Holding Up the Sky (53 page)

The North West Province has a completely different feel to the deserts of the far Northern Cape. Gone were the dramatic ochres, mountain peaks and lonely trees. The North West, where many of my own relatives lived, was a fat landscape dotted with gum trees and acacias over a sea of ruddy shrubs and grass. The reds and oranges of the desert were replaced by pale green and dusty brown.

Tiger Kloof school was on the road into town and it was with a great sense of relief that we pulled into the driveway after many hours of monotonous driving. Having announced ourselves at the office, we were taken to the principal's house for tea.

Like many fine schools in South Africa, Tiger Kloof was originally a mission school set up by the London Missionary Society in 1904. It boasted beautiful stone buildings, a chapel, workshops, boarding houses, classrooms and stables. In the 1930s and 1940s, it was educating 600 to 700 Setswana speaking students and student teachers, including Seretse Khama, the first President of Botswana, Ketumile Masire, its current president, Ruth Mompati, now the leader of the ANC in the province, as well as many other leading politicians and businesspeople in Southern Africa. Back then, Tiger Kloof not only produced black intellectuals but also had a trade program producing craftsmen of such high calibre that their student efforts were funding their own fees and making a profit for the school.

Then in 1954, under the jurisdiction of the Bantu Education Act that limited the opportunities of study for black students beyond those subjects that would prepare them to be ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water', Tiger Kloof was closed and sold for a fraction of its worth to the new apartheid government. It was run as a government school for a few years, with a dramatically diminished curriculum, but was finally closed under the Group Areas Act as the farm was declared a white area on which no black person could reside. Verwoerd, the President at the time, appeared to so hate what Tiger Kloof stood for that he ordered it razed to the ground. However, after only one building was destroyed, the property was sold to the Dutch Reformed Church where it briefly became a holiday camp for boys.

In 1988, the property was declared a national monument and given the costs of its upkeep under these new standards, it was once more sold. In 1995, Tiger Kloof was finally reopened as a school, with the help of the Anglo American and De Beers Chairman's Fund, the Independent Development Trust, the Open Society, the Genesis and Solon Foundations and a number of local Vryburg businessmen and alumni.

The reopening of the school was a lavish affair, attended by President Masire of Botswana, Ruth Mompati, Popo Molefe, the Premier of the North West, Desmond Tutu, whose mother was once a student there and three thousand others, including the local white community from Vryburg. David Matthews, the new principal and my boss Richard's dear friend, had been the principal of the famous Maru a Pula school outside Gaborone in Botswana. This school is one of the most remarkable in Southern Africa and has its own proud history producing graduates who go on to attend the top universities in the US and UK. David hoped to restore Tiger Kloof's heritage of excellence and add to the already impressive list of ‘old tigers'. But David also saw that Tiger Kloof needed to respond to the current market conditions and sought to prepare pupils for a variety of careers in the trades, hospitality and catering as well as professional careers. It was the hospitality focus that led David to be involved with our project.

This astonishing history was explained to us by David as we toured the grounds, the stone buildings as impressive as any I had seen in the top private schools. What was so extraordinary was that most travellers would simply have driven past, longing for the comforts of even a small town such as Vryburg after hours of nothingness on the road. What other stories lay hidden in remote parts of the country, if only one would stop and listen?

We ended our tour in the large kitchens of Tiger Kloof. Near the side door, the now familiar container stood, ready to be opened and its contents examined. The size of the kitchens gave us a unique opportunity to test the monster of all cookers, so large it needed to be fitted into the wall. The solar panels were positioned on the outside of the building and the cooking surfaces inside. It was also the only cooker that could store energy, allowing the cooker to work at night and on a cloudy day. A team of students had been briefed about the installation and were anxiously waiting outside the container, ready for a first glimpse.

We had spent a few hours at the school when the fading light reminded us that we still needed to head into town and check into the local hotel. We would return in the morning to train the catering staff and students on the use of each of the cookers, before heading to the township to meet the families there.

Huhudi was less exotic than the two other sites, being more akin to the urban townships I had been working and living in for many years now. Hearing the familiar rolling tones of Setswana in contrast to the predominance of Afrikaans spoken in the other locations, I was glad to be able to communicate once again. Veronica was one of our fieldworkers and as a well known youth leader in the township, she was able to open many doors for the project. As in each of the other locations, the feldworkers' own families were often part of the study; in Huhudi we took the first solar cooker to Veronica's mother's home. Once that was delivered, we began the slow process of visiting as many families as we could to distribute cookers before dusk sent us once more back to the hotel.

