Hello! Salaams! Come in, make yourself comfortable. Can I get you tea? How about samosas? I made them fresh and fried them crispy. You’re not like one of those baggy pants, fedora hat wearing hippies I see in Uncle Abdul’s spice shop looking for some chamomile-lavender-hibiscus concoction, are you? Do you take yours with a touch of milk like the English, or with a hint of cardamom and cinnamon like Indian-Indians, you know, chai?
They call me Sally. I’m the storyteller of the town. Name a family, point to a person, hint at an incident and I have details. I keep files on everyone. Not paper files! In my head, it’s a storage unit up there.
I never tell stories about my family. There’s no need to with the scandals that go on in this town. Most days I sit on my stoep and watch dramas unfold, and other days tattletale birds in skirts whisper tidbits in my ear.
Of course, my family is interesting! We have babies born out of wedlock, divorces, multiple marriages, elopements, extra-marital affairs, dabbling in drugs and alcohol, political incarcerations, fistfights at the soccer stadium, and deaths, all unexpected, hole-gapingly sad, and much too sudden. There are many of us, children, grandchildren, cousins, aunties and uncles. And we like laughing, the more politically incorrect a joke, the louder we laugh. And we love getting together, we don’t need an occasion to put cake on the table. And we are beautiful, especially the ladies, it’s in our bloodline, the desirable round hips and buttocks, we don’t have problems finding husbands. Also, we’ve more doctors in our family than most, and lawyers, optometrists, accountants, businessmen, teachers and nurses. We even have a diplomat who travels the world and mixes with the ‘who’s-who’ at the United Nations, but salt of the earth she is, never sticking her nose in the air, unlike Khadija from down the road who went to London for three months and came back with the Queen’s accent and a bun in the oven. In Afrikaans we say, ‘skrik vir niks’, no fear, not even of God.
Our story starts with my grandmother. Her name was Anna-Joanna. A surprising name to have in an Indian family in a small town in South Africa but oh, what a story!
Did you say Lydia Hayworth?
Lydia was not from the Indian side of the family, she was Anna-Joanna’s younger sister, from the Coloured side, although she was not classified Coloured, she was classified white.
You see, Coloured was the artificial name given by the apartheid state to people whose blood was mixed with a little or a lot of Bantu, Khoisan, European, Indian or Indonesian. And Lydia’s ancestry fell seamlessly into the Coloured designation. Her great-grandpa, Mr. Hayworth, heralded from Scotland and married a Khoi woman indigenous to the Cape. But Lydia did not look Coloured unlike Anna-Joanna who was a balanced blend, not too dark, not too light, not too coarse, not too soft. Lydia also did not look Khoi unlike her brothers Edward and Patrick whose full lips and curly hair were definitive Khoi features. She was more of a pale complexion, like milk, and her flaxen sun-streaked hair and jade-blue eyes held traces of the family’s Scottish blood.
Yes, race classification was based entirely on studying appearance, comparing skin tones to white paper, feeling the texture of hair, looking at the shape of jawlines and buttocks. That’s how it went in those dark days of apartheid when the Population Registration Act was enacted. And, no matter how much Lydia’s mother, Mary, explained to the apartheid goons that there were mixed marriages in the bloodline, they classified Lydia as white and the rest of the family as Coloured, and threatened that the police not find her in the Coloured area and that she relocate to the whites only area.
Yes, it was commonplace for members of the same family to be classified into different race groups. Apartheid easily made mielie pap of one, biryani of some, and braai-vleis of another, children ripped from parents or parents forcibly removed, leaving the family ruptured. But Lydia, born under a lucky star, lived between her family home in the Coloured area of Aliwal-North, a dusty town on the banks of the Orange River in the Eastern Cape, and the home of a white farmer. It was the farm where her father Adam worked as klein-baas to the groot-baas, an assistant foreman. The farmer, Ou Piet, and his wife, Tannie Sannetjie, were like family and went along with the ruse.
