Archive for the ‘South Africa’ Category

Look Out, Advice Columnists. You Never Met My Mother-in-Law.

May 12, 2012

This is a portrait I painted of my mother-in-law last year.

If we were ever to levy a special tax on advice columnists, the money should go to mothers-in-law. According to the advice-seekers, the only thing harder than planning a wedding, making your marriage work or raising kids is keeping your mother-in-law at bay. Flushed with her own success at raising your spouse, there is no aspect of your household immune to her interference.

But if everyone had a mother-in-law like mine, the advice columnists would be out of business.

I actually didn’t meet my mother-in-law, Anita, until a few days before my husband, Lala, proposed. I was the first girlfriend he had ever brought home (not for lack of candidates over the years), and it wasn’t a matter of heading across town or even across the country. I had just made my first-ever transatlantic flight and it was my first time in my husband’s native South Africa. His mom and dad have lived in a house in Soweto, outside Johannesburg, for almost thirty years.

While Lala and his father lifted suitcases out of the trunk, I went in the front door. I had waited four years to see my boyfriend’s childhood home. Anita was waiting in the living room. She hugged me before I could introduce myself.

Some people have trouble figuring out just how to address their in-laws. My husband’s parents have insisted on being “Mama” and “Papa” to me since before I ever walked into their house.

“Ah, my daughter,” Papa says when I sit next to him on the couch. “Thank you, my daughter,” Mama says when I hand her a plate.

Mealtime in her house always accounts for every family member. No-one is required to be home for dinner. But if you’re sleeping in the house, a full plate will be put aside for you, carefully covered, until you get home.

Some mothers-in-law are known for their iron grip on the kitchen. But when I visit South Africa, I get free rein, no questions asked, with my sisters-in-law leaning in to observe the process. My culinary free-for-alls there include but are not limited to spaghetti, pancakes for supper and Thanksgiving dinner, all of which had never been served to the household before.

Not that Mama hasn’t taught me a thing or two. I never learned the best way to separate a chicken drumstick from the thigh until she showed me. She finds me, an American child of an electric dryer, at the clothes-lines behind the house. Cotton and denim that wrinkles and wads in my hands submit to her immediately, hanging like breeze-kissed pennants of cleanliness with a few expert clips of the clothes-pins (or pegs, as they’re called there).

Some mothers-in-law seem to feel that every moment you are not pregnant with their grandchild is wasted. But Mama, herself a mother of six, offers no comment on the issue.  Throughout the years, Papa has kept mostly to one comment.

“One day,” he says, “God will bless you.”

I feel a special bond with Mama because in the Mabaso household, we’re both makoti, the bride. In my husband’s culture, the bride is not a role that finishes on your wedding day – it’s a lifelong mantle of duty and respect. She became makoti when she married Papa in the early seventies. Since Lala has four sisters (three married with their own children) and an unmarried brother, I am the only makoti of my generation in the Mabaso household.

Not that the neighbors are willing to believe it.

One night, while I chatted with Papa in front of the TV, Mama burst out in chuckles.

“My friends asked me, who is that white woman at your house?” she said. Her friends had decided I was a visiting co-worker of Lala’s.

“I told them, it is my daughter,” Mama laughed.

Mama has never failed to treat me like her own daughter, besides taking me firmly in hand in matters of laundry. During my first visit to South Africa, I quickly came down with a nasty cold, probably caught on the long flight. I was up coughing in the middle of the night, and she appeared in the dark with a mug of tea.

Mama has a magic in her fingers that not even her grown daughters can match. Look at the head-wrap I am wearing in this photo with Lala’s sister Nthabiseng. She arranged it with a few bobby pins in a matter of seconds. I wish I could wear it every week.

This is from a wedding in Soweto last year. Female guests often put on traditional African garb to celebrate. Since we’re both Tsonga brides, I had the honor of wearing Mama’s own wedding outfit. (Ntabiseng married a Zulu man, so her outfit is different. Our new nephew’s birth is weeks away).

Mama and Papa have stories that should never be lost. Lala was born in 1982, a time when violence and mass protests against South Africa’s apartheid regime roiled the black townships surrounding Johannesburg. Afrikaner tanks patrolled the neighborhood where my husband walked to preschool.

In the 70’s, Mama and Papa had harrowing experiences typical of a generation of black South Africans.

Mama and Papa, around the time they got married.

