Going to the Mountain Read online

  When we moved over to the second house in Houghton, Graça agreed that the older boys needed their space, so while some construction was being done to accommodate that, Mandla and I stayed in the first house. This was the perfect setup for sneaking a girl in, as if it was my crib and so forth, and my granddad was none the wiser. As far as I knew. Of course, in the moment, you always wish and hope and pray you’ll get away with it. Once when Mandla was home from uni for the weekend, however, he caught me getting busy with a beautiful American girl. One would think he would have been on my side, but at the end of the day, Mandla was always on his own side. He didn’t want me messing up his good situation or getting him in trouble with the Old Man. He seriously went off on me. Like any red-blooded male, I was trying to salvage the situation.

  “Bro, c’mon. Are you kidding me right now? Bro, don’t ruin this for me.”

  “Get her out of here!” He kept after me every five minutes until I had to give in and send the girl home.

  Not long after that, I borrowed Mandla’s car without asking. He was away for the weekend, and I couldn’t help myself. This car was a silver Toyota Tazz the Old Man had gotten him on a trip overseas. It was all custom designed with sixteen-inch alloy wheels, BBS mags, dark tinted windows, and four twelve-inch Rockford Fosgate speakers. Top of the range. He literally converted the entire boot of the car into a giant speaker. So I felt quite chuffed cruising around in the Tazz. Unfortunately, one of Mandla’s friends spotted me and called him. Busted!

  When Mandla got back, I was watching TV with one of my boys. Mandla was seriously upset, and things got physical. He beat me up right in front of his girlfriend. My friend was so scared, he took off and left me to get my ass whooped. Mandla punched me in the face and gave me a black eye that made me look like some kind of mutant for a whole bloody week. Obviously, I couldn’t tell the Old Man the whole backstory on that, so I had to make up some cock and bull fable, and I was never any good at lying to him, so I sat there feeling like he was staring laser beams through my skull.

  I was so over it. All of it. Not just this incident or the dog—it was everything. I started thinking about my dad’s setup just five minutes away, where I could come and go as I pleased, and no one would know or care. There was a cottage out back where I’d be able to entertain a girl if my dad was off with his mates. I didn’t so much ask my dad as tell him, “Hey, I’m going to move over to your house.” But you didn’t tell the Old Man stuff like this. You asked. I went into his office one evening and said, “Granddad, would it be okay if I go stay with my dad for a while?”

  He looked up from the book he was reading. He didn’t look surprised. He didn’t ask me why I wanted to leave. He didn’t argue that I should stay.

  “I’ve always been disappointed that I was not closer to your father,” he said.

  “But for him and me,” I ventured, “maybe it’s not too late.”

  He nodded. “Whatever you choose to do, Ndaba, you know this is your home.”

  “I know, Granddad. It’s just for a while.”

  I walked out of there thinking I was finally free, and it felt great. Nobody would be breathing down my neck, telling me that what I was doing wasn’t good enough, telling me to clean my room or pick up my crap. A lady came in to clean up after us. Life at my dad’s house was a pretty sweet situation, hanging out, doing whatever I wanted to do and not doing anything I didn’t want to do. Poor Kweku, I thought. Auntie Maki had him working away, studying and doing chores, while Dad and I lounged by the pool. My dad would get home from work, put some jazz on the stereo, take off his pants and shirt and put on shorts or his PJs. He had a lady friend—I guess we’d say “friend with benefits” these days—who came by now and then to take care of his manly needs. She was not a great looker by any standards, but she seemed harmless, and I didn’t much care about what they were doing anyway.

  Three days a week, a lady came in to cook for us. The rest of the time, we ordered takeout. I had never once gotten takeout at my granddad’s place. The Old Man had no time for that. He wanted that good old home cooking all day every day. Mama Xoli and Mama Gloria were on top of things no matter how late he worked or how many family members showed up for breakfast, lunch or dinner. At my dad’s place, it was usually just him and me, sometimes my brothers, sometimes a few friends, kicking it by the pool. Nobody preached at me about politics or history. We didn’t talk about much at all.

