by Ufrieda Ho
when she went off on Sundays to her church meetings. Like Sophie, the
women also covered their heads in a cloth tied neatly at the nape of their
necks. And then they were plunged into the water as a preacher, knee-deep
in the fast-moving water, prayed over the baptised.
No one asked why we had come; someone simply told us to leave our
shoes and cross the river. Three of us made the crossing, without conferring
with each other, without saying a word and barely feeling the sharp pebbles
beneath our feet.
‘You have come because the ancestors have told you to come,’ one
man said as he welcomed us at the top of the inclined path that led to the
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coolness of the cave. He pointed out a trickle of water that ran down the
smooth face of the cave. ‘You can wash there and be cleansed, then you
can speak to the ancestors,’ he said.
We washed and drank in the coolness, then sat quietly with him a bit,
understanding a little of how the ancestors turn waiting into patience and
surrender. Others had come before, decorating parts of the mountain,
sweeping the sand smooth where they slept, dreaming the ancestors’
message into reality.
On our way down the mountain we met two people who had been
baptised. We congratulated them and made the journey together to the
bottom.
The pair needed a lift in the opposite direction to where we were
heading, but we were the ones with the transport. When we dropped them
off in the small town, they said thank you and the man closed his eyes
briefly. He raised his hand a little and prayed. Then he withdrew from a
plastic bag a small Coke bottle filled with the water he had collected from
the trickle down the mountain’s face. There were other bottles he had
carried all the way down the mountain.
‘Put this in the baby’s bath water,’ he said, pointing to my friend’s infant
boy who had been part of our group. ‘It will protect him.’
I stayed in my spot at the back of the canopied pickup where I had
sat with the man we had given the lift to. I had offered up my seat to the
older woman who had joined us. I cried quietly all the way back past the
mountain. I knew then the source of Sophie’s magic water.
Sometimes Sophie would arrive a day or two later from her leave than
had been agreed on. My mother’s grumbles started up as the sun set on
the agreed-on return date. I hated those sunsets, because I knew heads
would butt when Sophie walked through the door in the next day or two.
Of course, my mother had the upper hand. Sophie would have to take the
tongue-lashing and there would be no happy greetings for someone we
had genuinely missed.
But eventually she would come back and as soon as she had removed
her beret and her closed ladies’ shoes, she was back in the role of the maid.
The doek was back on her head and her spotless takkies with their turned-
up tongues on her feet.
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She was like a second mother but she remained a mystery. When she
invited us into her room, we saw her bed raised on bricks and covered
with neat layers of blankets. The bricks were to keep away the tokoloshes,
she told us. The mythical creature with a man’s face and a monkey’s body
that Sophie described terrified me throughout my childhood. Later, when
I was in Standard Four and going through a government-issue history
textbook, I remember coming across a drawing of what the artist imagined
a tokoloshe to look like. It was probably some pejorative dismissal about
‘native’ superstition. My jaw dropped and my eyes grew wide – Sophie’s
devilish demon with its supernatural terror was indeed true because it
was in my textbooks. I did not care what the words said, there was the
picture of the tokoloshe! I wished for years after that my bed could also
be elevated on bricks.
These days I still like to ask people what a tokoloshe looks like. I smile
when, if they are South African, they do not say ‘a what?’ or ‘huh?’ but
launch into a description as if they had seen the creature the night before
as it bounced from the darkness across their bedrooms.
It hurts now that I do not remember Sophie’s face well and I do not
even know if Sophie was her real name. Back then, I did not question
this relationship in the same way that I never asked questions about the
outside toilet, a feature of so many South African homes.
Now I see the outside toilet as the ceramic bowl of national shame.
There it stands, apart from the rest of the house. There are no sparkling
tiles, no extras of a mirror to adjust a stray strand of hair, hand lotions
in pump-action bottles to indulge freshly washed hands or two-ply toilet
paper.
But it stands sure, apart, plain and basic; it is meant only for the maid
and the gardener. And new generations have filled Sophie’s shoes. They
are still black women, still the women who wear overalls with matching
aprons and doeks. They no longer have to say madam or eat from the
enamel plate but they are still considered the primary suspects behind a
missing brooch or the dipping sugar levels in the pantry. They are still paid
a wage that is little more than the cost of some madams’ pairs of shoes.
