by Ufrieda Ho
sweaty bras, some of them wrapped in lucky strips of animal skin or tightly
bound by an elastic band and they tumbled into the cardboard beer crate
that my father used to collect the purses and wallets.
The cardboard box echoed back the soft clunks of the purses and
money bags hitting the firm corrugated bottom. At that moment I pleaded
with ridiculous repetition in my mind for a win for my dad from this
bank. I hated the disappointment of a loss for my father, because I knew
for him that even when so much was a gamble in what he did, it was not
a random, careless act that brought him to these townships.
My dad would tell me the number he was playing that round and I
was given the job of opening up zips and seals to save him the task. It was
really just something for me to do without getting in his way. I always
went for the pink purses and the yellow ones first, or occasionally there
would be something unusual like a glossy plastic purse with big flowers
printed on it or, one of my favourites, a purse made to look like a panda’s
head with big black-bordered eyes and a flash of fake red leather for a
happy tongue. It had a click-lock mechanism. I would pull out clammy
notes that showed up the bodily intimacy people have with money and I
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would watch as my fingertips turned more and more grey throughout the
day as the long journey of the exchanged coins from the purses seemed to
rub off on my fingers.
As I got older, I was allowed to be helpful with more grown-up tasks.
My job then was to open up each bag, remove the betting slip carefully
and then check for the number that was being played. On the printed
betting slips it was easy to see if someone had a winning bet. But on the
handwritten notes I would check over and over again to make sure I had
not missed anything that could lead to a quarrel between the better and
my father later. When I was sure, I would upturn the purse and throw the
money into the cardboard crate and put the betting slip aside. At the end
of each bank’s round, my father would gather together the betting slips,
roll them up and snap an elastic band around them. On to the column of
paper he would write the bank’s name and stash it into the money bags
my mother had made. These would be brought out later in the night and
entered into my dad’s record books so that he could keep an up-to-date
record of play for the rest of the week.
If the number did come up, I had to stack the purse on top of the
betting slip and wedge them between the dashboard and the windscreen,
waiting there for my father to count the pay-out once he had finished
going through all the purses. I would get more and more worried as two
then three then more purses would find their way up on to the dashboard.
I started feeling like I had bad luck and that somehow my hands were
making them win against my father.
I did not understand the pay-out system that well and I did not really
comprehend the actual value of money. I only knew that when my father
had to return money back to a purse it was not good. And my child’s
calculations measured out winning bets as setbacks for my father. Later,
I found out that bets were paid out at a one-to-28 ratio and there was a
one in 36 chance of choosing a winning number. I am not sure how those
figures came about but they have more or less stuck. A winning 10-cent
bet earned the better R2.80. The better lost the money on any other bets
that were made.
My father had quick hands. He tugged at zips and plucked apart the
plastic bank-bag seals, and all other carefully sealed purses and bags
doubling up as pouches for a bet. He scanned betting slips, quickly checked
that the money corresponded to the bet and as he did the maths in his
head, his hands were already picking through the coins and notes and
pushing pay-outs back into purses.
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When my father beat his betters, wins came in the jingle-jangle of coins
and some notes emptied into the beer box. But his hand also dipped back
frequently into the cardboard box stash and some purses were returned
with a bulge that showed that the one-to-28 pay-out had smiled on the
better that day.
When my father was losing, especially on the days when it was his own
money on the line, the agitation and frustration sometimes commanded
his body like a possession. His jawbone became pronounced, his tone
grew sharp and he barked at runners for no reason. He took it out on his
cigarettes, Dunhills from a maroon box in his breast pocket. He dragged
on them deeply then tapped the ash out of the car window with his right
arm that was tanned distinctly darker than his left arm all his life.
A fahfee man is not your polite local butcher or the plumber who calls
his clients ‘ma’am’. Sometimes I thought my father was harder than he
should have been with his betters, but as an adult I realised that even
the attitude was part of the fahfee man’s life; it was not a business for
pushovers.
On most occasions, my father’s anger dissipated even though his
frustration was not easy to shake because it played out in a tally of losses
in his head. I am sure I made mistakes, allowing some coins to slip out,
missing a better’s win and with it causing unnecessary disputes, wasting
time and giving him more headaches than he needed. But he never shouted
at me or stopped me from coming out with him those few days each
holiday.