As we were dropping Veronica back home on our way out, she mentioned that she believed there were relatives of mine living in Huhudi and if we had time, we would pop in on them tomorrow before we left for Jo'burg. I never ceased to be amazed at the networks that operated in black South Africa. They were the first questions you asked when you met someone: ‘Where are you from? Do you know such and such a family?' In the townships, no one had an interest in what you did for a living, only in who you were in relationship to others. There is a word often used in South Africa that describes this: ‘
ubuntu
'. It means that we are only human through other human beings, and can only express our humanity through our relationships and dealings with others. In isolation, we cannot be truly human. Upon hearing that I had relatives in this community, I knew it would change the way I was viewed, giving me an entry and a belonging that the others in the project team would not be able to achieve.

Sadly, in a few years time, I would join the community to mourn the deaths of Veronica and four other youth leaders, killed in a car accident when they were on their way to a youth summit in Mafikeng. I would sit with Veronica's family in the church and when it was time, stand before those assembled and, in Setswana, tell of all her achievements as a fieldworker and youth leader, passing on our condolences to family and community alike.

We delivered the remainder of the cookers to the families, unaware of future events and the cloud they would cast over the project team. As they entered each home, our funders asked their now well-oiled questions about cooking, fuel choices and household arrangements. We finished with the last family at midday and, with tremendous gratitude on my part, loaded up the kombi and began the four-hour drive back to Jo'burg. At the time, I didn't fully appreciate the experiences this project would afford, the places I would now regularly visit and soon come to love deeply. On this trip, rushing through it as I was, I caught only a glimpse of what was to come.

Coming home after five long days on the road was exquisite relief. I leapt straight from the car to where Mama was waiting by the door with Dichaba in her arms. I held him close, smelling his hair and neck in deep thirsty draughts. I then heard a long squeal from inside the house that sounded like an approaching siren. Mello burst through the doors and wrapped herself around my legs. It was so very good to be home.

That night, when Teboho was back from work, we sat around the dining room table for a rowdy family dinner and I recounted stories of my trip and all the wonders I had seen.

THE
FIRST MONTHS IN MY NEW JOB WERE INTENSE AND CONSUMING AND, DESPITE THAT FIRST WEEK AWAY, I WAS ENJOYING THE STIMULATION. AS WITH EVERYTHING I DID, I THREW MYSELF INTO THIS NEW CHALLENGE WITH VIGOUR, WANTING TO SUCCEED, NEEDING TO PROVE MYSELF BACK IN THE WORKPLACE. BUT I WAS ALSO BEING FED BY THE FRIENDSHIPS WITH MY NEW COLLEAGUES, ESPECIALLY MARLETT WITH WHOM I SPENT UNTOLD HOURS DURING OUR MANY FIELD TRIPS AND PROJECT MEETINGS, AND LATER JEREMY, WHO WORKED IN THE OFFICE NEXT TO MINE. THOUGH JEREMY AND I NEVER WORKED ON A PROJECT TOGETHER, HE WAS A CONFIDANTE AND A SOUNDING BOARD FOR ANY SUBJECT I BROUGHT THROUGH HIS DOOR. JEREMY, AS A GAY MAN, UNDERSTOOD THE DYNAMICS OF DIFFERENCE, STILL THE UNOFFICIAL SPORT OF OUR CHANGING NATION. WE OFTEN FOUND OURSELVES EXCHANGING HORROR STORIES AND THE NAMES OF PLACES WHERE YOU COULD GO WITHOUT FEAR OF HARASSMENT.

It was still surprisingly difficult to travel around the country on holiday without feeling watched or under threat. Despite a growing understanding of Afrikaans through my work, I remained reluctant to learn the language properly as I did not wish to know what was being said to me when people spat and swore at me in Randfontein. I remember one occasion where I was with Moss and his son Boggie. We had gone to the roadhouse in town early one evening to fetch takeaway for both our families. As the tirade began, Moss urged me to respond so that they would hear that I was a foreigner.

‘They are angry because they think you are betraying the race with a black man', Moss explained. ‘If they hear your accent, they will just think you're a bleeding heart foreigner who doesn't know any better', he said with a chuckle.

Though Moss refused to be intimidated, I felt that crowd pressing in, my fear rendering me unable to speak. At these times, I was grateful for my friendship with Marlett for without her, I would surely have written off all Afrikaaners as a cruel and heartless people.

Though Jeremy's experiences and mine were different, he understood the everpresent threat of violence and intimidation that still wafted around the country like a bad smell. He understood the habit of constant vigilance. But he also understood the need to laugh at the situation and make light of it so that we should not accept it as the norm.

