These Things Really do Happen to Me

Introduction

I think that life is ultimately a collection of stories we either create or find ourselves in. Some moments are funnier than others. Some moments have little joy, though we learn lessons. Sometimes there is nothing to learn; they’re simply fleeting moments that we may remember for their uniqueness.

I have had the idea of writing a book with the title These Things Really Do Happen To Me for a while now. I remember telling some friends about how I had lost my mother’s suitcase after being homeless. I’d left the suitcase in a church so that they could look after it, promising them that I would collect it at a later stage. I didn’t tell them at the time that I didn’t have a place to stay.

After a few months of sleeping in a flat that was being renovated, and on desks at the college I was studying at in Cape Town, I eventually managed to find lodgings with the help of some church members. But when I went back to the church to fetch the suitcase, it had mysteriously vanished. No one knew what had happened to it. I assumed it had vanished through the Bermuda Triangle of Christian generosity.

And then, a while later, I managed to find it again by coincidence when I was helping a family whose home had been devastated by a tornado. That story can be found in my book, To Quote Myself.

I often tell stories like this and people comment on the fact that I have so many stories to share. I say that I don’t have better stories or more stories than them; the difference is just that I talk about and share my stories.

Part of the reason I felt encouraged to write this book is the comments that my long-ass captions on Instagram get. People often ask for them to be longer; they want more stories.

Instagram’s Best Nine feature shows, at the end of every year, users’ nine most popular posts from that year. Most people’s best posts are of them, by themselves. But not me. In 2015, for example, only one Best Nine post featured my face, and I was not even alone. If I am not mistaken, my Best Nine in 2016 was like this for me too. There were only two pictures that featured my face – and, again, I was not by myself in a single one of the Best Nine. My most popular posts each year were captions about an event or a story I was sharing.

I get the picture. Those who follow me on social media find the people I am with attractive, and I happen to be in the way. Obviously, I don’t have a face for Instagram. I am still going to therapy.

One of the primary reasons I wrote this book is because I feel that we have been through a lot of serious years and seen a lot of serious books published. My book is meant to be light-hearted, talking about everyday life.

There are some serious topics I touch on as well because I think they are important, even if I have to include them in a book that is largely meant to be light. Life happens whether we are being serious or having a good time.

We are each stars in our own lives, and simultaneously, co-stars in the lives of other people we encounter. Romances, tragedies, horrors and laugh-out-loud comedies are all part of our stories. My life is the same as everyone else’s.

Life is made up of those funny or coincidental moments that find their way into our stories while we are on our way to do the shopping, the moments that stand out in what seems mundane. These moments deviate from our normal routines, disrupt the everyday, and make for memorable experiences. I am celebrating those moments in my life with this book.

Johannesburg

July 2018

introduction

The shining Vaseline Blue Seal kid

There are many stories my mother, Nonceba Dlanga, loves to tell about me as a little boy. One of these is about my cousins from the big city and me.

When I was about three or four years old, I was living in Dutyini near Mount Ayliff with my mother, sister and grandparents, Alfred Kaiser Boyce and Vuyelwa Victoria Boyce. My mother had decided to move in with her parents when her husband, my father, left for Johannesburg with another woman and stopped supporting us. My mother’s sister, Nolulama Mshumi, was supporting her from Mdantsane, just outside of East London.

My aunt and her husband would drive down to Dutyini to visit my grandparents and sometimes they brought their children, who are my cousins. Obviously. There was Nobulali, Unathi and Mazwimahle, who is a month older than me. (Qiqa and Malubekho had not yet been born.) I would always hang around Mazwi because we were the same age.

I often played outside in the dust but when I heard my family from the big township were coming, my mother says I would go fill a small portable basin with water, wash myself, and then not so much moisturise as completely smear myself with Vaseline Blue Seal. I would then put on the newest clothes I had. I tried to look as presentable as possible.

My cousins looked really clean and beautiful from not having to live in the harsh conditions of village life. I thought that if I looked clean, and shiny from the Vaseline, they would take me back with them to the big city, where I would have a better life. I’d have hot, running water from a tap, electricity, and would eat meat often. I hoped they would not notice that I was not supposed to be part of them.

But, they always left without me and I realised that there is a certain layer of village that can’t be washed off with a single bath.

Years later, I would become a big city-slicker myself. My mother says it was if I knew, even as a child, that I wanted to change my circumstances: ‘Ndambona lo mntwana ukuba akasokuze aziqhathe.’ (‘I saw that this child won’t cheat himself out of a good life, even then.’)

My birthday is always weird

My birthday has always been weird for me. The reason only occurred to me recently.

When I was young, I lived with my grandparents in the village. My father lived in Johannesburg and had been absent from our lives for some time. My mother had moved to work in East London, which is roughly five hours away by car.

The year I turned six, my mother decided to throw me a big birthday celebration. It’s something she had seen parents in the city do for their kids. My sister Sikelelwa’s birthday was four months later but my mother didn’t want her to feel left out, so we had a combined party. If you look at the photo on the next page (don’t mind my aunt peeking at the neighbours through the curtain), you can tell this was a big deal because there is even guava juice on the table. And don’t let me get started about the chips in the enamel dish.

It was on this day that a telegram was sent to the village. It was on this day that the grown-ups at my birthday were all called into a room. It was on this day that I heard a collective gasp from the grown-ups. It was on this day that I heard my mother’s uncontrollable, pained cry from that room, while we were playing outside. It was on this day that we found out that my father had been stabbed to death. On my birthday. He was only 26, making my mother a very young widow.

