Song for Sarah Read online

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  The Housewife, Ronelda S Kamfer

  I

  Under this roof

  II

  The corner house

  III

  Mark Straat Nommer 3

  IV

  ‘Basta’ and the blind

  V

  A church for each colour

  VI

  The Gospel People

  VII

  The warrior woman

  VIII

  Breaking bonds

  IX

  An Abraham for Sarah

  X

  Concealing the shame

  XI

  Sarah-iah law

  XII

  Toughees

  XIII

  Bras and Brasso

  XIV

  Turning out

  XV

  Doughnuts and duty

  XVI

  The teacher must have had a reason

  XVII

  The skin off your hands

  XVIII

  Politics by other means

  XIX

  The floppy brown purse

  XX

  Angels unawares

  XXI

  Living on tick

  XXII

  Repairing Abraham

  XXIII

  Making drunk men sober

  XXIV

  The sister not from Africa

  XXV

  Learning to die

  XXVI

  Great she was

  Epilogue

  Sources

  Acknowledgements

  A book is a community project. Yet while many people make a book happen, only a few normally get the credit on opening night or at the book launches that follow. And so I begin by thanking the entire production team at Bookstorm for the polished final product, from the critical readers and the cover design artists to the copy editors and the very slick marketing team. A very special word of thanks to Russell Clarke for making the production process so enjoyable for the author.

  A book on mothers is inevitably a family affair as well. I thank my only sister, Naomi Jansen, for agreeing to add her richly undiluted voice to the book. At some point I doubted whether our different styles, voices and experiences would come together seamlessly in a work of this kind, but it turns out that those were precisely the qualities that enriched the book. We knew our mother Sarah from different vantage points – boy/girl and eldest/middle child. In addition, Naomi lived most of her life in the family home while I spent many years away as an overseas student or working in other provinces. The reader will therefore sense how the story runs together and apart and then together again in two memories of one subject, our mother. So thank you, Sis.

  A big thank-you also to my cousin Natasha Pekeur in Wellington for running the fact-checking enquiries between myself and her mother (my aunt, the youngest sister of Sarah) about the Montagu where our mother Sarah Johnson was born and raised. And a word of thanks to Godfrey Johnson, who was raised by my grandparents and who provided the finer texture to the stories of Ma, Pa and Montagu.

  This book contains excerpts from the works of mainly Cape Flats’ poets on mothers and memories from the area. The poems selected make vivid the fraught and fragile lives of mothers in ways that simple narrative writing cannot. In this regard, a sincere word of thanks to my friend Professor Hein Willemse for working over the Christmas period to identify brand-new as well as classic Afrikaans poems that address questions of motherhood from the Cape Flats. Without his assistance the excerpts from Afrikaans poems would not have found their way into Song for Sarah.

  Among the poets, a word of gratitude to the very talented Ronelda Kamfer for permitting one of her longer works, The Housewife (translated), to headline this tribute to mothers. I should thank Desirée Homann of Pretoria for her very competent Afrikaans translation of the original English manuscript. An Afrikaans publisher friend observed that she has two first languages – that’s how good the translation is.

  Most of all I pay tribute to my superb editor Louise Grantham who is the consummate professional when it comes to working with the widest range of author personalities. Louise is not only fast and efficient, she is thorough and dependable at all stages of the book development process. She is unflinching in her criticism but conveys feedback in ways that retain the commitment and respect of the author. For that I am grateful.

  Any book I write has to pass the Grace test – does the central idea make any sense? If my wife Grace hesitates after reading a page or chapter then I know something is wrong without the need for her to spell it out. And so I thank my most critical and committed reader for her honesty with author and manuscript throughout the book-writing process.

  My children remain our greatest treasure and they would testify to how the values of their grandparents were transmitted through us as parents to their benefit. It is truly amazing to see how Sara-Jane and Mikhail carry within their own life choices and commitments the faith and fortitude of two sets of grandparents from opposite sides of the Cape Flats. And so when the delightful young Katherine joined the family as Mikhail’s wife, we were blessed to see the values chain strengthened because of the inspiration that Kat’s wonderful parents, in turn, had on her life.

  Mothers matter, is the message of this book, and to all of you who made us, shaped us and continue to inspire us, thank you so very much. This is for you.

  Jonathan

  Cape Town, 2017

  THE HOUSEWIFE

  auntie Doris was a typical housewife

  dropping her kids off at school every morning

  dressed in a pink check overall, big green rollers in her hair

  she cooked and cleaned and did her laundry

  she was a housewife

  one rainy day in June auntie Doris

  did her regular housework, washing the clothes and the windows

  watering the plants on her stoep

  later a police van and two Tygerberg mortuary vans

  pulled up in front of her house

  three body bags on stretchers were pushed out

  one big and two small

  for the first time in years

  auntie Doris wore a floral dress with her hair in luscious curls

  down her back

  she was handcuffed and climbed into the police van

  telling the nosey crowd that we can look all we want

  her house is clean.