My life felt richer now that it was no longer confined to the far West Rand. My experiences and relationships in the township were balanced by my friendships at work. At home Chaba, as everyone now called him, was becoming a little boy. His gentle, playful personality blossomed like wildflowers on the roadside. Despite the conflicts of the world around him, he had a generosity of spirit that radiates only from those who feel completely loved and safe. Mello had started pre-primary at a nearby school in Greenhills and was growing wings. The school was newly integrated but the teaching staff were surprisingly committed to creating an open environment, even in the suburbs of Randfontein.

On weekends, we all laboured together to make a garden, Teboho and I first laying a large lawn on which the kids could play. Slowly I planted one garden bed after another around the house, then a large vegetable garden which produced the tastiest food to pass across our table. I made use of our extended household with Joseph, Mello's eldest brother and many others who came to stay, working long hours digging up and replacing the barren topsoil. Within a year, the garden had become a place of rest as well as toil, and a place to play when we finally bought a swing set for the kids, all of it making the house more of a home.

To the world around us, we must have appeared to be a happy family: two beautiful children, a house full of family and friends, Teboho and I both with good jobs and the opportunity to travel. Surely there were those who envied us our lives together. Yet there remained an emptiness that rattled round our house like pebbles in a tin. Gone was the treasured closeness of our years together in 'Maritzburg, where we spoke of all things, big and small; where we loved and cared for and protected each other. Our interactions now were merely functional, pragmatic: what, where, when, how, who–never why. It was too easy to engage with the many other people who lived with us–children, mothers, brothers, nieces, nephews, friends–and both Teboho and I rose to the occasion, seldom withdrawn or moody in front of others.

Teboho was an adoring father, playing, joking, tickling, and lavishing them both with affection and love. While he could be a disciplinarian when the situation required, his return from work each day triggered laughter and joy in both our children. I sometimes wondered, however, whether Chaba in particular became the recipient of the tenderness that we could have been giving to each other. Sex between us, once tender and frequent, was now mechanical and irregular, at times little more than a marital obligation. I felt that what we once had was slipping away, like water dripping from a broken tap, one missed opportunity at a time, becoming a memory of what once was.

While the exchange between us that morning in Tasmania could quickly have grown into something that destroyed us, it did not–it blunted our relationship but did not break it. I suspect I unknowingly called upon my mother's legacy to get past this wounding: accommodate, adjust, accept. While I was rarely this way in the world, I had unconsciously learnt to be this way in my relationships with men. And yet, there was never a repeat of the cruelty he had dished out to me that day. Never again did he hurt me so unashamedly, blatantly throwing another woman in my face. As soon as we left Tasmania, he once more became the husband I knew. Sometimes, it was as if it was someone else's story, not my own. I wonder if he put it aside himself, forgetting, denying that it had ever happened.

And yet, I now knew that he was capable of betrayal and one day soon I would find out, to my complete surprise, that I was too.

You could reason that we were no longer close, that I suspected he was unfaithful and wanted to settle the score. You could say that I was lonely, that Teboho wasn't paying me enough attention and if he had, it never would have happened.

You could say all of these things and yet none of them would adequately explain why one day, a man I knew through work flirted with me yet again and I flirted back. It simply felt good to do it. Though I felt no strong obligation of fidelity towards Teboho given what had happened in Tasmania and possibly since, in reality I wasn't thinking about anyone else–about revenge, about what it could do to my marriage, my own sense of honour, my faith. I wasn't thinking.

After months of being on a slow boil–a word, a look, a gesture, yet nothing returned to which he could attach a promise of more–I took a single step across the line that kept it a simple flirtation, fun, harmless. I decided to go down this road with him, to follow him back to his apartment, to kiss, to caress, to reciprocate. I put my mind on hold and found a momentary freedom on the other side of that line, one I was raised not to cross–by my family, by the church, by society. Yet I didn't finch, nor did I find myself wracked with guilt.

In many ways, I had been in a state of inaction in my marriage for years, letting things go, overcompensating for our differences by embracing his life, his culture, his community. This step felt like a movement in the opposite direction, a step back towards myself. I also found that on the other side of the line, I could be more expressive and adventurous than ever before, feeling present not only in the decision to be with this man but to be doing something that was for me alone–not husband, not family, not community.

Each encounter with him was complete in itself; there was no promise of a future together, no questioning what it meant for us. It was all it needed to be in that moment, all I needed. I had no words for these feelings at the time, but understood that my lack of guilt suggested something beyond a simple affair was happening. Had I allowed myself to remember my own fear of the torturer's hands, the possibility of pain to come, I would not have put Teboho through it. And knowing what I know now, I would never choose to go down that path again. But this was one time when I was not thinking about him, about his pain, his wounds; I was thinking only of my own life, attempting to still my own restlessness.

