Song for Sarah Read online

  The matriarchal figure hovered over that child for life. Many stories have been told on the Flats of a small-bodied mother reaching out to deliver retribution to the tall, well-built son who stands there quietly as he takes the timid smack to the face or the ineffectual punch to the body. She had earned the right to reprimand her grown child. This story of the Cape Flats mother, and of many mothers across the length and breadth of South Africa, will be told in this book.

  Being the eldest in the family, my siblings suspected that I was favoured by my parents. Of course I felt differently because of the constant pressure from my mother to ‘set the example’ as the eldest. ‘Firstborn’, my sister would nevertheless tease me, and that will be my third-person voice in the main text. For a reality check, I asked this sister of mine to add in her own reflections on our mother as the only girl smack bang in the middle of two older and two younger boys.

  Naomi Jansen has the knack of saying and seeing things as they really are. One day that sting in her commentary really got to me as a boy so I chased her along the very short route from the kitchen to her bedroom. By dint of practice she managed to dash into the room, close the door and secure the latch bolt lock in one and the same swift action but it was too late. I ran right through the flimsy green planks of that wooden door. The personal shock probably saved my sister from further repercussions although I never could raise a hand against any of the siblings.

  Her sharper eye and tongue therefore qualify Naomi to give another view of our mother. My sister’s voice appears in italics as ‘Naomi remembers’. In appropriate places throughout the main text she shares her own experiences and insights into our remarkable mother. Sometimes Naomi’s recollection or interpretation of events is different from mine, and that is fine. It is what gives this work of memory an added and special value.

  ‘While you are under this roof,’ my mother would often chide, ‘you will do as I say.’ Under this roof is both a telling metaphor about us and the interwoven tiles above us. Sarah knew that she had little direct control over what happened in the harsh outside world. We would all grow up one day and make our own decisions as working adults and parents of children. There was little our mother could change about that. But while under her roof, the rules applied. That was where she had authority over the five children and, as will be explained, also over her husband. There was not much overhead roof to speak of in the small Council house, but anyone who stayed in that confined space, including a string of relatives, would abide by Sarah’s rules.

  It was under Sarah’s roof that I learnt how to live and where she would teach us how to die. Under that roof I learnt the value of selfless giving and the importance of personal discipline. Sarah did not only tell, she showed. And nothing impressed more heavily on the children’s consciousness than what my mother taught us about the ethics of work. She laboured day and night, literally, as a shift nurse. ‘Nobody ever died of hard work,’ she would say all the time and you knew that offering a medical science rebuttal of such an assertion might lead to a premature meeting with your Maker.

  Mrs Sedras, Mrs Volmink and Mrs Jansen are not alone. There are thousands of mothers spread across the Cape Flats and throughout South Africa who deserve recognition for their heroic efforts in raising families under difficult conditions. On one hand, this book could be read as an attempt at recovery of ‘the other mothers’ whose stories have been buried by unrelenting stereotypes of women from the flatland areas of the Cape. On the other hand, such heroic mothers are found in every community where ordinary people struggle to make impossible ends meet. This work of recovery is offered, therefore, as a song of gratitude for all mothers.

  Or to borrow from Diana Ferrus in ‘A poem for Sarah Baartman’:

  I have come to take you home

  Where I will sing for you

  For you have brought me peace

  II

  The corner house

  Number 51 Tenth Avenue is a corner house, which meant that all the troubles and traumas of Retreat passed by this semi-detached Council building. It was the oasis thirsty children came to for water after playing in the rolling sand dunes alongside the red-and-white brick house. It was on this corner that cars or cyclists turning too fast into the intersection crashed into a lamppost, a pedestrian, or each other. It was into this house that an anxious-looking woman, sexually assaulted in the dunes, fled for refuge. And it was from the garden of this corner house that Sarah Susan Jansen played the role of a kyk-uit auntie (lookout aunt), chiding drunk men balancing against the fence and warning truant children that their working parents would know ‘as soon as they get home’ that a day of school had been missed. The wise ones knew to take a longer route home.

  Sarah in the garden of the corner house

  The corner house sat at a four-way intersection. Here choices were to be made. The traveller could go over the sand dunes behind the house and take the dangerous short cut westwards through dense bush to the Retreat train station. The relatively safer but longer path to the station was southwards along the tarred road to the taxi route along Concert Boulevard – now renamed after a family relative, the late Joe Marks. That intersection at the corner house also offered a straight road to the church going northwards or an off-road diversion into Dullie se bos where lurked all kinds of dangerous pleasures. That corner was a place where people made choices; inside the corner house those decisions had already been made by the family kommandant, the mother of the house.

  Sarah did not believe that people were victims of history or slaves to their appetites. You chose whom you will serve, as was taught inside and preached outside the corner house.

  Naomi remembers...

  I got to know Sarah Susan Jansen of the corner house as a proud, hard-working, no-nonsense woman. Her gait was confident and stately, her manner unswerving. I watched her uncut hair go from black to mostly grey, emphasising her black unwrinkled skin all the more. Depending on the audience, Sarah would tell that the grey was a genetic trait among the Johnsons, or alternatively that it was an affliction brought upon her by the naughty children.

