The Pavement Bookworm

by Philani Dladla

  The Pavement Bookworm

  The Pavement Bookworm

  A True Story

  Philani Dladla

  First published by BlackBird Books, an imprint of Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd, in 2015

  10 Orange Street

  Sunnyside

  Auckland Park 2092

  South Africa

  +2711 628 3200

  www.jacana.co.za

  © Philani Dladla, 2015

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN 978-1-928337-00-3

  Cover design by Shawn Paikin

  Also available as an e-book:

  d-PDF 978-1-928337-01-0

  ePUB 978-1-928337-02-7

  mobi file 978-1-928337-03-4

  See a complete list of Jacana titles at www.jacana.co.za

  Contents

  Foreword

  In the beginning there was a book

  The saga of my African family

  Nervous conditions

  Should I stay or should I go? My life on the streets

  My bookshop on Empire Road

  Once you get in, you can’t get out

  Life on the streets

  Bad luck and trouble

  A bend in the river and things start to change

  Qala kabusha: Trying to make a new start

  The return of the Pavement Bookworm

  Building a happy sandpit: My book club takes off

  The unluckiest lucky guy I know

  A country of my skull

  Screw it, let’s do it: I do a TEDx Talk

  My liberation diaries

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  by Busani Ngcaweni

  THE THING ABOUT WRITING A BOOK is that once it is published, you lose your innocence, your privacy and all the privileges afforded to ordinary members of society. Put differently, writing a book is like being elected into political office. Upon assuming this public position, you subject yourself to scrutiny, to praise, to a dipper measuring stick. You literately become a subject in the world of literature.

  Through this book, Philani Dladla loses his innocence. Not that it matters much to him anyway, I suspect. After all, this chronicle tells tales of multiple losses, triumphs and opportunities. It tells the South African story of finding identity, meaning and being. Through the Pavement Bookworm, we are reminded of the pitfalls of power and privilege and the degrading consequences of neglect, poverty and deprivation.

  Sometimes the story sounds unbelievable, a fiction existing only in Philani Dladla’s imagination. Yet, each page represents the experience of many young men and women in post-apartheid South Africa. Young people who have lived through the perils of broken families and dreams deferred. Young people living through social, economic and urban transitions that come with lives led in homelessness, sexual assault, drugs and alcohol abuse. All in the midst of achievement, progress and social mobility which has been the experience of the majority of young people who have made good of progressive youth development policies.

  Looking away is a common refrain for many who come across homeless people. We look at them with an irate eye: ‘What are they doing here?’ ‘Why is he not at school?’ ‘Where are his parents?’ Through this book, we enter the world of homeless people and their daily encounters with the ‘outside world’. We are taken through the backward and forward journey of young people who end up in less desirable circumstances.

  Looking away was also my attitude until I encountered the Pavement Bookworm through Ayanda Allie-Payne of SABC’s Morning Live. I took on the challenge of helping a young homeless man make his publishing dream a reality. I could not believe that after all the spectacular international coverage he had received, he still struggled to get a publisher. But as I have said, when homeless people are involved, we tend to look away. Worse still, he is black and without a benefactor trying to break into in an untransformed industry.

  Working with Philani to edit this book was an emotional rollercoaster and an intellectual stretch. The young man is brave. Brave for what he has survived and for his readiness to bare all. Very few young men would consciously tell the world about being sexually abused. Even fewer can make so bold a conclusion that ‘my father is not my role model’. In a way, Philani spoke of my own life experience and those of many others who had fathers who made zero impact in their spiritual and intellectual growth. But I digress. Perhaps not an impossibility given the propensity of this book to touch a nerve, to bring one into a reality check.

  This book is not about homelessness. It is a book about books, about the liberating and healing effects of reading. It takes creativity and courage for a young man in the era of social media to abandon one hundred characters and short-hand in favour of a more painstaking hobby: reading and now, through this project, producing a compelling semi-autobiography.

  At the Pavement Bookworm Foundation (PBF), a platform we have created to help Philani Dladla advance his book reading clubs, we are inspired to invest social capital towards advancing the course of literacy and education among disadvantaged children. Like Philani himself, those who navigate the following pages should discover their conscience and purpose and proceed to work towards building a society we want and deserve to live in.

  At the PBF we are ready to partner with likeminded individuals willing to donate books, computers and calculators for distribution to township schools, the inner city, rural areas and informal settlements. Let us clear our closets and donate old conference bags which poor children can use to carry books to school instead of plastic bags.

  After many hours of argument, doubt, cut and paste, we finally present this book to the world, believing this story of post-apartheid South Africa will change the way young people think of their invincibility and vulnerability.

  – Busani Ngcaweni, book editor and

  editor of Liberation Diaries

  In the beginning there was a book

  BOOKS ARE A VERY IMPORTANT part of my life. Books are my wealth and pay my bills. Books have a magic that keeps me going through hard times.

