Was that dream deferred, or did it dry up or sag as the poet suggests? Answers to that question should reveal something essential about Mr Qengwa: Who is this man and what is he about?
Tyhini ‘Kini’ Robert Qengwa is a retired principal of Vuyani Higher Primary School, a position he held for twenty-seven years. In that position, he acquitted himself with singular aplomb. His integrity has earned him the admiration and gratitude of thousands of students who passed through his classroom. Vuyani Higher Primary School had an enrolment of just under a thousand pupils, with a staff complement of twenty-one teachers. Like most township schools, it was overpopulated, understaffed and inadequately resourced. Despite those handicaps, Vuyani was one of the top African higher primary institutions in the Western Cape. Academically, it came second in the Lagunya area. But even though the top position always went to its arch-rival, Luzuko Higher Primary School, which was also in Gugulethu, there were two things at which Luzuko or any other school could never outperform Vuyani: the behaviour of its learners and its athletic excellence.
At eighty-six, Mr Qengwa still looks very much the athlete he was and still is. He remains an active member of the Methodist Church. Always soft-spoken, a smile does a slow, lingering dance in his eyes; and it is not until one probes, and probes deeply, that the enduring hurt in this man’s soul is revealed. It is so securely buried, most days I doubt he even knows it is there. However, despite that almost shy smile, the man oozes confidence – a quiet confidence; there is no strutting, no blowing of his own horn. This is the smile, I later realise, of a deep thinker – someone who has lived a long and productive life; has seen unbelievable changes, and rejoices in many and laments not a few; and is grateful that, despite what many would have seen as insurmountable odds, he has had a life that many born under similar (or even somewhat better) circumstances might even envy.
Like most South Africans, the advent of democracy in the country caught him pleasantly by surprise. The event or phenomenon gives him cause to ponder what it would have meant for him had he lived without the hobbling, oppressive system of racial discrimination. In other words, what did he miss that others, with similar dreams to the one he once held in his heart, now enjoy and often take for granted? Throughout his school life, Qengwa was known as the top runner among his peers. Unfortunately, his peers were not all the children in his age group but only those racially classified as ‘Bantu’ or ‘Native’ or, years later, ‘African’. Therefore, when he ran, he ran only in competition with others who were similarly classified. Even though South Africa kept records of its runners, records that would help it send athletes to the Olympic games, the best the nation had to offer, his record would not be among those under consideration. Why would it, when he himself was not considered a citizen of the country, never mind that he could lay claim to the citizenship of no other? Never mind that citizenship, according to internationally recognised law, is a birthright. But, given that the country is South Africa, we are reminded that it was a place that used its laws for decades to deprive the majority of the country’s population of that very birthright. Not until 1994 would people classified under apartheid as Bantu or Native or African be granted that right – the common right to South African citizenship.
Born of parents who worked in a city where they had no right to live as a family; losing his father before he’d had the chance to take his first breath; weaned off the breast after a month and left with a relative in a village far away so that his mother could go back to work; and even naming himself. What could the future possibly have held for such a child?
Baby Qengwa was born on 19 February 1932 in Rhabula Village in Keiskammahoek. This little boy was the third child born to Mr and Mrs Qengwa. The couple already had two daughters. The birth of a son should have been cause for much celebration, as it was in the heart of his mother. This was to be her last child, not by design but by fate. Mrs Qengwa, uMamCirha, had been widowed less than a month before. Her watchman husband, Abbey Manxiwa Qengwa, had not been ill. Rather, he and two other men with whom he worked and lived in a compound had made a brazier to keep warm against the cold night air. They had fallen asleep – most probably not for the first time – with the brazier inside the workman’s hut in which they kept their nightly watch. Carbon-monoxide deaths were, and still are, not uncommon among the poor of South Africa. The three men succumbed to it that sad night. And although her husband’s employer helped with the expenses of the funeral for Mr Qengwa to be buried in East London, Mrs Qengwa, a domestic worker and mother of two little girls, with another child expected soon, was left in dire straits. Labourers had no pensions back then. She expected nothing from the employer upon her husband’s death. Why, the man had already shown such generosity, helped her bury her husband, why would she have expected more? She did not and was not disappointed in that expectation. No windfall came her way.
