I had only ever known happiness. My life in Botswana was the epitome of peace and serenity, and I hold only good memories of that time. We were a blissfully ignorant, happy, middle class family living in Gaborone, and my parents had several children. My father had started his own business, that made furniture for rich people, but as the company grew he had to sell it to someone who could handle it better, and so he got a job in a diamond company. There were a lot of us but by Botswana standards we were a normal sized family. I had four siblings – two brothers and two sisters – but we were very close with all our neighbours and cousins so there were always lots of people to play with. Like most people in Botswana we were from the Tswana tribe and fit in perfectly in the middle class society of Gaborone.
When I was young we had a lovely home on the outskirts of Gaborone – close enough for a convenient commute for my father, but enough out of the city so us children could enjoy the outdoors. My mother didn’t work because there were so many of us children at home and she didn’t want somebody else to take care of us. She dedicated her days to us and loved us always, a pretty impressive feat since she was one woman alone with five hyper children. If she had decided to work and hire a nanny it would have been looked down on, and people would talk. But she was happy with us and cherished us everyday, and for that I will always be grateful, as I know she was a large contributor to the happiness of my childhood.
We children would spend all day outside in the garden, playing and running around, using up our enormous amounts of energy, as most children do. In the garden there was a baobab tree. It was under this tree that I spent all my time as a child. We would climb its branches, and then sit up there and tell each other stories, or read new books together. When we wanted to run around we would run in circles around its trunk, playing tag and giggling. Whenever I was upset I would run to the tree and sit at its base, feeling mad, or sad, or even just lonely. My mother would always know where to find me if I ever got mad with someone at home, or if something had upset me at school, and she would come sit with me under the tree, telling me it would be alright. I always remember this tree with the fondest of memories; it held me during my best and worst times, and always comforted me. Sometimes I felt like the baobab tree could hear me, was listening and understanding all my troubles or excitements; it was like my closest friend.
My parents always talked to me about equality. They said we were fortunate, for we lived in a country that was so free and accepting, that out of all our African neighbours, we were the strongest and happiest. We didn’t have civil wars, or tribal violence, unlike our South African neighbours who were always fighting, especially the Boers and the English against the tribes. My parents said the Europeans had brought a cloud of unhappiness when they arrived on the continent. They divided us up into different chunks and pieces, so that there were neighbours living in different countries. Our tribes had never had distinct borders, we wandered and interacted as we pleased, but they brought a storm of fighting as they put us into boxes and didn’t allow us to follow our ways. In Botswana we managed to keep our customs and our rights, but in South Africa, our brothers lost their freedom and were pushed around by the whites. They took all their rights and forced them into townships where everybody was living on top of each other. Here in Botswana we treated everybody equally, our neighbours were like family, and it didn’t matter what people looked like, where they came from, what kind of family they had, we treated everybody well and like a friend. We would soon find that this was something we took for granted and it wasn’t the case everywhere.
My family was always very close, and we trusted and enjoyed each other a lot. My youngest brother, Limpopo, was the baby of the family, and we all fawned over him. Before him was my sister Mokope, the second youngest, and then I was right in the middle. My two oldest siblings were quite a bit older and were in university, but they still mostly lived at home. My mothers name was Precious, something my father always joked about, “How did her parents know she’d be the most precious thing in my life?”
My mother and father nurtured us all as best they could, despite occasional financial difficulties during our youth. Never had anything split our family apart and it never occurred to any of us that that might change.
December 11th, I will always remember that date. That was the date of when we left Botswana for good, for South Africa. My father’s job in the diamond industry meant he travelled to South Africa a lot, as the industry was very established there. When I was eleven years old, my fathers company made some cuts. They dissolved most of the Botswana branch, and left very little of the company in Botswana, deciding to focus more on the business in South Africa and Western Africa, in countries such as Sierra Leone. However, my father’s talent as a salesman made him very valuable to the company. He was very charming, and had the ability to woo anyone he wished, something that made him a very cherished employee in a business concerned with selling items like diamonds. When the company shut down parts in Botswana, they selected certain employees and kept them in either the Botswana branch, or had them transferred to South Africa, where they would be more valuable.
In the spring they announced to my father that he would be moving to South Africa. It wasn’t really a decision for our family to make, either my father lost his job and joined the group of many unemployed citizens, or he did what the company told him and continued providing for his family. We faced a difficult choice at this time though nonetheless. My father was being made to work in Cape Town, a port city in South Africa, where the diamond company had a big foreign trade base, but whether or not we all followed him was the question. We could either continue our lives in Botswana, with our family and friends around us, in a country we knew, the country of our ancestors, where we had all grown up, or we could stick together. Every side had its obvious advantages and disadvantages. Our tight-knit family would clearly suffer from loosing a member to go live miles away, who would only be able to visit upon occasion, but we would also suffer from leaving our home. South Africa was becoming a difficult place, and although they still wanted my father even though he wasn’t white, it didn’t mean that would remain the case, or that our whole family would be welcome in the country. South Africa was having racial uprisings, as the white, Dutch, Afrikaans wanted to take over the country completely, as they always had. They had always taken everything from the tribes, including our land. Now they were taking our peoples rights, and our jobs, as they tried to push the blacks out of the cities, in an effort that wouldn’t reach such an extreme until later. We knew that if we moved to South Africa we wouldn’t have as nice a home as we did in Botswana, and we would suffer from racism and hatred much more than was ever encountered in our city of Gaborone in Botswana. We would also suffer isolation, from our family, and neighbours, and school, and the whole community. We lived in a very close community, where everybody knew everybody, and walking down the street you knew and greeted the other pedestrians. You knew whose car was driving down your street and possibly even where they were going. It was safe to let your children wander the streets because in our outskirts of the city everyone knew them and you knew they would watch out for your children, and make sure of their safety as much as you yourself would. In Cape Town we would be living in a city where not only would we not know anybody, but it would be so big and crowded that we would never have that familiarity, and we would never have that sense of community.
However, our family was too close and we couldn’t stand the idea of splitting up. Many families had to do it for work, and we had too often seen fathers going off to other cities and countries in order to get work and all too quickly ending up distanced from his children and wife. We didn’t want that to happen to us and ruin our happiness, so my parents decided it would be best if we all followed my father to South Africa. And that was that; once it was decided we were leaving there was no changing the decision.
My fathers company agreed to send us to Cape Town in an airplane, instead of the all too often form of travel that consisted of driving for days through the southern African landscape. My father was to leave a few weeks before us to set things up, so we would have a comfortable home to arrive to, and so everything would be settled in already. We drove him to the airport, and my little sister, Mokope cried at the sight of him leaving through the sliding doors to a room we couldn’t see into.
“Baba! Baba! Come back soon, please?” she pleaded to our father through her tears as he tried to pass through the doors.
“My dear, dear, Mokope, I want you not to worry! We shall see each other soon enough, you will see. It will be as if no time has passed!” he said as he tried to soothe his confused daughter. He had travelled for work before, but never for so long, and she didn’t know what to expect.
Once we returned back home, we began the process of preparing for our departure. We had to pack up our whole house, and separate the stuff we wanted to bring with us, and the stuff to leave with our grandparents in Botswana. Once he had arrived and found us a home, my father called to tell us what to expect and what our new house was like. He said it was on a beautiful street, with lovely trees and flowers surrounding it, and with lots of room inside, but not as much as our house in Botswana. We would have to leave some possessions, and sell some of the furniture that would be too complicated to transport and would be easier to just buy there. We were all surrounding the phone and talking to him and listening together to what our father had to say of our new life that was soon to come. He told us there was a surprise at the house that we would love but we would have to wait until we got there to see it. At one point, he told us children to go play outside and enjoy the country while we could, but he sounded serious. My mother seemed to have picked up on this note too, and picked up the phone to her ear to speak more privately to him.
“My dear Precious, I am worried,” he confessed to her, “I have found us a lovely home, but I cannot say how long we will be able to live here. The uprisings and persecutions are increasing by the day and tensions are running high here in this country. I can’t guarantee how long the neighbours will accept to have a black family living in this nice home, but I’m pretty sure it won’t be long. Don’t tell the children though.”
“Is our home in a nice neighbourhood? It’s not dangerous is it?” my mother demanded of him, ignoring the bigger issue, “I’ve been reading stuff in the news and there’s a lot going on there, Cape Town is becoming a dangerous place! A woman got shot the other day!”
“I know, I know, but you don’t need to worry. We will be safe. I must admit though, it’s not been easy here. People spit on the ground in front of my feet when I walk through the rich parts of town, and they give me ugly glares. The other day, I was buying bread in the shop, and I took the last loaf. A man came up behind me and told me I had taken his bread, that he needed and deserved it more than I did. When I asked him why that was, do you know what he said? Do you? He said it was because he was white. What does a useless black like me need? I was thrown out of the shop!”
At this point in the conversation, my mother had begun to cry. I had not gone outside but stayed in the doorway listening to my parents talking on the phone. She sobbed quietly to herself, until I came over to her and embraced her. She held me tight and tried to explain things to me.
“Where we are going, it will not always be nice. Not everybody looks like us, and they don’t all like us. We will live in a lovely home, and I want you to always remember, that inside those walls, you are safe. No one can hurt you or be mean to you, they can’t look at the colour of your skin and judge you or spit at you. But outside those walls, you need to be careful, understand?”
“Yes, yes” I answered my mother, “but why? Will it be scary? Are people going to hurt me?”
“No of course not, no one will ever hurt you, my baby. But there will be people speaking languages you don’t understand, and you must remember to stay away from them. They are powerful people those Afrikaans are, and they don’t like us, so we must be careful with them. They are like little children, used to getting what they want, but they can’t have South Africa.”
It was hard to leave everything I had grown up with and grown accustomed to. In Botswana, my people, the Twsana, made up the majority of the population. In South Africa, there was a large Tswana population but it wasn’t the majority over all the other tribes and ethnicities. In Botswana, we had always had good and peaceful relations with the Europeans at the time that they were going across Africa and carving it out for themselves. The British took on Botswana as a Protectorate, naming it the Bechuanaland Protectorate, and they governed us well. Our kings even asked that they continue to lead our country because we were in danger from our neighbours, South Africa and Zimbabwe, who kept invading us. Britain continued protecting us from becoming a part of South Africa, until in 1966 we became the independent Republic of Botswana. But here is the difference, because we asked for the British to help us and govern us, and when we were ready to do it ourselves, we had a very peaceful move for independence, and attained comfortable agreements with the British. The South Africans however, had a very different situation. In South Africa there was so much hatred and war, for so many years that they couldn’t even stand up as a nation anymore. The Dutch Afrikaans were fighting the English and the native Bantu people and the whites were oppressing the blacks and the whites were causing animosity between the tribes, to the point where no one could get along and the whole country was a mess.
We left on a Saturday morning. As we walked out of our house, I didn’t really have any emotions because I was in too much shock. I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that we were leaving and wouldn’t be back in this house ever again. I just didn’t even know what that could possibly be like, and so I couldn’t muster tears nor did I feel any excitement. My uncle drove us to the airport in his new car, which was the new family jewel. All the children loved riding in it because it was so shiny, and still had that ‘new car’ smell. But on this day, it wasn’t exciting. I didn’t squeal with pleasure as we got in it and rolled the windows down with an electronic button. I could see my mother was worried, mostly at her children’s lack of emotion and sudden quietness. My mother sat in the front, and all the children squeezed in the back seat, all small enough that we could pile on top of each other in the three seats.
Once at the airport, my mother started getting anxious. My uncle dropped us off and said his farewells, and then returned home to his family. We’d had a going away party a few days prior, and had said goodbye to all our relatives and friends then. We went to check in but were affronted with an untimely shock.
My mother approached the attendant, “Sir, we need to check in, we are going to South Africa.”
“Where in South Africa? There have been terrible storms in certain parts and flights have been cancelled.” He responded with a sympathetic face. “I’m afraid you may not be going anywhere today Madame.”
“Where are the storms? We are going to Cape Town, we are moving there, my husband is waiting for us, and we must get on the plane! It cannot be cancelled!”
“I’m afraid that the bad weather is over Cape Town exactly. I believe that the Table Mountain they love so much causes weird weather problems. Please Madame, no please, calm down, don’t be upset it will all be alright!” My mother was becoming hysterical now. She had only ever been on a plane once before and it had been a long time ago. She was very anxious at travelling alone, and with four children (my oldest sister had decided to stay in Botswana and live with family). She didn’t know what to do, and at the news that the flight was cancelled, she broke down. She pulled herself together and looked at the attendant.
“I am a woman travelling alone, with four young children. I don’t fly a lot, I don’t go to airports a lot, and I certainly don’t know what to do right now, but I am going to try and sort this out because it’s all I can do. Now, can you tell me when the next flight to Cape Town is?”
The attendant seemed very cautious now, trying not to set her off again, but also slightly intimidated by her determination. “Let me check the most recent update…” and he picked up the phone and called someone in the building who had more news about the delays. “Okay Madame, it appears the next flight at the moment isn’t for a few days. Now, you can always go home and call to get an update of the next flight and then come back when there are planes going again, or there are other options. You could always take an alternate route. There are trains and buses that go to South Africa, and you could take one of those. They are right over there” and he pointed to the left at a big sign of a bus, and a closed counter behind it.
My mother thanked the man, and then took us over to the counter. Us children were exhausted, just from moving around, so we plopped ourselves down in front of the counter. My mother was about to scold us and tell us to get up, but then she gave up and said we might as well since we had to wait for them to open, and she sat down next to us. My mother had always been a very patient woman, and had always adored us and flourished over us, even when we were naughty. She never seemed to get tired, until now. Being the second oldest of the children with us, I could see it in her face. The last few days of final packing and goodbyes had taken a lot out of her, physically and mentally. She had grown up in Botswana, and it was the only life she knew. She had lived her whole life looking at the same scenery and around the same people, following the same rules, but now it was all changing. The life she had chosen to live was being taken away from her, for a life she had accepted, but didn’t really want. South Africa seemed like a big scary horizon, with so many possibilities, most of which were bad, while Botswana was the safe comfortable reality she knew and appreciated, that she never found any flaws in. South Africa was crippled with problems, and she feared it would poison her family.
We ended up travelling for a few days just to get to Cape Town. We first took a bus over the border and into South Africa, and then we switched buses and got on another one that took us deeper into the country, and then finally a train. The train took us from the countryside into Cape Town, but it took all night and so we slept on the train. When we finally got to Cape Town, my father was waiting to pick us up at the train station. We were all so exhausted from travelling, and from the bad nights sleep on the rickety train that we were very grumpy. But when we saw my father, we all ran towards him. My mother has never looked so relieved to see anyone; she collapsed in his arms and I could almost see the stress and responsibility fall off of her and onto him.
“Father! Baba! Dad!” We all clamoured to his side and tackled his legs.
“Oh my children, I have missed you all so much! You will see how great it is here; they have beautiful trees and the ocean! How great will it be to go swimming in the sea for the first time!”
“Oooooh the sea! I want to go swimming!” awed my youngest brother.
