My friend June tells the story of how her mother arrived, as a young bride, a stranger, to the small Eastern Cape village that was to be her home for the next 50 years.
It was the early 1950s and, barely 21, her painfully shy English-speaking mum was now a farmer’s wife. As the new Mrs F settled into life in this foreign Afrikaans community, she made huge efforts to fit in, often pandering to the whims of the demanding, carefully coiffed farmer wives.
She learnt how to bake mosbolletjies and rusks and melktert, she added sugar to her cooked vegetables, she stiff upper-lipped her way through the slaughter and preparation of livestock for her own kitchen. She mastered the art of konfyt making, and strung up droëwors alongside chunks of salted meat that would become biltong. She learnt the local languages, Afrikaans and Xhosa.
Mrs F hung onto only two things from her English upbringing: the habit of afternoon tea where she would serve scones with her sweet, scented homemade strawberry konfyt and clotted cream, separated from the cows milk with her own hands.
She heard a woman’s voice ask who the woman in the turquoise dress with the ostrich feather hat was. The answer was in Afrikaans: ‘Who? Her?’
That, and a rose garden that was a sight to behold in the arid, desert-like conditions of the area. Her magnificent roses had to be nursed through the bitter winters, and nurtured through the blistering heat of summer.
She raised three children on that homestead; two petite girls and a rowdy boy whose laughter echoed through the cavernous farmhouse with its wraparound stoep and pointy, green corrugated-iron roof.
It was at her wedding, my friend June said, that she noticed it. The women in the neighbourhood had helped in a myriad ways: paper lanterns were cut; countless squares crocheted into blankets that were strewn on straw bales in the barn; jars of pickles and jams were made to accompany the lamb on a spit main meal.
Her small-boned, fine-featured mum, she said, looked regal in her ostrich feather fascinator, and radiated the relief and joy reserved for mothers whose daughters have married well. When I say married well, I mean that they chose kind, caring, loving, gentle men to walk side by side with them, neither ahead, nor behind.
In the midst of the merriment, as June and her new husband were about to cut the cake, she heard a woman’s voice ask who the woman in the turquoise dress with the ostrich feather hat was. The answer was in Afrikaans: “Who? Her?” The woman pointed to Mrs F.
She’s that new English woman, not from here. She’s the bride’s mother.
Still an outsider
My friend said her jaw dropped. Her mother had lived on the farm, and been a regular in the town, for 40 years. She’d helped mend fences and broken hand-made patchwork blankets; she’d wept when husbands, children, dogs got sick or died; she’d learnt to speak the language, albeit heavily accented, and badly.
A newcomer? Not from here? Mrs F still didn’t belong after four decades? She was still thought of as “the outsider”?
The story resonated with me. When I got to Rhodes and moved into Phelps House, I was the first darkie ever to do so. And the fuss that the warden and the girls made to make me feel welcome was … well … a big fuss.
The year was 1977. I was 19. A hopelessly young 19-year-old, not ready yet to be unleashed on the big bad world. I was terrified — of everything. My parents, and the community that I grew up in ensured that I had led a sheltered life.
Everything was overwhelming. I didn’t fit in, and so I changed how I spoke — pebbles under my tongue, a tape recorder and a million repetitions of “the rain in Spain” to loosen my tight tongue (thank you Jane Osborne and Beth Dickerson) gave me BBC “received pronunciation”.
In the end, I talked differently, dressed differently, and tried to think differently — more like those around me whose parents had allowed them date and who took overseas holidays and who ate in restaurants and who could swim because they could use the public swimming baths in their towns, if they didn’t have pools in their back gardens.
This time, when the violence and the looting and the burning and the hate and the killing began in the part of Johannesburg they live in, Samu and Promise went to ground, literally hiding under the bed in their home
Just when I thought that I belonged and was just one of the gang of girls who lived in Phelps House, I heard someone refer to me as that Indian girl. A very drunk boy/man came up to me at Rag and told me to go back where I came from; to go home to India.
So I knew that actually, I didn’t belong. I didn’t fit in quite as well as I thought I did. I was a foreigner in my own residence, in my own country. I felt connected and disconnected at the same time; a part of everything around me … and not.
The thing that was missing, of course, was fear. Nobody was going to kill me or burn down my bedroom or take all my things, just because they could. But I felt shamed and humiliated for not being accepted. Which is why I understood how my helper Samu felt when she explained how terrified she and her husband Promise are — all the time.
They’re Zimbabwean, you see, and for the most part, they are an integral part of the community they live in and happily socialise with their SA (and other African) neighbours.
In 2015, during that horrific bout of xenophobia in Alexandra Township, their neighbours turned on them. A crazed mob first looted, then set fire to their shack home. It was razed, for no reason other than that they happened to have been born across a porous border, not a dozen hours drive away from where they now lived.
So, this time, when the violence and the looting and the burning and the hate and the killing began in the part of Johannesburg they live in, Samu and Promise went to ground, literally hiding under the bed in their home, hoping the bricks and mortar would shield them from the violence and the horror on the streets.
It doesn’t make sense. A petrol attendant and an apartment block janitor both — separately — told me they approved of the “punishment” of foreigners, especially Nigerians, who came here and sold drugs to their children.
Why not report the drug dealers to the police or take a signed petition to the justice minister, or the mayor or the head of the police force?
*Shrug*
What does it take to belong, to become a part of? How much time has to pass before you are recognised as “one of our own”.
*Shrug*
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