By: Pat Spencer

Generally, I find public transportation to be hours of isolation, interrupted by a neighborly comment or two. So, when I boarded a repurposed school bus for the bone-jarring ride from Johannesburg to Zimbabwe, the last thing I expected was for my seatmate to tell me stories from her life that forever changed mine.

The woman in the center row patted the space beside her. I took that as an invitation to sit and settled into the ripped vinyl seat. We exchanged names and remarks about the bus running late. I complimented her on the beauty of her name and asked if it had special meaning.

She answered, “Eshile means burnt, and Liyema, pillar of the family. Both foretold my future.”

Intrigued, but uncomfortable prying, I remained silent, hoping she might tell me more. But my eagerness got the best of me, so after several minutes passed, I said, “I’m looking forward to seeing the magnificent Victoria Falls and spending a few days at a wildlife rescue and rehabilitation center.”

She replied, “I take this trip once a year to visit my grandson, his wife, and three children. When I was younger, the trip seemed easier. Now it wears me out.”

I nodded, disappointed because I thought our conversation might end there. But while the bus creaked and groaned its way to the main road, I unknowingly opened a proverbial door. “I expected more noticeable change after the defeat of apartheid.”

“Ah, yes. The changes are within our hearts and souls. I sense it every moment of every day. But it will take lifetimes before we achieve what we could have if apartheid had not gone on so long.” Eshile gazed out the window. Her wistful expression led me to think she was looking into the past.

Although that was thirteen years ago, I still hear her voice, as if she is speaking to me today. Now that I am retired and enjoying the luxury of spare time, it is my honor to recount these moments from her life, in her own words, as she told them to me.

Eshile Liyema Mthembu.

I vividly remember my first experience with apartheid, on a summer morning in 1966. It was the first time I felt shame, even though my heart told me it was wrong to feel that way. I was a mere five years of age, yet what happened changed the course of my life.  

My mother, two sisters, and I left our shanty and strolled to the corner where our neighbors dumped their rubbish. We hurried past the kakhuis, stinking of human waste, and then continued beyond the tiny yard filled with stacks of old tires. When we reached the community hydrant that provided our drinking and washing water, we turned from our dirt alleyway onto another.

My older sister, Asanda, and I walked side by side. Our mother, Umama, followed with baby sister, Onele, slung on her hip. I remember throwing my shoulders back and strutting pridefully because I was wearing my only Sunday worship dress. The sun beat down upon our heads as Umama crooned her favorite prayer song, “Amazing Grace.”

But I squealed in surprise when she yanked me off my feet, causing me to fall into the dirt.

She hissed, “Shh, Eshile, police! Act like a servant’s child.”

I knew how servants acted because Umama worked six days a week as a housemaid for a White lady in Johannesburg. So, I scrambled to my feet and bowed my head as if ashamed of whatever I’d done wrong. Asanda hurried forward three paces and lifted her head high. We remained separated until the police car drove out of sight.

Later that evening, I showed Umama the angry red streaks her fingernails made on my arm and the dirt stain on my Sunday worship dress. Her left eyebrow rose to an extraordinary height, puckering her forehead like a seam sewn too tightly.

“Eshile, I’ve told you one hundred times, White police don’t abide Blacks who walk too close to Whites.”

When I asked why, she snapped, “You’re too young to worry over the differences in people’s skin. Just step away when I tell you to and be thankful I saved you from those policemen arresting you and locking you up in some filthy jail.”

A jail full of five-year-olds? I craved to know more, but my mother’s rising eyebrow and squinty-eyed glare silenced me. I plunked my bottom onto my grass sleeping mat and pondered the questions swirling in my brain.

My family was various shades, from light to dark. If five was too young to worry about the color of people’s skin, at what age should I begin? Would someone notify me? Or was this another thing I had to figure out for myself?

Umama always said I was annoyingly persistent, but those traits served me well. Over the following year, I discovered what I needed to know. On Friday evenings, my mother, her three sisters, Uncle Abel’s sister Mable, who owned the beauty parlor, Pastor AmaZizi’s wife, and several neighbor ladies gathered around the flaming brazier out front of our shanty. They spent hours drinking homemade marula wine and skindering about everyone who wasn’t there that night. Each glass they drank loosened their tongues even more. And from my position, deep in the shadows, I learned apartheid classified people either White, Coloured, or Black on the basis of their physical appearance. And this is how my sister Asanda, who was two years older than I, came to be White.