“And Table Mountain! Oh you must see it, it’s so magnificent and beautiful! Tomorrow, we will take the car – yes we have a brand new car! – And we will drive up the mountain. How does that sound?”
We all cheered and giggled, excited at the exciting adventures that this new place was beginning to offer us. As we were walking towards the car my mother grabbed onto my father, and he held her, as she showed him the desperation in her eyes. It had been a hard journey for her and that just added onto her additional worries of the whole situation.
“Baba what is our surprise?” I leaned over my brother to the front seat so I was right by his ear, and whispered to him my curiosity.
“You will see when we get home, Grace! Tell me though, have you been talking good care of your mother and your brothers and sisters?”
“Yes Baba! I walked Limpopo and Mokope to school everyday so Mme didn’t have to! She was very pleased with me.”
“Good, good. Then you have been good. Have you been playing outside a lot? Have you been playing under your baobab tree?”
“Yes, yes! Everyday I came home and I missed you, so I went and sat under the tree and blew you kisses. I hope you got them all the way over here.”
“I absolutely did get them! And every time I got one of your kisses, I sent you one back.” In truth, he had actually know every time I blew him a kiss because my mother would watch me from the window, or from where she was doing laundry outside, and it would touch her so much to see my sadness that when she would talk to my father later she would always tell him.
When we got to our new house, it was mid afternoon already. My father went into the kitchen and prepared us lunch and left it to us to explore and discover our new house. On the outside, there was a low fence that separated our house from the neighbours and from the street. There was a garden that went all the way around the house, within the fence. In the garden there was a chicken coop with lots of little baby chickens in it, running around. I squealed with delight at the sight of them, and assumed that this must be the surprise we’d been waiting for. My father came out of the back door at that moment to come and show me more. I thanked him for the surprise, but was quite surprised at his answer.
“No, no, this isn’t the surprise! Although I am glad you like the chickens, I hope you’ll help me look after them?
“Of course, they’re so adorable! They smell a bit bad though… But then what is the surprise?”
“Go run over there – yes behind the house over there.”
I ran in the direction he had told me and he walked slowly behind me, watching me. And then I saw it. I was overcome with a sudden wave of a mix of sadness and happiness. One of the hardest things for me to have left in Botswana was our baobab tree in the garden. And here I was, in South Africa, in a new house, in a new garden, yet I was looking out at my very own baobab tree. There was a ribbon tied around its trunk, knotted in a pretty bow that was facing me. My father came up behind me as I stood there and stared.
“It’s why I chose this house, you know. I looked at quite a few homes, but when I saw this tree, I thought to myself, what in the world could make Grace happier? So I bought this house, and had the tree get taken care of because it was in bad shape. Do you like it?”
Up until now I hadn’t said anything, because I was in too much shock. Looking back now I realise to any outsider they would have thought I was insane, to get so much pleasure and happiness at the sight of a baobab tree in my garden. But that tree got me through a lot of my childhood in South Africa, and without it, I’m not sure I could have been strong enough.
“Baba, I love it. I think it’s the best part about this house. Maybe even this city!”
“Is it better than the ocean and the beach?”
“Yes because I can climb in its branches, and I can hug its trunk. It will always be here for me, but the ocean won’t. It will never have a stormy day where it’s too dangerous because of waves, but it will instead protect me from these things.”
The beach was kind of synonymous with happiness in South Africa. Sometimes it would be there, and it would be great, and I could enjoy it for hours, but then sometimes, it would be completely closed off and inaccessible to me. I think my father knew all this, and he knew that during this tough time, and it was going to be a tough time in South Africa for us, I would need something to rely on, when no one else was around.
For the next few months, we focused on settling in. We met the neighbours, some of which were quite stuck-up and only spoke Afrikaans. Fortunately, in his time in South Africa, my father had begun to learn Afrikaans, and he said it was quite similar to English. We all spoke some English from school, but in Botswana we’d never really needed it. It seemed however, that here in South Africa we would need our English to communicate, especially with the Afrikaners that didn’t speak any of the tribal Bantu languages. I spoke only Setswana, the language of Botswana, but it didn’t do very much for me in South Africa. In school I had learnt English, but it was quite basic. However, as soon as I spent a few weeks in Cape Town my English improved drastically and I mostly spoke English with strangers. When we found other Tswana people it was such a relief, and we could revert back to our old customs and language. Although South Africa and Botswana have similar tribal groups, most of the Tswana lived in the north, and we lived in the southern tip of the country, so there weren’t very many around us.
My father strongly disliked the Afrikaans language, but before I never really understood why. Afrikaans was the official primary language of South Africa but what spoken mostly by the rich white Afrikaners, the Dutch settlers. Every day they were finding new ways to outlaw people from society. It always seemed bizarre to me, that they cold take the citizenship of someone whose ancestors had lived on that very soil for millennia, when they had just arrived from Europe. What made them more African than us? They took the land from the native blacks and then said they weren’t allowed to be members of their own county. Then they slowly started taking rights away. There was slavery in the beginning, but eventually it just became small ways to take away from us. We couldn’t go to the same parks, or work in the same buildings. Luckily for my family, my father had what was, at least for the moment, a secure job. Many blacks had been kicked out of their jobs and the companies were being made almost completely white, but he was reserved for certain reasons and so they kept him on, although working in a lower position than he probably deserved.
We had arrived in South Africa during the summer holidays, and soon school was starting. On February 3rd I started school again, and it was a difficult change. I began attending Table View Primary School, a public school not far from our home. Uniforms were mandatory, and so a few days before classes started, my mother took my siblings and I to buy our new uniforms, and get them fitted. On the first day, I woke up early to get ready for school. I took my new pleated skirt and carefully put it on, trying desperately to avoid wrinkling it. I put on my white, buttoned blouse and then the thick red and gold blazer over it. It was still summer and in the blazer I was boiling and uncomfortable. I quickly wriggled out of it and then collected my school bag and went into the kitchen where my mother was making breakfast. I sat down at the table, and she came over and tucked a napkin into the neck of my shirt.
“The last thing you need is to get oatmeal on your clean white shirt! This is your first day; you need to make a good impression. And you need to put the jacket on too before we leave.”
“But it’s so hot in it! I can’t wear that thing all day!”
“Rules are rules. Sometimes there are things you just need to put up with. See, your brother is even wearing his jacket - Oh Limpopo! You put your socks on inside out and you put on your tie wrong!” She bustled over to fix him up and I settled into my breakfast.
We all piled into the car and my father got into the drivers seat. He would be dropping us off at school on his way to work, so we wouldn’t have to work. After school he would leave work, come pick us up, drop us off at home, and then return to the office. For the first day only, he parked the car and walked us into the building. We went to the headmaster’s office and waited outside his door while his assistant went inside to check that he was ready to see us. It was the first day of the term so there were quite a lot of people wanting to see him, but the assistant took us through to the front of the queue. She was a very nice lady, and tried to soothe the nerves out of us children. She could see we were uncomfortable so she gave us all a sweet and then brought us into the headmaster’s office.
Inside, there was a plump old man sitting behind a large, oak desk. There were stacks of papers and folders all over the surface of the desk, but the rest of the room was extremely neat and tidy. The headmaster, Professor François Nel, was a large man with a large smile. Right off the bat one could tell he was a kind person, with only everyone else’s interests at heart. He got himself up and pulled some chairs over, until there were enough for all 4 of us. My father took a seat directly facing the desk and introduced himself.
‘Oh yes, I know just who you are! We’ve been looking forward to your arrival, although I must say, it has caused some discussion in the community, but never you mind of all that. What matters here is that you children are happy and learning!”
We all stared at him, not really knowing what he was talking about, or realising that he was referring to some of the white disapproval of the enrolment of three black children in the prestigious school.
“Well, what are we waiting for!’ he continued, ‘my name is Headmaster Nel, and let me try and guess… yes, you, the youngest, you must be Limpopo.” My brother just nodded at him, trying to hide his pleasure at having been correctly identified. Mr. Nel gave a great big chuckle and went on, ”Well how very nice to meet you Limpopo. Your classmates are waiting for your arrival and are all very excited to meet you. Now, who else have we got here… okay well you must be Grace! What a lovely name, the same as my daughters! And last but not least, you must be Mokope.”
“Now, what a lovely family you have got here Mr. Maphane! Well, we best get started then. Children, we have some rules at this school that must be followed or else you may be expelled. There will be no fighting among each other. If anyone is found in a physical fight they will be sent home and in a lot of trouble. Another important rule is to always listen to your teacher. You must do as she says, no matter what! And respect the adults at the school. Now, of course there are more rules but let’s just leave it at that for now, and let’s get you off to your classes!”
“Thank you so much, Mr. Nel,” my father murmured to the headmaster, “for everything. I’m glad I could find my children such a good school that would take them, especially in the current situation in the country…” he trailed off with the mutual understanding that he was talking about the rising tensions around racism and white superiority in South Africa.
Mr. Nel led us out of his office to give us a tour of the school. As he left his office and passed the huddle of anxious parents waiting for him, he gave a small wave and told them he’d be right back with them. They all grumbled their protest and it only increased when they looked at us and saw who he was spending his time with instead them. He led us out into the corridor and brought us to the dining hall first.
“This is where you will come everyday for breakfast and lunch. All of your classmates will be eating here and the lunch ladies over there will serve you.” He pointed out the large room full of tables and a counter behind which there were four black women working. They were all Xhosa women, and looked to be related too. My father gave them a quick, salutary wave, and greeted them in the Xhosa custom, which he had learned in his time in Cape Town, where the Xhosa were dominant.
“Molweni, hello” My father commenced.
“Molo, Unjani? Hello, how are you?” One of the women responded.
“Ndiphilile, ninjani wena? I’m fine thanks, how are you?” My father continued the customary greeting.
Mr. Nel looked on, impressed by the Motswana’s ability to converse in the difficult Xhosa language. He said nothing aloud, but in his mind he was praising the African peoples for their ability to understand and learn each other’s customs so much more proficiently than White’s could ever learn from each other.
We carried on and the headmaster showed us all the different parts of the school, from the football field outside to the theatre room inside. After about half an hour of walking around and getting a detailed historical tour of the Table View school.
Finally, Mr. Nel took us outside to a patio with a magnificent view. “Well, now that you’ve seen most of the school it’s time for you to see the sight that gives this school its name!” From this patio there was an amazing view of Table Mountain. I’d spent some time in South Africa by now, and we’d done plenty of sightseeing, which included a trip up Table Mountain. But in all our trips, I’d never seen the mountain from the angle and it was spectacular. It was mesmerizing, standing under its enormity and gazing up the mountain with the sea on its shore.
After a few minutes, Mr. Nel told us we must be getting on, and that we should go join our classes now. First we took Limpopo to his classroom. Mr. Nel took him inside and introduced him to the class and his teacher. They all seemed happy to get a new comrade, and some went up to him almost immediately to ask him what he liked doing and such. As we were walking towards Mokope’s class, the headmaster’s assistant came pacing up to us. She quickly went up to Mr. Nel and whispered quietly to him. I couldn’t hear exactly what she said but from what I did catch I understood she was telling him that he had to hurry up and get back to his office because there were a lot of angry and impatient parents waiting for him. Apparently, they were upset that he was taking so long and making them wait, and they didn’t appreciate feeling ignored.
Mr. Nel made an understanding nod towards his assistant, Ms. De Beers, and then turned back to us. “I’m afraid some parents feel they have been waiting to long to see me, and we don’t want anyone getting upset! I must go back to my office, but don’t you worry Mokope and Grace, Ms. De Beers here will show you to your classes. Have a wonderful first day, girls! Mr. Maphane, it’s been very nice meeting you, I hope to see you again soon.”
“Thank you very much Sir, for everything. I am very grateful that you will be giving my children such a good opportunity and experience.”
Mr. Nel then turned on his heel and marched down the corridor back the way we’d come. We all watched him leave, sort of instinctively, then all faced each other again. Ms. De Beers had a big intake of breath and then gave us a curt smile.
“If you’ll follow me, I’ll take you to your classrooms. Yours is closest Mokope, why don’t we go there first?” As she began talking to us, she warmed up towards us and it seemed as if a barrier of discomfort had been removed and the woman had become the person she really was, who got much joy out of children and enjoyed their company more than that of most adults. “You know, girls, Mr. Nel is a very busy man, but he is such a good headmaster. All the children love him! And he knows who everybody is, it really is quite incredible in a school this large, but he knows everybody and their families, it’s all so very important to him.”
We gave a small chuckle but didn’t say anything. We were both feeling very nervous and not feeling like we knew this woman well enough to really talk to her, but she persisted on.
“I know this must be a very scary day for you, and I’m sure you’re both feeling very nervous about starting in a new school, with new classmates. But trust me, you are going to make so many new friends! The children here are so kind, you’ll feel right at home, I promise. And I’ll tell you what, if you don’t feel comfortable by tomorrow in your class, you can come visit me in my office, ja? I’m almost always there, and you can come spend lunch with me, or something. Sound good?”
“Yes Ms. so if I have no friends tomorrow I don’t have to be alone? But don’t you have work to do!” my sister responded timidly now,
“Ja, sure I do, but this is more important. What kind of school would this be if we let our students be unhappy?”
We each gave a smile, already able to tell we liked this woman. We decided with each other, that no matter what our social situations were the next day, we would both go eat lunch with her. Ms. De Beers would eventually become very important to me, and she helped me through a lot. It was she I turned to when I was struggling at school, with anything, and she never turned me away. Eventually, she would end up in more danger than I think she bargained for because of this, but that came much later.
After dropping Mokope off at her classroom, it was my turn. Every step was suddenly so much heavier, and took so much more effort. I suddenly was come over with a wave of nausea and my stomach filled with butterflies. I just had no idea what to expect and suddenly became very nostalgic for my old home and life. All I wanted was to go back to Botswana and to my old school and friends, and not have had any of this happen. I’d never felt so resentful towards one place. But soon enough, we turned the corner and Ms. De Beers announced that my classroom was right up there on the left. I slowed my step and took a deep breath. It felt like it took centuries to reach the doorway, even though I tried to draw out every moment as much as possible.
Once we arrived at our destination, Ms. De Beers stood in the doorway for a moment until the teacher noticed her there. In those moments my father grabbed onto my shoulder and when I turned to look at him, gave me a look that transmitted so much. In that one instant he was telling me to be brave, that there was nothing for me to be nervous for, and that he knew I could do it. He was saying he was proud of me, and that he was sorry that all this had to happen, but he had so much faith in me, his daughter, that he knew I was strong enough. I think this connection is what was helped my family through the next few years. I know many families weren’t this close, or their fathers had left when they were young, but my father and I were very close and could help each other through anything.
When Ms. De Beers did finally enter the classroom, she gave a little signal to me to follow. My father waited in the doorway, wanting to give me some independence in front of my new peers. She brought me in front of her and introduced me.
“Good morning class! Today is a very exciting day because a new student will be joining you! This is Grace Maphane, and she’s just moved here from Botswana. This is her first time here in South Africa so everybody ought to be very welcoming and show her how nice we can be in this country, ja? Grace also has a brother and sister who are joining us, one brother in year four, and a sister in year six. I am counting on you lot to be very welcoming to Grace and her family, and accept them into your groups.”
