Black Like You

by Mashaba, Herman;

  “Connie and Herman, you are our greatest friends. We love you both dearly and we cannot bear to see the heartbreak of childlessness. I want to offer to be a surrogate mother for you,” she said. Connie cried, and I could barely answer I was so overwhelmed.

  Dr Rodriguez was positive about our chances of surrogacy succeeding. “I’ll refer you to a counsellor who will speak to all the parties concerned. This is to ascertain candidacy for the procedure and the experience. Put simply, this means that if the counsellor approves you as good candidates, then I will refer you to a lawyer to draw up the legal contracts.”

  Sally conceived within two weeks, but in the third week of the pregnancy Dr Rodriguez confirmed that she had an ectopic pregnancy. This was a very hard moment for us all, especially Connie, who really took the failed pregnancy very badly. Soon afterwards I said to Sally, “You know I am very grateful for the generous gift that you have tried to give us. But, unfortunately, it is time to say ‘enough’. Connie and I will just have to accept that we aren’t meant to be parents. We have wonderful nieces and nephews and godchildren and friends’ children – they are precious and we are blessed to have them in our lives. They will have to be our children, too.”

  Connie, who was exhausted and sad, did not disagree.

  The years passed, and all our energy went into Black Like Me, whose extraordinary success exceeded our wildest dreams. Then, in 1993, Connie felt her biological clock ticking again, and she became broody. I have never resorted to traditional African doctors for any muti or advice, and I was quite taken aback when my mother suggested that Connie consult a traditional doctor she’d heard positive reports about.

  “You can go if you like,” I said to Connie, “but I’m not going with you.”

  Connie didn’t have faith in traditional medicine either, so she was also sceptical. But she’d reached the stage where she felt she had nothing to lose and a baby to gain, so she agreed to go along with my mother.

  Before she left, I said, “Sweetheart, here’s the money for the doctor; but I don’t want you to be disappointed. This problem isn’t something that money can fix – if it was, you know I’d have given every single cent I own to give you a child. This is beyond our control, but I hope it works out for you.”

  Of course, the muti had no effect. Unfortunately, not everyone was as supportive as our family and friends, and one day Connie received a malicious phone call.

  “Is this Connie Mashaba?” a voice asked. “Yes,” Connie replied.

  “I wonder how you feel about your husband going to all these beauty contests?” the stranger said, unaware that Connie has never given in to the green monster of jealousy.

  Connie coolly replied, “I don’t know what you’re getting at. It’s part of his work. He’s there in a professional capacity.”

  “I was just wondering how you feel about his being surrounded by beautiful, fertile young women. Especially since you haven’t been able to give him a child,” the stranger said.

  Connie put down the phone and let out a sigh. When she told me about the phone call, I took her in my arms to reassure her. She laid her head on my shoulder and whispered, “Herman, I could say that if you want to leave me because we’re childless, then the choice is yours. But you see, I don’t believe I’m only a baby machine to you. I believe in us, that we are a couple who love each other in spite of everything.”

  And then, to our delight, in 1994 Nkhensani was born! Oh, the joy at the birth of our long-awaited little girl. At the time, I was travelling extensively, and my mother moved in with us to help Connie ease into motherhood. Although Connie had waited to be a mother for such a long time, she was inexperienced. And so, like every good granny, my mother wanted to make sure that Connie had the support she needed. My mother hadn’t been able to be there through much of my own childhood, and her involvement in the lives of our children was her much-appreciated attempt to make up for that absence in my own life.

  We were equally thrilled when our son, Rhulani, was born on 2 April 1997. Our family was now complete.

  While Connie was attending with great zeal to her maternal duties in the years following 1995, I was taking care of our other child, which Connie refers to as “Herman’s Baby”. Black Like Me was a model child; her development was exemplary, and she rewarded Connie and me in so many ways – I enjoyed golf games with friends, and weekends away, and holidays with our friends and family, and we were able to travel extensively. By this time, we had already travelled to about sixty countries. I had broken the curse of the saying: people who are born in Hammanskraal grow up and die there.

