We Are Not Such Things (16 page)

“Sick” in township parlance can often be a euphemism for HIV, which has a 19 percent prevalence rate among South African adults. And Easy was using the word “brother” in the black South African sense: when he said “brother” he meant “cousin.” Biological brothers and sisters are not differentiated from cousins; the family structure is such that uncles and aunts have power and responsibility equal to fathers and mothers, and any local adult can discipline or direct a child—a village to raise a baby, indeed. As a Xhosa person, if your sibling dies or falls ill or simply has too much on his plate, you are expected to take in his children and raise them as your own. In this way, Wowo lived in his uncle’s house from the age of three until the age of eleven, and in this way, he raised his sister’s child.

Xhosa people refer to complete strangers, too, as brother or sister—
bhuti
or
sisi,
respectively. An older man is
tata;
an older woman,
mama
. Nelson Mandela, father of the nation and the world’s most famous Xhosa, is referred to as Tata Mandela. Truly old men and women are addressed with great extravagance as
tatomkhulu
(grandfather, the term Easy and others used to address Peter Biehl) or
makhulu
(grandmother, the term Easy and others use to address Linda Biehl). Once, a young man addressed me as mama.

“No, call me sisi!” I said, and he looked at me blankly. I thought he was telling me that I was old, like when people stopped calling me “miss” and started calling me “ma’am.” But later I learned that “mama” was simply a term of honor and respect, and the man had been trying to flatter me. To be mama is to be held in high regard, though to be bhuti or sisi isn’t bad either. A Xhosa friend once explained to me that in adhering a familial term to a person, one humanizes him or her.

“Even if you don’t know my name, if you call me sisi, I am
somebody
.”

By the time of his death in 1997, Melvin was a tata, or a tatomkhulu. In traditional Xhosa culture, a baby’s umbilical cord and placenta are buried near their birthplace—Lady Frere, in Melvin’s case. In a perfect world, a Xhosa returns to die near this very burial place, near his ancestors and relatives, on the land they all worked, completing the circle of life, from the soil and to the soil. You can live anywhere, but your home will always be where your umbilical cord rests—and in fact, when a Xhosa person recites his lineage, he usually begins by stating in Xhosa where his cord is buried.

But Melvin died and was buried in Gugulethu township; he never found the time or the money to return to his homestead and build the hut in which he wished to spend his final days. By the time Melvin died, Mandela was president and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had commenced (in fact, Easy sat before the TRC in the year of Melvin’s death). But the TRC didn’t particularly register with Melvin. So much had been taken from him even before he was born; and after he was born, he was slowly stripped of most prospects he might have had. Melvin’s entire life had been shaped by apartheid politics, but he remained apolitical and had not endured any terribly dramatic incident that labeled him, officially, as a victim: no police beating, no imprisonment or torture. So Melvin did not qualify as someone against whom human rights violations had been committed, and the commission was therefore irrelevant to him, and he was irrelevant to the commission.

Easy’s mother, Kiki, was born Pinky Magdelene Mahula on June 6, 1955, in the tiny, depressed, overcrowded homeland of QwaQwa, that slip of earth designated for the Sotho people by the apartheid government. When Kiki was young, her family relocated to Gugulethu, where they eked out a living. Kiki left school at twelve. Her first baby, born when she was thirteen, couldn’t pronounce Pinky, and called her Kiki—and the nickname stuck. By the time she was twenty, she had four kids in her care. By the time she was thirty, she had seven.

Kiki had no choice but to work, and found a job as a maid and nanny, caring for three strapping white children in a rich white suburb. Kiki’s boys wished that she would wait for them with snacks and hugs when they returned home from school, like they saw TV moms doing, but she was in a Dutch-gabled home near the cricket fields, preparing sandwiches for the children of an insurance executive, and the boys had to make their own way.

The Afrikaans journalist Antjie Krog wrote of visiting an old friend who, when asked if she should provide her maid with soap or a heater during winter, claimed that maids “don’t get cold like white people” and “don’t like washing.” When Krog asked if the maid missed her own faraway children, her friend answered, “Maids don’t feel like other people about their children. They like to be rid of them.” I heard similar sentiments repeated in the white community, over and over again.

These dehumanizing opinions of black people naturally boiled over into neglect and mistreatment by employers of their employees. And such mistreatment naturally caused the employees pain and humiliation, which, since they could not speak up to their employers, they often took out on their own families.

“The white person is very naughty,” Easy remembered. “Our mothers are domestic workers, raising other kids. Our fathers are garden boys. When they come home, your mother push children away. Your father come home and give you harsh punishment.”

Kiki was tired at the end of each long day, and she was not the hugging sort, but she still bandaged her babies’ cuts, gave them baths, cooked their dinners. The elders slaughtered a goat every time a new child was born.

As they grew older, the Nofemela boys became aware of apartheid and what it meant for them. There was a shining world, they learned, outside Gugulethu, but they were not allowed there. Their parents had seen such places, but only because they worked over the city borders.

“We been blocked from town,” Easy said.