Over the few months of our affair this man, who was in many ways more friend than lover, began to challenge me about where I was in my life that I would even consider an affair. He admitted that in all the months of flirtation, he had felt sure I would not reciprocate and so flirted unashamedly. By taking things further, and essentially calling his bluff, I had caught him off guard. After the initial thrill of intimacy, he could not help but wonder why I was doing something so out of character. He encouraged me to think about what it was that I really wanted, rather than what others expected of me.

‘It seems to me that you spend your weekends attending weddings and funerals of people you hardly know, just to do the right thing by the family. What would you do on the weekend to relax, if it was completely up to you?' he asked me one day.

‘Do you know I've never actually thought about that?' I replied, astonished.

‘Never?'

‘No. There are things on and we are expected to go. I usually enjoy it, but sometimes work is so draining that I wish I could have stayed at home.'

‘You should try it next weekend. Just once, do whatever it is that would make you happy.'

As strange as it sounds, I was so used to communal living that I had never taken a weekend to do only what pleased me. Of course, I had spent time gardening and the like which brought me great pleasure, but I had always done what was expected of me as a
makoti
, a bride, a
mosadi
, a wife. As I began to think through how I would like to spend my time, I longed for friends, movies, restaurants, music, things we did a little of but only within the confines of the conservative West Rand, amid stares and derision from those white people around us.

I longed to go to places where I would not stand out, places where change was happening faster. I knew Barry and Rags lived in a more integrated part of Jo'burg with their son and their adopted black daughter. I knew they lived a vibrant life, full of the things that suddenly seemed important. Initially when I thought of the things I wanted to do, I felt the need to do them without Teboho, to strike out on my own for a time. But I also knew that the desire to be alone was a temporary one. The more I sat with this, the more I knew that I wanted to find a way to be happy with my family intact. I wasn't ready to break our family apart, of that I was sure. As this knowledge emerged, I knew it was time for the affair to end. I also knew that this was not a pattern I wished to repeat, then or since. While my feelings for this man did not disappear–in fact, I felt more for him as he patiently helped me work through the issues–the decision was made to end it. I also made another decision at that time–I wanted to talk to Teboho about moving away from the township.

‘Can we talk?' These three small words echoed around our bedroom.

‘About what?' Teboho replied cautiously.

‘I want us to think about moving. As much as I love this house, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to live here.'

Teboho did not respond, but looked off through the window into the garden. I took a breath and continued on.

‘I feel very cut off from friends, living so far out. No one comes to visit. It takes forever to get to friends. Even getting to work and back is two and a half hours a day.' I let these reasons fall and resonate like a broken string of pearls.

After a long silence, Teboho finally spoke: ‘But this was our dream, to build a home here, to build a life as part of this community. I feel like you're breaking a promise you made to me'.

His words hung in the air, the truth acting like helium, suspending them.

‘That's true, this was our dream. I've tried to live this way, but I can't.'

‘But you have friends here. What about Moss and Khumo? What about Beans, Dennis, Daddy, Solly and all the others from church? They are all your friends.'

‘Khumo is my friend, and Moss. But the others are your friends. And most of the people from church need our help in some way. They're not
friends
. There's a difference. I need something more.'

‘What are you saying?' he said, a thread of fear in his voice.

‘I'm saying that I want us to move closer to Jo'burg. I want some middle ground if this life is going to work for both of us.'

Silence filled the room once more, making the sound of my breathing seem like an intrusion. Finally, in a whisper he said, ‘This is the life I want. It's here that I was born and it's where I belong. I don't want to leave'.

I almost took it all back. Despite everything, I still flinched at the thought of hurting him, of making his life harder than it had already been. I knew that the only time he had not lived here, apart from our brief stint in Australia, was when he had gone away to study in 'Maritzburg. I knew it was his home.

‘I don't want to make you unhappy. I really don't. But I'm not sure I can be happy here. It feels like it costs me so much to hang in. I know it's not what we planned, but I just don't think I can do it. I'm sorry.'

He slowly got to his feet, leaving me sitting on the edge of our bed. ‘Let me think about it', he said, as he moved quietly out of the room.

After several weeks of deliberation, Teboho agreed to move. He felt that if it was no more than a thirty minute drive to the township, he could make a compromise and, anxious to move, I agreed. I will always be grateful to him for this decision. It wasn't what he wanted, but he did it because he loved me. After all we'd been through, after all the distance of the last few years, he still loved me and was willing to give up what he wanted to make me happy. It was no small thing.

We began looking at properties a few weeks later. While the thought of moving closer had me on a high, I soon realised that a thirty minute radius still had us in the West Rand, still with potentially conservative neighbours, still one of the few black families in the area. Despite this, I deeply appreciated Teboho's willingness to compromise and was determined to find a place that would meet our needs.