And indeed, as I was to discover, he had stopped drinking. He had also converted to Islam. It did look like he had turned over a new leaf. In due course, once I’d forgiven his bumbling ways of shelling me endlessly, I gave him a chance. Our romance began. He was good to be around. He made me laugh. The laughter made me feel happy, at ease in his presence. He respected me. He loved me. Although I had no experience in the business of falling in love, I thought what I felt for him was love. It did not matter that he was so poor that he had only two pairs of pants (with patches galore) and maybe two or three shirts. He was always neat. It also took me a long time to discover that he did not have a place of his own.
Having come from rural Zululand to join Gibson Kente’s cast, he had stayed at the playwright’s house while he performed in Mama and the Load. The play was on the road when Mbongeni and Percy Mtwa broke away from Kente and took a chance at carving their own niche in the theatrical industry. When I finally ‘gave him the crown’, as we say in the township, Mbongeni was busy rehearsing the play that would become Woza Albert! The two of them stayed at Percy’s brother’s house not far from my parents’ house in Daveyton.
The more I got to know Mbongeni, the more I realised just how different he was from me. My sister Mpumi tried her best to drive a wedge between the two of us. After all, her own relationship with Percy Mtwa had collapsed.
‘These men are just players, Xoli,’ she said. ‘I’m older than you and far more experienced in these matters. Did you see what Percy did to me? The relationship did not go anywhere. And you, being the young, ignorant and naive girl that you are, your day of disappointment is coming. I am asking you to walk away from him while it’s still early. The higher you go in this relationship the harder you will fall.’
My persistence with the relationship with Mbongeni Ngema turned Mpumi against me. We stayed in the same house, yet hardly spoke to each other. It was such a painful experience. I loved and respected Mpumi. She had in the past been my role model. No, I am actually lying. She was to me a sister, a friend, an intellectual sparring partner and a mother. That’s right.
From the time we were small, and I’d just started school, at our home she played the role of mother. My parents would leave home for work at around 5 am. Sometimes, by the time they left for work my mother would have made breakfast, which we would eat before we went to school and the younger children were sent to their place of care. But other times, my mother would leave in a hurry, without having made breakfast. It therefore fell on Mpumi, as the elder sister, to feed me and my younger brothers, wash us and dress us appropriately (if it was winter, she had to make sure we were dressed warmly; if it was summer, we had to wear shorts; etcetera). Having washed and fed us, she would lock the house and walk with me to school, and the younger kids would be dropped at their place of care, Gogo MaMbhele’s house. All of this at the age of nine or ten. She couldn’t have been older than that when I first noticed her performing these chores every weekday.
One day stands out in my mind. In the morning she fed us as usual and got us dressed. Because it had rained hard the previous night, the streets were muddy. The streets in Daveyton were not tarred then. So, in order to protect our two younger siblings, who must have been around three years and five years respectively, Mpumi put them in their twin-cab pram. The pram only came out on special occasions. With the streets so muddy, it only made sense that Mpumi should drive our two younger siblings in a pram. At any rate she locked the house. We got out of the yard, onto the street. Thanks to the rain the previous evening, the roads weren’t as dusty as usual, but there were puddles everywhere and dozens of treacherous potholes into which an unwary foot could sink, with disastrous results.
The distance from home to my school was only about a kilometre and a half, but for a seven-year-old girl that was still a long way to walk unsupervised by an older person. Mpumi was all I had. I walked alongside her as she pushed the twin-cab pram. My siblings were happy to be in their ‘moto!’ The idea was to first drop the smaller kids at Gogo MaMbhele’s, after which Mpumi and I would proceed to our own school. When we came across a car, Mpumi had to steer the pram onto the side of the road. The car passed. Then she tried to push the pram back onto the road, which was smoother, but the pram was now stuck in the mud. She tried to push. The pram wouldn’t budge. I added my own seven-year-old hands and together we pushed. Nothing doing. The pram wouldn’t move. My younger siblings in the pram did not appreciate the seriousness of the situation. They thought we were playing a game. They were giggling, as kids would do. We were going to be late for school, Mpumi said under her breath. She suggested I carry on walking on my own. Once she got the pram going, she would drop the kids at Gogo MaMbhele’s, then catch up with me. I decided to stay with her. We tried pushing again. Still no luck. People were passing by. In their haste to get to work or school they did not pause to look at us, to consider what we were up to. Maybe they thought we were playing. Nor did we stop any of the passing adults to come and help us. At any rate, after a long while two men who were passing by paused long enough to realise that we needed help. They easily and quickly pulled the pram from the mud and set it back onto safe ground. When one of the men offered to take us to Gogo MaMbhele’s, my sister reassured him that it was not very far. We would manage. We did manage. But by the time we got to school, we were splattered in mud. It was not funny.
Then there was another time when Mpumi was supposed to miss school and stay at home because there was a crisis at home. The neighbourhood woman who looked after yet another one of our siblings, who was too small, was not available. Mpumi decided she was not going to miss school. So what did she do? Dressed in her uniform, she tied the little kid to her back as old women do. Then she walked to school. The teachers rushed to her, asking, ‘Why have you brought this child to school?’
She explained her predicament: she could have stayed home and looked after the baby, but then she would have missed out on school. One of the teachers suddenly remembered that that day was prize-giving day, or some such. Mpumi knew she was going to be on the list of prize winners. No snotty-nosed sibling was going to stand between her and her special day. You can readily see that the whole notion of child-headed households did not come with the advent of AIDS, which robbed children of their parents, leaving kids to fend for themselves. In many working-class neighbourhoods in South Africa – especially in the black community, although it was also a reality in the coloured community – child-headed families existed long before social scientists even dreamed up the concept that would dominate social discourse in later years.
Anyway, my sister Mpumi had every right to be angry when I defied her and started having a relationship with Mbongeni. She was more like a mother to me. She knew me better than my mother knew me. She had protected me from many storms in life – in the township when we were growing up, and in the Transkei when we were in boarding school. It was through her that I first met Mbongeni when the Gibson Kente cast came to Mthatha. Now I was defying her.
I will not lie to you, my reader: there were moments of doubt; moments when I thought my sister was telling the truth. I recalled that this man I was head over heels in love with had proposed to me twice before – each time mistaking me for a girl he’d never met. He was a player, indeed! But my inner voice said he had changed. Hadn’t he, after all, stopped drinking and smoking? Hadn’t he converted to Islam, which made him more focused and single-minded in what he wanted in life?
Apart from the fact that he was a smooth-talking player, another reality I couldn’t run away from was that the two of us were an odd couple, with almost nothing in common. He was Zulu, I was Xhosa. He was deeply rural, and I, on the other hand, was a city girl through and through. Until I went to boarding school in Transkei in 1976, I had never been to a place where they collected water from the river, where they used wet cow dung to polish their floors, where womenfolk crawled on all fours whenever they had to serve food to their menfolk. Mbongeni came from a polygamous family – his father had two wives – and in the compound in which he’d lived as a young man, he’d told me, he’d shared food and sleeping quarters with countless aunts and their offspring. I came from a close-knit family – one mother, one father and seven siblings. When my father came to the Transvaal as a young man, he’d cut ties with members of his extended family. As a result, we hardly knew our relatives. We would see them at extremely important family gatherings