  When, as a young boy, I travelled on the train from Hammanskraal to Pretoria or Johannesburg, I felt as if I was embarking upon an exciting adventure; later on, honeymooning in Durban and experiencing the ocean, and driving through the open spaces of the country to get there, had opened my eyes to the vastness of the country. But it was international travel that really exposed me to a world beyond, and to the diversity of cultures. Travel also taught me much by exposing me to the world’s expectations of me; all I needed to do was open my eyes to the opportunities that existed and seize them.

  Prior to 1994, travel among blacks was not merely financially difficult; getting a passport was such a logistical nightmare that few blacks bothered to apply. I had managed to obtain a passport fairly easily when I worked at SuperKurl because I needed to travel to Swaziland, Namibia, Lesotho and Botswana on business.

  In those days, I especially enjoyed the run to Lesotho with Leon Thompson. Connie would wake up early and make me breakfast so that I could be on the road before dawn. In the coolest hours of the morning I drove to Leon’s house so that we could leave at 5am, before the morning rush-hour traffic snarled up the highways. Lesotho was a lucrative market for SuperKurl, and Leon and I would spend two or three days there promoting the products and writing up orders. It was during the five-hour drive to Lesotho, and at the inevitable border post wait, that I really got to know Leon. We would discuss business and, inevitably, the current affairs of the day. Leon was an astute executive, and although our trips were purposeful and deadline driven, the aim was to offer service, a good product, and get the maximum orders. During our conversations, I managed to gain an insight into the perceptions that black and white people had of each other, and how difficulties in understanding manifested themselves on both sides. I soon realised that our interaction wasn’t so much a case of breaking down barriers as of realising the falseness and deceptiveness of stereotypes. Leon and I were in many ways equals, and our discussions revealed our commonality.

  Shortly before I’d started Black Like Me in 1985, Connie and I took our first aeroplane flight and visited Cape Town, spending the week at the Cape Sun hotel. We felt as if we were in a parallel universe; hardly any black people were visible in the city streets, and one day as we were walking down St George’s Mall, I turned to Connie and said, “Where the hell are the black people?” Fortunately, my sister Conny had told a nursing colleague, Adolphina Moleba, that we’d be visiting Cape Town, and Adolphina had arranged for a cousin of hers to show us around the city and its surrounding townships. Adolphina’s cousin turned out to be none other than the recently banned Black Consciousness activist, Dr Mamphela Ramphele.

  At that time, the apartheid government was forging ahead with its resettlement programmes, and it had built many houses in Khayelitsha. The people who were supposed to be relocated to Khayelitsha refused to leave the areas they were living in. There were many reasons why they didn’t want to be resettled in this alien area, not the least of which was Khayelitsha’s distance from business areas that offered jobs. I could sympathise with these people’s sentiments because I myself was in the process of trying to find suitable premises for Black Like Me; in my own way, I knew how difficult it was living and working in areas that are off the beaten track.

  From the mid-1980s to the late 1990s I seized any travelling opportu
nity that arose, and as a result I spent many days and weeks away from home, sometimes leaving Connie to keep an eye on the business. I worked hard to promote Black Like Me at whatever community opportunity arose, so as to keep the company in the public eye. We organised workshops in salons to train hairdressers in the appropriate use of our products, and we also ran hairdressing competitions and beauty competitions. As Black Like Me increased its market share, Connie and I could afford to take leisure trips overseas. Our first such trip was to Mauritius in 1986. We both found this beautiful island very different from South Africa. Mauritius was calm and harmonious – it was a relief and a joy to travel without having to look over our shoulders for someone waiting to accuse us of some racial offence.

