He reminded us that one of the reasons the UDF was formed was to fight the introduction of the farcical Tricameral Parliament, intended to further entrench the exclusion of the black population, designated to homelands:
So our African brothers and sisters will be driven even further into the wilderness of homeland politics, millions will have to find their political rights in the sham independence of those bush republics; millions more will be forcibly removed from their homes into resettlement camps.
Clearly the oppression will continue, the brutal break-up of black family life will not end. The apartheid line is not all abolished, it is simply shifted so as to include those so-called coloureds and Indians who are willing to co-operate with the government.
We returned to Natal invigorated into supporting the UDF’s Million Signatures Campaign and went round canvassing in Wentworth, a semi-industrial area of Durban to which coloured people had been relocated.
Despite my extramural activities, I didn’t neglect my studies.
I was the only black engineering student to graduate in my year, others having fallen victim to engineering drawing and design, calculus – or politics, never far from the life of a black student.
After my final year exams, I went back to Tabase, where I found my mother hosting a group of MK activists who had come to see me. One of them was a former St John’s classmate from Alice who had been politically active against the repressive homeland governments and had skipped the country. Now he was back and in my family home; Transkei was an important infiltration route for MK activists.
This group was on what appeared to be an operation of some sort. I found myself eyeing their many bags anxiously, wondering if they contained weapons. Up until then my involvement in the struggle had been mainly on an intellectual level. I didn’t know what their mission was – nor was I sure that they did. One Saturday night I took them partying in Southernwood, Mthatha, near Unitra. At some point during the evening, one of my mysterious guests came and told me he had ‘lost a hand grenade’. We set about hunting for the missing device and attracting unnecessary attention, I thought. It seemed to me a rather haphazard operation and it was with sadness, but not surprise, that I heard some months later that the group had been ambushed and killed by police near Fort Jackson in East London.
*
At the end of my first semester at Natal University, Afrox – a subsidiary of a British industrial gas company called BOC (of which I had never heard) – gave me a bursary to complete my degree. Then, in my final year, I was offered a Rhodes scholarship to study towards a master’s degree in engineering in Germany. It would have taken me away from South Africa for two years. I turned it down because, at the time, my mother wasn’t in good health: she had debilitating stomach pains that doctors couldn’t attribute to anything in particular. She, however, kept sending out signals that she wasn’t long for this world. It was probably overwork and stress, but I didn’t feel comfortable moving so far away from her.
It was the right decision. I was destined for business, not academia.
I headed for Selby, Joburg, the headquarters of Afrox.
Words from Fundile Nyati
Our Nyati family as we know it today are descendants of the Fingo people of the Eastern Cape, refugees from the ‘Shaka Wars’ (1818–1828) in KwaZulu-Natal. They were allocated land in the ‘buffer zone’ between the 1820 settlers of Grahamstown and the indigenous Xhosa people of the Far Eastern Cape.
These destitute Fingos were then caught up in the Frontier Wars between the Xhosas and the settlers. Although they tried to integrate with the indigenous Xhosa communities, they were not fully accepted.
On 14 May 1835, our Fingo forefathers gathered under a milkwood tree in the Peddie district, in the presence of a missionary, Reverend John Ayliff, who was sympathetic to their refugee status. At that gathering they swore a Great Oath (‘Fingo Oath’) that:
They would obey the Queen of England;
They would accept Christianity; and
They would educate their children.
Because of their alliance with the colonial forces, the Fingos were the first African people to use ploughs and to plant wheat. They were well educated and secured the bulk of elite positions as clerks, teachers and traders.
As descendants of the Fingo people, in line with the ‘Fingo Oath’, our family valued education more than anything. It was a practical route to a better life. We’ve passed on the Fingo education gene – my son is an engineering graduate from MIT in Massachusetts and Mteto’s daughter, Anda, is a pre-medical student in Baltimore.
Our dad, Michael Mtutuzeli Nyati, born in 1929, became a teacher, like his parents and grandparents before him. But what he really wanted was to be a medical doctor. He matriculated from Healdtown College in 1947 as top student in the Cape Province. Before that, he had been the best student at St John’s College in Mthatha, where he obtained his Junior Certificate.
My siblings and I followed in his footsteps and also went to St John’s and did well enough to obtain merit bursaries.
In 1948, when apartheid was enacted, our dad was among the first group of ‘medical’ students at the newly opened Medical School for blacks at Wentworth, outside Durban.
A year into the programme, he was expelled. Black students had discovered that they weren’t actually being trained as doctors and revolted. They were being trained as auxiliaries, professional nurses, only good enough to assist white doctors. As one of the protest leaders, my dad was kicked out of Wentworth and forced to go back to Transkei, where he grudgingly took up the tried-and-tested family profession.
He obtained his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of South Africa through correspondence.
Although he became a headmaster, his dream of being a doctor never died, and he tried to make it live on in his children. I am the only one who bit and he was proud of that.
Our dad got married when he was only 23 years old. He had five children with his first wife (three girls and two boys), and also had an extramarital girl child. When they divorced, he obtained custody of all his kids.
In 1963, he met our mom Nombeko Annie Nogemane. They married and had four children, three boys and a girl. The oldest of the kids from the second marriage was a boy named Mteto Silumko Mzuvukile, born on 21 December 1964; followed by me, Fundile Mabhelandile three years later, and then Pelokazi Nomfundo in August 1968. The last-born, in 1970, was Mcebisi Langa, on our mom’s birthday, 14 April.
When my mom married our dad, she took on a lot more than a husband. She had to play a parenting role to six stepchildren, and later to her own four children. Two parents and ten kids in one household! In her attempts to ensure that she would not be perceived as soft on her biological kids, she was big on discipline. My mom was of the belief that sparing the rod would spoil the child. Even the name Mteto means law, order, discipline.
When my mother decided to quit teaching in the mid-’70s to run our store in the Tabase Mission village, she expected Mteto to spend his free time assisting at the shop. So he grew up behind the counter of a general dealer, serving rural customers, and respecting them. Growing up with a businesswoman – and the only woman who drove a truck in Mthatha – taught us that success does not come easily, and that women are as good as men, if not better.
As firstborn, Mteto had it tough sometimes, especially when he began to be naughty in his early teens. Despite her heavy hand, our mom loved Mteto so much and shaped him into something the rest of us could follow. She was determined, in bringing him up, that he would be a role model and useful member of society.
He was our mom’s ‘guinea pig’ – she tried to create a child who would not take privilege for granted, a child who could put himself in the shoes of others, a child who valued focus and hard work as the only way to