Colour Me Yellow: Searching for My Family Truth

Prologue

It seems that as far as women and issues are concerned, a lot of emotion is involved. ‘I feel’, ‘I really feel like’, ‘I think’ – that’s all one seems to hear when surrounded by so-called real women. What nonsense.

One particular day springs to mind when I forgot to ‘feel’ but rather decided to exercise my right to know the truth. I called in sick at my place of employment – I was a practising journalist for a daily newspaper, but there were no breaking stories on that day and I wasn’t going to be missed in the downtown newsroom.

I took a bath, got dressed, ate breakfast, grabbed my handbag and was off to the parking lot and into my car. There was no fuss really; I don’t even remember saying a prayer about it. To me it was the most natural thing to do, to drive for forty-five minutes to what was then the East Rand (now called Ekurhuleni Metropolitan after all the democratic name changes). It was a weekday when school-going children would not be at home. I counted on the fact that the dearest husband would not be home either, because he drove big trucks for a living and was likely to be on some long-distance trip to deliver something for his employers.

I really took care to make sure there would be very little distraction because I considered my mission to be crucial. The matter had been bugging me for many years. While others in the family had shed some light on what they knew, the only person who knew the whole truth had stayed mum, not once volunteering to talk. The closest she had come to it was when she said: ‘I hated being pregnant with you. I used to cry the whole day. I hated carrying you in my stomach. It was such an embarrassment for me and my family.’

Of course, the woman was only seventeen or eighteen years old when she was pregnant with me. I understood the embarrassment bit, but the hatred? I didn’t understand that. Over the years I had perfected the trick of shutting down completely – emotionally, that is. If for one reason or other my head refuses to process some information at a given time, I don’t waste my time trying to reason it out – I just shelve it.

Well, to say I wasn’t shocked by Mother’s words would be an understatement, but did I show any emotion? Absolutely not. My brain couldn’t program the magnitude of that piece of information since I was barely a teenager at the time, so I did what I do best – I saved it under the To Do List somewhere at the back of my mind with the hope of revisiting it when the time was right.

The thought of not having dealt with Mother’s unfortunate statement did cross my mind as I drove pass Spruitview Shopping Centre, crossing the set of traffic lights that would see me closer to the house – it’s not my home, never was, never will be. As I drove past cheerful hawkers at the roadside, the thought that I had been the hated pregnancy threatened to wreak havoc in my mind. After so many years with the people who were supposed to be my blood family, I’ve learned a few lessons; there are things they prefer to do differently and most, if not all the time, no explanation is given.

After Mother told me I was an embarrassment to her and her family, she never once mentioned the subject to explain what she meant by it. The adult me, with two children of my own, needed urgent answers.

I should think I greeted Mother when I arrived at her house for I am polite – maybe not always, but most of the time. I don’t recall discussing the weather to break the ice. All I remember was asking the most important question in my life and waiting patiently for an answer.

‘Who is my real father? Did you have sexual relations with a certain white man on that farm where you lived? What’s my real surname?’

To my utter disbelief, what followed were ugly emotions and a screaming match. Had I been a proper woman with a healthy bunch of feelings, I may have reacted differently, but I was far from being impressed.

‘How can you insult me like that?’ Mother said, weeping and making sure her voice caught in her throat. ‘You have really hurt my feelings.’

That was the response from the woman who gave birth to me some years back. I should call her Mother but I’m not too sure the title fits. After all, she hated being pregnant with me and I was an embarrassment – validating my existence by saying ‘Mother’ may upset her or, worse, invoke more hateful feelings. I called her many names but ‘Mother’ wasn’t one of them. To be precise, as a child I called her ‘malume’, meaning aunt, because that’s how my cousins referred to her. When I was a grown-up with my own kid, I’d refer to her as my son’s grandmother. More recently, I have called her by her name or, depending who I’m talking to, I use the title that person would have used to refer to her. If it’s her brother’s kid I’m talking to, I’d say ‘ukgari yakho’ (your aunt). When I was being myself, honest to the point of being blunt, I called her ‘that woman who allegedly gave birth to me’.

And now: ‘He is such a good husband. He’s been very good to me. He’s treated you so well all these years. You ate Nespray tinned milk just like white kids and you wore white and pink vests from Woolworths stores, now you want to insult us like this?’

My question had nothing to do with her husband. I could have sat there and disputed every quality she attributed to him but that was not the reason I was there. I wanted to know who my real father was. I wanted this good woman who goes to church almost every day of her life to tell me the truth, once and for all. I tried to calm her down, volunteering to share my own questionable love life.

