Posts Tagged ‘South Africa’

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.)

Tags:, , , ,
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.

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in South Africa | 14 Comments »

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.

Tags:, , , , , , ,
Posted in Journeys, South Africa | Leave a Comment »

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.

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in Journeys, South Africa | 1 Comment »

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.”

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Journeys, South Africa | 2 Comments »

Going Postal: It All Makes Sense

October 5, 2010

The co-worker sitting next to me was fixing his breakfast at the morning staff meeting. He took out one Tupperware full of peanut butter cereal puffs and one full of milk. He pried the lids from both, poured the milk on the cereal, replaced the cereal’s lid, and shook the container like a maraca.

“Don’t get cereal milk on me,” I said, moving my things just a little farther away.

“You’ll go postal, right?” he said as he dug in his spoon.

I work in the hospitality industry, but my coworker didn’t worry that I would go hostal. Despite centuries of atrocious acts committed by husbands or wives, no-one says Jack Torrance went spousal at the Overlook. If an oral hygienist had a meltdown, we wouldn’t say she’s gone dental. If a realtor has a tantrum, has he gone rental? No: they’ve all gone postal, and to me, this makes sense.

It’s more than the nosy comments from my present mail carrier on the days I happen to be home. “You join a book club or something?” “You’re not really gonna read all those books, are you.”

The number of books I order online is, of course, part of the postman’s continued livelihood, but it’s also none of his business.

There are also the endless trials of actually going to the post office. I don’t mean just waiting in an acres-long line at a center city location because two of about sixteen windows are intermittently in service. There’s the difficulty my husband and I have mailing packages to his parents.

“And what country is this going to?”

“South Africa. The address is already written on there.”

“Yes, but what country in Africa?”

When I, an apparent dunce, am not sure which envelope is the right one for international versus domestic or standard versus priority versus express, the worker behind the counter at one office helps by pointing at three nearly identical envelope racks and saying, “That one!” over and over again, a little louder and angrier each time.

Despite what I see as a history of surly and unreliable service, some postal workers exhibit enormous, even aggressive pride in their infallibility.

Once I sent a package that never arrived. I mentioned the lost package the next time I was at the counter of that office. The postal worker froze and looked at me the way Senate Republicans must look at Olympia Snowe when she votes for health care reform or a review of the prison system.

“The Postal Service. Does not. Lose. Packages.” She said.

I was feeling feisty and I flashed my gauntlet. “Well, this package was never delivered.”

“Did you ask the recipient if it arrived?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Well, that package was definitely delivered. That person lost it, and didn’t want to tell you, or else it just got buried on someone’s desk after it was delivered.” It was a bit much to assert that the USPS has never lost a single item, but implying that my friend was a disorganized liar was adding insult to injury. (Why, may I ask, does Netflix maintain a link to report “shipping problems” on its DVDs?)

I met a postal employee with similar assurance just last week, when I had to mail sensitive documents to a government office to obtain a new passport in my married name.

“I’m nervous about putting these documents in the mail,” I said at the counter. “I think I’d like a trackable, guaranteed overnight service.”

The postal worker looked at me as if I’d just asked her to babysit her infant godson, but demanded that she keep him helmeted in a padded room full of Nerf toys. Clearly she had caught the subtext of my request: I’ll give you a chance, but I really don’t trust you.  “We are not going to lose your paperwork,” she said.

“So are you saying you think it’s not necessary to pay the extra fifteen dollars for overnight service?” I asked.

“Well now, that is YOUR decision,” she said. “I cannot advise you on that.”

“The Post Office has lost a package of mine before,” I announced.

“Oh, really,” she said, in the exact voice I would use if I met a real live Creationist and he told me that the Grand Canyon was made by Noah’s flood 6,000 years ago.

“Did you have that package insured and tracked with Express service?” she asked.

“No.”

“Well then.”

In other words, it’s my fault no matter what.

“The US Postal Service is the best in the whole world,” she said as she handed me the label for overnight service. “And I don’t just say that because I work for them. Other countries, anyone can just rip into your mail. But not here. Your mail is protected.”

I thought about mentioning the time a letter to me arrived weeks late and mangled, with the envelope ripped open down the side and stapled back together, but filed that under “unproductive” and kept quiet.

