MY FINAL YEAR AT MELPARK PRIMARY SCHOOL was a turning point in my life. It was the year 2004 and I was at the peak of my academic excellence. I was elected into the Learners’ Representative Council and was the head monitor of the media centre and library. I was also the class captain and in the first team of all the sports I was playing: netball, softball and, by this time, girls’ soccer. I was also part of all cultural extramural activities: traditional dancing, school choir, the debating and public-speaking society and the poetry team. My academic record was great. I’d gone from knowing barely any English two years before to being the top English student in the grade. I could write a two-page essay in ninety minutes. English became my favourite subject, followed closely by Natural Science and Human and Social Sciences, the primary school equivalent of History, which would also become one of my favourite subjects in high school. I’d got over the culture shock of Melpark Primary School and begun to embrace it as a part of my life I had to actually be present in.
My mother must have realised the year before that I was finding the transition from the township neither easy nor exciting. After the disastrous experience at the Johannesburg Youth Theatre, she’d enrolled me in dance lessons with a renowned choreographer, Somizi Mhlongo, who I knew from Sarafina!, a revolutionary movie about the student uprisings of the 1970s. And so, every Saturday morning, I’d catch a taxi to the Auckland Park campus of Technikon Witwatersrand, where I’d have dance lessons until the afternoon. I was doing ballet, contemporary and tap dancing. The dance lessons boosted my confidence in very many ways. I was the youngest in the class and received the most attention from Somizi and the other students, most of whom were professional dancers. They doted on me. When they looked at me they saw a ‘cute and chubby’ little girl, not a dark and fat child, which I had long convinced myself was how I was seen by my fellow schoolmates. Sometimes after class Somizi and his partner, Uncle Tom, would take me out with them. They’d take me to McDonald’s or to Milky Lane for icecream. We often went to visit one of their friends, Sharon Dee, in Northcliff. She too was a known figure, a kwaito star whose hit song, Local is Lekker, had at one point been very popular in my township. I was surrounded by great people who cared a lot about me and this helped me to settle better into a world I was battling to adjust to.
Back at home, my grandmother had returned from her sangoma school. Having been let off by Kagiso Trust, she had returned to working in the kitchens, this time for a Jewish family in Dunkeld, an affluent suburb in the north of Johannesburg near Hyde Park. She’d become very resigned and was a shadow of her former self. My uncles had completed their matric and were in tertiary institutions. Ali, the younger of the two, was enrolled with the Federated Union of Black Arts, better known as the FUBA Arts Academy. He was doing a national diploma in Drama and Directing. Vina was enrolled with the South West Gauteng College, studying towards a Mechanical Engineering national diploma. The financial burden had become heavier for my mom but she wanted all of us in school and she was determined to see to it that we had qualifications that would enable us to escape the cycle of poverty that gripped the township.
My mother’s activism in the student movement had imprinted itself on her heart. She always told us that she was destined to be an activist her entire life. Because of this, she only ever wanted to work in the civil society sector, where she believed there was a greater chance of making a significant change in the country. When I was completing my final year at Melpark Primary School, she was still employed as a communications support officer at SANGOCO. The SANGOCO offices were in Auckland House in Braamfontein, less than fifteen minutes from Melville. Instead of heading straight home after my dancing practice, I began to take a Metrobus to Braamfontein to wait for her to knock off from work. We would walk down to Bree taxi rank in the central business district and wait in long queues for taxis to Meadowlands. Sometimes at the offices I would just sit and read. Other times, I would play in the elevators, going up and down the building for no reason at all. But, one afternoon, one of my mother’s colleagues, abuti Nhlanhla Ndlovu, called me up to his office. I thought he’d scold me for getting up to mischief but instead he gave me a pile of papers and told me to read them. I took them to my mother’s desk and began to sort through them one at a time.
The papers were mostly articles, newsletters and pages photocopied from journals about two conferences: the World Summit on Sustainable Development and the World Conference against Racism. I’d heard about these conferences from my mother a few years before. She had not been speaking to me per se—she was probably speaking to one of her many comrades—but I’d heard her make mention of them and, at some point, she’d left home to be in Durban for a few days to attend one of these conferences. I later learned that it was the World Conference against Racism.
I sat in my mom’s office looking through the stack of papers until I came across one document in particular that really caught my attention. It was a few pages, no more than ten, stapled together. The cover page read, ‘World Children’s Prize for the Rights of the Child’.
The document contained stories of children from all across the world who had been faced with difficult circumstances, such as abuse and discrimination. These children had stood up against the injustices of the system by being activists. The first story was of Xolani Nkosi Johnson, a young South African boy who had fought tirelessly against the discrimination of HIVpositive children. Infected with the incurable disease during his mother’s pregnancy, Nkosi had been adopted by a white woman named Gail Johnson, who had been instrumental in Nkosi’s journey and battle with the dreaded disease. A hospice for mothers and children living with the disease, Nkosi’s Haven, had been established after Nkosi’s death in 2001, on World Children’s Day. I knew Nkosi Johnson’s story. He had been a student at Melpark Primary School during his death. Teachers always made a point of telling us about him.
But the story that particularly caught my attention on that day was that of Iqbal Masih. I have never forgotten his story.
Iqbal Masih was a young boy from Pakistan who had been forced into bonded labour when he was only four years old by his family, who had borrowed money from a businessman who owned a carpet factory. This system, where a child is forced to pay off a loan that his or her family gets from a businessman, is known as peshgi. The child is not consulted but is just sent to live and slave in a factory as a way of paying off the loan. Over the years, Iqbal’s family borrowed more money from the businessman, resulting in Iqbal remaining in the carpet factory for many years. The conditions in the factory were horrific. The children, some as young as three years old, were forced to work fifteen-hour shifts six times a week. They barely had anything to eat. While working, weaving threads into carpets, they weren’t allowed to speak to one another. If they dared to, they were beaten to a pulp. At times they’d be hung upside down or placed in solitary confinement.
After having worked for six years in the carpet factory, Iqbal heard about the Bonded Labour Liberation Front (BLLF), an organisation that was working to abolish child labour, which the Pakistani government had outlawed in 1992. Iqbal sought the help of Ehsan Khan, the president of the BLLF, who sent documentation to the businessman that Iqbal worked for. This documentation was evidence that peshgi had been outlawed by the state and erased the debt owed by families to businesses that used child labour as payment for the loans. Iqbal was subsequently set free. Not content with his own freedom while other children were still kept in factories across Pakistan, Iqbal joined the BLLF and began advocating for the liberation of other child slaves in Pakistan and the rest of the world. As a result of his efforts, thousands of children were freed.
Iqbal’s popularity grew instantly. His influence caused him to receive death threats, possibly from the businessmen he was freeing child labourers from. On 16 April 1995, aged just twelve, Iqbal was shot and killed while riding a bike on his way to visit an uncle. The details of his death remain a mystery. What is for sure is that twelve-year-old Iqbal Masih became a martyr for a just cause, one of the youngest activists the world had ever seen. After reading the story of this young boy, I read all the other documents that abuti Nhlanhla had given to me.
Along with Bounty Hunters Charity Shop, the SANGOCO offices had become my sanctuary, my own personal library. Iqbal Masih’s story had awoken something in me. I wanted to know more, to understand the world of social justice and activism. Years later, I would marry myself to this world.