Disaster struck soon after. To compete with a similar ANC plan, the PAC called for a day of mass demonstrations the following year on March 21. Blacks were to march in protest against the much-hated passes – an ill-advised public show that was sure to lead to confrontation. Several thousand demonstrators gathered outside the police station in Sharpeville, a small township south of Johannesburg; the crowd was unarmed and generally calm. Suddenly, with no discernible provocation, the police who had been guarding the building opened fire on the protesters. They continued to shoot as the panicked people turned and fled. When it was over, sixty-nine Africans were dead – most of them shot in the back. One hundred and eighty-six people lay wounded.
The massacre provoked outrage and condemnations outside the country. The South African government was unperturbed: it declared a state of emergency, allowing the police to detain thousands of activists without charge or trial. Ten days later, it banned both the ANC and the PAC. The government had effectively ended all means of quasi-legal protest; efforts to defeat apartheid would now take a violent turn.
Nomkhitha followed these events closely. She ran to the shops every evening to buy the newspapers, then pored over the stories. Nomkhitha admired the ANC greatly, but was sceptical: how could these young people ever change things? She tried to engage Joseph in political discussions, much as Daniel had done in their house when she was young. But Joseph wouldn’t countenance such talk. He had no reason to believe that things would ever be different; no one he knew owned a shop or a farm. Such aspirations were a waste of time. Joseph’s only hope was to earn enough money to educate his children; that was the way, in his opinion, to a better life.
But it was a difficult path. After several years of trying to manage on one salary, Nomkhitha had little choice but to get a job. She found a position as a machinist in a factory that produced women’s clothes. The factory was downtown; one of Joseph’s relatives worked there and had told her of the job. She sewed side seams in dresses and hems in skirts with about sixty other women. The pay was meagre but much needed; Nomkhitha could barely afford to take time off to give birth to a new baby. She worked until a week before the delivery date, then stayed at home for a month afterwards – less than half the time allowed for maternity leave under South African law. Nomkhitha found it cheaper to hire a babysitter. One of the neighbourhood’s old women – aunties, they were called – would accost Nomkhitha on the street during her pregnancy and, jabbing a finger into her burgeoning belly, announce, ‘This one is mine. I’m going to look after him.’ And when the children were three years old, Nomkhitha could leave them at a nearby crèche.
Joseph and Nomkhitha still barely managed. The family rarely ate meat; Nomkhitha served pap (a stiff maize-meal porridge) and cabbage, or pap and onions and tomatoes instead. A kindly butcher saved good beef bones for her, which she added to the stew to make it more savoury. There was no money for emergencies: if one of the children became ill, a visit to the local clinic ate up half of Nomkhitha’s weekly pay. Joseph used his Christmas bonus each year to buy the children one set of clothes and one new school uniform. Despite the hardships, Nomkhitha tried not to despair. She had been raised to believe that God never imposed a burden on a person he could not bear; on bad days, Nomkhitha reminded herself that many people in Soweto could not even afford to eat. She took heart from the fact that her children never went to bed hungry.
It was a far cry from the privilege and status she had known as a girl and expected to continue into adulthood. That world had virtually disappeared. Daniel had died soon after Nomkhitha’s wedding, and her half-siblings immediately began fighting over the division of his estate. In the meantime, the government passed the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act, which established eight, ethnically based Bantustans. Under the law, blacks – who comprised about 73 per cent of the population – were allocated 13 per cent of the country’s most underdeveloped land. Although the majority of Africans resided in ‘white’ areas, they were to become citizens of their own ‘tribal homeland’; in this way, blacks could forever be deprived of political rights inside South Africa itself. Transkei was the first to be so transformed. In 1963, the government’s Transkei Constitution Act turned it into a semi-autonomous ‘homeland’. Daniel’s lands were confiscated by the new regime, his stone house knocked down. All was lost.
Reduced to penury, Olive moved to Johannesburg. She searched in vain for a teaching position and was eventually forced to take a job as a domestic with a white family. They knew nothing of the Great Place, the majesty of court, the beauty of an imbongi’s poetry. Olive’s employers could not be bothered to learn her surname, let alone the origins of her quiet dignity and excellent English. To them, she was just another kaffir woman come to clean their toilets and change their children’s nappies.
Nomkhitha saw her dreams vanish. She had long ago abandoned the idea of becoming a nurse, but still yearned for some sort of profession. Nomkhitha used to pass a secretarial school every day on her way to work. She would stop and stare at the advertisement in the window: the smiling, smartly dressed woman sitting at a large desk, surrounded by office equipment. The tableau looked so respectable, so modern. After allowing herself a few minutes’ reverie, she would sigh and continue down the street; they could never afford the tuition fees.
But if Nomkhitha could not achieve her ambitions, she was determined that her children should. She began buying books for the kids with the few pennies she salvaged at the end of every month. Starting with comics to get their attention, she pointed out the pictures and explained the stories. As the children grew, they graduated to more sophisticated books in Sotho and English. It didn’t matter that Nomkhitha arose before dawn, worked all day in the factory, returned home to cook supper and wash out nappies – she always read to her children. Her dreams, she decided, would become theirs.
Mokete, Tsietsi, Mpho, Lebakeng and Tshepiso came to be the most politically active of the Mashinini children. Each arrived at his involvement from a different path. For some, it was a studied decision; for others, a hasty act of volition or sheer chance.
Being the first-born, Rocks (as Mokete was called) felt the full weight of his parents’ expectations. School was paramount; on this subject, Joseph and Nomkhitha were unrelenting. Joseph beat Rocks when he played truant. Nomkhitha made him – and the other children, as they got older – sit at the dining-room table after supper every night to do their homework. (Rocks developed a passion for the comic books Nomkhitha bought. His favourite was Chunky Charlie: a hero-type who slunk around in a heavy overcoat, laden with various tools that were useful in fighting crimes.) His parents taunted him if he neglected his studies: he would end up like the men who emptied the night-soil buckets left on the streets in the morning, they warned, or as one of the chaps who lugged the fifty-kilogram bags of coal to houses for cooking and heating. Rocks took the admonitions to heart; those people were figures of derision among children in the township.
Joseph and Nomkhitha closely monitored Rocks’ progress in school. Any slip in grades during the year prompted a warning to improve; it also put him on a kind of probation, during which it was difficult to extract money from his parents for extracurricular activities. The Mashinini children were expected to finish among the top five students in their class. The family would ridicule anyone who ranked lower throughout the December school holidays; those who succeeded were rewarded with a rand. Joseph always threw a party to celebrate the good grades. He bought sodas, sweets, crisps, peanuts; and he gathered the children around the dining-room table to offer a prayer of thanks. It was the best day of the year. Rocks chafed under this intense parental scrutiny, but ultimately came to see its value. He would be one of the few of his boyhood gang to graduate from high school.
The pressure he felt from his parents turned Rocks into an introverted, measured sort of person. (In that, he took after Joseph. When political violence overwhelmed the township in later years, Nomkhitha often dashed headlong out the door to witness each new confrontation. Joseph, on the