The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena Read online

  Voted one of the hundred most important books published in Africa during the last century.

  Winner of the WA Hofmeyr Prize, the CNA Literary Award and the Louis Luyt Prize.

  Sharing the language and religion or the Afrikaners bent on her people’s subjugation, Poppie Nongena – a Xhosa woman born in an Upington township – has no choice but to negotiate the riptide of structural violence that is apartheid South Africa. Rootless, her ailing husband emasculated by legislation and her children bearing witness to her degradation, Poppie is forced on a spiritual and cultural journey from Lambert’s Bay to a Cape Town township to Mdantsane in the Eastern Cape. Her heartache is the pain of a nation – an emblem of how the human spirit may strain under the weight of tyranny, yet adapts and prevails.

  Written to break the barrier of ignorance in late-1970s South Africa, The Long, Journey of Poppie Nongena – unsentimental but sensitive – documents a harrowing life lived in a time that a country would rather forget. A literary and commercial success when it was released in Afrikaans in 1979, Elsa Joubert’s searing indictment of inhumanity remains universally relevant almost 40 years later in a world in which political dispensations continue to rise and fall. It has won a clutch of literary prizes, including the CNA and Hofmeyr, and has been translated into 13 languages and sold around the world. In 2002 it was selected by a panel of 16 international academics and writers as one of the 100 best African novels of the 20th century.

  Elsa Joubert rose to prominence with her novel Die swerfjare van Poppie Nongena, which was translated into 13 languages and also staged as a drama. Since the publication of her first novel in 1963, Ons wag op die kaptein, for which she was awarded the Eugène Marais Prize, she won 14 further awards for her writing, including the WA Hofmeyr Prize, the Recht Malan and Hertzog prizes. In 1981 the British Royal Society of Literature awarded her the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, and she also became a fellow of the society. She has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Stellenbosch (2001) and Pretoria (2007), as well as the Order of Ikhamanga (2004).

  The Long Journey of

  POPPlE NONGENA

  Elsa Joubert

  JONATHAN BALL PUBLISHERS

  JOHANNESBURG & CAPE TOWN

  AND

  TAFELBERG

  CAPETOWN

  Elsa Joubert was born in Paarl and lives in Cape Town. Throughout her illustrious and very prolific career she has been awarded almost every prize for Afrikaans writing, some more than once.

  Elsa’s work has been recognised intemationally as well as within South Africa. She was awarded the Winifred Holtby Prize by the British Royal Society for Literature, as well as being made a Fellow of the Society for the novel The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena, (originally published in Afrikaans as Die swerfjare van Poppie Nongena).

  This novel was also awarded the W A Hofmeyr Prize, the CNA Literary Award and the Louis Luyt Prize.

  To the reader

  This novel is based on the actual life story of a black woman living in South Africa today. Only her name, Poppie Rachel Nongena, born Matati, is invented. The facts were related to me not only by Poppie herself, but by members of her immediate family and her extended family or clan, and they cover one family’s experience over the past forty years.

  ONE

  Upington

  1

  We are Xhosa people from Gordonia, says Poppie. My mama used to tell us about our great-grandma Kappie, a rich old woman who grazed her goats on the koppies the other side of Camarvon. Her second name was Plaatjies and she had the high-bridged nose that runs in the family – our oompie Pengi got it from her.

  She told our mama about the old days and about the big man, Dark Malgas, who was killed on the island in the Great River, which they call the Orange River these days. She told our mama about the rinderpest and the cattle and sheep that died and about the English war or the Imfazwe yamabulu, the war of the Boers.

  We saw the Boers coming on horseback, she said, and we fled into the koppies, herding the goats as we went. We left everything in the huts and stayed in the koppies till the white men had left. They didn’t take our things. Everything was as we had left it, but they ate all the mealie porridge in the cooking pots.

  And then Jantjie rode away with them as agterryer and was shot dead in the war.

  Jantjie, take the horses and flee, the Boer shouted when he saw the English soldiers surrounding them, but by then, old woman – so he came and told our great-grandma Kappie – your child was dead.

