CHAPTER TWO
Joseph, Nomkhitha and the Children
The day after the wedding celebrations, elders from Nomkhitha’s and Joseph’s family sat down with the newlyweds and, as was their tradition, talked about the couple’s responsibilities: From today, you are no longer a boy and girl. Now you are husband and wife; soon you will have a child. You must act accordingly.
It was a difficult transition. Nomkhitha found the living conditions at Sara’s uncomfortable. Her mother-in-law rented two rooms in a big brick boarding house; Sara, Joseph, Nomkhitha, Joseph’s sister May and her four children all squeezed into the small space. Although always surrounded by people, Nomkhitha felt lonely. She had to stop speaking Xhosa out of respect for her mother-in-law, yet she didn’t know Sotho. Nomkhitha, eager to prove herself as a makoti, a young bride, devoted much energy to mastering the new language. That accomplishment alleviated her sense of isolation only slightly. Being the dutiful daughter-in-law and wife meant subordinating her culture, her ways, to those of the Mashininis. Nomkhitha had a brief respite when, a few months after the wedding, she gave birth to a son, Mokete. Tradition required that a woman return home the week before the arrival of her first-born, and stay there for the first month of the baby’s life. So Nomkhitha got to go back to Letitia’s for a glorious, five-week reunion.
Joseph, too, was overwhelmed by the changes. Supporting a wife and child seemed an enormous task; how could he provide a home for them on the pittance he earned? With little confidence, Joseph put his name down for a tiny plot of land offered by the government in the areas reserved for black inhabitants. The Johannesburg municipality had acquired considerable acreage to the south-west of the city on which to house its proliferating black population. It charged rent for the minute pieces of land carved from these tracts; but tenants owned whatever abode they constructed. The government hoped to engender social stability among the disenfranchised blacks by making them homeowners. Of course, because it retained possession of the land, the government could dismantle the native locations – as they were known – at will and only pay compensation for the dwellings it destroyed.
In this manner, Soweto was created. (The name is an acronym for South-Western Townships.) The place was unspeakably bleak: barren, brown, dusty. Few trees grew there. The streets were narrow and rutted; they flooded when it rained. Hillocks of garbage decomposed by the roadside. It took hours to commute to work in Johannesburg. But with the areas allowed them already crammed, blacks were desperate for any place to live; they flocked to get their names on the government’s list for Soweto. Joseph and Nomkhitha rejoiced when, the year after Mokete’s birth, they were allocated a plot in the township.
They were among the first families to move to Pitso Street in the Central Western Jabavu section of Soweto. Their neighbourhood consisted of a rubbish-filled field across the road and a smattering of shops. The plot was similarly spartan: the government provided a single cold-water tap and a latrine – both outside. At first, Nomkhitha and Joseph could only afford to erect a zinc shack. In that small space they had to cook, eat, sleep. (They would later build a ‘matchbox’ house: the ubiquitous, concrete structures that, when seen from afar, made the township look like rows of monochromatic blocks marching to the horizon.) Despite the rudimentary nature of their residence, Nomkhitha and Joseph considered themselves lucky. They had got away from the suffocating closeness of Joseph’s family and, unlike many of their friends, they had their own home.
To make more money, Joseph left his job at the medical school for one in a factory manufacturing brushes and brooms. The factory operated on a piece-work system: the more shoe brushes Joseph turned out, the more he earned. The pressure to produce was tremendous. Foremen were forever shouting at the workers; if someone made a mistake or dawdled, his entire line was penalized. Employees had to punch a time clock to use the toilets. The tea-break lasted exactly fifteen minutes: a bell rang, and the workers rushed to gulp down a cup of the steaming liquid; another bell rang, and workers rushed back to their machines. Joseph hated his job – but kept at it because he had a family to support.
That sentiment became the watchword of Nomkhitha’s and Joseph’s marriage. In the beginning, Nomkhitha still had hopes of pursuing an education: Okay, I’m married, she would tell herself, but that doesn’t mean I can’t go to school. I’ll find a way somehow. But then the babies started coming: two years after Mokete’s birth, Tsietsi was born. Lehlohonolo came two years later. Then Mpho. Then Lebakeng. Then Moeketsi. Then Tshepiso. And so on: a new baby arriving just about every two years. Nomkhitha would give birth to a total of thirteen children – all of them boys, but for a set of twin girls.
At times, she resented the demands of so large a family. But, like many African women of her generation, Nomkhitha felt powerless to prevent her pregnancies. Contraception was viewed very much as a woman’s responsibility. Medicines were expensive; Nomkhitha could not afford to buy birth-control pills every month, and she had heard that using them sporadically could make her even more fertile. Nomkhitha dreaded the opprobrium each new pregnancy seemed to bring. Some neighbours made innuendoes about her being an ignorant country girl; others were more forthright and demanded to know why she just didn’t get an abortion. But Nomkhitha had seen the injuries, and death, caused by the illegal procedure and feared endangering her health. Years later, she would speak proudly of the courage it took to resist the pressure: ‘I never miscarried, never aborted,’ she said, ‘so I could live and die in peace.’
Nomkhitha and Joseph, by necessity, became consumed with providing for their children. In his endless quest to earn more money, Joseph obtained a driver’s licence and went to work at a brewery. His job was to drive salesmen around the Eastern Transvaal. Joseph left home on Monday morning and returned on Friday, sleeping in a different place every night. He was not allowed to stay in the hotels with his salesman; they were only for whites. Instead, Joseph was relegated to the drivers’ rooms: filthy, cramped places filled with all kinds of winged and horned creatures. If the room were not too horrible, Joseph would spend the night there in a sleeping bag. He usually found it unbearable, though, and wound up sleeping in the car. Still, Joseph liked the job. His territory was beautiful, verdant country: here were the open spaces, the cattle, sheep, goats, and the infinite fields of maize that he had left behind. Here he could breathe again.
Joseph stayed at the job for several years, then switched to driving for a construction company – a position that allowed him to work in town, returning home every night. And the salary was better. But he never seemed to have enough money for his ever-expanding family. Joseph often regretted not having continued his education so he could get better-paying jobs. While working at the medical school, he had attended classes three nights a week in the hope of obtaining a junior-high school certificate; his employer offered the study sessions for free. But Joseph was exhausted after a full day’s work and by the amount of studying required for the certificate. After two years, he gave up.
While Joseph and Nomkhitha struggled to provide for their family, remarkable political events were happening around them. The African National Congress, the country’s oldest black liberation movement, led thousands of people throughout the 1950s in campaigns to defy the apartheid laws. In 1955 it had convened a two-day, outdoor mass-meeting in Kliptown to adopt a set of democratic principles. The ANC solicited suggestions from across South Africa; their request produced an overwhelming response. Members of trade unions, clubs, schools, women’s groups, church organizations and cultural associations heeded the call, sending their ideas on everything from brown paper bags to scraps of foolscap. The Freedom Charter, as the final version was called, eloquently proclaimed: ‘. . . That South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people . . .’. It was a revolutionary document. The government thought it treasonous: 156 leaders and activists who participated in its adoption were arrested a year later and put on trial.
In the meantime, a group of dissident members was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the ANC. Known as Africanists, they believed that whites had come to dominate the ANC; in their view, white involvement only furthered the black dependency that apartheid created. The Africanists also objected to what they saw