Asanda was born of a relationship deemed illegal under the apartheid’s Immorality Act. The boy loved my mother, and though she was not yet sixteen, she loved him too. But as a White Dutchman and a Black woman, they risked imprisonment—he as long as four years and she, five—on the slightest evidence of their relationship. And when my sister’s birth provided solid proof of their crime of loving each other, his brother had little trouble convincing the boy my mother loved that he must return to his family’s home in the Netherlands, shortly before I was born in 1961.

Our mother quickly married a local Black man. Still, my birth raised eyebrows and waggled tongues. As a stroke of luck, or perhaps a fluke of genetics, although Asanda and I were born of the same father, she was considered White while my caramel skin and curly hair resulted in me being classified as Coloured.

That made it unlawful for my family members to live together. We couldn’t even walk the same streets. The laws also forbade us from attending the same churches and schools or eating at the same restaurants (not that we had money to spend on that). Any report of these egregious acts could result in our parents being condemned to one of those prisons from which many never returned home.

So, going out of our shanty resembled a covert operation of the highest military level. It also set me on a lifelong path of fighting apartheid with my words.

However, I must confess, as a young child, I was most concerned with the special treatment Asanda received. I longed to be given a brand-new plastic, three-ring binder, an unending supply of clean, lined paper, and a Parker ballpoint pen like the Catholic school in Johannesburg provided my sister, without charge.

I also envied her for the books she brought home. The Soweto school I attended required parents to purchase their children’s books. That expense resulted in weeks of meatless dinners of rice seasoned with a homegrown tomato or a can of peas. And as the ultimate indignity, these school books that cost my family dearly had ripped and missing pages and no covers to protect the few good pages left intact.

I lusted (if a six-year-old can lust) after these gifts from the Catholic school that Asanda took for granted—pens, pencils instead of nubs, fresh notebook paper, and textbooks having all their pages. I thought I needed these to achieve my goal of fighting injustice with my words. And since my older sister hadn’t expressed a single goal for her adulthood, I resented that she went to a superior school providing ample books and supplies, and was learning more than I.

From time to time, Asanda gave me the sheets of lined paper she hadn’t used on her assignments and read to me from her advanced schoolbooks, yet jealousy continued to sit in my chest like a lump of wet clay. As I look back on my life, I guess it comes as no surprise that at age nine and a half, I wrote my first article on the unfairness of apartheid’s unequal treatment of the races.

 Mr. Wallace ran an underground newspaper from the back of his Used Bookstore and Print Shop. I barely contained my excitement when he published my exposé comparing the textbooks provided by the White Catholic school to my Soweto school’s ragged specimens, books printed decades ago and now missing pages, which may or may not have been critical to our education. My point was that we would never know.

One might think releasing my fury via this publicly printed article would assuage my jealousy. And maybe if apartheid hadn’t made it dangerous for us to be a normal family, I’d have grown to know my sister better, to understand her in a way that might have extinguished the envy eating at my gut. But since the laws of our country forbade her from attending my Black school, and me from attending the White Catholic school, she lived in Johannesburg with our mother’s parents. Their home offered the closeness to the school that enabled Asanda to slip out unseen and walk the short distance to the Catholic school.

At one of the women’s Friday night skindering sessions, I overheard Pastor AmaZizi’s wife tell the women that only twenty percent of South African citizens were White. This set me off. How was it that the minority had captured the privilege of better schools, homes, and access to any job they desired while confining my future to writing for underground newspapers? And since these illegal newspapers did not pay their writers, would I, as my weary mother did, cook, clean, wash, iron, and mend for a White family to earn a living?

#

My spirits sank when Eshile’s eyelids closed. Gripped by the desire to learn more about her struggle to understand discrimination, I distracted myself by gazing at the different lengths of green, yellow, and brown wild grasses swaying from the force of our bus speeding along the road.

My thoughts wandered back to how, as a six-year-old child living in the Deep South, things I saw confounded me. Still today, many years later, I carry a vivid memory of the spanking I received in a Sears Roebuck store. I had kicked and screamed when my mother lifted me to drink from the taller “White” water fountain instead of allowing me to help myself to the shorter fountain marked “Colored”, which surely would have emitted a spray of delicious rainbow-colored water.

