I nodded obediently and scuttled through the turnstile.
My bags were already circuiting on the carousel when I reached the baggage collection hall. A bent black man with graying hair was heaving suitcases off the conveyor belt as passengers pointed to their moving luggage. A traveler half his age slipped him a coin.
“Sank you, baas,” said the old man, his shiny black face lighting up, his hands clasped together in a ritual of gratitude.
I collected my own luggage and followed a white family down the green corridor—Nothing to Declare.
A woman dressed in khaki intercepted me. “This way,” she directed me, her painted fingernails pointing to a stainless-steel counter.
She had short, bottle-blond hair and a heavily made-up face. Balanced on top of her curls was a boxlike hat, its upturned brim standing stiffly to attention. A thick layer of foundation had blanked out any hint of blemish or freckle.
My smile was not reciprocated.
“Open your bag.”
As I clicked open my suitcase, the lid sprang back, releasing a burst of cramped contents. It had been a tight squeeze.
Ten minutes later the guts of my case lay spread out across the counter—underwear, an emptied tampon box, a squeezed tube of toothpaste, socks, books, medication, a now unwrapped present of Scottish shortbread . . . Even the jar of Colman’s mustard had been opened. I felt as if I had been opened up and emptied out too.
The khaki woman made an all-embracing sweep with her arms and stuffed everything back into the case, but made no effort to shut it. “Okay. Move along,” she said, already heading for a young Indian man.
My face was burning and blood was pounding in my temples. “But . . .” I fought back tears as I struggled to close my case. Another official slouching against an X-ray machine looked on absently.
Eventually, my hands trembling and my blouse damp with perspiration, I heaved my bag off the counter and made for the frosted-glass doors marked Exit.
As I approached them, I faltered. They were about to slide open on a different world—a world of so many unknowns. I’d hoped to feel an immediate affinity with this land I so desperately wanted to call home, but I realized now it could never be that simple. This country did not want me either.
For two pins I’d have jumped on the next plane back to England—back to Dave and my job, back to Zelda and her kids, back to the life I knew. The country of my birth hadn’t received me with open arms or clasped me to its breast. Instead, in just a matter of minutes, I had been deftly deprived of my dignity. Everything I’d learned and practiced in the study of the mind hadn’t prepared me for the psychology of apartheid. How quickly it ensnared and undermined its prey. How quickly I had succumbed.
I was angry, mostly with myself for being weak in the face of these people, but also for foolishly believing the riddle of my life could be solved so easily. Where did I belong?
Then, like the Red Sea, the doors in front of me parted and I was looking into a busy arrivals area, the pathway bordered by a blur of faces.
Miriam Mphephu.
I spotted the whiteboard with red writing hovering above the crowd. It took a few moments for me to realize it was my name; I still thought of myself as Miriam Steiner. I traced the sinewy black hands holding up the placard back to their owner—a tall man standing in the front row of the crowd. I had the advantage of being able to inspect him before he knew who I was.
His hair, a mass of tiny French knots, framed a luminous, open face dominated by a prominent forehead, angled cheekbones, and wide, warm eyes. A scar pulled at one corner of his mouth as it tracked down over his jaw. He was wearing a casual cotton work shirt with the sleeves rolled up and collar unbuttoned. Faded blue jeans hung off his bony hips, big dents in the denim accentuating his skinny frame.
I maneuvered my trolley toward him.
“Miriam?” His voice was strong and deep and left me feeling flustered.
“Welcome, sister,” he said, breaking into a huge grin that creased his eyes shut. I was about to put out my hand, when he leaned forward and pulled me into a tight hug. The smell of his shirt—wood smoke and soap—awakened in me a strange sense of déjà vu. Undeveloped negatives flashed through my mind.
“You must be Thabo,” I said clumsily, as he released me.
He gave a deep, throaty chuckle and extended his hand in formal greeting. “So very pleased to meet you.”
