by Ufrieda Ho
weekends when first-years were forced to stay in residence for closed
weekends, I was excused and could go home. They could not fight my
legitimate excuse of having to get back home to my weekend job as a
waitress in a Chinese restaurant. Anyway, it was easy to keep me away
from mixing too much with their ‘cultural’ activities.
Still, I was initiated into the strangeness of Afrikaans student culture.
There were firm gender roles and expectations that women did things like
entertain their male friends in the lobby with doily-decked tea trays and
neatly arranged plates of homebaked goods. It was proper, it was ladylike
and that was what was expected from good Afrikaans meisies (girls) .
But even so, there were some scandals and a few ‘good’ girls vanished
from residence unexpectedly and later we would hear that they had got
married or had returned to the farm. There was the getting drunk all
weekend, throwing up in the flowerbeds and streaking across the residence
forecourts, then dressing for Sunday lunch with a tie and saying grace with
pious performance.
In my time at residence, my Afrikaans improved immensely, my dancing
did not. I did become less of a novelty and more just a person to the people
I came to call friends.
But there were collisions, too. I was an outsider even as my Chineseness
became less and less of an issue; it came from my being a journalism
student rather than because my skin colour was different. Not a single
journalism student had managed to survive at one of the on-campus
residences. These residences were notoriously repressive with their
exaggerated austerity meant to ‘break down, then build up’ first-years.
The fussy and often nonsensical rules and regulations were anathema to
the idealistic journalism students who wanted to use writing to change the
world, fight the establishment’s censorship and denial of the truth that was
still choking the country. Many journalism students could not deal with
rules like having to wear white stockings, learn residence anthems and
be called by a nickname the whole of the first year. But, being the good
Chinese girl I was, I never thought too much about putting up resistance
or refusing to participate. I was not about to kick up a fuss that would
mean my parents would have to make alternative arrangements for me. I
did use the student newspaper to criticise residence policies but I still wore
the white stockings, turned to look if one of my seniors called me ‘Tweety’
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and I did not resent that as just another lowly first-year student I had to
do switchboard duty.
Still, there were students who experienced institutionalised bullying.
There were students who simply crumbled under the drawn-out initiation
process and with the added pressure of studying they were often pushed
really close to the edge. An opinion piece I wrote for the student paper
criticised the failure of initiation to recognise that this intensive period,
followed by a milder but still persistent form of the so-called rite of
passage just before year-end exams, had a destructive and humiliating
edge while masquerading as team building. There were silly punishments
and chastisements for transgressions like being caught not wearing your
residence badge on campus or around town.
My piece brought on the wrath of the student representative council for
the technikon. The SRC called for a meeting with me and the paper’s editor.
The editor and I arrived dressed as typical students in shorts and T-shirts
only to be met by the SRC men all with crushing rugby-boy handshakes
dressed up in their SRC ties and blazers. They laid the piece I had written
on the table; it had red rings and underlined sections everywhere. Part of
what they battled with was that I had the right to write an opinion piece
in the first place.
It was the final throes of apartheid but there were incidents of journalism
students’ rooms at other residences, the supposedly more open residences,
being raided for having the ‘wrong’ books such as political literature that
was pro-democracy, pro-labour, pro-struggle or anything that looked too
socialist, too communist. When I heard about the raids, it felt like it came
from twenty years earlier. Although I was never questioned for any of the
many books, pamphlets and essays that I amassed as a journalism student,
I did take to keeping some of the more ‘sensitive’ political material inside
my padlocked wardrobe.
In the meantime, our reading list for political science, to create more
rounded journalists, our lecturers believed, included knowing the once-
banned works of books and films like Fanny Hill, Lady Chatterley’s
Lover and A Clockwork Orange. For a sheltered seventeen-year-old, it
was like being let in on the biggest secret. The world opened up to me
with full-frontal male nudity, institutionalised violence, infidelity, lust and
prostitutes.
While I was a student, there was a massive march to the Union Buildings
by ANC supporters. The government was no longer able to stop the waves
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of protest and a sea of people, close to 60 or 70 000 strong, was going to
descend on the Union Buildings.