“Yes Miss” responded the class in unison. The teacher then got up from where she was perched and introduced herself. She came over to me and shook my hand, while smiling and saying, “Good morning Grace, and welcome! My name is Mrs. Fitzpatrick, and I’ll be your teacher for the remainder of the year! I hope that you are enjoying South Africa, although I’m sure you’ll fit right in at Table View. These are all your classmates and we’ve been eagerly attending you. You can take a seat on the carpet with everybody else if you like, and we can all introduce ourselves!”
I gave a nod and before walking over to the seat she had motioned to, looked behind me one final time to my father who was still standing in the doorway, and he gave me a small smile, which despite my best efforts, I couldn’t return. I felt like the tears were in the back of my throat and like it was all going to come pouring out. I wanted everything to just go away, and more than anything for this day to be over so I could go home and cry to my mother about how much I hated it here. Just as I was wallowing in my hatred the girl I’d sat next to began talking to me. The teacher, Mrs. Fitzpatrick was turned away from us, in the doorway, having a quick word with Ms. De Beers, and so the students had broken out into chatter.
“Hi! My name’s Eliza. So you’re from Botswana? I went there on holiday not long ago, with my family. It was very nice, I especially liked the animals, we’ve never gone on safari here, but in Botswana we went. Have you ever been on safari?”
“No,” I hesitantly answered, not sure how to react to this enthusiastic girl, “my parents say if we want to see animals we can just go for a trek not far from our house. Our old house. Although of course we never did, that’s just one of those things parents say, you know.”
“Oh that’s too bad. It was very cool, there were lions and leopards and we were so close to them all! My parents say our people aren’t made for the wildlife and that we should observe it from the distance like the English are meant to do. Our ancestors were English, like my great-grandparents. I’ve never been though; I’ve spent all my life here, in South Africa. It’s my home of course.”
“Yes, I can see what you mean.” This girl, Eliza, was pouring out her heart to me, and telling me all about her life, and I didn’t know how to respond. In all honesty, I couldn’t decide how I felt about her right then. On one end, I wanted her to shut up so I could just sit in my self-pity and misery, but on the other end, I was kind of glad to have something to distract me and keep me talking about something.
“Alright class, quit down,” Mrs. Fitzpatrick returned her focus to us and tried to get our attention and recommence the class, “Let’s all go in a circle and say our names so that Grace here can learn who we are.”
They all went around and said their names, and I tried to keep a tab in my mind of everybody’s name, but there were about 20 people and it was too much to remember all at once. My new teacher seemed to have picked up on this from my face, because she said, “Don’t worry Grace, you don’t have to memorise everyone’s name immediately! You can slowly learn who everyone is, although I’m sure it will all become easier as you integrate in with the class and you’ll know everyone as well as I do in a matter of days, I’m sure.”
“Okay class,” she brought everyone together again, “someone should be Grace’s buddy for the next week or so, and show her around and just stick with her so she can learn the ways of our school.” Eliza’s hand shot up, inducing a small smile on Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s face. “Eliza, of course, you can be Grace’s buddy, I see you’ve already become friends. Eliza, you can accompany Grace around the school later, and show her where the toilets are, and how to get around. You can also show her where things are in the classroom, and how things are done. I’m sure you’ll catch on just fine Grace without any trouble, ja?
She then instructed the class to get out their English journals, and went to fetch me a new one. For the remainder of the day, the class continued as usual, with me being introduced to all the normalities of the school day. At the end of the day, I was feeling extremely exhausted from the intensity of the day. Eliza showed me where to go after school to get picked up, and along the way she also showed me the other important landmarks in the building. After school I found Mokope and Limpopo and we all huddled together waiting for our father to collect us. Being the eldest and used to taking care of them, I put my worries and problems aside and asked them how their days were. Limpopo, being a boy, found it fine and interesting, while Mokope had had a day more like mine, and was a little bit upset from the change. I told them how in a few days it would all be perfectly normal and they would be accustomed to it soon enough, and hid my own similar concerns.
Over the next few days, my schooldays all followed a similar pattern. They consisted of waking up early, dreading the day ahead of me, going to school, being slowly introduced of all the nuances of everyday life at Table View, and then returning home to slouch in my misery and do a rising amount of schoolwork. After the first two weeks though, things started to get better. I started to accept my situation, and not dread the day as much, but rather think of the good things to come throughout the course of the day. The second day I’d been there, I’d taken up Ms. De Beers on her offer to eat lunch with her. It had been quite an enjoyable experience, and so I continued to return to her every other day for lunch. On the first day of our meetings, she hadn’t had much work to do and so could entertain me.
“So how is everything going Grace? Are you liking your new school and classmates?” she asked. I could tell she was asking out of true interest and worry, not just to make small talk like most adults. In that moment, I knew I would be able to confide in her.
“It’s been alright. Mrs. Fitzpatrick is really nice, and I’ve made a new friend I think. Eliza is her name… she’s been very welcoming to me. Everybody else seems nice too, but a little scared to talk to me.” Ms. De Beers gave a little twitch when I said that, expressing a moment of sadness and discomfort. I would later learn that for me, it was just a group of children’s reaction to a new student, but for her, it was a group of white children feeling uncomfortable about a black student, and not knowing how to express it. For her, this was saddening, especially as a white person herself, who felt the guilt of her people’s racism.
I continued to join Ms. De Beers for lunch, although we agreed that I shouldn’t come everyday, so that she could get some work done occasionally and so that I could spend some time with my classmates. She, like all other adults at the time, was worried that I wouldn’t find my spot in my class, and wouldn’t make new friends, something that everyone considered necessary after such a life change.
All the days I didn’t spend lunch with Ms. De Beers I spent with Eliza and her friends. It turned out she was quite popular in the class, and many people liked sitting with her, but she always gave me priority for a seat. I began to feel very close to Eliza, and most of all extremely grateful to her. In a time when no one else was really reaching out to me, she did, and she protected me. If anyone else said anything about ‘the new girl’, she would defend me, saying that I was only quiet because they needed to get to know me, etc. I stuck to her and she gave me the friendship I needed.
After a few weeks of adjusting, I finally felt like I fit in and had a place in this new life. At school, I had friends and people would talk to me and joke with me, just as they did with everyone else. My class had quite a bond, and everyone was very close with each other, so when they let me in, it felt like I had a whole new family surrounding me. Until that point I’d never really felt a big difference between the whites, and me because my family was well off, and from a distance we seemed the same as the white families. But upon closer inspection of these white South African children, I realised some big differences. Their parents either worked a lot or spent their days at home, but didn’t spend much time with their children. They left that up to the nanny’s, which everyone had. They all lived in wealthy parts of town, and had big houses and nice cars. Of course, this was slightly true of my family too, as we owned a decent vehicle and a lovely home, but my parents didn’t like to spend money on luxuries, but rather spend those efforts on the honour of our family. We didn’t really fit in anywhere, because with the whites we stood out because we were black, but with the blacks we stood out because we weren’t living in poverty and had a better situation than most of them. Our history wasn’t tainted with disease, or crime, or living in poor Townships, but rather a happy life in Botswana. It is something that distanced us from everyone, and left us slightly in the middle, stranded.
One Thursday, in April, Eliza asked me if I wanted to come over to her house the next day for a play date. Everyone else in the class always had play dates on Friday afternoons, and this was the first time I was being asked over, and I was trilled at this. I felt as if this was my last right of passage, and I was finally a part of the group for good. I gave Eliza my parents phone number, and she gave me hers, and we went home with the intention of asking our parents to call each other and arrange something. When I got home, I told my mother first.
“Eliza’s asked me to go over to her house tomorrow. Can I? Please, please, please? Every one else is always having play dates and this is the only way for me to make friends!”
“I suppose it’s fine Grace. I’ll talk to your father though and see that it is alright with him that you miss our family dinner.” In our household, Friday nights meant dinner with some Motswana friends we’d met and grown close to. It was a nice luxury for my parents to be able to have dinner and spend time with someone from their country, and be able to reconnect with what was familiar to them. I was worried my father would decide that it was too important to miss such family obligations, but it seemed that his concern at my lack of friends so far overrode this, and so he agreed to call Eliza’s parents.
At six o’clock he called, and her mother picked up. I’d told him that her name was Caroline Kinsley, and that I was sure Eliza had already brought up the subject with her. They spoke for a bit and then when he hung up, I rushed over to him to ask what had been decided.
He told me, “She is going to pick you up from school tomorrow, with Eliza. I’ll be picking up your brother and sister, but you’ll be going home with her. You can stay for dinner, and then I will bring you home around eight. Does this sound good for you?”
“Yes Baba, it’s brilliant! Thank you so much!”
He smiled at me and instructed me to go off and finish my homework. I was so excited that night that I could barely sleep, and stayed awake in bed for hours. In the morning, I prepared for school as usual, and went to school making plans in my head for the fun we would have later. This continued all throughout the day, with me and Eliza constantly chattering about what we were going do, if we wanted to get ice cream after school, and so on. At the end of the day, we wandered outside to wait for her mum. She mentioned that her mother was usually late as she had to come from work, so while we were waiting my dad came by. Mokope and Limpopo got in the car, and he wished me a fun afternoon as he drove off to take them home. By the time Mrs. Kinsley arrived, almost all the other students had already left. As her car approached, Eliza jumped up and told me that it was her mother and that we could finally leave.
I got up with her and we walked over to the car, which slowed down as it neared us. Her mother stuck her head out the window, with a confused face.
“Where is your friend Eliza? Where’s Grace, I thought she was coming home with us! Who is this girl?”
“This is Grace, Mama. She is coming home with us!”
Mrs. Kinsley’s face suddenly dropped the confusion and took on anger, and disgust. “This is the girl? This black girl? I can’t believe this! No daughter of mine will be friends with a filthy, poor, useless piece of shit like her! I am ashamed of you Eliza, I thought you were smarter than that; this is the last thing I expected of you! Making buddies with a black girl… I’m surprised she hasn’t infected you yet with her ways! This girl is not coming home with us; I will not stand to have her in my house! Get in the car Eliza, now. RIGHT NOW.”
Eliza’s face had been paralysed in an expression of shock. She just stared at her mother for a moment, not understanding, and then it was as if something clicked. In that moment she realised there was nothing she could do. Her mouth opened, in an effort to say something back to her mother, but it just shut again after no words had been able to come out. She gave me a helpless look that I will never forget. I learnt a lot in that moment. As Eliza shook her had at me in an apologetic way, she was telling me how there was nothing she could do, and how sorry she was about this, that she wasn’t expecting it either, and that she didn’t understand why it was happening. Eliza got in the car, and her mother gave me a dirty look while yelling, “I can’t believe they even let you into the school, what where they thinking! Look what this place has turned into, a yard for homeless children, not the elite education I’ve been paying for!”
But as she drove off, the first thing to hit me was not anger, or sadness, or helplessness, although all those would come momentarily. The first thing that occurred to me was a realisation that would define so much in my life in the coming years. I would later think back to this moment and remember what it had taught me, and it would somehow always apply later. I saw an extreme that afternoon, the extreme of the white-European racists that didn’t even have the smallest thread of belief in the blacks, and that didn’t understand that we were not a parasite that would cause harm everywhere. It didn’t even occur to Mrs. Kinsley that I wasn’t a poor homeless girl because all she could see was the colour of my skin, as if when she looked at me she saw an endless sea of blacks surrounding me, showing disease and poverty. But her own daughter, someone she had raised and had at least attempted to indoctrinate with her strong beliefs, hadn’t even seen the colour of my skin. When the storm had poured out of Eliza’s mother’s mouth, I saw in Eliza’s face that at first, she didn’t even know why her mother was upset. The colour of my skin and the fact that my ancestors were from a different continent than hers hadn’t even crossed her mind as a possible issue, because to her innocent mind, it didn’t matter. All she’d seen in me was a young girl just like her, even a friend. But all her mother saw in me was what I wasn’t, and what I wasn’t was white.
The experience crushed me, and made me feel worthless, but later on in life it would give me hope in people. Eliza gave me hope in people. Her attitude was all I needed to think of when I thought this country would never turn around, because there really are some good people.
As Eliza’s car sped away, I just stood there, frozen. I’d never been treated like that before, and I didn’t even know what it meant. I’d been raised thinking that my people were good, honest, people, but here this woman was telling me the opposite. Worst of all, I couldn’t figure out why she was acting like that. I’d been pretty shut off from the escalating racism in South Africa because my parents had tried to keep us sheltered, but a shell of racism had just been let loose on me and I didn’t know what to do.
My immediate concerns were of course more futile as they consisted mostly about being upset that I couldn’t go to Eliza’s house. I thought her mother must just be insane, but surely one day she would come round, or surely no one else’s parents acted like that. As I stood there outside the school, so many thoughts passed through my head, and finally I landed on the greatest concern of the moment – how would I get home? My father had already picked up my brother and sister and gone home, and almost everyone else had already left. The only people left outside waiting were all staring at me after the scene Mrs. Kinsley had left, and there was no way I was going to ask them for a ride home. Partly it was because of embarrassment and I just wanted them to stop staring at me. But deep down I was scared that they too would reject me just like Eliza’s mom. What if they believed what she had just yelled? What if they really thought I was a terrible person, like she had, just because I was black? Even worse, what if they agreed and when their parents came they had the same reaction, and the whole scene happened again?
For a little while I just stood there, and after a few minutes a car pulled up. They were just coming to collect another student, but it sent me into a wave of panic, and I dashed away, now frightened of strange cars. I ran into the school and stood in the doorway. What good would it do being in here? Eventually I decided maybe Ms. De Beers was still here, so I went to her office, because I knew she at least liked me, and I would be able to tell her everything that had happened. But when I got there, her door was closed and it was dark inside It suddenly occurred to me that that morning at lunch, she had told me about her plans for that weekend to travel to her parents farm in the countryside and how she was going to need to leave right as soon as school ended.
I wandered slowly back outside and realised I had no options left but to walk. It was a four-mile walk and as I set out it dawned upon me that I didn’t fully know the way. In the car, I never had to pay attention to these types of things and so I only had a general idea of how to get home. But as I had no other option I continued walking, and after 30 minutes my feet were already killing me. My school shoes were too small and the hard leather was pressing on my toes. As it turned out, for the most part the route home was straight. I could mostly follow the main roads and everything looked familiar. After an hour of walking I was exhausted. I decided to take a break and so I walked over to a bench and sat down. On the other end of the bench was a man who was Afrikaan and mumbling to himself. He was quite old and seemed to be quite the grouchy type. As I sat down and took my shoes off, he gave me a dirty look and got up immediately. His mumbling turned into louder words but I didn’t understand what he was saying, as I didn’t understand Afrikaans. He kept looking at me and swearing, looking disgusted at the proximity between us.
