MY NAME IS MALAIKA LESEGO SAMORA MAHLATSI. I was born twenty-two years ago in the now-dilapidated Meadowlands Community Clinic on a rainy morning on 19 October. It was my mother’s twentieth birthday on that day. Her name is Dipuo Mahlatsi and, until just over a decade ago, she had dedicated her life to serving you: the ANC. Like me, she was born in the historical township of Soweto at a time when children could not have a childhood.
Dipuo’s mother, Matshediso Mahlatsi, had been a young girl when she left her hometown of Parys in the Free State. Having been born into a poverty-stricken family, my grandmother was unable to attend school and, as a result, received no form of education. Like most young women from a working-class background in Parys, she had the responsibility of looking after the children of the many aunts and uncles who lived in the family home when they were out working the houses and gardens of white families. Cooking, cleaning and doing the laundry were also part of her responsibilities. The young woman, trapped in her own home, where she would have remained in a state of perpetual servitude, made the bold decision to leave the monotonous and stagnant life of the village in search of gold in Johannesburg: the city that never sleeps. In the late 1960s, alone and scared, my grandmother bid farewell to her displeased family and took a train to Johannesburg, where she would spend the rest of her life.
My grandmother has often narrated to me the story about her early days in the city. To this day, she remembers it as though it were yesterday. She tells me that the first sign that the train had entered Johannesburg was the smell of working men: men working underground to dig out gold they would never own, men weeding and watering the gardens of homes they could never enter and men running everywhere to evade the ruthless white policemen.
Johannesburg, she recalls, was a true concrete jungle. When she arrived in the city, my grandmother was completely alone. She knew she had some relatives somewhere in Soweto but she didn’t know their exact location and didn’t want to bother them with her unannounced presence. She was a beautiful young woman with nothing but a duffel bag containing her few possessions: two washed-out blouses, a black skirt that had been given to her by an aunt who had stolen it from a pile of her madam’s old clothes, a single dress that she normally wore to church and two pairs of panties that today would be considered unfit for human wear. She had no money and no plans, only a strong desire to escape the suffocating realities of Parys. A woman who had been on the train with her from the Free State, realising that my grandmother was foreign to the city, offered to provide her with accommodation for a few days until my grandmother could sort herself out. Grateful for this intervention, she accepted and, on that night, slept peacefully on a thin mattress laid over a concrete floor in a small house in Moletsane, a township in the east of Soweto.
It was not too difficult to find work at that time. My grandmother, young, uneducated, desperate and black, was exactly the kind of worker the system wanted. She was soon working in the home of a white family as a ‘girl’, what we today call a domestic worker. The responsibilities of a ‘girl’ were no different to what she’d been doing back home: cleaning the house, doing the laundry and looking after children, this time of the baas and madam. Of course, this time around, she was remunerated for her work, albeit with meagre wages that could barely cover her living expenses. Now that she was working, it was expected of her by the lady who’d taken her in that she would contribute to the expenses of the house. At this point, my grandmother couldn’t afford to rent a shack of her own so she continued to live with the family that had shown her kindness in a city known for its cruelty.
Over the next few years, my grandmother worked for the white family and continued to make ends meet with the little she was receiving. It may not have been difficult to find work at that time but whichever work a black person found, he or she was bound to find him- or herself being super-exploited. But the alternative was more terrifying and so black people found themselves working long shifts for peanuts, at times not even making enough to feed their families for a full month.
Towards the end of the 1960s, my grandmother met a young man. According to what she tells me, it was love at first sight. Having never had the opportunity to interact with young men around the township due to her busy work schedule, she hadn’t had the time even for casual dating. But when she met this young man with his sun-kissed skin and charming mannerisms, my grandmother was swept off her feet and, before long, she was being courted by him. The relationship intensified with time and a year later she was carrying her first child by him. While very excited by this news, she was also terrified about the implications. She was unmarried and was hardly making enough money to be able to find a place of her own. It was already burdensome on the family she lived with that she was occupying what little space they had to themselves, and now she’d be bringing in an extra person to occupy yet more space. Her child’s father was living with his family in the family home and so, like her, had no place of his own. Being unmarried, however, was a huge scandal, for which she knew her family back in the Free State would never forgive her. Back then, it was taboo for a woman to have a child out of wedlock. It would bring great shame to the family. But my grandmother wanted this child and she loved its father most dearly.