In 1950, two years after the National Party took power, Parliament passed the Population Registration Act. This required all South African citizens to register as one of four racial classifications: white, Indian, colored, or black. To determine the race of ethnically ambiguous folks, the government implemented several highly scientific tests, such as the pencil test: If the pencil inserted into your hair fell out, congratulations! You’re not black. Once you had been officially deemed a member of one racial classification, you would have to live, learn, love, and work among other similarly categorized people. Interracial relationships were illegal.

Perhaps more problematic, from the early 1700s until 1986, a series of laws had been passed, bit by bit, to curtail the movement of black people and maintain white control of resources and jobs. By 1956, black men and women over the age of sixteen were required to carry “reference books,” or passbooks, everywhere they went. These books contained their photographs, employment records, fingerprints, ID numbers, tax details, and employment details, which had to be signed by a white employer. If a black person wished to enter a white area for any purpose other than labor, he was to request official written permission, which, if granted, would be noted in his passbook. The passbook was to be furnished to any policeman who demanded to inspect it; failure to produce the pass, or a pass that did not justify its bearer’s movement, was grounds for immediate arrest. In 1975, when Easy was four years old, nearly 400,000 people were arrested for offenses related to their passes.

Taking the kids to the city was not, therefore, an easy feat. At night, from the dark townships, you could make out the sparkling city center in the distance, an unreachable world eleven miles west. When Easy did make the rare twenty-five-minute expedition to Cape Town—say, to accompany his parents to a government office or to work—he returned to Gugulethu with stories: skyscrapers, abounding electricity, seaside boardwalks, white folks in bespoke suits carrying leather briefcases, markets full of figs and peaches and whole roast chickens on the spit, rings of fried cake called doughnuts, malls displaying fashionable clothes, mansions on oak-lined streets, pruned botanical gardens full of picnickers in pretty dresses. It was the 1980s.

“You see the beautiful lights far away, you visit the city,” Easy remembered. “You tell your friend, ‘Yho! I was in America.’ ”

But once Easy had made it to this makeshift America, his experience was limited to that of an observer, alternately enraged and admiring. Easy could not step foot into the gleaming stores except to buy something and get out; so that white businesses did not lose potential customers, black people were permitted to buy food but not sit down and eat it. Easy could not walk on the same beaches as white people or sit on the same park benches or use certain toilets. Taxis, buses, trains, elevators, hotels, churches, parks, movie theaters, and restaurants were segregated. The entrances to the nice areas were marked with large signs stating a simple regulation, spelled out in Afrikaans and English, and enforced by both civilians and police, viciously if they were in the mood:

BLANKES ALLEEN

WHITES ONLY

Easy and I started to see each other more often. He allowed me to ride along with him in the cranky Amy Biehl Foundation vans. I sat to his left as he drove kids from their schools in the townships to their various lessons in the ritzier parts of town: guitar, cello, singing, ballet. The van was always full of loaves of bread, which were to be ferried from the foundation to the after-school programs. Once, we stopped at a light where an old lady stood in the rain, holding up a sign asking for help. I motioned to the pile of white bread, encased in plastic, on the floor.

“We can’t give her some bread?” I asked Easy. He picked up two loaves from the floor and handed them out the window. “Is it against the rules?”

“You can see the condition,” Easy said as the light turned green. “You can break the rules.” Then he thought for a moment. “In fact, is not breaking the rules. You can teach.”

The foundation management, which had initially supported my research, seemed now irritated by my presence. Easy forgot a volunteer in the township one evening and was calling in sick a lot, and a couple of his bosses told me that I was a distraction. They were also warring with Linda, way across the Atlantic, over the direction of the foundation, and they seemed worried that I was a mole.

“I must ask, does Linda have any editorial power over your work?” the HR director asked me during a tense meeting. She was a broad, officious woman with a no-nonsense blond bob; she had retired from the British military and now volunteered for the foundation. The British woman additionally requested a synopsis of the book.

My concern is that Easy might not be a “true” reflection of the Foundation
, the foundation’s publicist wrote me in an email.

Soon enough, it became so difficult for me to access Easy via official channels that I gave up. Their attempts to block me from seeing him, however, worked in my favor. When figures of authority attempted to impose rules on Easy, he considered it “oppression” and immediately found ways to circumvent them. He believed that if he didn’t use every single one of his vacation days as well as his overtime, “in a sense, is exploitation! They exploiting me!” Easy was already unhappy with the number of colored people on the management team, likening it to a “colored empire.” (Other than the white managing director, Kevin Chaplin, Ntobeko, and the British woman who volunteered to work HR, the management team was colored.) Now he felt that these very people were further undermining his hard-earned freedom by trying to interface with whom he could see. He would therefore throw off the shackles and hang out with me whenever possible.

“I don’t like when somebody close the door that supposed to be open,” he said. “When I meet you, we became friends, we share, we continue the friendship. You ask to speak to me or Ntobeko. Ntobeko refuse. They ask me, they say, ‘Please, please, please, Easy,’ crossing fingers. I said, ‘Okay, I will try.’ They said, ‘Wow!’ They were happy. Now, end of story, they are moody. Same people who create our friendship are same people who have problem now. I hate that.”