AS YOU ARE AWARE, the South African school calendar begins in January. However, I was only placed in school in February 2005 because my mother didn’t have money to pay for my registration at Roosevelt High School, where Tshepiso had been enrolled the previous year. And so we had looked around for available options. Most schools were full and the Department of Education had to be called in to intervene. Eventually, I was registered at Florida Park High School, a multiracial school in a former Afrikaans neighbourhood in the west of Johannesburg. While I was disappointed that I couldn’t go to Roosevelt High, I was grateful I was in a school that had proper facilities and a good infrastructure, which was a far cry from the schools in Soweto that the Department of Education had also recommended as options due to their close proximity to my home. By this time I had got over the nostalgia of township schools. I had come to the realisation that, indeed, the infrastructural deficiencies in township schools were a serious threat to quality education. And I wanted a quality education because I had decided in my last year of primary school that I wanted to go to university to study law. The reason for this was that I wanted to be president of the Republic of South Africa and I thought that since many politicians had studied law, it would serve me well to study it too. Maybe that way, my chances of occupying the presidential seat would be increased.
Florida Park High School introduced me to myself in more ways than I can ever explain. In grade 10, we were allowed to choose our own subjects. The first subject I chose was Setswana as my first additional language as an alternative to Afrikaans. Throughout high school, I’d hated Afrikaans with a passion. It reminded me of the many stories that my mother used to tell me about her childhood and how the Boers would harass folk in the townships. I hated it because it reminded me of everything I didn’t want to think about. And I hated the arrogance of Afrikaans teachers, who treated the subject like it was the most superior in the country.
During my high school life, my family moved thrice. The first move happened in 2006, when I was in grade 9. My grandmother had been given an RDP house by one of her relatives, who had been bought a bigger house in Dobsonville by her children. So we had relocated from our small shack in Zone 8 to Phase 2 in Braamfischerville. I hated everything about our new neighbourhood. In 2006, Braamfischer, as it is called, was not as developed as it is today. Electricity in the area was scarce; we often relied on our paraffin stove for cooking and warming the house. There were hardly any tarred roads and the dust in the area was unbearable. This was worse in autumn when violent winds would rip through the streets, sending waves of dirty particles and sand inside homes. Braamfischer was also far from civilisation. There was no hospital or clinic in the area. The nearest one was Clinix Tshepo-Themba in Meadowlands Extension 11. The problem was that Tshepo-Themba is a private hospital and so none of us could ever have afforded it anyway. The nearest police station was in Dobsonville, as were the nearest schools and shopping complex. There was literally nothing in Braamfischer except small RDP houses where the poorest of the poor lived.
Braamfischer gave a face to the injustice of post-apartheid South Africa. It introduced me to the cruel reality of a divided society that had black people on the receiving end of the brutality. Thousands of families lived below the poverty line in Braamfischer, most of them barely able to afford even mere basics. Every morning as I queued up for taxis to Florida, I would see very small children carrying heavy backpacks, their emaciated bodies being blown around by the angry winds that ravaged the neighbourhood. The uniforms they wore indicated that they studied in schools as far away as Meadowlands Zone 1, a trip that took nearly two hours.
People who had lived in squatter camps and older people were being made a priority by the government so the area was full of people who were unemployed and others who didn’t have adequate income. This made the level of crime in the neighbourhood very high. The area was notorious for housebreakings and robberies. Fed up with the crime, the people of Braamfischerville started taking the law into their own hands. Criminals would be subjected to the most brutal mob justice punishments, at times even being necklaced.
I witnessed such an incident one late afternoon when I was coming home from the Florida Community Library, a place I’d made my second home. My house was situated near an open field that was used as a soccer pitch by the boys in the neighbourhood. The open field was near a patch of a bushveld that was used by criminals as a hiding spot due to its vast expanse and strategic location near these grounds, which led directly to the other side of Phase 2. As I walked past the open field on my way home, tired beyond measure, my attention was caught by a loud noise coming from the opposite end of the open field. As I inched closer to inspect the source of the noise, I realised that a group of people were surrounding what looked like a corpse. Terrified, I went to join the group and asked someone standing beside me what had happened.
