We Are Not Such Things - Justine van der Leun Page 0,196

the kitchen, where they suddenly looked, for all their age and wisdom, like bashful schoolboys. Taku was a retired teacher. “The principal gave his friends jobs,” he said. “While we were twenty years in the field, that new chap will be our manager. So I decided to take my pension.” He was now studying to become a preacher. Wowo was the older one, a man inclined to silence, who had left school to work any and every job: on the assembly line at a steel factory, as a janitor at a nursing college, “putting dead people in the fridge” in the tuberculosis hospital morgue, stocking shelves at a grocery store, and finally working as a cleaner and then a gardener at Old Mutual Insurance. He had also played drums in a band of other gardeners, called the Cape City Kings. After thirty years, he took retirement on February 14, 2009. On February 15, his son Monks was thrown from a car and paralyzed. Upon retirement, Wowo got a one-time pension payout the equivalent of around $14,000 for three decades of service.

“You can’t do nothing on that money,” he observed. “When I think of it, I want to cry.”

Easy, who regressed to boyishness around older relatives, had followed us and was staring at the fridge as Wowo and Taku gathered up their courage to talk to me. I leaned against a kitchen counter, gazing down at the three short Nofemela men before me.

“We’re all going, right?” I asked. “You, too, Wowo?”

“I don’t know,” Wowo said.

“Why not?” Easy and I had been planning a trip to the Eastern Cape, which had absorbed the former Transkei homeland, to see where the Nofemela family had come from. Wowo and Taku, who had spent some boyhood years there, would accompany us and act as guides.

“We don’t have any pocket money, not even for a cool drink,” Wowo said apologetically.

“So, we can’t fund petrol,” Taku added. His shoulders slumped. “We don’t know if you are expecting that.”

Taku and Wowo had worked for white governments and white-owned corporations and then for black governments and corporations still run by whites, from the time of their youth until old age. They had stayed away from drink and drugs and all the temptations available to frustrated people in the depths of poverty. They had raised black boys in Gugulethu, none of whom was dead or in prison; they had lifted paralyzed adult children up on bad backs and slept in beds with little grandsons and taught neighborhood kids soccer and fed their hungry nieces and nephews; they had nurtured marriages for fifty years; they had built and improved family homes with their bare hands. These were the respected elders of their communities, heads of overflowing families. And here they stood before me, a young white American female thirty years their junior, chastened, admitting they were too broke to pay for the gas necessary to make it out to their ancestral land.

“I expect five thousand bucks each,” I said. “Three gourmet meals a day and a bottle of wine from everyone.”

For a moment, the room was quiet. Then Easy began to laugh, and the men followed.

“It’s my research trip and I am grateful you will come as my guides. I have already arranged funding.”

The two breathed out. Then they looked a little bit excited.

“Well then, we will be happy to show you our roots,” Wowo said.

A few days later, I woke at dawn and drove up to High Level Road, which ran parallel to the ocean but far above it. I passed the palms of the N2, the power plant, all the familiar landmarks, and entered Gugulethu. The shacks in the marshlands looked flat in the morning light. At such an hour, the township was more lively than town: these were the nannies that had to arrive before Mom left for work or yoga; the clerks who had to open up shop; the security guards changing over from the night shift to the morning shift. And before all that, everyone had to bathe, dress, and feed their own kids. The nine-to-five jobs were for the fortunate, the middle-class-plus. Those people were served. These were the people who did the serving.

On the morning of the road trip, I walked into the Nofemela house on NY111 and found Wowo sitting expectantly by his suitcase in the living room. Wowo’s two-year-old grandson, perched on a plastic motorcycle, was glaring, alternately at me and at Wowo. The child slept against Wowo every night of his