We Are Not Such Things (14 page)

“So who was the culprit?” I asked.

“We wake up and we’re all suspects.”

Easy was not a star student, having started school at age seven. This, he claimed, was due to an inexplicable rule that I have never found in official literature, but that has been mentioned to me several times by black men who entered the education system in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as a Nigerian friend who attended school in Nigeria during the same time: in some instances, to start attending classes, black boys had to be able to reach their right arm over their head and clutch their entire left ear, with their necks stick-straight. This, for whatever reason, meant they were ready to go to kindergarten. Easy, small of stature and short of limb, couldn’t manage to grab his ear until he was nine, but, after watching kids in uniform march past his house for years, he stormed the school and announced to the principal that he wished to study.

“My only problem is my elbow,” he argued, and the principal relented. Once he was there, he was taken with mathematics, physics, and geometry.

“Everything about maths is tricking people,” he said.

In the mornings, Kiki made home-baked Sotho bread—sugary, dense, and steamy. The boys drank a mixture of fruit-flavored corn syrup and water, or, near the end of the month, simply water. Their favorite TV show was
Knight Rider
. Wowo coached a local soccer team, Harmony United, and taught his own kids to kick around a soccer ball as soon as they could walk. Easy played the game competitively and later somehow convinced journalists to refer to him as a “former soccer star.” In reality, he wasn’t half bad, but he was irritating to play with because no matter how crushing his team’s defeat, if Easy had scored a single goal, he’d celebrate for hours.

“I am a hero!” he’d exclaim, running around with his arms in the air, while the others glared at him.

In the Xhosa tradition, the family elders ruled the roost, and the Nofemela household was run by Melvin Nofemela. Melvin Nofemela was Wowo’s father and Easy’s grandfather. He was born in 1910 in a rural Eastern Cape village and died in 1997 in Gugulethu. He navigated a lifetime marked by massive historical changes, his suffering and his struggles engineered by a succession of distant white politicians and their loyal followers, and his liberation brought about three years before his death by a party of black freedom fighters who remain in power still, their glory days marred by persistent corruption and double-dealings.

In the century before Melvin’s birth, the land of his ancestors had become a battleground. Then, as in South Africa today, the fighting came down to the issue of land ownership. As white people encroached deeper into the nameless sweep of country, its borders yet drawn, wars erupted between the whites and the threatened African tribes with which they made contact. Melvin’s people, the Xhosas, fought the British and colonial forces in the border wars, but by 1860, the once prosperous farmers had been shattered, concentrated in small “native” areas, and stripped of their cattle.

Meanwhile, a new wave of Dutch pioneers, infuriated by British policies in the Cape Colony, loaded their belongings into wagons and headed north, armed with rifles. They pushed the Ndebele into today’s Zimbabwe. They fought the Zulus at a spot that came to be known as the Blood River, where three thousand Zulu soldiers, armed with spears, died at the hands of just over fifty pioneers, who obliterated their enemy with bullets and cannon fire. Within a generation, the Zulu kingdom, once a proud, repressive military dictatorship, had been definitively torn apart, first by civil war and next by an army of British soldiers. Meanwhile, the Sotho people, led by the famed Moshoeshoe, successfully battled Afrikaner commandos, and, years later, were allowed by the British powers to maintain a tiny mountain kingdom, an independent nation carved out of the greater South African mass and known today as Lesotho. Over time, the Pedi and the Shangaan, the Venda and the Tswana, the Tsonga and Swazi, were also dispossessed or run off their ancestral land by Dutch commandos, British army officers, or a combination of the two.

As the battles multiplied, Britain, which had once hoped only to protect a trade route, found itself pumping money into Southern Africa, trying to control numerous wars as well as a rebellious population of Dutch descendants. They had to deal with droughts and locusts and protect settler populations from angry indigenous populations. The colony had become a nuisance.

Between 1852 and 1856, Britain, in an attempt to quell restive Afrikaners, recognized two Afrikaner republics: the interior regions of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. These land masses up to the northeast of the Cape were unenviable parcels of farmland in the middle of precisely nowhere. The Afrikaners were nonetheless pleased at this measure of autonomy, and commenced developing their republics. They were too few in number to build anything significant on their own, so Afrikaner commandos kidnapped black children. These children were often referred to as “black ivory,” in reference to their value as laborers, which was soon higher than that of white ivory. It was certainly more plentiful, as the elephant population had been decimated ever since men with guns landed on the peninsula.

Then, in the year 1866, in a dusty scrubland on the outskirts of a remote agricultural village in the Orange Free State, a young boy found a shiny pebble in the dirt on his father’s farm. It turned out to be a 21.25-carat diamond that was called, aptly, Eureka. Prospectors descended upon the area. In 1871, an 83.5-carat diamond was found on a hill on a property belonging to the farming De Beers family. One month later, a stampede of two thousand men had descended upon the land, and the hill was turned into an enormous depression, forty-two acres across, known as the Kimberley Mine, or, more colloquially, the Big Hole. Today, tourists gape at it.

Twenty years after the discovery of Eureka, as thousands of men marched into the Big Hole, a British carpenter wandered across a hill range in the Transvaal. He kicked a glistening stone and walked farther, scanning the land, until he happened upon a long reef of rocks, beneath which lay the biggest deposit of gold in the world. Soon, 300,000 miners would be working in this remote hinterland.