‘Bamo thuntse a utswa ko ntlung ya batho,’ was the reply.
The man on the ground looked very young, perhaps in his very early twenties. He was bleeding profusely from a gaping wound on his head. A bloody brick lay beside him, next to an old car tyre. But he wasn’t dead. Faint murmurs were coming from his bleeding mouth, his torn lips bruised. He could barely open his eyes because they were both swollen from the beating he’d received from the angry mob. Someone was busy kicking him in the lower abdomen while everyone else stood aside, doing nothing. As I stood there waiting to see what would happen to him, an older man who lived near my house came running with a gallon of petrol. It was only then that I realised what was happening. I’d only ever seen something like this in movies and documentaries about the apartheid era. I never could have imagined it would happen right before my eyes. The infuriated and irrational mob was waiting for the petrol so they could burn this young man. I was terrified beyond measure and I knew I couldn’t watch what was about to happen. I knew that the police wouldn’t arrive any time soon because there was no police station in Phase 2 at that time. If any had been called, they would have had to come from Dobsonville, which was about thirty minutes away because of the bad roads in Braamfischerville. It was inevitable that the young man would be necklaced, burnt beyond recognition. I quickly ran home, trying with all my might to block out the scene I had witnessed a few minutes earlier.
Later than night, I was informed by Ali that the young man had been killed by the community. He’d been necklaced right there in the open field. Young people had witnessed this, some barely teenagers, and no one had tried to stop this senseless killing. When I raised this with Ali, he responded in a very defeated voice, ‘Lesego, I don’t agree with the killing. I wish there was another solution. But you must understand that in Braamfischer, solutions are very limited. People here are very poor, they have nothing. They’re just trying to survive with the little they have. These criminals break into homes and steal from these people. There are no police officers anywhere to help. Even when the police are called, they take hours to arrive. Sometimes they don’t even come at all. What would have happened if there had been a little girl in the house when the criminal entered? He would have raped her, maybe even killed her. What are people supposed to do in this situation? What were they supposed to do?’
I didn’t understand this explanation. I knew that he was making a valid point but I didn’t believe that there truly was no solution to the problem. To accept that explanation would have been to reconcile myself to the inevitability of another necklacing in the not-so-distant future. I did not want to believe that more than a decade into the new dispensation, necklacings could be normal in South Africa. I could understand why impimpis during the apartheid era deserved to be necklaced. They were betraying the revolution and compromising the liberation struggle of our people. But in this new South Africa, where there was a promise of a different reality, why was it necessary to burn people alive? There had to be another way. We could not have defeated white domination only to find ourselves killing each other for food! I went to bed with a heavy heart that night.
Incidents of this nature continued to happen in Braamfischer until, eventually, a small satellite police station was built and street committees were established. They were responsible for protecting the community by patrolling at peak hours looking for robberies, mainly in the early mornings and late evenings. A new system was also introduced. Every household was forced to have a whistle, which would be blown when an intruder attempted to enter the house. The repeated blowing of the whistle would alert the community that someone was in trouble. Everyone would then blow their whistles to inform the rest of the neighbourhood and help would come in the form of the people. The criminal would then be immobilised through a non-fatal beating. The police would be called and the suspect incarcerated. The introduction of this system saw a dramatic decrease in criminal activity in the neighbourhood. The people had won the war against crime. Above all, someone’s son, someone’s brother, was not going to have to watch his own flesh peeling as petroleum penetrated his pores.