It was not hard for Lydia to grow-up apart from her siblings. In fact, being classified white changed her; the change was subtle but noticeable, a touch of superiority in her step, a sneering down on the family. She didn’t mean to, but her whiteness highlighted their blackness. And, Lydia wanted to be out in the world. She dropped out of school to work in Tannie Sannetjie’s kitchen where she baked the breads, cakes and pies that were sold at the farm store, and often went home with leftover baked goods that made up for the minimal wages she earned, a quarter of which she contributed to the family, and three-quarters of which she spend on luminescent lipstick, wide-brimmed hats and dancing shoes. After all, she was the local beauty and suitors traveled from far and wide to prance with her. And, Lydia moved through the world differently. She could study her naked body for hours in the full-length mirror that leaned up against her bedroom wall. One time, she even accepted to stand in her nakedness and be painted by a big time artist from Johannesburg. It was as if she knew with certainty that her body was worthy of putting paint to brush to canvas. I am told a white couple bought the painting and hung it on their bedroom wall.
The marvel of Lydia’s life was that she gave apartheid its comeuppance.
Because she married five times, each husband a different race, one was even foreign, Portuguese, from the neighboring country, Mozambique.
Lydia’s first husband was Simon or Meneer Simons as everyone called him. He was the headmaster of the local school, thirteen years her senior. Everyone teased that he was her sugar-daddy, but Lydia said they fell in-love the old fashion way, by walking and talking. They walked home together from school. Nothing so scandalous! Lydia was not his student! She would go to the school to pick-up her nephews, Tony and John, Anna-Joanna’s boys who remained in Aliwal-North when Anna-Joanna went to work as housekeeper for a Jewish couple in Johannesburg. Lydia and Simon would talk for hours, often while watching Tony and John play, or hanging over the garden fence at her family home, and on all subjects, from books and politics to classical music, history, philosophy, sports, opera, even gardening. Simon had an air of sophistication, a refinement that Lydia found classy.
After they got married Lydia stopped wearing garish dresses, opting for beiges, baby-blues, lilacs, all high-cut with sleeves. She pinned her wild tresses and exchanged her dance shoes for church-going flats. She stopped eating meat, surprising, given her link to Ou Piet’s farm where every part of a sheep was consumed; head, tongue, brain, trotters, and tripe, but she exchanged those delicacies for salads and steamed vegetables. And she smiled smaller and laughed softer. For Simon, Lydia needed no alteration, but in her head, the changes were what respectability looked, tasted and behaved like.
Then their twin girls were born, Dorothy and Janet, both of whom still live in Aliwal-North, spinsters, probably their way of rebelling against Lydia for abandoning them, though they were raised in her family home, amongst her belongings, by her mother Mary, and with the money she sent home. Their birth catalyzed Lydia’s unravelling. She said her breast milk turned sour and refused latching. She threw open the doors and windows of the house claiming she couldn’t breathe while standing in the middle of the yard wearing a white-ribboned nightie smoking a cigarette. She binged on copious amounts of fatty sausage and chocolate. And many a morning the neighbors witnessed her walking to the train station, no shoes, empty suitcase, not boarding the train, only standing on the platform staring into the distance, until one morning when she donned a brilliant red dress, red kitten-heels, red lipstick, red flowers in her hair and boarded the train to Johannesburg. I’m told she returned years later, for Simon’s funeral, and wore the same red dress.
Lydia’s journey to Johannesburg took her into a job as a receptionist at the Fruit and Vegetable Exchange on Bree Street in the city center. There, her tight fitting dresses and pretty eyes grabbed the attention of many white businessmen, one of whom was Erik Van Heerden, the wealthiest avocado farmer in Phalaborwa, a northernmost town of South Africa. Not much is known of the seven years that Lydia was Mrs. Van Heerden except that everyone called her Madam or Mevrou, and that she lived as a white woman in a big white house on a large estate, and took up driving, a silver Chevrolet, and drinking, scotch and whiskey. Her brother, Edward, once paid her a visit and relayed that she met him at the backdoor meant for Black servants and offered him dry brown bread and water in enamel utensils used by her Black gardener. She scolded him for showing up unannounced, warned him not to mention to anyone that he was her boetie, then drove him back to the train station, giving him the longest lingering hug and the fattest envelope stuffed with cash.