Word spread, and immigrants poured into South Africa, including thousands of persecuted Lithuanian Jews, from whom my husband is descended. European businessmen arrived with high hopes. Harbors sprang up along the coasts, as did a shipping industry. In the thirty-some years since Eureka’s unearthing, workers, mostly black laborers, had laid nearly four thousand miles of railway. Johannesburg, a city built around the gold trade, exploded, and within ten years of its founding it was larger than 250-year-old Cape Town. The earth was plundered and more minerals discovered: copper, iron, and coal. By the turn of the twentieth century, South Africa was no longer a backwater colony but a place in which a white man could make a fortune.

With the discovery of gold and diamonds, Britain regretted allowing the Afrikaners to set up shop on such precious land. In 1899, the British and the Afrikaner republics went to war. Initially shocked and humiliated by successful Afrikaner guerrilla tactics, imperial Britain resorted to all-out destruction: burning crops, razing homesteads, and interning the opposition in concentration camps, where 26,000 Afrikaners died, 80 percent of them children and the rest mostly women. In the end, the British lost 22,000 troops but prevailed.

The main result of this clash for the Afrikaners was a long-standing hatred for the British passed down through generations, and the birth of a particularly hard-line form of Afrikaner nationalism mixed with Dutch Reformed Christianity. This heady mix of religion and nationalism bloomed into a widespread belief that Afrikaners were God’s chosen people, under fire from blacks and British alike but destined to emerge as the ruling white tribe of Africa. They sought, then, to dominate the land in order to protect themselves and realize a divine plan. These deep-seated beliefs would one day morph into the formal system of governance known as apartheid.

After the Anglo-Boer War, the British and the Afrikaners negotiated a peace settlement. The British colonies merged into the Union of South Africa, which was self-governing under the dominion of the British government until 1961, when South Africa became a republic. The Afrikaner general Louis Botha won the 1910 elections, voted in almost entirely by the white British and Afrikaans minority. Though Botha encouraged Afrikaner pride, he was pragmatic: in a country with a black majority, the Afrikaner’s best bet was to create a white power base with his British countrymen, consolidating resources and authority in white hands.

The year of Botha’s victory was the year of Melvin Nofemela’s birth, on a distant homestead on an empty bluff in the far-off village of Lady Frere. Lady Frere was named after the wife of Britain’s high commissioner to the Cape Colony, a stately mustachioed Welshman named Sir Henry Bartle Frere. Frere, who had previously acted as governor of colonial Bombay, had plans to defend the Cape from a “general and simultaneous rising of Kaffirdom against white civilization,” as he said, and took to crushing Xhosa rebellions and starting a bloody war with the Zulus, despite their chief’s continued pleas for peace.

The exact day that Melvin came into the world was never recorded; birthdays are of little significance in old Xhosa culture. Melvin’s parents were illiterate subsistence farmers who had been tending to their land for generations, worshipping their ancestors, living in huts, and visiting
sangomas,
or traditional herbal healers, when they needed healthcare. The Nofemelas had little wealth and no formal education. The only schools in rural areas were isolated missionary programs, run by evangelical European families intent on saving African souls.

Melvin’s parents might have considered pursuing an education for their child, but when he was a year old, the Mines and Works Act was passed, prohibiting black South Africans from holding skilled jobs; menial labor would be their appropriate calling. By 1959, black students could only attend university with special state permission.

In that case, Melvin’s family may have hoped to leave the area and purchase land elsewhere, but when he was three years old, the Natives Land Act of 1913 passed. This act barred black South Africans from buying or leasing land in white areas; instead, they were relegated to “native areas” or “reserves,” undesirable and overpopulated plots. The land that blacks could legally own made up 7 percent of the total landmass of South Africa. In 1936, this was expanded to 13 percent. With the passage of the Land Act, blacks living on white-owned land were evicted. Many of them had been well-off peasant farmers, and now, if they did not make it to the reserves, they were forced to trudge from place to place, their families and downtrodden animals in tow, begging white men for a plot on which to pitch their disassembled homes in exchange for their labor.

Melvin could have headed to the cities to take a job, but by the time he was thirteen, the Native Urban Areas Act of 1923 cut short any such dreams and laid the foundations for the first townships, then called “native locations.” This act defined towns and cities as the white man’s turf. If blacks were ministering to white men as laborers or servants, they were permitted to live in segregated areas on the outskirts of the cities. But if a black man ceased to adequately serve the purposes and needs of whites, he could be deported back to the reserves.

Melvin, living on the bluff in Lady Frere, likely knew little of the political forces shifting his early life. But when he met and married teenage Alice, and she had their first baby in 1940 and their second in 1942, he knew he had to make money. Blacks had been surviving off the soil from time immemorial, but once their land had been reorganized and repopulated by the white government—too many people condensed on too little land, with watering holes and streams overrun—it became impossible for most residents to produce enough food on which to survive.

Melvin left his family in search of a job elsewhere, like many able-bodied black men at the time. In addition to supporting his family, he owed the government taxes, despite receiving neither rights nor representation. Along with hundreds of thousands, Melvin headed north and got a job in the expanding mines. His pay was a pittance, especially compared to a white man’s doing the same work: in 1951, the white gold miner earned nearly fifteen times the wage of the black gold miner, and by 1970, white miners earned twenty-one times the wage of black miners. Because of the Mines and Works Act, Melvin could never rise above the lowest rung of the job hierarchy. He was housed in a hostel, a single-sex compound that often pressed ninety men into a single dormitory. When he left to visit his parents, Alice, and his children for three weeks a year, he was strip-searched in case he was smuggling gold.

Though the idea of unionizing was gaining traction, it was still a daunting task. In 1913 at an open-pit diamond mine in the middle of the country, a black worker offended a white foreman, who proceeded to kick him to death. When his black colleagues went on strike, white workers and cops banded together to kill eleven black miners and injure thirty-seven others. Fighting for one’s rights was lethal business.