A few months into the pregnancy, her boyfriend asked her to move in with him and his family in another section of Moletsane. Relieved of the burden of having to explain her condition to the woman in whose house she was staying, my grandmother gladly moved to the Mokhethi home, where she received a warm welcome. She continued to commute to and from work on a daily basis until she was no longer able to do so. My uncle, Lesley Mokhethi, was born in 1969. Soon after his birth, my grandmother was back at work scrubbing the floors of white homes and looking after ‘klein baases’ and ‘klein madams’. The Mokhethi family doted over the newcomer to the family. He was the first grandson of maMokhethi, the mother of my grandmother’s boyfriend. All the women in the house took turns looking after him when my grandmother was at work. At night when she returned, feeling very lethargic, she would breastfeed him while she rested on the couch until both of them fell asleep. She would wake up in the early hours of the morning, often because of the piercing cold, to find that one of the aunts had covered her with a warm blanket and taken Lesley to bed. This would happen on days when her boyfriend would not have slept at home. On days when he did, he’d wake her up and take her to sleep beside him on a mattress laid on the concrete dining room floor. She never complained. It was not too unusual for a man not to sleep at home, and a good woman knew to not ask questions about his whereabouts when he returned.
By the time Lesley was just over a year old my grandmother was pregnant with another child. Having long since welcomed my grandmother as their son’s prospective wife, the Mokhethi family was once again thrilled at the idea of raising the child in their home. But this excitement was not shared by the child’s father, who was disputing the unborn child’s paternity. Nonetheless, my grandmother continued to stay in the Mokhethi home until she gave birth to a healthy baby girl in October 1971. The child’s looks gave its father more reason to deny it was his. The Mokhethi family was very light in complexion as a result of its partly white lineage. My paternal grandfather had been a product of a mixed-race pairing—a white man and a black woman. But this child was darker in complexion than even my maternal grandmother, and stuck out like a wildebeest on a busy city street in the Mokhethi family. That child was named Dipuo, which means ‘a child born amid talks’. Unlike the first child, she did not assume the Mokhethi surname. Instead, she used her mother’s: Mahlatsi. The talks and suspicions about the child’s paternity became unbearable until, a few years later, my grandmother decided she’d had enough.
On a cold June morning in 1975, she packed her and her children’s bags. She was determined to leave the Mokhethi household and raise her children on her own. Before she could walk out the door, she was stopped by their grandmother, who demanded that she leave on her own without the children. She knew that my grandmother had not informed her family about the birth of either child so it was very unlikely that she would be returning to the Free State. She also knew that my grandmother was not making enough money to be able to afford to rent a place of her own. But my grandmother refused to leave her children behind. She wanted them with her even as she knew not where she was heading. This led to an argument between her and the children’s grandmother and, eventually, a cruel compromise was reached: my grandmother would leave her son behind and only take with her the daughter whose paternity had been the foundation of the conflict in the family. MaMokhethi would have wanted it differently but my grandmother was adamant that her daughter would be better off with her than with the family of a man who didn’t even want her. The deal sealed, my grandmother took off with her daughter strapped tightly to her back, never to set foot in the Mokhethi home again.
Because she was not very familiar with Soweto even at that point, due to never having had a social life, my grandmother had no way of knowing just how close she was to the home of the relative she knew she had in Soweto. And so, after leaving Moletsane, she roamed the township in search of a place to rest her head. She walked for hours on end, knocking on doors, begging for a place for her and her child to sleep. Eventually, she found rescue in the form of a family that lived just outside Moletsane, where she had by now spent many years. For the next few months she lived happily with her newfound family while continuing to work ‘at the kitchens’, as working in white suburbs is called in the township. Her daughter was growing into a clever young girl, inquisitive and ahead of her peers. It was around this time that my grandmother began to search for her relatives. She eventually found them residing in Meadowlands Zone 3, just a few minutes away from Moletsane. By the time she moved in with them, she had two children with her: my mother and a son named Godfrey Motsamai Mahlatsi, who would die a painful death in 1999.
