5.3. Autoethnography Part 6

5.3. Autoethnography Part 6.

Change, time, and gravel roads. Mabopane, 2003

The car created a path in the brown-red sand as the boy pushed it through, forming a raceway for the other cars to follow. To be accurate, it was not a car. It was a perforated brick that had been broken into two while being transported to a home-renovation site. An RDP four-room house was being extended into a family home. Like the other kids in the street, the boy had taken this one as his own, the half-circle shapes resembling seats in the bricks’ forms. He was alone in the street. His older brother was indoors playing on the PlayStation console their mother had bought them. The boy in the sand was barefoot. Barefoot is a commonality of township life, with feet hardening against the gravel roads where he now walked. He had moved from a suburban home and travelled to a foreign place where everyone spoke a language he did not know. He was an outsider here, mannerisms and mindset as foreign to this place as a boy who spoke English or isiXhosa.

A group of boys came running out of a house two plots up the street, bare feet consuming gravel. One of the boys peeled off, swerving from the hard-packed part of the street into the stone-filled sand that the boy was playing in. The running boy jumped up and down, waving in a way that meant ‘follow’ to the boy in the sand. The running boy said, “Ey, English. Let us go. The big boys are playing a soccer tournament by the hills. Let us go.” The boy in the sand took the cars one by one and threw them over the wall to his grandmother’s house. He peeled off running, following the boy on their barefooted adventure. They rarely invited him to play these days, the novelty of his foreignness falling away as they realised he did not understand the norms of the context in which he found himself. They ran for what was to them two shifts of the sun, or about an hour or so.

They crested the first hill that faced The C where they lived to find almost an uncountable number of people in the open sand area where the older guys played soccer. There must have been boys from C, X, YY, F, and even the E areas. Four games were being played, and the boys sat on the crest of the hill to watch. With its height (about an adult’s head height), they could see almost everything. Here in this place on a Friday, it did not matter what area you were from or what gang had issues with what. Everyone played soccer or gambled on the game results on the side. Older men were carrying sticks and eating sugar cane, ensuring the older boys did not bully the younger ones. Some men are too old or injured to work and live with their families, and their wives spend weeks away from home as domestic workers in the city or distant suburban white areas. The boys sat there watching until it was time to go back and the sun was setting towards the western sky. If they got back when the lights were off, they would get beaten. Judging by where the sun was, they might barely make it. They ran while mimicking the moves that they had seen on the field. The moves were unique to the Diski form of soccer, where showmanship was just as important as goals. He belonged there for that moment, communicating with his body and emotions rather than the words that only he could understand. As they turned into the street, they saw women calling for their kids by every door, saying it was suppertime. The boy was being called by his older brother, sent by his uncle. His grandmother and mother both worked in the city, rarely coming home. He was a township kid not by language or culture but by the shared lifestyle that all who called this area home.