Yes, neither parent of the soon-to-be-born baby was a professional. However, both were or had been hard-working and were people who took their role as parents seriously. But, the times being what they were, that role was pretty much prescribed by the circumstances of their station in life. The late Mr Qengwa had hailed from Healdtown, not far from the famous Methodist missionary education institution of the same name, where South Africa’s first president of the post-apartheid era had received his high-school education. He had worked hard and saved in the manner of men of his ilk and times. He had bought cattle. These were in his real home, his family homestead in Healdtown. He was, had been, the eldest son. Therefore, not only by virtue of that fact, his incidental birthright, but also by dint of diligence, he had left his family a relatively sizeable inheritance.
After her husband’s burial in East London, Mrs Qengwa had taken leave from her job as a domestic worker and gone to her marital home in Healdtown for confinement. But there she found open hostility from her late husband’s brothers, all younger than the first-born son and heir. Now that he had passed away, all that he’d inherited from their father and all that he himself had worked for – the cattle and sheep and goats, the only true wealth in the eyes of the amaXhosa men at the time – became a bone of contention. Mrs Qengwa, heavily pregnant, was seen as a threat. She could lay claim to what these men saw as theirs. Women, in their eyes – and, indeed, in the eyes of customary law as it was interpreted then – had no right to ownership of livestock or land. But now there was the baby. ‘My uncles made life intolerable for my mother,’ recalls Qengwa from what his late mother had passed on to him. ‘In fact, there was real threat on her life and mine.’ Thus, poison would be put into the water tanks or the mielie bags. Fortunately, the expectant mother escaped from such attempts by sheer good luck. It would happen that she did not feel like a particular dish that day or drank water that she herself had fetched from the river and kept in her own hut. But talk and action showed her that her life and the life of the baby she was carrying were in danger. Mrs Qengwa fled. She went back to Rhabula, the village of her birth family in Keiskammahoek, never to return to her marital home.
In Rhabula, she rested for a while and, in due course, delivered her baby boy. Hard-working though her husband had been, all his earnings, what there was of it, had gone into the buying of cattle. Now, those very cattle were the cause of her leaving her marital home, taking absolutely nothing with her. With three children to care for, there was little money to go around. It soon became clear to Mrs Qengwa that she needed to go back to work as soon as she could. But she couldn’t do that while minding a baby.
So, Mrs Qengwa took the baby to Ngqumenya Village. There, she left him with one of his maternal grandaunts. This was Mrs Qengwa’s deliberate choice. Her own mother notwithstanding, she wanted her son to be raised by the eldest of her mother’s sisters, of whom there were five. The reason? Mr Qengwa explains, ‘Because, of the Sityo sisters, her Aunty Nongqulu was the strictest of them all.’ Discipline. Mrs Qengwa wanted her son brought up by someone who understood and applied discipline in the raising of a child. Telling the stor
y today, Mr Qengwa smiles and says, ‘I was very lucky!’ He believes that he had a very good upbringing, with much demonstrable love, liberally sprinkled with insistence on hard work, honest ways and, when called for, corporal punishment.
The baby was called by various nicknames until – a little over a year following his birth – he started to talk. He liked imitating grown-ups, interjecting ‘Tyhini!’, but he had difficulty with the ‘ty’ sound, which he pronounced as ‘khi’. His efforts soon earned him a new nickname, and the grown-ups started calling him ‘Khin-Khin’.
Khin-Khin grew up and started school at Ngqumenya Lower Primary School. Then, in his fifth year of schooling, he transferred to Ngudle Primary School in Rhabula, where he lived with yet another maternal aunt (his mother, by this time, was working in Cape Town).
He was a bright student and didn’t once fail a class in the first four years of his schooling. That changed in his fifth year, when he was in Standard Three. Today, Mr Qengwa looks at that failure and says, ‘There was a very good reason why I failed that year!’ Owing to events at the time, he missed half the school year, moving not only between relatives but also from one village to another and then back again. In Rhabula, his attendance was very poor.
