MY UNCLE’S DEATH LEFT A VOID IN MY HEART. I had loved him with every fibre of my being. We had not been very close in the true sense of the word but he had been my favourite of my three uncles, mainly because he was friendlier to Tshepiso and me. Lesley would resurface but we were to see him only very rarely, and Vina and Ali were often too busy with their own friends to really pay us attention. Not Godfrey. Whenever he was around, he would sit with us and tell us stories about Never-never. He also asked about our schoolwork and life in general. He’d been a good uncle to us.
After Godfrey’s death, my family changed completely. My grandmother became paranoid, claiming her son had been killed with muti. She insisted she needed to go and become a sangoma but first she’d have to attend the preparatory school for a year. And so she left the house and went to live where she was being trained to become a sangoma. My mother, who had been closest to Godfrey, was very resigned and often in a very foul mood. After my grandmother left, my mother was left with the responsibility of heading the household. And so, between her busy work schedule and her political activities, she also had to look after her younger siblings and me. The burden was very heavy on her shoulders.
Not long after Godfrey’s death, for a reason I never understood, we were evicted from our home in Tlhomedi Street. I have no recollection of the exact day but I recall that a few months after we buried Godfrey, we were back in Sekhwiri Street, this time a few houses away from the shack we had rented years before. We were staying in yet another shack, this one smaller than the last. It was around early 2001, I was ten years old and still in Tshimologo Junior, completing grade 4. Tshepiso had gone to Retlile Senior Primary School. Tshimologo ended with grade 4 so students would transfer to Retlile for their senior primary schooling.
This was the saddest period of my childhood. The humiliation of moving from a proper home back into a dilapidated shack with rusted corrugated iron and holes along the roof edges was more than I could bear. At times, when we had arguments with our friends, they would tease us about living in a shack. It was humiliating. Tshepiso and I began to isolate ourselves from other children, finding comfort in each other. I made new friends, two younger girls called Pepsy and Lerato, who because of her emaciated and tiny frame we called ‘Monang’, meaning ‘mosquito’. I had nothing much in common with them but they were different from my older friends. Perhaps because they were younger they were less judgemental and cruel. I enjoyed their company and often sat with them inside the shack that I called home, in no way embarrassed by its condition. One afternoon, while Monang and I were sitting inside the boiling shack waiting for Pepsy to come so the three of us could go play at the tennis court not too far from home, it began to rain. It poured as if a dam had burst. The leaking roof was split open by the ferocious downpour. The two of us stood inside the flooded shack, watching helplessly as the water seeped into the only sofa in the shack, which was used by Tshepiso as a bed. Utensils and cutlery were floating above the pool of water that had formed inside. The bed, in which my mother slept, was consumed by the water. Everything in the shack was sunk into the pool that was now reaching my knees. As quickly as the rain had started it suddenly stopped, leaving destruction in its wake. Monang and I stood beside each other, our feet drowned, looking helplessly at the debris surrounding us. Pots and pans were strewn about. Suitcases that contained my family’s clothes were dripping wet. My school bag was floating above the water, its contents obviously now mashed. It was a heartbreaking experience and for the first time since I had befriended these younger girls, I felt humiliated beyond measure.
Monang and I proceeded to use buckets to get rid of the water inside the shack. The process took hours. Vina and Ali eventually arrived home and lent us a helping hand. After that day, I never hung out with Monang or Pepsy again and, eventually, I returned to our old friends.
Although greatly depressed by the new conditions and having to head the household alone because of my grandmother’s departure to her sangoma initiation school, my mother’s political activism did not falter. By this time, she was actively leading the ANC Youth League (ANCYL) and contributing to the Women’s League. She had also found another political home in the form of the South African National Non-Governmental Organisation Coalition (SANGOCO), where she was employed as a communications support officer. SANGOCO was doing developmental work in and around the country. My mom would come home from work to prepare supper for us before heading out to one of her Youth League meetings. More often than not she’d take me with her to these meetings, while Tshepiso preferred to stay home with Ntswaki, from whom she had become inseparable.
By this time, ten years old, I was a regular at your gatherings in Soweto. My mother would always take me with her to meetings and other events around the township. By this time, my father was an undergraduate student at the University of the Witwatersrand, leading the South African Students Congress (SASCO) on campus. When I was not with her at Mapedi Hall in Meadowlands, I was with him in Braamfontein attending meetings of SASCO and the ANC Youth League. I had come to be known as ‘the last born of the revolution’ in my township and when my mother did not have me in tow to her gatherings, her comrades would ask after me. Not that I did much at these gatherings, hardly anything at all. I’d just sit through the discussions, understanding nothing, and only participate when they started singing revolutionary struggle songs. There was one in particular that I loved and when comrade Clifford Sedibe (I had started calling all members of the ANC ‘comrade’ by that time) belched it out, I would join in enthusiastically and sing at the top of my lungs:
Comrade MmeMahlangu, Ao botse Solomon
Hore scorpion sena
O na se bona kae.
Comrade MmeMahlangu,
Ao botse Solomon
Hore scorpion sena O na se bona kae.
Thabeng tsa Angola! Thabeng tsa Angola! Tsa Angola
Se ne se ja maBuru!
I didn’t understand the message behind this song. I didn’t know what a scorpion that killed the Boers was. I did not know what Solomon Mahlangu was doing in the mountains of Angola, or why his mother was being asked where her son got the scorpion that was killing Boers. But I knew that something about this song touched me in very many ways. It was a beautiful song and the look on comrade Clifford’s face when he sang it told me that whatever the story behind it was, it was a powerful one. I vowed to myself that someday I’d find out what the story behind this song was and that I too would sing it with the passion that emanated in comrade Clifford’s tenor, when I too, like him, would be a leader of the ANC. I would later discover that the song is a dedication to an MK combatant’s training in Angola. Nineteen-year-old Mahlangu was hanged by the apartheid police after being convicted of the Goch Street bomb attacks.