LITMIR.BIZ

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the way I imagined a grandmother should be. This, I believed, was a bone of contention between father and son.

      So when it was announced it was time to take a trip to Mafeteng, I went into total whinge and protest mode. Weirdly, Tamkhulu – much like my maternal grandfather Ntatemoholo Sekamane, who had blue eyes – had green eyes and was light skinned. He always wore thick, square black-rimmed glasses and, even though he intimidated me, now and again he showed signs of kindness by giving us chips and cooldrinks. His paramour, on the other hand, could be needlessly cruel and this was exacerbated by the fact that she was an alcoholic. One night when our mother had left us there the woman threw a terrible scene and was so verbally abusive that Momo took us down the road to a family friend Me’ Mphu Mofolo until Mama returned to pick us up.

      Daddy’s mother, my grandmother Nomayise – Makhulu, as we got to call her – never left the village of Cofimvaba. My father was the fifth of six children, three of whom died shortly after birth. “Because,” said my dad in an interview with historian Luli Callinicos just weeks before he was assassinated in 1993, “in the rural areas, in those days there were literally no health facilities. A family was lucky to have the whole offspring surviving. If 50 per cent survived, that was an achievement.”

      From the stories I’ve been told, life was extremely harsh for the Hani family. My Makhulu, who was completely illiterate, was basically a single parent while her husband was away working. She did her best to raise her three surviving sons on her own, working herself to the bone to make ends meet from subsistence farming.

      Up to the age of seven, I had never laid eyes on my Makhulu, nor my uncles Victor and Chris.

      Sometime in 1988, it was decided that it was worth the risk to smuggle Momo, Khwezi and me into South Africa to meet Daddy’s family. This was a direct request from Daddy – I guess he was concerned that time was passing and that it was imperative that we meet his family, especially my Makhulu, who was getting older. I have a vivid memory of driving towards the South African border, all excited and bright-eyed to travel ‘Overseas’, into the big unknown. As we got closer to the border post, we were bundled into the boot of the car. Instead of feeling fearful in the cramped, dark space, all I felt was great excitement to be going on this big adventure. We crossed over the border without incident and once we’d travelled some distance, we were let out the boot. As we made our way to Cofimvaba, it was like exploring some new, exciting foreign land. On the way, we stopped over in Queenstown and stayed with the Baduzas, who were relatives of our mother. I was completely in awe of their huge mansion-like property, just as I imagined Daddy’s Warbucks house looked. That night we slept in a double bed with blue satin linen. There were little silver salt and pepper cellars as well as a bell on the table to summon ‘the help’. Apart from the hotel on the Baltic Sea in Russia, this was the most luxurious night I’d ever experienced.

      The next day we got up at the crack of dawn and drove for the next 2.5 hours to the very rural village of Cofimvaba, off to see my grandmother and my uncles. It was something of a culture shock to travel on untarred red dirt roads, to see rondavels and the villagers of the outlying areas. Knowing that this was where Daddy had been born brought my little heart enormous pleasure. This was the place where, as a boy not even old enough to go to school, Daddy had woken up each morning to look after the family’s small herd of livestock.

      As the car pulled up in front of a tiny house, my Makhulu appeared. This tall, dark and stately woman hurried towards us and simply pulled us into her arms, babbling away in a string of isiXhosa that I did not understand even if she had spoken slower. For me, it was love at first sight. Makhulu was kind and open-hearted; she just kept touching and kissing us as though we had appeared in a dream and were now standing in front of her.

      As per tradition, a goat was slaughtered in front of us to welcome us home. I was horrified, watching the meat being cooked and knowing that we would be expected to eat it. Yho! I was one of these wussie kids who, although I loved meat, I refused to eat the meat of an animal that was killed in front of me. I was about to refuse to eat the goat that Makhulu proudly placed in front of me when I felt Momo glaring daggers at me, so reluctantly I started nibbling on a tiny piece.

      On seeing Daddy’s two brothers, Uncle Victor and his baby brother Uncle Chris, I was transfixed by the miracle of genetics; it was astonishing to see how much they looked like my father. But it was not only their looks that had me staring; on hearing their voices and watching their mannerisms, it felt like I was seeing Daddy’s doubles. Time flew by far too quickly and soon the moment arrived for us to return home to Maseru. Back in the boot, as we neared the South African/Lesotho border, my heart and mind were filled with such joy, having finally met another part of our family. It made me feel even closer to Daddy, especially meeting and bonding with my Makhulu. Out of the boot back in Lesotho, I could not wait to see Mama to tell her of our big adventure.

      Although I never heard Daddy speak about his aunt, his father’s sister, in Daddy’s interview with Luli Callinicos he mentioned her as having a huge influence over him as a child.

      “I remember as a small boy I used to have a fascination of books, I would read those books although I understood very little. [My aunt] encouraged me and taught me a few necessary rhymes and began to open up a new world even before I got to school. A world of knowing how to write the alphabet, how to count, in other words not only literacy but numeracy.”

      So by the time Daddy was seven years old, when he was enrolled in the Roman Catholic school nearby, he was already able to read. “When I went to school I was in a better position than most boys in the village, and I remember the principal of the school got encouraged, how I would read a story and actually memorise that story – without looking at the book, I would actually recite it word by word.”

      I grew up often hearing what a mission getting to school was for Daddy. He had to walk over 20 kilometres to and back from school every day, five days a week, and then on Sundays another 20 kilometres to get to church and back. I cannot imagine me or my sisters ever showing that kind of commitment for school, let alone church! All that exercise probably helped to make him the fitness fanatic he would later become. By the time he turned eight, he was an altar boy, feeding into his dream to become a priest. “I was under the spell and influence of the priests, the monks and the nuns,” he told Luli. “There was something one admired in them – a sense of hard work, selflessness. These people would go on horseback to the most rural parts of the village, taking the gospel to the people, encouraging kids to go to school, praying for the sick and offering all sorts of advice. In other words, they were not only priests, but they were nurses, they were teachers, they were social workers. I must submit that had a very, very strong impression on me and in the formation of my character.”

      But my Tamkhulu was completely against the idea of priesthood as a vocation; he desperately wanted Daddy to be educated and to live a better life, a life that had never been available to him. So Daddy had to give up his dream of entering the priesthood.

      It was during this time – Daddy must have been eight or nine – when some of his teachers joined the Campaign against Bantu Education. Their commitment to protesting against the introduction of inferior Bantu Education lit a fire for justice in Daddy at a very early age.

      In 1954, at the age of 12, he enrolled in Matanzima Secondary School in Cala, Transkei, which was named after the head of the Transkei, Chief Matanzima. This was the year that the apartheid regime forced Bantu Education into black schools, a system described by Daddy as “designed to indoctrinate black pupils to accept and recognise the supremacy of the white man over the blacks in all spheres”. It upset him deeply and was another fire that inspired him to become involved in the struggle for equality and freedom in South Africa.

      Daddy did very well at school, especially in English literature and languages. He landed up writing his Standard 5 and Standard 6 examinations in the same year and was promoted to high school. He was awarded a Bhunga scholarship that allowed him to leave the small village school and enrol for high school at Lovedale College in Alice in 1957.

      It was here that Daddy’s activist spirit would really be awakened. He soon got involved in student politics,

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