LITMIR.BIZ

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gain an understanding of our family’s plight as well as of the levels of poverty which had overtaken our people in the cities and the countryside.

      Regrettably, I took a very long time to accept and understand the troubles that had befallen our family. The easy way out was to blame my father for his decisions. By the time he died, in 1981 in Soweto, he was effectively left with one wife – the one with whom he had continued to live in Johannesburg. My mother had moved to a cottage I had built for her next to her sister’s home in Olifantshoek, near Giyani in Limpopo.

      It was only during my participation in the Second Carnegie Inquiry into Poverty and Development in Southern Africa in the 1980s that I gained a better understanding of our fate as black South Africans as the apartheid racial utopia took shape in town and countryside during the late 1950s and 1960s. I had innocently decided that my contribution to the inquiry would take the form of an essay titled ‘The Worst of Times: A Migrant Worker’s Autobiography’, which focused on the working life of a labour migrant from Limpopo.⁷

      I researched the life history of my mother’s elder sister’s husband, Chipa Hlengani Mkhabela. Like my father, he spent the major part of his life working in Johannesburg. For him, too, life had been good in the early years of his career as a migrant. I had seen him back home at times, at a place called Barota in Limpopo, when my mother and I visited her sister. There were no alarm bells then about hunger and poverty. Yet, by the time of the inquiry I was compelled to describe his life as one of misery and struggle. Excerpts from the Carnegie paper provide some interesting insights into a migrant’s dilemma with regard to some of the most pressing problems of those days.

      What I discovered during my conversations with him was that in the course of his protracted working life between the 1930s and 1983, when ill health compelled him to stop working, the conditions of his life had changed dramatically. Now, at 70, Mkhabela, like my father and thousands of his contemporaries, lived what I described in the essay as the ‘marginal life of the seasoned but permanent migrant who is neither a townsman (proletarian) nor a village peasant’. Like millions of his African compatriots, he had been compelled by our country’s racist laws to move back and forth between his home in the Northern Transvaal countryside and the urban residential ghettoes known as hostels in Johannesburg.

      As though that were not enough suffering for one lifetime, his family and tribe back home were faced with government-enforced migrations from one part of the Northern Transvaal to another, mandated in the interests of Afrikaner farmers as well as to achieve the ethnic segregation of black people in the rural areas. Sadly, I concluded after my conversations with him that his life and work history illustrate the kind of social alienation, displacement and rampant impoverishment that accompanied the roll-out of the everyday practical applications of Verwoerd’s policy of separate development. Indeed, the conditions of his life and work were so onerous that it became increasingly difficult for him to support himself and his family in the countryside.

      Revisiting Chipa Hlengani Mkhabela’s life story still makes me indignant. In it I recognise a replay of the life story of my father and the cruel fate that our family endured as separate development policies took hold throughout South Africa. I now appreciate more clearly than I ever did during the early 1980s the impact of the lifetime employment of men such as my father and his brother-in-law in South Africa’s cities on their lives and those of their families. For me, participation in the second Carnegie investigation opened up wounds that had been festering in my heart and mind for many years.

      What made the situation more distressing for me was the fact that my father had died early in 1981. I was left imagining how I might have asked him for understanding and forgiveness for my youthful ignorance and the ruthlessness with which I had judged him. It had been difficult for me to understand how the caring, family-oriented, self-respecting man of my childhood years could have changed into what we called in Shangaan a ‘kholwa’, or one who never returns to the rural areas from the cities. Now I understand that the burden of black migrant male workers during the second half of the twentieth century was simply too onerous for anyone to carry with any dignity. Men such as my father and his brother-in-law had known self-respect and a sense of self-worth before the unrelenting claims of urban and rural poverty left them with an unmistakeable sense of shame, silent anger and regret.

      In my juvenile lack of understanding in the late 1960s and 1970s, I failed to appreciate the fact that my father had managed, through what on occasion must have been intolerable sacrifices, to pay my school fees at Douglas Laing Smit, the high school section of a mission boarding school called Lemana, a short driving distance from the small provincial town of Louis Trichardt. I attended Lemana for four years between 1956 and 1959, when I completed matric.⁸ Unlike Mphaphuli High, Lemana, a combined teacher-training and secondary school co-educational institution, was a boarding school. On the male campus on which I lived during my student days, each of us was allocated to a house. Each house was named after an outstanding figure (one was Seretse Khama of Botswana). I lived in Livingstone House.

      Like many other celebrated African schools in the late 1950s, Lemana was invaded by crusaders of what was to become known as Bantu Education and was educationally vandalised through the introduction of that iniquitous system by the Afrikaner emissaries who formed the advance teams dispatched by the apartheid government to take over the management and administration of African schools. Like St Peter’s in Johannesburg and many other notable schools throughout our country, Lemana was ultimately closed down and literally abandoned to the elements, a fate which must stand out as one of the most shameful wastes of educational infrastructure in South Africa’s history.

      On a Saturday morning in 2010 I paid a lone and nostalgic visit to my alma mater. I was greeted by an eerie silence as I walked along the unpaved pathways and roads from the male housing complex and around the ornate dull-brown chapel that had looked so much bigger during my school days. Then followed a slow walk down the cascading slope from what used to be the teacher-training part of the campus to the old Douglas Laing Smit Secondary School at the brow of the hill. I could not help thinking that, following their arrival, the Swiss missionaries, educators and medical doctors who had come to this part of the country must have banked on a long stay at Lemana and at the Elim Mission, Elim Hospital and Valdezia, some kilometres to the north-east of Lemana. The old buildings at Lemana Hill, including the superintendent’s residence, as well as the forest plantations along the edges of the hill continued to create an atmosphere of serenity. Even after years of neglect the campus remains remarkably steadfast and visually engaging. I felt that my old school was like a sanctuary waiting for a second coming.

      While the vulgarity of Bantu Education was creeping into our classrooms in 1958 and 1959 at Lemana and elsewhere, Afrikanerdom was bringing a splendid educational chapter to a close and, along with it, the intellectual bounty of excellent teachers. My Lemana teachers found me ready for demanding studies in English higher grade, history, geography, Xitsonga and Afrikaans. I left each lesson with the distinct feeling that the teachers knew what they were doing. What I needed to do was to take full advantage of what was on offer.

      By the time of my solitary visit to Lemana I had learnt a lot more than I had known as a schoolboy about the history of the school’s founders and about Elim Hospital, where I was circumcised, where I received my first pair of spectacles and where I worked in close proximity to medical doctors, doing odd jobs during school holidays for the first time in my life. Experiences at Elim Hospital opened the doors for my appreciation of what could be achieved with a good education, beyond teaching and missionary work. Little did I know at the time that hospitals and healing would play such an important role in my professional life.

      Before my visit to Lemana I had read Patrick Harries’s book Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa. This helped me to understand the role of Swiss and other missionaries in the development of education in the north-eastern part of our country. One of their aims was to harness the combined potential benefits of belief in God and the discoveries of science. We learn from Harries’s account that a farm named Klipfontein at the headwaters of the Levubu and the Letaba rivers became home to several thousand early Christian converts. The missionaries named the station Valdezia. A few kilometres from Valdezia another mission outpost, called Elim, was established. The point at which this history touches my own life arises

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