Life in Zone 3 was not much different from life in Moletsane. My grandmother was still forced to work in order to feed her children. She was not making a lot of money but having the burden of paying rent eased off her stretched far what little wages she earned from her work in the kitchens. My mother and Godfrey grew alongside the other children in the house and lived the ordinary lives of ordinary township children. By that time, they were both in primary school not too far from the family home. My grandmother had not seen Lesley in years and every night before she went to sleep, she would pray for his safety and for the Lord to have mercy upon her beloved children.
A few years went by.
The apartheid regime was unleashing brutality on the townships and when children were not on the streets kicking torn soccer balls, they were indoors locked away from the screaming police sirens and all-too-common petrol bombs that had become part of the township scenery.
In 1979 and 1981, my grandmother gave birth to another two sons: Vincent Teboho and Alpheus Liphapang Mahlatsi. They too, like my mother and Godfrey, grew up in Meadowlands Zone 3. A few years after the birth of Ali, as the youngest of the boys was called, my grandmother was on the move again. This time she relocated to Zone 8, where she spent her first few years staying with the Makama family, whose matriarch, known only as ‘Mawe’, she was very close friends with.
Dipuo, Godfrey, Vina (the nickname by which Vincent would be known for the rest of his life) and Ali were all attending school in Meadowlands. By then, Dipuo was in junior secondary at WK Maponyane in Zone 9 while Godfrey, Vina and Ali were all in Lejoeleputsoa Primary School in Zone 3. The three boys walked the ten-kilometre trip to Zone 3 every day. It was not unusual at the time. Schools in Soweto were, as they continue to be, very tribalist in posture, reflective of the tribalist posture of the township itself. Schools in zones 7, 8 and 9 had Setswana as the medium of instruction. All the primary schools—Tshimologo, Palesa, Retlile, WK Maponyane, Nkwe and so on—and all the high schools—Mokgome, Kelokitso, and so on—were for Setswana-speaking students. Schools in zones 1, 2 and 3 were mainly for Sesotho-speaking students. Lejoeleputsoa Primary School was one such school and because the Mahlatsi family was Sesotho-speaking, all the children attended it. My mother, being a highly intelligent child, had no trouble at all learning new languages and so it wasn’t too difficult for her to switch from a Sesotho-medium to a Setswana-medium school.
A few years after moving into the Makama home, my grandmother was finally able to afford to rent a one-roomed shack, where she moved with her children in the mid-1980s. By this time, her only daughter, my mother, was a rebellious teenager heavily involved in student politics. Dipuo had graduated from WK Maponyane and was now studying at Kelokitso Comprehensive Secondary School, one of the oldest high schools in Meadowlands. She’d been bitten by the activism bug and was unstoppable in her political activities. This made my grandmother very angry but she knew there was absolutely nothing she could do to prevent her daughter from being an activist. Among other things, the material conditions of the time dictated that young people actively join the struggle to overthrow the apartheid regime that was terrorising and killing many black people.
The year was 1985 and a state of emergency had been declared nationwide. This signalled the increase in state repression. The Congress of South African Students (COSAS), which Dipuo had joined immediately upon entering high school, was banned in this year and township schools were being occupied by the police. Barely a teenager at this stage, my mother was among the many students who were detained by the police for leading boycotts. These were a form of resistance and along with consumer boycotts were a response to your call, ANC, to render the country ungovernable. You had made this call at the Kabwe Conference in Zambia when it declared a people’s war as a tool to heighten mass action against the repressive regime.
My grandmother tells the story better. She remembers the day vividly, for it is etched in the gallery of her mind. She’d got off a taxi from work on a Friday afternoon and was looking forward to spending time at home with her children. By this time she was a cleaner at Kagiso Trust. It was the best job she’d ever had, she says. Kagiso Trust is an organisation that was established in 1985 as a mechanism to channel funds into programmes intended to help the oppressed fight against the apartheid regime. On Fridays she knocked off from work relatively early and, as a result, arrived early at the township. She always looked forward to this day, not only because she could spend time with her children but also because it was one of only two days in the week when she had the time to cook for them. During the week, because work ended late and taxi queues from town were long, the responsibility of cooking was left to my mother, who would return from school in the afternoon and cook before setting off to do her political duties. On Fridays, she made spykos for her children: potato chips with fried chicken and whatever fast food she managed to purchase from vendors in town. The children always looked forward to this meal. Fried chicken and potato chips were considered a great luxury in the township and whenever the children ate it they felt like royalty.
