Going to the Mountain Read online

  YOU MAY HAVE HEARD the expression, “It takes a village to raise a child.” The Xhosa have their own version: Akukho mntwana ungowendlu enye. “No child belongs to one house.” One would hope that the logical extension of this is: “Every child belongs to every house.” Which is to say, we all share responsibility for the care and feeding of all the children in this world.

  I missed my mom and dad, but the good part of my childhood came after I went to live with the Old Man. Mama Xoli cared for me like a mother hen. Auntie Maki had returned from the United States, so I spent holidays with her family, and Kweku and I tore around having fun like we did when we were little. Life with my grandfather settled into a disciplined daily routine. I was expected to behave myself, do well in school, and keep my room clean. Madiba was a man of extraordinary will who’d spent almost three decades living a very rigidly structured life. Self-discipline was like a religion in his house, and that was something very new to me. Grandma Evelyn ran a pretty tight ship, but she was also warm and generous with affection. I don’t remember much in the way of hugs or sentimental words from my granddad during that first couple of years. I think he was as perplexed by me as I was by him.

  Still it was hard to complain. For the first time in my life, I had my own room and a lot of other things my friends were quite envious of. I arrived at school in a private car instead of a taxi—and South African taxies are not like yellow cabs. In South Africa, a taxi is like a minibus with fifteen or sixteen people jammed into it. The private car was driven by a guy I called Bhut, a word that essentially means “bro” but older. This was a very nice change, and sometimes my friends were allowed to come home in the car with me after school to play games, watch videos, or swim in the pool.

  My cousin Rochelle stayed with us in those early days, but she was in her twenties and had a life of her own. I never asked why Mama Winnie wasn’t there. I’d overheard enough adult conversation to know that her life was separate from the Old Man’s. They weren’t divorced yet, but the duties of First Lady were being carried out by Aunt Zenani and Aunt Zindzi, who came to Madiba’s office when needed and accompanied him to various social and state events. Everyone who worked in my granddad’s house loved him and felt privileged to be there—and no one hesitated to remind me what a privilege it was for me as well.

  The ladies who prepared Madiba’s meals took great pride in serving him their best work. He was very specific about the type of food he wanted to eat, and the kitchen staff was more than happy to accommodate him. My granddad adored tripe, chicken legs, and something called amasi in isiZulu or maas in Afrikaans. Mama Xoli made it by setting a jar of raw cow’s milk on the window sill, letting it ferment until it separated into a layer of watery umlaza on top of the thick white amasi that was sort of like cottage cheese or plain yogurt. The amasi could be eaten right out of the jar or spooned over maize meal. My granddad liked it very sour. The sourer the better. Sometimes he’d have a taste, consider it for a moment, and then shake his head, and the ladies would put it back on the windowsill to let it curdle even further.

  I had breakfast and lunch in the kitchen with Mama Gloria and Mama Xoli, but most evenings, Madiba and I sat down together, just the two of us, at seven o’clock sharp, to eat our dinner at the long table in the formal dining room. He always sat at the head of the table, of course, and I sat on the side in the seat closest to his. During that first year, dinner conversation was sparse and always in English.

  He’d say, “Good evening, Ndaba. How was school today?”

  I’d say, “It was okay.”

  He’d say, “Good. Good.”

  He rang a little bell when he was ready for the food to be brought in. Not in an imperious way, just to let people know we were ready. He saw me eyeing that bright silver bell the first few days, and then one evening he gave me a wink and said, “You want to give it a try?” I nodded. He slid the bell across the table to me, and I gave it a solid ding-a-ling. In came the chef with our dinner, and somehow that felt very satisfying to me, like I was the founder of the feast or something. Madiba laughed and clapped my shoulder and thanked everyone for our supper, which we ate in silence. It wasn’t an uncomfortable silence. We were together, and that was good. My granddad was happy to have a family member sitting there with him. I was happy to have enough to eat. Everybody’s cool.

  Sometimes someone would bring a phone to the table. Invariably the caller was a very important person calling from someplace where it was still business hours. Madiba would set down his fork, dab his mouth with his napkin, and then take the phone. “Hello! How are you today?”

  He always greeted the caller with the same big smile. It didn’t matter who they were or that they couldn’t see the smile. It could be heard. It could be felt. I have no doubt. At the time—eleven years old, my mind firmly on soccer and video games and MTV—I wasn’t listening, and if I had been, I would have understood very little, but it occurred to me years later, as I was studying the history of this period, how truly contentious some of these phone calls must have been. Some of those callers were angry, bitter, and afraid, so it blows me away now to think of him greeting every one of them with respect and warmth.

  In April 1994, Madiba voted for the first time in his life. On May 10, he became the first black president of South Africa.

  “Let there be justice for all,” he said in his inaugural address. “Let there be peace for all. Let there be work, bread, water and salt for all.”

  Black South Africans were free at last, and my grandfather was being called the Father of the Nation, but as Coretta Scott King reminds us, “Freedom is never really won; you earn it and win it in every generation.” The bitter legacy of apartheid carved deep ruts in that road: long-ingrained racism, inner-city violence and poverty, a rampant AIDS epidemic, and intense political pressure from both sides. The eyes of the world were on us, and there were huge expectations—positive and negative. There was unimaginable pressure on Madiba—far beyond anything I understood at the time, but he kept his cool, even at home in private, no matter how exhausted he was.