The grandaunt with whom Khin-Khin lived in Rhabula was downright lazy and exploited him mercilessly. He had to do a lot of chores, such as grinding corn, smearing the floor with cow dung, brewing beer, watering the garden and fetching water from the river. But the old woman was not only hard as a taskmaster; she was not saddled with a big or generous heart. Khin-Khin was often hungry. It is therefore not at all surprising that the move from Ngqumenya to Rhabula cost him a year of schooling, forcing him to repeat Standard Three. Reflecting on that now, he recalls, ‘When my other grandaunt, Nongqulu, came to fetch me from Rhabula, that was one of the happiest days of my life!’ To this day, Mr Qengwa is grateful to her for recalling him ‘from Pharaoh’. He laughs and then adds, ‘I would not have been educated had I not left Rhabula!’
When they reached what was to be his permanent home from then on, Nongqulu exclaimed, ‘Sibuye nayo igusha’ (We’ve brought back the sheep). The taste of freedom was sweet to Khin-Khin; free from hunger and unreasonably demanding work, he resolved to make the grandaunt who had made his life so much better as happy as possible, and he knew that nothing would please her more than his doing well at school. He therefore put all he had into that single goal. However, he also knew that he had to help this kindly woman all that he could. Not only did he attend to all the chores usually regarded as boys’ work – such as herding and helping in the fields – but he also did all the other work that needed doing, from helping his grandaunt by fetching water from the river to gathering wood from the forest and smearing the floors with cow dung. He didn’t feel any shame in doing ‘girls’ work’, Mr Qengwa remembers. ‘All I wanted to do is not to be a burden, as much as I could. I was grateful she was looking after me.’ This training, he feels, did him a lot of good. He learnt to depend on himself and to work hard both in school and at home.
Indeed, he began to do very well in school and went on to complete his primary school education, passing Standard Six in 1950. He was the first in his family to hold any certificate of education – no small achievement in those days, when so many people like him had either not yet heeded the call to education or hadn’t yet fully understood how an education would determine every aspect of one’s life – especially the quality of that life. For most children of that period, passing Standard Six marked the end of their short school journey. In these times of mass compulsory education, this fact is often still overlooked. Formal education, especially for the black African segment of the South African population, is relatively new. Within living memory, there are people who still recall how ‘avant-garde’ or enlightened those who sent their children to school were regarded in their communities. In Elinor Sisulu’s 2002 biography of her parents-in-law, Walter and Albertina Sisulu: In Our Lifetime, the education of Albertina Sisulu is vividly recalled as more a matter of happenstance than design. Her maternal grandfather’s support of the missionaries’ efforts to found schools and to get the children of surrounding villages to attend those schools meant getting the support of those children’s parents in freeing them from what was then regarded as children’s roles, such as herding and working in the fields, especially for the boys, and housework for the girls. But the vast majority of rural villagers saw no immediate need for nor benefit in a school education.
However, young Khin-Khin’s family, fortunately for him, fell in the ‘enlightened’ category. Among the factors that may account for that is that Keiskammahoek is a district in the Eastern Cape that was blessed with a plethora of missionary stations, accounting for a faster spread of education in the area. Institutions included high schools such as Healdtown, St Matthews, Lovedale and Fort Cox – all boarding schools and all founded by missionaries. Our hero went to one such school after he passed Standard Six.
At the beginning of 1951, Qengwa started his secondary education at the same boarding school that the illustrious Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela had attended a few years earlier: Healdtown High School. As can be imagined, the institution in the town of Fort Beaufort gained wide fame after 1994. Several decades previously, in 1952 – the young Qengwa’s second year at Healdtown – there was a strike. The students were protesting against the poor quality of food. Eventually, the school authorities took the students to court.
