Mamphela Ramphele: A Passion for Freedom. Mamphela Ramphele
target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_2e91dc7f-e31b-5346-a8e1-d6e7c808e3cc">7 Our family moved into this house in 1964.
Chapter 4: boSofasonke
MY INTRODUCTION TO POLITICS WAS A SILENT ONE. I remember my parents discussing politics in hushed tones, particularly after my aunt Ramadimetsa’s husband had been detained under the 90-days detention clause which the Nationalist government introduced to deal with rebellion against their authoritarian rule. At this time the anti-pass campaign organised by the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), and later strengthened by the involvement of the African National Congress (ANC), was gaining momentum on the Witwatersrand and farther afield. My uncle Solly Mogomotsi was a member of the ANC and had been a member of the South African Communist Party (SACP) before it was banned in 1950. The SACP affiliation could be traced back to his active union membership in the boiler-making industry. My aunt spent many anxious weeks searching for her husband while he was detained, with no assistance from the authorities.
My own elder sister, Mashadi, was expelled from high school in her matriculation year because she had participated in a demonstration against the celebrations of South Africa’s becoming a republic in 1961. All schoolchildren were handed miniature South African flags, which we carried high as we paraded around the school under the watchful eyes of our teachers. I remember the day vividly, though we did not know what the occasion was about. I wonder how much of the symbolic weight of that day impinged on the teachers, and how much, if any, discussion took place about the significance of the day’s events.
My sister and her classmates refused to celebrate what they understood to be a worsening situation of oppression for black South Africans. They were summarily expelled, and put on homebound trains with the help of police. It was a bitter disappointment for my father, who was a strong believer in education as an essential part of a child’s development and an escape route out of poverty. He was, however, wise enough not to make my sister feel too guilty about her stance. He took it in his stride and expected everybody else to do so. It was not a matter for discussion with us children. We understood that we were not to ask any questions about it.
My sister’s expulsion was not an uncomplicated event for my father as principal of Stephanus Hofmeyer School, which was also part of Afrikaner hegemony. My father was expected to be an active member of the local Dutch Reformed Church: conducting Sunday school, being a church warden, the church choirmaster, as well as interpreter for the local dominee. The Reverend Lukas van der Merwe was certainly not an easy person to work with. He was a bully, a racist, a chauvinist of the worst kind. It is difficult to remember a redeeming feature in him. His wife was a gentle woman who endured many abuses, some of them public, from her ill-tempered husband. She was a kindly woman who was a source of great comfort and assistance to many local women, especially in matters of health. She saved many lives in a place far from medical facilities and with poor means of transport. According to my mother, I owe my own life to her. I contracted severe whooping cough at the age of three months. It was the advice given by Mrs Van der Merwe, together with the remedies she brought from Louis Trichardt to dampen the cough, which my mother is convinced saved my life.
As pupils from the local school, one of our responsibilities was to keep the dominee’s house and yard clean. This entailed sweeping the open spaces between the fruit trees around his house with makeshift brooms fashioned from local bushes. We were not allowed to touch any of the delicious-looking fruit on the trees. It took extraordinary discipline for children our age to do so, but the alternative was too ghastly to contemplate. The dominee was a merciless man.
He ruled his congregation at the Kranspoort Mission Station like a farmer presiding over his property. He took over the communal mission fruit farm, employed his parishioners at starvation wages and denigrated them in the most racist way. He had a peculiar sense of morality which he applied to blacks under his charge. They were not to drink alcohol of any kind, on pain of expulsion from the mission, or suspension from the church sacraments for three months. This prohibition was a puritanical version of the liquor laws of the time, which prohibited Africans from buying and consuming ‘European’ alcohol. He also decreed that any unmarried woman who became pregnant faced immediate expulsion from the mission – being given a trekpas (dismissal) as the practice was referred to, no different from the sanctions racist farmers used against ‘stubborn natives’. He was himself not a teetotaller, nor did we know enough about his morality to be convinced that he was the puritan he insisted others should be.
A particularly painful memory I have is of a classmate who fell pregnant during her first year at boarding school at the age of about fourteen. She had one of those ‘one-night affairs’ with an older boy from the village whose father was a trusted assistant to the dominee as the chief koster (church bell-ringer and usher). She came from one of the poorest families. Her mother had been abandoned by her father, who married another woman and left her without any means of support except charity from locals. The girl was cast out in her pathetic pregnant state. After giving birth to a sickly child, she was not allowed to come home to whatever emotional support her mother could have provided. The death of her miserable child almost a year later released her from her agony. She came back to the village and was assisted by her elder sister to return to high school, and later qualified as a primary school teacher.
My father negotiated a fine line between obedience to and defiance of this racist tyrant. He understood that he was in the belly of the beast, but was not prepared to sacrifice his human dignity in the process of surviving. He enjoyed his beer and other alcoholic beverages with a ‘coloured’ friend of his, Mr Philip Bekker, who lived in a neighbouring ‘coloured’ village. The dominee knew all about this aspect of my father’s life, but never raised it. He probably sensed the limits which my father had set in their relations.
I remember my mother proudly relating to her friends how much the dominee respected my father, in spite of his racism. She said that whenever my father accompanied the dominee on district parish visits, they would be invited by his Afrikaner friends for lunch. They would set a separate table for my father in the same diningroom! That was an honour in the 1960s in rural racist South Africa.
The high-handedness of this man eventually led to a mass expulsion of two-thirds of the mission villagers between 1955 and 1956. The events were the product of local and national grievances coinciding and igniting into open rebellion. It was a significant development involving people who had been compliant and docile. Most of the men in the village were migrant workers, a significant proportion of whom were working as labourers on the Witwatersrand. The Defiance Campaign of the 1950s, the Kliptown Congress of the People of 1955, and the anti-pass campaign triggered by the extension of the pass laws to women, kindled a rebellious spirit in many of these migrants, who in turn influenced their relatives in Kranspoort. It required only a small spark to set the mission village alight. This spark was provided by the dominee when he refused to allow an old woman, the mother of a resident of the village, to be buried in the mission graveyard, because she was a ‘heathen’ (someone who had not converted to Christianity). This old woman used to live on a farm in the mountains above the mission village and had been brought to her daughter’s home for nursing in the twilight of her life.
The battle for the right to have her buried was a fierce and sad one. I have only a vague recollection of it, because I was then only seven years old. I must rely on my mother’s recollection of the events. The village was divided between those who supported the dominee’s ruling, referred to as boDaza, and those defying it, the boSofasonke (We will die together). It is noteworthy that in the 1950s there was a strong following of the Sofasonke party in the poorest parts of Soweto, and some of the migrant workers may have brought the name back with them for this local struggle. The old woman was defiantly buried in the mission graveyard with the church bells rung by the rebels, who physically took control of the church grounds, Police were called in to protect the dominee. He was beside himself with anger after being humiliated by the public defiance, which included some militant women poking their fingers at his face and calling him ‘Lukas’ (his first name) instead of the usual respectful Moruti (Preacher).
The conflict raged for months after that episode. The rebellious residents were arrested under various excuses by security policemen and beaten. But they would not give in. A massive removal was then executed with the support of the