I giggled like a schoolgirl, embarrassed at my own stiltedness.
To my surprise a small sparrow suddenly alighted on his left shoulder. I screamed and Thabo ducked just as my handbag glided past his ear. He straightened and looked anxiously over to his shoulder. The bird was still there, its small body puffed up in fright.
Stroking its wings, Thabo smoothed down the bird’s ruffled feathers. “Miriam, meet Zaziwe.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said, mortified. “I had no idea. Is it a pet?” This was one time I was glad of my dark complexion; otherwise I would have been the color of a tomato.
“Not really a pet,” Thabo said, looking thoughtfully at the small bird. “That would imply some degree of ownership. No, we’re just good friends.” And with that, he nimbly wrestled control of my trolley. “Come, you must be tired and we still have a long journey ahead of us.”
So we headed out of the airport building into a glorious morning—golden dry heat, still blue air, sharp white light. In the parking lot we stopped beside a rusty red VW Beetle bearing the scars of several skirmishes. It took numerous attempts to start the engine before the little car finally coughed and spluttered toward the exit.
At the ticket booth, a man leaned out of a small square of window. “Skakel die motor af.”
Thabo switched off the engine.
“What are you doing?” I was mystified, considering the effort it had taken to start the car.
Thabo put a finger to his lips.
“Goed,” the man said, feeding our parking ticket into his machine. “Twee rand.”
Thabo rummaged in his back pocket and handed over a crumpled note.
“Ry aan. Drive on.”
Now free to move, Thabo made several unsuccessful attempts to start the engine again, before finally leaping out and, with the handbrake down, pushing the car past the elevated barrier into a running start.
“What was that all about?” I asked once we were moving again.
“A security measure,” he said. “Many cars are stolen. They check to see you have keys for the vehicle you’re driving, just in case you’d jump-started it.” He gave an engaging chuckle. “Welcome to the Wild West.”
The six-lane highway stretched in a straight line toward the horizon, the road bordered by strips of golden grass interrupted occasionally by bands of leggy pink and white cosmos. So this was Africa. Like a word on the tip of my tongue, I could nearly remember it.
“Open your window if you like,” Thabo volunteered. “Natural air-conditioning.”
I wound down the window and a warm, grassy breeze blew in. Zaziwe ruffled her feathers indignantly and took refuge behind Thabo’s ear.
“You must be tired,” he said, fiddling with the radio dials. “We’ll have lots of time to talk later. Just sit back and relax.”
I was grateful. It relieved me of the pressure to make small talk. I was weary, having slept for only a few hours on the flight. Strains of African music filled the small car, and it wasn’t long before the deep bass beat, rattling car parts, and soaring morning temperatures lulled me into a mellow stupor.
When I emerged from my reverie, there it was in front of us—Johannesburg—a tall gray tower with a bulbous top dominating the skyline. The gouty finger grew larger and larger and soon our little red car was trapped within the shadow of this skyscraper.
We wove through a maze of flyovers and highways until a sign prompted Thabo to abruptly change lanes. A pro
longed hooter blast from behind saw Thabo swerve sharply to avoid colliding with a minibus packed with people.
“Ai! Bloody taxi drivers!” he cursed. “They’re a law unto themselves.”
I laughed nervously, releasing my foot from an imaginary brake pedal. Thankfully we were soon veering away from the hectic metropolis.
Two mounds of yellow dirt rose up on my right like flat-topped dunes.
“Old Rand mines,” Thabo said, answering my gaze.
The mines.
“I can remember my mother telling me my father worked on the mines,” I said, this recollection coming as a surprise. “I remember her telling me how important his job was. Busy too, I guess, because he never visited us.”
Where was this coming from? Had the landscape so effortlessly unlatched a box in my mind? My voice was shaking and I struggled to maintain my composure in front of this stranger with whom I was sharing my very personal history—history that felt new even to me. It was a shock to face such recollections—recollections that sprang uninvited from my unconscious. But memory was like that. Capricious.