Every black citizen who wanted to move beyond their designated township was required to carry a passbook, known as a dom pas, that authorized his or her presence in the area. In Afrikaans, according to my husband, dom means “dumb” or “fool”.  Blacks had to obtain special living permits, and their movements outside their own neighborhoods, into areas reserved for whites, were determined by their employers, whose dom pas stamps authorized workers’ presence in the company’s city. Anyone white could ask for it at any time. If you didn’t have it, you were arrested.

Now, the musty dom pas books are stashed in drawers like old tax forms (Mama and Papa never throw anything away).

Before the late eighties, if the city you were in didn’t match the city stamp on your dom pas, you were arrested. All employees were required to get a monthly signature in the dom pas from their employers. If the signature was missing, you were arrested. If the signature was made in the wrong page, you were arrested. If the signature was not made before seventh of the month, you were arrested.

Mama and Papa had plenty of experience with employer’s stamps. Papa, now retired, worked several jobs over the years, often as a welder, and Mama was a seamstress until her retirement last year. Mama’s name is misspelled in her book. This was very common. There was no point in trying to get it fixed. It was just one more reminder of what a second-class citizen you were.

“Permitted to remain in the prescribed area….” A page from the dom pas Mama had in the 70′s and 80′s.

Papa was arrested in Germiston in 1976: his employer had suddenly moved operations there from Johannesburg without issuing him a new dom pas. He was stopped and taken right off the street, but released with a warning when his employer vouched for his presence in the city.

Another of Papa’s arrests had to have been as harrowing for Mama as it was for him.

In 1975, with the three children they had at the time staying with relatives, Mama and Papa took the risk of renting a room in Pimville without getting a permit to live there.

These permits cost R2.50 per year, Papa explained. At the time, that was more than many black families could afford. Today, one US dollar is worth approximately seven rands. In the mid-1980s, Papa made R140 per week working Monday through Saturday.

One morning at 4am, they woke up to pounding at the door. Mama dashed to the wardrobe and hid herself inside. When Papa opened the door, police officers interrogated him.

“Where’s your permit?” they demanded. He had none.

“Where is your wife?” He said he didn’t know where she was. Papa was determined to go calmly and gave no sign that anyone else was hiding there. The wardrobe wasn’t searched. He was forced into the police car and taken to jail.

“What did you do?” I asked Mama breathlessly.

“I went to work,” she said. She hid until everything was quiet, and the next morning, she had no choice but to head to work as usual. Phones were scarce. If she went to the police to ask where Papa was, she would have been immediately arrested as well. She couldn’t ask any neighbors – she knew that someone in the neighborhood had reported them to the police, but had no way of knowing who.

Papa spent the rest of the night and the next day in jail. R10 was the usual fee for bail.

“At that time, ten rands was scarce,” he said.

All Mama could do was wonder and wait. Papa returned that evening, unharmed. He had been questioned, and then the judge shocked him by releasing him, with strict orders not to tell any of his neighbors how leniently he had been treated.

I asked Papa if would have predicted the end of Apartheid. At the time, “I didn’t think it would ever be different,” he said.

I asked Mama what it was like, trying to raise her family at that time.  I expected something profound on keeping a family intact under terrible oppression. She surprised me by side-stepping the question.

She explained that Papa’s family wanted them to take the children and move back to the rural eastern province, near today’s Kruger Park, where she and Papa grew up. But she wanted to stay in Johannesburg so that she could keep working, not leave for a quiet, traditional life the countryside.

“I didn’t want to sit in Bushbuck Ridge,” she said.

Mama lived through terrifying times, but her concerns were the same as any working woman. Despite the incredible gulf between our experiences, we are not such different women, after all.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mama!

Mama and I outside Lala’s childhood home in Soweto. (We both like purple.)

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Posted in Interviews, South Africa, The Joys of Marriage | 11 Comments »

The Linguist’s Comeuppance

August 11, 2011

Take that, American linguaphiles.

Without even leaving her home country, my husband Lala’s little niece Manqoba is already presenting a challenge to my American relatives. I can see the anxiety in family members’ eyes when we talk about Lala’s rambunctious nthukhulu.

“Man-koba? Is that it?” They say hopefully.

Manqoba’s mother and father are Nthabiseng and Mandlakayise. Her name, which means “victor”, is Zulu.

I’m a girl who was called “the Dictionary” in elementary school. All my life, people have been asking me, “is that a word?” “how do you spell it?” and “what does that word mean?” Not only am I a writer. I’m sort of an English whiz who chased my etymological obsession through five years of Latin. I never studied for school vocabulary tests. I was born with spell-check in my head. I was one smart cookie.