  The ample black-and-white photographs in the well-worn albums stored in Sarah’s wardrobe portray her as being somewhat taller, slender, and reservedly happy with an ever-so-faint smile. Not much could be known about Sarah the person, her dreams and aspirations, because ‘children should be seen and not heard’. There were therefore no deep mother-daughter discussions in those days. If you had met Ma, Sarah’s mother, that distance would have made sense for your own parents simply raised their children in the ways they had been reared.

  III

  Mark Straat Nommer 3

  Like many of her generation, Sarah was not born in Cape Town. She was from upcountry, which meant one or other small town in the rural parts of the Western Cape. If you wanted work as a professional or even as a labourer, the bright lights of Cape Town offered more opportunities than the little town of Montagu where Sarah was born into a decent middle-class family.

  Most of the children of Pa and Ma, the maternal grandparents, became professional nurses or educators. Such consistent accomplishment was unusual for rural black families living under the hardships of apartheid. But there was something special about the Johnsons, and that is where the story of Sarah begins.

  The Johnsons had a solid house off the main street that passes through the picturesque town of Montagu. The large house at Mark Straat Nommer 3 seemed cavernous to the visiting grandchildren and the wooden double door opened into a large yard area filled with fruit trees that seemed to sag under the weight of large, juicy peaches. In the neatly paved road alongside the house ran a man-made sloot (sluice) channelling warm water down from the mountains into and through the town. Across the road from the house was the old Avalon Hotel and a movie house. Hotels those days were places of drink as much as accommodation, long before the town became famous for its packaged dried fruits and fancy resorts built around the
hot-water springs.

  A teenaged Sarah in Montagu

  The Dutch Reformed Church (NG Kerk) was a short walk away, and all the shops lined the one or two roads running through the downtown area. There could be no more idyllic place on planet Earth in which to grow up as a child, where you literally picked the fruit from the branches of trees hanging over fences and anything you wanted was within safe walking distance.

  There was just one small problem – the Johnsons were black or, in the finer classification schemes of the white government, Coloured.

  Naomi remembers...

  To understand the dignified Sarah you must start with her parents. There’s her blind, respected and thickset role-model father called Pa, and her petite, scowling, Indian-featured mother, Ma, with her grasblom (grass-flowered) dress and apron. Being placed on the lap of a sightless stranger as a two-year-old, and not quite understanding why Mommy and Daddy would keep coming back to what felt like yet another less-than-welcome visit, didn’t really make sense to this young child even then. But to ask this question is perhaps to fail to understand the complexities of growing up in a rural Boland town, where Pa and Ma somehow ably managed to raise their children.

  Pa Johnson was a wine vat craftsman and Ma Johnson a stay-at-home mom. It was particularly tough when the Afrikaner government introduced the Group Areas Act, which made it illegal for them to continue living in their respectable home in the town. This unforgiving act apparently caused the vat maker’s inexplicable and traumatic blindness and subsequent disorientation for the grandchildren from Cape Town, who could not comprehend the extreme housing downgrade. Yet nobody seemed to mind because they did not seem to say anything that suggested outrage.

  IV

  ‘Basta’ and the blind

  So began the humiliating routine of dispossession and relocation familiar to many black South African families. The respectable Johnsons were forced out of their large house into the location, a move that inflicted loss and hurt that would be felt down generations. Shortly afterwards Pa Johnson, the proud and respected patriarch of the family, went blind for the rest of his life. It could have been glaucoma or detached retinas but for the eldest daughter the explanation was straightforward: ‘Pa refused to see’ after losing the property.

  In stark contrast to the large and lively six-bedroom family home in Mark Straat, the two-bedroom house in the location was small, dank and lacking in any character. It was elevated on an incline of rocky brown and dusty soil and there was not a tree in sight. No more tarred roads. Toilets were outside and water had to be fetched from die ou blok, a makeshift water reservoir located down a sharp-stoned gravel road. Your feet hurt on the scattered stones as you carried two emmers (buckets) swinging from side to side on opposite ends of a long, crooked tree branch; in the process, water spilt onto your irritated legs. The faster you walked – a rugby game among the boys was interrupted when Ma shouted the instruction to get water – the more of a mess you made so that there was always less water in the emmers than when you started. There was no electricity in the house and candles became part of the new reality here in the location. For a middle-class family, it was not only the loss of possessions that the Group Areas Act visited on the proud family; it was their very honour that was trampled upon.