We journalism students were excited to attend the event that was set to
bring the capital city to a standstill and convey a message. At the residences,
though, a kind of panic set in as the march date was announced. It was
decided that the residences would be locked on the day of the march. The
men’s residences went into testosterone mode and vowed to protect the
women’s residences. Students who had lectures on the inner-city campuses
were advised to abandon classes.
When the house committee member on my floor heard that not only
was I going to go to class as usual but that I intended being part of the
march in the city centre, along with the other journalism students, she
was shocked and agitated. She pleaded with me to reconsider for the sake
of my own safety. I tried to explain that the march was about making a
political point, it was not war. She was not convinced.
I went to the march, while the rest of my residence friends were
barricaded behind closed doors, too frightened to attend lectures.
We were all so young; many of us were just teenagers. But the world was
changing; democracy was just around the corner. History was reshuffling
its deck. For some of us, it was the dawn of the new world we believed
we could finally be part of. For others, the candle lighting the dim view
of the world that mattered so much to them was about to be snuffed out
forever.
I remember one afternoon a fellow journalism student, who was a black
person, asked if he could borrow a book from me. I had to fetch it from
my residence room and invited him to walk with me to get the book. Men
were not allowed inside the rooms so Vusi took a seat in the lobby and
waited as I ran up the stairs.
I came back downstairs with the book and saw one of my seniors
in the lobby. I greeted her warmly as I always did. Instead of her usual
friendliness, she glared at me and then at Vusi.
Only then did I realise that I had unwittingly violated a code, a code
that almost said that I would be tolerated as the Chinese girl they had
come to know, but Vusi would not and if I was with Vusi then I, too, was
not going to be tolerated. I was shocked and hurt. I never said a word to
Vusi about it but as we walked back to class, my cheeks burnt.
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16
The Dark Night
I was still a student in the capital city as the seat of power in the Union
Buildings was about to get shaken up. On the streets there were whites-only
buses and it was still unusual to see a black person in a restaurant, unless
he was a waiter. Change felt like a distant rumour but the portents started
to creep into consciousness.
One of them was the announcement of a national referendum. It would
be for the white voting public only and they would be asked to say yes or
no to the ruling National Party proceeding with talks with the recently
freed Nelson Mandela.
In my class, there were about 40 journalism students. On the day of
the elections, those who were white and old enough to vote headed for the
biggest recreational centre on campus that had been turned into a voting
station.
One girl said: ‘I am going to vote yes today for you Ufrieda and Vusi and
Mpho and Kenneth.’ I was not sure what response I was supposed to give
her as she called out the names of the few non-white students whose lives
she was going to change. But I knew what she meant, so I smiled. I walked
with a few of them from our lecture room down to the voting station. I
knew I was not allowed inside. It was a whites-only affair, a yes or no vote
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UFRIEDA HO
to see if the white minority was ready to cosy up to the unbanned ANC
and its leader who had already walked free from prison in 1990.
I walked to the entrance of the hall. I was intrigued to see how a vote
took place. But before I got through the door I was asked to leave.
Politics still mattered to me then. My naive student self was convinced
that political shifts could make the world a better place and that it could
respond with decisiveness to the lives of vulnerable people. Political science
was the holy grail of our lectures. We had a demanding political science
lecturer. He was impatient with teenagers who could not grasp Immanuel
Kant and Rousseau or who were still whingeing about his prescribed reading
lists that went on and on with everything from Alice in Wonderland to
Gramsci, Marx and the Bible. There was an urgency in what he wanted us
to know about the world, about how it was going to change and what role
we were about to play in a new world. I was not quite ready and definitely
not so when it came to reading Homer’s The Odyssey, which was part
of the reading list. I had duly started wading through the wicked list of
literature as I regarded it then. I eventually chose The Odyssey because it
had adventure and multi-headed sea monsters. But I was drowning rather
than managing to stay afloat reading the dense text. Eventually, after about
the third time of renewing the book from the Pretoria library, I realised I
was not progressing past about the first 40 pages every time I sat down to
read from the old tome. I approached the librarian and asked for a simpler
version, maybe an abridged version, or one with a bigger font at least.
She nodded and told me to walk with her to the shelves. But she walked
beyond the dusty hardcovers and instead we carried on straight to the
children’s section. She handed me a copy with colour pictures and bigger
text and finally Homer started to make sense.
