Throughout the years, at the conferences I have attended and at the workshops that I have hosted, people have asked me the question that I have asked myself a thousand times – what makes one man succeed and another man fail? This question has always resonated with me, because it is the question I have continually asked myself, especially when it comes to making sense of my brother’s short life and contemplating my own full one.
I have so often asked myself the question: Could Pobane’s life have had a different outcome? This I will never know, but what I can do is describe the unfolding of my own life.
I was born on the 26th of August 1959 in GaRamotse in Hammanskraal, about thirty kilometres north of Pretoria. A late winter wind blustered through the streets of the village on the day my mother went into labour with me, her fifth child. My life had begun like that of many, many young black South Africans. GaRamotse was a typically rural village, so remote and insignificant that, at the time, it did not even warrant a mention on any official maps. But while the village may have had no significant meaning to anyone other than the close community that lived within its boundaries, to the Mashaba family, my family, GaRamotse was the centre of our universe.
GaRamotse was one of many villages and townships that formed part of the greater Hammanskraal area. Among these were places such as Majaneng, Leboneng and Temba, where I lived at various times; I knew them all well, as my family moved around over the years. Such villages were generally drab, uninteresting places. The red earth of the dirt roads formed muddy canals in the rainy summer months, and in winter the roads were corrugated sandy strips overhung with whitened grass and the peeling branches of bluegum trees. In early autumn, though, the roadsides were brought to life by wild cosmos flowers that briefly bloomed pink, purple and white. Groups of modest mud homes huddled together amidst dense bushveld that, in summer, smelt sweet after afternoon thundershowers.
My mother and father, Mapula and Silas Matinte Mashaba, were an unconventional couple. In the 1950s it was uncommon for young black couples to go away and live apart from the extended family. Custom and financial circumstances usually meant that a young couple lived with the husband’s family. But after her marriage, my mother felt that living with her in-laws would curb her spirit of independence, so she and my father kept a small house near his family home. By all accounts, my mother Mapula was an exceptionally independent young woman. She had excelled during her limited schooling, and as a young married woman she confided in her good friend and neighbour, Mrs Ramaphoko, that she wanted to go out to work.
My father worked as an assistant at Osbourne Pharmacy in Marshall Street, in Johannesburg. Whenever my older sisters, Esther, Florah and Conny, developed a fever or a touch of stomach trouble, my father’s experience at the pharmacy helped him to concoct a mixture to cure their ailments, and, as a special treat, he often bought them lipstick. But for black women, at the time, there were far fewer opportunities. The only job my mother ever managed to find away from home was that of domestic worker – the bleak fate of many talented black women during the apartheid era.
To this day, my family and neighbours love to recount how important my birth was to my grandfather; for in the late fifties, it was an unusual cultural activity for men to be involved in what they considered women’s business.
The day I was born, the wind sprayed sand through the village. But my grandfather closed his eyes against the sting of it as he rolled a twenty-five-litre drum down the road to the village dam. He took long strides, his body leaning into the wind, hoping, as he hurried, that my grandmother had lit a fire so that he could boil some water on his return. On any other day, my grandfather might have taken his time on the two-kilometre walk to the dam, stopping to roll a cigarette with a villager or accepting a mug of beer from a neighbour. But on that day he had to hurry because his daughter-in-law, my mother, was in labour, and my grandfather wanted to make sure that there was enough warm water for the birthing process and to wash the newborn baby.
Wisps of smoke trailed from village fires as the cold wind whipped bare flesh; village dogs limped towards the warmth of the flames, competing with children, who stood dancing from one foot to the other as they warmed their frozen hands. My grandfather gave a wave to neighbours who shouted greetings, apologising for his haste. Men usually steered clear of broad-hipped midwives and bosomy matrons who bustled about the mother in labour, for men had no business wincing at the sharp cries of a woman bringing a child into the world. But my grandfather puffed out his chest and told everyone he met along the way that his grandson was about to be born, and he didn’t have time to indulge in small talk.
As he rolled the heavy drum up the road towards his home, my grandfather saw the glow of the fire and nodded with satisfaction. Without fanfare, he heated up the pots of water on an outside fire. There, he sat with my father, until, an hour or two later, a midwife put her head round the door and called my father inside the house. Shortly afterwards, my father emerged from the doorway and sat next to my grandfather at the fire.
“It’s a boy,” my father said, unable to conceal his pride. My grandfather nodded.
“I knew it would be a boy,” he replied.
The two men stood at the fire and discussed names, as was their right. But it was my mother and father who had decided that their baby son would be called Samtseu, an ancestral name, and Philip, after a community clergyman.
“This is no ordinary boy, Silas,” my grandfather said to my father. “This boy must have a name that will tell everyone that he will grow up to be an important man.”
