I put my hand inside the plastic bag to pull out the biltong. But instead I touched the ice-cold Black Label dumpies. My mouth started to water. I tried to swallow the saliva, but my throat was too dry. I spat out the saliva and watched the blob fall noisily on the tarmac while my hand groped inside the bag again. With a mind of its own, my hand bypassed the biltong and came out with an ice-cold lager. I laughed at myself, but I didn’t put the beer back in the bag. After all, the Y is still far away and I am tired of walking. Who’s going to see that I’m drinking a beer under this tree?
As I twisted the top off my dumpie my mind landed comfortably on the very first glass of beer that my father gave me. That was way back in the late 1970s.
My father was a good musician. Unfortunately none of his children took after him, but in drinking I think I outclass my old man. My mother used to complain a lot about my father’s drinking and his late homecomings; sometimes she would even accuse him of having an affair. But later I found out that my father was just enjoying playing his music and drinking beer at the bottlestore, where he could find good drunken backing vocalists to accompany him when he played his Xizambi.
This traditional Shangaan instrument was made out of a thin cane which was bent into the shape of a bow. A melodious string would be fastened from one bent end of the wood to another. A short carved stick would then be struck against the cane, providing percussion and melody at the same time.
My father was brilliant at carving and he used to make his own instruments as well as other things. He would often go to the countryside and fell trees from which he would carve wooden spoons, wooden plates and things for home decoration. He would sell those things for profit at the train stations during his spare time.
Most of my father’s followers were drunken women that he met at the bottlestore. Every Friday night we would hear him coming from afar with the crowd behind him singing along in carefree tones. But by the time he reached our home the crowd would have disappeared. His food would be ready on his carved wooden plate, but he would continue playing his instrument. Sometimes he would ask my mother to join him in a tune. She would join in if she was in a good mood. She knew all of his songs. He sang the songs when he was both happy and sad, or when he wanted to make a point about something.
There was a particular song that my father used to sing when he wanted to tell a troublesome tenant to leave our home. Its Shangaan title was Nghoma ya makhalibode, The song of cardboard boxes, and it went like this:
| Ayi gube ya makhalibode | (Take your cardboard boxes and leave my house) |
| I khale mi hi nyagatsa | (It is long that you been troubling us) |
| Aho chava ku mi hlongola | (We were afraid of chucking you out) |
| Hi nghoma ya makhalibode | (This is the song of the cardboard boxes) |
After singing that song we all knew that someone among my father’s tenants should leave the house, but my father was a very kind man and although most of the tenants in our home were our relatives, they never paid rent.
One day my father arrived home late, singing as usual. My mother was very angry because he had spent most of his money on beer. What made matters worse was that earlier the same day she had come home with her hand torn and bleeding. She and her friends had been bitten by the dogs at a farm near Pimville. A white farmer had set the dogs on them as they were trying to collect cow dung to smear on the floor of our house. Only one of her friends managed to escape, by jumping the fence. My mother was caught by the arm by one of the dogs, while her other friend was caught by the leg. After enjoying their plight the farmer instructed his dogs to leave the ‘kaffirs’ alone, but the scar is still vivid even today. My father used this as an opportunity to compose a song about white people. The song ran as follows and was in English:
You white man leave my family alone
This is the last warning
I worked hard and paid lobola for my wife
Unlike you who just give them a ring to put on their finger
I have eight children with her not just two
But that night we were woken up by a serious argument in my parents’ bedroom. My brother and I were sleeping in the sitting-dining-room. We listened very quietly. My mother was threatening to leave the house because my father didn’t spend enough time at home. But soon he apologized and everything was back to normal again.
The following day, a Friday, he came straight home from work sober. After dinner he told me to come with him. I didn’t ask where. We went to the local bottlestore, and that was the day he gave me my very first beer. The first ever glass of beer in my life. When we came back home I was his backing vocalist. I was drunk, but my mother was happy and never complained when he took me with him. It was clear to her that if he took me with him he was just enjoying drinking at the bottlestore and not seeing other women.
I began to think about our life in Soweto in those days. At midnight every Tuesday and Friday the white policemen would knock rudely on our kitchen and sitting-dining-room doors. Without search warrants, they would rummage through our house for so-called illegal immigrants from the homelands and any other illegal stuff such as homemade ntakunyisa beer. After opening the doors, they would count us in their attempt to control the African birth rate, or influx from rural areas, or whatever the reason was.
One day my uncle, who had recently arrived from the rural areas to look for a job in the big city of gold, got a seventy-two-hour order from the police. That meant that he had to leave Johannesburg and go back to the country if he did not find a job within three days. No one was allowed to hang around in town without written permission from his or her employer in those days.
It had been about three weeks since he got the order on his urban permit document. He should have left the city and returned to the homelands a long time ago. My uncle had been surviving the police raids by hiding under a big steel bath which we would turn over with him underneath it when we heard the terrifying knock of the police at the door.
The police caught my uncle one cold Saturday night. We were still listening to a radio broadcast when they knocked. Everybody was excited by the news that Prime Minister B.J. Vorster had resigned as the Prime Minister of the country and P.W. Botha had taken over as the new Prime Minister. I was the only one who was listening with blithe indifference, as I was still politically naive. The police had been clever because they had changed their timetable and come to our house on a Saturday. But we still identified the knock at the door as theirs because it was very loud as usual, and was followed by the words, ‘Polisie, maak oop,’ spoken in a gruff voice.
In two ticks my uncle had run to the kitchen to take his usual shelter. Unfortunately for him the steel bath was full of soaking clothes. There was no way he could throw the clothes out because the water would spill all over the place and make the police suspicious. Sweating, my uncle just stood there in nervous anticipation of his fate.
Suddenly the voice at the door became unfriendly.
‘What are you natives still doing there? Do you think we have the whole night for you? We will break this scrap door now!’
We all froze with horror inside the house. We were aware that the police were capable of doing what they said – they had broken two of our doors the year before because we had not responded in time. The first time they came was around midnight when we were all asleep. My father was still getting dressed when they said he was wasting their time and broke down the door. The second occasion we delayed them, as we were still hiding my uncle under the steel bath. Because of this our small bedroom, where three of my brothers and my uncle slept, had no door as we had used it to replace the sitting-dining-room door. A sheet had been hung across the doorway as a substitute for the broken