Qengwa says that he was surprised to see his mother there. She had come all the way to Fort Beaufort from Cape Town. He felt like crying when he considered the unwarranted expense she’d been forced to suffer. Unbeknown to the students, however, their parents had been summoned by the authorities and their presence demanded under threat that their children would be expelled, or worse, arrested and locked up. The widow, who now worked in Cape Town, had been compelled to make the long and tedious third-class train ride to Fort Beaufort.
Mindful of the fact that he depended solely on his domestic-worker mother for all financial support, from boarding-school fees to trips home and some pocket money, Qengwa applied himself to his studies diligently and completed his Junior Certificate on time, in three years, in 1953. He then continued his studies at the same institution, doing a two-year primary teachers’ course, which would qualify him to teach at primary schools. Again, it should be remembered that this was a course of study designed only for teachers classified as Bantu. Teachers of other races had to have matriculated before they could take up studies enabling them to teach.
At Healdtown, Qengwa distinguished himself as an athlete of extraordinary talent – gifted, disciplined and dedicated. And, despite the absence of any government support, such talent was not only noticed but also rewarded – at least to the extent that sparse resources permitted. When he had completed his teachers’ course, the college awarded him a bursary to undertake further studies. Significantly, besides its school and teaching qualifications, Healdtown also offered a one-year course in physical education. Qengwa gladly accepted the offer. As to why he had received funding to continue his studies, for Qengwa the reason was obvious: ‘I received the bursary because I was one of the best runners in South Africa in long distance. I ran in Johannesburg, Durban, Welkom and other places.’ In six years, he had completed his Junior Certificate, Primary School Certificate and a Physical Education Certificate. He was more than ready to enter the field of professional work.
Meanwhile, being a student did not exonerate one from the menace of the country’s politics. From age sixteen, the law demanded that all Africans carry a reference book or pass, commonly known as a dompas. By 1955, government officials had come to Healdtown Institution, and students were informed that all those sixteen years or older would be excused from classes in order to go to Fort Beaufort to have their photographs taken for the dompasse.
There was certainly cooperation between the institution and the government on this legal matter, regardless of the Healdtown authorities�
�� view on the principle of enforced passes. On the appointed day, the affected students were allowed to go into town to present themselves at the offices for processing. There, a policeman asked Qengwa for his name. ‘Khin-Khin, Robert,’ he answered. The policeman understood Robert to be the boy’s school name, his English or Christian name. ‘But,’ he asked, ‘what is your Xhosa name?’ ‘Khin’ was the answer.
After a little toing and froing, the exasperated policeman still wanted to do a proper job of registering a Bantu male. Finding Khin uncooperative, he wrote down ‘Kini’. While he did not consult Qengwa about the spelling, he nonetheless knew that all words in isiXhosa ended with a vowel. The young Mr Qengwa, quietly amused at the officer’s predicament, just laughed at the stupidity of the situation.
It would be no laughing matter later in his life. It is a hard name to explain to prospective employers and colleagues, and even to family. But that is what is in his identity document. This has to be why, after all these years, even among his familiar fraternity, none know Mr Qengwa’s first name: ‘Tyhini!’
Recalling the story of the name in his ID book, Mr Qengwa reveals that the incident shows police bullying during apartheid and how ‘We blacks feared them.’ He feels that had fear not been uppermost in his mind, he would have argued with that policeman and told him to write his name correctly. The oppressive humiliations of the apartheid system touched on all aspects of one’s life, not just the big issues such as schooling and employment but even smaller details like what name would be attributed to you and how that name would be spelt in official documents.
For apartheid to succeed, all institutions had to cooperate, and the church education authorities could not but work hand in hand with the government to enforce state laws. At the end of each year, the Healdtown students were given official forms on which they had to list their name, confirm that they were returning home on annual holidays, and state when and to which institution they would be returning. For quite some time, Qengwa had had a great longing to go to Cape Town. But his mother was afraid that he would be arrested because he didn’t have the right papers for official ‘permission’ to be in that area of the Western Cape. Such permission was granted to those Africans who had been born in the area; to those who, having entered the area legally for the purposes of work, had remained in the same employment continuously for ten years; or to those who had continued to live in the area continuously and legally for fifteen years.
Illuminating Lives Page 24