But when I visited my husband’s family home, not only was I surrounded by toddlers who speak three or four languages without even trying; I was reduced to learning letter sounds. Papa (Lala’s father Josiah, a Tsonga man whose name is really Matshikete) gave me a new education on “c”, “q”, and “x”.  Zulu and Tsonga are both frequently spoken at the Mabaso household, and “x”, already shifty enough when it comes to American usage (“fox”, “xylophone”, or even the phonetic pandemonium of a Philadelphia restaurant called Xochitl) has a whole other life in South African languages. In Tsonga, “x” is a soothing “sh” sound. But in Zulu, it’s a click. Actually, each of the letters I mentioned above has its own unique click sound.

Papa taught me the difference. He bounced his tongue off of the highest part of his palette, and a sound like the clop of a horse hoof on cement resounded throughout the house. That click is a Zulu “q”, as in “Manqoba”. To make a Zulu “c”, bounce the tip of our tongue off the very top of your palate, just behind your front teeth, like a “tsk tsk” sound. Try it: cela means “ask”. To make an “x” sound, bounce the side of your tongue off the inside of your teeth on one side, like the sound you’d use to encourage a horse.  Try it: ixoxo, gloriously, means “frog” (and that “i” makes an “ee” sound).

Including English, South Africa has eleven official languages. Many are related: for example, speakers of Zulu, Xhosa (practice your “x”) and Ndebele can often understand each other, because their languages have similar origin. People who speak Setswana or Sotho (“sue-too”) dialects have common ground in a second language group.

“Please please teach me how to speak Venda, people,” says our nephew Karabo on Facebook. Comments imply that there may be a girl involved. Venda belongs to a third language group, and it’s one of the few languages in Johannesburg that my husband can’t understand. My husband’s home language, Tsonga, belongs to a fourth category, which has its roots in the Shangaan people’s Xishangana, though it’s influenced by the Zulu group.

For a few mornings, I proudly greeted my in-laws with avuxeni, (practice your Tsonga “x”) meaning “morning” or, as a greeting, “good morning”. Then one day Lala pulled me aside and quietly explained that dumela would be more appropriate for his mother, whose own family language is actually of the Sotho grouping, not the Shangaan. Another appropriate Sotho greeting is okayi  (which, depending on context, means “where are you?” or “how are you doing?”), to which one responds, keteng (“I’m fine”).  When addressing more than one person, the greeting becomes lekayi – though this is also used to address a single person to whom you want to show respect, like a family elder.

Meanwhile, Lala’s Zulu brother-in-law, Mandlakayise (Mandla for short), was teaching me Zulu greetings, which vary according to whether you’re addressing one person or many: sawubona for one becomes sanbonani  for more than one – unless you want to use a different greeting.

I decided to practice when a nice little boy on his way home from school said “hello” as he passed us in the street.

“Ninjani!” I replied. “Is that right?” I whispered to Lala.

“Sort of,” he said encouragingly. “You have the right idea. But ninjani is Zulu and he’s actually Sotho. And really, ninjani  means ‘hello to all of you’.”

“How do you know he’s not Zulu?”

“His school uniform. They speak Sotho in that school.”

“So what should I have said?”

“Well, if he was Zulu it would be unjani  – that’s the casual version. If you want to be correct, though, it’d be gunjani to say hello to one person.”

“But that kid wasn’t even Zulu!”

“Anyway, he knew what you meant. Good job, babe.”

Right.

A family’s home language is determined by its patriarch, so I decided to focus on my Tsonga vocabulary, even though Tsonga is not one of the languages primarily spoken in  my in-laws’ home neighborhood of Soweto, outside Johannesburg.

Though Tsonga lacks the “click” sounds which, to many Americans, would typify an African language, many of its words are gorgeous multisyllabic journeys which mash all kinds of consonants together in the most cavalier way, like lwandlenkulu, which undulates as smoothly as the ocean it describes, or Nhlampfi, meaning “fish”. Xinghezi means “English” and xinyenyana means “bird”.

I was pleased to have mastered this, and then was baffled for an entire afternoon as Mandla and Nthabiseng’s kids repeatedly peeked out the front door and then surged back through the living room screaming “ijuba! IJUBA!!” It’s Zulu for pigeon, I learned, like the one that was roosting above the front porch.

