|
|
|
|
|
|
Childhood: South Africans recall their pastArja Salafranca
Click on book cover to buy
In her glass-enclosed room, converted from a balcony, my grandmother would tell me to enjoy my childhood. "They're the best years of your life," she'd say dreamily, her eyes far away. Perhaps they were, for her - bright and interested in her school lessons, she loved school, won several awards and wanted to be a teacher. Her ambitions were thwarted in this regard by her traditional parents who said higher learning was for the boys. Perhaps her life was never the same after this, and childhood indeed came to be the shining beacon in her life: a faraway, remembered paradise. Growing up in the 1980s I couldn't understand her stance. We were in a hurry to grow up, as much in a hurry as the prepubescent girls and boys you see every Saturday night at The Zone in Rosebank, young faces made up, clinging miniskirts revealing all. We tried to wear boob tubes, so popular at the start of the 80s, but didn't have the cleavage to support the tops. I first wore makeup at nine, and carried an occasional handbag at that age. Childhood was a period in waiting: waiting to be old enough to become salary-earning adults with our own apartments, cars, and lives. Childhood was a rehearsal for adult life - and we rehearsed for all we were worth. This is not an experience shared by the majority of the contributors to this volume, Childhood: South Africans recall their past. Whether happy or sad, well-off or struggling to survive poverty, each child in this volume is rooted firmly in childhood and the day-to-day minutiae of their lives. The present is what matters and the childhoods are mostly recalled in fond, affectionate terms. This book, edited by former journalist Adrian Hadland, brings together a wide range of memories of childhood culled from autobiographies. Thus they are not separate essays but excerpts from autobiographies previously published. The result is a fascinating, richly detailed picture of a number of childhoods by people from all walks of life. There are the knowns - Nelson Mandela, Cecil Margo, Ahmed Kathrada - as well as those who are not famous, yet still have penned autobiographies. An example here is the excellent excerpt by Dugmore Boetie, a vagabond and thief who was born in Johannesburg in the 1930s. Familiarity is the Kingdom of the Lost describes a childhood of beatings and a mother who fried in a fire, with Dugmore landing up in hospital. He ran away and took to a life on the streets. His adventures are unbelievable, and he's labelled a survivor in his biography at the end of the piece. That he certainly was. There is some debate over whether Dugmore Boetie was an actual person or a fictional creation of editor Barney Simon. Whatever the truth, this remains a fresh, fascinating look into the world of a child brought up by himself on the streets: there are enough true stories of this kind of childhood to lend veracity to the experience, at least. Also outstanding is Rian Malan's excerpt from My Traitor's Heart. In the piece selected, Malan meditates on the farm that belonged to his Uncle Ben, and the sense of Afrikanerhood that was imparted to him on that farm; the isolation that meant he didn't even know Reader's Digest was a foreign magazine. This is a beautifully written piece, which should surely point even more readers toward the groundbreaking book it was excerpted from. Not having read Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom, I read the excerpt from his autobiography with pleasure. Somehow it's not hard to imagine him as a small boy in Qunu in the Eastern Cape, the rural village where he spent the first nine years of his life. When his father died, the family moved away from the village: "I do not remember experiencing great grief so much as feeling cut adrift. Although my mother was the centre of my existence, I defined myself through my father. My father's passing changed my whole life in a way that I did not suspect at the time." Leaving Qunu also exposed the young Mandela to ambitions other than becoming a champion stick-fighter, and a thirst to pursue knowledge and education. What would have happened if his father hadn't died in his childhood? It's facile to speculate, but not hard to see how events in childhood influence us long beyond the actual occurrences. Cecil Margo's excerpt from his autobiography, Final Postponement, was also a delight. Born in Johannesburg in 1915 Margo recalls that he was dimly aware "of the titanic struggle for survival between good and evil that was being fought out over the horizon on the other side of the world". Margo recalls episodes in his childhood with clarity and vivid detail: a horse whose leg has been torn off in a collision with a van, a policeman pumping bullets into it to put it out of its misery, the fire which burned his mother and caused her to spend months in hospital. But Margo describes his childhood as a happy one, notwithstanding the fact that he didn't get to raise a camel. If you need to know more, read the except. Don Mattera's Memory is the Weapon is both funny and chilling. He recalls waiting in a queue to be classified as either "pure Coloured" or "native". How did the authorities decide? If you could recite the Lord's Prayer and Psalm 23 in Afrikaans and exclaimed "eina" when prodded, and not "aychoo", then you were lucky enough to be classified as a Coloured. He writes: "Apartheid decided my race and my destiny on that dusty August day in 1955 in a government courtyard, where men stood in long queues to be branded and pedigreed with the hot iron of humiliation and scorn." Chilling, sad stuff indeed. Equally chilling and no less fascinating is Mbulelo Vizikhuno Mzamane's The Children of Soweto. This describes the experience of marching in the June 16 uprisings and watching as a beloved friend dies of police gunshot fire. Political realities also intrude into Gillian Slovo's childhood with night-time raids in the early 1960s, which no longer surprised the young Slovo or even interrupted her sleep. There are rural and urban childhoods. Some writers recall their mothers having to smooth over the dung floors of their huts; others recall their mothers trying to straighten and smooth unruly hair and wearing trim suits. But all are recalled vividly, emotionally and eloquently. If the past is a foreign country, these writers somehow found a way into that past and have brought it all magnificently to life in these excerpts from autobiographies.
Send your comments to webvoet@litnet.co.za to continue the discussion on SêNet, our interactive opinion page.
|
||
© Kopiereg in die ontwerp en inhoud van hierdie webruimte behoort aan LitNet, uitgesluit die kopiereg in bydraes wat berus by die outeurs wat sodanige bydraes verskaf. LitNet streef na die plasing van oorspronklike materiaal en na die oop en onbeperkte uitruil van idees en menings. Die menings van bydraers tot hierdie werftuiste is dus hul eie en weerspieël nie noodwendig die mening van die redaksie en bestuur van LitNet nie. LitNet kan ongelukkig ook nie waarborg dat hierdie diens ononderbroke of foutloos sal wees nie en gebruikers wat steun op inligting wat hier verskaf word, doen dit op hul eie risiko. Media24, M-Web, Ligitprops 3042 BK en die bestuur en redaksie van LitNet aanvaar derhalwe geen aanspreeklikheid vir enige regstreekse of onregstreekse verlies of skade wat uit sodanige bydraes of die verskaffing van hierdie diens spruit nie. LitNet is ’n onafhanklike joernaal op die Internet, en word as gesamentlike onderneming deur Ligitprops 3042 BK en Media24 bedryf. |
|||
Click here and subscribe to our fantastic free newsletter - for your
weekly cultural fix!