  “Man, I’m spoiled by South African beer,” said Dad. “Light, clean, never bitter. Just like a good woman.” He laughed, and I thought, Oh, yeah. This is gonna work out fine.

  I didn’t drink with my dad, but he knew I was drinking. One night Kweku and I went out and got hammered and stumbled in about 4:30 in the morning. Dad was up watching a Mike Tyson fight. We made a perfunctory effort to hide our booze, but not very well. My pops let it slide. I vaguely remember him having a conversation about the fight with Kweku. I could hardly stand up. That little voice in my head told me, “Time for bed, buddy.” I staggered to my room and passed out.

  My dad was sympathetic when it came to my growing issues with Mandla. “I’ve lost faith in him. He’s a spoiled brat,” he said. “Your brother is self-absorbed. I tried to influence him otherwise, but I failed. He won’t listen to anyone.” Mandla was eager to get married, but both Dad and the Old Man gave him the same advice: “Don’t rush. Finish your degree first.” Mandla didn’t want to hear it. He went ahead with the wedding, even though I was the only family member who attended. People kept questioning me about it, and I repeated some weak story about how they were traveling or something. When I tried to talk to Dad about it, he said, “Just focus on your studies. You could get your degree before Mandla.” At first it felt good to know he was on my side, but it became uncomfortable. I would have been happier if it could have been the three of us hanging out by the pool.

  Dad encouraged me to do well in school, but he didn’t dog me about it constantly. If I went out at night and got a little too much party on, he didn’t expect me to rock out of bed first thing in the morning to exercise and make my bed and get to school on time. The mess in my room was my own business, and the mess in his room was his business. He seemed more like the old warm, easygoing dad I remembered from when I was little and we lived with Grandma Evelyn in the Eastern Cape and I could stop by the grocery store for chocolate or chips or whatever I wanted. My friends and I spent a good many evenings floating in the pool and getting drunk off our asses. We partied every weekend. I pretty much blew off studying, cutting more classes than I attended, and it showed in the miserable marks I received. When the next round of reports came out, I was glad the Old Man was out of the loop. I thought I could count on my dad to take it in stride, but he didn’t.

  “Ndaba, you’ve got to do better,” he warned. “I put up with years of nagging about my own studies. I don’t need the Old Man on my back about yours.”

  I knew he was serious, but I also knew he wasn’t actually going to do anything to slow my roll, so we were still cool. Auntie Maki was pleased that Dad and I were finally making an attempt at building a relationship. She encouraged him to tell me more about his own childhood, which was pretty screwed up. Madiba and Grandma Evelyn were divorced when my dad was eight years old, largely because Grandma Evelyn was completely into the Jehovah’s Witness faith and not down with all the ANC stuff. She believed Madiba should allow God to correct the wrongs in the world, and she didn’t want to live with the constant threats. She hated having to constantly run away and hide from authorities. From the very start of primary school, Dad and his big brother Thembi and little sister Maki had to adopt fake names in order to go to school, knowing they must never tell anyone who they really were.

  Even after Madiba married Mama Winnie, the police harassed and threatened Evelyn because she was his first wife and had his three oldest children. Madiba was Public Enemy Number 1, and they were desperate to draw him out. Eventually, Grandma Evelyn fled with her children to Swaziland, where they l
ived as refugees until Madiba was found and arrested. Dad was twelve when Madiba went to jail. He was nineteen when Thembi was killed.

  “After Thembi died,” Dad told me, “I get a letter from your granddad. He says, ‘I hate to give lectures, Kgatho, but your big bro is gone, now you better step up your game!’”

  I might have laughed at the notion of the Old Man holding back from a good lecture, but as I grew to know my father, I was coming to an uncomfortable conclusion: My granddad had failed my dad in many of the same ways my dad had failed me. I’ve seen that letter fairly recently. It’s archived in Madiba’s book Conversations with Myself. I find it quite stunning for several reasons: the tone, the content, and the timing—just fifteen days after Uncle Thembi’s death—but also the foresight. At that moment in time, there was little hope that Madiba himself had any future at all beyond Robben Island, but he expressed a prescient and optimistic view of the future and was determined to see my father find a place in it.

