To Survive and Succeed - Mkhuseli Jack

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leading them in scripture reading and prayers at the morning assembly point.

      Mr Msizi’s wife, who was also a teacher, replaced him as the head of the school when he was promoted to a high school. By the time she took over, all my older brothers had abandoned school to work as farm labourers in the potato fields of the Langkloof area. My older sister was a domestic worker for one of the farm owners.

      I enjoyed learning to draw circles, to count and later to read and write in isiXhosa. We had no books at home, but I had always enjoyed stories. I particularly liked the biblical stories we were taught at school – stories of Abraham who was willing to sacrifice his son for his belief in God, and Moses who was born into slavery and grew up in the oppressive Pharaoh’s palace, but ended up leading his people to the land of milk and honey. In my first four years of schooling the biblical stories were more appealing to me than all the other lessons.

      I started attending church only when I was thirteen. It was an Anglican Church and I used to watch the boys who were servers with great envy. The sermon that stood out for me was about two men, one wealthy, the other poor – Dives and Lazarus. The essence of the preacher’s sermon was that God is capable of hearing our pain and can bring our suffering to an end out of His love and mercy. The message I got was that there was something wrong with the situation we were facing as black people in our land.

      On one occasion I accompanied my mother to the Anglican Church when an invitation was extended to the women in the surrounding farming community. It was said that a certain woman from the city was going to address them. I did not know her name, title, or the organisation she represented – I was just curious to see her and listen to her. My mother insisted that I was not invited – the invitation was only for women. I pleaded with her to let me tag along and promised I would behave and she reluctantly agreed.

      The woman arrived driving a car. A black woman driving a car! That was a first for me. I wanted to touch her, but I could not as I had promised to behave myself. The women who were assigned to meet her greeted her first. I saw them talking to her and they started to escort her towards the other women to whom she was introduced, one by one. As she came closer to my mother I decided to put on my best face and was so proud of my mother when she was also appropriately introduced to a person who definitely, in my little world, was of high class. The woman touched my head and asked my name. When I told her, she smiled and said: ‘We need a lot of Mkhuselis in this troubled country of ours.’ I loved the attention but did not understand what her comment meant.

      During her address, she told the Bible story of a certain King Ahab, his wife Jezebel, and a vineyard owned by Naboth, the king’s subject. Apparently the king wanted Naboth’s vineyard for his personal use. He offered Naboth money or a vineyard somewhere else, but Naboth told the king: ‘I inherited this vineyard from my ancestors. The Lord forbids that I should let you have it.’ The king became very angry. His wife told him that she was going to organise people to deal with Naboth. Stories were spread that Naboth had insulted the king and God and finally he was stoned to death. When Jezebel got the news that he was dead she told the king to take possession of the vineyard.

      Our important visitor said God did not like what the king and his wife had done. By the time she reached the point where a prophet was telling the king what would happen to him and his children, my mind was lit up and my imagination had wandered far away. I was suddenly filled with sorrow. I looked up at my mother but she did not respond to my gaze. The realisation hit me – a boy of fourteen – that the Bible was saying that taking somebody’s land was a sin. The only consolation was that we were still alive. We had not been stoned like Naboth because a greedy king coveted land Naboth had inherited from his ancestors.

      This story had a lasting impact on me. Before we went to Oyster Bay to squat on other people’s land we used to have land we called our own. Before we were evicted we had limitless access to vast grazing and arable land. It was my understanding that this had been the land of our kinsmen for generations.

      As the woman was driving home her point about the unacceptable behaviour of the king and his wife, I recalled our tears of despair and pleas for help after being made homeless and landless. The message that my brothers and sisters kept repeating to us – that we were ‘reasonably prosperous’ before we were uprooted from the farm – was ringing in my ears, and it did not go away.

      I was impressed by what the speaker was saying, and by her appearance. She was neatly dressed and was wearing a nice perfume. Her skin was smooth, without a single blemish or any sign of hardship as was the case with the farm women. She was of the same class of women that we called iNgesikazi, meaning an English woman. This Ngesikazi meant that she was of a higher class than our missuses, that is, the wives of the farmers. The farmers’ wives were always simply and cheaply dressed compared with those who were regarded as classy English women.

      The English classy woman we used as a benchmark was Mrs Phoebe van Tonder. We nicknamed her Nomgcikilwane, describing her slender, elegant figure. Nomgcikilwane was always dressed as if she was off to attend a high-class social function in Johannesburg where, the rumour said, she had come from. She was dressed like that even when she was instructing us to dig a hole for a new tip for rubbish, or to level the gravel roads after heavy rain. You could smell her perfume even when she was out of sight. Her nails and high-heeled shoes were always perfectly polished and she was never without her make-up and bright red lipstick.

      CHAPTER 4

      Hell, damnation – and salvation

      As there were not many believers in our rural area, there were few church services. When a priest visited the area four times a year, we attended. I found the sermons meaningful and began to understand and like the Bible, but it was a luxury. Although we could not afford to own one, I started to nag my mother to buy a copy. I was in Standard 2 (Grade 4) when she gave in and bought the gospel of St Matthew. It cost four cents. That was the first time in my home that money had been ‘wasted’ on reading material. Within two weeks I had read the book from cover to cover and could not wait to raise enough money to get copies of the other gospels. I bought the next one using money I had earned from selling redbait and white mussel to holidaymakers, who used them for fishing bait. It was the book of St John.

      I was reaching the age where I was able to do piecework, casual jobs that were not too strenuous – to avoid bringing on an asthma attack. Jobs such as working in the gardens of holiday homes belonging to wealthy white people were relatively well paid. This meant that I managed to acquire the other gospels, St Mark and St Luke. But there was always a heated argument at home about why I was spending my money without consulting others. Were these books a priority? I was asked.

      The Bible and its stories were sometimes a double-edged sword; one minute it was telling me about social injustices and the unfairness of men towards men; the next minute it was frightening the hell out of me. Mntuyedwa Sixhayi Sotyelelwa, also affectionately known as Maxhayi, was a great-uncle through marriage (the brother of my mom’s uncle’s wife). He was an elder in the Dutch Reformed Church, the version for black people, and was a proponent of the frightening side of the Bible. He had never gone to school but he could read the Bible and quote from it, chapter and verse. Maxhayi worked on Mr Bellingham’s farm, where the school was, and he also owned a general dealer store selling groceries to farm labourers.

      Maxhayi and his wife Nobantu stayed in their mud-and-corrugated iron house on Mr Bellingham’s property, as was customary for labourers. The family relationship through my mother was sufficient for us to spend a night at his house because of its proximity to the school. He was also close to farm fields with delicious watermelons. Of course the watermelons were to be stolen. Another attraction was the possibility of getting stolen mutton, since a known sheep thief was active in that area. Dlamnana was a legendary sheep thief, with a reputation that some boys argued could not be challenged by anyone. Some in the local criminal community said that cats did not escape Dlamnana’s voracious appetite. The local farmers knew that when Dlamnana was out of prison the task of counting sheep had to be doubled – something they did not bother to do when Dlamnana was in jail.

      When a sheep is stolen, slaughtered and cooked it has to be eaten and no evidence should remain. Dlamnana, it was said, needed a few young boys to clean up

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