We went from bank to bank and then we re-did the whole routine again
as generally there were two trips to a bank each day. These coincided with
the betters’ lunch breaks and with when they headed home or when they
were already home from work.
Sometimes we went to a smallholding and stopped a distance away
from some beehives. The plot owner farmed bees and sold honey. My
father bought a few jars that the runner was dispatched to buy for him.
The yellow-topped lids held back dark viscous sweetness that dad liked to
dissolve in his tea. There were also jars jammed full of perfectly formed
hexagons, repeating themselves over and over, forming the honeycombs,
the raw honey, that my dad also enjoyed and said was a healthier alternative
to sugar.
Among the smallholdings in the Eikenhof area south of the city that
made up some of my dad’s banks, we would make trips to the poultry
farms. My dad’s order, made via the runner again, was for eggs in bulk,
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trays stacked neatly on top of each other and carefully deposited into our
car boot. It was the same with some vegetables and fruit that came straight
from the farms, not pre-packaged.
With the shopping done, we would head back out to most of the banks
we had been to earlier in the day. Now, though, everything was in darkness.
I remember the dim, gloomy glow of the location lights high above the
ramshackle township houses. We waited for runners in this orange haze of
the lights, the Apollos, outside
someone’s small home, or parked inside the
range of some fluorescent lights outside a spaza shop that had electricity.
My father switched on the car’s interior lights and we went through the
routine once again as the township came to life with people who had
returned home from the city.
Betters congregated, waiting for my father to arrive – he was their
hope for something extra for that night’s dinner table, or when they lost,
it meant going without a new pair of shoes for longer than planned. I
guess, though, he always represented hope, because gamblers are eternal
optimists.
On those days with my dad, I did not have to share him, neither with
my mom nor my siblings. I saw how money was made in our family and
I saw dad in this other role, not as husband and father, but navigating
relationships with people who were not friends or colleagues and not even
customers really.
There was a competition and a game that made the fahfee man and the
betters more like opponents. But they could not be too far apart either.
They needed each other. Dad needed them to bet; the bigger the pool the
greater the odds for him to make a profit. The betters needed dad as an
opportunity, even in the form of a gamble, to add meat to that week’s
menu. And fahfee needed apartheid, too.
Fahfee needed two groups on the edges of society, separate but bound
together, to connect momentarily in the collusion of circumventing the
ways of the economic mainstream. The end goal for both groups was to
walk away with a few extra rand in their pockets even if it meant they
were taking from each other.
Theirs was a pact forged from their mutual conspiracy against the
apartheid system. The ma-china and the poor black man of the townships
were pushed towards the periphery; neither was part of what whirled in
the tight inner circle: white wealth.
There was infighting, too, as dad and his betters were drawn into the
vortex of dispute – it was part of the game. Dad would stand his ground;
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the betters, with their heads leaned into the car window, would disagree
with gesticulations or shaking their heads, also standing their ground.
None was ready to back down. And then my father would just drive off,
incensed and frustrated and maybe also adding a bit of dramatic effect. He
would return for the evening round to fight again or be ready to give in,
whichever move he decided to make in the hours he had to cool off and
to refocus.
Drama and dispute aside, there had to be a shared respect so both sides
could take the steps to engage in fahfee’s dance of superstition, suspense
and survival. It was what they did day in and day out.
And fahfee also showed up the humanness of connection and the
ordinariness of transaction, both parties understanding how harsh things
were when you existed on the edges of opportunity. I remember my father
occasionally grabbed a few notes from the beer crate and gave them to the
runner sitting nearby.
‘Go buy cooldrinks for everyone,’ he said.
The runner disappeared with people shouting their orders and
instructions after him and he turned his back, telling them to shush. We
would be in the car emptying the purses and wallets when the runner
arrived back. Dad would wave his hand telling him to keep the change.
Then Cokes and Fantas in their cold glass bottles were passed around.
Someone would produce an opener and that was also passed around. We
all drank in the fizzy, sweet coldness like it was not a day of work after
all.
Dad was an outsider here, but he was also tied to this world of hard-
working men and women. He understood what it took to make a bet,
to gamble not for fun but for the hope of changing the day’s fortune.
In the townships, I saw for the first time how the dusty streets turned
the barefooted children’s feet a chalky grey, how houses were not lit with
electric bulbs but with gas stoves and candles and that rough hand-painted
numbers distinguished one house from another. There were no snoozing
Mexican wall-hangings of the suburbs, no garden gnomes or dogs back
from the parlour with ribbons in their hair.