Being rejected again was the last straw. I looked down at my hands and tears started streaming down my face. Before I knew it I was sobbing and couldn’t control myself. I stared at my skin and wished it was a different colour. But this only made me cry harder because I’d never before felt this way about myself, and I’d never wanted to be something that I wasn’t. I was ashamed with myself for wanting to be white, but I couldn’t help the feeling. Everywhere I turned I was being rejected and insulted because of my skin and it wasn’t a good feeling. The sobs kept coming for a while until they finally dried up. I stopped feeling sorry for myself and got off the bench. I walked over to the water fountain to get a drink and splash my face to try and cool the headache that the crying had ensued.
I kept on walking towards home, even though my heels and toes had developed painful blisters and my legs ached from the hike. As I walked, so many things were going through my head. I dreaded the moment when I would arrive home and have to explain what happened. I was embarrassed and humiliated by the experience, and I didn’t want to have to retell it to my parents. I was also scared of their reaction. I was expecting anger towards Eliza’s mother, but I was scared they wouldn’t let me be friends with her anymore. Or what if I wasn’t allowed to go to school anymore because they were scared other people would act like that? I’d finally made friends and fit into the class and I didn’t want it to all be taken away. The main thing I was worried about was how they would feel. I knew they were going to feel responsible and guilty, but I didn’t want to give them that weight. They were parents, and they were going to feel bad for that having happened and I didn’t want them to pity me or beat themselves up.
All these feelings made me want to keep the days events to myself, but at the same time I needed to tell them. There was a part of me that needed to lift the weight and tell them what had happened. We were always close, so I couldn’t just keep them in the dark about such a big event. I also felt like the weight of knowing what happened that afternoon was going to sink me into the ground, and I needed to tell someone about it so that I wouldn’t be carrying all the weight.
After two and a half hours of walking, I finally arrived on my street. Before entering the house, I sat down on the curb and took off my shoes and socks. These were my lasts moments of just being me, because as soon as I walked in the house and told them what happened, everything would change. Luckily it was still early so our dinner guests hadn’t arrived yet. I collected myself and planted my bare feet on the ground in front of me, and slowly lifted myself up off the ground. I picked up my school bag, and slowly walked over to the house. I went up to the front door, but then thought the better of it. Instead of ringing the doorbell, I went to the side of the house and threw the gate that led to the back garden. I walked into the garden, feeling the damp grass on my small feet, and dropped my bag down. I walked over to the big tree and started climbing the baobab. I allowed my skirt to tear a bit in sacrifice for my stretching limbs that were extending out to each branch. I climbed and I climbed, reaching through the tree until I reached the top of the tree and then I stopped. From up there, I could see the whole house from above, and those of the neighbours as well as their gardens. I could see the street on the other side of our house and I saw cars driving by at a leisurely pace through the residential streets of southern Cape Town.
I found a long trunk of the tree were I could extend my body and I laid there, in the late afternoon sun, soaking up its rays. I let my mind wander and forget, letting go of the days events, and allowing myself to just relax and appreciate nature. There was something about the baobab tree, that even when I was angry, sad, upset, and tired, it would always make all my troubles go away and make me feel better, just by being within it. I’d always believed the ancient folklore that the baobab tree had special powers that could make anybody happy. There were old stories in our culture about when bad things happened how everyone in the village would go visit the baobab tree and everything would be aright. Ever since my youth, lying among the trees branches had always soothed me and brought me back to a happy place. I allowed myself some time to rest with the tree, feel the tree and listen to it.
After some time, I heard my mother yelling at my brother from inside, and I knew that whenever she got mad at him he would run outside to escape her. I didn’t want them to come outside and find me there, so I got down, picked up my bag, and went back through the gate. I walked back around to the front door of the house and this time I rang the doorbell. In Botswana, our doors were always open, but here in Cape Town that was too dangerous, so we had to have a door that locked, but it meant you couldn’t get in without a key. I stood uncomfortably in the doorway, shifting form foot to foot, waiting for my mother to answer the door, knowing she would be confused to see me home so early and start asking questions. Soon enough, the door swung open from the inside and there was my mother, looking down at me, puzzled.
“Grace! What are you doing here, your father was supposed to pick you up from Eliza’s house later! Why haven’t you got shoes on, girl? And what did you do to your clothes, they’re all dirty and torn!”
She pulled me into the house while asking what was going on. I walked into kitchen, and sat down at the table, as I took my jacket off. I plopped my head down on the table, and everything kept pouring back into my mind, and I kept reliving the scene outside of school. I began to tear up and then burst into sobs again, and my mother came running over to me and held me. She asked what was going on, and so I told her everything, from Eliza’s mom to the walk home, and when I finished she was almost in tears too. I hadn’t wanted to make her sad or upset her, so I kept apologizing, saying “I’m sorry” over and over again, while she just kept responding to me, “No, I’m sorry my baby, I can’t believe this happened.” She called my father at work and told him that he wouldn’t need to pick me up from Eliza’s house, but that he needed to come right home, as soon as possible.
My father came home from work and had everything explained to him. He was so furious by the end it took all my might to stop him from going straight to the phone and ringing Eliza’s parents, because I didn’t want any more embarrassment from the day, or to get Eliza in any more trouble. My parents were furious but they both new there was nothing they could do; this kind of behaviour in Cape Town was becoming more and more common and there was nothing to be done as the government endorsed it. My father kept saying that as long as only the white Afrikaans ran this country, it would be run by bigotry and the country would never advance.
The next Monday, my father took us to school a bit earlier than usual, so he could come in and have a word with the headmaster. Mr. Nel seemed very upset by the news of what happened the Friday before, but he admitted that there was nothing he could do. Under law, Mrs. Kinsley had done nothing wrong, and so there wasn’t much to be done. But he insisted that he use his position of power to do something, and so he arranged a meeting the following morning between him, my father, and Mrs. Kinsley.
That day in school, Eliza seemed to be avoiding me all morning. At first I was upset, but whenever I went up to her she wouldn’t make eye contact, and she would walk away. It seemed that no matter what I did, even apologising to her back, she wouldn’t turn around and speak to me. At lunch, I finally confronted her.
“Eliza! Eliza! Please! Just talk to me for one minute then you can leave again!” I pleaded to her as I chased after her when she tried to avoid my confrontation.
She turned on her heel, and stared straight at me, waiting for me to catch up to her. When I did, she started, “I’m sorry. Truly. But there’s nothing I can do. My mother has forbidden me from speaking to you and if I am around you again she’ll punish me. I’m sorry, really.” She said she was sorry, but I didn’t really see it in her face, as I had three days prior.
“But wait Eliza, I don’t understand! What did I do? Why does your mother hate me so much??” Of course I knew the answer, but I needed to hear it from her, to really feel the blow.
“You know. It’s because… because you’re black and inferior, my people aren’t equal with yours so we shouldn’t pretend to be. I’m afraid I have to go now. I’m sorry.”
I stared after her as she walked quickly away, trying to get away from the scene of her betrayal. I stood there fixated in the middle of the playground, unable to move. I’d known that she wouldn’t be saying something nice, but I never thought such words could come out of her mouth, my own friend. A group of girls playing jump rope started yelling at me telling me I was in the way of their game, so I ran off to the abandoned swings, which were a ways away from everyone else.
For the rest of the day, I sought out solitary spaces, sitting where I was far away from everybody else, and where I could be left alone. When the bell rang at the end of the day, I couldn’t have been happier. I spent all day waiting for that moment where I would be free to leave what had become a sort of hell for me. I was the first out of the door and to get my bags, and ran outside to wait for my dad. I had to wait a few minutes but when he arrived I jumped in the car and started crying. I could see the sadness in his eyes, and the pain he was suffering from watching his daughter go through such racism and unfair treatment. He asked what was quite wrong and what had happened after he left, especially with Eliza. I told him what she said, and I saw the sadness in his face turn to anger.
“Listen to me Grace. I know you’re going to say, ‘I know it’s not true,’ but really listen. Eliza and her mother aren’t the only ones; there will be many other people who will treat you like they do, and tell you things like them. But you must always remember, that what’s important is not what colour your skin is, or your hair or eyes, but what kind of person you are. Everybody has good and bad in them, and you just need to make sure you act on your goodness, and not on the badness like them. What’s important is that you always know who you are, and that your actions are what define you, not your skin. And don’t let anyone ever tell you there’s anything you can’t do, understand? Don’t let people stop you from dreaming; you came into this world fair and square just like anyone else and you can do whatever you want in it. Do you understand me Grace?”
“Yes Baba, I understand. But that doesn’t make it any better, I don’t want to go to school ever again, it’s so terrible!”
Of course my father would here none of that, and so I continued going to school everyday. The next day my father, Eliza’s mother, and Mr. Nel had their meeting in the morning. I wasn’t there so I don’t know exactly what was said, but from what I was told from Ms. De Beers and my father, it wasn’t a pleasant conversation. Apparently Mrs. Kinsley was furious with Mr. Nel for allowing black students to attend the school, and especially be in her daughter’s class. She apparently demanded that I be switched into another class so as to not be around her daughter, but of course Mr. Nel told her that that was ridiculous and unnecessary. Worst of all, she wouldn’t even speak to my father. She acted as if he wasn’t there, never addressing him or talking directly to him, and if he spoke to her she ignored it. Mr. Nel tried to reason with her and explain to her that the school didn’t discriminate and gave equal opportunities to everyone, and that her racist behaviour would not be tolerated at Table View, but Mrs. Kinsley threatened to remove Eliza from the school. The meeting didn’t accomplish much, and my father and Mrs. Kinsley both left feeling dissatisfied.
That day for lunch I decided to go visit Ms. De Beers as it had been a while since I’d joined her for lunch, and I didn’t think I could handle being stared at and excluded with everyone else at lunch. When I arrived there she told me, “Ah, I had a feeling I might be seeing you soon. Come have a seat, it’s been a while since I had the pleasure of your company!” After about three minutes she had already made me laugh, something that hadn’t happened in a few days, and something that I was sure would never again happen under the roof of the school that I regarded with such loathing. We talked about happy things, and she asked me about my old life in Botswana. It felt like my first few days at the school, when I’d thought I could never be happy at the school, and when I told Ms. De Beers this she said, “Well if that’s the case, then you should remember that after those few days you made friends and were extremely happy! So that will come again soon, just you wait and see.”
After a while, I began to cope with my feelings of loneliness. I became accustomed to not having many friends in my class but I stopped letting it get to me, because I eventually figured I couldn’t be sad forever. My parents noticed that I had become resigned to an unhappy life, and so to help they decided to sign me up in classes outside of school, where I could start fresh and have a chance at happiness again. I began taking ballet lessons, and I immediately fell in love with it. I would look forward to my weekly dance classes so badly, and once I was there I was in my own heaven. When I danced everything went away, and I didn’t have any more problems to clutter my mind. It was freeing and it was a good solution to my unhappiness. In the months to come, as we faced real difficulties, dance was my support and without it, I couldn’t have got through it all. Without dance it seemed as if there was no more happiness in the world, and no reason to be happy, but when I danced, lights went on and the world suddenly became much brighter.
Nine months after our move to South Africa things started to go down hill. Apartheid enforcement was becoming stricter and it was becoming harder to pretend not to be affected by our race. For us, it all started with one neighbour.
One day, we were all sitting in the kitchen eating dinner when there was a knock at the door. My father got up and answered it, and saw our middle-aged, Afrikaans neighbour.
“Good evening, Mr. Bennet. How are you?” my father greeted him.
“Good evening, I am well. I’m afraid there has been a neighbourhood meeting.”
“Oh, I’m sorry I missed it, I don’t think I knew about it. I wonder how that could have happened…”
“No, it’s true, you were not informed. You weren’t informed because the meeting was regarding you and your family.” He said this without looking my father straight in the eye, but my father still picked up on the tone of the conversation, and knew something bad was coming. “Considering all the violence that has been going on, the neighbours have all decided that they don’t feel comfortable with a black family living so close.”
Stunned, my father began to laugh. “Dangerous? Me? My family? Oh but quite the opposite Mr. Bennet! Precious and I insist on teaching our children not to be violent, and we don’t even keep a gun or a single weapon in the house! We are anything but violent!” His faced turned to disbelief when he realised that what he was saying was having no impact on Mr. Bennet and that he was retreating. He saw there was nothing he could say that would change anyone’s mind, so he decided to hear out Mr. Bennet and see why he was here. “Well then, why are you telling me this? Surely there is a reason you have interrupted our evening for more than just to inform us that the neighbourhood considers us a danger to their welfare.”
“Please don’t be upset, Mr. Maphane. But I must inform you that the neighbourhood is beginning a series of proceedings to have you removed from your home, and I wanted to warn you. I sincerely think it will be in your best interest to leave the house yourselves, rather than be ousted. I just came over to warn you so you could be prepared, but I am sorry for the message I am delivering. Have a good night.”
My father watched him leave then shut the door behind him, then punched the door and yelled in his frustration. He calmed himself before coming back to the table, but we’d all heard the conversation and were sitting in silence, scared for what would come. My father sensed this, so he looked at us all and sincerely said, “Don’t worry children, everything will be fine. This is our home; they cannot make us leave it! The only reason we would ever leave our home would be to return to Botswana, and I don’t think that will be happening any time soon.”
The next day at work however, my father secured the very fate he had told us he was sure wouldn’t be happening – we were going to be moving back to Botswana. It all began with some friendly banter at the office. My father was talking with a co-worker and told him about the neighbour from the night before’s visit and how preposterous the whole thing was. Unfortunately, someone overheard and decided to report the conversation to the boss, thinking my father, being black, had no right to challenge what a group of white people clearly thought tot be true. The boss called my father into his office, and told him that people wouldn’t be pleased to know that he let my father talk like that about whites, and that he would need to be let go. He apologised, and said that we were welcome to stay in South Africa, but the company would no longer be paying for our school and home, and my father would not have a job, and a well paying-job would be difficult for him to find. So we would be returning to Botswana after all.
When my father came home that night and told us the news that we would be going back home, we were all ecstatic. Only my mother didn’t seem to be joining in the celebrations, as she seemed slightly worried and quiet. Later, she would express her fears to my father. “What if you can’t find a job? I’ll probably have to work again, but what if I can’t find a job either?”
“Don’t worry my Precious, everything will work out fine. My boss gave me the name of someone to call who might be able to give me work. We’ll move back into our old home, we won’t be spat on walking down the street, and our children won’t grow up in an environment of hate – what can be wrong about that!”
We began packing over the next few days, and two weeks later, our stuff was being sent back to Botswana. The last few weeks of school were much more enjoyable, as I knew they would not last forever, and that soon I would be back with my friends, in my country, and happy. It seemed we were leaving at a good time though, because laws restricting blacks were becoming more and more extreme and soon we wouldn’t even be able to sit on the same benches as the whites. After begin kicked out of our home we probably would have ended up living in a township, surrounded by violence and poverty, living dead-end lives. Getting out of the country before it suffocated us was a good decision, but it made us feel a bit like outsiders in our own country. We’d been gone for quite a while, and everything was different, but nothing was taken for granted anymore. I cherished the right to go into whatever shops I liked in Botswana, and the ability to make friends without being judged and treated carefully, as if I was some foreign specimen.
