The Keeper of the Kumm. Sylvia Vollenhoven
very brave when I walk past him without a word.
Being the older sister has many advantages. I am now given grown-up things to do. I can help my grandmother with her hair and she tells me stories I’ve never heard before. When I have angered Ma, her wrath disappears in an instant if I offer to ‘do’ her hair. If she is on her way out when I make the offer, my stocks rise considerably. But I don’t like this job at all because there is a hole in my grandmother’s head.
“Mama se kind weet so mooi hoe om die ou haartjies te kam. Ek sukkel so en my arms raak lam.”
First I part the long, springy curls and clip them into neat segments. Then one by one I release each piece, sweeping it up into a kind of all-round beehive that frames her face. Sometimes I feel her head lolling as she becomes drowsy with delight. When I reach the spot near her crown, Ma’s pleasure becomes my pain.
I have the ability to feel the hurt of others in my own body. There is a deep dent in her skull, near the crown. Each time I comb her hair, my fingers and my hands ache. Sometimes my arms become heavy as the pain moves closer and closer to my heart.
When I read a book and the characters are experiencing heartache, I have to put it down from time to time because the sensations in my hands become too intense.
“Ag nee, Sylvia. Waar het ’n mens nou ooit van sulke nonsens gehoor?” says my friend Isobel when I ask her if the stories in the books hurt her arms too.
There is no way I can comb Ma’s hair without touching the soft place where the bones have never come together. The wound is almost in exactly the same spot as the dent in my skull from “Blue Moon” Sybil’s wooden box that fell on my head when I was four or five years old.
Whenever I ask about it, Ma says she will tell me one day when I am old enough to understand. When that day finally comes I wish I had not asked. Now it is even more agonising than before to comb her hair for her.
“Die boer het my oor die kop geslaan met die hosepipe se ysterkoppel, want ek wou wegloop.”
Sophia “Sofie” Petersen was born on a wheat farm belonging to the Streicher family, in the Swellendam district. Everyone calls my granny Ma, even those not remotely related to her. Few people know her name is Sophia. She looks surprised when I tell her one day that her name means ‘wisdom’7. Born circa 1902, the year the Anglo-Boer War ended, she comes from a time when officialdom did not think it necessary to dish out papers to the descendants of slaves and Bushmen.
Her parents Abraham and Elizabeth raised six children in a small, whitewashed cottage with two rooms. One room was for sleeping and the other was for everything else.
When Sofie is eight years old she has to begin her working life by helping the women in the kitchen.
“Ek was nog baie klein, en maer. ‘Hier kom Sofietjie met die spyker bene,’ het hulle altyd gesê. Mama het my gewys hoe om op ’n bankie te staan om skottelgoed te was. As Mama hulle besig is met die kos, moet ek my hare vasmaak met ’n wit meelsak doek. My hare was al van kleins af wild, net soos joune. Oubaas Streicher se vrou het so kwaad geraak as ek my doek vergeet. Daai vrou het mens geslaan vir die geringste ding.”
When she is a young woman, she decides she will run away to Cape Town. She is caught trying to escape and brought back to the farm, and that is when she is attacked with the metal end of the hosepipe.
“Vir sulke goed het die Ounooi jou nie geslaan nie. Die Oubaas self het my bygeval.”
But the attack is not enough to keep teenage Sofie on the Streicher farm, cooking and cleaning. The world is a different place as World War I draws to a close. In South Africa, black women have been mounting a small campaign against carrying passes. Under the leadership of the legendary Charlotte Manye Maxeke, the campaign becomes the Bantu Women’s League (later the African National Congress Women’s League).
Encouraged by her eldest sister, Elizabeth “Lissie”, who married a landowner in Cape Town, my grandmother made her way to the city.
Sophia Petersen sees Table Mountain and the ocean for the first time in the winter of 1918 and remembers it well. It is a story I hear often, especially when I’m combing her hair.
“Maak daai hare vas, Sofie, het ounooi altyd gesê. Toe ek hier in die Kaap aankom het ek klompie kopdoeke en min rokke. Dankie tog vir uniforms.”
It isn’t long before Ma finds a job as a ‘cook general’ for a Jewish family in Rondebosch. Her experience of Dutch, Afrikaner and Khoisan cuisine stands her in good stead with the middle-class madam.
“I remember the day I bought my very first weekly to start working. But I never used that expensive train ticket.”
On day two of her brand new job, Ma succumbs to the Great Flu Epidemic of 1918 and spends the rest of the week in bed. She keeps the ticket for decades. When she tells the story, she takes it out of her bag to show me. The ticket has 14 small squares, two for each day of the week, for the train conductor to clip. A big red W sits behind all the writing on the face of the ticket. I imagine being grown-up one day and having a handbag with a classy looking ‘weekly’.
Ma lost many relatives and friends in the flu epidemic of 1918. About 40 000 South Africans died that year.
When I help her get ready to go out, the hole in her head takes me back to the Oubaas Streicher story, the flu epidemic and all the tough times she has been through. A part of me is so happy that she is here with me, wrapped up in the intimacy of hair combing.
“Hoekom wou Ma my nooit vertel van die gat in Ma se kop nie?”
“Mens vertel mos nie kinners alles nie. Stories maak seer.”
Ma believes that stories can harm and they can heal. I know she’s right because of the ache in my own body when she recounts the events of the early 1900s.
We feel in this manner
We feel a sensation
Our stories in our bodies
Dootje and Trina de Klerk
The mistress stood upon her. The mistress had been trampling her. I who was there, I beheld that
/Gui-an’s breath had gone. Her heart had fallen.
She was insensible.8
– /Han≠kass’o Klein Jantje
The hole in my grandmother’s head, in almost exactly the same place as a dent in my own from a childhood injury, is like a livewire connection to a vast, unspoken history. Our stories in our bodies.
About 80 years before my grandmother tells me how her head injury was inflicted, //Kabbo’s son-in-law /Han≠kass’o tells British researcher Lucy Lloyd a similar tale.
I no longer see my grandmother’s revelation as an isolated incident, something to be hidden with shame. It is part of a pattern of cruelty that has lasted for centuries and that we still have great difficulty talking about.
The 19th-century account in the Bleek-Lloyd notebooks evokes a similar intensity as the real pain in my hands when I combed Ma’s hair.
In the summer of 1879, /Han≠kass’o tells Lucy Lloyd about his grandmother /Gui-an, who they called Dootje, and her employer Trina de Klerk:
“We were sleeping in one place, one house, when my grandmother /Gui-an Dootje was ill. She could not talk. When she got better she told us that Trina de Klerk was beating her about the washing of skottelgoed.
“/Gui-an was slow washing up and Trina wanted to give food to her people. The mistress refused to wait for her. /Gui-an could not see nicely. She dried the dishes slowly, packing one thing on top of another carefully. One time she worked quickly and a cup broke. She was beaten and since that day could not see properly. She was afraid it could happen again on account of her eyes.
“/Gui-an Dootje told me the mistress stood upon her, the mistress was trampling her. She became insensible. Then she arose while she was still