Paper Sons and Daughters

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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  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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  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