Lydia and Erik did not have children so there were no hearts to break on the day she left Phalaborwa, although I’m told she broke all the expensive plates, cups, glasses, vases and ornaments, smashed the furniture, used a hacksaw to cut through the mattresses and sofas, and set the curtains ablaze.
Erik must’ve done something terrible to incur her wrath. Whatever it was, his guilt was huge for Lydia received the biggest divorce settlement, so much money that she instantly became a woman of leisure. But instead of buying a comfortable home with a lovely garden in a tree-lined suburb as other white women of her standing would do, she banked the money and took her leisure in Anna-Joanna’s home in the Indian location, surrounded by Anna-Joanna’s sticky Indian children.
When Lydia and Anna-Joanna reunited, Anna-Joanna had left the city for this obscure town on its eastern outskirts, and had converted from Christianity to Islam to marry Mohammed Ally, even changing her name to Halima, which in Arabic means forbearance, apt for all she tolerated in Mohammed’s family.
Yes, Mohammed was my grandfather and with him began our Indian bloodline, flowing back to his forefathers, long before they were taken from India by the British onto colonial ships and forced to work the sugarcane plantations in Natal as indentured laborers, and long after they morphed from laborers to land and buildings owners, establishing businesses and trading posts all over South Africa.
Mohammed had a best friend, Yusuf, who was heavily involved in South African politics. He was a revolutionary, an anti-apartheid activist, prominent in the Defiance Campaign and a member of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the paramilitary wing of the ANC founded by Nelson Mandela, and like Mandela, he was an enemy of the state who the South African Security Forces regularly jailed, detained and tortured. He lived a life fueled with risk and danger, slept with an AK-47 gun under his bed, and fell fervently in-love with Lydia, and she with him. Their love was that unexplainable, overpowering kind that was all limbs, fluids and feelings and more passionate and pleasurable than love described in Mills and Boons, the romance books that I hide in my kitchen, in the ladle and big spoon drawer, and that Aunty Fatima of the green grocer’s hides in her oven, behind the cake pans.
Yusuf and Lydia’s love led to pregnancy, Miriam and Yasmin, a second set of twin girls born to Lydia, which was biologically questionable as twins did not run in the family, not in the Coloured, Indian, Scottish or Khoisan bloodlines.
When Lydia informed Yusuf of the pregnancy, he proposed marriage and raced home to share the joyous news with his family. But they threatened to disown him if he made a life with someone of a different race, religion and culture, no matter how fair-skinned she was, which spoke volumes because Indians are partial to fair complexion, whether they reside in Bombay, Durban, Toronto or London, they adore fair skin, but can’t rise above their own special brand of racism, the caste system, the Indian way of thinking. In Afrikaans we call it, ‘kak gedagte’, shitty thinking or small mindedness.
Not deterred by family and defiant as ever, Yusuf wed Lydia, and moved into a two-bedroom pondokkie in the Indian location, hidden from the apartheid machinery because of the Mixed Marriages Act that made their union an illegal punishable crime, more so than the union of Anna-Joanna and Mohammed, a Coloured and an Indian.
You see, Lydia was classified white and a white woman marrying a man of inferior race was not only illegal, it was damning, sinful in the eyes of the apartheid God for whom the sanctity of whiteness was preserved. It mattered only that white people did not marry across the color line. Us, Brown and Black people could mix and make merry as long as we did not taint the whiteness. After all, Apartheid was about the separation of the races, and the preservation of whiteness.
Lydia’s year of marriage to Yusuf was the happiest of her life because with him she lived, in her words, the most romantic version of herself.
Yes, they were married for only a year.
Because he died.
Yusuf and his comrade, Sibusiso, were tasked by Umkhonto we Sizwe to blow-up the bus depot in Krugersdorp, a mining town on the West Rand of Johannesburg named after Paul Kruger, Oom Paul, who personified Afrikanerdom. But it went awry, either the plan was foiled by a mpimpi, or the bomb was tempered with making it murder.