A common Tsonga sound can baffle most English-speakers. How would you say nhlekani, meaning “afternoon”, or, as a greeting, “good afternoon”? That “hl” sound can be a demon for non-native speakers. Arch your tongue and put the tip of it against the back of your front teeth, ready to make an “L” sound. Blow gently out of your mouth, around the sides of your tongue, and let the air roll in to the “L”.

Now you can say Nelson Mandela’s real name. He is Xhosa, and Nelson is the name a white elementary school teacher once assigned him, because she couldn’t pronounce his real name: Rolihlahla. By the way, make that “r” a guttural, back-of-the-throat “h”, kind of like the sound we make when we imitate a cat’s hiss. As perhaps the best-chosen name of all time, literally translated, Rolihlahla means “one who shakes the branches of the tree”, or one who alters the established order.

My Tsonga vocabulary might please my father-in-law, but out and about in Johannesburg, I was surrounded mostly by Zulu or Sotho speakers. At stores and restaurants, I constantly chickened out, saying “thank you” instead of “ngiyabonga” or “ke ale boga” because I didn’t know which language to use for which individual – or if they belonged to a tribe whose language I hadn’t even heard of.

Even offering a drink to workers re-doing my in-laws’ ceiling proved challenging. They stared at me curiously as I tried English, Zulu, Sotho and Tsonga to ask them if they wanted water… manzi… metzi… mati?  Finally I went to the kitchen and returned, hoisting a glass of water in my hand. I am not sure if I had the wrong languages altogether or if my pronunciation was so bad they couldn’t understand me. Maybe the prospect of a white American girl traipsing unheralded into a Soweto household to interrupt their work was overtly bizarre. Or maybe they just weren’t thirsty.

I picked up several words around the house, mostly courtesy of the kids, who demanded a lot of isinkwa (bread) and often endured “vala!” at high volumes from Papa, demanding that they close the door.

Lala and I set out on a city-wide search for African language books that catered to English-speakers. There were African-language books teaching Afrikaans (one of the official eleven, a variant of 17th-century Dutch spoken by most white South Africans) and Afrikaans books teaching English. We searched street stalls, malls, bookstores and school supply outlets for English books teaching Zulu, Sotho or Tsonga.

Even official college-supply staffers were nonplussed at best, irritated at worst.

“We don’t have that kind of book,” they said. “I never heard of anything like that.”

One kind staffer took pity on us, though she warned that she didn’t think any English-to-Zulu/Sotho books existed. She waved us behind the counter to the stacks of the school-supply center. As long as we left our backpacks at the register, we were free to comb the shelves ourselves.

We worked our way up and down the rows for a long time. I thumbed fruitlessly through volumes of African poetry and literature, and Afrikaans workbooks, searching for a title, any title, in English.

“Lala!” I cried at last. I seized a large, thin book from the elementary shelves.

It was “My Zulu Word Book”. It was full of lists of Zulu words opposite lists of English words. Jackpot. After a further search, with the renewed help of the slightly sheepish employee, we also found “Say It In Zulu” for grown-ups.

But it was the kids’ book that really caught my fancy, because of the picture on its cover. A terrified little white girl in a yellow blouse and hair-ribbon opens a box with rats, ticks, roaches, mosquitoes, fleas, spiders and bees bursting out of it. Whether this is supposed to offer some sort of commentary on what happens to white girls who want to learn Zulu is anybody’s guess.

“Can you stop that?” my husband mumbled one night from his pillow. Without realizing it, I had been staring into the dark, clicking my tongue to make the Zulu “q”, “x”, and “c”, over and over again. I’m back in the US now, returning with relief to the single language that got me a reputation as a pretty smart chick – until I met my niece Manqoba and the natural-born linguists of the Rainbow Nation.

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The Pear Brigade Meets the Steakhouse

February 16, 2011

This is the fourth post of a series on a visit to my South African in-laws. Check out earlier installments here, here and here. 

We are all going out for dinner.

With Mama, Papa, the Pear Brigade, and Njabulo and Manqoba’s teenage half-brother Wandile (Wan-dee-lay) home from school, only a portion of the household has arrived. Later, with the appearance of Aus’Nthabi and her husband Mandla (Manqoba and Njabulo’s parents), Abu’Thabo and Lala’s cousin/sister Lerato, the party is deemed sufficient to head for a local family restaurant. We pile into three cars and set off into a lingering thunderstorm, Lala driving Mama, Lerato and me. True to form for most individuals who decline to give directions and instruct one to “just follow us,” Mandla and Thabo immediately set off at top speed, weaving through traffic until our car is hopelessly lost. Of course, no-one has his cell phone on.

