By 1980, Wowo was thirty-three and married to twenty-five-year-old Kiki. They had five children. The house on NY41 was overflowing, and relatives had built small tin shacks in the backyard. Even if they had been financially able, they could not legally purchase property in the Western Cape, since it was not a black homeland.
Finally, Wowo was granted his own place, a two-bedroom on NY111, where he remains today; he and Kiki took one room and their sons took the other. Kiki gave birth to her youngest soon after they moved in, and Wowo’s sister’s boy came to live with them—eventually seven boys were sleeping together on one big straw mattress. Since obtaining the house, Wowo had slowly extended it to the furthest edges of the property line; an overhang made of uneven cement blocks abutted the edge of the sidewalk, and a series of stand-alone brick rooms pressed against the far end of the backyard.
By 2013, Melvin’s grandchildren numbered fifty living souls—twenty men and thirty women, Easy among them. They were taxi drivers, clerks, housewives, hairdressers, insurance salesmen, postal workers, train conductors, cleaners, hospital workers, hotel room-service providers, supermarket checkout clerks, and employees of the South African Revenue Service. Ten were students. Five were unemployed. Nobody knew what two of them did with their days. One suffered from depression, one was disabled, and one was, according to her relatives, “a slow thinker from birth,” who’d been raped and who now had to be supervised twenty-four hours a day. Some lived in the Eastern Cape province—after apartheid, the country’s homelands were absorbed into the nine provinces of today—while most lived in the Western Cape, home to Gugulethu. Six had died. The number of great-grandchildren was climbing into the triple digits.
Though Melvin had no official political power, in his house, his word was law. The family considered Melvin as close to a god as they would find in this lifetime, and so as long as he was around, Wowo may have been a married father of seven, but he did not have the final say in his own household.
In the years since the first European missionary introduced Christianity to South Africa in 1737, many black preachers had taken over congregations and had created a particularly African brand of Christianity. Melvin and his wife Alice believed in Jesus Christ their Lord and Savior and in their Xhosa ancestors, who demanded animal sacrifices in return for protection. Everyone in the family followed suit, though at least one of their sons eventually disavowed traditional mores for conventional Christianity and was always grumbling about his relatives’ lost souls. Easy, for one, believed halfheartedly in Jesus and wholeheartedly in the powers of his ancestors, and the meeting of the two seemed natural to him.
Melvin, “short-tempered but peaceful,” according to Easy, encouraged prayer and was prone to beating disobedient kids. Alice supported this form of discipline.
“If she is angry, she get Father to beat you,” Wowo recalled fondly. “She’s a good wife. She like people, she like her children, but she is not funny, and if you make funny things, you make her cross.”
Melvin was wise and prescient. You had best pay attention to him, because he knew what he was talking about.
“My grandfather said to one my brothers: by the end of the day if you don’t want to listen you will result in prison and you will result in steal things,” Easy remembered. “My brother was in and out and in and out of prison, and he get sick and pass away. My grandfather propheted that.”
“Sick” in township parlance can often be a euphemism for HIV, which has a 19 percent prevalence rate among South African adults. And Easy was using the word “brother” in the black South African sense: when he said “brother” he meant “cousin.” Biological brothers and sisters are not differentiated from cousins; the family structure is such that uncles and aunts have power and responsibility equal to fathers and mothers, and any local adult can discipline or direct a child—a village to raise a baby, indeed. As a Xhosa person, if your sibling dies or falls ill or simply has too much on his plate, you are expected to take in his children and raise them as your own. In this way, Wowo lived in his uncle’s house from the age of three until the age of eleven, and in this way, he raised his sister’s child.
Xhosa people refer to complete strangers, too, as brother or sister—bhuti or sisi, respectively. An older man is tata; an older woman, mama. Nelson Mandela, father of the nation and the world’s most famous Xhosa, is referred to as Tata Mandela. Truly old men and women are addressed with great extravagance as tatomkhulu (grandfather, the term Easy and others used to address Peter Biehl) or makhulu (grandmother, the term Easy and others use to address Linda Biehl). Once, a young man addressed me as mama.
“No, call me sisi!” I said, and he looked at me blankly. I thought he was telling me that I was old, like when people stopped calling me “miss” and started calling me “ma’am.” But later I learned that “mama” was simply a term of honor and respect, and the man had been trying to flatter me. To be mama is to be held in high regard, though to be bhuti or sisi isn’t bad either. A Xhosa friend once explained to me that in adhering a familial term to a person, one humanizes him or her.
“Even if you don’t know my name, if you call me sisi, I am somebody.”
By the time of his death in 1997, Melvin was a tata, or a tatomkhulu. In traditional Xhosa culture, a baby’s umbilical cord and placenta are buried near their birthplace—Lady Frere, in Melvin’s case. In a perfect world, a Xhosa returns to die near this very burial place, near his ancestors and relatives, on the land they all worked, completing the circle of life, from the soil and to the soil. You can live anywhere, but your home will always be where your umbilical cord rests—and in fact, when a Xhosa person recites his lineage, he usually begins by stating in Xhosa where his cord is buried.
But Melvin died and was buried in Gugulethu township; he never found the time or the money to return to his homestead and build the hut in which he wished to spend his final days. By the time Melvin died, Mandela was president and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had commenced (in fact, Easy sat before the TRC in the year of Melvin’s death). But the TRC didn’t particularly register with Melvin. So much had been taken from him even before he was born; and after he was born, he was slowly stripped of most prospects he might have had. Melvin’s entire life had been shaped by apartheid politics, but he remained apolitical and had not endured any terribly dramatic incident that labeled him, officially, as a victim: no police beating, no imprisonment or torture. So Melvin did not qualify as someone against whom human rights violations had been committed, and the commission was therefore irrelevant to him, and he was irrelevant to the commission.
Easy’s mother, Kiki, was born Pinky Magdelene Mahula on June 6, 1955, in the tiny, depressed, overcrowded homeland of QwaQwa, that slip of earth designated for the Sotho people by the apartheid government. When Kiki was young, her family relocated to Gugulethu, where they eked out a living. Kiki left school at twelve. Her first baby, born when she was thirteen, couldn’t pronounce Pinky, and called her Kiki—and the nickname stuck. By the time she was twenty, she had four kids in her care. By the time she was thirty, she had seven.
Kiki had no choice but to work, and found a job as a maid and nanny, caring for three strapping white children in a rich white suburb. Kiki’s boys wished that she would wait for them with snacks and hugs when they returned home from school, like they saw TV moms doing, but she was in a Dutch-gabled home near the cricket fields, preparing sandwiches for the children of an insurance executive, and the boys had to make their own way.
The Afrikaans journalist Antjie Krog wrote of visiting an old friend who, when asked if she should provide her maid with soap or a heater during winter, claimed that maids “don’t get cold like white people”