After leaving the Smiths house, following the death of Mrs Smith, my mother was employed by Mr Joseph Castyline to look after his wife. She used the experience and the reference from the Smiths to secure her new job as a caregiver to Mr Castyline’s wife. She worked for the Castylines for many years. Even after Mrs Castyline passed away, uMa continued to work there until Mr Castyline died. After Mrs Castyline passed away uMa’s job was just to clean the house.
We made a lot of memories with that good old man. I remember the smell of the good food he prepared every time I visited. He read me good books and he was good to uMa, so she always looked forward to going to work. Mr Castyline was super cool and super kind. I wished that my father were half as kind as Mr Castyline. I visited Mr Castyline many times before he passed away, but the visit that stands out from all other visits was when I turned 12 because that’s when he gave me that first birthday gift, The Last White Parliament.
It was like my father was waiting until uMa was happy again before he came back into our lives. My mother insisted they build their own house while uMa and I lived in my granny’s house. My mother’s uncle was a special advisor to the chief; he helped her to secure a piece of land under her own name back in the days when it was rare for a woman to own land.
My mother worked for Joseph Castyline for seven years, all the while supporting my father who, after being absent for I don’t even remember how long, came back. She took him back and it was a nightmare because he beat us and abused us. He only came back after he lost his job at the laundry in Port Shepstone where he used to work. She had two more sons with my father during the next few years, my brothers Sabelo and Sphesihle. My mother had to put food on the table for my two brothers and my father and me.
Needless to say, we were very surprised when Mr Castyline left everything that he had to my mother when he died. Suddenly, here was a domestic worker owning all the belongings of her late employer. I still have Mr Castyline’s will. She had a car, furniture, appliances and money in the bank. That man finished what he started. Since he was the one who got me addicted to reading in the first place, he left me more good books to read and own, just like he had promised.
All of a sudden, my father started respecting us. He was now behaving like a good child; my mother’s ‘overgrown first born’. He would be bought underwear, clothes and food.
As far as we know, this wise and bold lady, Ms Dolly Dladla, invested most of that inheritance by rebuilding her 2-room mud house for her four sons: that’s my father, the late Khayelihle Lushaba, Sabelo Dladla, Sphesihle Dladla and Philani Dladla.
The first house uMa built was a two-roomed mud house. (I’m excluding my father as he did nothing to help.) Aunt Cynthia and her young brother, Malume Siya, helped build the house from start to finish. We now had a decent house at Oshabeni village. I’m still proud to call it home, the nice house my mother built.
I don’t know any other domestic worker who built a house like the house uMa built for us. She didn’t stop there. She also bought land next to our home and built a house for her mother Syleen and father John, her sister Cynthia and uncle Siyabonga. My older uncle, Sthembiso, was doing ten years’ jail time. He didn’t get to see his younger sister do the things that many brothers ought to have done for their parents. In my mother’s day she was always kind to everybody, and shared as much as she could with our neighbours. Her motto was giving is a gift to the giver, and she did just that, giving and giving without remembering. In my community she made history, like her son is making history today. This will be the first book to be published that was written by somebody from Oshabeni. Since my mother has always been both a mother and a father to me I guess I’m qualified to say like mother like son. Don’t get me wrong – I feel that I never had a father. My mother gave me everything that my father failed to give.
There are many housewives where we come from. But uMa never wanted to be one. She chose to work hard outside the home despite everything Mr Castyline had left for her. As fate would have it, she found herself with a househusband, her ‘overgrown first-born son’. Mind you, this is the same guy who had abused us all for many years.
In the past women were not as confused as women are today, as they knew exactly what they wanted from a man. They wanted love. If true love never existed, uMa wouldn’t have held onto an abusive monster like my father. She must have loved him, and love is blind. She still believed that he would change some day. Well, love only blinds the one who loves, not the bystanders. Our neighbours knew that he was not going to change. They knew what kind of man my father was. They knew that he was beating and abusing us. They heard us crying day and night. They saw what was happening but they were afraid of him.
In retrospect, one of two things was happening here. Either my mother was a faithful partner who wouldn’t allow her new material status to change her or she was just naïve.
As for my part, I agonised, thinking, what other woman would tolerate this? Would they pack their bags and go or send the man packing? My father felt comfortable and decided that he didn’t have to go job hunting. He decided to hunt animals in the jungle around the Umzimkhulu River instead, but that was no real job; it was just a hobby he did to kill time and take his mind off things. It didn’t put food on our table or benefit us in anyway.
Besides, he was not a good hunter. You can imagine how hungry spending the whole day in a jungle can make a man, and extreme hunger makes a man angry, so you know it was an angry man who came home in the evening. My father had six dogs. He spent more time with them. He loved them more than he loved my mother and my brothers and me. My mother had a big yard at home and other kids liked playing marbles in my mother’s yard but they all knew that when they saw my father coming they had to run for their lives – he used to beat anyone he found in uMa’s yard, because he said it was keeping us away from our daily duty of cooking pap and bones for his dogs.