  I started writing this book on Friday 5 August 2011 on a piece of paper, just like Abraham Lincoln, who only had a pen and a sheet of paper available to him at that time. But I was sitting on the pavement on Empire Road in Johannesburg where I sold second-hand books. I love reading but felt I could write just as well as the author of the book I was reading at the time. So I took out a pen and started writing about my life as though writing a letter to my unborn child, as honestly as I could.

  I fell in love with books at the age of 12. My first book was a birthday gift, entitled The Last White Parliament by Frederick van Zyl Slabbert. It was a gift from the man that my mother worked for, Mr Joseph Castyline. He promised me that if I were able to read it and tell him what it was about, he would get me another one.

  The book was about South African politics, but because I couldn’t read or speak English properly at the time I didn’t know that. I was just another 12-year-old African boy who went to a school in a rural community in KwaZulu-Natal. IsiZulu was our main language, and our teacher only spoke isiZulu, even during English classes; she explained everything in isiZulu. I mean we were learning English in our isiZulu language. But that did not stop me from achieving my goal.

  I started spending more time alone with my new best friend, that book The Last White Parliament. I played less and read more. I did not just read to kill time, but tried hard to read with understanding; I wanted to impress my mother’s boss. Back in those days you were considered to be very lucky if white people liked you. I was lucky because the white people that uMa worked for liked me, Mr and Mrs Smith and later Mr and Mrs Castyline. All my mother’s bosses liked me and they played a very important role in my childhood.
I’m not sure I would’ve made it if uMa had not worked for such angels. They never called us kaffirs, like many white people called black people in those days.

  My past made me who I am today and I want to take the opportunity writing this book presents to tell you about my goals and dreams. But first you have to know where I come from so you can understand why I have the goals that I have and dream the dreams that I dream. So in the next few chapters I’m going to take you back to my roots, before I was the Pavement Bookworm, before I moved to the City of Gold, before I received that first book.

  My name is Philani Emmanuel Dladla. I come from a small, peaceful town on the south coast of KwaZulu-Natal called Port Shepstone. It’s a town of summer rains and consistently mild temperatures. I know some people think being rich means having lots of money. Today I’ve come to know a different kind of wealth. Those people think I’m crazy because I have no money or flashy material things. People might define wealth differently, but I am rich. For me wealth is being able to give without remembering and to be able to write my name on people’s hearts every day. I know that if I died today my kids from the readers’ club that I started in Joubert Park and those who have been helped through the Pavement Bookworm Foundation would remember me and would tell their grandkids about the stories I once read to them. For me that is wealth, a legacy that will last for generations.

  I’m wealthy because when I go to bed at night I sleep. I can sleep peacefully because I have no guilt. I know I haven’t stepped on anybody’s toes to get what I want. I know how to be satisfied with the little I’ve got. I believe that people who care more about money than they care about people are empty inside. Nothing will ever be enough to fill that emptiness.

  Some rich people say that broke people pretend money isn’t everything. Of course, I like the things that money can do for me, but I believe in people and not in paper and coins, because these have no feelings. Of course, money helps me help my kids and puts smiles on their faces when I buy them books or stationery or whatever they need for school. That’s what I like, that’s what makes me happy – putting money to good use. To me, merely accumulating money is pointless.

  As you will read in the pages of this book, I’ve done stupid things in my life with money. I did drugs, drank alcohol, had unprotected sex and gambled. I didn’t just gamble with money; I also gambled with my life. When I look back at my past and everywhere I’ve been, I wonder how I have managed to survive. I did things I’m not proud of, but I don’t want to hide any of them or try to cover them up or pretend they never happened. I’m no saint and I was a bad guy. I might still be young but my past is filled with dark memories. Experimenting with drugs was probably the worst decision I ever made.

  I’m sharing this with you, dear reader, because I want you to learn something from my mistakes. If you’re wise you don’t have to make the same mistakes. I’m sure you won’t do the stupid things I did unless you don’t care about your life, or you’re one of those guys who always says it won’t happen to me. I won’t deny it; I was once one of those it-won’t-happen-to-me type of guys.

  Today I have nothing to hide because yesterday is behind me now. If I hide the truth and try to be perfect and act like the past never happened I’d be a selfish fool, because somewhere out there someone else is going through what I went through. Take it from me, drugs are bad; they make you think you’re the wisest man on earth while you’re actually the biggest fool under the sun. I was once that big fool.

  But I digress; let’s go back to the beginning.

  The saga of my African family

  MY CHILDHOOD WAS NO WALK in the park. I remember how much it made us both cry, like we were reliving the nightmare, when uMa told me about the many hardships she faced and the hell she went through just to keep me alive. When I think about it I still cry.

