A man appears. It is as though he was sent to remind us that the world is made not only for the young and beautiful but also for the old and the grey. He is shrunken and mottled so that he looks like something discarded, a paper bag lying on the side of the road or a can crushed on the pavement. But he is not nothing. He is a man.
At first we only notice him moving at the edge of the frame but soon he is centre stage and rising. He opens his mouth and sings, ‘Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, men have named you. You’re so like the lady with the mystic smile.’ He croons as though he were born to the stage. ‘Do you smile to tempt a lover, Mona Lisa?’ he continues and a silence settles on us. ‘Or is this your way to hide a broken heart?’ His voice is like velvet but he is singing for his supper. He is literally holding a cup in his hand and we are singing along because he has transformed into Nat King Cole in a dinner jacket and a tie and we are transported into a world his voice has made and in it there is no rancour, only the beautiful ones who have been born for this black and beautiful moment.
Without warning or provocation a waitress with a screaming gash of a mouth is shouting at our debonair crooner. She is standing in front of him – ‘Get out of here’ – and before he can respond she pours water on him and he is humiliated and cowering in front of her, shivering like a dog.
Ah! Here it is, finally: the moment we anticipated as we packed our bags in Nairobi. We landed in South Africa prepared for this confrontation. Truth be told, our lives in exile as the children of revolutionaries were one long rehearsal for this scene.
Here is the villain and she is barely a woman, still a child really, smashing the dignity of a man who could have been our father.
And he is taking it. ‘Sorry, please, I’m sorry, forgive me, I’m only looking for bread.’ His voice is no longer velvet. Now it is cracked stones, gravelly and ruined by drink. But still each word is enunciated perfectly as though he were educated at Eton and the contrast between what he once was and where he kneels now, wet and trembling on the street, should be too much for anyone to bear.
We are up on our feet and Slumko is roaring and Mandi is hissing and I am shouting and Lindi is stabbing her finger into the waitress’s face and the girl who is almost a woman is white as a sheet and backing slowly inside, edging her way towards the safety of the restaurant. We are following her and we are seething and rage boils in our veins and we are so outraged that we forget the old man. We forget to ask if he is okay. Instead, we give the perpetrator our full attention.
‘What are you doing?’ Slumko thunders. ‘That man is old enough to be your father!’
‘You have no respect. What kind of behaviour is that?’ Mandi chimes in.
‘Where is your manager?’ says Slumko. ‘This is simply not on.’
The waitress gulps. She looks shaken but she is defiant. ‘You don’t work here,’ she says. ‘Every day he’s here. Every day asking, begging, bothering the customers.’
‘We are customers,’ Slumko retorts. ‘We are paying customers and we didn’t complain.’ Then it is her turn to look towards the ground, chastened.
I go in for the kill. ‘You’re racist. That’s your problem. You’re racist and you think you can talk to him any way you like because he’s black.’ My objective is to maim, not to reconcile or elicit understanding.
The waitress’s eyes snap into focus and she wants to cry but she is stubborn and entitled to express herself and she has never ever been spoken to like this by black people and she cannot allow this travesty to unfold like this. ‘Don’t tell me I’m a racist. You foreigners think you know everything about this country but you know nothing. This isn’t America, this is South Africa.’
The word ‘racist’ is like a dog whistle and the other patrons are now paying attention. A pack has formed.
A white man at a nearby table pipes up, ‘She’s right. I come here all the time, that old man is a pest. Tell me something? Have you ever been here before?’ he asks, looking me dead in the eye. ‘Have you ever walked into this place before tonight? Because if you had, you would know, we are all nice here. There’s no racialism. This one here’ – he motions at the waitress – ‘is just doing her job.’
The kinship of skin is deep.
They think we are strangers; they have assumed we are black Americans and this makes us even angrier, so Lindi says in her British accent, ‘You think we’re from America? You think that because we speak English we aren’t from here? Don’t try those tricks, you have nothing to teach us about our own country.’
