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Authors: Charles Larson

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(
BORN 1919) SOUTH AFRICA
In the depths of apartheid, at the same time that he wrote “Mrs. Plum,” Es'kia Mphahlele noted in
Voices in the Whirlwind
(1972): “The black man is in the majority in South Africa. The agony of waiting for ‘something' to happen here is of a different kind from the agony in the black American situation. The black American has to work toward the point where the white man will weaken, not out of any moral considerations but out of necessity. The black man in South Africa has to work toward breaking the white man. He needs to hate more than he is doing. Only after the revolution can he allow the civilized white to stay for the reconstruction.”
In an earlier work called
The African Image
(1962), Mphahlele had remarked about the relationships between many Africans and Europeans: “This is a continent of servants—servants of all kinds. There are as many conceivable kinds of relationships between master and servant as the writer cares to explore; especially in the case of white master and black servant, the usual pattern in Africa.”
Mphahlele has been a major force in African letters—literally across the continent. In 1950, he was one of the founding editors and writers of
Drum
, the South African journal. His autobiography,
Down Second Avenue
(1959), remains one of the major documents of growing up black under apartheid. That book and several of his other early works were banned in South Africa, forcing Mphahlele into exile for many years.
The African Image
codified black
artistry from an African perspective at a time when most commentaries were Western.
Dr. Mphahlele (he earned a Ph.D. in English at the University of Denver) continued, in exile, to write short stories, novels, and criticism. His novel
The Wanderers
(1971) spoke eloquently about displacement for South Africans, though the exile was in West and East Africa. The narrator explores the problems of Pan-Africanism, asking at one point: “How can I make my children understand we have all wandered away from something—all of us blacks; that we are not in close contact with the spirit of Nature, although we may be with its forces, that growing up for us is no more the integrated process it was for our forebears, but that this is also a universal problem?”
Of the writer himself, Mphahlele remarked in
The African Image:
“I would like to think that the writer and the artist will be better able to delve deep down into a people's personality, a people's consciousness … . The best he can do is to make us aware of ourselves, know ourselves as we truly are and can be. The politician defines the social situation in terms of imperatives. The writer, as teacher and entertainer, in terms other than the politician's. And yet he arrives at something like a set of imperatives. That is the paradox he is.”
Es'kia Mphahlele broke his exile in 1977 and returned to South Africa. He worked for two years as an educational inspector in Lebowa, where he had spent part of his childhood. In 1979, he was granted a Research Fellowship at Rhodes University, in the Institute for the Study of English in Africa. Later the same year, he was appointed Senior Research Fellow at the University of Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg. In 1983, he inaugurated the division of African Literature, at Witwatersrand, in the Department of Comparative Literature. Since that time, he has remained active as a writer, teacher, and editor/publisher of African literature.
My madam's name was Mrs. Plum. She loved dogs and Africans and said that everyone must follow the law even if it hurt. These were three big things in Madam's life.
I came to work for Mrs. Plum in Greenside, not very far from the center of Johannesburg, after leaving two white families. The first white people I worked for as a cook and laundry woman were a man and his wife in Parktown North. They drank too much and always forgot to pay me. After five months I said to myself, No. I am going to leave these drunks. So that was it. That day I was as angry as a red-hot iron when it meets water. The second house I cooked and washed for had five children who were badly brought up. This was in Belgravia. Many times they called me You Black Girl and I kept quiet. Because their mother heard them and said nothing. Also I was only new from Phokeng, my home, far away near Rustenburg, I wanted to learn and know the white people before I knew how far to go with the others I would work for afterwards. The thing that drove me mad and made me pack and go was a man who came to visit them often. They said he was cousin or something like that. He came to the kitchen many times and tried to make me laugh. He patted me on the buttocks. I told the master. The man did it again and I asked the madam that very day to give me my money and let me go.
These were the first nine months after I had left Phokeng to work in
Johannesburg. There were many of us girls and young women from Phokeng, from Zeerust, from Shuping, from Kosten, and many other places who came to work in the cities. So the suburbs were full of blackness. Most of us had already passed Standard Six and so we learned more English where we worked. None of us liked to work for white farmers, because we know too much about them on the farms near our homes. They do not pay well and they are cruel people.
At Eastertime so many of us went home for a long weekend to see our people and to eat chicken and sour milk and
morogo
—wild spinach. We also took home sugar and condensed milk and tea and coffee and sweets and custard powder and tinned foods.