According to Lydia, the night before the operation Yusuf sensed something was askew. He told her that revolutions kill their sons for the good of the revolution. He said if the bomb he was carrying detonated while still in his possession then she should know he was killed by his own to further the goals of the revolution.
Yes, the bomb detonated in his carrier-bag before he planted it.
No, Lydia’s finger pointing was disregarded as ramblings of a grieving widow.
Yes, a bigger goal was revealed, but only to those not afraid to look.
You see, another comrade was also killed when the limpet mine he was to plant in Park Station, the main train station in Johannesburg, detonated in his possession. And in Durban, a comrade was killed when the bomb he was carrying exploded before he stepped into the lobby of the Holiday Inn, a popular beach-front hotel. And on Long street in Cape Town a bomb exploded in a car outside a busy nightclub with the comrade still at the wheel. According to reports, the deaths were accidental, caused by a faulty ammunition consignment from Russia via Mozambique to the ANC. The Soviet link, rooi gevaar, drew international media attention and spotlighted the plight of oppressed South Africans, resulting in South Africa being declared a pariah nation, and in financial and military aid flowing into the ANC coffers from Libya, Cuba, Northern Ireland and China. The connection between the deaths and the surge of support for the revolution was clear, but there was no evidence, save a widow screaming murder.
After Yusuf’s death Lydia lived with his ghost, determined to prove he was killed. She neglected the twins, leaving them in Anna-Joanna’s care. Her only goal was to find Sibusiso, the comrade who accompanied Yusuf on the operation and who curiously disappeared. She began her search by confronting local ANC cadres, the Moodley’s, Naidoo’s, Akhalwaya’s and Cachalia’s. She even co-opted Mohammed, but he wanted no part of her mission, venerating Yusuf as a martyr. Finding no answers, she crossed the railway tracks that separated the Indian location from the Black township and went seeking there. Her frequenting the Black township led to her frequenting the homes of leading ANC families like the Tambo clan, where she encountered ANC higher-ups and discovered that Sibusiso had fled to Lusaka in neighboring Zambia. She followed the trail using the Van Heerden name and wealth. I am told because of her beauty, wits and guile, and lots of palm greasing, she strolled into the ANC camp on the outskirts of Lusaka and found Sibusiso. Information about what happened after was scant, save for a letter she had sent to Anna-Joanna stating that she and Sibusiso were married. Her letter did not say it was love, but alluded to shared grief, survivor’s guilt, and remorse. The marriage did not last. She unwittingly blamed Sibusiso for Yusuf’s death and left Lusaka for Mozambique.
From what I gathered, every Umkhonto we Sizwe operation had a handler, and Yusuf and Sibusiso’s handler was from Mozambique. His name and location Sibusiso had disclosed to Lydia. She went searching, but the trail went dead.
She stayed in Mozambique for twelve years, first in Beira where she bought a lavish villa at the mouth of the Pungwe River and regularly entertained government officials and spies, looking for proof that Yusuf was killed. Then in Maputo, swapping her villa for a mansion overlooking the Indian ocean. The mansion belonged to Ricardo, her fifth husband, the Portuguese Ambassador to Mozambique, an influential man given that Mozambique was once a Portuguese colony.
I dare not speculate if it was a marriage of convenience, but there was no doubt Lydia harangued Ricardo’s good standing to prove that Yusuf was killed. And the title of Ambassador’s Spouse provided her with safety given that the ANC did not appreciate her question-asking.
When Ricardo’s tenure was up, Lydia refused to go to Lisbon with him claiming it was a far stray from her family. The truth was Lisbon was a stretch from her quest. She returned to Anna-Joanna’s home, and there she tarried until she gave-up Yusuf’s ghost and moved back to the Eastern Cape.
Yes, having found no evidence, she laid the ghost to rest.
But ending the quest was haunting. She spoke of it on her death-bed. I was there, so was Anna-Joanna, and Lydia’s daughters, all four of them, awkwardly patched-up in their reconciliation. In her dying moments, she called out to Yusuf, awakening the ghost and lamenting ‘what if’ and ‘if only’ on lips, cherry burgundy, eternally vibrant.
