My Earthly Dad And My Heavenly Father

By Tshidi Mokgabudi

Tshidi's father was absent from her life because he made the difficult choice to go and fight for love of country. Exiled in Tanzania while Tshidi was a little girl, her daddy never came back home. Her brother took the baton from her fallen father and he too, fled into exile, leaving the family's womenfolk, seemingly, with no one at the helm.

Can Tshidi reconcile her Daddy's vision for a politically free South Africa with her pull to fight for her country's economic freedom? Is she strong enough to pick up the baton and run the course towards the finish line? Can she get past the pain the absence of both her father and her brother caused her and empathize with what it cost them?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tshidi Mokgabudi
• Release date: Jul 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781990901188

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

M

y earliest memories are of our home, filled with the comings and goings of my dad, my mother, siblings and of course, neighbours. I marvel at those who have to go long distances to visit their friends and neighbours for if I stepped out of our house, in just a few steps I would be at our neighbour’s doorstep. I could hear and share in their laughter and in their goings on as if they were inside our home. It made for interesting times.

The township was vibrant with smells of food cooking, chickens clucking, babies crying amidst mothers’ soothing words and young men whispering, for in those days there was much to talk about in hushed tones. The men came and went on the weekends, their mouths filled with political talk and umqombothi, the local brew, talking of things that saw many go into exile or prison for indeterminate periods.

My dad was one such man whose thoughts and hushed words would force him to flee to Tanzania for fear of being assassinated in the country he called his own. He was not alone. Many would leave and only return after 1994 when after multiple bloodbaths, weeping wives and fatherless children, a document would be signed signalling the end of an era and the start of another.

Soweto is an urban settlement or 'township' in South Africa, southwest of Johannesburg, that now boasts a population of approximately 1.3 million. Soweto was created in the 1930s when the White government started separating Blacks from Whites. Blacks were moved away from Johannesburg, to an area separated from White suburbs by a so-called cordon sanitaire (or sanitary corridor); this was usually a river, a railway track, an industrial area or a highway, etc. They did this by using the infamous Urban Areas Act in 1923. Soweto (a compilation of South West Township) became and continues to be the largest Black city in South Africa.

However, until 1976 its population could have status only as temporary residents, serving as a workforce for Johannesburg. It experienced civil unrest during the Apartheid regime. There were serious riots in 1976, sparked by a ruling that Afrikaans be used in African schools there; the riots were violently suppressed, with 176 striking students killed and more than 1,000 injured. Reforms followed, but riots flared up again in 1985 and continued until the first multiracial elections were held in April 1994.

In 2010, South Africa's oldest township hosted the FIFA Soccer World Cup final and the attention of more than a billion soccer spectators from all over the world was focused on Soweto.

Oh, but I have gone way, yes years ahead of myself. Let me start over. Come with me and experience chapters of my life that read like fiction. Oh, how I wished, many a time, that I could have had a commercial break from the tears, the heartbreak and even from the attendance of too many funerals. Aha! I did get a break for a short while when the rainbow nation was born. Unfortunately, today, the funerals are just as frequent but this time, the perpetrators are no longer the police of the Apartheid government, oh no, they have been replaced by HIV/AIDs, gangs and drugs. What is heart-breaking, tragic and totally unacceptable to me, in memory of my dear father and my beloved brother, is the fact that there are funerals as a result of xenophobia here in South Africa where, on occasion, African brother has turned against African brother.

Aha, now back to the beginning.

CHAPTER ONE

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MY FATHER, MY HERO

I

was excited at the prospects of learning Geography. The teacher opened the first lesson by telling us to let our minds wander through the lands we would be learning about. To make his invitation even more succinctly, he pointed at a map of Africa with his ruler. There would be rivers, lakes, and seas to cross and oceans to traverse. There would be mountains to climb and slippery slopes that even the most ardent climber would surely slip down occasionally, their spiral downhill only broken by footholds that miraculously appear at the right time and in the right places.

I was in Grade 9 at the time, more particularly, Teacher Phatudi’s class. A man with a vivid imagination, he took us, without passports or preparation, into faraway lands. He talked of a land where the South African Defence Force (SADF) were non-actors though that was beyond our imagination. When the bell rang to indicate the end of the class period, most of us were amazed to find ourselves still seated on our hardwood seats, never having moved an inch and yet in our minds, we had travelled beyond our borders to a land he said had once been called Tanganyika but was now politically correctly so, referred to as Tanzania.