It was a home girl of mine, Chimane, who called me to take a job in Mrs. Plum's house, just next door to where she worked. This is the third year now. I have been quite happy with Mrs. Plum and her daughter Kate. By this I mean that my place as a servant in Greenside is not as bad as that of many others. Chimane, too, does not complain much. We are paid six pounds a month with free food and free servant's room. No one can ever say that they are well paid, so we go on complaining somehow. Whenever we meet on Thursday afternoons, which is time off for all of us black women in the suburbs, we talk and talk and talk: about our people at home and their letters; about their illnesses; about bad crops; about a sister who wanted a school uniform and books and school fees; about some of our madams and masters who are good, or stingy with money or food, or stupid or full of nonsense, or who kill themselves and each other, or who are dirty—and so many things I cannot count them all.
Thursday afternoons we go to town to look at the shops, to attend a woman's club, to see our boyfriends, to go to bioscope some of us. We turn up smart, to show others the clothes we bought from the black men who sell soft goods to servants in the suburbs. We take a number of things and they come round every month for a bit of money until we finish paying. Then we dress the way of many white madams and girls. I think we look really smart. Sometimes we catch the eyes of a white woman looking at us and we laugh and laugh until we nearly drop on the ground because we feel good inside ourselves.
What did the girl next door call you? Mrs. Plum asked me the first day I came to her. Jane, I replied. Was there not an African name? I said yes,
Karabo. All right, Madam said. We'll call you Karabo, she said. She spoke as if she knew a name is a big thing. I knew so many whites who did not care what they called black people as long as it was all right for their tongue. This pleased me, I mean Mrs. Plum's use of
Karabo;
because the only time I heard the name was when I was home or when my friends spoke to me. Then she showed me what to do: meals, mealtimes, washing, and where all the things were that I was going to use.
My daughter will be here in the evening, Madam said. She is at school. When the daughter came, she added, she would tell me some of the things she wanted me to do for her every day.
Chimane, my friend next door, had told me about the daughter Kate, how wild she seemed to be, and about Mr. Plum, who had killed himself with a gun in a house down the street. They had left the house and come to this one.
Madam is a tall woman. Not slender, not fat. She moves slowly, and speaks slowly. Her face looks very wise, her forehead seems to tell me she has a strong liver: she is not afraid of anything. Her eyes arc always swollen at the lower eyelids like a white person who has not slept for many many nights or like a large frog. Perhaps it is because she smokes too much, like wet wood that will not know whether to go up in flames or stop burning. She looks me straight in the eyes when she talks to me, and I know she does this with other people, too. At first this made me fear her, now I am used to her. She is not a lazy woman, and she does many things outside, in the city and in the suburbs.
This was the first thing her daughter Kate told me when she came and we met. Don't mind Mother, Kate told me. She said, She is sometimes mad with people for very small things. She will soon be all right and speak nicely to you again.
Kate, I like her very much, and she likes me, too. She tells me many things a white woman does not tell a black servant. I mean things about what she likes and does not like, what her mother does or does not do, all these. At first I was unhappy and wanted to stop her, but now I do not mind.
Kate looks very much like her mother in the face. I think her shoulders will be just as round and strong-looking. She moves faster than Madam. I asked her why she was still at school when she was so big. She laughed. Then she tried to tell me that the school where she was was for big people who had finished with lower school. She was learning big things about cooking
and food. She can explain better, me I cannot. She came home on weekends.
Since I came to work for Mrs. Plum, Kate has been teaching me plenty of cooking. I first learned from her and Madam the word
recipes
. When Kate was at the big school, Madam taught me how to read cookery books. I went on very slowly at first, slower than an ox-wagon. Now I know more. When Kate came home, she found I had read the recipe she left me. So we just cooked straightaway. Kate thinks I am fit to cook in a hotel. Madam thinks so, too. Never never! I thought. Cooking in a hotel is like feeding oxen. No one can say thank you to you. After a few months I could cook the Sunday lunch and later I could cook specials for Madam's or Kate's guests.
Madam did not only teach me cooking. She taught me how to look after guests. She praised me when I did very very well—not like the white people I had worked for before. I do not know what runs crooked in the heads of other people. Madam also had classes in the evenings for servants to teach them how to read and write. She and two other women in Greenside taught in a church hall.
