We Are Not Such Things (15 page)

Melvin desperately missed his family, his hometown, his community. He returned annually to slowly build a small traditional house with a clay floor and straw roof. On one of his short holidays home, he took a second wife, as per Xhosa custom. His longing for his children and his hatred of the sweltering, perilous mines grew. Between 1933 and 1966, nearly twenty thousand men had died in the mines, which did not have adequate safety measures. The vast majority of victims were black. Frightened, both of death and of leaving his family destitute, Melvin searched for another job.

By that time, the Mines and Works Act had been expanded, so that white citizens would get first dibs at employment in other burgeoning industries: the railways, civil service, iron, and steel. Despite this, Melvin managed to get a job laying track for the expanding railways. First, he was based in Lady Frere, but soon the railways moved him to Cape Town. While the second wife remained in Lady Frere, Alice and the children followed, living with thousands of migrants on the outskirts of the city, pitching shacks just miles from stately white-owned 1950s-era homes with all the trappings of Western comfort and modernity. Melvin and Alice held strong against the odds. Often, defeated by distance, lacking telephones, and overwhelmed by loneliness, black men began affairs in the cities, which fractured many families and resulted in scattered children. Despite their commitment to each other, however, the Nofemelas found city living prohibitively expensive; they kept their elder children with them and sent the babies to be raised by relatives in the country.

The government, noting the unending creep of women from the reserves to the city, wished to remove “surplus females” (i.e., women who didn’t serve white businesses or other white interests) and growing families from the locations. But Melvin had other plans. He was saving money with the dream of bringing all of his children back together, one by one.

Nineteen forty-eight was Melvin’s thirty-eighth year. His son Wowo had just been born, and would in two years be sent to live with his uncle. Across the ocean, World War II had come to a close—of the 5,500 South Africans killed while supporting the Allies, a forgotten 25 percent were black. The world was reeling from the Holocaust, and the Nazis were on the losing side of history. But one party in South Africa was taking its inspiration from Hitler. This was the National Party, led by D. F. Malan, a Dutch Reformed cleric who campaigned on the platform of apartheid, Afrikaans for “separateness.”

The central theory behind apartheid was that South Africa was not a single nation, but in fact a collection of separate nations, each populated by a certain ethnic group. Conflict in South Africa stemmed from the unreasonable attempts of these nations to meld into one, and such conflict could be eliminated if only each group existed in separate but equal spheres, free from the demands and traditions of other pesky cultures. As with all systems of segregation, however, the truth was that the founders of apartheid intended to create a society that was indeed separate, but was breathtakingly unequal. Then they could keep all the good stuff for themselves.

Malan’s challenger was the incumbent Jan Smuts, a lesser racist, all things being relative. (Smuts, though opposed to giving blacks political power, helped draft the constitution of the United Nations’ forerunner, the League of Nations, and met with Gandhi on the rights of Indians in South Africa.) Only coloreds in the Cape and whites could vote in the election. On May 26, 1948, Melvin watched from the sidelines as Malan took power. One of the Malan government’s first orders of business was to eliminate the voting rights of coloreds.

In 1950, the National Party passed the Group Areas Act, a law that Prime Minister Malan dubbed with great reverence “the very essence of apartheid.” For centuries, various colonial and white governments had been redistributing black land into white hands, so that less than 10 percent of the population owned more than 85 percent of the land. But after their victorious 1948 election, the Afrikaner nationalists running the country started putting in place what they called
groot apartheid
, or grand apartheid.

The act aimed to forcibly separate each of the four official South African racial classifications into their own living areas. In Cape Town, whites, for the most part, inherited the beautiful city center, the leafiest suburbs, and the ocean views; Indians were bestowed with two small neighborhoods; and colored people were placed in square government matchbox houses in bleak zones that neighbored Gugulethu. Although the records are poor, some studies estimate that between 1960 and 1982, over 3.5 million South Africans were forcibly relocated, ripped from their property, and taken to townships or newly created “homelands.” The apartheid dream was to eventually create a white nation free of black inhabitants.