At home we were not allowed to go and play without cooking for the dogs first. If my dad found you playing on the streets without feeding the dogs you got a hiding. But my books helped me stay inside. I wanted to read and understand. I enjoyed it and it also kept me away from getting beaten because time spent with friends was accompanied by a hiding.
After a while, my father got bored of hunting so he decided to start a soccer team. That also didn’t work, but my loyal mother was behind him all the way until he woke up from his dream and realised that it was just a waste of time.
My mother was always strong, always a fighter. She was a mother to her man and her children; yes, all of us were her children. If I could, I would raise my father from his grave so that he could testify that the lovely Dolly Dladla was his mother too, feeding his children and even his precious dogs, and on top of that buying him clothes, toiletries, even underpants! Love is blind because even after all the abuse we had suffered, uMa still loved him.
Nervous conditions
AT SCHOOL I was just an average learner, not very bright. I was passing my grades but I was not the smartest kid. Now that I spend most of my days surrounded by many kids, I clearly understand the reason why I never did well at school. No matter what your colour or race is, kids with abusive parents and from abusive backgrounds do not succeed in doing well at school (although, there are a few exceptions). My English was improving though, because uMa and I always communicated in English so that I could learn it quicker. Later on when my reading ability improved I used the dictionary most of the time to define and learn how to pronounce difficult words. Eventually this increased my vocabulary. Throughout all this, unknown to anyone else, I was struggling with suicidal thoughts.
Imagine wanting to die at the age of 16 just to prove I had rights and that nobody could tell me what to do? Perhaps if my father had spent more time teaching me about manhood than he spent with his dogs I would’ve made different choices in my teen years. Don’t get it twisted; I don’t blame him or anyone else for my stupid decisions, because I was free to make my own choices and nobody forced me. I
won’t lie and say that my father told me this or that, because as you know, he wasn’t really there. He never even gave me his name. I will be Philani Dladla until the day I die. Dladla is my mother’s surname and will always be my surname because they were not legally married. Like I said before, he only paid lobola. He didn’t raise me; a struggling single lady raised me.
It was a tsunami at home after my father died. He died on 12 January 2000. We woke up in the morning to find he had died in his sleep. My father’s family tried to kill my mother, two brothers and me. They accused my mother of being a witch and said she used muthi to kill my father. They sent men to kill us all, but the men they hired didn’t have enough balls to perform the task that they were hired to do. They confessed to uMa, and warned her to be careful because his family had said they wouldn’t rest until we were all dead.
They were angry that my mother made it against all odds. They didn’t like it that the girl they used to abuse and call names had enough good fortune and financial power to build a better house than the hut that they lived in. They were calling me a dog and saying that uMa should just leave me to die because I was a waste of fresh air. When I look at them today I just feel sorry for them. Forgive me; I don’t want to say that they are the ones who are a waste of fresh air.
I borrow the title for this chapter from Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel, Nervous Conditions, not because of my callowness but as an expression, like Dangarembga’s main character, of my deepest feeling of what my father’s death represented. It represented the end of patriarchal oppression. It represented freedom from abuse.
Why cry? After all, my father spent most of his time away from us. His death didn’t change things, except now there was no one to beat us up and call us dogs. In my eyes we had always only ever had a mother. Only my mother missed my father. I don’t know how she did it but uMa made us happy, she always had a plan. We had computers before most kids in my community knew how to use them. We had the latest cell phones that not even our class teachers had.
But I guess that was not enough for me. I felt like something was missing. After all the things uMa had done for me, I still had a desire to be cool. I wanted to be a part of the crew that was the coolest crew at my school. I did all that I had to do to impress them. I started smoking, fighting at school, making fun of other kids and not respecting my teachers. After some time, my dream became a reality and I became a crewmember. Our crew was a gang made up of stupid young troublemakers who did everything they could just to impress girls and be seen as cool. Selby Mkhungo, our crew leader, always reminded us how much girls liked bad guys. Being a crewmember meant a lot to all of us. We were the envy of many of our schoolmates and we were like a family, so if someone had a fight with one of us, he had to fight all five of us. I did a lot of stupid things to be seen as a cool guy. We saved our pocket money for beers on the weekend; we started drinking before the age of eighteen. After becoming a crewmember I went from being bullied to being a bully.
Eventually, I belonged. Finally I was validated. The love I received extended beyond the love I received from my mother.
But friends they come and friends they go, I learned that early in life. My best friend in my teen years was a guy called Doda Mbuso Ndovela. We grew up together. I had some of the best times of my life with that guy. One day my girlfriend came to visit but she brought her friend with her, so I had to call Doda and hook him up so that her friend could also have a date. The first time we spent a night with our girlfriends was in my bedroom. My mother’s house had enough bedrooms for all of us – I had my own bedroom when most kids in my hood still used their parent’s lounges as bedrooms.
Hey, but uMa was not at all happy with that. She woke us up in the middle of the night, shouting and saying; ‘Hey Philani, what is happening here? Are you trying to turn my house into a brothel? Why doesn’t your friend take his girlfriend home too? Is it because he’s afraid of his parents and you are not afraid of me? Am I an easy target? Is it because I don’t have a man in the house?’