We lived in Braamfischer for three years. In July 2007, my mother took my younger brother Lumumba, who had been born in 2003, and me out of the neighbourhood. A few months before that, a feud had divided the family irreparably. In the midst of it all, my mother had taken Lumumba, Tshepiso and me to the house of close friends, Mark Weinberg and Celeste Fortuin, to escape the nightmare that was happening in the family. Because of its depth and the wound it inflicted on my family, I have lived my life attempting to bury it, to never have to talk about it with anyone. Perhaps it is the desire to erase it from my consciousness. Maybe one day I will be able to talk about it but I am not quite ready yet.
Mark and Celeste had gone to Cape Town, where they had another house, and left the one in Norwood under my mother’s care for a few weeks. The house was not glamorous but it was very big and very comfortable. For a few weeks, the four of us allowed ourselves to forget about everything that was going wrong at home and just focus on being happy. And, indeed, we were very happy.
I used to wake up every morning to listen to one particular song: I Have a Dream by Westlife. The Johannesburg Youth Theatre had made me resent anything artistic that didn’t relate to my black reality but at that point in my life, Westlife’s music became a medicine, healing the brokenness of my soul. I’d sweep and scrub the kitchen floor singing it loudly at the top of my voice.
The day we had to return home was a very painful one. None of us wanted to leave Norwood, least of all me. I had had a taste of what peace feels like and I wanted it. I wanted to take long walks around the quiet streets of Norwood, where old men and women jogged in their skimpy outfits. I wanted to return to a home where there was no shouting and no fighting. I wanted to see my mother laughing and playing with us, where everything was okay. I wanted what didn’t exist in Braamfischer, where World War III had been declared within the Mahlatsi family. But Norwood was not our life. It had merely been a temporary haven, a sanctuary where we’d gone to gather the strength necessary to survive the turbulence of life back home.
Soon after we returned from our vacation in Norwood, things got worse at home. It became clear that there would be no reconciliation in the family. My mother decided to take me and my brother and move. We moved to a rented house in Meadowlands Zone 3, a street away from where my mother had grown up. At the time, she was unemployed. After leaving SANGOCO she’d had stints at the Gender & Trade Network in Africa and Southern Africa Communications for Development before moving on to Sidewalk Productions. The struggling production house had few resources to sustain staff on a long-term basis and, as a result, she had leave.
Our move to Zone 3 was a very difficult one. My mom had no job. Zone 3 was further from my school than Braamfischer had been. Where I had taken one taxi to school in Braamfischer, I was now forced to take two taxis as none went from Meadowlands to Florida directly. Lumumba was also forced to drop out of his multiracial crèche in Creswell Park. It would have been very expensive to keep him there as the fees were high and he would have needed transportation to fetch him from Zone 3. He was enrolled in a local crèche in our new neighbourhood, a far cry from what he’d been used to.
Zone 3 brought me closer to my mother. We were on our own and we needed to be strong for each other and for Lumumba, who was too young to understand what was happening. There was hardly any money at home. Whatever little my mother and I were able to earn would be used to buy clothes and food for Lumumba because we didn’t want him to feel the poverty that the family was going through. We wanted him to have what other children had, to not be made to feel inferior in any way.
Because my mother hardly had any money to pay for my fees or my transport to school, I had to learn to make money. I started two businesses at school. The first was selling assignments and essays to students. The business was a very lucrative one because it addressed a basic need for students: passing. I knew it wasn’t right, but students didn’t want to do their own work but they wanted to pass. They also had a lot of money, which I didn’t have. So I began to supply what they demanded and, in the process, made enough money to help out my family with buying groceries and other necessities in the household. I had learned to master the art of writing essays over the years and it was easy for me. I had an excellent command of the English language as a result of my extensive reading, a hobby I’d picked up in Melpark Primary School and at the SANGOCO offices years before, and had never abandoned.