As I say, Kate tells me plenty of things about Madam. She says to me she says, My mother goes to meetings many times. I ask her I say, What for? She says to me she says, For your people. I ask her I say, My people are in Phokeng far away. They have got mouths, I say. Why does she want to say something for them? Does she know what my mother and what my father want to say? They can speak when they want to. Kate raises her shoulders and drops them and says, How can I tell you, Karabo? I don't say your people—your family only. I mean all the black people in the country. I say, Oh! What do the black people want to say? Again she raises her shoulders and drops them, taking a deep breath.
I ask her I say, With whom is she in the meeting?
She says, With other people who think like her.
I ask her I say, Do you say there are people in the world who think the same things?
She nods her head.
I ask, What things?
So that a few of your people should one day be among those who rule this country, get more money for what they do for the white man, and—what did Kate say again? Yes, that Madam and those who think like her also wanted my people who have been to school to choose those who must speak
for them in the—I think she said it looks like a
Kgotla
at home who rule the villages.
I say to Kate I say, Oh I see now. I say, Tell me, Kate, why is Madam always writing on the machine, all the time every day nearly?
She replies she says, Oh my mother is writing books.
I ask, You mean a book like those?—pointing at the books on the shelves.
Yes, Kate says.
And she told me how Madam wrote books and other things for newspapers and she wrote for the newspapers and magazines to say things for the black people, who should be treated well, be paid more money, for the black people who can read and write many things to choose those who want to speak for them.
Kate also told me she said, My mother and other women who think like her put on black belts over their shoulders when they are sad and they want to show the white government they do not like the things being done by whites to blacks. My mother and the others go and stand where the people in government are going to enter or go out of a building.
I ask her I say, Does the government and the white people listen and stop their sins? She says No. But my mother is in another group of white people.
I ask, Do the people of the government give the women tea and cakes? Kate says, Karabo! How stupid; oh!
I say to her I say, Among my people if someone comes and stands in front of my house I tell him to come in and I give him food. You white people are wonderful. But they keep standing there and the government people do not give them anything.
She replies, You mean strange. How many times have I taught you not to say
wonderful
when you mean
strange
! Well, Kate says with a short heart and looking cross and she shouts, Well they do not stand there the whole day to ask for tea and cakes, stupid. Oh dear!
Always when Madam finished to read her newspapers she gave them to me to read to help me speak and write better English. When I had read she asked me to tell her some of the things in it. In this way, I did better and better and my mind was opening and opening and I was learning and learning many things about the black people inside and outside the towns which I did not know in the least. When I found words that were too difficult or I did not understand some of the things, I asked Madam. She always told me, You see this, you see that, eh? with a heart that can carry on a long way.
Yes, Madam writes many letters to the papers. She is always sore about the way the white police beat up black people; about the way black people who work for whites are made to sit at the Zoo Lake with their hearts hanging, because the white people say our people are making noise on Sunday afternoon when they want to rest in their houses and gardens; about many ugly things that happen when some white people meet black man on the pavement or street. So Madam writes to the papers to let others know, to ask the government to be kind to us.
In the first year Mrs. Plum wanted me to eat at table with her. It was very hard, one because I was not used to eating at table with a fork and knife, two because I heard of no other kitchen worker who was handled like this. I was afraid. Afraid of everybody, of Madam's guests if they found me doing this. Madam said I must not be silly. I must show that African servants can also eat at table. Number three, I could not eat some of the things I loved very much: mealie-meal porridge with sour milk or
morogo
, stamped mealies mixed with butter beans, sour porridge for breakfast, and other things. Also, except for morning porridge, our food is nice when you eat with the hand. So nice that it does not stop in the mouth or the throat to greet anyone before it passes smoothly down.
We often had lunch together with Chimane next door and our garden boy—Ha! I must remember never to say boy again when I talk about a man. This makes me think of a day during the first few weeks in Mrs. Plum's house. I was talking about Dick her garden man and I said “garden boy.” And she says to me she says, Stop talking about a “boy,” Karabo. Now listen here, she says, You Africans must learn to speak properly about each other. And she says, White people won't talk kindly about you if you look down upon each other.
I say to her I say, Madam, I learned the word from the white people I worked for, and all the kitchen maids say “boy.”
She replies she says to me, Those are white people who know nothing, just low-class whites. I say to her I say, I thought white people know everything.