Although I had an older brother and three sisters, my father did not dare challenge my grandfather by insisting that all of his children were special, that they might all grow up to be influential. To this day, it is customary for age to be associated with wisdom, and it would have been discourteous to be dismissive of an elder’s suggestion.
“His name will be Highman,” my grandfather insisted.
I often wonder what my father thought at the time about my grandfather’s grand vision. How did he manage to stop himself from dissuading my grandfather from giving me this strange name, with its connotations of highborn nobility and influence? My father had travelled further than GaRamotse, he had been to Pretoria and Johannesburg; my father knew only too well the absolute denial of status that black men suffered in the cities of South Africa. The villagers may have been somewhat protected from the direct, demeaning consequences of living under apartheid, but my father was under no illusion. Or, perhaps, did my father imagine a time when South Africa would be a democratic country and it would not matter whether you were a High Man or a Low Man, a time when everyone would enjoy the same rights? I am sceptical of the latter scenario, because even as I was growing up, and discussed political events with my friends and family, I never honestly believed that I would see democracy in my lifetime.
There are times I used to wish that my father had stood up to my grandfather, because growing up with a lofty name set me apart in some way from my peers. After soccer games that ended in dispute, I would have been overlooked in the fracas if my name had been Philip or Samtseu, but Highman just couldn’t be ignored. Inevitably, my name was the butt of jokes, and even though I managed to shrug off the teasing, I grew up resenting this grandiose label. Fortunately, I was saved from eternal embarrassment when, as a young adult, I came across the name Herman and realised it would be easy enough to make a change. Herman was more ordinary and my friends had no trouble adopting it, even though there are some old-timers in the village who still call me Highman whenever I visit. It was only in post-apartheid South Africa that I legally changed my name to Herman when I applied for an identity document – a positive change in a positive political environment.
When I was two years old, my father died suddenly after a very short illness; I was too young to have any memories of him. Regrettably, my father never lived long enough for me to pour him a beer and ask him wh
y he’d allowed people to call me by that unfortunate name, for he’d in fact officially registered the names my mother and he had chosen for me – Philip Samtseu.
My father’s sudden death brought about drastic changes in the family – my mother had now become the family breadwinner. Like most villagers, my parents had enjoyed little more than a few years at school – generally, rural people had about three to five years of very basic education. So, in spite of my mother’s obvious aptitude, her skills were limited to rearing a family, being a housekeeper, a wife, a mother, with all the attendant duties. There were few well-paid employment opportunities for her near the village and she was forced to do what millions of other black wives, sisters, aunts, mothers and grandmothers did: she looked beyond the village for a job that would provide her with an income to support her four children – my three older sisters and me.
During this early stage of my life, my brother, Pobane, who was seventeen years my senior, had already left home and was living independently. He had completed the minimum requirement school-leaving certificate, which was the equivalent of today’s Grade 8. Our family considered this an important achievement, and had encouraged him to continue with his education. But Pobane had always been a reluctant student and, fearing that my parents would force him to continue studying, he had run away to Pretoria.
Fragmented families were a common feature of rural life as many people went to the cities to find work, and the Mashaba family was no different. By now it was the early sixties, and like many young black men Pobane had left his village to find fortune on city streets. Life was difficult enough for black men at the time, but it was even more difficult for those who did not have any skills. Unfortunately, Pobane was at the time one of thousands of unskilled workers in Pretoria.
Years later, as we matured and the age gap between us decreased, I got to know Pobane a bit better. I enjoyed the lively conversations we had, and I was sorry that he had not finished school; the opportunities, skills and knowledge that he would have gained, underwritten by maturity, might have allowed him to lead a much easier life.
Shebeens were the social hotspots for men in the townships. They mushroomed on the outskirts of Pretoria, where Pobane hung out. Thousands of men’s lives ended in those shebeens before they’d even had a chance to get started. Long before they had even had the chance of tasting the fruits of hard work, they became addicted to the anaesthetising effects of alcohol. It helped them to forget their responsibilities and the demands their families made on them, and after a couple of drinks they could quickly forget that they’d been turned down for half a dozen jobs in a week, and that their wives in the village needed money for school fees for the children. Unlike many men who found that alcohol masked their disappointment, Pobane simply loved to socialise, and couldn’t resist downing a couple of pints with his friends. In this way, we were similar – we both loved socialising. However, even that social indulgence affected his performance, and so Pobane managed to secure only temporary, poorly paid piece jobs that he happened to hear about from his network of friends and family. There were so many unskilled young black men looking for work that white employers had their pick of the bunch; they exploited the over-supply of employees who were willing to work for nothing more than their next meal.
