied yourself everything to give us a childhood against all odds. Burdened by the weight of your own history, there was only so much you could do, and you did it willingly with love and sacrifice. On emotionally testing days, such as Christmas, your strength shone through. When other children’s fathers, uncles and older brothers came home from Gauteng to bring joy to their families, you understood the inadequacy my brother and I were feeling.
‘Monate o a iketsetswa, bana ba ka,’ you would say. We didn’t need a father at home to enjoy Christmas. We didn’t have to be a normal family. It was up to us to make meaningful memories, even though Christmas served as a dreaded reminder that we were not a normal family, that we had no uncles or cousins, that we had never seen our father.
I have decided to break the silence between us. I am starting this conversation to remind you of your younger son and to update you on my life. Perhaps it will catch you off guard if I point out that the way you raised me suggested that you wished I was a girl. It was clear from the way you treated me — the things you told me, the tasks you assigned me, the trust, the friendship, the gossip. Everything was typical of a mother–daughter relationship. When you looked at me, it was as if I were a female companion who could stroll with you through the bush to relive those carefree days when you giggled and chatted with my father like twittering birds.
Your reality forced you to groom my feminine side to relieve your misery as a single mother who lacked a daughter to share the domestic load. In fact, if the homosexuality denialists were right, the type of household chores I grew up doing would have made me gay.
I woke up before you every morning to make a fire so you could have a warm wash. I packed your lunch, and if anything needed ironing, I was your girl. But you were not good with timekeeping. No matter how early I woke you with hot water in the basin, you invariably ended up running after the taxi that took you and the other women to work, while I chased behind with your lunchbox in hand. And all the while you’d be shouting my instructions for the day.
Over time you stopped emptying your bathwater. In your mind you had a girl child to clean up after you. So I rinsed your panties, dried them outside and threw out the bathwater. Then I would either go back to bed or sit by the stove until it was time to get ready for school. As your health gradually degenerated, I took over washing you, dipping the cloth in the water and moving it all over your body. I wasn’t ashamed of your nakedness. Privacy was a luxury we couldn’t afford. I grew up surrounded by the naked bodies of you and your sisters. But washing you was more than an ordinary encounter with ordinary nakedness. It was a deeply spiritual ritual between a single mother and her “daughter” son.
It was hard to watch your body become a playground for diseases. Sometimes a headache would burst your head apart. As it receded, a new illness took its place. Concerned neighbours suggested remedies and rituals. When your feet ached so much you could barely walk, you were told to put them in the river and pray. I accompanied you to the river. I held your hand while you leaned on a stick, and I talked to distract you from the pain of each step. At the river, how you pleaded with God to cast out your suffering. But soon more illnesses came to join the party.
As chief among heaven’s beauties, I hope you can find time in your busy schedule to read this long note of mine. I want to share with you the breakdowns and breakthroughs of my life. I have arranged it into sections to avoid confusing you.
My ambition is not just that you absorb this communication. I also hope you will write back. You might describe to me how the angels envy your innocent beauty. But most of all, I yearn for you to assure me that you did not leave this world without a fight. I want to know that you heard my heartfelt wails as the earth opened to swallow you. I need to be reassured that you protested against death; that you kicked and yelled and thrashed on the floor when your hour came; that you refused to simply abandon your two kids to a world of danger, uncertainty and cruel relations.
June 16 books
Given the 40th anniversary of June 16 1976, it’s no surprise that authors and publishers have been hard at work to mark that day in print. Among the books out are:
Year of Fire, Year of Ash: The Soweto Revolt — Roots of a Revolution? by Baruch Hirson (Best-Red, an imprint of HSRC Press). Hirson’s classic first came out in 1978 and has been republished by BestRed; it probably deserves to be the best read of the tomes on June 1976.
The Road to Soweto: Resistance and the Uprising of 16 June 1976 by Julian Brown (Jacana) is more a prelude to June 16, providing context and background to the events of the day itself.
A graphic record of the day’s events is provided in June 16 (Seriti sa Sechaba Publishers) by renowned lensman Peter Magubane, 130 of whose photographs adorn this 312-page account, with text by veteran journalist Joe Latakgomo. — Arts reporter