I get sad when I hear Chinese South Africans speak about their pain
and humiliations at being treated like second-class citizens. Their faces
burn with anger when they remember the humiliation of having to ask
white people if their children could learn in their schools, or they had to
carry documents like my dad had to, declaring them ‘gentlemen of good
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standing’ or they had to go from door to door with spring rolls and smiles
asking to be allowed to buy or rent a house in a white suburb.
But their memories of racial injury were fuzzy when it came to their
domestic workers or gardeners sometimes. Food that was past its expiry
date was good enough for the ‘girl’. There were still separate enamel plates
and cutlery differentiated with a crude scrape of a sharp knife. This was for
the woman who knew the exact amount of milk to pour into the madam’s
tea, how to coax their grumpy children to sleep and what underwear they
kept in their drawers.
Sophie must have worked for our family for six or seven years until
shortly after we moved to our house in Judith’s Paarl, just a few kilometres
away from our Bertrams home. I am not sure if she eventually had a fallout
with my parents or whether she did indeed have to return to her family in
that faraway ju kaa, as we were told.
We never had another live-in, full-time maid and I never saw Sophie
again after she said goodbye to us for the last time outside the gate. All
these years later, it is a shame that in some ways I remember Happy, the
sweet, loyal dog of my childhood, better than I do Sophie, this woman
who was also a stand-in mom.
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15
The Hand that
History Deals
As gambles go, it was a big
risk for my parents and grandparents to have
hedged a bet on a good life in Naam Fey, this country in the south of the
world.
They could not have guessed, or maybe they did not want to know,
about something like the Group Areas Act of 1950 that was already in
place by the time they arrived in the country. Maybe they fi gured these
were itty-bitty laws like ‘keep off the grass’ or something like that. I
imagine they must have convinced themselves that things would be better
for them. They would have believed that their hard work, their readiness
to face up to whatever hurdles lay ahead, would see them through. As
poor villagers not politically connected with the Communist Party elite,
they were second-class citizens in their own country anyway; could South
Africa really be worse?
Dad’s older brother, whom we called Lok Buk and who lives in Macau
today, cast his mind back over 60 years and remembered that his younger
brother, my dad, as the uneducated orphaned teenager in China, had to
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survive as a scavenger when they had all left home and when his mother
had died. Dad could lean only so much on relatives and on the kindness
of those in the extended community of the village who themselves had so
little to build a life. By going through other people’s rubbish, he found
things that could still be used or that he could sell or barter for a few coins
or lumps of rice.
Lok Buk’s story opened valves of sadness for me but it also gave context
to why men like my father and women like my mother made the decision to
come here. It was really about choosing to leave a broken China. Whatever
lay ahead for them – racial persecution, being second-class citizens, starting
from scratch – still held the possibility of being better than what they knew
in those southern villages in Guangdong, especially for dad.
For my Lok Buk, who ended up in Mozambique, the years there
gave him the life of a second family and the odd jobs and few years of
shopkeeping meant he did get to save enough money. When the outbreak
of civil war prompted him to leave, he returned to China, to his wife and
three children, without empty hands. He chose to settle in Macau, which,
like the old Lourenço Marques, was familiarly stained with its Portuguese
colonial imprint.
In Colour, Confusion and Concession s Melanie Yap and Dianne Leong
Man spell out how bad prospects were for the Chinese from their very
first days on the African continent: ‘From the 1870s [Chinese immigrants]
settled in the Cape, Natal, and later the Transvaal only to discover that
being Chinese limited their opportunities and made them outsiders in a
land where race drew the dividing line.’
The South Africa of the 1960s that greeted my parents was already
haemorrhaging. Protests against racial oppression had turned from
marching to massacre; the bleeding from the Sharpeville uprising had
soaked the streets with the blood of 69 people. It was the follow-on from
the incendiary flare-ups that had started years before, including in 1956
when hundreds of women showed their steel by marching on the Union
Buildings to protest the carrying of passbooks.
The campaign of public bombings by the armed wing of the ANC had
started to crest and by 1963 it would result in the Rivonia Trial that would
see Nelson Mandela and his nine ANC co-accused charged with sabotage.
It made the National Party more resolute to keep the black man in his
place, under its tyrannical thumb.