No, she did not die in Aliwal-North. Not even God with His wicked sense of humor could have willed her back there. Lydia lived out her days in Molteno, a farming town neighboring Aliwal-North. It was where Leon was from, where he worked as a traveling salesman for the farm that produced Ouma Rusks, a dried buttermilk biscuit that South Africans dunk into coffee and tea.
Leon was Lydia’s grace, the lover she took in her mature years. He ambled into town pedaling samples at Patel Brothers, our big supermarket, and met Lydia who was there to satisfy her penchant for baked goods. Their connection was instant, the kind that ignites wonderment experienced in childhood when you run wild, guffaw, snot-cry, dream, scream, glow, gloom, glum, fueled with joy, madness, sadness, and simply be, free. It was God given love. In Afrikaans we say it comes from ‘anderkant die berge’, beyond the mountains. Or as Lydia said of Leon on the day she buried him, he was her imaginary friend come to life, the one she ran with through golden mielie fields, who took her by the hand to play a last time, he the pure-hearted alcoholic, and she, wayward. And when she threw a final rose on his coffin, she wept loudly, then softly, then no more.
Here, take a look, a photo of the two of them on their stoep in Molteno, their wry smiles saying, I know something you don’t.
And here is a photo of Lydia when she was young. A true beauty. None of her daughters or granddaughters take after her. In fact, my daughter, Lydiatjie, nicknamed small Lydia, is her replica, made so by the phenomena of bloodlines. You see, bloodlines don’t flow languidly, they splatter, spatter and spit, horizontally, vertically and haphazardly, skipping over generations, crash-rolling into some, pouring into others, a phenomena that the white man of this country could not accept, a phenomena that apartheid could not erase.
And so ends my story.
Would you like a koeksister? It’s been dipped in syrup and coconut. Or perhaps you’d like to use the facilities? Where did you drive in from? Mozambique? That’s a ways away. And why are you handing me the hefty envelope that you’ve been clutching so tightly since you walked in?
It is addressed to Lydia Hayworth.
You want me to gift it to Lydia and Yusuf’s twins, Miriam and Yasmin. They are around, both married, two children each and living on the other side of town, near the public swimming pools and tennis courts, by the bigger houses with the bigger yards and the bigger problems.
I don’t open mail not addressed to me, but as you insist, I’ll make an exception. Do pass my reading glasses, behind you, in the crack of the sofa.
Let me see. It says…
But this is the proof, the evidence that Lydia…
So it wasn’t an accident.
He was murdered.
This is quite the pickle, a spurting sour pickle. If brought to light, it will result in re-opening the inquiry into Yusuf’s death and the others who died in the same manner. There will be questions, cover-ups, wounds re-opened, pains re-lived. But truth comes at a high price, like freedom, paid for with blood and bodies, too many, the land unable to hold. On second thought, given the TRC that heard truths about apartheid determined that Yusuf’s death was an accident, I’d say what we have in the envelope is not a pickle, it is spicy atchar, bunched and bottled in masala, like the kind sold by Aunty Fatima of the green grocers. I’ll buy a batch and label it with your name to take back to Mozambique.
What is your name?
You, the grand-daughter of the handler from Mozambique? The grand-daughter of Yusuf and Sibusiso’s handler?
Of course it’s a story I want to hear! And start from when Lydia met your grandfather. She did meet your grandfather, yes? Otherwise, how did you come by the envelope? How did you know to come looking?
Your grandmother? That’s a twist I did not see coming, or as we say in my business, it’s the kind of plot that calls for another round of tea. But before I put the kettle on, do you hear that sound? Not the tinkling of wind chimes on the stoep. Listen. It’s the sound of laughter in the heavens, Lydia’s and Yusuf’s and Sibusiso’s laughter, and your grandfather the handler, and your grandmother.
I too am laughing.
Because in all my years of storytelling, I’ve never woven an ending like the one in your envelope, an ending that comes from ‘anderkant die berge’, beyond the mountains.
The End
—–
Image: Copilot AI