  This is my story. A struggling single mother, Ms Dolly Dladla, who never gave up, raised me in abject poverty. A fighter raised me. A survivor raised me; maybe that’s why I also survived. Before freedom there was no Child Support Grant; no 50/50 rights for men and women. Men did what they thought was right. They did what they wanted to. A woman had no right to question a man’s authority and simply had to obey even if she was against the man’s decision. My mother was one of those women who never questioned her man’s decisions.

  Although my parents were not married, my father had paid lobola for my mother and so he had all the customary rights to take her to his home in a village called Mhlwasimbe when she was pregnant, where I was born. This is where my mother and I suffered abuse at the hands of my father’s mother and sisters – I can’t bring myself to call them my grandmother and aunts.

  We lived in the same compound as his family but my mother had her own hut. Although we were supposedly eating from the same pot we were always hungry because those whose fathers were supporting the family by sending groceries were treated better than me. As my father did not send money and was always absent, we were the ones who suffered abuse from his family members. They did not go hungry but they did not like my mother. I think they hoped that if I died my mother would leave as she was only staying so that I would know my father’s family. They never shared anything with her, not even soap to wash nappies. She used to pick xubgwewe (watercress) by the riverside, crush it and use it to wash our clothes. If she asked for food, she was told to go and ask Philani’s father to give you food. Some people still remind me that I was called ngwadule – which means ‘a land where nothing can grow’ – because even hair wouldn’t grow on my head from malnutrition.

  My father’s family valued cows more than human beings. They really hated my mother and me. My father had a girlfriend who already had two sons with him, and they were always telling him that he was stupid because he wasted his father’s cows paying lobola for my mother and not for Bheki and Xolani’s mother. Bheki and Xolani were born before me.

  I still believe that their taunting and stupid village family politics turned my father into the abusive man that he became. My father left my mother and me alone in the hands of his abusive family. My mother never knew where he was. He gave her nothing; not a cent. He never let anybody know where he was going. I believe my father never cared about uMa and me.

  For the first year of my life, uMa struggled in poverty in his family home trying to raise me, trying her best not to give up. My father’s sisters and his mother treated her like a slave. My mother told me I cried day and night because I was hungry. When she tried to breastfeed me her breasts were dry because she was also hungry and couldn’t make milk. Sometimes, if I was lucky, uMa would ask the guys who milked the cows for some milk to feed me. Those boys also called me ngwadule. Even a simple porridge with no milk or sugar would have been a luxury for me.

  Because I was malnourished, I was always sick as a baby. My mother was always hungry because they never gave her food. She used to walk a very long distance without shoes from Mhlwasimbe to Assisi District Clinic with me on her back. People she met on her way to the clinic told her to go back home and light the candles and mourn because they thought I was already dead. But she never gave up. She used every cent she could get her hands on to feed me, trying to make me healthy.

  I know the reason my mother was treated poorly was because my father didn’t send any money home to support us. By contrast, my father’s older brother had a wife with whom he had a daughter and son. He had paid lobola for her and also taken her to live at his home in Mhlwasimbe with the same family that was treating my mother like a slave. The difference was that she was from a rich family. Her father was one of the first men to own many taxis and cars and other businesses at Oshabeni, a town in uMkhanyakude District in KwaZulu-Natal. This woman was treated like a queen, and she had everything that my mother didn’t and her kids had everything I could only dream of. There was nothing there for my mother but suffering; she had only one hope – that maybe my father would come back some day and take us away from his evil sisters and mother.

  Because I was a
lways sick as a small baby, uMa knew that I would die if things continued the way they were. She risked everything and escaped early one morning with me on her back. Like I mentioned before, uMa had nothing, not even a cent, but people still had the spirit of ubuntu and a local taxi owner, Mr Mzelemu, gave her a free ride from Assisi Clinic to uMthethweni.

  uMa knew her way around that area, so she went to the home of the Smiths where my granny was working as a domestic servant. Seeing how bad things were the Smiths didn’t chase us out. They gave us accommodation in one of the back rooms. They gave my mother food and bought me baby food and medication. They took care of my mother and me until my health improved. They also offered my mother a job to assist my grandmother. My mother would go on to work for the Smiths for four years.

  When Mrs Smith was sick, Mr Smith took uMa for a healthcare training course, which helped her to put many meals on our table long after the Smiths had passed away. Mr and Mrs Smith saved my life. If they had not welcomed us with open arms, I would’ve died. Even during the apartheid days, there were white people with good hearts who took great risks and made huge sacrifices like Mr and Mrs Smith did for us. They loved and spoilt me like their last-born child. I occupied the space of their children who had left home.

  They bought me toys, medication and food when so many other white people would’ve said let the kaffir die. They saved my life and they reminded uMa how to smile again. The Smiths gave uMa more than just a reason to smile. They made me healthy and gave her a job and a roof over her head. They gave her the title Healthcare Worker. She knocked on their door with nothing but a crying, sick baby with a big head on her back, but she left their house with a healthy and happy child, some money and a qualification.