She said, You'll learn, my girl, and you must start in this house, hear? She left me there thinking, my mind mixed up.
I learned. I grew up.
If any woman or girl does not know the Black Crow Club in Bree Street, she does not know anything. I think nearly everything takes place inside and outside that house. It is just where the dirty part of the city begins, with factories and the market. After the market is the place where Indians and Coloured people live. It is also at the Black Crow that the buses turn round and go back to the black townships. Noise, noise, noise all the time. There are women who sell hot sweet potatoes and fruit and monkey nuts and boiled eggs in the winter, boiled mealies and the other things in the summer, all these on the pavements. The streets are always full of potato and fruit skins and monkey nut shells. There is always a strong smell of roast pork. I think it is because of Piel's cold storage down Bree Street.
Madam said she knew the black people who work in the Black Crow. She was happy that I was spending my afternoon on Thursday in such a club. You will learn sewing, knitting, she said, and other things that you like. Do you like to dance? I told her I said, Yes, I want to learn. She paid the two shillings fee for me each month.
We waited on the first floor, we the ones who were learning sewing; waiting for the teacher. We talked and laughed about madams and masters, and their children and their dogs and birds and whispered about our boyfriends.
Siesl
My Madam you do not know—
mojuta oa'nete
—a real miser …
Jo—jo—jo
! you should see our new dog. A big thing like this. People! Big in a foolish way …
What! Me, I take a master's bitch by the leg, me, and throw it away so that it keeps howling,
tjwe
—
tjwe
!
ngo
—
wu ngo
—
wu!
I don't play about with them, me …
Shame, poor thing! God sees you, true … !
They wanted me to take their dog out for a walk every afternoon and I told them I said, It is not my work, in other houses the garden man does it. I just said to myself I said, They can go to the chickens. Let them bite their elbows before I take out a dog, I am not so mad yet …
Hei!
It is not like the child of my white people who keeps a big white rat and you know what? He puts it on his bed when he goes to school. And let the blankets just begin to smell of urine and all the nonsense and they tell me to wash them.
Hei
, people … !
Did you hear about Rebone, people? Her Madam put her out, because her master was always tapping her buttocks with his fingers. And yesterday the madam saw the master press Rebone against himself …
Jo—jo—jo
! people … !
Dirty white man!
No, not dirty. The madam smells too old for him.
Hei
! Go and wash your mouth with soap, this girl's mouth is dirty …
Jo
, Rebone, daughter of the people! We must help her to find a job before she thinks of going back home.
The teacher came. A woman with strong legs, a strong face, and kind eyes. She had short hair and dressed in a simple but lovely floral frock. She stood well on her legs and hips. She had a black mark between the two top front teeth. She smiled as if we were her children. Our group began with games, and then Lilian Ngoyi took us for sewing. After this she gave a brief talk to all of us from the different classes.
I can never forget the things this woman said and how she put them to us. She told us that the time had passed for black girls and women in the suburbs to be satisfied with working, sending money to our people, and going to see them once a year. We were to learn, she said, that the world would never be safe for black people until they were in the government with the power to make laws. The power should be given by the Africans who were more than the whites.
We asked her questions and she answered them with wisdom. I shall put some of them down in my own words as I remember them.
Shall we take the place of the white people in the government?
Some yes. But we shall be more than they as we are more in the country. But also the people of all colors will come together and there are good white men we can choose and there are Africans some white people will choose to be in the government.
There are good madams and masters and bad ones. Should we take the good ones for friends?
A master and a servant can never be friends. Never, so put that out of your head, will you! You are not even sure if the ones you say are good are not like that because they cannot breathe or live without the work of your hands. As long as you need their money, face them with respect. But you must know that many sad things are happening in our country and you, all of you, must always be learning, adding to what you already know, and obey us when we ask you to help us.
At other times Lilian Ngoyi told us she said, Remember your poor people at home and the way in which the whites are moving them from place to
place like sheep and cattle. And at other times again she told us she said, Remember that a hand cannot wash itself, it needs another to do it.
