Being Chris Hani's Daughter - Ferguson Hani

Скачать книгу

he was always there. He would phone almost daily, and we’d all have a chance to talk to him. I would breathlessly narrate my day, filled with “and then, and then” to which he would listen lovingly and patiently. Wherever he happened to be, be it Russia, Mozambique or Zambia, there were phone calls for birthdays, Father’s Day and Christmas Day. And of course our report cards were always sent to him. Heaven help you if you didn’t do well. Stern ‘talking-to’s could go on for what felt like hours. He was such a huge presence in our lives that even when we misbehaved, as soon as Mama said “I’m going to tell your father” there would be instant about-turn in our behaviour. For at least an hour.

      The only thing we could never ask him was where he was at any given time; we learned that from the start.

      Although we lived in a few different places in Maseru, the one I most clearly remember is Devcourt, where we stayed from 1983 to 1990.

      Devcourt comprised two blocks of white-painted flats on one property. We were very close to the city centre and within walking distance from school. Behind the block of flats was rugged terrain, while on one side a huge garden spread out, with the most majestic willow tree.

      Devcourt felt like living among an extended family. We were a very tight-knit community where neighbours knew each other by name and looked out for each other. There were so many kids living in the flats that during holidays and weekends I would leave home immediately after breakfast to join my gang of friends. The extent of our little tribe was when we all decided that we would orchestrate a mock wedding; Khwezi was betrothed to a neighbour Tau Tlabere. All the adults pitched in and the happy couple was even bought a suit and a white dress, plus there was food and ululations throughout that day.

      My mother’s only rule was that you always had to be back for all meals and get your butt into the house before the streetlights came on. Most days I would come back purple-streaked from pilfering the blueberries next door, which we managed to steal by scaling the wall and returning with laps full of our sweet, sticky treasures. I remember one year one of our neighbours requesting some blueberries; in exchange she would make us a pie. This mission was incredibly tricky as we had to make sure that we were not caught by the owner or our curmudgeon of a caretaker, Ntate Baxtin. The grief we gave that poor man will probably come back to haunt me one day, but at that time tormenting Ntate was what gave meaning to our lives. We loved hiding in the stairwell and screaming our lungs off, waiting for him to hear us. As soon as we heard him coming, we’d scamper off as he angrily gave chase.

      When not driving Ntate Baxtin crazy, we would play house-house. Sadly for me, being the youngest, I was always given the rather unenviable role of being ‘child’ when all I wanted to do was to graduate to being ‘wife’ and ‘mother’.

      We would sneak food from the house and combine it with leaves, mix them up and arrange the mush in little silver tins, make a fire and cook it. It was paradise to play kick-the-can or hide-and-seek, or flatten cardboard boxes and slide down the hill. I was always filthy on my return home and most of the time my Goddess-of-Clean mother would make me strip at the door so as not to track my nastiness through the house.

      Once there was a huge fire in the adjacent block of flats, forcing us to evacuate in the middle of the night. I remember watching from across the street, transfixed by the giant orange flames as they engulfed one entire section of the block, but really thankful that all of us had made it out okay.

      Summer was my favourite time in Maseru. Mama would go to the Gatti’s factory and buy boxes of sticky-sweet ice cream and ice lollies, which cooled us down in the boiling 30-plus-degree temperatures in the capital.

      We would walk or ride our BMXs to the Maseru club and swim the entire day, eating hot chips for lunch while lying on the steaming concrete paving around the pool. These were the milk-and-honey days of my childhood. Then there were the long drives out to Molimo-Nthuse, a small town in western Lesotho, which in English means “God help us”. The harrowing drive up the steep, endlessly winding mountain pass, where the roads were so narrow that it felt that we would fall off the edge of the world, still remains clearly carved in my memory today. The final destination always took my breath away: the hotel’s main building in the shape of a Basotho hat perched on stilts, surrounded by rivers and trees around which we would laze and enjoy picnics with our family and friends. As a child, I harboured ideas of buying that place and living there one day when I grew up. I still get pangs of longing to do that today.

      I was an exuberant, busy child, not to mention helluva talkative. I remember my first day of nursery school vividly. I was placed into Mrs Da Silva’s class at the Montessori school, the same one Khwezi had attended. Within minutes, as Mrs Da Silva greeted with “Good morning, children”, I was in trouble. For some reason, I thought it would be hilarious to mimic her and repeated, “Good morning, children” in a mock teacher’s voice. Needless to say, she did not find me very amusing and called my mother to take me home immediately.

      After a year with the overly serious Mrs Da Silva, I was enrolled at Maseru English Medium Preparatory School (MEMPS), or ‘Prep’, as we called it. Once again I was following the Great Khwezi legacy, floundering in her huge shadow. My clever and talented sister was a model student and the teachers were not shy at expressing their hope that I would prove to be as exemplary as she was. Ha! I was definitely not as studious and way more talkative, but I like to believe that what I lacked in scholastic discipline I more than made up for in cuteness and my fun-loving demeanour. On my first day in Class 1 at Prep, I was put in Mrs Lee’s class. She was a slim Irish woman with short brown hair; I loved her kindness and was especially mesmerised by her lilting accent. Within the first few hours, I made fast friends with Nomathemba Mhlanga, who would be my best friend throughout my entire school career.

      On Saturdays, I loved getting ten Maluti from Mama and meeting my group of friends in town. Much to my horror, Khwezi often tagged along. We would buy tickets for the double feature, and during the reel change, before the second feature began, we’d walk across to the Maseru Café for snacks. After movies, Khwezi and I loved to go to the local mall, the LNDC centre, where we’d wander round the CNA, picking up comics for the week. Once we’d each had our fill, we’d swap them, so she’d buy Archie and I’d get Betty & Veronica.

      Prep was a multiracial international school and from day one I was totally colour blind – I never felt any prejudice and didn’t even know at this stage what racism was or that we were geographically positioned in the middle of the bastion of segregation, South Africa. Until I actually saw it on a map, I thought that South Africa was some dangerous, faraway country ‘Overseas’, a place that we as a family were forbidden to enter, but this had no direct bearing on my young life. In fact, in my world, South Africa, Zambia or Russia – any place that wasn’t Lesotho – were all conveniently labelled ‘Overseas’.

      Oblivious to the real dynamics at play in the country of my father’s birth, I attended school in my green-and-white checked tunic and went about my days in Maseru with the innocence of an ordinary child.

      In retrospect, there were clues that maybe all was not as it appeared to be. Each morning, before driving us to school, Mama would make us stand a few metres away from our green Toyota Corolla, while she systematically opened the bonnet and then checked underneath before finally turning the ignition. It only dawned on me years later that she was checking for bombs, that our lives were under constant threat.

      At the time, I believed that this was how all families began their days. I was completely confused one day when I tried to open a package of books that had been sent to me after I joined a book club in some magazine. Before I could get to my precious stash, my mother grabbed it out of my hands and tossed it off the second-floor balcony. I watched in complete disbelief, horrified by her sabotage of my treasure. Little did I know that she was expecting an explosion, a Boom! as it hit the ground. Thank the mother of all dragons, it simply hit the pavement below with a thud. I shot her as angry a look as my eight-year-old self could muster, then stalked downstairs to retrieve my books.

      Years later I would understand that these were the consequences of being connected to one of South Africa’s most wanted ‘terrorists’.

      Before Daddy was killed in 1993, he had had a number of death threats and lived through many attempts

Скачать книгу