  Great-grandma Kappie only had one girl child, our grandma Hannie. We called her ouma Hannie. Hannie married George Williams, a shearer who worked on the sheep farms. He was born in Beaufort West and his clan name was Mgwevu and he died in the Big ‘Flu of 1918. The isibetho, ouma Hannie told us, was the plague that the Lord sent us, the people were sick for three days and then they died.

  Hannie had eight children by him. They were born on the sheep farms where their pa was working at the time. When he died, they were staying at Koegas, outside Prieska. But ouma Hannie had a hard time rearing the children and they moved to Vaalkoppies and they stayed on the lands at Louisvale where the Bushmen taught them to use a scythe. When the children grew up, ouma Hannie moved across the river to Upington, to get them to church and to put them to school.

  The children were oompie Kaffertjie and oompie Domani and grootma Martha and grootma Mieta and Lena who was our own ma, and then kleinma Hessie and oompie Sam and oompie Pengi, ouma Hannie’s last born, her dry-teat child, her t’koutjie, as the Namas say. Grootma means a sister of your ma that’s older than she is, and kleinma is her younger sister. Oompie is uncle.

  Ouma Hannie’s children weren’t at school for very long. Oompie Kaffertjie moved back to Koegas and worked as a farmhand, and oompie Domani went away to war, the Big War of 1914, and never came back. And the other children looked for work from Lüderitz on the coast to Upington, Putsonderwater, Draghoender and Prieska along the railway line.

  All my aunts were married by force; that was the way the parents used to do it in those days. My mama didn’t want my pa. He came to Lüderitzbucht to work on the boats, and then he saw my ma who was visiting with grootma Mieta. He walked behind her and the wind was blowing hard and he didn’t stop walking because he had fallen in love with her. So he went to Upington to ask ouma Hannie if he could marry my ma.

  Ja, he was a great talker, says ouma Hannie, and he paid a lot of lobola money for your ma, and that’s how it was that he married her. His name was Machine Matati and his clan name was Mbele. His forebears came from the Ciskei but he himself was born at Mafeking.

  Ouma Hannie was very strict with her children. She wasn’t at rest till they were married with lobola money, as well as in church. Then she settled down in the location of Upington and took in the grandchildren that her children brought to her, and reared them as she had reared her own. But our ma’s children were closest to her heart, because our pa didn’t look after us well. He left us on a Saturday morning and went to the office in Upington and joined up for the war, the war of 1939. He was sent away as a lorry-driver to Egiputa in the north and never came back to us at all.

  Just like your oompie Domani, said ouma Hannie. But that was a different war, the war that was the first of the two great white people wars.

  2

  Lena’s fourth child was brought to ouma Hannie who called her Poppie. She had another name as well, Ntombizodumo, which means girl born from a line of great women, and her mother added two more names, Rachel Regina as baptismal names, because she preferred the sound of the English to the more ordinary names like Lena and Martha and Mieta and Hessie which she and her sisters bore.

  T
he three sons of Lena had English names as well, Philip, Stanley and Wilson. Perhaps it was Machine Matati from Mafeking, who went to war for the English, who chose these new names. No, says Poppie, it was not just our pa who was educated, our ma had some learning too.

  But ouma Hannie called the child Poppie from Poppietjie which means little doll. And because her mother was away at work in far off Prieska, and because the child and her brothers grew up with their grandma, her words – Leave Poppie alone, or sshh Poppie, or give Poppie some of your milk – mingled with their play. The words, mingled with the clucking of the chickens they chased across the hot clay-smeared backyardwere caught up in the wind rustling the feathers of the red-brown fowls, swished with the sound of the top spinning in the sand. Because of that, the name stuck.

  Ouma had no truck with English names. She called Wilson, the toddler who had to leave ouma’s back to make place for Poppie, Mosie, and Philip she called Plank, and Stanley was Hoedjie.

  They lived in Blikkiesdorp, which was Upington’s shantytown or location. All kinds of people, except whites, were living there. In those days nobody spoke of coloured or brown people. There were Basters who looked almost like whites, with long hair; and mixed Basters; Damaras who were blqck but tried to pass themselves off as Basters; Bushmen with the short bodies and big backsides, yellow skin and tight frizzy hair. Their Afrikaans was different, almost Nama, but everybody spoke Afrikaans, even the black people, the Rhodesian Africans and Xhosas and Sothos living there.

