I Crave Freedom from the Confines of Our Family’s Male Tradition As I walk Route 67, I wonder if women ever will be granted a chair at the man’s table By Ziphozakhe Hlobo After learning why my father was shot eight times many years ago in his home village of Engcobo in the Eastern Cape, I shake my head. I should have known better. I was too young when he died to realize what truly happened, but I think about his death every time I walk down Route 67 and see the “Conversational Piece.” I think about the shooting and how women in my family have been abused for generations. What is that woman standing there doing? Is she cleaning and cooking for men? Is she dressed that way because she is a housewife waiting patiently behind that chair to serve her husband after he comes back from work? “I am no longer afraid of being shot because I survived a deadly shooting,” Father often boasted when he recounted the brutal shooting that nearly left him dead. Narrating this story, he would turn to Mother to confirm details that he was not certain about, and she would nod if he had said something accurate or shake her head if he had not. Even though the story became Father’s “comic narration” to break tension in awkward situations, during the shooting there was little to laugh about because Father said he really thought he was going to die. I heard this story, and plenty of others, during my visits to Khayelitsha, Cape Town’s dangerous township where my mother lived. The township often felt like a prison because of the number of criminals
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Reflections on Freedom 2013
you would walk past every day, and sometimes walking its streets on a Friday night felt like knocking on death’s door. As we walked with him, Father would tell the “shooting” story to ease our fears, implying that he was a largerthan-life man and that Mother, my two sisters, my brother and I should not be alarmed by the consistent sounds of cries and gunshots at night. “Why did you get shot?” my little sister would inquire, and Mother would laugh and say he was resisting men who wanted to rob him. One night while we were sleeping in my aunt’s little house in the same area, we heard sounds of windows being broken. “You’ve ruined my house! You’ve ruined my house!” exclaimed a voice that sounded familiar. For as long as I had visited Cape Town, she had always been called Mam’ehouse (mother of the house), and she was known for her loud voice and evil ways. Suddenly we heard the sound of police cars and boys shouting, “We will be back, you witch! You witch!” Mam’ehouse was known as a witch and promiscuous, an ungodly woman who slept with other women’s husbands. It was said
that she would bewitch the men to make them leave their wives and children. “How else can you explain that joke of a marriage with that old man in her house?” people would ask among themselves. “That poor man. She bewitched him and made him leave his wife and kids.” “But then again, did anyone put a gun on that stupid man’s head to leave his wife and kids?” my aunt would say. Her clarifications did not satisfy, and I wondered where the rumors came from. When my father hit my mother or came home drunk and swore at everyone, the consolation from my aunt would be, “Don’t think that your father is the first one to abuse and cheat on his wife. Our father, your grandfather, was the same — even the ones before him were the same. It’s a Thembu-man thing.” And if you dared ask my aunts and my female cousins why they are not married, they would say, “Look at these men in this family. What if we get the same kind of men?” From what I have gathered while eavesdropping on adult conversations, my grandfather was quite a catch — flamboyant, light-skinned and good with his tongue around women. When he came back from the mine after running out of money, MamCwerha would have to care for him and use up all the money she had made being a domestic worker in Port Elizabeth. “But the wonder of it all is that when MamCwerha fell ill with lung cancer during the 1980s, your grandfather did not lift a hand to help her. He was all over the village giving his women all of his money, some of MamCwerha’s money and vegetables from her garden,” my female cousins often said. “Even your father, MamCwerha’s favorite son, did not help,” a cousin told me. “It was us women who nursed MamCwerha.” MamCwerha, my grandmother, is still remembered in the village as one of the fiercest and zero-tolerant wives Thembu men have seen. When my grandfather, George Zaphalala Hlobo, started cheating on
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…these men had already been ruined by their mothers and there was nothing that they could do to change them.