My business grew very quickly. By grade 10, I was writing essays for students in my grade as well as those in grade 11 and matric. I was making hundreds of rands a month, enough money to pay for my own transport and to help out at home. To subsidise this income, I opened another lucrative business: selling sweets at school. I hired my three best friends, Nompumelelo ‘Mpumi’ Motaung, Palesa ‘Worm’ Moroe and Kgothatso ‘SL’ Mudau, to help me with the running of the businesses. Kgothatso was very good with figures so I employed her to manage the finances. Mpumi was a very pretty girl, very popular with students for her looks and sweet demeanour, so she was tasked with marketing both businesses. Palesa, because of her good command of language, would often help me with the writing of assignments and essays. We were making a lot of money. Sometimes we’d blow the money on things like movies and lunches. This would set us back but we always managed to make more money. Even though most of my money went to helping my mother, there were days when I just wanted to be like an ordinary child, to have no worry in the world. I wanted to be able to just blow R200 at the movies at Westgate Mall, or buy one of the Karrimor schoolbags that were so popular with students. I needed, just once in a blue moon, to escape from the burden of being a breadwinner at sixteen years old.
When we were unable to make enough money on time, my best friends would put together money from their own pockets and give it to me for transport. On these days, I’d be unable to help out at home and we’d rely on a feeding scheme known in the townships as ‘malebese’, which poor people received from the government. My mother would walk to Zone 1 with a two-litre bottle to receive sweetened milk and a loaf of bread with peanut butter and jam. We’d have malebese for breakfast, lunch and supper. If we could spare a few rand, my mother would buy chicken drumsticks for Lumumba. It was the cheapest meat, and the only meat we could afford.
A few months later, my mother, desperate for employment, joined the corporate sector as a personal assistant to a managing director. She was also a client service coordinator and junior copywriter for a below-the-line advertising agency. The following year, we moved to Dobsonville Extension 2, a lower middle-class neighbourhood not too far from Meadowlands. Dobsonville Extension 2 had been established in the late 1980s as a sanctuary for the emerging black middle class. Because of this, there are many professionals, such as doctors, nurses, teachers and businesspeople, in the neighbourhood. Ours was a beautiful peach-coloured house on a cul-de-sac. It had a very small garden where bright flowers were planted. The green grass was a striking contrast to the black-and-red paving on the ground. The yard was not necessarily very big but it had adequate space for a family of three. For the first time in my life I had my own bedroom that I shared with absolutely no one else. My mother also had her own bedroom and so too did Lumumba. All the rooms besides Lumumba’s were fitted with built-in wardrobes. There was an indoor toilet that was separate from the bathroom and a small kitchen and lounge. It would be the place I called home for the longest time.
Dobsonville Extension 2 was very different to where I had come from. Because it was associated with the black township middle class it was less rowdy than neighbourhoods like Braamfischerville or the old Meadowlands where I had grown up. People in this township kept to themselves most of the time and there were very few young people out on the streets playing. My grandmother would have said that the people of Extension 2 ‘bashapa dithupa’.
While I knew my mother hated the private sector, I also knew she hated poverty even more. She hated being unable to put a meal on the table for my little brother and me. She hated having to rely on me to make ends meet in the house and, many times, she told me that it made her feel inadequate as a parent to have a sixteen-year-old bringing home the bacon. When my mother was working at the ad agency, things had improved at home. Lumumba was sent to a multiracial crèche in Roodepoort and also started taking karate lessons in Melville, just as I had taken dance and drama lessons many years before. I had money for transport to and from school every day and my daily allowance was even increased from five to fifteen rand, which at that time was still quite a lot of money for someone who took lunch to school anyway. After many years of struggling, things were looking up.
But the work depressed my mother greatly. She’d worked in the civil society sector her entire life and knew very little about the private sector. She complained about everything: the dress code expected of a corporate employee, the ‘cold’ environment of the office and above all, the lack of transformation in the advertising sector. My mother always spoke about how, over a decade into a democratic dispensation, there were hardly any black-owned advertising agencies in the country and how the industry is monopolised by a white elite minority.