All the way home, my friends, Jeanette, Mamothobi and I talked of Tanzania and what we had learned about it. Teacher Phatudi had told us that Tanzania borders Kenya and Uganda and is interlinked by Lake Victoria and Rwanda, across Lake Kivu. How I longed to visit that land that was home to Africa’s highest mountain peak, Mt. Kilimanjaro. Where tea and coffee were not simply drunk out of china cups but where they grew as ‘cash crops’, according to my teacher, on African-owned lands. How I longed to go to the island of Zanzibar, which had joined Tanganyika, hence, its name change to Tanzania. I loved the name, perhaps because it rhymed with Azania.

My friends, Jeanette, Mamothobi and I stopped on the way home and put our bags on a green patch of grass. We played Hopscotch, a childhood game in which you throw a stone into a block, hop, skip and jump. If the stone falls outside the allotted block or if you step on a line as you hop, skip or jump, then you are out and the next person has a turn.

In a little while, all that had featured in school was relegated to the backs of our minds as we played and laughed at each other’s antics. We had not a care in the world. Indeed, seeing a psychiatrist or child psychologist was, in those days, as rare as finding a chicken with teeth.

We knew it was time to go home when the hunger pangs could no longer be ignored. As soon as I walked in the door, I felt something was not quite right. Gogo, my grandma, who would normally be in the kitchen, bent over a pot of Samp, was seated in what we referred to as the living room. I later learned that it is called a passageway or a corridor. She and my mother were speaking in hushed tones as if to keep a secret from the neighbours. I eavesdropped without wanting to and what I overheard chilled my bones despite the Johannesburg warm, extremely warm weather.

I knew I had not heard them right when they said that my father, my beloved father, had left for Tanzania. Could the lure of growing tea and coffee on his own plantation be the reason he had left in a hurry? Maybe it was the potential of fishing in the famous Lake Victoria. Why my father, my beloved dad, could have left without telling me was beyond my comprehension. Then again why Tanzania? What if Teacher Phatudi had taught about Soviet Russia or Morocco? Might my dad have gone to one of them? At the time, I believed so.

I was to learn later that there are times when choices are limited and one does what they have to do. My father may have chosen to leave South Africa but only because he found himself, as they say, between a rock and a hard place. I would later find out that Tanzania provided a safe haven for our freedom fighters.

So what freedom was my dad fighting for? Who was he fighting against and who was fighting with him? To a young child, these questions were as mythical as why a rainbow streaks the sky after it rains or whether the clouds are as soft to the touch as they appear to be?

In my heart I was free-spirited. You see, I was the apple of my dad’s eye and in my grandmother’s eyes, I could do no wrong. Even when I didn’t feel like doing my homework and my mother got tough with me, grandma would, seemingly, side with me but then cajole me into doing the teacher’s assignment. This is how she did it; she would take me onto her lap and prophesy into my life in her sing-song voice,

My little one, one day you will be a leader in this country. You are destined for great things, but my child, the only way to have a great future is to invent it... study hard.

In retrospect, my parents and my grandma were all of the same minds. They believed, unlikely as it seemed at the time, that South Africa would one day be free. That racial segregation, what’s that? would one day be relegated to our history books. That black people would determine the political future of our country, run enterprises and bring equality for its entire people. Really? Yes, and all peoples would walk, drive and live without the dreaded passbooks.

There were many who scoffed at such high ideals and unrealistic dreams but as my mother would later tell me, my father in his own words often told her:

What you seek is seeking you. If we seek freedom, we shall find that it is also seeking us. I cannot stop because I dream of freedom, if not for us, for our children and our children’s children.

My mother was aware of the sacrifice that would entail but you cannot stop a man’s dreams even if it means giving up yours of having your husband by your side, your children’s father being present in their lives to see them grow and have someone to grow old with.

And so my father went to Tanzania, the land of my geography studies. It is said that there were other South Africans there. They were graciously hosted by the legendary leader, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere. Among its people, they found a home away from home where thankfully there was no xenophobia. That would have been tricky for where else would they have gone if their own African brothers had turned them away? Certainly not to Europe because that was who was oppressing them at home. Maybe the Middle East? Well, language would have been one barrier and religious faith would have been another unless, of course, they were willing to convert to Islam. The Far East was exactly that, far! So, they settled for the African continent, some of them going as far as Libya where Muammar Gaddafi is said to have been a host as gracious as Nyerere.

Back to my dad. He stayed in Tanzania for several years and I believe, as was the case with all those freedom fighters in exile, they plotted and planned under tremendous pressure, ways to free South Africa from the oppressive and repressive Apartheid government.

One day I came from school, having stopped on the way with my dear friends, put our schoolbags on the patch of green grass and played our regular game of hopscotch, and as usual, only driven home by hunger pangs.

However, upon reaching home, there was an eerie silence when I walked in. There was no smoke twirling