Kelokitso Comprehensive Secondary School also closed early on Fridays; both the teachers and the students were exhausted by the time the week ended. On Fridays, Dipuo would usually arrive home no later than two o’clock. The distance from school in Zone 9 to home in Zone 8 was no more than a twenty-minute stroll. There, she would complete her homework and assignments and then cut the potatoes into chips and leave them in a bucket for my grandmother to fry when she arrived home from work. She did this religiously before heading out to engage in her political activities. On that significant Friday afternoon, however, my grandmother returned home to find the potatoes uncut. This didn’t worry her much. While her daughter was never neglectful of her household chores, my grandmother understood that from time to time children had to be allowed to stray a little. But by the time the sun set and my mother had not returned from school, my grandmother began to worry. Panic engulfed her as she went out into the streets to ask neighbourhood folk about her daughter’s whereabouts. No one seemed to have the answer.
Later that night, after she had searched everywhere possible for her daughter, my grandmother was sitting with her three sons, all in a sombre state, when there was a knock on the door. Expecting it to be my mother, my grandmother jumped up and ran to the door, only to find herself face to face with a young man she didn’t know. He introduced himself and told her that he was there to inform her of her daughter’s whereabouts.
‘Your daughter,’ he said, ‘was arrested this afternoon at school, along with other comrades.’
My grandmother was dumbstruck. Of course she knew that police were harassing activists and had made township schools their playing fields. And she also knew of many young people who had been arrested, never to be seen or heard from again. There were rumours going around that the police were killing people who were involved in political activities. They were not in any prisons, their bodies were in no mortuaries or hospitals and they had not crossed the border to join Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) or the Azanian People’s Liberation Army (APLA) anywhere on the continent. Some were being thrown out of prison windows and their deaths reported as suicide. Some were being fed to crocodiles in the Zambezi River. The thought that her own child could be one of the statistics terrified her beyond measure. She thanked the bearer of bad news and returned to find her sons staring at the closing door, sitting in stunned silence.
Being a staunch believer in Christ, my grandmother dedicated the entire weekend to prayer. She pleaded with the Lord to protect her only daughter. She bargained with Him, vowed to be a better mother if only her daughter could be spared the brutality that she knew the police were capable of. But, more than anything else, she prayed for you, ANC. She prayed that someday you would be the ruling party so that children would cease to suffer. She prayed for all the children who were fighting for what you believed was the ideal South Africa. She prayed for the release of Nelson Mandela. She also prayed for white people to stop their hatred of black people.
A few days after that fateful night, my mother returned home with bruises all over her body and scratches on her face. Her clothes, or what remained of them, looked as though she had been involved in a violent fight with feral animals. My grandmother wasn’t there when she arrived; she had gone to work with a heavy heart and a broken spirit. When she returned home from work that evening, pots were on the stove and the shack had been cleaned. Never before had she been as relieved as she was on that day when, just by entering the shack, she knew her daughter was home.
By the time she was in standard 8 (grade 10) in 1986, my mother was a seasoned activist of the Soweto Youth Congress (SOYCO) and being detained by the police had become part of her way of life. My grandmother had tried on numerous occasions to convince her daughter to cease her political activism. She’d pleaded until she no longer could, and threatened until she realised that she was fighting a losing battle. Dipuo was married to the liberation struggle and nothing anyone could say or do would convince her to abandon it.
But Dipuo wasn’t the only one who was giving her parent a hard time. In the late 1980s, Soweto was the hub of student activism. In every township, young men and women, some barely teenagers, were involved in the activities of SOYCO and the United Democratic Front.