The child behind me pulled me from my past by kicking my seat. I glanced to see if he had disturbed Eshile’s rest, then struggled not to smile when her eyes opened. The boy’s scolding mother receded in my mind as the woman I was beginning to think of as a friend began to speak again.

Eshile Liyema Mthembu

For me, it was a time of uncertainty. I felt confused and frustrated over what was happening in my township, to my friends and family. Boldness was punished rather than celebrated. At age ten and no longer willing to look the other way, I signed up to work on the school newspaper.

I was proud when the teacher who oversaw the paper approved two of my articles. The first covered my Auntie Grace’s experiences as a sangoma. My second discussed the herbs she, as a highly respected healer, used to treat a headache or the flu.

In contrast with Auntie Grace’s open embrace and gentle touch, my mother Umama’s strongest trait was fierceness. I envisioned her as a lioness protecting her pride. So, I should have predicted her reaction after she peered over my shoulder and read bits of my third article.

“Eshile, no teacher wants to read, in black and white, for the world to see, your assessment of their teaching skills any more than I want to listen to what a terrible mother you think I am.” She shook her finger in my face and forbade me from taking my article to school.

On this occasion, I obeyed her. Then the newspaper advisor just happened to be sick the day designated for putting the paper to bed and mimeographing copies we’d distribute to students. With minimal pressure from me, my classmates agreed to rearrange a few pieces and publish mine on the front page.

My report focused on the teaching of the advanced classes Asanda attended at the White kids’ Catholic school. I considered it a positive commentary that might result in teachers who held higher degrees offering similar classes in Soweto. Our principal didn’t see it that way. Rather than stimulating conversation on how to raise the level of our learning, the school board’s discussion centered on Blacks trying to rise above their natural-born positions and our principal’s incompetence at running our school. The principal said he understood my intentions, but my article did more harm than good. He also asked me to warn him if I wrote anything else that might get him fired.

The most painful lesson I learned from this experience was that the ruling class held the power and punished those who dared to openly question their right to rule South Africa. My mother took it more personally, thinking officials would investigate our family and arrest her and the man she married, the local man who became my father.

Fortunately, that didn’t happen. However, I spent the weekend held prisoner, restricted to our shanty, on my sleeping mat, warned not to move, not to even turn on the radio. Worst of all, Umama forbade Bini, my best friend for life, from visiting me, just because I attempted to bring better teachers and classes to Soweto.

#

I wiped sweat from my brow as Eshile dug into the African-print cloth bag resting beside her feet and pulled out a handwoven fan shaped like a horse’s hoof attached to a leather handle. When she swished it, I leaned in, hoping to catch the air on my perspiring face.

“None of the fans I’ve seen in the gift shops have the charm of yours—cream, gold, green, and brown, the various shades of African grasses.”

“Buffelgrass,” answered Eshile. “My younger sister has exceptional talent. The weather is uncommonly warm today, and we have hours until we arrive. Perhaps you prefer to close your eyes and rest?”

I reached into my backpack, removed two plastic water bottles, still sweaty cool from the lodge’s refrigerator, and offered one to Eshile. When I said, “There is nothing I’d like better than to hear more of your story,” she smiled and began again.

Eshile Liyema Mthembu

When I turned eleven, my father accepted an amazing job at the Ilanga Safari Lodge. Moving five hundred kilometers away offered a welcome respite from the smothering effects of apartheid. We found peace in being isolated from the hardships that made up our everyday activities in Soweto and neighboring Johannesburg. And while my father’s new employment left us far from wealthy, we never went to bed hungry.

Our living conditions also improved. We lived in a rondavel with walls made of polished tree trunks and plaster instead of large pieces of plastic or cardboard from the rubbish dump. Its golden-brown roof of thatched African grasses protected from the heat and rain better than the aluminum slab our father balanced atop our shanty. Our cement floors, instead of dirt, were so easy to sweep. And I can’t express how happy I was that we had running water, saving me from hauling it from the neighborhood hydrant. Living in this place, my father called paradise, provided scant motivation to write about life in Soweto. Unfortunately, a tragedy limited our stay and forced us to return.