  Imagine me in 1986, in my mid-twenties, living in apartheid South Africa at a time when the state of emergency had just been declared, and all my leaders were exiled or in jail; here I was, operating a business from a modest factory in a remote South African township. And then, suddenly, I was off to America. My first international business trip was to New York. One of my friends and a regular customer, Goolam Kaka, was flying via New York to visit his sister in Canada, and we agreed to fly to New York together. When I went to the US embassy to apply for my visa I had to deal with bureaucrats who were uncertain about granting an American visa to a young black South African man. During the interview, I explained that I was in the beauty industry and that I was going to the States on a fact-finding mission. I had no business agenda, and I did not have a network of business contacts, but my air of confidence seemed to persuade them: the business visa was approved.

  The flight stopped over in Ilha do Sal in the Cape Verde Islands, and during refuelling passengers were allowed to disembark and stretch their legs. We strolled to the airport building; it was midnight, but we decided to have a nightcap in the bar, and it was there that I met a fellow South African who told me he was a photographer for The Sowetan. We got chatting over a drink, and he mentioned that he’d be visiting a South African friend. “I’ll be attending to some business in New York. We should get together one night for a meal.”

  It was fortunate that I had the worldly photographer as my companion: when we landed at JFK airport, it was a complete culture shock – the vastness of it, the people and the chaos. The photographer’s friend, Duma Ndlovu, was in exile at the time; he greeted all three of us warmly at the airport, and drove us to the Hilton Hotel on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. After he’d seen to it that we were booked in, he said to Goolam and me, “Why don’t you guys come to my apartment in Harlem? I’d love to introduce you to some exiles, I’m sure they’d love to hear some stories from home.”

  Duma was an excellent host, but the evening remains memorable because it was the first time I’d met fellow South Africans who were in exile. I found their thirst for information about South Africa quite humbling.

  “Do you think apartheid will ever be dismantled?”

  “What are the whites saying, what are they doing, about the situation?”

  “Are there still protest meetings at Regina Mundi in Soweto?”

  “Can there ever really be a peaceful solution for South Africa?”

  “Hey, I miss eating apricots off the trees behind my granny’s two-room in Dobsonville.”

  I felt moved by their longing for their homeland, their commitment to South Africa, the immense love they had for the country, and the hopes they had for its liberation. I lay awake a long time that night in my suite at the Hilton, my thoughts turning around the political situation in the country, and the people who desperately wanted the anti-apartheid struggle to succeed.

  Duma was active in the arts, and over the next few days he took us to the Lincoln Centre and various sites of black activism in Harlem. One evening we dined together, sharing stories over delicious food and perhaps drinking one glass of wine too many. When the bill came, I insisted on paying. I suppose you could say that I felt I was in a better financial position to do so, after having seen Duma’s modest Harlem home; my assumption was that he was the struggling exile and I was the successful businessman. Duma, however, refused to allow me to foot the bill.

  At the time, there were a lot of government spies about, both black and white, who caused a lot of harm. Ruth First had been murdered in exile in Mozambique in 1982; though this had happened four years earlier, many exiles remained vigilant and suspicious of strangers. It is not surprising that Duma himself was apprehensive of this black guy – me – who was staying at the Hilton hotel.

  “I was used to South African exiles who landed on my doorstep with empty pockets and grumbling bellies, and I was used to having to host them until they got used to New York and could stand on their own two feet,” he later told me. “I couldn’t help being suspicious when I first met you. I thought you might be on the boers’ payroll – until, that is, I read a newspaper article about you. It described how you manipulated the system and managed to develop a successful business outside the legal framework.” Whenever Duma and I get together, we still reminisce about that first meeting in New York, and to this day we have a good laugh about it all.

  At the time, after seeing the huge sacrifices made by Duma and the other exiles in their struggle for liberation in South Africa, I was forced to rethink the regret I’d felt as a young adult, the sense of bitter disappointment, that I had never managed to leave South Africa and join Umkhonto we Sizwe. I realised how fortunate I was to be building a successful business, which required my full attention, at a moment when the apartheid system was beginning to show signs of strain under international and local political pressure. How long it would to take for the government to yield to the pressure was not certain, but it was evident that the system was not sustainable. During my youth, none of us ever imagined that we would see the end of apartheid in our lifetime, but by the late 1980s a spark of hope lit our optimism. The dismantling of apartheid might take another ten or twenty years, but at last we sensed that the end of oppression was on the horizon.