  Ronelda S Kamfer, 2008

  (Translated from the original Afrikaans, Die Huisvrou)

  I

  Under this roof

  I cannot recall when I first tired of the much-peddled image of the Cape Flats mother, except that it was a long time ago. In the media she was always loud and vulgar, permanently dressed in check overalls while hanging out of the house window with hair in rollers. In real life or fiction, the Cape Flats mother embodied the well-worn stereotype – foul-mouthed, semi-drunk, clownish, over-sexed and gap-toothed, with artificially straightened hair. En route to motherhood she dropped out of school, flirted with boys and fell pregnant before taking a job at one of those factories that peeled off the suburban railway line somewhere between Steenberg and Salt River stations.

  Reminds the poet, Ronelda Kamfer:

  Good girls don’t live on the Cape Flats

  Comedians found rich material in these flattened images, whether as Auntie Merle in Marc Lottering’s stand-up routines or as Auntie Katie in Leon Schuster’s slapstick comedy. There appeared to be no limits to excoriating the soul of the Cape Flats mother. Nomakula (Kuli)
Roberts went further than most in her Sunday World column, ‘Witches Brew’, ending her diatribe against ‘Jou ma se kinders’ with this sickening line: ‘Besides, only in the Cape would you hear somebody screaming out “Jou ma owe jou hond sex geld”’ (Your mother owes your dog sex money). ‘With a bit of editing,’ said the online editor of a more respectable newspaper, ‘it would have been funny.’ From Saartjie Baartman in the early 19th century, mothers of the Cape are simultaneously the object of mirth and derision from which comedians make money, newspapers sell stories and with whom every horny man seems to have a good time.

  If she was not downright disgusting, the Cape Flats mother is portrayed as helpless and pitiful, the victim of circumstances beyond her control. She does what she can and then becomes what she can no longer fight. That mother image is represented in Ellen Pakkies, the Lavender Hill woman whose tik (meth)-addicted son stole from the family and abused his mother until one day she ‘snapped’ and strangled her own child to death. Such is the sympathetic account of this Cape Flats mother given in Sylvia Walker’s book Dealing with Death. Magistrate Van Leeve went on to issue a suspended sentence after declaring that Pakkies was ‘a victim’ who was ‘not prison material’ but rather ‘a loving mother’.

  Sarah in her late teens or early twenties in Montagu

  In Rehana Rossouw’s novel What Will People Say?, there is the well-meaning Cape Flats mother, Magda Fourie, who loses the trust of her children and the control of her only son to the gangs of Hanover Park. The thirteen-year-old boy’s initiation includes participation in the gang rape of his sister’s friend. Mrs Fourie, the factory seamstress, is a decent, conservative and church-going mother who is very concerned about outward appearances, as the title of the book suggests. Despite her best efforts, the mother finds herself overcome by the social and political turmoil of the 1980s. Magda’s personal and family life eventually tears apart in the context of violence, despair and destruction, which the novelist expresses in the vulgar language of the streets. The dutiful mother divorces and her son is murdered on the instructions of a gang leader. The people obviously had a lot to say.

  The book of poems by Kamfer under the title Hammie gives a raw and intense account of the relationship between the poet and her mother where they lived in the northern areas of Eerste River and Blackheath. Here the Cape Flats mother is the absent presence, detached from her daughter physically – during her growing-up years with grandparents on a Grabouw farm – and emotionally. The daughter experiences her mother as sleepwalking through life even as the vulnerable young child is forced to navigate her way around paedophile uncles, jailbird relatives and neighbourhood gangsters. Growing up, the sensitive and observant daughter waits in vain for Hammie to learn how to raise her children. The insecure Hammie, on the other hand, feels constantly overwhelmed by hard living and rejected by all around her. She remains in a broken marriage for the sake of ordentlikheid (decency). Throughout their lives together there were moments where mother and daughter haltingly reached out to each other, withdrawing for periods of time, and then reaching out again. But they never quite found solace in each other, even after Hammie dies:

  Ek dra my ma se trouringe

  Maar dit maak my vingers seer

  I wear my mother’s wedding rings

  But they make my fingers ache

  Of course the novelists, poets, comedians and journalists are not entirely off-target in their portrayal of these varied images of the Cape Flats mother. There are indeed those mothers who are loud and vulgar (allevrou/every woman), helpless and pitiful (Pakkies), concerned but overcome (Fourie), as well as self-absorbed and detached from their struggling families (Hammie). But as with all part-images, they throw both light and shadows on the challenges of motherhood in difficult places.

  Here the shadows are favoured images, especially the ones about the loud and vulgar allevrou who enjoys so much media attention. You will seldom find in the creative work of these image makers that other Cape Flats mother who simply does not fit the mould of violence, victimhood and vulgarity that stereotypes the ‘typical housewife’ from this part of the country.