I fear I can’t speak of the tragedy without being consumed with sadness, so I won’t explain. I’ll just say a sense of hopelessness settled in my core. For months, I faltered, set my dreams aside. Still, given time and help from those who loved me, I left these doubts behind and renewed my belief that I could make a difference,

I was fourteen when I submitted an article more bold than the others I had written for Mr. Wallace’s underground newspaper. The paper’s name Staan Op! translated as both Rise Up! and Stand Up! in Afrikaans. Mr. Wallace used Afrikaans, a language heavily based on Dutch, so if caught, those who punished him might understand his purpose for publishing this paper.

While that made sense to me, the intent behind requiring half of our curriculum to be taught in Afrikaans caused heat to rise behind my ears. My classmates were fluent in English and a native language, most often Xhosa or Zulu. Our teachers did their best to instruct us, as they scrambled to learn these foreign words themselves.

The only teacher who spoke fluent Afrikaans was Mr. Nnadi, and he taught the maths—a subject most of my friends didn’t get in a language we couldn’t understand. In my article, I asked two questions. First, how could anyone think that was a proper learning experience? Second, was forcing a new language on us an attempt by the White ruling class to destroy our South African culture?

I struggled to find a powerful conclusion until, by chance, I overheard Mr. Nnadi speaking to our principal. “They’re holding Black people down by making us teach in Afrikaans, so when our students get jobs, they’ll understand what their White bosses demand of them.”

After class that day, I didn’t stop at Bini’s to pet her newborn kittens and didn’t go by ole George’s market to collect the sweet treat he always saved for me. I went straight home and picked up my #2 yellow pencil stub and wrote.

I heard students and adults discuss my questions and their possible answers over and again after the government dismissed our school board for resisting their demand to teach in Afrikaans.

Bini’s mother said that government officials did this to scare other school leaders into abiding by the law, but it had the opposite effect. Teachers and parents met secretly in private places. Black organizers rallied through underground communication networks. And student leaders stepped forth and planned a peaceful demonstration.

The most noted being the Student Protest of June 16, 1976. Have you heard of this?

#

“I have not,” I said, eager to get the inside scoop. Before she could speak, a giant cloud of gray smoke rolled out as if an impending rainstorm was escaping from beneath the hood. Our driver, Banga, slowed and parked off the side of the roadway, leaving me with the impression this was not the first instance of such an event.

“Calmly, please. Everyone off.”

Eshile and I gathered with the other passengers a safe distance off the road, knee-deep in dry, brittle grass, another possibility for disaster. Banga raised the hood and spread a blanket atop the blaze. Once the engine cavity cooled, he yanked out a ball of melted wires and flung them to the ground. Then he opened an outside compartment below the driver’s window and brought out a worn cardboard box filled with tools, wires, and a well-used carburetor.

When I returned to the United States, I entertained my friends by pantomiming my panic. Even as my friends reared back in delight, the fear I felt when re-boarding the bus that might blow up coursed through my veins, causing an adrenaline rush as if I had gulped the final cup of coffee—the one that had sat at the bottom of the pot the entire day.

I fretted that the fire beneath the hood might distract Eshile from continuing, but once we settled in our seats, she took up her story again.

Eshile Liyema Mthembu

Now, where was I? Ah, yes, the Student Protest. Bini and I were then fifteen, old enough to take care of ourselves. Nevertheless, our mothers would not have let us go to school if they’d known how the day would turn out.

Bini and I joined the students gathered in the schoolyard. Our classmate, Gabby, jammed posters attached to thin slats of wood into our hands. Mine read: To hell with Afrikaans. I barely noticed as the crowd moved us into long lines that took up the width of the street because I was worried what Umama might do to me if she saw me carrying a sign with “hell” written on it. I searched for a spot to ditch the sign but found myself locked in, shoulder to shoulder, with my classmates. To avoid being called a traitor, I raised my sign to my chin while keeping a watchful eye out for Umama.

More protesters joined at each street. With no noticeable prompt, hundreds sang Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, a song offering words of prayer to end war, poverty, and the troubles faced each day.

A young Black man standing atop a tractor called out, “Brothers and sisters, I appeal to you. Keep calm. Remain cool. Police are approaching. Do not taunt. We did not come here to fight.” The poster he held read: Don’t shoot. We are not fighting.

We came upon students parading off the Phefeni Junior High School grounds. Unaware of the police blockade ahead, our group pushed forward. A White officer lobbed a tear gas canister between a cluster of older students. They cried out and covered their weeping eyes with handkerchiefs, rags, or shirttails. Gasping and choking, they circled the vehicle while pelting the officers with rocks.