After pulling into the wrong mall by mistake and wheedling two suspicious locals to trade Lala six rands for a dollar so we can pay to exit the garage, Nthabi calls Lerato’s cell. Mandla has turned back to find us.

So we arrive at Spur Steakhouse together. “Spur-rr-rr,” Lerato laughs, mimicking my American accent. Spur is a popular restaurant chain. It has a Native American motif, complete with massive faux totem poles. A cherubic boy in moccasins and a feather headdress is labeled “Flying Eagle” on the menu. It occurs to me that this is the South African equivalent of Outback Steakhouse, suburban America’s cheesy, preposterously caloric homage to Crocodile Dundee. We all like to pretend we’re in the wilds of some other country before we tuck into our steak.

Once Lala’s niece, Neo’s mother Ntsako, arrives, we number 13 in all. The Pear Brigade falls immediately upon the kids’ placemats and crayons which must be distributed to hungry youngsters the world over. While we wait for our dinners, Ntsako’s younger sister Takatso calls, and Ntsako shows us pictures of their one-year-old sister, Musa. It’s hard to hear Takatso on the phone. “That’s ok,” she says. “No-one can ever hear anything when Manqoba is around.”

On my left, Papa orders a steak, and on my right, Lala orders a braai platter. I know that a braai (roll that “r”!) is what Americans call a BBQ, and I know that “chips” are French fries and that they’re pronounced “cheeps.” But what, I whisper to Lala, is the dish called “Monkey Gland Rump”?

“There’s definitely a different language here when it comes to steaks,” Lala shrugs, “but I don’t think it’s really a monkey’s gland.” I try to play it safe with a cheeseburger and cheeps, but I learn that there is a different language when it comes to burgers, too. “Just cheese, please,” apparently means “cheese and about a quarter cup of BBQ sauce.” I notice that other dinners of all descriptions seem similarly drenched. “They put BBQ sauce on everything,” Lala says with some asperity. “It’s how it is here.”

As we all dig in, the children exhaust the last vestiges of their patience, lose interest in the crayons and the food, and worm their way under the table (Njabulo extricating himself from his booster seat with admirable skill), eventually encompassing full laps of the restaurant in their explorations. In what is possibly the worst idea in all of human civilization, someone brings three balloons on foot-long plastic sticks to the table.

“Balloons!” three piping cries of ecstasy erupt. The brigade immediately reclaims their seats and commences whacking their balloons back and forth to the full ratios of the sticks. Since people cannot eat steak with balloons buffeting their faces, the balloons are quickly confiscated and placed under the table, which drives the brigade back underground to the tolerant jungle-gym of ten adults’ legs.

They resurface when the wait staff demonstrates that the humiliation of a deafening public round of “Happy Birthday” by a round of strangers is a phenomenon not limited to the northern hemisphere. Papa gets a dish of ice cream with a lit sparkler in it, and the last time anyone’s jaw dropped as far as Manqoba’s, the Heavenly Host was appearing to Bethlehem’s shepherds.

The family lingers late over ice cream and then carries the sleepy children out the cars. Once home, I say to Nthabi that the kids must be tired, being out so late. She seems uninterested in the sentiment, perhaps because she’s so tired herself. Or, a small, worried voice inside me suggests, the brigade is usually allowed to continue its antics until after 10pm.

Lala and I climb into bed ourselves. Down the hall, the sight of her pajamas has seared Manqoba into wakefulness, and her howls at the injustice shake every corner of the house. “Thank God for crèche,” Lala says as sleep claims us.

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The Pear Brigade

February 13, 2011

This is the third post of a series on a visit to my South African in-laws. Find additional installments in the “South Africa” category.

Despite stout resolutions to stay awake until the proper Jo’burg bedtime, after arriving in Diepkloof, I find that I literally cannot keep my eyes open. It’s a mark of my in-laws’ hospitality that they’ve given us a room to ourselves in a house with four bedrooms and more than ten people. Our bedroom has been decorated with a bright duvet and a framed picture from our wedding. I’m dimly aware of Lala flopping down beside me. Later, a shrieking tumble of voices bursts in, chided by Papa and swept from the room just as suddenly. Creche must be over. How many kids do live here, I wonder before I am unconscious again. It’s something Lala never seemed clear about – with one brother and four sisters, his collection of nieces and nephews is always being augmented, and he took the attitude that we’d be able to count and sort them when we arrived. No point in trying to keep track of these things at long range.