Politics and learning about what bought us to where we were did
matter then. Our lecturers urged us on with their hurried anxiety. We had
to rage and be victorious over things like our reading lists, we had to
know the world and what had shaped it to this crossroads in our history.
We would be the first generation of journalists not to be threatened by the
notorious Section 205 that compelled journalists to rat on their sources or
face being imprisoned; we would be the first generation to work in an era
of democracy, they hoped.
It was weighty stuff, but I was still trying to master another serious task:
I had to learn to drive. I was still a learner driver at that time, confused
about hand signals for failed indicators or how to do an incline start.
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Without my licence it was up to my dad or Yolanda to do the Sunday night
trek up to Pretoria for me to make it for my week’s lectures. To get home
on Fridays, I caught the train. People were being pushed off moving trains
and carriages were being set alight, all in the angry uncertain days of the
early 1990s. But for a few extra rand, which I was lucky enough to have,
the first-class carriages were an option. First class was just simple padded
seats and racks for luggage, but it kept us immune from what could be
happening at the tail of the train. More of the separateness of two worlds
so close together. One Sunday night, as dad, mom and I were driving back
up to Pretoria, we glimpsed the throbbing labour pains of the world that
was about to come and it would come into sharp focus as the traffic lights
changed. Waiting for a red light to blink to green as we neared my Pretoria
campus, I saw three white men putting up banners on a street lamp. At
first I did not notice that they were all khaki-clad and in shorts. This was
not particularly unusual, as it could have been the uniform for many men
in Pretoria. But then my gaze dropped to the posters they were putting up.
They were Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) members, the far right-
wing group, whose ideas of self-determination extended to thinking that a
white supremacist worldview was ordained by God. Then one of the men
turned and saw us.
He glared at us, then from his lungs he released a deep, venom-filled
‘Heyyyy!’
His friends turned and they all faced us as our car was paused at the
light. Without taking my eyes off them, I said, ‘Just drive, Ba’. He did not
say a word and put his foot on the accelerator.
Rumours of change were in the air, I reassured my father and myself.
Theirs was a lost cause and all they had now were posters to hang and rage
to act out on passing motorists.
The world was changing.
At home, though, dad and mom were unconvinced that a black
government would be any good for the country, or more specifically good
for the Chinese.
‘The Afrikaner is an arrogant oppressor who has no morals and the
black man is a lazy fool’ was the kind of sentiment that circulated in my
community and it was also the thinking that seeped into our house. I was
not sure what to think about that. I had met and lived with Afrikaans
people and a Sotho-speaking student who moved into residence for a
semester during my second year. I was not sure I agreed.
>
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My parents worried that a black president would run the country into
the ground. They had never heard of this Mandela anyway, until just a few
years earlier. My granny worried that the small pension the state gave her
now as a naturalised South African would be taken from her with all the
talk of a change of government. They all felt that whatever happened at
the Union Buildings, it would have little positive impact on the Chinese.
They knew they would just keep on working, detached from politics as
always and just trying to find their way among the big men, white or
black, who would call the shots.
Under the apartheid regime, the Chinese South Africans wanted what
was entitled to the whites but they did not want to be regarded as white.
It was part of why in the early 1980s when the Chinese South Africans
were offered representation on the President’s Council, with a seat on an
advisory panel, the Chinese community rejected the offer. They did not
want to be in the white camp, not when the same offer had been denied
to all other non-white groups. These were just scraps from the master’s
table. But at the same time, there was no sense of brotherhood between the
Chinese and other non-white groups either. The Chinese regarded them as
inferior, with no culture and with no moral centre.
On TV, it was clear that whatever was to come for our country would
not come easily and it would make its demand in the price of lives. News
reports used words like ‘massacres’, ‘faction fighting’ and ‘necklacing’.
But things were shifting. For some years, The Cosby Show presented
a version of normal that was not about an all-white family. Into our own
living rooms came a black family we loved, from the big-hearted, funny
doctor to his wise wife. I thought Lisa Bonet’s older sister character was
so cool. She always looked funky and there was something individual and
free-spirited about her that made me want to be like this black girl.
For the first time, TV advertisements showed a few black people, not as
‘Philemon’ the gardener or the tsotsi for a security gate company, but just
people cracking open a few beers together.
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I went back home to Johannesburg for my final year of study. We had to