That thumb would press down on the Chinese and squash their hopes
for a better life, along with all non-white groups. The Chinese may not have
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been part of the political melee, but they were still part of the dangerous
non-white unknown, the geel gevaar, the communist yellow danger, as the
apartheid government referred to them. Even though there were quotas that
restricted the number of Chinese allowed into the country, the Chinese had
been in the country from the early days of the Dutch East Indies arrivals
in the 1660s. Back then, they arrived as slaves and convicts from what
is today Indonesia. In later years, they would arrive as stowaways from
the mainland, like my family. In addition, a handful of free Chinese had
ventured to the southern tip of the ‘dark’ continent over the decades.
But long years here did not mean that the Chinese eventually gained
the status of merging with the comfort and acceptance tagged on to being
middle class. The Chinese of my parents’ generation remained on the
periphery. They were allowed to become traders, like the Indians, but they
were prohibited from owning property or shops, from serving whites in
white areas and they were not allowed to live in white areas.
Even those who became professionals, who got the same degrees and
qualifications through quota systems, were forced to take lower positions
than their white colleagues. But instead of uproar, protest or joining a
union, they simply carried on working harder and becoming even more
loyal to their companies, even when their employers checked first with
white staff if it was okay for the single Chinese employee to use the same
toilet.
Apartheid entered the statute books when the National Party came
into power in 1948. Their plan was for social engineering for not just
separateness, but for oppression of the black man. It was a methodical
system that was terrifyingly efficient. It would reserve decent jobs, decent
education and decent living areas for whites only. For my immigrant
father, illiterate in English and without any financial muscle, his life in
South Africa was always going to see him as a shopkeeper, a fahfee man or
put to work for someone else who ran a small trade business like making
security gates and fencing or selling spare parts for cars and other light
industrial operations.
My father did not arrive here with the prospect of becoming a citizen;
he was not the kind of immigrant marked for strategic assimilation by
having to learn the chronology of a country’s past presidents or being
able to mumble through a national anthem and to eventually join the tax
base. Dad had to survive in South Africa as the loathed trespasser, not
someone who worked through the migrant milestones over a few years to
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eventually become a citizen. It would take decades before he and my mom
were given the status of naturalised citizens.
Fahfee becames an allegory for the life the Chinese hid from polite white
society. Fahfee, the transaction of hidden spaces, was known to some and
hidden from others. It always bore a burden of guilt and shame yet it could
not simply be abandoned because it had economic muscle. It played out in
secret spaces, making it part fiction and myth.
Numbers for fahfee betting revealed themselves in synchronicity’s
peculiar visions and dreamtime revelations. It was a mystery that was
completely rational and reasonable. But you could only see this if you w
ere a
fahfee insider. From the outside – the view from the white neighbourhoods
of over-chlorinated swimming pools and ‘garden boys’ scooping up dog
poop – fahfee cleaved to its impenetrable anonymity.
Fahfee stayed a secret because that was how it could survive as an
economic lifeline. Fahfee was the way out of the paltry trade of selling half
loaves of bread and giving change in Chappies bubblegum in a shopfront.
The hush around fahfee protected and disguised it enough to keep
mainstream white society from getting too nervous about the Chinese.
But officially the National Party’s Calvinistic state made fahfee men
like my father criminals, along with buying liquor on a Sunday or being in
possession of skin magazines without stars on the centrefold’s critical bits.
Fahfee was a tax dodge, it was also sinful gambling and, perhaps worst of
all for the apartheid authorities, it looked like collusion between the non-
white groups.
For the fahfee man, there was always a cat-and-mouse game with the
fahfee man evading and eluding the police and the police giving chase.
Sometimes the fahfee man got away, sometimes he got caught. When the
blue lights flashed him to a standstill, the game was up for the mouse.
Then came the confiscations of the record books, betting slips and the
day’s takings or the day’s cash floats. Their bribes and warnings came next
and also the parallel exhibition of power and contrition all ending in the
tacit acknowledgement that the next day the chase would be on again.
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An uncle of mine ran a corner café for many years. It was not until I
was an adult and asking questions about the Chinese under apartheid that
he said that he was also a fahfee man at one stage. I did not know this.
With four children to raise, he had to supplement his income from the
shop. You could only sell that many cans of pilchards and loose cigarettes
to that many customers, he said.
He drove out in the middle of each day to a few banks, while my aunt
stood behind the café counter by herself for a few hours. One day, he was
just about finished at his banks when in his review mirror he saw a cop car
tailing him. He turned into a side street, hoping not to look suspicious but
also hoping to shake them off. But the blue lights came on and the police