I tried to tell uMa that my friend didn’t have a bedroom at his house and that we didn’t do anything with the girls, we were just sleeping and waiting for the sun to rise. But I lied – we did have sexual intercourse. I’m not sure about the girls, but for my friend and me it was our first sexual encounter. At first I thought my mother was a bad person for embarrassing me in front of my friends like she did, but when I think about it now she was right, I was disrespectful to her. She was just trying to teach me what is right. But when you’re young and wild you do stupid things to impress your friends and girls. Young people do all sorts of stupid things just to be cool and thinking twice is the last thing on our minds. Regrets always come later and even though it happened a long time ago when I think about it today it’s still embarrassing.
Some time after that, in 2005, I ended up being expelled from high school, when I was in Grade 12, because I was always causing trouble. I wanted attention, even at my own expense. I just wanted to be known as the coolest, most wicked guy around. That caused me a lot of trouble in the end. But my lovely patient mother never gave up on me. Sure, she knew I was a troublemaker but she gave me another chance. After all the hard times I caused her, she still cared a lot.
She told me, ‘My son, I don’t know who you think you’re impressing with all these bad things you’re doing out there, but you must remember one thing – you don’t know how many days I have got left to look after you. You’re not going to school for me or your friends but for yourself and your wife and kids.’
My mother managed to save enough money for me to study towards an N3 Business Management course at a FET college (which is the equivalent of a Matric Grade 12) the following year, 2006. Looking back, I didn’t learn anything from my stupid high school mistakes, because a few months after starting my studies, I started partying again. I wanted to be just as cool and popular as I was in high school and impress the girls and friends. Again it didn’t end well – in fact this time things got more out of control. On 25 August 2007, I got stabbed while I was drunk and high. I can’t remember what really happened, only waking up in hospital with a drip hanging over my head. I tried getting out of bed but I was too weak. It was hard to move any part of my body – I got badly beaten up before being stabbed, I guess. That was the most painful experience of my life. Being cool didn’t feel so cool anymore.
While my peers were writing examinations, I was being nursed in a hospital bed. My mother and brothers and some neighbours were the only people who came to see me in hospital. Some only came to tell me what a bad boy I was and how much of a disappointment I was to my mother; others came only to see how bad it was and to say ‘I told you so’. Not one of the girls that I was trying to impress came to visit me. Not even Mahlengi Gumbi, my girlfriend at the time, who seemed to be ‘crazy-in-love’ with me, came to see how I was doing. I was out of sight, out of mind.
More pain and hurt was waiting for me at home. After being discharged from hospital I remember how everybody used to look at me. Elders in my community warned their sons and daughters not to go near me because I was a bad influence. My girlfriend at that time broke up with me saying I was a serial loser and a joke. Those were the worst days of my life, because my friends turned against me, telling me how stupid I was for wasting my mother’s hard-earned cash on girls, drugs and alcohol.
People in rural communities like gossiping. It got so bad that I ended up trying to take my own life by hanging myself. That suicide attempt didn’t work thanks to my brother, Sabelo, who managed to save me before it was too late. I tried taking my own life more than once. Trying to hang myself was the most painful, but I also tried to overdose on tablets, which also didn’t work. There’s still a track on my neck that the rope left all those years ago. It’s a painful reminder of what I was going through those days; I’ve tried removing it using different skincare products with not much success.
Today my childhood friend, Doda Mbuso Ndovela, doesn’t care how much trouble
I got into to just look cool in his eyes. When I got kicked out of high school, dropped out of college and tried to commit suicide he was one of the people laughing at me and calling me names. When his older brother started making money and became a taxi boss, he used every opportunity he could get to make me feel like a nothing, flashing money in my face, racing up and down the street in his mother’s car with his new friends. Every time he saw me he reminded me of the days when my mother had a lot of money and when his family had not had much. I remember it like yesterday.
Should I stay or should I go? My life on the streets
MY MOTHER DIDN’T LIKE IT THAT PEOPLE were saying bad things about me and worried that it would push me closer to an early grave. In July of 2008 she decided that it would be better if I moved to Johannesburg. So I moved in with my mother’s friend in Doornfontein. It felt good to be away from all the negativity and the judgemental people who had nothing better to do than to gossip and spread rumours. One thing I like about Johannesburg is that nobody sticks his or her nose in your business, although that can become a problem, because even when people see you being robbed or being beaten up they continue minding their own business.
My first job in Johannesburg was as a waiter in a restaurant called Gramadoelas at the Market Theatre in Newtown. Gramadoelas was one of the most famous restaurants in South Africa. Famous people used to walk in and out of it every day. People like Nelson Mandela, Queen Elizabeth, Denzel Washington, and many famous people have dined there. My boss, Edwan Naude, and his partner, Brian Shalkoff, were very nice to everybody who worked for them. I should have stayed there and served famous people every day like we did. But I wanted to save rather than serve people, so I did a healthcare course. From there I moved to being a healthcare worker at Johannesburg Association for the Aged.
The Pavement Bookworm Page 2