  Ouma Hannie spoke Xhosa and Afrikaans. She scolded when the children wouldn’t speak Xhosa. She said: Stop speaking Afrikaans, people who pass our house at night and hear you speak will think, Ninga malawu – you’re all Bushmen. The Xhosa did not care much for the small yellow people.

  Ouma’s youngest child, oompie Pengi, used to tease her. He’d come home drunk, singing, and then he’d say: God, ma, just watch the way old George’s child is singing. Then ouma Hannie would say: Pengi, you’re making a noise, my head can’t stand it. Then he’d say: But listen, ma, listen I’m singing to you. Then he’d start dancing, doing tap-dance steps – he’d travelled a lot, he knew the steps. Then he’d dance round ouma Hannie and say: God, ma, people say I’m not a Xhosa, I’m a Zulu. Then ouma would ask: Now why would they say that? And he’d answer: They say I sing too well for a Xhosa. You’re no Xhosa, they say, you’re a Zulu, go search for your pa. Ouma Hannie would reply: Go search till you find him, I don’t mind. But it was just Pengi’s joke.

  The fact was we couldn’t speak Xhosa, says Poppie. Even now when my brothers and I are together, we speak Afrikaans, that’s what we like to speak, that comes naturally, ja. My brothers had Xhosa names too, but in Upington we knew nothing about all that.

  When Poppie grew too big to be carried on ouma’s back, the safety pin was unclasped, the blanket dropped and she was put down on to the ground. Then Mosie left his place at ouma’s side, it was Poppie who clutched her long skirts, and Mosie joined Plank and Hoedjie where they played behind the chicken coop on the heap of left-over sheets of corrugated iron. They clambered on to the old wagon, and followed the dogs, and got to know the sandy streets of the location. They went as far as the shops, and even further than the kraal where the goats were kept.

  Our house was built partly of reeds and clay and partly of bricks. In front was a low wall and we liked to play and walk on it. Sometimes we sat on it to eat our food. Behind the house was a chicken coop and we liked to feed the chickens for our ouma. As long as I can remember we had a black and white goat in our backyard, tied to the wagon wheel with a thong. Oompie Pengi milked the goat and gave us the milk to drink.

  Ouma gave us bread and magou. She would make very thin mealie-meal porridge and let it cool, then add a spoonful of fine flour to it and stir it well, but she had to have some left-over magou to add as well, because that made it go sour. We drank the magou or ate it with a spoon. We liked ouma’s griddle cakes too, and umphokoqo, a crumbly porridge we ate with sour milk. At night we ate samp cooked with beans and meat.

  My ouma never used a Primus stove, she did her cooking outside in three-legged cooking-pots over an open fire, and we liked to go with her when she gathered wood in the veld, because it meant that we could look for gum. It was not customary for the boys to gather wood, but they would climb the trees to get the gum for us. That’s mine, that bit’s mine, we would yell to them, pointing high up in the trees. The boys also hunted hares and shot at birds with their catapults. Sometimes we would set out early in the morning, but if we only needed kindling for the cooking fire, we went in the late afternoon and did not go far into the veld. When ouma did ironing for the white people in Upington we waited till three o’clock in the afternoon to go.

  Ouma would bend her knee to break the wood, giving us the pieces to drag to the stacking place where she tied it up into bundles. Then she twisted rags into small padded rolls for our heads. We had to hold on tightly to the bundles of firewood she lifted on to our heads. It was only when we felt the wood coming to rest on the pad, moving with our movement as we walked along the footpath, that we would stop clutching, that we trotted and danced. In the approaching dusk we could see the houses coming closer. The outside fires were burning, the people moving around the flames, the shadows lengthening and creeping up to the footpath.

  Oompie Pengi had come home wearing his thick overcoat. He sat flat on the ground with his back against the wagon wheel and underneath his coat he hid a bottle. He turned on to his side, ducking into his coat to hide his head. He was groaning as if in pain, and then we heard the sound of his drinking, ghorr, ghorr, ghorr.

  Plank lay on his back on the ground next to the fire. His legs kicked the air, in his hand he pretended to hold a bottle. He drank, he squirmed as if he had a bellyache. He was pretending to be oompie Pengi.