The homelands would help realize this dream. Each homeland was intended to act as a pseudo-autonomous “nation” for a particular ethnic group, where all its members would live in peace. The homelands, which eventually numbered ten, were actually rural backwaters, where white investment was illegal. They were geographically fractured, separated by white farms, and overcrowded, set on just 13 percent of South African territory. In one central eastern homeland named QwaQwa, designated for the Sotho people, 777 people were expected to survive on the fruits of a single square mile; Easy’s mother, Kiki, had been born there.

There was neither sufficient healthcare nor sanitation in the homelands, which resulted in outbreaks of cholera, tuberculosis, polio, and even the bubonic plague—in the mid- and late twentieth century. In 1974, the infant mortality rate of black children was 110 per 1,000, and the primary cause of their death was malnutrition.

“There was too much witch in the Transkei,” Easy once told me, referring to the portion of today’s Eastern Cape province that included his family’s hometown of Lady Frere. “The women have many miscarriages.”

Melvin, once a citizen of South Africa, was considered by lawmakers a member of the “Xhosa nation,” and was to become a citizen of Transkei, where he was expected to settle permanently. He might work in the “European” cities or towns—and might, in the course of this work, father children in these white areas—but his family would always be temporary laborers in the greater South Africa. As the Department of Bantu Administration and Development stated in 1967: “As soon as [black workers] become, for one reason or another, no longer fit for work, or superfluous in the labour market, they are expected to return to their country of origin or the territory of the national unit where they fit ethnically if they were not born and bred in their homeland.” The state, still intent on marketing the homelands as decolonized areas, installed cooperative black chiefs linked to the apartheid leadership. In 1977, Parliament granted Transkei independence. This independence was recognized by no country in the world other than South Africa.

Melvin, like many black South Africans, defied official attempts at confinement. By the late 1950s, Melvin and Alice had succeeded in bringing all of their twelve children back to Cape Town. They lived in a cramped, makeshift shack in an area called Elsie’s River, on the outskirts of the city. But then, as per the Group Areas Act, Elsie’s River was declared a colored area. Colored people, who had been forced from their homes—many lovely houses near the sea were handed over to whites—were relocated to crime-ridden apartment blocks or shoddy little houses on the Cape Flats. In 1960, Melvin and his family, including thirteen-year-old Wowo, were loaded onto an open truck and driven five miles south, where they were unceremoniously dumped, with their belongings, on a vast field on the border of the preexisting township of Nyanga.

For two weeks, as they built a new shack by hand, they sheltered under a table and washed and drank from a single tap installed a mile away. Nearby sat rows of houses constructed for “bachelor” men, whose purpose was to provide labor to white industry. Those dumped on the field took to calling their new neighborhood “Elsie’s,” since they had all been rounded up there. But soon groups of removals came from elsewhere, and the government dubbed the area Nyanga West.

In 1962, the government saw that Nyanga West was growing, teeming with new arrivals rounded up throughout Cape Town, as well as the regular migrants from the Eastern Cape. They renamed the area “Gugulethu Emergency Camp,” and it would soon become the city’s third official township. Gugulethu means “our pride.”

“What did you do?” I once asked Wowo, as he recalled his displacement.

“You can’t complain. You keep quiet.”

“What did you think?”

“You can’t think nothing if you want to stay alive.”

The white Cape government favored coloreds, likely because Afrikaners and coloreds share a common ancestry, a language, and, often, a disdain for blacks. White people could not be expected to perform much of the menial work needed for the growing economy, and so the government’s plan was to eventually expel blacks from the Western Cape and use coloreds as their cheap labor. But the endeavor proved difficult. First, the colored workforce was not big enough to meet the demand for workers; second, blacks kept illegally sneaking in across the homeland borders, squatting in the bush, and begging for work in the cities. The government soon decided it would have to build more township houses to contain such people. After eight years of squatting in the emergency camp, Melvin’s name came up on the government’s wait list, and the Nofemelas were allowed to rent a small house on NY6. The next year, they were shuffled to a three-bedroom house on NY41; fourteen family members took up residence in the space, sharing a lone outhouse. This overcrowding was common and enduring: in 1978, in a township bordering Gugulethu, a single bed was designated, on average, for six people.

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.”