I always thought of Madam when Lilian Ngoyi spoke. I asked myself, What would she say if she knew that I was listening to such words. Words like: A white man is looked after by his black nanny and his mother when he is a baby. When he grows up the white government looks after him, sends him to school, makes it impossible for him to suffer from the great hunger, keeps a job ready and open for him as soon as he wants to leave school. Now Lilian Ngoyi asked she said, How many white people can be born in a white hospital, grow up in white streets, be clothed in lovely cotton, lie on white cushions; how many whites can live all their lives in a fenced place away from people of other colors and then, as men and women learn quickly the correct ways of thinking, learn quickly to ask questions in their minds, big questions that will throw over all the nice things of a white man's life? How many? Very, very few! For those whites who have not begun to ask, it is too late. For those who have begun and are joining us with both feet in our house, we can only say Welcome!
I was learning. I was growing up. Every time I thought of Madam, she became more and more like a dark forest which one fears to enter, and which one will never know. But there were several times when I thought, This woman is easy to understand, she is like all other white women. What else are they teaching you at the Black Crow, Karabo?
I tell her I say, Nothing, Madam. I ask her I say, Why does Madam ask?
You are changing.
What does Madam mean?
Well, you are changing.
But we are always changing, Madam.
And she left me standing in the kitchen. This was a few days after I had told her that I did not want to read more than one white paper a day. The only magazines I wanted to read, I said to her, were those from overseas, if she had them. I told her that white papers had pictures of white people most of the time. They talked mostly about white people and their gardens, dogs, weddings and parties. I asked her if she could buy me a Sunday paper that spoke about my people. Madam bought it for me. I did not think she would do it.
There were mornings when, after hanging the white people's washing on the line, Chimane and I stole a little time to stand at the fence and talk. We always stood where we could be hidden by our rooms.
Hei,
Karabo, you know what? That was Chimane.
No—what? Before you start, tell me, has Timi come back to you?
Ach, I do not care. He is still angry. But boys are fools, they always come back dragging themselves on their empty bellies.
Hei
, you know what?
Yes?
The Thursday past I saw Moruti K.K. I laughed until I dropped on the ground. He is standing in front of the Black Crow. I believe his big stomach was crying from hunger. Now he has a small dog in his armpit, and is standing before a woman selling boiled eggs and—
hei
home girl!—tripe and intestines are boiling in a pot—oh—the smell! you could fill a hungry belly with it, the way it was good. I think Moruti K.K. is waiting for the woman to buy a boiled egg. I do not know what the woman was still doing. I am standing nearby. The dog keeps wriggling and pushing out its nose, looking at the boiling tripe. Moruti keeps patting it with his free hand, not so? Again the dog wants to spill out of Moruti's hand and it gives a few sounds through the nose.
Hei
man, home girl! One two three the dog spills out to catch some of the good meat! It misses falling into the hot gravy in which the tripe is swimming I do not know how. Moruti K.K. tries to chase it. It has tumbled onto the woman's eggs and potatoes and all are in the dust. She stands up and goes after K.K. She is shouting to him to pay, not so? Where am I at that time? I am nearly dead with laughter the tears are coming down so far.
I was myself holding tight on the fence so as not to fall through laughing. I held my stomach to keep back a pain in the side.
I ask her I say, Did Moruti K.K. come back to pay for the wasted food?
Yes, he paid.
The dog?
He caught it. That is a good African dog. A dog must look for its own food when it is not time for meals. Not these stupid spoiled angels the whites keep giving tea and biscuits.
Hmm.
Dick our garden man joined us, as he often did. When the story was repeated to him the man nearly rolled on the ground laughing.
He asks who is Reverend K.K.
I say he is the owner of the Black Crow.
Oh!
We reminded each other, Chimane and I, of the round minister. He would come into the club, look at us with a smooth smile on his smooth round face. He would look at each one of us, with that smile on all the time, as if he had forgotten that it was there. Perhaps he had, because as he looked at us, almost stripping us naked with his watery shining eyes—funny—he could have been a farmer looking at his ripe corn, thinking many things.
K.K. often spoke without shame about what he called ripe girls—
matjitjana
—with good firm breasts. He said such girls were pure without any nonsense in their heads and bodies. Everybody talked a great deal about him and what they thought he must be doing in his office whenever he called in so-and-so.
The Reverend K.K, did not belong to any church. He baptized, married, and buried people for a fee—who had no church to do such things for them. They said he had been driven out of the Presbyterian Church. He had formed his own, but it did not go far. Then he later came and opened the Black Crow. He knew just how far to go with Lilian Ngoyi. She said although he used his club to teach us things that would help us in life, she could not go on if he was doing any wicked things with the girls in his office. Moruti K.K. feared her, and kept his place.

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