As you come up the driveway, you have on your right the building that serves, apart from sleeping quarters, also as kitchen (unfortunately not very hygienic), library, pig-feed depository and chicken hatchery. Here live Nomsa and Thamsanqua Ndlovo. Nomsa is nine and Thamsanqua is fifteen. Their elder brother, Xola, was here till last year, but he’s now rapping along with Die Antwoord (our answer to the Baader-Meinhof Group); amazing the progress they have made. Rub your eyes in disbelief.
The Ndlovos’ father died of alcohol-related causes when Nomsa was an infant. Ma Ndlovo clearly couldn’t cope and brought the children here a few years later. So Nomsa has been living on the farm for the better part of her life. (Remember, it’s a foster farm and halfway-house). She has overcome her uncertainty regarding origin and family identity very well, it would seem, because she possesses natural self-assurance and a pronounced social disposition.
The Ndlovos are talented children. Thamsanqua (which means good fortune) goes to school somewhere in Nyanga. She walks and takes the train to get there. She only comes home in the late afternoon. She does well at school. Sculpted brow, large, expansive face — very expressive. Huge alto voice. Never talks about feelings, but always with feeling. A generous presence. More than anybody else here, she has a foothold in the townships. She sometimes disappears sight unseen, reappears sight unseen; goes to visit her mother, wherever she is to be found. She strikes me as a first generation urbanite — she’s in any case no rural girl — one feels how the older pastoral Xhosa values of cooperation and fellow-feeling have in her been transposed to the space of the big city, the metropolis. She plays rugby, swings, singing loudly and extrovertedly, on the swings in the little Tamboerskloof park.
A bit further along, on the left, lives the former spouse of Josias B, Laetitia, with her boyfriend (Argentinian with white hair recently dyed black). With them live Laetitia’s two sons and a daughter from the marriage to Josias, the boyfriend’s daughter from a previous liaison, and the foster daughter Nomalizo Mhlaba (fourteen years old). In the first years of her life Nomalizo lived with her alcoholic mother under a bridge in front of Checkers. Her brother Jongilanga was also on the farm till recently. The Mhlabas are survivors. Jongilanga was about nine when he escaped with Nomalizo, then four or five, from a previous foster home (near the now imploded salt-and-pepper pot cooling towers this side of Langa). He carried her all the way to the farm on his back.
After the kitchen on the right follows the pig area. (Expect to recoil slightly from the smell.) This area is a free-for-all. Here the pigs are fed. There are muddy pools where they can wallow to their hearts’ content. A bit further on the left is the nursery. This is the middle level. There are plants here, fish ponds and frog-hatching ponds, with tadpoles in various stages of development. When they are fully grown, the frogs hop out of their respective ponds, and hit the road. Between the road and the nursery is a vegetable garden.
But there endeth the known world, because the rest of the setup is a manifestation of Josias B’s imagination and his collector’s hand. Because lord-oh-lord, here where I live, there is something of everything. The road, on the incline, curves to the right, and on the penultimate level there are five halls. Each measures about twenty-five by eight metres, with a vaulted ceiling — about six metres high in the centre — one seamless brick structure from floor to roof. Architecturally impressive spaces. Old weapons depots, built at the end of the nineteenth century. In one of these halls I live. In every hall there is something of everything — expect to be surprised. From top to bottom, in every nook and cranny, from brick floor to vaulted roof, with hardly any space to move. The whole setup larger than life, a humungous installation. Believe me when I say that it blows every effort at installation before and since out of the water. Kurt Schwitters, eat your heart out, and all the chaps in the Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin, and all their aspirant acolytes.
Here I am installed, in one of these storage depots, or installation spaces, and who could have guessed that I would end up here at last. That I would find somewhere to rest the sole of my foot, provisionally. Everybody’s uncle, an ordinary daily part of an extremely extraordinary setup — all things considered. More later about me and about the byways that brought me here.
In one of the other halls — hall two — lives Lizeka, and in an antechamber lives Dustin, father of the child of Josias B’s eldest daughter. So, son-in-law of Josias, you might say.
About thirty paces to the right of us, looking towards the mountain, lives the Hlobo clan. (Clan of the Cave Bear.) By this I mean Lucinda, her mother, Victoria, her children Dorothea (seven), Amos (four) and Isaiah (eight months). Also her asthmatic nephew Igor (eleven) and her brother, a handsome young ethnic man who comes and goes. The Hlobos are Sotho-speaking and have spent some time in Egoli among other places. These Hlobos are tough and inflexible, and they look after their own interests very assiduously, make no mistake. Though at times it seems as if they want to wipe each other out.
Grandmother Victoria seems to me like a woman who first had to make her peace with the rough side of life before she could start embracing it. Very controlling. Vehemently so. She and Josias started falling foul of each other quite soon after the settling of the clan; she accused him of making money out of black children. And Josias is not your kind of customer who would reply: lady, with respect, it’s none of your business, could you please accept with simplicity and detach with love. No. The fat was in the fire instantly, and what Josias refers to as a kaffir war was in full cry, and probably still is. No love lost between Josias and the Hlobo clan. Hardly give each other the time of day. Things weren’t helped along by Josias catching Lucinda with a hand in the till, and saw her marching off to Sea Point in knee-high white boots. Sailor beware. We are marching in the light of God.
Two years ago (when I was still a visitor here) Lucinda solicited me shamelessly one evening at a gathering around a fire. Lord-oh-lord, she was pretty irresistible. I didn’t know her from Adam (or Eve), but her blend of worldly wisdom and forthrightness was exciting. With sexy hollow cheeks, almighty kisser, and one eye wandering wildly to the side of her head, she dragged me into the darkness and in well-modulated English whispered against my throat that she had two jobs that didn’t pay well, she had a phone number, did I want her to like me? But of course. Then you have to prove yourself. Arch smile, but good pitch. She’d taken my measure pretty well.
That evening she was a mite pickled, to put it euphemistically. I have never seen her like that again — never again drunk, carnal or sexually aggressive. We have since become good acquaintances. We keep our distance. From neither side any innuendo or veiled suggestion. A few months ago it became known that she was pregnant. She takes a regular job and her face fills out. But no possible father is anywhere to be seen south of the equator, even though Celia, the daughter of Josias by Lucinda, alleges that Lucinda got pregnant to get a hold on the child’s father.
Perhaps I should move in with the Hlobos. Lucinda as the contented homemaker, and Victoria as my African mother-in-law. Living there with three foster children and a foster nephew. Who knows, could be a winning combination. Accepted norms so shattered that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could never put them together again. Liberated at last.
My own blood-related challenged cousin Henkie (son of my own blood-related challenged aunt, sister of my own blood-related challenged father; each after his or her own fashion), would be well advised also to take up residence here in one of the bomb bunkers. Amos can trot around every day with his psychiatric medicine — Ritalin or lithium or whatever they feed such sufferers nowadays. Then everything will get nice and cosy, all ethnic and feudal.