“Gold,” Thabo said. “Black gold.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant.
The countryside was changing, dry grass giving way to dusty paths littered with rubbish, overturned supermarket trolleys, and abandoned car tires.
“The ridge of ore discovered here was actually low grade. It was simply the sheer amount of it that gave it any worth.”
I watched anxiously as his hands lifted off the steering wheel to accompany his script.
“Extracting the particles of gold was labor-intensive and required huge amounts of manpower and expensive machinery. If the mining houses were to make any money out of the venture, they had to have ready access to cheap labor; I mean very cheap labor.”
He swung an arm out, as though inviting someone onstage from the wings. “Enter the black man. Forbid him from living in the cities. Put him in large reserves where the land is barren and job opportunities poor. Offer him work and accommodation on the mines. And hey, presto, migrant labor is born!”
He slapped the rim of the steering wheel with the flat of his hand. The horn sounded. I jumped.
“Then forbid his family from joining him. That way you only need pay wages for a single man. And . . . wait for it . . . this is the best bit . . . because the worker is a migrant, no need to budget for illness or old age. Throw in hostel living with appalling conditions; make it a crime for a worker to break his contract; force him to carry a pass whenever he leaves the compound . . . Your labor problem is sorted and you get rich. Very rich.”
I shook my head, unable to think of something worthwhile to say.
“This African earth would not easily give up its treasures to the white fortune hunters; it took the black man’s pickax before it finally succumbed.”
We drove on in silence.
“Now you’ve really got me going.” He winked at me, a wide grin sweeping away his earnest expression.
“No. Go on, please.” I wished I had something valuable to say.
“Just be proud of your father,” he said, taking his eyes off the road to look at me. “Even if you didn’t know him, I can tell you he will have worked hard to build the wealth of this nation. Our people are the true gold. The black gold.”
For the first time in my life someone was claiming ownership of me. I was a member of “our people.” It was a heady feeling.
A lull descended again. I spotted a new blot on the horizon. My eyes narrowed, trying to make sense of it. As we drew closer, I could make out thousands of rooftops sprawling across a vast scape of grayness.
Welcome to Soweto, beckoned a dilapidated sign positioned where the tar road gave way to red dust.
I closed my window as the rust-colored particles settled quickly on our windscreen, conniving with the smog to shroud our view.
Thabo pushed down his doorknob. “Lock your door.”
Characterless, square brick-and-corrugated-iron dwellings stretched for as far as the eye could see, one after another after another. Two windows, one door. Two windows, one door. Two windows, one door—like Lego blocks stripped of color. The only interruptions to this blanched monotony were the bright rags hanging limply on makeshift washing lines. Even the red seemed to have been leached out of the earth.
Smoke spiraled from crude chimneys to blend with the blanket of smog. Mangy dogs sniffed in upturned dustbins, while children dressed in shreds of fabric played in the dirt. Toddlers squatted on steps, oblivious to the flies feeding off their crusty noses. Rusty cars minus wheel or windscreen served as playgrounds. Scrawny chickens scratched in the barren earth.
I tilted my head back to take in the towering streetlights at every corner. They were more suited to prisons.
“Soweto,” I said out loud.
Thabo nodded. “Stands for ‘South-Western Townships’ Twenty-four townships clustered southwest of Joburg.”
I sensed there was more to come. Thabo’s amiable and easygoing exterior clearly belied a strong passion for the history of his people.
“The discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand saw a flood of black people into Johannesburg seeking work, and with time their labor became vital in areas other than just the mines; Johannesburg needed the black man. But where was he to stay? In desperation he built makeshift dwellings on empty lots out of anything he could lay his hands on—rocks, sacking, sheets of corrugated iron—and soon illegal shantytowns sprang up.”
