So, on a sleepy Sunday morning, my friend took me to meet Mpho Mashinini, the fourth-born son. (There were eleven boys and two girls in the family.) I was immediately drawn to his vibrant, raucous clan with their stories of growing up in Soweto. Home was an airless ‘matchbox’ house: four tiny rooms inside, a pit latrine and cold-water tap outside. To bathe, the family boiled water on a coal-burning stove. At bedtime, Joseph and Nomkhitha, the parents, had to stack the furniture in one corner of the house, then squeeze the children together on the floor in the living room, the kitchen, wherever they could find space.
Mired in a dreary existence of poverty and political repression, the Mashinini parents cared about only two things: the Methodist Church and education. Joseph insisted that the children sing in the choir; any time spent in church, he figured, was time spent off the streets and out of trouble. For her part, Nomkhitha became positively fanatical on the subject of schooling. She believed it to be the greatest gift she could give her children – and their only hope for a marginally better future. Even after a full day’s work in a clothing factory, then cooking and cleaning and washing at home, Nomkhitha made the children sit with her around the dining-room table to do their lessons; under her tutelage, they knew how to read before beginning school.
Thus, books and grades and God dominated conversation in the Mashinini household, not politics. How did such a home produce guerrilla fighters and revolutionary leaders? To me, it seemed the quintessential story, the story of modern South Africa itself. But Joseph and Nomkhitha refused to talk about the family and its history; with four boys still in exile, they were terrified the government would seek retribution. Besides, the security police – who knew everything that occurred in the Mashinini house – would never have countenanced such a project.
It took apartheid’s demise to be able to tell the Mashininis’ tale. I returned to Southern Africa several years later, this time as the wife of a diplomat. The decades of civil unrest and economic sanctions had finally succeeded: the white government was no more. Nelson Mandela had been elected president, South Africa transformed into a fully democratic nation, the exiles allowed to come home. The Mashininis were now ready to remember.
One caveat: this book is not intended as a definitive history of the anti-apartheid struggle; that is for a South African to write. Rather, it is one family’s rendering of that fight, retold from a great remove of time and distance. I have tried, wherever possible, to corroborate the Mashininis’ recollections with newspaper clippings, trial records, other contemporary accounts and documents, and by extensively interviewing their colleagues, friends and relatives. A few characters are not named for reasons of political sensitivity. Other names have been forgotten with the passage of time. Some dialogue has been re-created from memory and thus not given direct quotation. All this I have attempted to weave into a narrative whose shortcomings, whatever they may be, are entirely my own.
CHAPTER ONE
Nomkhitha and Joseph
The story of the Mashinini family begins more than 500 miles south of Johannesburg in the Transkei: the place of Nomkhitha’s birth. It is a world apart. Even before the apartheid government went through the charade of erecting a border marker, the boundary between white South Africa – with its paved roads, electric street lights, freshly watered lawns – and this black area was inescapable.
Here the dreamy, desolate landscape stretches for miles. There are few cars and little movement, save the occasional goat balanced on tiptoe to nibble at the thorny bushes. The distant mountains are ragged outcroppings of boulders, lightly smeared with green vegetation and topped with purple-blue shadows. Whitewashed huts dot the undulating hillsides.
For all its poverty of development, though, the Transkei is rich in political tradition. The first white missionaries settled here among the Xhosa people in the 1800s. Their arrival had a profound effect: the Xhosas – who lived in what used to be one of South Africa’s largest territorial divisions and numbered more than three million – were among the first blacks to be exposed to Western education. The Transkei became renowned for its missionary schools; the country’s first black university, Fort Hare, was established here. That so many black political thinkers and activists – Nelson Mandela among them – subsequently emerged from the region is hardly coincidental.
It was to these dual tendencies – education and politics – that Nomkhitha was born. Her mother, Olive Nonthuthuzlo, came from St Marks, a village dominated by its Anglican church. She was one in a long line of teachers – a not-unremarkable feat for women of that era. Her five sisters and one brother also had teaching certificates. Olive had been a quiet, serious girl with a beautiful singing voice and a penchant for netball; her great passion, though, was reading. Teaching suited her studious nature.
When the time came for Olive to marry, her father, a prosperous sheep farmer who had built St Marks’ first sizeable house, wanted an educated man for his daughter. Daniel Boto seemed an ideal match. Of royal blood, Daniel was a praise singer at the chief’s court, an interpreter in the local magistrate’s court (he spoke several languages), a respected politician, a successful farmer and a poet. This would be the widower’s second marriage. Daniel had fifteen children from his first marriage, the oldest of whom was Olive’s age.
On her wedding day, Olive left her parents’ home for Daniel’s village several miles away. Hers was a ‘white’ wedding, so called because Olive’s father could afford to buy a white gown. After the ceremony in St Marks’ church and a feast at her father’s house, Daniel hoisted Olive – still wearing the prized frock – into a covered wagon drawn by a team of oxen. White flags adorned the lead animal to show that this was a wedding party. Lest anyone miss the message, the bridegroom’s best men, astride horses bedecked in beads and white flags, preceded the wagon as a kind of honour guard. They rode at a breakneck speed, now doubling back around the wagon, now racing forward, trilling: ‘Li, li, li, li, hallelujah! Umtshato! It’s a wedding!’ Daniel moved the procession steadily forward. His wagon was loaded down with wooden trunks containing bed linen, towels, blankets, crockery and a bedroom set – all gifts provided by Olive’s family; a new bride was not supposed to ask her mother-in-law for anything.
The wagon came to rest in Bengu, a speck of a settlement. It sits at the end of a rock-strewn road that snakes for miles through the mountains from the white town of Lady Frere. A forlorn, wind-whipped place, Bengu has sweeping vistas of the land as it rolls gently towards the Great Kei river. Most of its inhabitants lived in shacks. Their floors were cold stone caked with dirt; they cooked on coal stoves that filled the tiny dwellings with acrid smoke; their meagre possessions were usually covered with a thick coating of flies.
Daniel’s house, as befitted his position, was Bengu’s grandest. Built of brown stone, it boasted three spacious rooms and several outhouses. He also owned a large tract of land. It was a rare thing for an African to own land; most blacks were tenant farmers, paying an annual rent to the government or to a white landlord. But Daniel had inherited part of the property from his father, with the rest bequeathed to him by the chief. He grew maize and wheat; in the orchard were peaches, apples, apricots and pomegranates. Daniel also raised goats, pigs, sheep, horses, cows, geese and shaggy-feathered chickens.
In this house, Olive gave birth to Virginia Nomkhitha – her name means ‘attractive’ in Xhosa – on 9 May 1935. A son, Mark, followed a couple of years later. The two children would soon become inseparable companions; by the time they started school, their half-siblings had all grown and moved to nearby villages. And so they did everything together: homework, play, household chores. (Neither was required to help in the fields or kraals, where the cattle were kept; hired hands did that work.) Their contrasting personalities complemented one another. Like Olive, Mark had a calm, gentle manner; Nomkhitha, on the other hand, emulated Daniel’s exuberance.
Theirs was an unconventional family for the times. Olive had to be away for most of the week; her teaching job in a village near Lady Frere was too distant for her to travel there and back every day. She would leave on Sunday night, riding her horse the fifteen miles to the school, and return on Friday. Much of the child rearing fell to Daniel. He came to favour