* An asterisk indicates a pseudonym.
2 | Untimely Loss
I was born in the Johannesburg township of Soweto in 1972, the younger of two children. In many ways my childhood was typical for many black children growing up in the townships during that period. My parents had settled in Soweto in 1970, the year my brother, Abbie, was born. They had met two years before, when they were both working at the Natalspruit Hospital on Johannesburg’s East Rand.
My father – who had been schooled at the Catholic St Francis College in the Mariannhill area of KwaZulu-Natal and then gone on to study towards a Bachelor of Science degree at Turfloop University, now known as the University of Limpopo – was an apprentice in the hospital’s pharmacy. My mother was a student nurse at Natalspruit. She was soft-spoken, pretty and petite – so petite that she was affectionately known as Tiny by her friends and family. When they met she was swept off her feet by the confident and sometimes boisterous person my father was. Her nursing ambitions were thwarted when she fell pregnant with my brother in her final year of study and was forced to return to her parents’ home in Soweto.
Like so many black South Africans at that time, where my family lived and worked was intimately linked to the prevailing apartheid laws. My maternal grandparents hailed from the farming town of Bothaville in the Free State. They moved to Johannesburg in the late 1930s in search of work opportunities. My grandmother initially worked as a washer woman before moving on to domestic work in one of Johannesburg’s northern suburbs. My grandfather’s efforts were somewhat more enterprising – he took advantage of his fair complexion and passed himself off as a coloured “Mr Stevens”, earning himself the right to own a small fleet of taxis. The venture didn’t last, however, and he worked as a driver for a furniture manufacturer until his retirement in the late 1970s.
They settled in the Western Native Township on the outskirts of Johannesburg but were compelled to uproot their young family of seven children when the apartheid government forcibly relocated them to Rockville location in Soweto. This was the house where I was born shortly before midnight on 14 November. It was my first act of defiance – my mother’s wish had been that I make my appearance the following day, her own birthday.
My father was new to Johannesburg. He grew up in the former homeland of Qwaqwa, now part of the Free State province. His family was desperately poor, and when it was noticed that he was academically gifted, a friend of the family facilitated an introduction to a foster family in Natalspruit. The respected clergyman’s family took him in and raised him as their own, and facilitated his schooling at Mariannhill.
We were a God-fearing family. At my grandmother’s house – where I spent most of my days while my parents worked – prayer was an integral part of our life. Evenings always ended with long prayers and singing, and church on Sundays was non-negotiable. My mother converted from her Methodist roots to Catholicism when she met my father, though he wasn’t much of a churchgoer. He had grown up Catholic and, though he loved the rituals and traditions of the Catholic Church, he saw little reason to observe the practice of attending mass regularly unless necessitated by an occasion such as a funeral or wedding.
As a child I didn’t feel particularly impoverished; my basic needs for food, shelter and clothing were always taken care of. It was only as I grew older and became aware of racial inequalities that I was able to appreciate the relative hardships of our daily reality. My grandmother would often refer to herself as modidi o ithatang – a proud peasant; we made the most of the little we had.
We didn’t have a house of our own until I was in high school. Until then my parents rented a garage in a neighbour’s backyard, and my mother did her best to turn the meagre single-roomed space into a home. A cupboard was used to partition the room; on one side was the space where my parents slept, and the other side served as a kitchen, dining room and TV room. Abbie and I would move the kitchen table aside after the evening meal to make our beds on the floor.
Even though I did not experience much material hardship in my childhood, my source of suffering lay elsewhere. Ours was an emotionally unstable home. My father was an alcoholic, and so much of what we did and didn’t do was determined by his level of inebriation at any given time. My mother did all she could to manage the mood swings that accompanied his drinking. I grew up surrounded by the constant static of low-grade tension, which would erupt into a full-blown tirade with hardly a moment’s notice. I drew comfort from the adoration that my brother, who was two years older than me, heaped upon me. In his eyes I could do no wrong, and having him there made it easier for me to cope with what was going on at home. He was my rock in a family that was often teetering on the verge of collapse. Abbie was more than a brother; he was an ally.
Abbie was as laid back as I was studious. He did okay at school, and he was very popular. It wasn’t particularly difficult for Abbie to get in with any crowd. He was one of those people who you instantly warmed to, with his ready smile and easy charm. I, on the other hand, excelled on the academic front. Though our childhood was fairly typical for a working-class black family in apartheid South Africa, unlike many I had two things going for me. My parents were firm believers in the value of education, and they’d saved and made sacrifices in order to send us to Sacred Heart College, a nonracial Catholic private school in the Johannesburg suburb of Observatory. I was also blessed with an enquiring mind and acute intelligence, and I diligently applied myself to my studies with considerable success.
I thrived in the school’s multicultural environment, and I immersed myself in its academic, sporting and cultural life. Many of the children at the school came from wealthy families, and I often marvelled at the luxury cars that dropped them off in the morning and the palatial mansions they called home. This was a far cry from the garage that I returned to every afternoon. I sometimes felt like an interloper in this world of wealth and privilege.
Life at home became tricky when Abbie entered his teenage years. He had many run-ins with our father, and I was often caught in the middle. On weekends he always found a party to go to, and he would stumble home at all hours of the morning. When I could, I would let him into the house when he got back, but on occasion I was given strict instructions not to. On those nights I would lie awake, tortured by the thought of him sleeping outside. But in the morning, in quintessential Abbie style, we’d find him sleeping soundly in the car or on the neighbour’s lawn, oblivious to the mental anguish his absence had caused.
When I was thirteen, he developed a habit of showing me off. He’d insist that I dress up and make myself look pretty, and then he’d take me for a walk around the neighbourhood, introducing me to all his friends along the way. I say “friends” but it was just about any teenage boy we met – they all seemed to know him. I never asked him why he did it, but it was a clever move. Of course he was proud of me; I could see it in the way he bragged about me to his friends. But he also understood how street law worked in Soweto, and I think that by introducing me to the local young men, he was trying to ensure that they knew who I was so they would not bother me if I wasn’t with him. And it worked a lot of the time; I was often greeted with a distant respect, and some even came to my rescue whenever I was harassed by outsiders.
Abbie died when I was only fourteen years old. Bizarrely, he was struck by lightning while walking back from the shops near our home in Diepkloof. In a way I think it’s just as well that it was such a freak occurrence; in my mind it was easier to deal with an incident that was out of our control.
I was alone when he died. Our parents had gone away for the weekend and Abbie had just nipped out to buy something at the shops. He’d planned on going to a party later that evening; his white LACOSTE golf shirt and matching sports shoes were laid out in his room, but he never made it back to wear them. A neighbour came to tell me that he’d been struck by lightning on the soccer field between our home and the shops. I didn’t get to see his body but I overheard a callous neighbour in the days after his death saying: “O ne a butswitse [He was cooked through].”
Abbie’s death shook my family to its very core. We were overcome by a mixture of shock,