I saw the razor first, a glint of silver out of the corner of my eye. Then I spotted the barber. He cut a dapper figure leaning over his swathed client, in high-collared white jacket and neatly pressed trousers. An orderly queue of prospective patrons stood patiently looking on. On top of the bonnet of an old Toyota was a tray of the barber’s instruments glinting in the sunlight. This barber’s shop was the roadside; his barber’s chair an upturned metal drum. All that was missing was a candy-striped pillar.
“These overcrowded and squalid settlements would quickly become a breeding ground for crime and disease, yet it was only after an influenza epidemic swept through the black population of Johannesburg, nearly decimating it, that a formal housing scheme was born, and with it, the concept of the township.”
Thabo hooted as we passed a group of men playing cards beside the road. They looked up and waved.
“Townships are ghettolike areas positioned on the edges of white cities—an answer to the government’s dilemma of where to house the black workforce servicing these cities.”
It must have been break time. A group of children dressed in school uniforms milled around outside their classroom—an old shipping container. The girls looked out of place wearing their black school pinafores and white cotton blouses. Their busts were too big, their hems too high, and their exposed thighs too womanly. The boys seemed incongruous too—their expressions and body language jarring with the notion I held in my head of carefree schoolchildren. These schoolboys looked more like men, their eyes restless and hard.
“Houses began being built under a housing project, but far too slowly. Finally Sir Ernest Oppenheimer stepped in and loaned six million rand to the scheme to help ease the crisis.” He turned to look at me. “Heard of him?”
I shook my head, embarrassed by my ignorance.
“The father of Anglo American—a corporation whose fortune was founded squarely on the backs of black miners.”
We stopped at an intersection. The coins on the dashboard began to reverberate and the earth beneath us shuddered as a massive lemon-yellow vehicle rumbled past, leaving our car cloaked in another layer of grime. Rising up out of the dust, like an apparition, was a pimply white soldier standing on top of the vehicle, his R1 at the ready. He looked out of place, standing there in his khaki army uniform—too young, too fresh faced. School shorts and shirt would have been more fitting.
I twisted the flesh on my wrist. I needed to be sure I wasn’t wading through a bizarre dream. It was all so surreal.
“And that, Miriam, is how this vast city, which is not classified as a city in any atlas I have seen, was born.” Thabo swept a hand across the dashboard. “You know, it stretches for more than two hundred kilometers.” The car veered slowly across the midline before he casually retrieved control. I don’t think Thabo even noticed the army vehicle.
We drove through a labyrinth of streets with no names and, after a time, turned down a road that distinguished itself by houses boasting precast walls or small patches of lawn. Thabo pulled up outside a house with 7789 painted in black on the front door.
Behind a low wire fence was a threadbare strip of lawn. An elderly black woman was kneeling on all fours painstakingly trimming the grass with a pair of scissors.
“That’s Patience, my brother’s mother-in-law.”
“You can say that again,” I said in disbelief. “Cutting grass with scissors!”
Thabo laughed. “That is her name. I live here with my brother and his family. You’ll meet them tonight. Everyone except Patience is away at work or at school.”
Zaziwe jumped from the dashboard onto my shoulder, startling me.
Thabo smiled. “I think she likes you.”
“Evidently not that much,” I said, wiping a chalky blob off my blouse.
Thabo parked in front of a pair of lopsided old gates secured with a heavy brass padlock. I wasn’t sure about the need for a lock; anyone could have leapt over the waist-high gates.
As Thabo climbed out of the car, the old woman stood up, flinching as her wizened body complained. He spoke briefly to her in his native tongue, then she shuffled over to unlock the gate, a warm smile creeping over her face.
I climbed out to greet her.
She took my hands in her callused ones and pulled me in, her sagging breasts the only barrier to her warm embrace. I could feel her dry, wrinkly skin pressed up against me. I inhaled deeply and a sweet earthiness filled my nostrils, then I closed my eyes, and for the briefest moment, Patience became my mother.
Another Woman's Daughter Page 16
