Lighting the fire in the afternoon was the bane of Mpho’s life. He simply could not work out how to do it and play football after school. Mpho devised three strategies, all of which had serious drawbacks. He could light the fire immediately upon returning home, before heading out to a match. But the fire was sure to burn out in the three hours or so before Nomkhitha’s arrival. Or he could dash home at half time, hurriedly kindle a blaze and check the chimney for smoke, then race back to the field across the street to finish the game. The fire rarely caught properly and would be stone cold by the time Nomkhitha entered the house. As a third course of action, Mpho could keep playing until the last possible moment, until he saw Nomkhitha walking tiredly up the street. Then he would sprint home and madly start making the fire.
Football was, unquestionably, the most important thing in Mpho’s existence. The rubbish-littered field across from his house regulated the pulse and rhythm of his youth. School, church, household chores – all seemed nothing more than interruptions to the real substance of life: playing football. He could not step outside without seeing that field. It was beckoning, seductive, omnipresent: the stuff of dreams.
In the summer Mpho played barefoot; when he was older and had got a bit of money, he bought takkies, or sports shoes. Each neighbourhood had its own team, but would send its best players to participate in area competitions. On Sundays, Mpho and his mates went to the nearby hostels where migrant labourers lived. The workers organized their teams along tribal lines, but were often short of players and paid the township kids to fill in the open positions. Mpho could earn as much as three rand in an afternoon, a princely sum. (He could also take a shower, a unique experience. The hostels had virtually the only showers in the township.) Nomkhitha never knew of Mpho’s exploits; he feared she would have been outraged. As it was, she would often march over to the field and, screaming at Mpho, jerk him from a game.
Swimming was Mpho’s other great passion. The township had only one public pool, located in White City – a section of Soweto named for its low, white houses made from concrete blocks. Mpho liked to spend the entire day there during the summer holidays, returning home at night ravenously hungry and exhausted from the sun. But swimmers had to pay an entrance fee of two cents and Mpho always struggled to find the money. One method was to ‘liberate’ it from the gangs that roamed the area. Mpho, his older brother Cougar, and a group of friends often ambushed a squad of Zulu youths who had to pass through Mpho’s territory to arrive at the pool. They would thrash the youngsters and appropriate their money. But that didn’t ensure a day of swimming: they still had to negotiate the back streets of White City to avoid getting molested themselves by a gang called the Damaras (after a Namibian tribe), bent on relieving Mpho and his companions of their coins.
One day they decided to use Cougar, who had had polio as an infant, as a kind of courier. (The disease had attacked his leg and arm, but permanently affected only the latter.) After assaulting the Zulus, Mpho hid the money in the hand of Cougar’s disabled arm. Then he pushed Cougar to the front of their group as they approached the Damaras; the gang, seeing that Cougar was disabled, let him pass. At that moment, Cougar accidentally let the precious coins clatter to the ground. There was no swimming for them on that day.
Like his siblings, Mpho was always desperate for money. His one steady source of income came from reselling train tickets. Trains were the main mode of transportation between the township and Johannesburg; taxis and buses hardly ran in the black areas. On Sundays, Mpho’s parents sent him to stand in line to buy a six-day ticket for the coming week, the cheapest fare. As a reward, they allowed him to sell the sixth ticket (still valid for another day) back at the station on the following Saturday morning. Mpho charged 30 or 40 cents for the 50-cent ticket, a saving for people who wanted to go into town to shop. He got to keep the money he earned: sometimes he spent it on the admission to see his beloved Orlando Pirates football team play at Orlando Stadium; or he treated himself to an orgy of potato chips, sodas and candies.
Mpho occasionally went to work in town on the weekends, washing the cars of white people. Nomkhitha didn’t like him doing this because it kept him in Johannesburg all day – a forbidding thing for a child. But Mpho had virtually no knowledge of whites; the car-washing forays provided his only contact with them. And so he eagerly looked forward to the treks into town. To him, whites weren’t actually people; they were rich other-beings who lived somewhere beyond his range of vision.
Being a Mashinini, Mpho was diligent at attending school. He and the other children arose before dawn; Nomkhitha, who departed at six o’clock, lit the fire and left water warming on the stove so they could wash. Joseph used it first, then the others, according to age. After gulping down a mug of tea Joseph prepared for him, Mpho walked to school. His class consisted of about fifty students and one teacher. The children sat two or three at a desk. The rest of the school was equally overcrowded and operated on a staggered schedule: Mpho’s grade spent half the day inside a classroom, the other half sitting under a tree outside. When it rained, the two shifts had to squeeze inside the sultry, suffocating room.
Learning brought little joy to Mpho. The aim of Bantu education was, in the words of its Nationalist creator, Hendrik Verwoerd, ‘to prepare blacks for a status in life as hewers of wood and drawers of water’. Often Mpho’s beleaguered teacher seemed to go through the motions of teaching: thirty minutes spent on history; thirty on geography; and so on. Mpho saw these classes as something to be endured. His real education took place at night around the dining table: there his older brothers brought to life the dry, uninspiring stuff of school, stimulating him with their debates and drawing him into their world of books and ideas.
Unlike his older brothers, Lebakeng (or Dee, as he was called) was neither studious nor serious. As the fifth child, Dee saw himself as a kind of nexus between the older siblings and the younger ones. He nonetheless found his closest companionship in a cluster of school friends. He and four of his classmates formed the core of their school choir, where Dee sang first tenor. They dominated their school football team. They designed identical tunics out of old mealie bags and wore them as team uniforms. When they decided to skip their studies to play a match, they did so en masse. (Dee’s love of football was such that Nomkhitha’s voice alone, wafting across the field and summoning him home, was the only thing that could stop him from playing. Even his sobriquet had football associations: it came from a player for the Moroka Swallows.)
Dee had a bit of the devil in him. His younger siblings saw him as an aggressive, flamboyant type, forever trying to arrange business deals. Dee befriended the children of neighbourhood shopkeepers and wheedled cold drinks and sweets from them. He gambled with fervour; his favourite game was to spin a coin, shouting out to anyone within earshot: Heads or tails? Heads or tails? Dee always managed to have money. Sometimes he appropriated the change his parents left for the children to buy bread and used it to gamble. On other occasions, Dee spent the coins intended for the church collection on vetkoeke (fat cakes): greasy, fried confections that could be had at a nearby café. He also rolled dice, but that stopped the day Dee noticed Joseph observing him from the back-yard. For a while, he carried a knife.
His siblings were of two minds about Dee. They often reported him to their parents for stealing the bread money and making them go hungry. Dee would receive a punishment that night, but by the next morning he was always so cheerful that his brothers felt a bit ashamed – until the next infraction. Even Nomkhitha was ambivalent. She knew him to be mischievous and disobedient, and yet he could be so helpful. ‘I’m going out now,’ he would say, struggling into his football clothes, ‘but if you need me, just stand at the door and call.’ And when Nomkhitha called him, he indeed came running.
Dee found school boring. He was dogged by the brilliant reputation of his older brothers. Like the others, he did his homework at the dining-room table at night by candlelight. (The house caught on fire three times because of the candles, a not uncommon occurrence in Soweto. Few, if any, homes had electricity. The fire usually started in a bedroom while the family was in another part of the house. Once, all the children’s clothes were destroyed.) Dee could not see the point of devoting much energy to his studies. Whites held all the power; blacks