Then I caught a glimpse of Gabby, until her older brother whisked her up as if she were a toddler and bounded in the opposite direction. When I looked to see what he was running from, an armored troop carrier entered the roadway.

Someone fired a rifle. Bini tumbled and tucked into a ball. I thought she was dead. When I touched her, thank our Lord, she popped up, and we ran. Bini’s shorter legs churned at twice the rate of mine. Her chest heaved in its fight for air. I worried she’d pass out, so I veered onto Vincent Street and slowed our pace. A row of troop carriers, we called them hippos, blocked the road. Bullets cut through a mist of tear gas and whizzed past our skulls. We screamed, bolted into an alley, then cowered in a doorway.

Oh, my. Telling you about the protest has my heart pounding against my chest, so I need to stop there. You can read more details in old newspapers and magazines, if you wish. I warn you, though, numerous news and government agencies slanted their reports. You must sift through quite a few before the truth reveals itself.

I’ll only go on to say that my perspective of this protest changed over time. Students were killed in that effort to persuade the ruling majority not to compel us to learn Afrikaans. Initially, I found the price too high, that our efforts to maintain our languages needlessly cost many children their lives. But over time, I came to understand that these brave young people inspired others who might never have come forward in the absence of their sacrifice.

#

Eshile pressed her hand against her chest. My mind raced with the horror of what she had told me. I wanted to ask a million questions, except I could see that doing so would release even more pain in my new friend. So, as we approached the Beitbridge Border Post to cross from South Africa into Zimbabwe, I sat silently.

I knew officials would inspect our papers before allowing us to continue, but didn’t expect the bus to be surrounded by four soldiers wearing khaki uniforms with AK something-or-another rifles slung over their shoulders. My fingers trembled when I handed my passport to Banga. After collecting various types of identification from each passenger, he carried the documents inside the aging wooden structure.

Eshile winked. “Do not worry, dear. Everything is fine. They only shoot those who run.”

I laughed inwardly to convince myself she was joking and stayed put in my seat.

About twenty minutes later, Banga trotted out, returned our papers, and quickly pulled the bus away from the checkpoint.

Shortly, I would board a small plane with another group destined to explore the mighty falls, search out the Big Five via jeep safaris, and sip glasses of wine on a Zambezi River sunset cruise. Yet sadness enveloped me as we crossed the Limpopo River and rolled into town.

When Banga spun the steering wheel and ran over the curb, the bus tilted us all to the right. He shot us a toothy apology. “Sorry, my friends! I must find a good place to park.”

I reached beneath the seat to retrieve my belongings.

As a military child who was uprooted and moved from one state to another almost every year, I learned to avoid the tears of saying goodbye. Like the outlaw in a cowboy movie, it was my habit to slip out of town.

My shoulders sank with dismay because we had arrived at our destination. Yet my heart swelled with humility and pride because Eshile had trusted me with her most inner thoughts, her doubts and dreams. I couldn’t walk away. So, as my mother had always advised, I ‘put on my big girl shoes’ and told Eshile how honored I was that she had chosen me as the one to hear her stories.

The bus ride had left us hot and sticky, yet we clung to each other, hugging as if we’d been friends our entire lives. Our eyes moistened as we said our goodbyes.

This bus trip happened in 2012, six years before Eshile inhabited my thoughts and insisted I write the stories she had shared. When I sat at my laptop and wrote, a heaviness rested upon my neck and shoulders. I suppose it was the responsibility to get her story right, or the weight of all she shared, but I sensed she was still with me, so far away from her home.

I should have asked for a way to contact her. But after our long hug, I implemented my childhood strategy to evade the emotions of a lengthy goodbye and slipped away.

I have spent many hours regretting that.

###

Dr. Pat Spencer has a lifetime of experience publishing fiction and nonfiction: Sticks in a Bundle trilogy, Golden Boxty in the Frypan, A Baker’s Dozen For Writers: 13 Tips for Great Storytelling, and Story of a Stolen Girl. Her short story won the 2019 Oceanside Literary Festival. Other pieces are published in online literary magazines and blogs. Pat formerly authored columns in the Press-Enterprise newspaper and Inland Empire Magazine.