  July 28, 1969

  I hate giving lectures, Kgatho, even to my own children and I prefer discussing matters with everyone on a basis of perfect equality, where my views are offered as advice which the person affected is free to accept or reject as it pleases him. But I will be failing in my duty if I did not point out that the death of Thembi brings a heavy responsibility on your shoulders. Now you are the eldest child, and it will be your duty to keep the family together and to set a good example for your sisters, to be a pride to your parents and to all your relatives. This means that you will have to work harder on your studies, never allow yourself to be discouraged by difficulties or setbacks, and never give up the battle even in the darkest hour.

  So no pressure, right?

  Remember that we live in a new age of scientific achievement, the most staggering of which is the recent landing of man on the moon. That is a sensational event that will enrich man’s knowledge of the universe and that may even result in a change or modification of many fundamental assumptions in many fields of knowledge. The younger generation must train and prepare themselves so that they can easily grasp the far-reaching repercussions of developments in the realm of space. This is an era of intense and vicious competition in which the richest rewards are reserved for those who have undergone the most thorough training and who have attained the highest academic qualifications in their respective fields. The issues that agitate humanity today call for trained minds and the man who is deficient in this respect is crippled because he is not in possession of the tools and equipment necessary to ensure success and victory in the service of country and people. To lead an orderly and disciplined life, and to give up the glittering pleasures that attract the average boy, to work hard and systematically in your studies throughout the year, will in the end bring you coveted prizes and much personal happiness. It will inspire your sisters to follow the example of their beloved brother, and they will benefit greatly through your scientific knowledge, vast experience, diligence and achievements. Besides, human beings like to be associated with a hardworking, disciplined and successful person and by carefully cultivating these qualities you will win yourself many friends.

  The strangest thing about this letter is that I see both the man who failed in raising my father and the man who succeeded in raising me. I know Thembi’s death gutted my granddad. I know he was in unimaginable pain. He had to have known that my dad was suffering the same debilitating grief. Couldn’t he have found one word of comfort to offer? Or would that have cracked some floodgate that kept his own grief from killing him? Was he forced to keep this stone-cold fix on the future so he could physically keep fighting? If that’s the case, though they could not have known this at the time, it was not my father Madiba was fighting for. It was me.

  Apartheid did not willingly let go of its last generations. They emerged from it free but deeply damaged. You can’t break a man’s hands and then tell him, “Hey, you still have toes, right? So if you would only work hard enough, you could still be a concert pianist.” The opportunities available to me in the first thirty years of my life and the opportunities available to my father in the first thirty years of his life are not even close to being in the same stratosphere. I learned many important life lessons from my granddad, but here’s something I learned from my dad: No one who was born with less opportunity than you is asking for your pity. They don’t need your charity. They are asking for your respect, an honest recognition of the mountain they have already climbed just to survive as far as the point at which others started.

  We all need and deserve the same thing: a fair lane of opportunity in which to reach our full potential. Even if it is true that all men are created equal, the world quickly tips the balance to alter that equality. Two evenly matched boxers are not in a fair fight if one of them has a cinder block chained to his ankle. If his only opportunity to survive is to pick up the cinder block and use it as a weapon, why should anyone be surprised if he does that? The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was an enormous step forward for the people of South Africa. We took ownership of the moral aspect of apartheid, but we’ve yet to address the economic aspect, in my opinion.

  The Bantu Education Act of 1953 was pitched to parliament by Dr. Hendrik F. Verwoerd, Minister of Native Affairs, as a measure that was both Christian and compassionate: “There is no space for [a non-white person] in the European Community above certain forms of labor…. Until now he has been subjected to a school system which drew him away from his community and misled him by showing him the greener pastures of European society where he is not allowed to graze.”