My family returned to Botswana changed, but more experienced and appreciative. I had seen something important and never forgot what it was like to live like an outsider with no place in society. I vowed to never allow that to happen in my own country, and I was fortunate enough that Botswana remained at peace and equal for the rest of my life there. But no matter what happened, I would always have my baobab tree.
When I was young we had a lovely home on the outskirts of Gaborone – close enough for a convenient commute for my father, but enough out of the city so us children could enjoy the outdoors. My mother didn’t work because there were so many of us children at home and she didn’t want somebody else to take care of us. She dedicated her days to us and loved us always, a pretty impressive feat since she was one woman alone with five hyper children. If she had decided to work and hire a nanny it would have been looked down on, and people would talk. But she was happy with us and cherished us everyday, and for that I will always be grateful, as I know she was a large contributor to the happiness of my childhood.
We children would spend all day outside in the garden, playing and running around, using up our enormous amounts of energy, as most children do. In the garden there was a baobab tree. It was under this tree that I spent all my time as a child. We would climb its branches, and then sit up there and tell each other stories, or read new books together. When we wanted to run around we would run in circles around its trunk, playing tag and giggling. Whenever I was upset I would run to the tree and sit at its base, feeling mad, or sad, or even just lonely. My mother would always know where to find me if I ever got mad with someone at home, or if something had upset me at school, and she would come sit with me under the tree, telling me it would be alright. I always remember this tree with the fondest of memories; it held me during my best and worst times, and always comforted me. Sometimes I felt like the baobab tree could hear me, was listening and understanding all my troubles or excitements; it was like my closest friend.
My parents always talked to me about equality. They said we were fortunate, for we lived in a country that was so free and accepting, that out of all our African neighbours, we were the strongest and happiest. We didn’t have civil wars, or tribal violence, unlike our South African neighbours who were always fighting, especially the Boers and the English against the tribes. My parents said the Europeans had brought a cloud of unhappiness when they arrived on the continent. They divided us up into different chunks and pieces, so that there were neighbours living in different countries. Our tribes had never had distinct borders, we wandered and interacted as we pleased, but they brought a storm of fighting as they put us into boxes and didn’t allow us to follow our ways. In Botswana we managed to keep our customs and our rights, but in South Africa, our brothers lost their freedom and were pushed around by the whites. They took all their rights and forced them into townships where everybody was living on top of each other. Here in Botswana we treated everybody equally, our neighbours were like family, and it didn’t matter what people looked like, where they came from, what kind of family they had, we treated everybody well and like a friend. We would soon find that this was something we took for granted and it wasn’t the case everywhere.
My family was always very close, and we trusted and enjoyed each other a lot. My youngest brother, Limpopo, was the baby of the family, and we all fawned over him. Before him was my sister Mokope, the second youngest, and then I was right in the middle. My two oldest siblings were quite a bit older and were in university, but they still mostly lived at home. My mothers name was Precious, something my father always joked about, “How did her parents know she’d be the most precious thing in my life?”
My mother and father nurtured us all as best they could, despite occasional financial difficulties during our youth. Never had anything split our family apart and it never occurred to any of us that that might change.
December 11th, I will always remember that date. That was the date of when we left Botswana for good, for South Africa. My father’s job in the diamond industry meant he travelled to South Africa a lot, as the industry was very established there. When I was eleven years old, my fathers company made some cuts. They dissolved most of the Botswana branch, and left very little of the company in Botswana, deciding to focus more on the business in South Africa and Western Africa, in countries such as Sierra Leone. However, my father’s talent as a salesman made him very valuable to the company. He was very charming, and had the ability to woo anyone he wished, something that made him a very cherished employee in a business concerned with selling items like diamonds. When the company shut down parts in Botswana, they selected certain employees and kept them in either the Botswana branch, or had them transferred to South Africa, where they would be more valuable.
In the spring they announced to my father that he would be moving to South Africa. It wasn’t really a decision for our family to make, either my father lost his job and joined the group of many unemployed citizens, or he did what the company told him and continued providing for his family. We faced a difficult choice at this time though nonetheless. My father was being made to work in Cape Town, a port city in South Africa, where the diamond company had a big foreign trade base, but whether or not we all followed him was the question. We could either continue our lives in Botswana, with our family and friends around us, in a country we knew, the country of our ancestors, where we had all grown up, or we could stick together. Every side had its obvious advantages and disadvantages. Our tight-knit family would clearly suffer from loosing a member to go live miles away, who would only be able to visit upon occasion, but we would also suffer from leaving our home. South Africa was becoming a difficult place, and although they still wanted my father even though he wasn’t white, it didn’t mean that would remain the case, or that our whole family would be welcome in the country. South Africa was having racial uprisings, as the white, Dutch, Afrikaans wanted to take over the country completely, as they always had. They had always taken everything from the tribes, including our land. Now they were taking our peoples rights, and our jobs, as they tried to push the blacks out of the cities, in an effort that wouldn’t reach such an extreme until later. We knew that if we moved to South Africa we wouldn’t have as nice a home as we did in Botswana, and we would suffer from racism and hatred much more than was ever encountered in our city of Gaborone in Botswana. We would also suffer isolation, from our family, and neighbours, and school, and the whole community. We lived in a very close community, where everybody knew everybody, and walking down the street you knew and greeted the other pedestrians. You knew whose car was driving down your street and possibly even where they were going. It was safe to let your children wander the streets because in our outskirts of the city everyone knew them and you knew they would watch out for your children, and make sure of their safety as much as you yourself would. In Cape Town we would be living in a city where not only would we not know anybody, but it would be so big and crowded that we would never have that familiarity, and we would never have that sense of community.
However, our family was too close and we couldn’t stand the idea of splitting up. Many families had to do it for work, and we had too often seen fathers going off to other cities and countries in order to get work and all too quickly ending up distanced from his children and wife. We didn’t want that to happen to us and ruin our happiness, so my parents decided it would be best if we all followed my father to South Africa. And that was that; once it was decided we were leaving there was no changing the decision.
My fathers company agreed to send us to Cape Town in an airplane, instead of the all too often form of travel that consisted of driving for days through the southern African landscape. My father was to leave a few weeks before us to set things up, so we would have a comfortable home to arrive to, and so everything would be settled in already. We drove him to the airport, and my little sister, Mokope cried at the sight of him leaving through the sliding doors to a room we couldn’t see into.
“Baba! Baba! Come back soon, please?” she pleaded to our father through her tears as he tried to pass through the doors.
“My dear, dear, Mokope, I want you not to worry! We shall see each other soon enough, you will see. It will be as if no time has passed!” he said as he tried to soothe his confused daughter. He had travelled for work before, but never for so long, and she didn’t know what to expect.
Once we returned back home, we began the process of preparing for our departure. We had to pack up our whole house, and separate the stuff we wanted to bring with us, and the stuff to leave with our grandparents in Botswana. Once he had arrived and found us a home, my father called to tell us what to expect and what our new house was like. He said it was on a beautiful street, with lovely trees and flowers surrounding it, and with lots of room inside, but not as much as our house in Botswana. We would have to leave some possessions, and sell some of the furniture that would be too complicated to transport and would be easier to just buy there. We were all surrounding the phone and talking to him and listening together to what our father had to say of our new life that was soon to come. He told us there was a surprise at the house that we would love but we would have to wait until we got there to see it. At one point, he told us children to go play outside and enjoy the country while we could, but he sounded serious. My mother seemed to have picked up on this note too, and picked up the phone to her ear to speak more privately to him.
“My dear Precious, I am worried,” he confessed to her, “I have found us a lovely home, but I cannot say how long we will be able to live here. The uprisings and persecutions are increasing by the day and tensions are running high here in this country. I can’t guarantee how long the neighbours will accept to have a black family living in this nice home, but I’m pretty sure it won’t be long. Don’t tell the children though.”
“Is our home in a nice neighbourhood? It’s not dangerous is it?” my mother demanded of him, ignoring the bigger issue, “I’ve been reading stuff in the news and there’s a lot going on there, Cape Town is becoming a dangerous place! A woman got shot the other day!”
“I know, I know, but you don’t need to worry. We will be safe. I must admit though, it’s not been easy here. People spit on the ground in front of my feet when I walk through the rich parts of town, and they give me ugly glares. The other day, I was buying bread in the shop, and I took the last loaf. A man came up behind me and told me I had taken his bread, that he needed and deserved it more than I did. When I asked him why that was, do you know what he said? Do you? He said it was because he was white. What does a useless black like me need? I was thrown out of the shop!”
At this point in the conversation, my mother had begun to cry. I had not gone outside but stayed in the doorway listening to my parents talking on the phone. She sobbed quietly to herself, until I came over to her and embraced her. She held me tight and tried to explain things to me.
“Where we are going, it will not always be nice. Not everybody looks like us, and they don’t all like us. We will live in a lovely home, and I want you to always remember, that inside those walls, you are safe. No one can hurt you or be mean to you, they can’t look at the colour of your skin and judge you or spit at you. But outside those walls, you need to be careful, understand?”
“Yes, yes” I answered my mother, “but why? Will it be scary? Are people going to hurt me?”
“No of course not, no one will ever hurt you, my baby. But there will be people speaking languages you don’t understand, and you must remember to stay away from them. They are powerful people those Afrikaans are, and they don’t like us, so we must be careful with them. They are like little children, used to getting what they want, but they can’t have South Africa.”
It was hard to leave everything I had grown up with and grown accustomed to. In Botswana, my people, the Twsana, made up the majority of the population. In South Africa, there was a large Tswana population but it wasn’t the majority over all the other tribes and ethnicities. In Botswana, we had always had good and peaceful relations with the Europeans at the time that they were going across Africa and carving it out for themselves. The British took on Botswana as a Protectorate, naming it the Bechuanaland Protectorate, and they governed us well. Our kings even asked that they continue to lead our country because we were in danger from our neighbours, South Africa and Zimbabwe, who kept invading us. Britain continued protecting us from becoming a part of South Africa, until in 1966 we became the independent Republic of Botswana. But here is the difference, because we asked for the British to help us and govern us, and when we were ready to do it ourselves, we had a very peaceful move for independence, and attained comfortable agreements with the British. The South Africans however, had a very different situation. In South Africa there was so much hatred and war, for so many years that they couldn’t even stand up as a nation anymore. The Dutch Afrikaans were fighting the English and the native Bantu people and the whites were oppressing the blacks and the whites were causing animosity between the tribes, to the point where no one could get along and the whole country was a mess.
We left on a Saturday morning. As we walked out of our house, I didn’t really have any emotions because I was in too much shock. I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that we were leaving and wouldn’t be back in this house ever again. I just didn’t even know what that could possibly be like, and so I couldn’t muster tears nor did I feel any excitement. My uncle drove us to the airport in his new car, which was the new family jewel. All the children loved riding in it because it was so shiny, and still had that ‘new car’ smell. But on this day, it wasn’t exciting. I didn’t squeal with pleasure as we got in it and rolled the windows down with an electronic button. I could see my mother was worried, mostly at her children’s lack of emotion and sudden quietness. My mother sat in the front, and all the children squeezed in the back seat, all small enough that we could pile on top of each other in the three seats.
Once at the airport, my mother started getting anxious. My uncle dropped us off and said his farewells, and then returned home to his family. We’d had a going away party a few days prior, and had said goodbye to all our relatives and friends then. We went to check in but were affronted with an untimely shock.
My mother approached the attendant, “Sir, we need to check in, we are going to South Africa.”
“Where in South Africa? There have been terrible storms in certain parts and flights have been cancelled.” He responded with a sympathetic face. “I’m afraid you may not be going anywhere today Madame.”
“Where are the storms? We are going to Cape Town, we are moving there, my husband is waiting for us, and we must get on the plane! It cannot be cancelled!”
“I’m afraid that the bad weather is over Cape Town exactly. I believe that the Table Mountain they love so much causes weird weather problems. Please Madame, no please, calm down, don’t be upset it will all be alright!” My mother was becoming hysterical now. She had only ever been on a plane once before and it had been a long time ago. She was very anxious at travelling alone, and with four children (my oldest sister had decided to stay in Botswana and live with family). She didn’t know what to do, and at the news that the flight was cancelled, she broke down. She pulled herself together and looked at the attendant.
“I am a woman travelling alone, with four young children. I don’t fly a lot, I don’t go to airports a lot, and I certainly don’t know what to do right now, but I am going to try and sort this out because it’s all I can do. Now, can you tell me when the next flight to Cape Town is?”
The attendant seemed very cautious now, trying not to set her off again, but also slightly intimidated by her determination. “Let me check the most recent update…” and he picked up the phone and called someone in the building who had more news about the delays. “Okay Madame, it appears the next flight at the moment isn’t for a few days. Now, you can always go home and call to get an update of the next flight and then come back when there are planes going again, or there are other options. You could always take an alternate route. There are trains and buses that go to South Africa, and you could take one of those. They are right over there” and he pointed to the left at a big sign of a bus, and a closed counter behind it.
My mother thanked the man, and then took us over to the counter. Us children were exhausted, just from moving around, so we plopped ourselves down in front of the counter. My mother was about to scold us and tell us to get up, but then she gave up and said we might as well since we had to wait for them to open, and she sat down next to us. My mother had always been a very patient woman, and had always adored us and flourished over us, even when we were naughty. She never seemed to get tired, until now. Being the second oldest of the children with us, I could see it in her face. The last few days of final packing and goodbyes had taken a lot out of her, physically and mentally. She had grown up in Botswana, and it was the only life she knew. She had lived her whole life looking at the same scenery and around the same people, following the same rules, but now it was all changing. The life she had chosen to live was being taken away from her, for a life she had accepted, but didn’t really want. South Africa seemed like a big scary horizon, with so many possibilities, most of which were bad, while Botswana was the safe comfortable reality she knew and appreciated, that she never found any flaws in. South Africa was crippled with problems, and she feared it would poison her family.
We ended up travelling for a few days just to get to Cape Town. We first took a bus over the border and into South Africa, and then we switched buses and got on another one that took us deeper into the country, and then finally a train. The train took us from the countryside into Cape Town, but it took all night and so we slept on the train. When we finally got to Cape Town, my father was waiting to pick us up at the train station. We were all so exhausted from travelling, and from the bad nights sleep on the rickety train that we were very grumpy. But when we saw my father, we all ran towards him. My mother has never looked so relieved to see anyone; she collapsed in his arms and I could almost see the stress and responsibility fall off of her and onto him.
“Father! Baba! Dad!” We all clamoured to his side and tackled his legs.
“Oh my children, I have missed you all so much! You will see how great it is here; they have beautiful trees and the ocean! How great will it be to go swimming in the sea for the first time!”
“Oooooh the sea! I want to go swimming!” awed my youngest brother.
“And Table Mountain! Oh you must see it, it’s so magnificent and beautiful! Tomorrow, we will take the car – yes we have a brand new car! – And we will drive up the mountain. How does that sound?”
We all cheered and giggled, excited at the exciting adventures that this new place was beginning to offer us. As we were walking towards the car my mother grabbed onto my father, and he held her, as she showed him the desperation in her eyes. It had been a hard journey for her and that just added onto her additional worries of the whole situation.