  A young Sarah with Pa Johnson, in one of those photographs taken on the streets of Cape Town as pedestrians walked by

  Sarah need not have worried about this shift in material status. Pa and Ma were determined not to let the loss of things mean the loss of dignity. It was a strange reaction to displacement, a kind of resignation among some of their generation who handed over the matter to much higher authority – as in Adam Small’s memorable poem on a Cape Flats township:

  We have long since learned to disregard/

  All our yearnings/

  In places like Windermere/

  O Lord you can listen/

  To our song/

  Without worrying, we are long/

  Past sorrow

  Dignity intact, Pa was immaculately dressed whenever he stepped out of the house. Sitting on a bench outside the location house, Pa would quietly direct Godfrey, the lanky eldest son of his daughter Jane, to fix the fence or erect a pen for the chickens or fulfil some task around the small dwelling. As the younger grandson, Firstborn was astounded by this routine. Blind Pa seemed to know exactly where everything was. The old man sensed what needed fixing or dumping and Godfrey, as always head down and obedient, would carry out Pa’s instructions around the house. There was not a stone out of place and the pine-needle broom left neat rows of lines where it had swept across the small yard surrounding the little house. Alles op sy plek (everything in its place). It was as if Pa was determined that he would not be defined by his suffering.

  When Pa went downtown, one of the children would accompany him to hold his hand and guide him along the neatly paved main road. In one shop, out the next. When Firstborn was old enough, he would go with his grandfather in a direction the Afrikaans family called dorp toe (towards town). What had little meaning then has come to mean everything now. Uprooted and displaced, Pa nevertheless strode upright through the streets of town. White people would pass Pa and greet him respectfully: ‘Goeie middag, Meneer Johnson!’ (Good afternoon, Mr Johnson!) The chances those days of being greeted by a white person, let alone by the accompanying appellation of Meneer was rare. And when Pa walked past a woman who greeted him, white or black, he would not fail to raise his hat as gentlemen did in those days. You greet a woman, you raise your hat. Pa, in his neatly ironed suit with the large shoulder flaps, moved through the rest of his life with a dignity undisturbed. This was what Sarah saw and emulated throughout the demeaning years of apartheid. You could not understand the daughter without having met her father.

  Ma was more difficult to fathom. She hardly spoke to any of the kleinkinders (grandchildren) and came across as cold and detached. Visiting grandchildren were not scooped up from the ground during family visits to Montagu, the way doting grandmothers do when their children’s children come through the door. She always seemed angry and as a small child you recognised the expression long before you understood it.

  Her favourite word was ‘Basta’, which probably has Dutch roots and meant ‘stop it’ or something like that. If the children were too loud in the small house, they would hear an emphatic ‘Basta!’ If there were too many of the little ones playing games in the kitchen, thereby blocking the movement of adults, out came the angry instruction ‘Basta!’

  If Pa was warm, friendly and generous to a fault, Ma seemed like the Marshmallow character from the movie Frozen. Stemmer, she called her husband whose given name was September. After Pa’s death, Ma would sometimes visit Sarah and the family in Retreat for weeks at a time. She hardly spoke. Often Sarah’s children would catch Ma staring out of the front-room window for long periods of time like somebody longing for something that was lost a long time ago.

  Ma did however share one thing in common with Pa: she was upright, well groomed and always wore a beautiful brooch keeping together the upper parts of her dress. Kulsum, Ma’s Malay name, suggested slave ancestry from way back in the Cape and she looked the part, with her straight black hair and Asian features. She walked slowly, head firmly forward and up, always a woman of dignity with every hair in place. It was unclear what kind of person Ma really was between the ‘Bastas’. She never spoke to the grandchildren of any age about anything, let alone the forced removals and the impact on the family. Ma was just there, unbowed by the relocation as she and Pa raised their litter.

  The eldest son Johnny, whose name everybody in Afrikaans-speaking Montagu pronounced as ‘Yawn-knee’, was clearly The One. Uncle Johnny was the respected principal of a one-man (it was always a man) primary school on a farm called Baden, a short drive outside Montagu. In those days teachers were well-regarded members of the community and principals even more so. Meester Yawn-knee made
an impression with his slow, deliberate walk, carefully combed Brylcreemed hair, neat moustache and a wry grin that seemed permanently affixed to one side of his face. The grandchildren would learn a precious lesson from observation alone: you did not speak to Yawn-knee; Yawn-knee spoke to you. Sarah and her sisters fawned openly around their big brother who ran a school, conducted a choir and drove a car.

  Naomi remembers...

  There was no running water in the location house and it was impressive how sparingly Ma worked with the cool water lying in the bottom of the dark barrel that was used for cooking and drinking. Then there was the water in the red, white and green floral enamel jug and matching saucer, which was used to wash one’s hands after using the outside toilet.

  V

  A church for each colour

  The small NG Sendingkerk (Dutch Reformed Mission Church) for Coloured people was in a most inconvenient place, right on the R62, the smoothly tarred main road that carried tourists and truckers through this beautiful fruit-farm country. Whereas the apartheid masters flattened the Johnson home on Mark Straat, they simply emptied the church of its mixed-race inhabitants and moved them to the location.

  In apartheid’s twisted imagination, the NG Sendingkerk was created for Coloured people, with separate ones for Indians and Africans while the Moeder Kerk was of course reserved for whites. It was a comforting thought to the racial ideologues of the time – by labelling one group of people as mixed-raced they could maintain the myth of pure races on either side, black African and white European. And so these contaminated peoples who supposedly followed the same God of the Moeder Kerk had to get their own church in their own location in order to deal with this eyesore of a place of worship on the R62.