My eyes pop open. Sunshine streams through the lacy beige curtains and the effervescent pounding of kwaito, a kind of South African house music, filters in on the breeze through the open windows. If my life depended on it, I could not tell you what time it is. I grope for my watch and squint at the Roman numerals, turning the watch this way and that as if I’ve never learned to tell time. I have no idea if it says 3:50pm or 10:20am.

Finally, I decide the sun looks afternoonish. I wonder who else makes up the family household, and we open the bedroom door.

Some sixth sense of adult awakening means that the question of the underage population of the house is immediately answered. Three small, brown, close-shaved heads snap to attention, and the biggest one throws her arms around my waist before I can blink. I recognize Neo (pronounced “Neh-woe”, meaning “gift” in Sotho, forget about Keanu), Lala’s great-niece. The other two are probably her first cousins once removed (not that that matters).

“What are your names?” I cry, though the family resemblances have already sorted them out pretty well. The younger two may have been born after our last visit, but they look astonishingly like Mandla, husband to Lala’s sister Nthabi. Perhaps it’s the language barrier, but instead of saying their names, they hold up configurations of fingers and begin to squeal numbers.

“THREE! THREE!” says Njabulo, holding up two fingers. “Three! Three! Three!” his sister Manqoba also shrieks, with three fingers to match. “FIVE! Five, five!” Neo screams, which I know to be a blatant lie, because she was one month old when we last saw her four years ago. Does anyone, anywhere, ever want to share their real age?

The truth is that Njabulo (“n-jah-bool-oh”) is two, his sister Manqoba (the “q” in her name pronounced with a resonant Zulu click high on the palate) is three and a half, and their cousin Neo will really be five in less than a year. I give them a board book about hippos counting to ten, in which the beasts jump, skate, and perhaps most improbably, drive bumper cars.

“One, two, three, five, six, seven, nine, eight, ten, four!” Neo stabs her fingers over the pictures.

“Pig.” says Njabulo. “Pig!”

“Hippopotamus,” I say. “But they do look a little like pigs. Mfuvu.” I try the Tsonga word for hippo.

“Mfuvu!” Neo answers. Njabulo just looks at me suspiciously. Perhaps it’s just the difficulty of coming home from creche one day to an American in his kitchen, or perhaps it’s just that I forgot his father, and therefore he, are actually Zulu, not Tsonga like my husband.

I get a pear from the fridge and the poor mfuvus are forgotten. Untutored in the household’s rules of survival, I allow the pear in my hand to reach the level of the kids’ faces. Quick as a chameleon snatching a fly, Neo sinks her pearly little teeth in, goading, if possible, an even sharper interest in the pear from her cousins. I finish most of the pear, but before I can reach the trashcan, a small hand seizes the juicy core. As they pass the rapidly shrinking core back and forth, I think of cows skeletonized in the Amazon river.

Still sporting the hair that comes with crossing half the globe in one day, I take interest in the immaculate bathtub. During my bath, there is a small commotion in the hall, and “One Hippo Hops” shoots in under the crack of the door.

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How To Become a Grandmother at 27

February 12, 2011

This is the second post of a series on a visit to my South African in-laws. Find additional installments in the “South Africa” category.

Let’s be clear: I don’t have any children. And I used to have only one mother, one father, and one brother. When I married into an African  family, I didn’t know just how much my immediate family was about to expand.

“Abuti” means brother in Sotho (pronounced “Sue-too”), one of the languages primarily spoken in Johannesburg. “Abuti” is often shortened to “abu” and added to the name of your brother. “Ausi” means sister and is used the same way. After our transatlantic flight, we are reunited past customs with Aus’Nthabi, Abu’Thabo and Papa (Lala’s father Josiah). The Philadelphia autumn is worlds away as we head into a beautiful summer morning and pack ourselves and our luggage into two small cars. Lala rides with Papa and Aus’Nthabi, and I rode with Abu’Thabo, hurtling onto the left side of the highway.

As we pull up to Lala’s childhood home in Diepkloof, a neighborhood of the famous Soweto district of Johannesburg, Papa shoos me away from the luggage, and I step in the front door. My in-laws’ one-floor house is immaculate, but not because we are arriving. It is a house where everyone scours the bathtub with cleaner after he or she uses it – every time.  As our arrival brings the population of the house up to eight adults, it may be the world’s cleanest bathtub.

The house smells faintly of detergent and fresh produce. The only signs of disorder are the hurricanes of scribbles on the walls of the single hallway, which, like cave art, hint at a different way of life – one which would begin at about 3 o’clock, when the kids would come home from daycare (“crèche”). Lala’s mother Anita welcomes me at the door. She’s thin from a recent illness, but her beauty is still striking – it’s where Lala got his handsome eyes.