“Baba what is our surprise?” I leaned over my brother to the front seat so I was right by his ear, and whispered to him my curiosity.
“You will see when we get home, Grace! Tell me though, have you been talking good care of your mother and your brothers and sisters?”
“Yes Baba! I walked Limpopo and Mokope to school everyday so Mme didn’t have to! She was very pleased with me.”
“Good, good. Then you have been good. Have you been playing outside a lot? Have you been playing under your baobab tree?”
“Yes, yes! Everyday I came home and I missed you, so I went and sat under the tree and blew you kisses. I hope you got them all the way over here.”
“I absolutely did get them! And every time I got one of your kisses, I sent you one back.” In truth, he had actually know every time I blew him a kiss because my mother would watch me from the window, or from where she was doing laundry outside, and it would touch her so much to see my sadness that when she would talk to my father later she would always tell him.
When we got to our new house, it was mid afternoon already. My father went into the kitchen and prepared us lunch and left it to us to explore and discover our new house. On the outside, there was a low fence that separated our house from the neighbours and from the street. There was a garden that went all the way around the house, within the fence. In the garden there was a chicken coop with lots of little baby chickens in it, running around. I squealed with delight at the sight of them, and assumed that this must be the surprise we’d been waiting for. My father came out of the back door at that moment to come and show me more. I thanked him for the surprise, but was quite surprised at his answer.
“No, no, this isn’t the surprise! Although I am glad you like the chickens, I hope you’ll help me look after them?
“Of course, they’re so adorable! They smell a bit bad though… But then what is the surprise?”
“Go run over there – yes behind the house over there.”
I ran in the direction he had told me and he walked slowly behind me, watching me. And then I saw it. I was overcome with a sudden wave of a mix of sadness and happiness. One of the hardest things for me to have left in Botswana was our baobab tree in the garden. And here I was, in South Africa, in a new house, in a new garden, yet I was looking out at my very own baobab tree. There was a ribbon tied around its trunk, knotted in a pretty bow that was facing me. My father came up behind me as I stood there and stared.
“It’s why I chose this house, you know. I looked at quite a few homes, but when I saw this tree, I thought to myself, what in the world could make Grace happier? So I bought this house, and had the tree get taken care of because it was in bad shape. Do you like it?”
Up until now I hadn’t said anything, because I was in too much shock. Looking back now I realise to any outsider they would have thought I was insane, to get so much pleasure and happiness at the sight of a baobab tree in my garden. But that tree got me through a lot of my childhood in South Africa, and without it, I’m not sure I could have been strong enough.
“Baba, I love it. I think it’s the best part about this house. Maybe even this city!”
“Is it better than the ocean and the beach?”
“Yes because I can climb in its branches, and I can hug its trunk. It will always be here for me, but the ocean won’t. It will never have a stormy day where it’s too dangerous because of waves, but it will instead protect me from these things.”
The beach was kind of synonymous with happiness in South Africa. Sometimes it would be there, and it would be great, and I could enjoy it for hours, but then sometimes, it would be completely closed off and inaccessible to me. I think my father knew all this, and he knew that during this tough time, and it was going to be a tough time in South Africa for us, I would need something to rely on, when no one else was around.
For the next few months, we focused on settling in. We met the neighbours, some of which were quite stuck-up and only spoke Afrikaans. Fortunately, in his time in South Africa, my father had begun to learn Afrikaans, and he said it was quite similar to English. We all spoke some English from school, but in Botswana we’d never really needed it. It seemed however, that here in South Africa we would need our English to communicate, especially with the Afrikaners that didn’t speak any of the tribal Bantu languages. I spoke only Setswana, the language of Botswana, but it didn’t do very much for me in South Africa. In school I had learnt English, but it was quite basic. However, as soon as I spent a few weeks in Cape Town my English improved drastically and I mostly spoke English with strangers. When we found other Tswana people it was such a relief, and we could revert back to our old customs and language. Although South Africa and Botswana have similar tribal groups, most of the Tswana lived in the north, and we lived in the southern tip of the country, so there weren’t very many around us.
My father strongly disliked the Afrikaans language, but before I never really understood why. Afrikaans was the official primary language of South Africa but what spoken mostly by the rich white Afrikaners, the Dutch settlers. Every day they were finding new ways to outlaw people from society. It always seemed bizarre to me, that they cold take the citizenship of someone whose ancestors had lived on that very soil for millennia, when they had just arrived from Europe. What made them more African than us? They took the land from the native blacks and then said they weren’t allowed to be members of their own county. Then they slowly started taking rights away. There was slavery in the beginning, but eventually it just became small ways to take away from us. We couldn’t go to the same parks, or work in the same buildings. Luckily for my family, my father had what was, at least for the moment, a secure job. Many blacks had been kicked out of their jobs and the companies were being made almost completely white, but he was reserved for certain reasons and so they kept him on, although working in a lower position than he probably deserved.
We had arrived in South Africa during the summer holidays, and soon school was starting. On February 3rd I started school again, and it was a difficult change. I began attending Table View Primary School, a public school not far from our home. Uniforms were mandatory, and so a few days before classes started, my mother took my siblings and I to buy our new uniforms, and get them fitted. On the first day, I woke up early to get ready for school. I took my new pleated skirt and carefully put it on, trying desperately to avoid wrinkling it. I put on my white, buttoned blouse and then the thick red and gold blazer over it. It was still summer and in the blazer I was boiling and uncomfortable. I quickly wriggled out of it and then collected my school bag and went into the kitchen where my mother was making breakfast. I sat down at the table, and she came over and tucked a napkin into the neck of my shirt.
“The last thing you need is to get oatmeal on your clean white shirt! This is your first day; you need to make a good impression. And you need to put the jacket on too before we leave.”
“But it’s so hot in it! I can’t wear that thing all day!”
“Rules are rules. Sometimes there are things you just need to put up with. See, your brother is even wearing his jacket - Oh Limpopo! You put your socks on inside out and you put on your tie wrong!” She bustled over to fix him up and I settled into my breakfast.
We all piled into the car and my father got into the drivers seat. He would be dropping us off at school on his way to work, so we wouldn’t have to work. After school he would leave work, come pick us up, drop us off at home, and then return to the office. For the first day only, he parked the car and walked us into the building. We went to the headmaster’s office and waited outside his door while his assistant went inside to check that he was ready to see us. It was the first day of the term so there were quite a lot of people wanting to see him, but the assistant took us through to the front of the queue. She was a very nice lady, and tried to soothe the nerves out of us children. She could see we were uncomfortable so she gave us all a sweet and then brought us into the headmaster’s office.
Inside, there was a plump old man sitting behind a large, oak desk. There were stacks of papers and folders all over the surface of the desk, but the rest of the room was extremely neat and tidy. The headmaster, Professor François Nel, was a large man with a large smile. Right off the bat one could tell he was a kind person, with only everyone else’s interests at heart. He got himself up and pulled some chairs over, until there were enough for all 4 of us. My father took a seat directly facing the desk and introduced himself.
‘Oh yes, I know just who you are! We’ve been looking forward to your arrival, although I must say, it has caused some discussion in the community, but never you mind of all that. What matters here is that you children are happy and learning!”
We all stared at him, not really knowing what he was talking about, or realising that he was referring to some of the white disapproval of the enrolment of three black children in the prestigious school.
“Well, what are we waiting for!’ he continued, ‘my name is Headmaster Nel, and let me try and guess… yes, you, the youngest, you must be Limpopo.” My brother just nodded at him, trying to hide his pleasure at having been correctly identified. Mr. Nel gave a great big chuckle and went on, ”Well how very nice to meet you Limpopo. Your classmates are waiting for your arrival and are all very excited to meet you. Now, who else have we got here… okay well you must be Grace! What a lovely name, the same as my daughters! And last but not least, you must be Mokope.”
“Now, what a lovely family you have got here Mr. Maphane! Well, we best get started then. Children, we have some rules at this school that must be followed or else you may be expelled. There will be no fighting among each other. If anyone is found in a physical fight they will be sent home and in a lot of trouble. Another important rule is to always listen to your teacher. You must do as she says, no matter what! And respect the adults at the school. Now, of course there are more rules but let’s just leave it at that for now, and let’s get you off to your classes!”
“Thank you so much, Mr. Nel,” my father murmured to the headmaster, “for everything. I’m glad I could find my children such a good school that would take them, especially in the current situation in the country…” he trailed off with the mutual understanding that he was talking about the rising tensions around racism and white superiority in South Africa.
Mr. Nel led us out of his office to give us a tour of the school. As he left his office and passed the huddle of anxious parents waiting for him, he gave a small wave and told them he’d be right back with them. They all grumbled their protest and it only increased when they looked at us and saw who he was spending his time with instead them. He led us out into the corridor and brought us to the dining hall first.
“This is where you will come everyday for breakfast and lunch. All of your classmates will be eating here and the lunch ladies over there will serve you.” He pointed out the large room full of tables and a counter behind which there were four black women working. They were all Xhosa women, and looked to be related too. My father gave them a quick, salutary wave, and greeted them in the Xhosa custom, which he had learned in his time in Cape Town, where the Xhosa were dominant.
“Molweni, hello” My father commenced.
“Molo, Unjani? Hello, how are you?” One of the women responded.
“Ndiphilile, ninjani wena? I’m fine thanks, how are you?” My father continued the customary greeting.
Mr. Nel looked on, impressed by the Motswana’s ability to converse in the difficult Xhosa language. He said nothing aloud, but in his mind he was praising the African peoples for their ability to understand and learn each other’s customs so much more proficiently than White’s could ever learn from each other.
We carried on and the headmaster showed us all the different parts of the school, from the football field outside to the theatre room inside. After about half an hour of walking around and getting a detailed historical tour of the Table View school.
Finally, Mr. Nel took us outside to a patio with a magnificent view. “Well, now that you’ve seen most of the school it’s time for you to see the sight that gives this school its name!” From this patio there was an amazing view of Table Mountain. I’d spent some time in South Africa by now, and we’d done plenty of sightseeing, which included a trip up Table Mountain. But in all our trips, I’d never seen the mountain from the angle and it was spectacular. It was mesmerizing, standing under its enormity and gazing up the mountain with the sea on its shore.
After a few minutes, Mr. Nel told us we must be getting on, and that we should go join our classes now. First we took Limpopo to his classroom. Mr. Nel took him inside and introduced him to the class and his teacher. They all seemed happy to get a new comrade, and some went up to him almost immediately to ask him what he liked doing and such. As we were walking towards Mokope’s class, the headmaster’s assistant came pacing up to us. She quickly went up to Mr. Nel and whispered quietly to him. I couldn’t hear exactly what she said but from what I did catch I understood she was telling him that he had to hurry up and get back to his office because there were a lot of angry and impatient parents waiting for him. Apparently, they were upset that he was taking so long and making them wait, and they didn’t appreciate feeling ignored.
Mr. Nel made an understanding nod towards his assistant, Ms. De Beers, and then turned back to us. “I’m afraid some parents feel they have been waiting to long to see me, and we don’t want anyone getting upset! I must go back to my office, but don’t you worry Mokope and Grace, Ms. De Beers here will show you to your classes. Have a wonderful first day, girls! Mr. Maphane, it’s been very nice meeting you, I hope to see you again soon.”
“Thank you very much Sir, for everything. I am very grateful that you will be giving my children such a good opportunity and experience.”
Mr. Nel then turned on his heel and marched down the corridor back the way we’d come. We all watched him leave, sort of instinctively, then all faced each other again. Ms. De Beers had a big intake of breath and then gave us a curt smile.
“If you’ll follow me, I’ll take you to your classrooms. Yours is closest Mokope, why don’t we go there first?” As she began talking to us, she warmed up towards us and it seemed as if a barrier of discomfort had been removed and the woman had become the person she really was, who got much joy out of children and enjoyed their company more than that of most adults. “You know, girls, Mr. Nel is a very busy man, but he is such a good headmaster. All the children love him! And he knows who everybody is, it really is quite incredible in a school this large, but he knows everybody and their families, it’s all so very important to him.”
We gave a small chuckle but didn’t say anything. We were both feeling very nervous and not feeling like we knew this woman well enough to really talk to her, but she persisted on.
“I know this must be a very scary day for you, and I’m sure you’re both feeling very nervous about starting in a new school, with new classmates. But trust me, you are going to make so many new friends! The children here are so kind, you’ll feel right at home, I promise. And I’ll tell you what, if you don’t feel comfortable by tomorrow in your class, you can come visit me in my office, ja? I’m almost always there, and you can come spend lunch with me, or something. Sound good?”
“Yes Ms. so if I have no friends tomorrow I don’t have to be alone? But don’t you have work to do!” my sister responded timidly now,
“Ja, sure I do, but this is more important. What kind of school would this be if we let our students be unhappy?”
We each gave a smile, already able to tell we liked this woman. We decided with each other, that no matter what our social situations were the next day, we would both go eat lunch with her. Ms. De Beers would eventually become very important to me, and she helped me through a lot. It was she I turned to when I was struggling at school, with anything, and she never turned me away. Eventually, she would end up in more danger than I think she bargained for because of this, but that came much later.
After dropping Mokope off at her classroom, it was my turn. Every step was suddenly so much heavier, and took so much more effort. I suddenly was come over with a wave of nausea and my stomach filled with butterflies. I just had no idea what to expect and suddenly became very nostalgic for my old home and life. All I wanted was to go back to Botswana and to my old school and friends, and not have had any of this happen. I’d never felt so resentful towards one place. But soon enough, we turned the corner and Ms. De Beers announced that my classroom was right up there on the left. I slowed my step and took a deep breath. It felt like it took centuries to reach the doorway, even though I tried to draw out every moment as much as possible.
Once we arrived at our destination, Ms. De Beers stood in the doorway for a moment until the teacher noticed her there. In those moments my father grabbed onto my shoulder and when I turned to look at him, gave me a look that transmitted so much. In that one instant he was telling me to be brave, that there was nothing for me to be nervous for, and that he knew I could do it. He was saying he was proud of me, and that he was sorry that all this had to happen, but he had so much faith in me, his daughter, that he knew I was strong enough. I think this connection is what was helped my family through the next few years. I know many families weren’t this close, or their fathers had left when they were young, but my father and I were very close and could help each other through anything.
When Ms. De Beers did finally enter the classroom, she gave a little signal to me to follow. My father waited in the doorway, wanting to give me some independence in front of my new peers. She brought me in front of her and introduced me.
“Good morning class! Today is a very exciting day because a new student will be joining you! This is Grace Maphane, and she’s just moved here from Botswana. This is her first time here in South Africa so everybody ought to be very welcoming and show her how nice we can be in this country, ja? Grace also has a brother and sister who are joining us, one brother in year four, and a sister in year six. I am counting on you lot to be very welcoming to Grace and her family, and accept them into your groups.”
