The next morning my phone rang. It was Hattie.
‘Have you heard?’ she said. ‘Nelson Mandela died last night.’
When I put the phone down, I made myself a cup of coffee and took two rusks and sat out on the stoep. But before I could bring the coffee to my lips, the tears started leaking out of me.
Mandela was ninety-five and had been sick for a while, but it still came as a shock. I looked out at the brown veld and the wrinkled gwarrie trees and the distant mountains. My tears made it seem like rain was falling, but the sky was wide and empty. I knew that people all over the land were crying with me for Tata Mandela.
Then my belly started shaking and tears from deep inside me came up and I realised I was crying for my own father too. My pa who had left me too soon.
I looked out at the veld and let my heart be filled with my sadness and my pride for my father and for Mandela.
Sometimes I thought that my father left my mother because of Mandela. But of course I couldn’t blame Mandela, who had, after all, sat for over twenty years in prison on Robben Island, a long way from the Klein Karoo. I knew my father did love my mother – with her brown eyes and soft hands, and her delicious food – but I also knew that the Klein Karoo, even with its big veld and open skies, was too small for him. And my mother’s mind too narrow.
To my pa, Mandela was a freedom-fighter and a great leader; to my ma he was a terrorist and a kaffir (though she did not use the K-word in front of my father). They did not often argue in front of me, but this was a disagreement that I heard more than once.
My father was the African correspondent for a newspaper in England, the Guardian, and he would travel a lot. Over the years, he came home less and less, and then he stopped coming back altogether. He would send money and postcards. The cards made my mother angry. Eventually the postcards stopped, although the money carried on every month. When I missed him I would read the old postcards that I had rescued from the rubbish bin (and sometimes had to stick together where my mother had torn them). I kept them in a book my father used to read to me when I was little – Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. And I waited to grow up, because when I was eighteen I would go and find him, and visit some of the wonderful places on the postcards and in the Just So Stories. But that’s not how it turned out.
When I was eighteen my mother got a long-distance phone call saying my father had died in an accident. She seemed just as upset that it was a black man who gave her the news as by the fact that my pa had died.
The money from my father stopped, but the Guardian continued with a small pension for my mother. I got a job at Agri – the Farmers Co-op – to help cover the bills. I lived with my ma right through my twenties.
In 1990, the apartheid government finally lifted the State of Emergency. Political organisations – including the African National Congress – were unbanned, and all political detainees and prisoners were released. Mandela was free at last. But the country was full of fighting and blood.
Mandela led the reconciliation talks and somehow took us down a path to peace. In 1994 all South Africans were allowed to vote in the first non-racial democratic election. The ANC came into power and Mandela was our president.
My mother, along with lots of other whites, was terrified. She bought boxes of tinned food and put bolts on all the doors and windows. I did not know what to think about the politics, but I felt more and more trapped in the house. It was then that Fanie started courting me. I was thirty-three. When he asked me to marry him, I was just glad to get out of my mother’s home.
Fanie had done his two years of conscription in the apartheid army and was angry with the Afrikaner National Party government for getting ‘all buddy-buddy’ with the ANC. This same National Party had trained him to kill these ‘ANC terrorists’, and had now let ‘the enemy’ take over our government. Mandela eventually charmed my mother, but Fanie never relaxed with him, or with the black government.
‘I like the way he dances,’ my mother said of Mandela. Of Fanie she said: ‘He has a good job at the bank, and the Van Hartens are a respectable family. His father was a NGK priest, you know.’
It was only once she had relaxed the bolts and started shopping normally (though she still kept two big sacks of flour in the pantry) that she told me the truth about my father: he had been an underground member of the African National Congress. Even though the organisation was unbanned and my father already dead by the time she told me, she whispered the news to me, and told me to keep it secret.
She would not tell me more about what he did or about what kind of accident had killed him, or why we didn’t have a funeral for him.
I hoped Mandela would cure her of some of her anger towards my father and the blacks who stole Pa from her, but she held on to a lonely kind of bitterness until she died.
Because Mandela was a good man, and was ANC, like my father, I started listening to him as if he might have the same sort of advice as my pa would have given me. Before that I had not paid much attention to politics; it all happened far away from me. After all, as we saw on TV, most of the unrest was trouble with the blacks, and in the Klein Karoo there were mainly coloured townships. After listening to Mandela, I didn’t vote ANC (in fact I didn’t vote at all), but I joined the NGK women’s group that raised funds for coloured schools and AIDS orphans. I did a lot of baking for those church fêtes.
And when I was married to Fanie and he started to beat me, I took courage from Mandela. Mandela stood up for women’s rights and criticised violence against women. Sometimes after listening to him, I felt I must just walk away from Fanie. But my fear was stronger. So was the voice of my husband, mother and church: Staan by jou man. Stand by your man.
Still, even though I stayed with Fanie, Mandela’s wise words helped with the loneliness and the pain, and made me think maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t all my fault.
When I had finished my coffee and brushed the rusk crumbs off my lap, I found myself crying a bit more. And the tears for my father and for Mandela, the father of our nation, were all mixed up on my cheeks.