An old white woman, who looks as though she may not have a place where she can lay her head every night, wanders into the conversation. She is thinner than an old woman should be, so thin she cannot have children to feed her. She takes us all in and hisses in our general direction, ‘Don’t bother about them. It’s obviously a case of bad breeding.’
Mandi loses it. ‘Breeding is for horses,’ she says in her high-pitched voice. ‘If you haven’t noticed, there are no animals here, just black people who happen to be human.’
The restaurant manager makes an entrance. He introduces himself and tries to assert an authority we do not respect. We don’t care about restaurant decorum. We have flown across the length of a continent and travelled decades in anticipation of this moment. A supervisor will not stop this collision course with a confrontation we see as our birthright. We are here to confront the apartheid whites whose boots have been on our necks. We are unruly and ungovernable. We have not been exiles only to return and capitulate with the politeness expected of us by unrepentant whites. We have found the racism our parents fled and we intend to mine it for all it is worth.
We respect the manager only insofar as he is capable of moving our agenda forward. So we demand that he instruct his waitress to apologise.
She refuses.
We insist.
He prevaricates, does not know what to do with blacks like us.
We smell blood.
‘What are you waiting for? We have demanded an apology for the racist actions of your employee and you seem to be thinking. Don’t you know that the customer is always right? Where exactly did you get your training?’
We sneer.
He stutters something incoherent.
‘Listen, this is not about us,’ Slumko says. ‘We don’t give a damn if she apologises to us or not. An old man has been offended here and he is the one she should be saying sorry to. Not us. She says it, and we let it go. She doesn’t, and you’ll be hearing about this for a long time to come. You have no idea what kind of connections we have.’
We are steeped in the rules of middle-class combat and far more cosmopolitan than he can imagine. It has been many years since we last suffered any kind of indignity, yet we know all about the moral high ground. We have been raised to fight on behalf of those who cannot speak for themselves. We have the articulate outrage of the entitled and we have the advantage of surprise. We are brown and that should not mean we are afraid or uneducated or polite. We are none of these.
The waitress senses she has been outwitted. She is confused – she had not known that a group of uppity black Americans would sabotage her shift. How could she have known? She looks at Slumko with his hulking muscles and his movie-star looks, and then at Lindi and Mandi and me – tall and elegant in our jeans and our high-heel sandals and made-up eyes – and she knows she must relent.
Her manager – frightened and equally confused – accompanies us back outside. The rest of the café clientele looks on. They have chosen sides – a small number are with us but the bulk are shocked by our cheek. Even here, in the most liberal of Johannesburg’s streets, no one has really begun to imagine the future. And yet here it is: brazen and unrelenting and demanding. Everything is tense and frozen and the neon street no longer looks glamorous. We are in a seedy part of town and the whites here are only sitting next to blacks because their choices are constrained.
He is gone. The old Bojangles has vanished and all our remonstrations have come to n
aught.
The waitress looks at us triumphantly, as if to say, ‘So much for that.’ But she quickly rearranges her face when she realises that, even though the victim we were championing has slunk off, we still hold the balance of power. We are angrier and more articulate than she is, and his absence does not change that, although it does sting. He is not there to celebrate our eloquence and bravery; he has gone somewhere to find the meal he was seeking. He has disavowed us.
‘I’m sorry,’ says the manager. He avoids eye contact with the rest of us, as though the fight was caused by too much oestrogen. Then he gives Slumko a look that says, ‘Man to man, let’s let this go now.’
He continues, still talking to our fearless leader. ‘I think we have learnt a lesson today and we will make sure it never happens again.’ He looks Slumko in the eye as though he hopes that sense will prevail. Slumko is seduced: the inclusiveness of the male gaze is so hard to resist.
‘It’s fine, man, it’s okay. We understand.’
The waitress is released and she scampers away. We stare at her back as she retreats. The manager walks us to our car, intent on making sure we leave his establishment and don’t cause any more trouble.