  In New York I had engaged with exiles who longed to return to the country of their birth, and yet they voiced their uncertainty about that hope ever becoming a reality. I’d felt an immense sympathy with them, living as they did with continual suspicion and uncertainty, having sacrificed family, friends and everything they knew and loved. Through this engagement with them, I no longer felt the desire to trade places with them, and I finally understood and accepted that my contribution to my country would not be that of someone who fought for change from outside her borders, but rather as an example of the kind of liberation that is achieved through personal independence. There are many kinds of freedom, but one certain path to freedom is taking responsibility for one’s own life.

  A month after I returned home from New York, South African Airways was prohibited from flying to the United States. This was part of the international boycott of the apartheid government, which gained momentum, so that every day brought increasing isolation.

  Yet my own world was expanding. I had my business to attend to, and I continued to visit the United States, flying there two or three times a year on other international airlines to attend trade shows, particularly in Chicago, which hosted the annual American Health and Beauty Aids Institute trade shows for black haircare and beauty companies. It often happened that Connie, or one of my partners or staff members, accompanied me, and the excursions were always great learning experiences. These trips provided me with more than just product knowledge, the latest trends and business contacts – they also taught me a lot about people. I encountered impressive human beings who broke down many of the misconceptions I had developed about race and culture from my early life experiences. My exposure to open-minded people who had grown up without the shackles of hatred made me adamant in my refusal to tolerate any expression of racism in my presence. As a young adult, I had avoided contact with whites because I was still vulnerable, and I feared any threat to my dignity. But, fortunately, by th
e time I started interacting with white people I had matured. I knew who I was by then, and I knew that I was in control of my life – nobody could devalue me or my achievements without my permission.

  Prior to meeting Johan Kriel at SuperKurl, I had interacted with white business people from large companies, selling their products on a commission basis, and during that time I had related to them at the same level; our business relationship was mutually valuable and beneficial. I met the CEOs of the companies I worked for because as their frontline, the commissioned sales person, I was a valuable asset to the company. I never allowed myself to be anyone’s “boy”. During these exchanges with the top management, I clearly saw that there was no reason for white managers to push around their black employees; that kind of behaviour does not make business sense. In my experience, most business managers strive to build good relationships with their staff members.

  A positive attitude was one of the main ingredients in ensuring that I achieved success. By dwelling on negativity, one’s mind becomes muddied; negativity obscures clarity of thought – and clear thinking is an essential element when it comes to making sound decisions. A positive attitude, on the other hand, opens the windows of the mind so that one is able to get a clear view of possibilities and opportunities.

  In 1997, then-president Nelson Mandela hosted several international and local dignitaries on the occasion of his first return visit to Robben Island. Guests were flown to the island by helicopter, and Hillary Clinton and her daughter Chelsea, as well as actor Bill Cosby, were among the international contingent. Connie and I had also been invited, and we both felt the significance and poignancy of the occasion. We would finally be going to visit the notorious prison where Nelson Mandela had been incarcerated for eighteen years, before being transferred to Pollsmoor and later Victor Verster Prison on the mainland for the remaining nine years of his prison term.

  I was immediately struck by the forbidding grey boulders surrounding the island harbour, and the shrieking of gulls in the solemn sky. The barbed wire and grey rock buildings conjured up the bleak atmosphere that the political prisoners had had to endure. We walked along the cell blocks, and eventually stood in front of a narrow fanlight window that ran the width of the corridor in Mandela’s cellblock; the wind howled through the opening. At a deeply personal level, I imagined the suffering of the unfortunate men who were incarcerated on the island because they had refused the inhumane system that had stripped them of all choice and agency.