my bicycle tyre with a nail. Mother believed me, but the husband was furious. He was quicker to undo his belt than to check if the bicycle tyre was actually flat. Telling tales about incidents that happened in the yard was not an option because Mother could also get mad and use her morning slippers trying to beat the truth out of me. In fact, it took very little for her to become mad. Without seeking advice, I knew I had to get my clothes out of this mess and keep quiet about it.
I was down and defeated but the crowd did not disperse. Perhaps they wanted to observe how boesmen stood up after being beaten stukkend. Stand up I did, but I had to steady myself on the nearest wall before facing my cousin.
‘One day when I’m older I’m going to be strong and rich. You’ll come to me for help but I will turn you away.’
I heard sarcastic laughter and for a second it looked as though she was going to punch the lights out of me again.
‘You won’t be rich with my uncle’s money that you and your mother are wasting,’ she said. ‘And listen, boesman, I will never ask for anything from you because there will be nothing to ask for!’
To this day if I close my eyes I can still hear the loud laughter that followed from the crowd.
Since all my attempts to be accepted were unsuccessful, I gave up. It was useless to try to smile when I knew I was not wanted. And that was when I forgot what it was like to smile. A frown and a serious look became my mask. I felt safe behind that mask.
Quietly, I started reading every book I came across. Even though I was in a Tswana school, I taught myself how to read the South Sotho Bible, and when my cousins weren’t watching I stole quiet and peaceful moments to teach myself to read their Zulu books. I was hoping somewhere someone might mention the word boesman. I wanted so badly to know the meaning.
The torture continued. It hurt a lot but I reasoned it was perhaps a good thing done to get all the boesman blood out of me. I concluded that my blood was bad after all and maybe if it all bled out, even through pain, I’d be like my cousins and everyone would like me. With no one to talk to, I looked for answers in novels and the Bible. I could neither cry nor play. I had to keep my mind busy. And while I kept quiet I promised myself, deep down inside, that I was going to get even with them all, I was going to show them one day when I was older that boesmen weren’t stupid and bad as they were always telling me.
What I didn’t know during the time I was constantly being beaten up was that someone succeeded in tearing a blood vessel. This led to heavy nose bleeding that remained unexplained for years. As a teenager and into early adulthood, I frequently had nose bleeds. All I knew was that it made me weak and so I fainted from time to time. Because I had also been told I was born with a weak heart I assumed the fainting was a result of my heart problem.
When I was grown up and had started working, a general practitioner said I was anaemic, and that began a love-hate relationship with iron tablets. I was referred to an ear, nose and throat specialist (an ENT) who tried to patch my torn blood vessel but told me that this wasn’t a permanent solution to the problem. I had to be extra careful not to apply too much pressure on my nose, and not to expose myself to strong sunshine or else the blood vessel would open, my nose would start leaking again and I’d have to pay the ENT another visit.
Paternal Grandmother wasn’t unaware of the way in which I was treated. Moreover, she had her own way of ill-treating me. It was tradition that every weekend at one o’clock she would be served tea and brown bread and butter on the veranda. All the kids would join her. If I ate all the food given me, it would be ‘Mabovana is eating like a pig’, but if I did not want to participate it was ‘Mabovana is too full of herself because she thinks she’s better than us’. But one thing was certain: Mabovana or boesman, I passed both grades one and two with a first class. Some of my cousins were at the bottom of the list and even had to repeat some grades.
I had memorised many verses in the Bible and on the rare instances when Mother and I visited her parents who lived in a place I knew only as being ‘across the dam’, somewhere near the shining lights, Maternal Grandpa liked to tell me that Jesus loved me. He always prayed when we arrived and when we left. His church was not the NG Kerk like ours. He attended Assemblies of God, sometimes called the Back-to-God or Kwatata uBhengu.
I reasoned there must be different Gods because Mother and her in-laws belonged to a church and although Paternal Grandmother insulted me, and sometimes everyone else, she never missed evening prayers with the whole family, as well as saying morning prayers while she lay in her bed preparing to wake up to face the day. I figured that her God understood that she couldn’t kneel because she was fat. She either had to sit on a chair or lie down to pray. I hated her cruel God because without being told I knew it was the same God that Father prayed to.
I also intensely disliked Mother’s passive God who was so blind he didn’t let her see so many things that happened right under her nose. My hatred was something I shared only with the people I played with, the ones I drew on the ground, and some of the characters in the books I read but, come Sunday, we all went to church looking like a decent Christian family.
I liked the God of Maternal Grandpa because one could speak to Him anywhere and everywhere. Grandpa talked to Him standing up and I preferred conversations with Him with my eyes wide open – just in case someone was trying to hit me or do something worse behind my back. On those nights when the moon was full, I’d go outside and sit on a rock next to our house. I’d look at the shining lights across the dam and whisper to the God of Maternal Grandpa, ‘I’m going to be good. I’ll pass all my tests. I’ll wash the dishes and clean the house. I won’t eat a lot of food. If you can, please go and tell my grandpa they’re hurting me and I won’t forget you. I’ll always talk to you.’
To this day when I go on difficult assignments as a journalist and television producer, I still say this prayer I started reciting as a child. That’s the only way I know I’m safe. It was also comforting to know that in Maternal Grandpa’s home almost everyone was light-complexioned, some to the extent of being really white with blue eyes. If you have an uncle going by the nickname of Whitey, then you know your family is a bit on the extreme edge of the acceptable colour in a black township. Maternal Grandpa spoke mainly in Afrikaans. He didn’t seem to be embarrassed by it. He didn’t seem to know there was anything wrong with it. How I wished I could have stayed with him where I would be similar to everyone around me. But there was no way to ask for that. Children didn’t have rights then. We were seen but never heard. Social services and social workers were words I never knew existed until I was an adult living in the big city of Johannesburg.
More than twenty years later when I went to tell Maternal Grandpa that ‘those people’ had hurt me and called me a boesman, he said, ‘I know. I have always known. But I trusted God to protect you. I’m glad you have built enough courage to come to tell me this yourself.’
‘God’ (uZimu in his Ndebele language), Maternal Grandpa said, ‘never fails you.’
But my biggest gripe with God, even Maternal Grandpa’s one, was that He never stopped bad people from hurting me. I seriously thought that if He had wanted to He could just have done it without lifting a finger. I didn’t understand why He couldn’t just do that? It was not the physical scars I sustained during the ill-treatment that were too painful to bear – it was the hurtful words that almost killed me.
Surely God could do better than allowing me and others to suffer?
I’m still waiting to hear why He chooses not to intervene as quickly as possible.
Chapter Two
| no kid asked to be born |
Even though no one called me by my name when I was a young child, I do have different sets of names. My real name is Khabonina. I’m told that’s the name Mother’s parents gave me when I was born. ‘Khabo’ means ‘home’ and ‘nina’ means ‘mother’. It’s an appropriate name given the circumstances under which I was born. Mother wasn’t married when I was born so that made me an illegitimate child. I was born before the era of moral degeneration, in the days when girls remained virgins until they were married,