“Yes Miss” responded the class in unison. The teacher then got up from where she was perched and introduced herself. She came over to me and shook my hand, while smiling and saying, “Good morning Grace, and welcome! My name is Mrs. Fitzpatrick, and I’ll be your teacher for the remainder of the year! I hope that you are enjoying South Africa, although I’m sure you’ll fit right in at Table View. These are all your classmates and we’ve been eagerly attending you. You can take a seat on the carpet with everybody else if you like, and we can all introduce ourselves!”
I gave a nod and before walking over to the seat she had motioned to, looked behind me one final time to my father who was still standing in the doorway, and he gave me a small smile, which despite my best efforts, I couldn’t return. I felt like the tears were in the back of my throat and like it was all going to come pouring out. I wanted everything to just go away, and more than anything for this day to be over so I could go home and cry to my mother about how much I hated it here. Just as I was wallowing in my hatred the girl I’d sat next to began talking to me. The teacher, Mrs. Fitzpatrick was turned away from us, in the doorway, having a quick word with Ms. De Beers, and so the students had broken out into chatter.
“Hi! My name’s Eliza. So you’re from Botswana? I went there on holiday not long ago, with my family. It was very nice, I especially liked the animals, we’ve never gone on safari here, but in Botswana we went. Have you ever been on safari?”
“No,” I hesitantly answered, not sure how to react to this enthusiastic girl, “my parents say if we want to see animals we can just go for a trek not far from our house. Our old house. Although of course we never did, that’s just one of those things parents say, you know.”
“Oh that’s too bad. It was very cool, there were lions and leopards and we were so close to them all! My parents say our people aren’t made for the wildlife and that we should observe it from the distance like the English are meant to do. Our ancestors were English, like my great-grandparents. I’ve never been though; I’ve spent all my life here, in South Africa. It’s my home of course.”
“Yes, I can see what you mean.” This girl, Eliza, was pouring out her heart to me, and telling me all about her life, and I didn’t know how to respond. In all honesty, I couldn’t decide how I felt about her right then. On one end, I wanted her to shut up so I could just sit in my self-pity and misery, but on the other end, I was kind of glad to have something to distract me and keep me talking about something.
“Alright class, quit down,” Mrs. Fitzpatrick returned her focus to us and tried to get our attention and recommence the class, “Let’s all go in a circle and say our names so that Grace here can learn who we are.”
They all went around and said their names, and I tried to keep a tab in my mind of everybody’s name, but there were about 20 people and it was too much to remember all at once. My new teacher seemed to have picked up on this from my face, because she said, “Don’t worry Grace, you don’t have to memorise everyone’s name immediately! You can slowly learn who everyone is, although I’m sure it will all become easier as you integrate in with the class and you’ll know everyone as well as I do in a matter of days, I’m sure.”
“Okay class,” she brought everyone together again, “someone should be Grace’s buddy for the next week or so, and show her around and just stick with her so she can learn the ways of our school.” Eliza’s hand shot up, inducing a small smile on Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s face. “Eliza, of course, you can be Grace’s buddy, I see you’ve already become friends. Eliza, you can accompany Grace around the school later, and show her where the toilets are, and how to get around. You can also show her where things are in the classroom, and how things are done. I’m sure you’ll catch on just fine Grace without any trouble, ja?
She then instructed the class to get out their English journals, and went to fetch me a new one. For the remainder of the day, the class continued as usual, with me being introduced to all the normalities of the school day. At the end of the day, I was feeling extremely exhausted from the intensity of the day. Eliza showed me where to go after school to get picked up, and along the way she also showed me the other important landmarks in the building. After school I found Mokope and Limpopo and we all huddled together waiting for our father to collect us. Being the eldest and used to taking care of them, I put my worries and problems aside and asked them how their days were. Limpopo, being a boy, found it fine and interesting, while Mokope had had a day more like mine, and was a little bit upset from the change. I told them how in a few days it would all be perfectly normal and they would be accustomed to it soon enough, and hid my own similar concerns.
Over the next few days, my schooldays all followed a similar pattern. They consisted of waking up early, dreading the day ahead of me, going to school, being slowly introduced of all the nuances of everyday life at Table View, and then returning home to slouch in my misery and do a rising amount of schoolwork. After the first two weeks though, things started to get better. I started to accept my situation, and not dread the day as much, but rather think of the good things to come throughout the course of the day. The second day I’d been there, I’d taken up Ms. De Beers on her offer to eat lunch with her. It had been quite an enjoyable experience, and so I continued to return to her every other day for lunch. On the first day of our meetings, she hadn’t had much work to do and so could entertain me.
“So how is everything going Grace? Are you liking your new school and classmates?” she asked. I could tell she was asking out of true interest and worry, not just to make small talk like most adults. In that moment, I knew I would be able to confide in her.
“It’s been alright. Mrs. Fitzpatrick is really nice, and I’ve made a new friend I think. Eliza is her name… she’s been very welcoming to me. Everybody else seems nice too, but a little scared to talk to me.” Ms. De Beers gave a little twitch when I said that, expressing a moment of sadness and discomfort. I would later learn that for me, it was just a group of children’s reaction to a new student, but for her, it was a group of white children feeling uncomfortable about a black student, and not knowing how to express it. For her, this was saddening, especially as a white person herself, who felt the guilt of her people’s racism.
I continued to join Ms. De Beers for lunch, although we agreed that I shouldn’t come everyday, so that she could get some work done occasionally and so that I could spend some time with my classmates. She, like all other adults at the time, was worried that I wouldn’t find my spot in my class, and wouldn’t make new friends, something that everyone considered necessary after such a life change.
All the days I didn’t spend lunch with Ms. De Beers I spent with Eliza and her friends. It turned out she was quite popular in the class, and many people liked sitting with her, but she always gave me priority for a seat. I began to feel very close to Eliza, and most of all extremely grateful to her. In a time when no one else was really reaching out to me, she did, and she protected me. If anyone else said anything about ‘the new girl’, she would defend me, saying that I was only quiet because they needed to get to know me, etc. I stuck to her and she gave me the friendship I needed.
After a few weeks of adjusting, I finally felt like I fit in and had a place in this new life. At school, I had friends and people would talk to me and joke with me, just as they did with everyone else. My class had quite a bond, and everyone was very close with each other, so when they let me in, it felt like I had a whole new family surrounding me. Until that point I’d never really felt a big difference between the whites, and me because my family was well off, and from a distance we seemed the same as the white families. But upon closer inspection of these white South African children, I realised some big differences. Their parents either worked a lot or spent their days at home, but didn’t spend much time with their children. They left that up to the nanny’s, which everyone had. They all lived in wealthy parts of town, and had big houses and nice cars. Of course, this was slightly true of my family too, as we owned a decent vehicle and a lovely home, but my parents didn’t like to spend money on luxuries, but rather spend those efforts on the honour of our family. We didn’t really fit in anywhere, because with the whites we stood out because we were black, but with the blacks we stood out because we weren’t living in poverty and had a better situation than most of them. Our history wasn’t tainted with disease, or crime, or living in poor Townships, but rather a happy life in Botswana. It is something that distanced us from everyone, and left us slightly in the middle, stranded.
One Thursday, in April, Eliza asked me if I wanted to come over to her house the next day for a play date. Everyone else in the class always had play dates on Friday afternoons, and this was the first time I was being asked over, and I was trilled at this. I felt as if this was my last right of passage, and I was finally a part of the group for good. I gave Eliza my parents phone number, and she gave me hers, and we went home with the intention of asking our parents to call each other and arrange something. When I got home, I told my mother first.
“Eliza’s asked me to go over to her house tomorrow. Can I? Please, please, please? Every one else is always having play dates and this is the only way for me to make friends!”
“I suppose it’s fine Grace. I’ll talk to your father though and see that it is alright with him that you miss our family dinner.” In our household, Friday nights meant dinner with some Motswana friends we’d met and grown close to. It was a nice luxury for my parents to be able to have dinner and spend time with someone from their country, and be able to reconnect with what was familiar to them. I was worried my father would decide that it was too important to miss such family obligations, but it seemed that his concern at my lack of friends so far overrode this, and so he agreed to call Eliza’s parents.
At six o’clock he called, and her mother picked up. I’d told him that her name was Caroline Kinsley, and that I was sure Eliza had already brought up the subject with her. They spoke for a bit and then when he hung up, I rushed over to him to ask what had been decided.
He told me, “She is going to pick you up from school tomorrow, with Eliza. I’ll be picking up your brother and sister, but you’ll be going home with her. You can stay for dinner, and then I will bring you home around eight. Does this sound good for you?”
“Yes Baba, it’s brilliant! Thank you so much!”
He smiled at me and instructed me to go off and finish my homework. I was so excited that night that I could barely sleep, and stayed awake in bed for hours. In the morning, I prepared for school as usual, and went to school making plans in my head for the fun we would have later. This continued all throughout the day, with me and Eliza constantly chattering about what we were going do, if we wanted to get ice cream after school, and so on. At the end of the day, we wandered outside to wait for her mum. She mentioned that her mother was usually late as she had to come from work, so while we were waiting my dad came by. Mokope and Limpopo got in the car, and he wished me a fun afternoon as he drove off to take them home. By the time Mrs. Kinsley arrived, almost all the other students had already left. As her car approached, Eliza jumped up and told me that it was her mother and that we could finally leave.
I got up with her and we walked over to the car, which slowed down as it neared us. Her mother stuck her head out the window, with a confused face.
“Where is your friend Eliza? Where’s Grace, I thought she was coming home with us! Who is this girl?”
“This is Grace, Mama. She is coming home with us!”
Mrs. Kinsley’s face suddenly dropped the confusion and took on anger, and disgust. “This is the girl? This black girl? I can’t believe this! No daughter of mine will be friends with a filthy, poor, useless piece of shit like her! I am ashamed of you Eliza, I thought you were smarter than that; this is the last thing I expected of you! Making buddies with a black girl… I’m surprised she hasn’t infected you yet with her ways! This girl is not coming home with us; I will not stand to have her in my house! Get in the car Eliza, now. RIGHT NOW.”
Eliza’s face had been paralysed in an expression of shock. She just stared at her mother for a moment, not understanding, and then it was as if something clicked. In that moment she realised there was nothing she could do. Her mouth opened, in an effort to say something back to her mother, but it just shut again after no words had been able to come out. She gave me a helpless look that I will never forget. I learnt a lot in that moment. As Eliza shook her had at me in an apologetic way, she was telling me how there was nothing she could do, and how sorry she was about this, that she wasn’t expecting it either, and that she didn’t understand why it was happening. Eliza got in the car, and her mother gave me a dirty look while yelling, “I can’t believe they even let you into the school, what where they thinking! Look what this place has turned into, a yard for homeless children, not the elite education I’ve been paying for!”
But as she drove off, the first thing to hit me was not anger, or sadness, or helplessness, although all those would come momentarily. The first thing that occurred to me was a realisation that would define so much in my life in the coming years. I would later think back to this moment and remember what it had taught me, and it would somehow always apply later. I saw an extreme that afternoon, the extreme of the white-European racists that didn’t even have the smallest thread of belief in the blacks, and that didn’t understand that we were not a parasite that would cause harm everywhere. It didn’t even occur to Mrs. Kinsley that I wasn’t a poor homeless girl because all she could see was the colour of my skin, as if when she looked at me she saw an endless sea of blacks surrounding me, showing disease and poverty. But her own daughter, someone she had raised and had at least attempted to indoctrinate with her strong beliefs, hadn’t even seen the colour of my skin. When the storm had poured out of Eliza’s mother’s mouth, I saw in Eliza’s face that at first, she didn’t even know why her mother was upset. The colour of my skin and the fact that my ancestors were from a different continent than hers hadn’t even crossed her mind as a possible issue, because to her innocent mind, it didn’t matter. All she’d seen in me was a young girl just like her, even a friend. But all her mother saw in me was what I wasn’t, and what I wasn’t was white.
The experience crushed me, and made me feel worthless, but later on in life it would give me hope in people. Eliza gave me hope in people. Her attitude was all I needed to think of when I thought this country would never turn around, because there really are some good people.
As Eliza’s car sped away, I just stood there, frozen. I’d never been treated like that before, and I didn’t even know what it meant. I’d been raised thinking that my people were good, honest, people, but here this woman was telling me the opposite. Worst of all, I couldn’t figure out why she was acting like that. I’d been pretty shut off from the escalating racism in South Africa because my parents had tried to keep us sheltered, but a shell of racism had just been let loose on me and I didn’t know what to do.
My immediate concerns were of course more futile as they consisted mostly about being upset that I couldn’t go to Eliza’s house. I thought her mother must just be insane, but surely one day she would come round, or surely no one else’s parents acted like that. As I stood there outside the school, so many thoughts passed through my head, and finally I landed on the greatest concern of the moment – how would I get home? My father had already picked up my brother and sister and gone home, and almost everyone else had already left. The only people left outside waiting were all staring at me after the scene Mrs. Kinsley had left, and there was no way I was going to ask them for a ride home. Partly it was because of embarrassment and I just wanted them to stop staring at me. But deep down I was scared that they too would reject me just like Eliza’s mom. What if they believed what she had just yelled? What if they really thought I was a terrible person, like she had, just because I was black? Even worse, what if they agreed and when their parents came they had the same reaction, and the whole scene happened again?
For a little while I just stood there, and after a few minutes a car pulled up. They were just coming to collect another student, but it sent me into a wave of panic, and I dashed away, now frightened of strange cars. I ran into the school and stood in the doorway. What good would it do being in here? Eventually I decided maybe Ms. De Beers was still here, so I went to her office, because I knew she at least liked me, and I would be able to tell her everything that had happened. But when I got there, her door was closed and it was dark inside It suddenly occurred to me that that morning at lunch, she had told me about her plans for that weekend to travel to her parents farm in the countryside and how she was going to need to leave right as soon as school ended.
I wandered slowly back outside and realised I had no options left but to walk. It was a four-mile walk and as I set out it dawned upon me that I didn’t fully know the way. In the car, I never had to pay attention to these types of things and so I only had a general idea of how to get home. But as I had no other option I continued walking, and after 30 minutes my feet were already killing me. My school shoes were too small and the hard leather was pressing on my toes. As it turned out, for the most part the route home was straight. I could mostly follow the main roads and everything looked familiar. After an hour of walking I was exhausted. I decided to take a break and so I walked over to a bench and sat down. On the other end of the bench was a man who was Afrikaan and mumbling to himself. He was quite old and seemed to be quite the grouchy type. As I sat down and took my shoes off, he gave me a dirty look and got up immediately. His mumbling turned into louder words but I didn’t understand what he was saying, as I didn’t understand Afrikaans. He kept looking at me and swearing, looking disgusted at the proximity between us.
Being rejected again was the last straw. I looked down at my hands and tears started streaming down my face. Before I knew it I was sobbing and couldn’t control myself. I stared at my skin and wished it was a different colour. But this only made me cry harder because I’d never before felt this way about myself, and I’d never wanted to be something that I wasn’t. I was ashamed with myself for wanting to be white, but I couldn’t help the feeling. Everywhere I turned I was being rejected and insulted because of my skin and it wasn’t a good feeling. The sobs kept coming for a while until they finally dried up. I stopped feeling sorry for myself and got off the bench. I walked over to the water fountain to get a drink and splash my face to try and cool the headache that the crying had ensued.
