Andre Eva Bosch
Alive Again
There’s a place of hope & courage inside all of us
Tafelberg
Sometimes life is hard and the world looks dark and hostile. At those times, we often do not want to read about the true-life suffering of other people. Their struggles could open our wounds and rekindle our pain.
Alive Again sounds like a real-life story, but it is a work of fiction. Many works of fiction have a message. A message is an insight that is revealed in a story. Some books contain “universal messages”. A universal message is an insight that touches all readers in one way or another, and which can lead to change.
Nandi’s story contains many such universal messages, but they all combine into one single, powerful message: All of us can step out of the dead darkness of despair into the brilliant sunshine of a new life by holding on to our dreams and reaching out for help.
In Alive Again, Nandi shows us how.
A.E.B.
1
Do you know what it is like when you have a dream that you treasure above all things, only to have that dream dragged through the mud, trampled on, broken into a thousand pieces?
I do.
But now when I look back to when my dream turned into a nightmare, I know there is a place of hope and courage inside each one of us. We just have to find that place. And the best way to find it is to seek out the company of those who respect our dreams. Those who believe in us. Those who help us hold on to our dreams. Come what may.
My dream of studying law after school was something I grew up with, grew right into until it became a part of me, until I could feel, see and touch it. It started when I was six years old, like this:
My mother, Eunice Dube, worked as a cook in the boarding house of a school. The school was in Nelspruit, now called Mbombela, the capital of the province of Mpumalanga. One day a teacher at the school, Mr Khumalo, ended up next to my mother in a taxi. The taxi was heading for KaNyamazane, where I lived with my parents and two brothers, and where Mr Khumalo also lived. My mother had often seen him at school and at the taxi rank. One couldn’t help but notice Mr Khumalo. He always wore bright shirts with bold African prints – Madiba-type shirts. So of course she had noticed him, but he was a stranger to her. That day, however, sitting beside each other, Mr Khumalo and my mother began to talk. From town to KaNyamazane is a taxi drive of about thirty minutes, so they had a lot of time to get to know each other.
My mother told him that she had a very bright little daughter. Her six-year-old Nandi was born talking. She started talking long before her friends of the same age.
“She always asks questions, non-stop,” my mother said. Nandi never told lies to get out of trouble, and when she visited a friend and the friend secretly took sweets out of her mother’s cupboard, Nandi refused to eat the sweets. And when naughty boys beat dogs just for fun, her little girl shouted at them to stop being so bad. And when those same naughty boys teased old Joseph (the madala who was a bit mad and who always sat under the marula tree near our house), her Nandi leant her little face against the wire fence which surrounded the house and warned them that she was going to call the police, she added.
Mr Khumalo listened with great interest, my mother told me later. And then he said, “Your Nandi should come to our school in town. It’s a good school, especially for a little girl who sounds as if she could be a good lawyer one day. Come tomorrow. I will help you with the application forms.”
By the time my mother walked through our front door, she had made up her mind: I would attend the school in town and my brothers, Sandile and Jabu, would follow as soon as they turned seven.
My father laughed when he heard that she was going to enrol me the following day. “Where do you think the money will come from for the taxi ride in and out of town every day? And school fees?” he asked.
My mother, with a face like a thunderstorm just about to break over KaNyamazane, replied that she would work overtime. She would work on Saturdays too if necessary. As long as her children were going to a good school. She dared not tell him that she had been saving for years for her children’s education.
When she tucked me in that night, she said, “Today your footpath turned towards the rising sun.” I had often heard my mother use that expression, and I didn’t understand it, but I knew it meant something good so I didn’t bother asking her where that footpath was that she was talking about.
After a short prayer and a kiss on my forehead, she said, “Mr Khumalo says you will be a lawyer when you are big.”
I remember asking her what a lawyer was. She said it was someone who helped helpless people. It was true, she said, that some lawyers she had heard about were dishonest and only out to make money. “But you, Nandile Dube, you will be an honest lawyer and make sure people are treated fairly and with respect.”
I still didn’t understand what a lawyer was, but that didn’t matter. All I cared about was that I was almost seven years old and that after Christmas I would be going to school, just like the big children who walked past our house in their school uniforms early in the mornings on the way to the taxi rank. And I would be travelling to town every day in a taxi.
Ever since that day, I never once questioned my mother and Mr Khumalo’s decision that I would be a lawyer.
* * *
Every morning, very early, we would all walk to the taxi rank. My mother would walk ahead and my brothers and I would follow, dressed neatly in our clean, ironed school uniforms, which my mother had bought at the second-hand shop at school. Every day my mother would look at us over her shoulder and say, “Do your best today. Listen to the teacher. Remember that knowledge makes you free.”
And if we didn’t listen, if we were waving to our friends along the way or begging my mother to buy chips in the spaza shop or staring at a shiny new car speeding past us, my mother would wait for our distractions to pass before stopping in her tracks.
She would turn to look at us, with her thunderstorm face.
“Every day you get chances to learn new things. Use those chances. So that one day you will have choices. Choices which I never had.”
When my mother was young, she was one of the best learners in her grade. It was her dream to become a teacher. But then she fell pregnant with me when she was only seventeen and she had to marry my father. My father was older and he had a good business as a tree feller, and my mother’s parents were happy to see their daughter married to a man with a small bakkie, two saws and a three-roomed brick house. But they didn’t know about his drinking, or that he beat my mother up. And they didn’t know that she got pregnant because he forced her to have sex with him. He had overpowered her and she was too weak to fight him off.
“Your father told me he would make me pregnant, and he did. He warned me that he would make sure I did what all women were born to do: stay home to look after their husbands and children. There’s one thing you must know about your father – he means what he says. That is what makes him so dangerous,” she said to me once.
My mother had no choice but to leave school and marry him. Before I was born she realised that my father would never pay for a good education for his children, and she knew she had to make a plan. So she made a clever plan. She liked to cook, so when I was a baby she found a job as a cook at the Themba Hospital in Kabokweni, not too far from home, knowing he would agree to it. He would have refused if she said she wanted to study again. But as long as she cooked and cleaned, he was satisfied. In that way she began to save money for our education.
“One wrong choice can put an end to your dreams,” she always said to my brothers and me when she came home, tired from working a double shift. We would be sitting at the kitchen table doing homework. She always looked at our schoolwork over our shoulders while she made supper.
“Good work,” she would praise us with a soft, proud voice. Sometimes I saw her wipe a tear from her cheek with the corner of