‘Next time you are here, please swing by, it will be a free drink. On us!’ says the manager to Slumko. The rest of us are invisible. We brought the trouble and now we are being ushered into the car. Slumko is the man of the hour because there is nothing else the manager can hold onto. We are not ordinary blacks he can threaten; we are loud-mouthed women led by a man who surely must be open to some sort of reason.
Slumko gets behind the wheel and the rest of us pile into the car. The car impresses the manager. In years to come he will see many more blacks like us but on this night we are singular and so his disquiet grows.
He reaches in to shake Slumko’s hand and then we pull off. After a few minutes of silence we burst into laughter. We retell the story of our heroism, we cheer one another on for standing up to the rabid racists and we dub Slumko the sell-out for forging a pact to bundle us out of there without causing further chaos. We laugh and we feel full although we haven’t eaten.
We will dine on the story for years to come and over time we will end the story with Mandi’s words as the punchline: ‘Breeding is for horses. We. Are. Human.’ Sometimes when we are together we will say the line in unison, cackling and giving one another high fives at this part, gloating about how clever we all were.
The old man and his vanishing act will become less and less important. We will forget whether he was singing ‘Mona Lisa’ or ‘Mr Bojangles’. The story we will tell in the weeks and then years after this scene will be about our own chutzpah. It will be about our encounter with the racism we have been told about our whole lives.
* * *
We rent a car and travel by road to Pietermaritzburg. The trip is lush. We drive on immaculate roads that slice through cane fields. The hills are a Van Gogh and we are sunflowers – soaking in the air and the curves of this new place we have never seen before, which Aunty and Uncle remember as though it were only yesterday. Uncle’s job is on the Pietermaritzburg campus, so we are going to settle him in – to buy crockery and linen and make sure the temporary house is spick and span. Our first destination though – before anything else – is Mkhulu’s house. We are on our way to meet my grandfather, Baba’s father.
As we get out of the car, an old man appears at the top of the stairs. He is grey and short, much shorter than Baba. He is plump and has the air of someone who is well taken care of – perhaps so well cared for that he has grown too soft. Standing looks difficult. The old man leans heavily on a cane and rests for a moment, then he shuffles forward and looks up. I shiver: I am peering into the future, looking at Baba in thirty years’ time. The old man does not attempt the steps. There are too many and they are too steep. Instead he stops and looks across the road at the car as we get out with our long legs and our eager faces. As he sees me he puts his arms out, forgetting the cane momentarily. He stands erect and steady, with his arms outstretched, waiting for me. His voice is strained, but I can hear him clearly. He is calling my name, the way one does a lost animal. His voice is old and slightly breathless but it is thrilling in its unmistakeable resemblance to Baba’s. ‘Sisonke!’ he shouts. ‘Sisonke!’
I move quickly, running across the road and then up the stairs and into his arms. He slumps heavily against me and for a moment I feel off-balance as though we might topple over. But I regain my footing and hold onto him. We cry into one another’s jerseys. His is plush and new and still smells like the shop, but his neck and face are those of an old man, stale with a hint of sourness.
‘Ahh. Ahh, mtanami,’ he says. The cracked veranda of the house heaves beneath us. The street looks on, tired and fading. My cousins smile up at us from the steps, and the mountains watch us with heavy-lidded knowing.
This landscape has seen the old man on this porch each and every day of his life. It knew him when he was a young man and before that when he was only a toddler. Those mountains watched him take his first steps on this very walkway and, later, they saw his son born. The sun, hanging low in the sky where it sits now, watched the old man’s son close the door one last time and never come back. It waited like the old man. The sun and the trees and the mountains and the sky waited and eventually they all began to see that the boy would not return. They saw too that the man did not give up. And now the sun and the trees and the sky are observing our embrace. They are watching in anticipation of another reunion yet to come. They know I am a mere harbinger, an augury sent in advance of the warrior who will soon return home.