One time, as we left the township, we saw a man with no legs trying
to push his awkward, broken body across a road. His clothes were
dirty and torn. The slow-motion scene played out in front of us as the
man lugged his body across the ocean of tar. My father rolled down the
window and handed the man a few of the large R1 coins with their leaping
springboks.
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Dad shook his head and a soft ‘Shame, shame’ dropped from his mouth
as the man writhed determinedly to complete his task. We drove off.
I never asked my father why black people lived in townships and why
there were no white people there, or Chinese people for that matter. Why
was life so hard for some people? My father never offered any context of
the world created by the hand of apartheid, the world that we lived in and
the world we slipped in and out of as the ju fah goung and his daughter. All
I could feel was the same useless pity of a few coins tossed to someone in
need and knowing that tomorrow my father would be back, and the man
with the broken body would still be dragging himself across the road.
The world of the townships seemed so far away from my other world
of textbooks with punctuated sentences, learning about capital cities or
how to do long division – the things my dad and mom felt were what we
should be concerned with. The world was full of nuance, full of all these
other lives and different ways to make a life. In my child’s mind, everything
fitted in as I was told it should, but I also saw that people slipped in and
out of where they were not supposed to be under apartheid’s dictates.
One holiday shift, Kelvin, dad and I drove past a young woman standing
at the side of the road with her hand extended, waving down a lift. It was
not unusual to see young women in this position, it happened often, but
this time we stopped. Something was different – she was white. I did not
understand why we had stopped for this woman when there were so many
others we passed on a daily basis.
Years later it became clear to me. Dad knew better than we did who
fitted in where and when, and a young white woman on the outskirts of a
township at dusk was the wrong fit.
To Kelvin and me it seemed simply a friendly gesture to stop. Kelvin
got out of the front seat to join me in the back. We assumed all adults got
the front seat by default. I could not remember ever having a white person
in our car, and certainly not a pretty girl with long blonde hair. Kelvin,
who had kicked off his shoes in the course of the day, used his toes to
push forward the seatbelt clip, trying to be discreet. But the young woman
noticed and when she smiled at him we both giggled into the back seat of
the car.
We knew the fahfee day ended when the dusty road and orange gloom
of the Apollos le
d back to the tarred roads. Here, working traffic lights
commanded order, houses were hemmed by neat lawns and house numbers
on walls were not hand-painted scrawls but shiny and polished brass cut-
outs or glazed ceramic plaques.
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We arrived home and as the car idled in front of our gate we jumped
out to undo with a noisy clank the metal chain-link we kept on our garage
gate. Pulling each side open, we waited for the car to pull in; the brake
light illuminated our legs as we re-wound the chain and anticipated the
sure clip of the padlock my mother kept hooked on the diamond mesh
fence she had erected to coax creeping flowers to bloom.
‘Have you locked the gate?’ my dad asked, as he almost always did.
He probably checked it again before we went to bed, but for now our yes
was enough.
We carried the bags of money that were also stuffed with the fahfee
record books and the fahfee slips from the day’s play. As we walked
through the door we dragged our feet a bit, exaggerating our movements.
We had been out to work after all, and we wanted to mimic our dad a
little; we wanted to feel like the man who had put in a hard day’s work
with tiredness as the badge to prove it.
Whatever real tiredness we felt was a truncated version of what dad
went through every day, and this was a holiday shift for him. Mom shooed
us off to wash up quickly as she put the final touches to the evening meal.
One of my siblings brought my father a cup of tea and he sat back to relax
a little bit before dinner.
Holiday time brought the unusual pattern of eating our evening meal
together as a family. With dad home, we would swop and shuffle to fit all
six of us around the rectangle of our blue Formica kitchen table. Dad sat
at the head of the table – and invariably it was now him, not my mom,
telling us to lock the dogs out of the kitchen so we could eat or mumbling
something about us holding our chopsticks properly. Once the meal was
done, we settled down to TV. But the day’s fahfee takings had to be counted
and the players’ betting trends recorded and made ready for the next day’s
rounds.
A newspaper was spread down its broadsheet centre. The homemade
fabric bags, heavy with coins, were emptied out like a roar of thunder to
count the money. Once the notes were scooped up, it was down to the