When I was growing up, I always understood the boundaries between family members. While extended family was much loved, distinctions between parents and grandparents, parents and aunts or uncles, and even first and second cousins were observed, and the only time the entire family might be together was Christmas.

Lala has five siblings, who, though they maintain their own houses and growing families, come and go at will in their childhood home. There is never any question of invitations, or of there being enough room for any family who wants to spend the weekend. Now stick with me. Your father’s sisters are your aunts, but your mother’s sisters are not; they are extra mothers. Your mother’s or father’s brother is your uncle (malume, “mah-loom-ay”), and his children are your cousins (if you want to be picky about defining things like that), but your maternal aunt’s kids are not your cousins; they’re your siblings. Hence Anita’s sister Maki is not our aunt, but one of several mothers to the nieces and nephews by birth and marriage of two generations. Mama Maki’s daughter Boitumelo is not Lala’s cousin, but his sister. Got it?

Lala became an uncle at five years old, when his oldest sister Priscilla had the first of her three daughters, Ntsako.  Ntasko grew up in her grandparents’ house like a sister to Lala. You might think that being an uncle at five years old is impressive, but Lala’s youngest sister, Puseletso, was an aunt from birth. Ntsako was older than her infant aunt Puseletso by about three years. To the young Puseletso’s chagrin, as she, Lala, and Ntsako grew up side by side, Ntsako’s seniority in age trumped any more traditional notions of an aunt’s seniority to her niece. When provoked by Ntsako, Puseletso’s screams of “but I am your aunt!” were to no avail. To me, who as a child was always interested in the distinction between first and second cousins, being your niece’s younger sister was a new one.

Lala and Puseletso became a great-uncle and great-aunt at 24 and 16, respectively, with the birth of Ntsako’s daughter Neo. At 11 years old, being an aunt to Neo is already old hat for aus’Priscilla’s second daughter, Takatso. And three years after she became a grandmother with Neo’s birth, aus’Priscilla and her husband welcomed their third daughter, Musa. It remains to be seen whether history will repeat itself, with Neo lording her age over her young aunt Musa.

In the US, there’s a big difference between your siblings and your in-laws. But to the Mabasos, the fact that I was born on the other side of the world – to a different continent, a different culture, and a different race – has no bearing on the relationships sealed by my marriage.  Anita and Josiah call me their daughter. My sisters-in-law introduce me as their sister.

The next generation is still in full swing. With Lala’s sister Nthabi, her husband Mandla and their kids staying with Anita and Josiah, the torrent of toddlers continues unabated today, which happens to be Papa’s 71st birthday.

The full implication of this inclusive attitude to family becomes clear to me when we all go out for Papa’s birthday dinner. “You know, you are now a grandmother,” Papa said, pointing at Neo, who was peering coyly at us through the beverage menus. I tried to explain that I was really the wife of Neo’s great-uncle. Papa just smiled at four generations around the same table. “Grandmother,” he insisted. “Yes, my baby. Grandmother.”

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Transatlantic

January 3, 2011

This is the first post of a series on a visit to my South African in-laws. Find additional installments in the “South Africa” category.

10:30am: It’s a brisk Halloween morning, and we’re chilly in the boarding passage. There will be no glowing, festive fall afternoon, kids in capes shuffling through the leaves – for us, at least.  Do not let the army of flight attendants, the service button, the cellophane-wrapped red blanket and the tiny, complimentary toothbrush fool you.  There is no coddling aboard a transatlantic flight. We’re flying nonstop from NYC to Johannesburg, South Africa, and no-one is going to help ease the transition.

12pm: I haven’t remembered anything I’ve forgotten, and I’m wearing my most comfortable pants. Soon after take-off, I realize that not only is the morning clearly over, but there will also be no afternoon.  I am feeling ready for a sandwich, but within an hour the flight attendants bring me steamed spinach and salmon. It is a forceful implication. We may still be over the mid-Atlantic coast, but we are now on Jo’burg time. Lala and I turn on the in-flight entertainment and watch “Toy Story 3” over our fish.  Whenever I eat an in-flight meal, I feel as if the airline has brainstormed the maximum amount of packaging which could accompany one meal. Each virgin cracker, cookie, and slice of cheese, each roll and dab of butter, each tiny medley of vegetables and bite of cake, adds to the pile of cellophane and plastic. Trapped in our seats by the dinners on our tray-tables, we almost disappear behind the wrappers before the flight attendants come around with trash bags.