We walk into the dark living room, both of us in tears. I am helping Mkhulu to walk, so he leans on me – the energy it took to stand properly on the veranda now depleted. We stand shoulder to shoulder. His other children – my aunt and uncle who are younger than me and dressed in their Sunday best – are already seated. They stand and greet us and I am surprised that they are so young. His wife is Mummy’s age so I suppose it makes sense. Technically they are my aunt and uncle but they are just kids. Strangers. Strange teenagers.
I try not to look disappointed at their presence. Fleetingly, I want them to disappear. A childish jealousy passes through me. Mkhulu doesn’t need me – he doesn’t need grandchildren at all. He already has children who are younger than my sisters and me. What kind of love can we give him that he does not already have? I feel robbed somehow. All these years spent waiting to meet my grandfather and here he is, beautiful in his old age and also a complete stranger whose life is already full – full of children.
The children look like him and so they look like me. I shake my head as though this is a weird dream sequence rather than the end of one part of my life and the beginning of another. I have only known him for five minutes but I am already greedy for his affection.
Exile has been like a blanket – it protected us from ordinary hurts just as it provided a sheen for the loved ones we longed for and made them seem heroic. In my dreams they were all perfect, just as in their dreams we were too.
There is no time for processing these sorts of emotions. We are in the deep end already. Mkhulu has a lot to say and all of it must be said quickly because he wants to make up for lost time.
Over the next few hours, he regales me with stories. He talks about what it is like to lose a son to the mist and what it feels like to be left behind. He says vanishing is an act of cruelty but seems to recognise that it was also an act of love. I don’t understand it all, of course. Baba has never spoken about his father and he has been an absence.
I know small pieces of the story, gleaned over years and told piecemeal and guardedly. In Baba’s version one particular school holiday he said his usual goodbyes to his father and to his stepmother (there was another wife back then – Mkhulu has had four in total over the years) and hugged his favourite cousin Gugu goodbye. He walked out the door and went back to school. There was a protest at Fort Hare within a few weeks and that was
when the M-Plan kicked into action. A few of them went underground. They took a train from Alice to Johannesburg and made their way through a line of police dogs outside Park Station. They did not have the hated dompasses that all ‘natives’ were supposed to carry and which gave them permission to live and work in the city, so their plan could have collapsed at that stage, but luck was on their side. They hid in Alexandra and then followed instructions from comrades who would emerge from here or there with packages and money and notes.
He was under strict instructions from the movement not to tell anyone he was leaving. All he knew was that he was part of a group of recruits who would take up arms in the new military wing of the people’s party. He wasn’t sure where he was going. That detail would only be revealed once they crossed the border, his destination kept from him to protect his own safety. This much I had known when I was growing up. Now, all these years later, Mkhulu picks up the story from there, telling me what happened on the other side of the border Baba crossed a lifetime ago.
After a few weeks, a police officer knocked on Mkhulu’s door. It was a Saturday, so Mkhulu was home. The officer took a seat in the kitchen, rather than in the formal lounge, which made Mkhulu extremely uncomfortable. He assumed he was here to tell him that his son had been found dead in a ditch on the way to Fort Hare, where he had been studying before he disappeared. That was not the purpose of the visit. The officer was looking for his son. The man was stern in his eyes, even though his mouth was friendly and spoke politely.
Mkhulu told the truth, which was that he had no idea where his son was. The officer leaned in close and told him that he had better cooperate. Mkhulu was alarmed because he was cooperating. The officer said fine and leaned back.
Mkhulu pauses in his story and stands up stiffly. He walks to a cabinet standing against the wall and picks up a frame. ‘Here she is. My wife at the time. So she offered him some tea and he graciously accepted. You know because of the apartheid laws and so on, technically he shouldn’t have said yes, but he was showing his human side. Du Toit and I became somewhat friendly over the years.’
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