  When he did crack down on me, he scolded proper. You felt that growl like thunder. This was something far worse than having him be mad at me; he was disappointed. I’d be chilling in the lounge in front of the TV and hear this deep, rumbling voice from upstairs.

  “Ndaba. Come and clean your room.”

  That was my cue to get up there and tidy up while he stood in the door, delivering a stern talk about personal responsibility. He made me keep my room tidy, and he kept his own room tidy—made his own bed, everything—despite the fact that household staff would have been happy to do it. He was strict, and that caused some friction between us over the years.

  There is one particular incident I must remember to tell my own children someday: I lost my school jersey and needed money to buy another one. I was free to ask him for anything I wanted—video games, books, a Sony Walkman—and that was fine. He might say yes or he might say, “No, I think you have enough games for now.” But there was no problem with asking. This situation was different; I was asking him to replace something because I had failed to take proper care of it. So I went to my cousin Rochelle first.

  “Rochelle, may I please have forty rand?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Psshh! No. If you need something, ask Granddad.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because—forget it.”

  I went to the kitchen. “Hey, Mama Xoli? Can you take me to get a new school jersey?”

  “Why?”

  “Because…”

  “Did you outgrow the old one?” She eyed me up and down. “You don’t look like you’ve grown so much since yesterday.”

  I thought of several excuses. It got torn when I was climbing a fence. It was stolen during soccer practice. A dog ate it. But I knew she’d see through that in a hot second.

  “I lost it,” I said.

  “Uh-huh. Well, you’d better go tell him.”
/>   I went down the hall and paused at the door to Madiba’s office where he was sitting in a chair reading. “Granddad?”

  “Ndaba.” He smiled and motioned me to come in. “How are you today? How was school?”

  “It was okay. But… Granddad, I lost my jersey. I need another one.”

  “Oh, Ndaba.”

  “I’m sorry, Granddad.”

  After the stern talk about personal responsibility, reminding me how many people in the world had nothing and no one to ask if they needed the most basic necessities, he said, “I’ll tell Rochelle to go with you and buy it tomorrow. And I expect you to take better care of this one.”

  Head bent by shame, I said, “I will. I’m sorry, Granddad.”

  “All right. Go to bed now.”

  I went to my room, feeling like the exchange had gone as well as it could have. “No blood, no foul,” as they say. But a few weeks later I lost my jersey again. I was shaking in my shoes when I had to go tell him, trying to come up with any possible Plan B. Run away. Go to a different school. Try to find any conceivable way to blame it on someone else. Try to look as pathetic as possible and stir sympathy.

  “Granddad?”

  “Ndaba…” When he glanced up, I suppose he noticed I was practically shrinking inside out. “What is it?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said wretchedly. “I lost my jersey again.”

  There was no sympathy. He was straight up furious. The personal responsibility talk went to another level, and at the end of it, he didn’t offer up Rochelle getting me another replacement.

  “Clearly,” he said, “you didn’t take it seriously when I told you to take better care of this one. That’s how much you appreciate your home and all the things you have here—your clothes, your games, your room that I must tell you every day, ‘Clean this room, Ndaba. Pick up your clothes.’ Well, you know what? Tonight you sleep outside.”

  I stood there, gobsmacked.

  “Go outside!” he thundered. “You’re not welcome in this house tonight.”

  What could I do? I slunk down the hall and out the door. The shadows were already long. It was dusk. It would be dark soon. The yard was surrounded by a high wall. I figured if bad guys tried to climb over it, the security people would come out and stop them. Theoretically. I found a fairly comfortable spot on the grass beneath a blue guarri tree, but I wondered if there might be snakes in the sneezewood trees and wisteria surrounding the pool. It got dark. The heat of the day faded. I sat there shivering, arms hugged tight around my knees. I just about jumped out of my skin when I heard Mama Xoli call my name from the kitchen door.

  “Ndaba?”

  Startled but relieved, I ran to meet her as she walked out under the yard light. I assumed she’d come to take me inside for supper. That was not the case.

  She handed me a blanket and said, “Madiba asked me to give this to you.”

  I tried to say “thank you,” but there was a lump in my throat. He was serious. He was going to make me stay out here all night in the cold with no food and probably poisonous snakes and potential thugs and assassins maybe climbing over the wall. Mama Xoli went back inside, and I swallowed hard. My eyes were burning, but allowing myself to cry wouldn’t have done me any good. I wasn’t one to cry, even at that age. Maybe for something physical, like the time my friends and I faced down the tear gas–belching Hippo, but this was a thousand times worse than that, because I was alone, and I’d made my granddad so angry, and sooner or later I’d have to face him again. So be it. Come what may, I was not going to cry. Because a Xhosa man endures. This is what we say when we greet each other.

  “Hello,” a guy says. “How are you?”

  “Ndi nya mezela,” says the other guy. I am enduring.