  The other Cape Flats mothers

  A television programme called Reis Na Gister (Journey into the Past) wanted to shoot images from my childhood home in Retreat, which lies in the southern areas of the Cape Flats. While the cameras were being set up that weekday morning I looked across the road from our corner house and there it still was after several decades – the home of the Sedras family on the upper floor of the old two-level, four-house, block-flats structure that the City Council no longer builds. The technicians were still planning details of the shoot so I decided to quickly ‘pop in’ at the neighbours.

  The perfectly wired gate was still neatly painted and the small patch of green grass was evenly laid out. I marched up the bright red stairs that looked as if they had just been polished. I looked through the open door and in that small front room everything was in place. The doilies on the dressing table. The Holy Bible with open pages on a side table. The modest but neatly ironed curtains with the see-through layer of silk behind it. A bowl of flowers and the polished legs of the chairs. Not a speck of dust in sight. Exactly as I first saw this house as a boy where after school we played hide-and-seek with the Sedras children while our parents were slogging away at work.

  You would be hard pressed to find the image of Mrs Sedras in swearing novels, racist columns and saucy newspaper accounts of sex, drugs and gangs on the Cape Flats. Like countless other Cape Flats mothers, Joan Sedras was not vile, violent, nor a victim of her circumstances. This mother was never an alcoholic and if this evangelical Christian was dependent it was on something, or rather someone, bigger than herself. She raised a family of children and yet none of them joined gangs, slept around or found themselves enslaved to drugs. In fact the children became leaders in the church, professionals in their fields and upstanding members of the community. The grandchildren would race up the red staircase and encounter the same love and devotion that their parents enjoyed from this doting grandmother and faithful wife.

  What I saw in Mrs Sedras I still see in the countless number of other Cape Flats women who raised children and held together families against the odds. Of course there was violent crime and teenage pregnancies and addictions of all kinds. Like everywhere else in South Africa. After the levelling of long-established communities such as District Six under race laws such as the Group Areas Act, and the relocation of families to the wastelands of the Cape, social challenges multiplied, including the growth of gangs and the competition for drugs. Enough university theses and speculative books have covered the social pathologies and manufactured stereotypes of people from the Flats.

  But what these works also covered or, more precisely, covered up, was the remarkable degree of stability within many families despite the breaking up of whole communities under apartheid. The struggle of a people to survive imposed hardships was overwritten by one-dimensional accounts of community pathology out of which came endless stereotypes from ‘the jolly hotnot’ to the shameless Cape Flats mother who, according to Ms Roberts, ‘breeds as if Allan Boesak sent them on a mission to increase the Coloured race’.

  This contemplation is therefore written as an antidote to stigma and stereotype so readily applied to Cape Flats mothers. It is also offered as a praise song to mothers everywhere who still raise families and build communities in difficult places.

  Under this roof

  When you thought about it, everything seemed to work against the Cape Flats mother, from family dislocation to financial hardship, to absentee fathers, to the relentless pressure of gangs and drugs. As an energetic teenager involved in church youth leadership in the southern areas, this single question would haunt me during the obligatory huisbesoek (house visits): how on earth do these mothers do it?

  Consider Mrs Volmink from Belgravia Estate in Athlone who put four boys and two girls through tertiar
y qualifications. One son leads a university, another is a medical school dean, and the other a prominent public sector lawyer; in their number you would also find a distinguished teacher and one who made his career in the training and development of civil servants. The eldest daughter died after a car crash because the whites-only ambulance would take only her pale friend. For long periods of time Johanna Volmink raised the children alone. Hardship was ever present in her home and yet not a single child fits the stereotype represented in comedy routines or violent novels or the evening news. When it came to human decency, academic achievement and community service, Mrs Volmink achieved much more in her home than any of the white families I knew in the well-to-do suburbs of Upper Claremont and Wynberg Proper.

  As I pondered that haunting ‘how’ question about these mothers over the years I realised that the answer was in front of me, all around me, even gave birth to me. That Cape Flats mother was Sarah Susan Johnson, married Jansen. Suddenly it all made sense. How they dealt with their pasts. How they organised their homes. How they raised their children. How they made sense of politics. How they managed affection. How they drew on their faith. How they communicated core values. How they thought about education. How they led with their lives.

  The products of their labour were no accident, as the poet Shirmoney Rhode would tell Litnet (23/9/2016) of the grandmother who raised her at Nomme 20 Delphi Straat (the 2016 book title) in Elsies River:

  Ek is ’n produk van haar 3am prayers

  En harde werk of course

  I am a product of her 3am prayers

  And hard work of course

  The Cape Flats mother was not faultless. Who is? To the children growing up, the mother was seen as being too harsh at times but was always deeply respected. This praise song is not, however, about the failings of our mothers but about the fact that they succeeded at all. None of the children was perfect. Whose are? To the mother the child was never one to be abandoned in the wrong but to be picked up again and again, and nudged towards what was right. And they did this work of correction day after day, for weeks followed by months, and year after year, sometimes even into adulthood and marriage.