Once again, my success at high school, and later at university, was assured by good teachers. The best among them made the classroom a very interesting place to be in, and learning became a challenge and an adventure. The brother-and-sister team, the Dzivhanes, who had university degrees, was the most memorable pair of teachers in my life, and I know now that all such individuals at both high school and university were able to engage my curiosity and interest in learning, encouraging me to learn even more by reading outside the classroom.
What I found most admirable about the memorable men and women who taught me at different stages of my life was their ability to engage my curiosity and interest in such a way as to leave an enduring disposition – a love of knowledge – that served me well for the rest of my life. Consequently, on looking back now, I am intrigued by the way in which certain people’s lives, their knowledge and achievements, as well as their example and their confidence in me at certain critical moments, has meant so much in the story of my life. To admit our indebtedness to others is a strength and a virtue. No one literally took me by the hand, but my favourite teachers enticed me with their intellectual brilliance and through gestures of confidence in me and what I was doing. I always admired their self-confidence, skill and the dedication with which they carried out their teaching.
Some aspects of my childhood and youth have puzzled me a great deal. One thing that still intrigues me today is how I and other infants born at that time survived both birth and early childhood without the benefit of regular visits to Western medical practitioners. There were neither clinics nor hospitals for miles in any direction from our home, yet here I am, still up and about a little more than seven decades later.
Our home in Mavambe was adjacent to the homestead of our chief, whose first name was Morris and his surname, like that of all of us in our extended family, was Manganyi. In common parlance he was Chief Mavambe, as were several of my ancestors who had been chiefs before him. According to information I found recently, our family was part of the migration from Mozambique to the then north-eastern Transvaal. In the course of my research I came across a brief, tattered document dated 25 November 1957 and written by N J van Warmelo, a South African government official of note. The document, signed at Sibasa, was given to my cousin Chief George Mavambe, who was investigating the land claims of his people after the democratic elections of 1994. It contains information about various chiefs and their descendants in Mavambe after their forebears’ arrival from Mozambique. In it Van Warmelo pronounced:
This chief has no jurisdiction as yet and some of his followers live on land adjoining the location. As with other smaller Shangaan sections south of the Levhuvhu river, the people of different units live interspersed, the farm boundaries on the map are unknown and not to be found with survey, and therefore meaningless for administrative purposes, so that a good deal of census-taking and other ground work will have to be done before defined areas can be set aside for different chiefs and headmen – if at all possible in some instances without causing hardship to the people who have either to move or transfer their allegiance. Alternatively, they may be left where they are, and amalgamation and abolition of headmanships can be resorted to. The need for attempting to do all this at once is not apparent and I would recommend getting Bantu Authorities started and working in the other bigger first [sic].
The everyday consequences of policies briefly referred to in Van Warmelo’s document are still evident today in Mavambe.
When I was growing up I never heard anyone refer to Mavambe as a location. What people talked about was a chiefdom, headed by a chief (‘hosi’ in my vernacular), not the character Van Warmelo calls ‘kaptein’. Van Warmelo confirms our Mozambican ancestry when he reports that the first three chiefs – Bungu, Mukhanwe and Khutla – were sub-chiefs at a place called Bileni in Mozambique. We learn also that the surname of all the chiefs had always been Manganyi. After migration from Mozambique to South Africa the succession involved Mavambe, Chabani, Muhlava, John Muhlava Mavambe, Morris Manganyi, Patrick Manganyi and John Magezi Manganyi, and I, too, was given the name Chabani – Noel Chabani George Manganyi.
Van Warmelo concludes his account by stating that the majority of the inhabitants of Mavambe were Tsongas. He is probably right; yet, during my boyhood in the 1950s and 1960s many Tshivenda-speaking families lived in our midst. Sadly, as Hendrik Verwoerd’s apartheid policies started to take hold during the 1960s, large numbers of Tshivenda-speaking members of our community were forced to move to predominantly Tshivenda-speaking areas across the Levubu River. The national loss of ethnic and cultural diversity involved in the separate development policy of the 1960s planted the insidious seeds of cultural and political fragmentation, which the independent homelands policy brought to fruition over the next several decades.
I do not know when my parents were born. My grandfather, a man I never set eyes on, was one of the many chiefs who were descendants of the family from Mozambique. His name was Chabani and I was dutifully named after him, though I had no prospect whatsoever of becoming a chief. I learnt when I grew up that there had been succession disputes in the past and my father was determined to stay out of the fray. He lived, worked and later died in Johannesburg, as though he was at pains to demonstrate his rejection of the chieftainship throughout his life.
Mavambe Store, named after the local chief and still in existence today, is a stone’s throw away from my childhood home. I remember the sedentary shopkeeper, Jerry Khangale, who became my first adult friend of a kind in Mavambe in the early 1950s. A short distance away from the shop and along the road to Phunda Maria stood a ramshackle brownish building that was called a hotel. I remember some locals meeting there to buy and drink home-brewed beer. Nwambhangini, a short, dark-skinned, enterprising woman, was the power behind this thriving but illegal undertaking.
My memories include regular meetings of the chief and his councillors under the big tree at the chief’s homestead and the comings and goings of men from the mines in Johannesburg being transported home to Mozambique and Malawi on buses owned by the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association. The miners would stop over on Saturday afternoons and drink more alcohol than was good for them in Mavambe Store.
At Christmas time, when most migrant workers, including my father, were home for the holidays, there were plenty of sweets and chocolates, new school clothes and shoes for me, plus the melodic sound of the His Master’s Voice gramophone. Our single-room house contained a sizeable double bed, a wooden table and chairs. Cutlery was brought into daily use only when my father was home.
This rural tranquillity was shattered briefly and our village and the neighbouring communities put on edge by a murder in one of the local forests. Fortunately for all concerned, a citizen’s arrest brought welcome relief. A story spread throughout the village to the effect that the murderer, whose identity remained a mystery, had been tied to a tree until police from Sibasa arrived to fetch him. For some time after this incident I remained fearful at night because there were only the two of us, my mother and me, at our home.
Well before I went to high school, my father had decided, like so many African men in those days, to marry a second wife. She was my mother’s niece. It was not long before there were consequences for the four of us. Instead of maintaining only the one home that he had so successfully supported in Mavambe, he joined the increasing millions of African migrant workers who were making the cities and towns of the Witwatersrand their second home. My father moved out of the single-sex hostel in which he had lived for many years to find a bed in a shared, single, all-purpose room in Sixth Avenue in the bustling Johannesburg township of Alexandra. At one stage in the mid-1950s two couples and a boy my age lived in the room.
My father must have known that he would struggle to support two families – he was biting off more than he could chew. No matter how well intentioned he was, the wife in Mavambe was going to play second fiddle to the one who spent most nights with him in Johannesburg. Remarkably, he made sure he had a job to wake up to throughout his working life, but it took several years of living in single rooms in Alexandra township and in Sun Valley in Pimville, Soweto, before he qualified for a cramped, three-room, semi-detached house in Zone 5, Diepkloof. On the few occasions that I visited him in Johannesburg, I was struck by the unfamiliar signs of naked poverty that surrounded the place in Soweto that we called home. The solid wooden furniture, double bed, crockery and cutlery of my youth in Mavambe were