A few years ago, I was making a Snapchat video about how awkward I get about my birthday. In the middle of making the video, I had a sudden realisation. I had always known that we found out about his death on that day, but I never made the conscious connection between his death and my feelings about my birthday until that moment.

That realisation, I think, is freeing me up to understand and let go of the discomfort I have about my birthday.

My father, the absent

My father, Zandisile Dlanga, disappeared in Johannesburg, and abandoned his wife and children. Tragically, he was murdered and would never have the opportunity to come back into our lives.

His father, Thambile Paulos Dlanga, died after being captured and tortured by apartheid police. He also died young – 44. Maybe the reason I try to do as many things as I do, is that a part of me feels that I, like my father and grandfather, could also die young.

I have three pictures of my father – none of them with us together. Perhaps he thought he still had time. I have a single memory of him: he was standing outside my grandmother’s house and talking to my mother, next to my aunt’s car. I remember being in my mother’s arms when she passed me over to my dad, and then he held me against his chest. That’s the memory.

The older I get, the more I hold on to this sole memory. In my memoir, To Quote Myself, I wrote about how unattached I am to it. Things change.

My mother says my father was kind, enjoyed reading, and was very loving and romantic (I must get that from him).

I do believe that our fathers, more often than not, love us more than they can tell or show us. Sometimes they may be overwhelmed by the responsibility of fatherhood, and avoid it or flee from it. I think that sometimes they vanish completely because they are ashamed that they didn’t or couldn’t take care of us. Seeing the children they have let down probably compounds an unimaginable guilt in them.

Fathers can inspire much bitterness in their children when they don’t become who they are supposed to be to us. But I do think it is important to love our fathers, regardless of their failings. Sometimes, simply by welcoming and loving them, we can encourage them to become better fathers. And that, in turn, releases us from the burden and poison that is bitterness.

Cars in the village

When my Uncle Senzangakhona and Aunt Nolulama, my mother’s sister, visited us in Dutyini, they would do me the honour of allowing me to stay and play in the car. My mother tells me that I was about three years old, and I would show no interest in my relatives when they arrived because all my attention would be directed towards the vehicle. Once I was inside, it was difficult to get me to get out. I’d turn the steering wheel, touch all sorts of buttons and pretend I was driving. I’d do this until it was time for my uncle and aunt to leave for Mdantsane, which was a six-hour drive away.

My mother remembers that I would turn to her as soon as they left and say, ‘Thula, anti, nam ndizokukhwelisa, nam ndizoyithenga mhla ndaya eGoli.’ (‘It’s okay, aunt, don’t cry, one day I will let you get in my car. I will buy one when I go to Johannesburg.’) Of course, I was the heartbroken one; she was completely unbothered.

When I was small, I thought I was going to go to Johannesburg to work in the mines because most young men in the village did so.

Later, when I did grow up and start working, I worked in Cape Town for four years before moving to Johannesburg. It was only after I had moved and started working in Johannesburg that I got a car. I may not have ended up doing underground mining but I did go to Johannesburg and I bought a car – just like I’d said I would when I was three.

Growing up in Dutyini, we didn’t see cars often. The only car we saw every day, a Toyota Hilux, belonged to Mr Chanca, the shopkeeper. The Chanca family was the most prosperous family in the village.

Mr Chanca’s bakkie would deliver big loads of groceries to various homes. If you had ordered a big load – 25 kilograms of mealie-meal, 12.5 kilograms of sugar, a bag of cabbage and so on – he would deliver the load to your family home. The roads were bad so a 4x4 was the best and most practical car to have in the village.

The village dogs would always chase after Mr Chanca’s Toyota, and we little boys would do the same. We would shout and ask the car – yes, the car, not the driver – to bring us sweets. Whenever we saw an aeroplane flying above us, we would also run after it until it vanished, and shout, ‘Uze usiphathele amasweet nama chips, ne gwava jus!’ (‘Bring us sweets, chips and guava juice!’)

If we wanted to see more cars, we would have to make our way towards the N2 or the road leading to Ntabankulu. Back then, this road was not tarred and cars, driving at speed, would leave plumes of dust in their wake.

We used to stand or sit by the side of the road, looking after cattle or sheep, making sure that they did not cross the road and get run over by cars. We would count cars or try figure out, from a distance, what makes and models they were. The person who guessed correctly first got a point. Naturally, I would always win this game. Even in these circumstances, I was more privileged than many of the other village kids my age because I got to go to Mdantsane and East London during the holidays – which meant I was exposed to different cars.

Sometimes the cars would stop and the people would take pictures of us. One day, after a photo of me had been taken – wearing oversized, somewhat torn and dirty clothes, with no shoes, and posing with clean, white children – I suddenly realised something was wrong with this picture. I must have been about seven or eight.

The people who did this were always white. The nice cars, with boats trailing behind them, with fishing rods sticking out the windows, with happy children, were always driven by – yes, you guessed it – white people. From that day on, I refused to have pictures of me taken. Even when I was offered sweets.

There were no white people in the villages. They were never poor. The only poor people were black. It didn’t make sense to me because I didn’t see what was so different between us. I simply could not understand. When I began asking questions, I found out about a thing called apartheid.

Snitching on my mom to get out of trouble

When my sister and I lived with our grandparents in Dutyini, my mother visited about once a month – to check up on us and to see if her parents needed anything from her. She worked in a pharmacy in Mdantsane, about 400 kilometres away from us.

Before she arrived, the homestead would be busy with people running around to ensure that my sister, Siki, and