Many parents were living in constant fear that their own children would be victims of the cruelty of the police. They were terrified that someday their own children would vanish into the Zambezi River and never return home. So they did everything in their power to dissuade them from joining any political organisation or participating in any way in the struggle. But very few of the children did stop. They understood that the temporary discomfort of their parents was nothing compared to the permanent oppression of the black race by the apartheid regime. It had come to the point where something had to give: either apartheid was to be defeated or South African black people were to accept the demise of their civilisation. Apartheid was genocide and black people were perishing one by one. It had to stop. The children were going to stop it, with or without the blessings of their terrified parents.
Life in the township was becoming a living nightmare. Many students were not going to school, police presence had intensified since the declaration of the state of emergency in 1985 and victory was becoming more and more uncertain with every passing year. My grandmother continued as the matriarch of her family, raising her three sons and rebellious daughter, who was now hardly ever home. By this time, Vina and Ali were in senior primary school and their elder brother, Godfrey, was in junior secondary. They were excelling academically, like their older sister, and my grandmother prayed every day that they would not follow in her footsteps.
Towards the end of 1989, my mother announced that she was leaving Meadowlands and going to Alexandra, a township in the east of Johannesburg. Alexandra, one of the oldest townships in South Africa, was a haven for political activists. As you know, ANC members, most activists who later joined the Congress, including Nelson Mandela, had lived in this working-class township that today continues to reflect the brutality of class segregation. Alexandra was initially intended to house labourers who worked in the mines of the Witwatersrand area where, in the 1800s, gold had been discovered. Over the years, and with the heightening of the struggle, it had become a safe-house for political activists on the run from the police. Alexandra, because of its history of violence, terrified even the most hardened of police. Hardly any police patrolled the area, both because of the violence and the dense clustering of shacks. The latter made it almost impossible for activists who hid there to be found. This character of Alexandra made it an ideal place for activists and it was this that made Dipuo and many of her comrades descend on the township. My grandmother didn’t protest when this announcement was made. By then she had reconciled herself to the reality that her teenage daughter was lost to the struggle and, above all, to you: the African National Congress.
My mother did not return home until January 1990, the year when Nelson Mandela was released from prison following the unbanning of political parties in the country. The apartheid regime was finally prepared to sit down for negotiations with national liberation movements and make a settlement that would see the end of the oppression of the black majority. The armed struggle had been abandoned to make allowance for peaceful talks. Students were back behind their desks and the streets of the townships no longer resembled a warzone. For the first time in many years, South Africa was alive with hope.
As a result of her education having been interrupted, by 1991, aged twenty, my mother was in high school completing her matric. A year prior to that, she had met a fellow activist who was leading COSAS in Soweto and had started a relationship with him. The young man was barely a year older than her and the relationship started off a whirlpool of childish romance in times of political instability. They usually met at COSAS meetings in Meadowlands, where he was also a resident. He was as assertive as she was, and theirs was considered a star-crossed relationship doomed to fail, not only because they were similar in so many ways but also because the political climate at that time made little allowance for such relationships to blossom. Student activists were perpetually on the run from the police, forced into hiding in townships like Alexandra. More often than not, even their parents wouldn’t know their whereabouts, for they had to live as silently as thieves in the night if they were to be able to elude the vigilant eyes in the patrolling police vehicles that guarded the townships like hawks. But this relationship wouldn’t meet its fate without leaving a permanent mark of its existence. Sometime after they met, the two lovers were expecting a child.
My mother maintains to this day that she was unaware of her pregnancy. She claims there were hardly any symptoms to indicate that a foetus was growing inside her uterus. Not until she was five months into the pregnancy did she know that she’d be bringing a child into the world. But when the knowledge presented itself she nevertheless, without any income and being out of school, made the decision to keep the child—a light in the dark odyssey of apartheid.
On 19 October 1991, Malaika Lesego Samora Mahlatsi was born at the Meadowlands Community Clinic, weighing a healthy three kilograms. It would be eleven years before my mother would have another child, whom she would name Morena Lumumba Rethabisitswe Mahlatsi, after the former prime minister of Zaire, Patrice Lumumba, a son of the soil who was snatched away from the arms of mother Africa far too soon.