‘Look, I’m an adult now. There really is nothing to be ashamed of. I have two children from two different fathers. I didn’t plan it that way but it happened and my boys know they have different surnames. They know how that little mistake happened. Really, at this stage, your being embarrassed to tell me the truth isn’t necessary.’

Those who say women are the best liars aren’t too far from the truth. And, yes, all is covered with a barrage of emotions.

‘What makes you think my husband isn’t your father? Look at your brother and two sisters – you have similar features. You look alike. No one can doubt he’s your father.’

There we went on that slippery road – the road I wanted to avoid at all costs – discussing and talking about her husband, the man I had to call Father, the man who had nothing to do with what I had come to talk to her about.

‘Well,’ I replied, ‘if you look at my two boys, don’t they look alike? They do. You know why? I’m their mother. They inherited some of their features from me. Therefore, it’s not too difficult for me to look like your other kids even though they are all darker than me. Let’s assume I inherited my light complexion from you and only you.’

None of this was the answer I had come for. It was ‘my husband this’ and ‘my husband that’. All I got were accusations and more tears. But did the strategy work? Yes, it let her off the hook, gave her a chance to concentrate on searching for piles of tissues to blow her nose. But so many years later, I’m still hungry for the truth.

And now that I recall that day, there’s one thing I forgot to do; I didn’t cry. All I did was leave the kitchen, walk around to the main gate, open it and get back into my car and then drive back to my home – answerless from Mother dearest, but made to feel guilty and disrespectful. You know that stage when you’re past being angry and you’re ready to spit on anything and everything that gives you grief? It’s the type of anger that could see you empty the entire magazine of a gun into some moron’s body. Yet I manage to smile without anyone noticing the internal anger. In my book, that’s not pretence but being polite, showing the spirit of Ubuntu, as Africans would say when mainly covering up crap. How do they explain the spirit of Ubuntu again? They say, ‘You are because I am.’

I’ve been gatvol for a very long time even though I haven’t had the time to express it. My not weeping actually has nothing to do with my feminine side but with the scary possibility that if I start crying what happens when I find I can’t stop? Who will be called to calm me down? The only man, if not the only human being who ever lived who loved me unconditionally – my maternal grandpa – is no more.

I hardly ever cry. There are many reasons and occasions that warrant the salty water called tears falling down one’s cheeks, especially for women. It’s as though society expects to see it happen or else one may be labelled as a hard nut to crack, a queen bitch or, even worse, women like me who don’t weep when the right occasion presents itself are said to be trying to be like men – to be tough or something.

The truth is, I’m an extremely sensitive person. I can’t say the guesswork about my character bothers me, that would be a lie. I’m not a saint but I avoid telling lies at all costs. My reason for avoiding lies is a logical one. If you’ve been lied to about your life by the very people who were supposed to have been honest with you, one thing you avoid as an adult is telling lies.

What dearest Mother had put me through now as an adult, a grown woman with teenage boys, was enough to send a weaker-minded individual to the nearest mental institution. I swear I can still hear as clearly as on that fateful afternoon of 19 April 2012:

‘Well, I didn’t mean to kill you if that’s what you think. I didn’t know the harm was going to be that bad. But we can reverse it – the harm, I mean. You must just learn to forgive. There’s no need to fight back here – I made a mistake and I admit it. The intention was not to kill you.’

With those words I had dropped the phone. When she called back I mumbled something about my mobile phone’s battery running low. But it wasn’t the mobile phone that was fighting for its life – it was my soul. What she had just admitted was worse than anything else she could possibly have done. The more I replay that telephone conversation in my mind, the more questions beg for an answer.

Am I such a bad reminder of her past? Was I conceived under such bad conditions that she can’t forgive me? Don’t get me wrong. I don’t hate Mother. I just don’t understand her way of doing things. Did carrying me in her womb embarrass her and her family that much that she’s willing to punish me for as long as I live?

And until I meet someone who’s been hated so passionately by their biological mother simply because they came out of her womb looking different, or they weren’t expected or for whatever other reason, I will have to learn to meditate, for mine is a simple request: please, dear God, help me not to cry for I’m scared it may take forever to calm down.

Chapter One

What’s it like to be a normal child?

I must have been seven years old when I realised that no one called me by my name. While some cousins called me by my nickname Tho, my Paternal Grandmother, the mother of the Father I grew up thinking and hoping was my father, called me Mabovana – referring to my light-skinned complexion. There was nothing wrong with that. Mother and I were the only light-skinned members of the family. Others were either a little bit darker or even pitch black. Even though I didn’t mind, because I didn’t understand, I noticed that three of my aunts and the older cousins referred to me as boesman.

