Mamphela Ramphele: A Passion for Freedom. Mamphela Ramphele
short notice to pack and go. There was no compensation for the property they lost. Many also lost household effects and personal clothing in the rush to leave before the deadline. They left their houses standing, some with furniture, which was later stolen or destroyed by the elements. Only about a third of the village residents remained. These were largely families of civil servants or other people who kept out of the conflict for fear of repercussions. There were bitter feuds between the two groups, and physical and other forms of violence were traded between them regularly.
My father in his usual quiet way successfully walked the tightrope between remaining a loyal civil servant and not antagonising those who were up in arms against the dominee. It was not easy. He took advantage of my mother’s eighth pregnancy to send the vulnerable members of his family away at the beginning of 1956 to his natal home in Uitkyk. My mother and my younger brother, Phoshiwa, went to live at my mother’s family home in Krantzplaas, where she could receive prenatal care from a nearby clinic. There were no clinics in Uitkyk at the time.
Sethiba, my younger brother, and I were left in the care of my paternal grandparents. My elder sister, Mashadi, was placed in the care of my mother’s cousin’s family, the Mahapas, while my elder brother, Mathabatha, remained at Kranspoort with my father. It was the first family separation, and it was not easy for us at all. The only reason I can now think of why all the children did not go with my mother was that my paternal grandparents would not have approved of ‘their grandchildren’ being looked after at my mother’s natal home. We were naturally not consulted in the matter. The separation from both parents for the sake of keeping the peace between the Rampheles and the Mahlaelas was traumatic for us. We resented it and cried a lot over it.
Sethiba was then in Sub A, and attended a nearby local school which catered for only Sub A and B. I had to go to G. H. Frantz Secondary School, some three kilometres from my grandparents’ home. Fortunately an older cousin of mine, Mbatha, attended secondary school there and could give me a lift on his bicycle. But I had to walk home from school on those occasions when he had afternoon activities. I found that hard, not only because of the long distance for my eight-year-old frame, but particularly because hunger was a constant companion. There was no lunch packed for me nor was I given pocket money to buy snacks from the village shop. I was regularly rescued by my mother’s cousin, who was teaching at the same school and living near by. She would give me food during the school break.
Breakfast in my grandparents’ household was mainly tea and dry stale bread bought from the local store. There was often no food waiting for us when we got home after school. We would then have to make do with whatever leftovers were available from the previous day’s supper. Sethiba was even more miserable. He was expected to herd my grandfather’s sheep and goats after school, often without any food in his stomach. He also bore the full brunt of my grandfather’s authoritarianism and harsh approach to child-rearing. His six-year-old body was subjected to hunger and hard work for most of the nine months of our stay there. I was protected by the relative gentleness with which both my grandparents treated me. My tears, which flowed very readily each time I was hurt or miserable, were a useful lever for obtaining greater and gentler care. In contrast, Sethiba was under pressure to respond to my father’s edict that moshimane ke draad, ga a lle ge a e kwa bohloko (a boy is like a piece of wire and should not cry).
I saw my parents only once during the entire nine-month period. Given the distances involved, my father could only afford to come and see us during the June school holidays, and later took us to visit my mother. We had to be torn away from her at the end of the visit. Release came one Sunday morning in September while we were waiting with my grandmother to depart on a church trip to another parish twenty kilometres away. Someone came to tell my grandmother that my mother had just arrived with her new baby. I jumped for joy and ran all the way home. Sethiba could hardly recognise his mother. As she got off the donkey cart that brought her, he thought to himself: That woman with the baby looks like my mother. But he was not sure until my mother called out to him and hugged him. The joy of reunion was indescribable for the two of us. We giggled and danced to the music within our deprived hearts. Our family was finally reunited.
* * *
We moved back to Kranspoort where things had calmed down. The innocence of my childhood was brought to an abrupt end one Wednesday evening late in 1960 just before I went to the weekly evening prayer service. I was twelve years old. I ran to the toilet to relieve myself, only to be confronted by a bloody panty. I had no idea what was happening to me. I quickly changed and ran to church. My special prayer was for the Lord to make the blood go back to where it came from. It was one of my many unsuccessful pleas for God to intervene directly in my life. The blood continued to flow for four or five days.
Fortunately, Miriam Mokgadi Kutumela, one of the many young people who used to stay with us, noticed my bewilderment and offered advice and practical suggestions about appropriate hygienic measures. She also explained what it meant in terms of the development of my sexuality, pregnancy and matters relating to childbirth. She had got to know all these ‘facts of life’ from the initiation she underwent at puberty in her village. Ironically, the embracing of ‘Christian ways’ deprived us of such an exposure, while not creating other mechanisms to provide information about human development for young people. One had the worst of all worlds in this regard.
It never occurred to me to tell my mother even though I was close to her in many other ways. The silence which existed between children and adults around sexuality was absolute. I sensed that this was not a matter to raise with her. It took my mother almost a year before she found out that I had reached puberty. Even then she did not talk to me directly about it. She asked her best friend, Mrs Moshakga, to speak to me. Mrs Moshakga was in turn very indirect in her explanation of what puberty was about and said very little which satisfied my curiosity. She simply said, ‘This monthly flow of blood signals that you are now a woman. You should not sleep with boys, because you will then have a baby.’ But how could I be a woman at the age of twelve? What did sleeping with boys mean? And what was the connection between that and babies? I had to rely on Miriam to respond in detail to my questions, and to interpret some of the innuendoes. My father’s encyclopaedias also came in handy: I could read and follow the biological explanations with the aid of the diagrams.
It is interesting how little the discourse of sexuality between parents and their children has changed over the years, particularly among working-class people. In my work with adolescents in the Western Cape townships I came across the same silences, and the unwillingness of parents to be open to their children about sexuality and their growing bodies. Many young people still have to rely on friends for information about this vital area of life. It is a measure of how deeply entrenched are the mystique of the human body and the ambivalences we seem to have about sexuality. Some researchers have suggested that the incest taboo may have something to do with this silence. Talking about sex may itself be regarded as a sexual activity.
Chapter 5: School, the institution
I DO NOT REMEMBER PLAYING THE FANTASY GAMES OF ‘When I grow up I will be this, that or the other’. Nor do I remember being asked by adults in their usual condescending way what I thought I would become later in life. It may well be that my distance from my peers had a lot to do with my unconcern about a career. But it may also have had to do with the assumption in the village that you automatically became a teacher or nurse if you did well at school, or a policeman or labourer if you did not. Given my academic abilities and the fact that my parents could afford to educate me, my choice of career didn’t invite questions from curious adults. I was destined to become a teacher.
Charles Dickens could well have set his bleaker social novels in South Africa and, specifically, in one of the most important secondary educational institutions in the then northern Transvaal. Bethesda was a teacher training college which was started by Dutch Reformed Church missionaries in the 1930s. It was situated about fifty kilometres west of Pietersburg – now Polokwane – in a mission station known as Rita, which nestles under a beautiful, sharply defined koppie whose name it shares. It had an enrolment of about three hundred students, most of whom were in the secondary school section. There were about three boys to each girl, and the boys’ and girls’ residences lay on either side of the school’s teaching and administrative blocks.
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