I kept on walking towards home, even though my heels and toes had developed painful blisters and my legs ached from the hike. As I walked, so many things were going through my head. I dreaded the moment when I would arrive home and have to explain what happened. I was embarrassed and humiliated by the experience, and I didn’t want to have to retell it to my parents. I was also scared of their reaction. I was expecting anger towards Eliza’s mother, but I was scared they wouldn’t let me be friends with her anymore. Or what if I wasn’t allowed to go to school anymore because they were scared other people would act like that? I’d finally made friends and fit into the class and I didn’t want it to all be taken away. The main thing I was worried about was how they would feel. I knew they were going to feel responsible and guilty, but I didn’t want to give them that weight. They were parents, and they were going to feel bad for that having happened and I didn’t want them to pity me or beat themselves up.
All these feelings made me want to keep the days events to myself, but at the same time I needed to tell them. There was a part of me that needed to lift the weight and tell them what had happened. We were always close, so I couldn’t just keep them in the dark about such a big event. I also felt like the weight of knowing what happened that afternoon was going to sink me into the ground, and I needed to tell someone about it so that I wouldn’t be carrying all the weight.
After two and a half hours of walking, I finally arrived on my street. Before entering the house, I sat down on the curb and took off my shoes and socks. These were my lasts moments of just being me, because as soon as I walked in the house and told them what happened, everything would change. Luckily it was still early so our dinner guests hadn’t arrived yet. I collected myself and planted my bare feet on the ground in front of me, and slowly lifted myself up off the ground. I picked up my school bag, and slowly walked over to the house. I went up to the front door, but then thought the better of it. Instead of ringing the doorbell, I went to the side of the house and threw the gate that led to the back garden. I walked into the garden, feeling the damp grass on my small feet, and dropped my bag down. I walked over to the big tree and started climbing the baobab. I allowed my skirt to tear a bit in sacrifice for my stretching limbs that were extending out to each branch. I climbed and I climbed, reaching through the tree until I reached the top of the tree and then I stopped. From up there, I could see the whole house from above, and those of the neighbours as well as their gardens. I could see the street on the other side of our house and I saw cars driving by at a leisurely pace through the residential streets of southern Cape Town.
I found a long trunk of the tree were I could extend my body and I laid there, in the late afternoon sun, soaking up its rays. I let my mind wander and forget, letting go of the days events, and allowing myself to just relax and appreciate nature. There was something about the baobab tree, that even when I was angry, sad, upset, and tired, it would always make all my troubles go away and make me feel better, just by being within it. I’d always believed the ancient folklore that the baobab tree had special powers that could make anybody happy. There were old stories in our culture about when bad things happened how everyone in the village would go visit the baobab tree and everything would be aright. Ever since my youth, lying among the trees branches had always soothed me and brought me back to a happy place. I allowed myself some time to rest with the tree, feel the tree and listen to it.
After some time, I heard my mother yelling at my brother from inside, and I knew that whenever she got mad at him he would run outside to escape her. I didn’t want them to come outside and find me there, so I got down, picked up my bag, and went back through the gate. I walked back around to the front door of the house and this time I rang the doorbell. In Botswana, our doors were always open, but here in Cape Town that was too dangerous, so we had to have a door that locked, but it meant you couldn’t get in without a key. I stood uncomfortably in the doorway, shifting form foot to foot, waiting for my mother to answer the door, knowing she would be confused to see me home so early and start asking questions. Soon enough, the door swung open from the inside and there was my mother, looking down at me, puzzled.
“Grace! What are you doing here, your father was supposed to pick you up from Eliza’s house later! Why haven’t you got shoes on, girl? And what did you do to your clothes, they’re all dirty and torn!”
She pulled me into the house while asking what was going on. I walked into kitchen, and sat down at the table, as I took my jacket off. I plopped my head down on the table, and everything kept pouring back into my mind, and I kept reliving the scene outside of school. I began to tear up and then burst into sobs again, and my mother came running over to me and held me. She asked what was going on, and so I told her everything, from Eliza’s mom to the walk home, and when I finished she was almost in tears too. I hadn’t wanted to make her sad or upset her, so I kept apologizing, saying “I’m sorry” over and over again, while she just kept responding to me, “No, I’m sorry my baby, I can’t believe this happened.” She called my father at work and told him that he wouldn’t need to pick me up from Eliza’s house, but that he needed to come right home, as soon as possible.
My father came home from work and had everything explained to him. He was so furious by the end it took all my might to stop him from going straight to the phone and ringing Eliza’s parents, because I didn’t want any more embarrassment from the day, or to get Eliza in any more trouble. My parents were furious but they both new there was nothing they could do; this kind of behaviour in Cape Town was becoming more and more common and there was nothing to be done as the government endorsed it. My father kept saying that as long as only the white Afrikaans ran this country, it would be run by bigotry and the country would never advance.
The next Monday, my father took us to school a bit earlier than usual, so he could come in and have a word with the headmaster. Mr. Nel seemed very upset by the news of what happened the Friday before, but he admitted that there was nothing he could do. Under law, Mrs. Kinsley had done nothing wrong, and so there wasn’t much to be done. But he insisted that he use his position of power to do something, and so he arranged a meeting the following morning between him, my father, and Mrs. Kinsley.
That day in school, Eliza seemed to be avoiding me all morning. At first I was upset, but whenever I went up to her she wouldn’t make eye contact, and she would walk away. It seemed that no matter what I did, even apologising to her back, she wouldn’t turn around and speak to me. At lunch, I finally confronted her.
“Eliza! Eliza! Please! Just talk to me for one minute then you can leave again!” I pleaded to her as I chased after her when she tried to avoid my confrontation.
She turned on her heel, and stared straight at me, waiting for me to catch up to her. When I did, she started, “I’m sorry. Truly. But there’s nothing I can do. My mother has forbidden me from speaking to you and if I am around you again she’ll punish me. I’m sorry, really.” She said she was sorry, but I didn’t really see it in her face, as I had three days prior.
“But wait Eliza, I don’t understand! What did I do? Why does your mother hate me so much??” Of course I knew the answer, but I needed to hear it from her, to really feel the blow.
“You know. It’s because… because you’re black and inferior, my people aren’t equal with yours so we shouldn’t pretend to be. I’m afraid I have to go now. I’m sorry.”
I stared after her as she walked quickly away, trying to get away from the scene of her betrayal. I stood there fixated in the middle of the playground, unable to move. I’d known that she wouldn’t be saying something nice, but I never thought such words could come out of her mouth, my own friend. A group of girls playing jump rope started yelling at me telling me I was in the way of their game, so I ran off to the abandoned swings, which were a ways away from everyone else.
For the rest of the day, I sought out solitary spaces, sitting where I was far away from everybody else, and where I could be left alone. When the bell rang at the end of the day, I couldn’t have been happier. I spent all day waiting for that moment where I would be free to leave what had become a sort of hell for me. I was the first out of the door and to get my bags, and ran outside to wait for my dad. I had to wait a few minutes but when he arrived I jumped in the car and started crying. I could see the sadness in his eyes, and the pain he was suffering from watching his daughter go through such racism and unfair treatment. He asked what was quite wrong and what had happened after he left, especially with Eliza. I told him what she said, and I saw the sadness in his face turn to anger.
“Listen to me Grace. I know you’re going to say, ‘I know it’s not true,’ but really listen. Eliza and her mother aren’t the only ones; there will be many other people who will treat you like they do, and tell you things like them. But you must always remember, that what’s important is not what colour your skin is, or your hair or eyes, but what kind of person you are. Everybody has good and bad in them, and you just need to make sure you act on your goodness, and not on the badness like them. What’s important is that you always know who you are, and that your actions are what define you, not your skin. And don’t let anyone ever tell you there’s anything you can’t do, understand? Don’t let people stop you from dreaming; you came into this world fair and square just like anyone else and you can do whatever you want in it. Do you understand me Grace?”
“Yes Baba, I understand. But that doesn’t make it any better, I don’t want to go to school ever again, it’s so terrible!”
Of course my father would here none of that, and so I continued going to school everyday. The next day my father, Eliza’s mother, and Mr. Nel had their meeting in the morning. I wasn’t there so I don’t know exactly what was said, but from what I was told from Ms. De Beers and my father, it wasn’t a pleasant conversation. Apparently Mrs. Kinsley was furious with Mr. Nel for allowing black students to attend the school, and especially be in her daughter’s class. She apparently demanded that I be switched into another class so as to not be around her daughter, but of course Mr. Nel told her that that was ridiculous and unnecessary. Worst of all, she wouldn’t even speak to my father. She acted as if he wasn’t there, never addressing him or talking directly to him, and if he spoke to her she ignored it. Mr. Nel tried to reason with her and explain to her that the school didn’t discriminate and gave equal opportunities to everyone, and that her racist behaviour would not be tolerated at Table View, but Mrs. Kinsley threatened to remove Eliza from the school. The meeting didn’t accomplish much, and my father and Mrs. Kinsley both left feeling dissatisfied.
That day for lunch I decided to go visit Ms. De Beers as it had been a while since I’d joined her for lunch, and I didn’t think I could handle being stared at and excluded with everyone else at lunch. When I arrived there she told me, “Ah, I had a feeling I might be seeing you soon. Come have a seat, it’s been a while since I had the pleasure of your company!” After about three minutes she had already made me laugh, something that hadn’t happened in a few days, and something that I was sure would never again happen under the roof of the school that I regarded with such loathing. We talked about happy things, and she asked me about my old life in Botswana. It felt like my first few days at the school, when I’d thought I could never be happy at the school, and when I told Ms. De Beers this she said, “Well if that’s the case, then you should remember that after those few days you made friends and were extremely happy! So that will come again soon, just you wait and see.”
After a while, I began to cope with my feelings of loneliness. I became accustomed to not having many friends in my class but I stopped letting it get to me, because I eventually figured I couldn’t be sad forever. My parents noticed that I had become resigned to an unhappy life, and so to help they decided to sign me up in classes outside of school, where I could start fresh and have a chance at happiness again. I began taking ballet lessons, and I immediately fell in love with it. I would look forward to my weekly dance classes so badly, and once I was there I was in my own heaven. When I danced everything went away, and I didn’t have any more problems to clutter my mind. It was freeing and it was a good solution to my unhappiness. In the months to come, as we faced real difficulties, dance was my support and without it, I couldn’t have got through it all. Without dance it seemed as if there was no more happiness in the world, and no reason to be happy, but when I danced, lights went on and the world suddenly became much brighter.
Nine months after our move to South Africa things started to go down hill. Apartheid enforcement was becoming stricter and it was becoming harder to pretend not to be affected by our race. For us, it all started with one neighbour.
One day, we were all sitting in the kitchen eating dinner when there was a knock at the door. My father got up and answered it, and saw our middle-aged, Afrikaans neighbour.
“Good evening, Mr. Bennet. How are you?” my father greeted him.
“Good evening, I am well. I’m afraid there has been a neighbourhood meeting.”
“Oh, I’m sorry I missed it, I don’t think I knew about it. I wonder how that could have happened…”
“No, it’s true, you were not informed. You weren’t informed because the meeting was regarding you and your family.” He said this without looking my father straight in the eye, but my father still picked up on the tone of the conversation, and knew something bad was coming. “Considering all the violence that has been going on, the neighbours have all decided that they don’t feel comfortable with a black family living so close.”
Stunned, my father began to laugh. “Dangerous? Me? My family? Oh but quite the opposite Mr. Bennet! Precious and I insist on teaching our children not to be violent, and we don’t even keep a gun or a single weapon in the house! We are anything but violent!” His faced turned to disbelief when he realised that what he was saying was having no impact on Mr. Bennet and that he was retreating. He saw there was nothing he could say that would change anyone’s mind, so he decided to hear out Mr. Bennet and see why he was here. “Well then, why are you telling me this? Surely there is a reason you have interrupted our evening for more than just to inform us that the neighbourhood considers us a danger to their welfare.”
“Please don’t be upset, Mr. Maphane. But I must inform you that the neighbourhood is beginning a series of proceedings to have you removed from your home, and I wanted to warn you. I sincerely think it will be in your best interest to leave the house yourselves, rather than be ousted. I just came over to warn you so you could be prepared, but I am sorry for the message I am delivering. Have a good night.”
My father watched him leave then shut the door behind him, then punched the door and yelled in his frustration. He calmed himself before coming back to the table, but we’d all heard the conversation and were sitting in silence, scared for what would come. My father sensed this, so he looked at us all and sincerely said, “Don’t worry children, everything will be fine. This is our home; they cannot make us leave it! The only reason we would ever leave our home would be to return to Botswana, and I don’t think that will be happening any time soon.”
The next day at work however, my father secured the very fate he had told us he was sure wouldn’t be happening – we were going to be moving back to Botswana. It all began with some friendly banter at the office. My father was talking with a co-worker and told him about the neighbour from the night before’s visit and how preposterous the whole thing was. Unfortunately, someone overheard and decided to report the conversation to the boss, thinking my father, being black, had no right to challenge what a group of white people clearly thought tot be true. The boss called my father into his office, and told him that people wouldn’t be pleased to know that he let my father talk like that about whites, and that he would need to be let go. He apologised, and said that we were welcome to stay in South Africa, but the company would no longer be paying for our school and home, and my father would not have a job, and a well paying-job would be difficult for him to find. So we would be returning to Botswana after all.
When my father came home that night and told us the news that we would be going back home, we were all ecstatic. Only my mother didn’t seem to be joining in the celebrations, as she seemed slightly worried and quiet. Later, she would express her fears to my father. “What if you can’t find a job? I’ll probably have to work again, but what if I can’t find a job either?”
“Don’t worry my Precious, everything will work out fine. My boss gave me the name of someone to call who might be able to give me work. We’ll move back into our old home, we won’t be spat on walking down the street, and our children won’t grow up in an environment of hate – what can be wrong about that!”
We began packing over the next few days, and two weeks later, our stuff was being sent back to Botswana. The last few weeks of school were much more enjoyable, as I knew they would not last forever, and that soon I would be back with my friends, in my country, and happy. It seemed we were leaving at a good time though, because laws restricting blacks were becoming more and more extreme and soon we wouldn’t even be able to sit on the same benches as the whites. After begin kicked out of our home we probably would have ended up living in a township, surrounded by violence and poverty, living dead-end lives. Getting out of the country before it suffocated us was a good decision, but it made us feel a bit like outsiders in our own country. We’d been gone for quite a while, and everything was different, but nothing was taken for granted anymore. I cherished the right to go into whatever shops I liked in Botswana, and the ability to make friends without being judged and treated carefully, as if I was some foreign specimen.
My family returned to Botswana changed, but more experienced and appreciative. I had seen something important and never forgot what it was like to live like an outsider with no place in society. I vowed to never allow that to happen in my own country, and I was fortunate enough that Botswana remained at peace and equal for the rest of my life there. But no matter what happened, I would always have my baobab tree.