7:30pm. A few hours after we boarded the plane, the lights in the cabin go out. It is an even clearer message than the baked fish and spinach at what I thought was noon; now, bizarrely, it is time to go to sleep. Due to the final throes of packing and cleaning, as well as a raging Halloween party next door, I had less than two hours’ sleep last night. But now, of course, with the noise of flight and several strangers reclining in their socks within two feet of me, sleep feels as far away as China.

8pm: “There’s Something About Mary.”

10pm: The flush in the airplane lavatory sounds like the water has punched a hole in the skin of the fuselage and the air at 33,000 feet is roaring in through the toilet.

10:30pm: “Glowering Boys, Often Shirtless”. Oops, I mean “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse.” It is determinedly dark in the plane, but whenever someone slides up a window, pure white sunshine blasts in. My eyes feel hungry for the light.

12:00am: Dammit, the tweezers and q-tips.

1:30am: To me, time on a transatlantic flight slows to the speed of continental drift. Lala, still upright in his seat, has covered himself completely with a red South African Airways blanket. It reminds me of the scene in “The Sixth Sense” when a haunted Haley Joel Osment flees his tent, only to return and see a specter sitting with the collapsed red blanket over its head. With my husband asleep, it’s the perfect chance to do something I rarely can: watch a movie with subtitles that is not kung fu.

2:00am: But “Coco Before Chanel” proves boring – or maybe it’s my state of mind. Lala wakes up ravenous and asks a flight attendant for something to eat. She brings a few cookies.  But the people sitting in front of us return to their seats from what we thought was a walk to the lavatory, and we hear the unmistakable crinkle of wrappers. The smell of cold roast beef wafts over us. It’s like blood in the water. Lala begs me to find a male attendant and use my “feminine wiles” to get food from him. I welcome a chance to leave my wrapper-strewn seat, and find an attendant behind the curtain at the back of the plane. The lights are on back there, the rushing whine of flight is less muted, and it’s refreshingly chilly.

“Hello, when is breakfast?” I ask.

“Four hours and feefty minutes,” he intones in steely, perfectly measured English. Clearly, from his perspective, there is nothing else to be said.

“Look, my husband is famished. Dinner was so long ago and I can’t fix him anything.” My eyes flicker over a mountain of sandwiches just behind another attendant, who watches with silent interest. They are obviously guarding the sandwiches back here, along with the light and the fresher air. They seem determined  to take me absolutely literally: the passenger asked us about breakfast, and we told her about breakfast. The heap of sandwiches five feet away could have nothing to do with satisfying her request for food. The male attendant and I lock eyes.

“Vegetable or meat?” he says at last, and I know I’ve won.

3:30am: Lala pushes up the window and the night is velvety black. He urges me to lean across him and see how bright the stars are. I feel the first seeds of acceptance that it is actually night-time. The flight attendants are on the move again, distributing sandwiches to those that are awake. We take our full share.

4:00am: I turn on my light and try to write in my notebook. I look back over the page, see that some of the words are missing random letters, and give up.

4:30am: My hair looks like a 13th-Century Scottish villager’s.

4:45am: Crap, I didn’t buy sun-block. Is it my imagination, or is the sky starting to seem cottony gray?

5:30am: My legs are like lead and my eyes are sandy, but the fellow sandwich-purloiner in front of me has been snoring since the last whiff of cold cuts. I envy his sleep with a true, burning covetousness that flouts the Ten Commandments.

5:15am: “Adam Sandler Croons in a Wig.” I mean, “The Wedding Singer.”

6:00am: A misty prism of color is appearing over the clouds. I feel like we’re flying towards the sun instead of seeing it rise.

6:30am: Who knows what new life forms have evolved since we were last on land?

7:30am: Breakfast is served in a landslide of wrappers. Afterwards, the successive lurches of heaviness in my chest and the pressure in my ears tell me the ground is getting closer. The Captain’s PA comes on; he hopes we’ve “ool hed a reasnible noight’s rist.”

8:30am: By the time we exit the plane, it looks as if a tornado full of blankets, cookie wrappers and headphones has struck the cabin. How could we have made such a mess confined mostly to our seats? On the ground, lavender jacarandas are blooming, the brown bulk of the mine dumps rear out of the townships, and sixteen hours after we left a cold Halloween in New York, Lala’s family is waiting for us in the African summer morning.

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