With my brother living elsewhere, my sisters Esther, Florah, Conny and I lived alone, though I considered my relatives as part of the extended community in which I lived. In those days, it was accepted that a community looked after all the people who formed part of the community. That is how discipline was maintained, and that is how attention and care were given to those who needed it. This spirit of caring, within and by a community, is the real meaning of ubuntu.
Chapter 2
A home holds a family together, but unfortunately we did not own the house we lived in. My father died before he’d managed to save enough money to buy the materials needed to build a family home. After his untimely death, my maternal grandfather called the family together and collectively they decided that my sisters and I would live in my maternal great aunt’s house, a short distance from my grandparents’ home. They would be able to keep an eye on us there.
It was a modest home, constructed from mud, plastered on the outside, with a zinc roof, though without a ceiling. Zinc roofs were hell when the weather was extreme; during the searing months of summer we sizzled, and in the frosty months of winter we shivered. When we dressed in the mornings, our breath blasted white from our mouths as we chattered to one another. As I grow older, the discomforts and inconveniences of a difficult childhood seem less severe, as the warmth and intimacy my family enjoyed casts a glow on my memories. As a result, I look back on that time with increasing affection.
Because difficult economic circumstances in the villages forced many people to work in the cities, at least one parent was usually absent from the family. Our family was quite unusual, though, as we lived in a house without the presence of either of our parents to take care of us. It concerns me that this situation is still a frequent occurrence in South Africa in spite of improved economic opportunities – but today it appears to have less to do with economics and more to do with the devastating effect of HIV and AIDS on the family unit. Tens of thousands of AIDS orphans are forced to live without the care and supervision of their parents or older generations, having to rely on other children in the family to provide the necessary family support.
In our family, where neither father nor mother was present, the running of the home was left to my formidable sisters: Esther, Florah and Conny. Even though Pobane was working – albeit in just a temporary job – he neither contributed to nor placed any demands on the household. And, of course, once he had married Salome, he had an obligation to her and their children. His sporadic earnings were in any case barely sufficient to support his own family, let alone allow him to make a financial contribution to the care of his four siblings.
As challenging as it was for us to grow up without the presence of our mother, I can imagine that life was equally hard for her to be away from her children. The Sixties heralded the era of women’s liberation in the western world, and many white South African women took advantage by staking their claim in the workplace, handing over their domestic and child-rearing duties to black housekeepers. My mother was one of millions of black women who worked as a housekeeper for a white family. When I consider how capable my sisters were in rearing me, I can only think that my mother would have been an asset to any family. I believe that my sisters’ gentleness, their attention to maintaining a clean and orderly home, as well as their patience and fortitude, could only have been learnt from my mother’s example during those rare times when she found work close enough to be able to return to our home in the evenings, where she took care of us all.
It may have been lucrative for white women to work outside the home, but the same cannot be said for most of the black women who took jobs in white homes. My mother earned a meagre salary as a domestic housekeeper, less than one-tenth of the average earnings of a white woman. Many white employers felt justified in paying a pittance to their black staff because they considered that the other perks they provided bolstered the cash portion: a small outside room to live in (usually without hot water and nothing more than a hole in the ground for a toilet); Thursday afternoons off; a weekend off a month; a 50kg bag of mealie-meal and a couple of kilograms of “servant’s meat” for meals. I wonder if white employers driving to the coast, or travelling to game farms for their annual holidays, ever gave any thought to the families of the women who had served them and their children for the best part of the year. We were lucky to see our mother for a full week once a year, but mostly we saw her only during the couple of hours she was able to snatch once a month.
The small salary that my mother earned could not possibly cover all our needs. Whenever she arrived home, we rushed to the packets of supplies that she dropped on the kitchen table, hoping to find a whole treasure box of
goodies. Our exclamations “Omo!”, “Sunlight!”, “Ace Mealie Meal!”, “Black Cat Peanut Butter!” may even have been heard in the next village. We fantasised about things like peanut butter, but usually we received nothing more than bare essentials such as soap powder and mealie meal. My mother’s salary barely met the cost of transport between Johannesburg and Pretoria, and it was certainly not sufficient to pay school fees – even though, at the time, school fees were only 25c per year.
My mother was a proud and hard-working woman, but faced with the prospect of her children going hungry, she did what most poorly paid domestic workers did – she helped herself to items from her employer’s home, though she was careful not to be greedy. When her “madam” wasn’t looking, she popped a couple of teabags into her overall pocket, a half-dozen eggs that wouldn’t be missed after a month-end grocery shopping spree, and perhaps even a bar of scented soap – just the sort of thing that put a smile on our faces when she came to visit us.
Domestic workers had responsibilities, but they had no rights. My mother could not take a day’s unpaid leave or an extra day at the end of a weekend; whenever we had a medical emergency, my sisters or grandparents had to help out.
Black Like You Page 2