  I found a good spot to sit down and wrapped the blanket around my shoulders. Birds settled in the trees, whistling softly every time a breeze moved through the branches. After a while, I saw Mama Gloria inside the kitchen window, washing dishes and hanging the pots and pans. Supper was over. My stomach was hollow with hunger. I would have been glad for a bowl of the old rice with ketchup. Beetles chirped in the hedges. Somewhere far away a dog was barking, begging to be let in. I started to drift off but jerked awake when I heard heavy footsteps coming toward me. I scrambled to my feet and saw the Old Man crossing the lawn.

  “Ndaba?”

  “Yes, Granddad?”

  “If you ever lose your jersey again,” he said, “you really will sleep outside. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Granddad.”

  “Let’s go in.”

  He headed back toward the house, and I fell in beside him, trying to keep up with his great long stride.

  “My father loved and respected his children, but he did not spare the rod. He maintained discipline.” He opened the kitchen door and shooed me into the entryway. “Go inside and have dinner and then go to bed.”

  I was never so glad to be at that kitchen table. And I never lost another school jersey. Since Lewanika and Neema came along, I hear myself saying a lot of the same things my granddad said to me when I was a boy. In fact, Lewanika’s mother called me not long ago and said, “I don’t know how he managed it, but your son has already lost his school jersey.”

  I laughed. He was just starting his first year at big boy school, so that didn’t take long.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked.

  “Nothing. Tell him if it happens again, he’ll sleep outside.”

  4

  Kuhlangene isanga nenkohla.

  “The wonderful and the impossible sometimes collide.”

  The Xhosa Story of the Tree That Would Not be Grasped resembles the European story of Cinderella. The similarity between two tales from utterly different cultures makes me wonder: Was one inspired by the other, or is there a common ground that brings this fable close to home for all of us? Do we all share an innate sense of justice and injustice that causes these stories to resonate like a tuning fork?

  In the Xhosa story, beautiful Bathandwa’s mother dies, leaving her to live as a servant at the mercy of the Second Wife and two unkind stepsisters. A tree that contains the mother’s spirit grows up by a river. A magic bird flies out of it and says to the king, “You should have a contest. Whoever can put their arms around this awesome tree should be given a great fortune, and if the winner happens to be a girl, she should marry your son.” The king likes this idea, so the contest is on, and everyone in the kingdom shows up, including the unpleasant Second Wife and cruel stepsisters. Apparently, they’re not so bright, because they don’t recognize Bathandwa. (Let’s just agree that she’s disguised herself or something, because it’s details like this that make the difference between a fairy tale and something that simply makes no sense, which is why the African version of any story will go off on lengthy tangents to explain random details.) So one after another, contenders wrap their arms around the tree—the strongest men, the most agile women—but the tree twists away from them, refusing to be grasped by anyone but Bathandwa, the tree spirit’s beloved daughter who was cast aside and abused.

  I like the African spin on this old fable. My little daughter, Neema, is feisty and imaginative, so I’d much rather tell her about a heroine who drives a team of oxen than a princess who rides in a golden pumpkin. I suppose you could say the “fairy godmother” in the Xhosa folktale is the spirit of the girl’s mother made manifest in the tree—a growing, living tower of strength—which is certainly an apt description of my mother and grandmothers. While Cinderella has a “happily ever after” ending, the Xhosa tale goes on to spin a fantastical web of murder and magic and (depending on who’s telling it) some adult matters. But in both stories, justice prevails in the end. The cruel stepmother and stepsisters come to a gruesomely bad end. Maybe this reveals another difference between the two cultures; African children were spared no gore. We were not protected from the facts of life and death. The place and time we grew up in made that impossible.

  When my friends saw me ride on ou
t of the slums of Soweto in a black BMW, I suppose they thought I was living a Cinderella story of my own. Without a doubt, my circumstances were remarkably improved, and in their imagination, I was living an easy life now. I think that may be the way the rest of the world viewed the end of apartheid. Throughout Europe and the Americas, apartheid was strongly condemned. Artists and musicians raised the awareness worldwide, and the whole world celebrated when Madiba became president of South Africa. I think a lot of people saw this as the happy ending, but we still struggle with difficult economic issues like land redistribution to this day.

  One example of this is the American movie Invictus, which tells the story of the 1995 World Cup won by South Africa when I was twelve. The movie version plays out like this: The majority of black people thought the government should do away with all institutions that stood as artifacts from the era of apartheid, but Madiba was wise enough to see that it would be more powerful to compromise on a few things as a gesture of reconciliation to the white minority. One was the national anthem “Die Stem van Suid-Afrika” (“The Call of South Africa”), a stolid march glorifying the colonization of South Africa. Another was the Springboks, South Africa’s national rugby team, which had had only one nonwhite player in its hundred-year history. In the movie, the Springboks win the World Cup, black people just have to get over themselves, and white people turn out to be pretty nice after all. During the climactic rugby match, Mandela’s black and white bodyguards become buddies, a white lady and her black housekeeper hug each other in the stands, and friendly white cab drivers hoist a delighted black boy onto their shoulders in celebration of this newfound harmony between races. And they all live happily ever after, which is how you know it’s a fairy tale. It wasn’t so simple in real life.