Sometimes my aggravation with postal workers is not due to their irritating insinuations and denials. It’s an apparent refusal to exert themselves at all.  Once, the interruption of our mail coincided with a minor snowstorm that left about three inches of snow on our apartment driveway. At first, I thought the next three or four days were an inexplicable respite from credit card offers and supermarket circulars. But when the resuming of our mail coincided with the melting of the snow, I realized that our postman had been disdaining his usual walk to our front door mailbox. Throughout the winter, whenever there was any snow at all in our driveway, we had no mail. The Pony Express it wasn’t.

But some former post-college roommates of mine may remember our most harrowing postal interaction to date. This postman would also skip our house if there was ice or snow in the yard. (So perhaps my expectations are too high, and it’s a settled postal regulation that nothing stops the mail – except for ice or sleet or snow and if the postman therefore doesn’t feel like walking up to your mailbox.) But in good weather, we noticed a curious phenomenon. The mailman would leave our incoming mail, but nothing would induce him to take our outgoing mail. He simply added our incoming mail to it. I tried propping up the outgoing envelopes, or making it stick out of the box a little, to tip him off, since the little red flag obviously wasn’t enough. When that failed, we tried putting a Post-It (an appropriately named sticky note, in this case) on the box which said “Please Take Outgoing Mail!!” The end result of this was that I called the local post office to complain and then took my mail with me in the morning, to drop into a city box.

On Halloween that year, I was feeling festive, and decided to try an experiment. I put some candy in a bag with a note: “Happy Halloween to the mailman!” and left it in the mailbox. If he couldn’t be bothered with taking our mail out, would he take an item meant for his own self? I also wanted him to know that there was more to us than our patronizing, emphatic little Post-Its and complaints.

Things came to a head that day. We had a mailbox like this:

and instead of leaving our incoming mail comfortably vertical in the box, the mailman had jammed it horizontally down in the bottom of the box with what could only have been the force of a karate chop. Once I pried the scuffed and bent envelopes out, the candy was revealed mashed in the bottom of the mailbox. My roommates and I convened that night, and we discussed the terrifying turn the situation had taken. It was not the last time we would come home to karate-chopped mail – obviously, we had pushed the mailman too far.

Sometimes when I was home on Saturdays, the mail truck would pull up opposite our house. I could see the mailman in there, just sitting. What was he doing? I could never figure it out from behind the curtains. Eventually he’d pull away. My housemates and I agreed that it was probably best not to leave the house for any reason until he was gone.

And there you have it. The term “going postal” is not simply a mysterious quirk of the English language which adapted a few tragic workplace events of the 80′s and 90′s into an enduring idiom. As a body of people who, in my experience, seem uniformly averse to going the extra mile or taking any responsibility, perhaps postal workers have a naturally lower tolerance for life’s challenges than other professionals. You can trace the origin of the term “going postal” to the obviously threadbare patience of nearly every postal worker I’ve ever met just as surely as you can trace the roots of modern English through the Norman conquest.

I work in tourism. It doesn’t matter that I’ve never delivered a letter. If droplets of someone else’s peanut butter cereal milk got on my notebook, my co-worker was right: I would have gone postal.

Tags:, , , , , , , ,
Posted in Challenges of the Modern World, Feelin' Grumpy | Leave a Comment »

MY FAVORITE SPORT; or, The Solution to Incompetent FIFA Refs

June 28, 2010

When I got off work early last Wednesday, instead of catching the train home, I found myself at Luigi’s Pizza, home of two large high-def flat screens mounted catch any soccer game being played anywhere in the world at any time. I caught the last half of the South Africa/Uruguay game, heatedly debating the penalties with three Italian strangers.

I couldn’t care less about the World Series. I go to the movies during the Super Bowl. I had to Google “basketball” to find out that “NBA Finals” is what that championship is called. The Stanley Cup? I dare you to find something that bores me more. I always hope the Phillies and the Flyers and the Eagles and the 76ers (don’t quiz me on which team plays which sport) wouldn’t clinch it because I want the insufferable parade to be held in a city where I’m not trying to get to work.

