This is a piece I did for the Oprah Magazine (SA). It was a pleasure to remember the happy days of innocence.
MEMORIES MAKETH WOMAN
If wishes were horses I would gallop back to my formative years and relive those December festivities that contributed positively in the making of the woman that I am becoming. My playground was the village field where I played to my hearts content. I jumped rope braided with kikuyu grass. My friends and I played “three tin”, a game of ducking a ball and stacking the tins into a little tower. Tins were recycled from food stuff. I think we were green before green became fashionable. I climbed trees in search of vitamin C filled guavas, peaches, oranges and black mulberries. I carried water from a natural well on my head using 25 litre containers.
Back then in a semi-rural Mpumuza village in KwaZulu Natal just outside Pietermaritzburg only one house had television. Today kids get a Blackberry as their present, but back in the 80’s a blackberry to me meant a black juicy berry fruit that was in abundance in the trees of Nodwengu, a grumpy old man in my village. My friends and I used to stealthy climb his trees pick the berries. My mother always knew I had been feeding off mulberries because my dress and my tongue would be black from the juice.
Peach mobile adverts that I see today, remind me of juicy peaches I used pick from Manzuza’s yard. I would eat them until my stomach complained from Vitamin C overload. Since Manzuza was an old lady, my friends and I would do chores for her and in return she would let us pick as many peaches as we wanted. The kinds of fruits that I now seem to only get in mini-markets were in abundance in the village. There certainly was no money for fat laden take-aways and fast food.
A farm that was kilometers away from my village had sugarcane and oranges. During school holidays my friends and I would walk there to pick on leftover sugarcane after the harvest. We would come back with bundles of sweet juicy sugar cane and oranges. I learnt my letters using “Zulu mottos”, a glucose filled kind of candy with phrases written on them. I would be allowed to eat them only after reading the phrase correctly. It made learning sweet, literally. My intake of processed sugar was sort of minimal though, because almost everything I ate came straight from the soil. Christmas day however is another story, me and my friends used to go from house to house getting sweets and biscuits. We would be dressed to the nines in “new” clothes some of which were bought from thrifty shops of course. Labels were not in then. The excitement was in the abundance of sweets shared in good company of friends.
Normally it was unheard of to have meat in a meal during a weekday. Maize meal was the stable food made as porridge in the morning for breakfast and phuthu with a vegetable relish at night for dinner. I love meat so I enjoyed weekends because we used to have meat if not on Saturday, it would be on a Sunday. On a meat day we would have curry and rice and for everyone who finished the plate there would be red or green jelly with custard. I loved the feel of jelly more than the taste. It was fascinating. My mother would stir jelly powder into warm water and then put the container in a cold natural brook at the edge of our house leaving it there to set overnight. By the next morning it would be set, shaking and ready to melt into our fascinated mouths. In my village, electricity was non-existent and in fact when I first came across it I was unnerved. I mean watching a kettle boiling water without firewood was a toss between magic and witchcraft.
December also meant I had time to play with my friends who were not attending school. Friends were central in the village because most of the games involved more than one person. We were authentic social beings in a way that was not manufactured like it is today. This is why I didn’t know any child back then who had anti-social disorders. On family gatherings children entertained everyone by singing and dancing. I think we knew very little of what it was to be self-conscious. We danced Zulu dance which is very physical and fun. Of course, like in any human circumstance we had clashes and fights that were sometimes incorporated into all the fun.
I remember once fighting with a girl who later became one of my best childhood friends. My sister and I had been watching her and her many cousins skipping the rope. One of them skipped while two held the rope from each end and others waited for their turns in the queue. We joined the line and waited our turn; if you missed a step you would have to hold the rope, relieving whoever held it to have their turn. My turn came and in the middle of the chant I missed a step but I was not about to admit to it, never minding that all of them had noticed. I screamed denial while they screamed faulty step. The argument led into a full fist fight between us causing screams of delight from everyone. We made up and became best friends afterwards.
Now, news reports of children getting diseases of lifestyle like diabetes because of inactivity are disturbing to me. Television has turned some of them into depressed potato couches. When I hear that holidays have become a time of melancholy and suicides, I think back to my childhood and I see a lot of goodness that is still relevant in creating happy childhood memories for children today. We had calming games like pottery making. I learnt basic pottery not as a trendy in-thing to do but as part of what my friends use to do for fun. We would walk to a nearby edabe – a swamp to collect clay that was plentiful. We molded pots, miniature animals like cows and goats. Of course we never got to put them through the firing process like sophisticated art pottery studios do. Sun rays did the job of drying out our works of art.
There is this assumption that the past was all doom and gloom which to some extent it was but there was a ton of fun too. I choose the fun. I think I may have been deprived of a lot of privileges back then but I learnt to have fun with the little that I had. I recently bumped into Nonhlanhla, a girl who was my best friend in my first year of school. We spent more than four hours in a restaurant laughing and reminiscing. We had to tell our waiter who was impatiently hovering around our table that we were catching up on 20 years of life. As we parted ways, I thought to myself, the only thing I would change about my childhood is apartheid. The games, the food and the friends can stay as they were because they made me a healthy happy little girl who has grown in a woman I quite like.