  The whole Bantu thing promoted an image of black Africans as heathen savages who should be firmly but lovingly domesticated and Christianized by their white benefactors, and a lot of people still see things this way. As recently as January 2018, Donald Trump, the sitting president of the United States, made reference to “shithole countries” in Africa, saying Nigerian people would never “go back to their huts” if they had the opportunity to live in the United States. It’s virtually impossible to watch late night television for fifteen minutes without seeing a plea from an NGO depicting African children with wide eyes and swollen bellies, marketing the idea that the proper response to this is a donation to their cause rather than a redress of political and socioeconomic wrongs that continue robbing the richest continent on this planet of her diamonds, gold, and oil.

  My father was given an extraordinary opportunity to change his circumstances in the latter part of his life, but hundreds of thousands of people educated in the Bantu system, which unabashedly trained black people to be a servant class to white people, are still in the work force doing exactly what the Bantu system hardwired them to do, seeing themselves exactly as the Bantu system hardwired them to see themselves. And if you think the legislative dismantling of the Bantu system—or of segregation in general—magically negates its far-reaching culturally toxic effects, then I must ask you: How big do the lions get in your neighborhood?

  We run from the past. Or we learn from it. During that short time I lived with my father, I was still running from my past. I just didn’t run quite fast enough.

  TO ABSORB THE FULL impact of The Story of Ndaba’s Epic Crash and Burn, you must understand that my granddad read the African newspapers every morning without fail. All eight regional papers. Front to back. Every day. After breakfast, he sat in the lounge in his favorite wingback chair. I was always welcome to join him, but I couldn’t just take the sports section or the comics page; I had to take the whole paper, and when he was ready for that paper, I had to hand it over. Occasionally, he pointed out an article about an event that he thought I should be aware of or responded out loud to an editorial, either agreeing with great enthusiasm or disagreeing with great vehemence. He also watched the local news every evening, and that habit is still ingrained in me. To this day, regardless of the constant stream of news on my smart phone, I don’t feel quite right if I haven’t seen the evening news on TV.

  But the papers. Those
are key to this story.

  One afternoon, I was out enjoying the pleasant weather and sharing a nice fat spliff with a few friendly chaps about three blocks from our high school. Some dudes cruised by, and I recognized one of them as an eleventh grader with whom Zondwa had kind of an ongoing tussle. We thought about diving for cover, but we’d seen this same fellow at a recent mash up—at his sister’s house, no less. I’m talking bongs, beer funnels while they hold you upside down, that sort of thing. Someone said, “He wouldn’t rat us out after that piss up, would he?” And we all agreed, “No, no. Of course, he wouldn’t.” But of course, he did. I suppose they figured that kicking our asses would be a lot of work and probably not end well for them, but they could seriously mess us up if they went into school and reported to the authorities that I was a few blocks up the street smoking reefer. The next day, I was called out of history class and questioned us about the incident. I remained silent, but a couple of these other chaps cracked like chicken eggs, and then it was over for everybody. We got “suspension expulsion,” which means you’re sent home for a week, and when you come back, the slightest infraction, even the tiniest step outside the rules means immediate expulsion.

  I was staying with my dad at the time, and my dad was a hustler who grew up in the street and knew the drill. He didn’t get mad at me. He was irritated about the logistical hassle, but not really angry. Probably not all that surprised.

  “Ndaba, seriously?” He rolled his eyes. “Okay. We’ve got this. It’s a situation, but we’ve got it. I’ll go to the school and deal with it. It’s fine. Main thing is, I am not gonna let your granddad find out about it.”

  That weekend, it was reported in the Johannesburg paper that a grandchild of former president Nelson Mandela was involved in a drug-related incident and expelled from school. They didn’t say my name, and several of my cousins attended the same school, but I was the one already known for blazing mad joints, so the time bomb was ticking. My dad tried to run interference. He went to my granddad’s secretary, pleading my case. “Zelda, please. He’s a good kid. He just screwed up this one time. There’s no need to upset the Old Man.” Dad did everything he could to make sure Madiba didn’t see that particular paper, but I knew he was going to see it. He saw every paper. Front to back. Every day. I knew I would have to tell him, and on one level I was glad, because trying to keep it from him felt like hell. The only way to have it be over was to face up to it, and I desperately wanted it to be over.