  Ouma threw down her bundle of wood, took a stick and beat the ground next to Plank. Dust rose and was coloured red by the fire. Child of Satan, she screamed at him, child of the dog. Satan’s child to mock your uncle.

  Auk, he screamed, auk, and he clutched his backside, dancing around the fire, waving his arms and kicking his legs in such a way that we didn’t know whether he was screaming or laughing.

  Oompie Pengi was very close to ouma’s heart, because he was her dry-teat child. But ouma was a God-fearing woman and it grieved her when oompie Pengi was drunk.

  My ouma didn’t have a bed, she slept on goatskins joined together, flat on the ground, with a pillow and a few blankets. Ag, she slept so well, and I shared her bed. It wasn’t hard at all, one sleeps well on a dung floor if one is used to it. In rainy or cold weather she used hessian bags underneath the skins to keep out the damp. My oompie Pengi slept on a bed in the next-door room, the room built of reeds and clay, but ouma and I slept on the goatskins and my brothers on hessian bags and blankets.

  My ouma never went to sleep without saying her prayers. And at five o’clock in the morning she woke to pray, and she woke all of us as well as she knelt between us. She owned a Bible, though she could not read. But she loved to sing. We all sang together. And at night oompie Pengi prayed. At times when he was drunk, he prayed for such a long time that I fell asleep sitting on the floor next to ouma, and when I woke up he was still praying. But ouma never got angry with oompie Pengi for praying; when she wanted him to stop she just started singing. Then we would all sing together, Plank and Hoedjie and Mosie and I and my kleinma Hessie, if she was visiting, and oompie Sam and grootma Martha or grootma Mieta, if they had come to see ouma. They were all so fond of singing.

  We had a cupboard with shelves in the kitchen. Kleinma Hessie could do paper cut-outs and she’d cut the patterns out of old newspapers and line the shelves. Every month she came from Putsonderwater to see our ouma, and she brought off-cuts of meat, or maybe flour or other foodstuffs. But when she left – this I remember well – ouma hid her prettiest stuff, because she complained: Hessie has long fingers, she loves my pretty things. But kleinma Hessie outwitted ouma and to
ok what she wanted in spite of ouma’s care.

  When our own mama came to visit, we were happy because she brought us gifts, she was our mama. But we were not sad when she left, because she beat us. Ouma never beat us. We loved ouma more, more than our own mama.

  Ouma Hannie earned her living by selling rags and bones. When she wasn’t going out to work for the white people, my ouma always carried a bag, Poppie says. I picked up bones and took them to her and she threw them in the sack. Whenever we had meat to eat, she saved the bones to sell to old Solly. We searched for bones in the rubbish dumps of the location. Ouma would poke her stick in the rubbish heap and, scratching around amongst the ash and the old rusty tins and the garbage, pry the bones loose with the tip of her stick and scratch the filth away saying: Poppie, there’s a bone for you.

  When I was small I loved searching for bones with my ouma, I blew on the bones and wiped them clean and kept them in the small tin ouma gave me. She would settle the tin on the little cushion of rags on my head and we’d take the main road to where the white people lived. Plank and Hoedjie carried a big paraffin tin filled with bones, hanging on a stick balanced on their shoulders, and ouma carried a big bag on her head.

  We would go up the steps to Solly’s shop.

  Old Solly will give you a penny for your tin of bones, Poppie, ouma says. Let go your hands from the tin.

  And she’d say to Solly: Give the child niggerballs for the penny.

  Plank and Hoedjie were given neither money nor niggerballs. They are big now, said ouma. But Poppie gave each of them one of her niggerballs. Ouma threw the empty small tin into the bigger one and it clanked as Plank and Hoedjie swung it. Then ouma picked Poppie up and fastened her on her back.

  Poppie saved the last niggerball for Mosie. He was lying on the sack in the dark room, on the bed that he shared with Hoedjie and Plank. He was cold, his knees clutched against his chest, he had a fever, his forehead was shiny with sweat. Ouma pulled the blankets up around him, but he pushed out his arm to see the niggerball Poppie had brought him, blue like a bird’s egg. He pushed it into his mouth.