Hockey is graceful and exciting to watch, but what’s with the incessant fighting? And forget about football. As far as I can tell, the players collectively pummel each other (according to rules that I don’t think anyone really understands) for about four seconds before a lengthy break for beer, razor and E*Trade commercials. Every once in a while, the four seconds is enough for someone to carry the ball to the end zone. Then all the men in the room raise their arms straight up over their heads for a special kind of deafening, laborious vertical clap.

The danger of a baseball game is that if it’s not resolved in nine innings (and is the “top” the beginning of the inning? Or is it the end?), it will go on indefinitely until someone wins. If there is a hell and I end up there, it will be a sporting event with no predetermined ending. Basketball can be moderately interesting to watch, I guess, but when the players are scoring so many points, are the baskets really that exciting? And, like their shorter, beefier counterparts in baseball and football, basketball players are usually such extraordinary physical specimens that I can’t relate to them very well.

But there is something about the World Cup. Maybe you scoff that, as wife to a South African, it’s my spousal duty to cheer this year’s FIFA World Cup and I’m making the best of it. But compared to the hulking pads of the football and hockey players, and the billed hats and bulging biceps of the baseball players, soccer players seem light, handsome and vulnerable. After all, they’re tearing around on a pitch where they’re supposed to handle the ball with the very same appendages they’re using to run, and all they have is a guard strapped to their shapely shins. They are lithe men of relatively average build and muscle, and we revel in their speed and dexterity over their size and brute power.

Another perk of their simple uniforms and lack of headwear is the hair. One of the first things I ever noticed about soccer players was the hair. Bounding, flinging dreads, intricate cornrows, thick, flamboyant crests, Mohawks, thrashing beds of corkscrew curls or just a shaggy mane that makes a soaked and stringy halo in the header slow-motion replay. More than any other sport, the hair seems essential to the soccer field.

I also enjoy the way the entire game momentarily halts for the contested plays (which happen about every thirteen seconds) so everyone can appeal to the referee like ten-year-olds calling Mom to arbitrate who really called the front seat. A player who hopes he’s been fouled spreads his arms in supplication like a medieval pilgrim pleading for the life of a plague-stricken child at the local shrine. Of course, the player who elbowed him or tugged his shirt puts his palms in the air as if he’s been caught in the bank vault with a pound of C4 (“Not ME! I was just trying to kick the ball!”). I like watching all those fleet, powerful, overwrought men hang on the ref’s instant decision. It reminds me of the days that Mom and Dad could settle an argument with a single irate word – however mad you were, the thing was done and you moved on.

No soccer player has perfected the art of staying on his feet. He perfects the art of getting up quickly. Staying upright is not considered when wresting the ball from opponents. I also like the gravity-defying goalies and defenders: a slow-mo Shamu could not muster more drama or fling more water droplets than an airborne FIFA player. In the instant replay, they’re suspended like sweaty, wild-eyed albatrosses over a sea of grass before they land like a lunchbox dropped from a helicopter.

But even the drama of the airborne save can’t compete with the excruciating injuries occurring about every two minutes. No victim of 19th century surgery sans anesthesia ever flailed with such agony. I am always shocked at how, after sustaining what are evidently grievous hurts – compound fractures of the femur, at least – in less than a minute the player is absorbed in his next sprint. I used to wonder how FIFA players could continue after the injury such unbridled expressions of anguish implied: pounding the turf as if it’s the last door on a sinking submarine and clutching their shins as if a hot poker and not a soccer cleat had touched it.

Or is being wholly seized and wracked by their pain on an international stage precisely what lets the players move on so quickly, the same way heated marital arguments can be healthier than resentful silence? Perhaps a little more momentary unbridled emotion would save us a lot of grief with family, friends and co-workers.

Or perhaps soccer players are just big babies. If this is the case, I have a suggestion for FIFA to reduce the play-stealing time that footballers spend gasping on the turf because somebody let his elbow go a little wild. This year, FIFA refs don’t seem equipped to notice when goals happen or when someone’s really off-sides, anyway. So send the refs packing and bring in some moms. They could be from any country, and they could have a whistle and a fanny pack with some Band-Aids. Unlike FIFA referees, moms are infallible. They could learn the rules of the free kick, but more important, I think, FIFA could give them the authority to kiss it better.

Tags:, , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Journeys | 1 Comment »

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 760 other followers