I was already doing grade one – sub-standard A in those days – at Tlo-Tlo Mpho Primary School in Ga-Rankuwa near Pretoria. Apparently, the school was called Siyokhela before the area was incorporated into a Bantustan.

I was convinced something was terribly wrong with me. My teacher never called anyone nasty names, not even those pupils who wet their pants and gym dresses. Some even soiled themselves, but Ma’am Ncanywa would be very understanding of their little accidents. She was a short, well-nourished Xhosa woman who would send those unfortunate pupils to the bathroom to wash their gym dresses or pants and hang them in the sun, telling them to sit outside while waiting for their school uniforms to dry. But if I dared not wipe my slate properly she would refer to me as ‘this yellow thing’ or say ‘you’re as yellow as a pumpkin’.

I learned to get everything right the first time to avoid being called yellow. As a result of trying never to be wrong I became very quiet and I never spoke unless I was spoken to. When answering, I would speak as softly as possible to make sure that no one noticed me. I even took up as little space as I could, trying to make myself invisible.

I might not have known what being ‘yellow’ meant but the way it was said told me it was something bad, something to be ashamed of. I learned very quickly that in order to survive as a yellow thing (and also as a boesman) I must not only do well but I must excel at everything. That, I reasoned, would take attention away from my yellowness and help me stay unnoticed because I was excruciatingly shy.

To put a smile on my teacher’s face and to prove that the yellow thing wasn’t as bad as she thought, I remember collecting loads of the papers wrapped around Nestlé condensed-milk tins at that time, determined to win a competition draw at our school. Other learners tried hard but I was the best, with the highest number of wrappers. I won the Nestlé competition and the prize was a white T-shirt with the word Nestlé written in bold red across the front. Deep down it felt good to excel. I was awarded the prize in front of all the pupils, even those from the senior grades. They all clapped their hands.

That taught me one lesson: there’s only one way for you, little yellow girl, silence your critics by always winning.

Four of my cousins attended the same primary school with me in Ga-Rankuwa. At the time the area belonged to the independent state of Bophuthatswana, hence the mother tongue at school was seTswana. I travelled on the same school bus as my cousins because we lived far from the school in an unknown little place called Tsebe near Klipgat. Our houses were all situated in the same yard, but as soon as home was out of sight we became strangers. I walked behind, remembering not to share a seat in the bus with any of them.

The boesman issue was getting worse, even though I still didn’t know the meaning of the word. On the days when some of my cousins didn’t have tuck-shop money, they preferred to share other kids’ food rather than eat with me. I concluded that the boesman thing must be contagious. Instead of trying to get closer to my friend Mambu Ellinah Moeti, I made sure to distance myself because I didn’t want to make her sick. In fact, she was also doubtful of being around me, always checking me out and uttering unflattering statements such as: ‘Why do you tie your belt in such a stupid way?’ or ‘Your hair isn’t properly combed’ or ‘The pleats in your gym dress look ugly, like they weren’t pressed with a hot iron.’

I assumed that I was not only different as a boesman but I was also sick. When nurses came to the school to immunise us the puncture marks on my arm became swollen. In those days inoculation was not administered as a single injection that left no mark like nowadays. We were inoculated with a stamp-like gadget that had to be pushed into your shoulder. It must have made six punctures for that’s what it left on soft sensitive skin. Since my first inoculation became swollen, the nurses were prompted to repeat that stamp-like immunisation more than once. I was sure it was being yellow that made me sick because my cousins’ immunisations didn’t swell. On top of all that, I was given little white tablets by my class teacher. The nurses didn’t say why I had to take them and the teacher didn’t bother to explain. Every time I swallowed them, I felt embarrassed to be a sick yellow boesman thing. Four rings of brown skin with tiny pores are still visible on my right arm to this day as proof that I wasn’t as healthy as the other children, and I assumed it was all because I was yellow and a boesman. The problem was that I didn’t know what it meant to be yellow or a boesman – I only knew it was bad.

Although I got the answers right in class, I wasn’t good at any school sport and I couldn’t sing and dance like most of my female classmates. I enjoyed the moments spent in the dark watching Bruce Lee movies at a hall in Zone 16 on occasional school trips. To my mind, the way he kicked everyone around placed him among the gods to be worshipped. Maybe that’s the reason I chose karate as a sport later in life – to kick butt for real. Other precious moments in school were the days magicians came to perform for us. We