A Journey From Nowhere to Nowhere

A Journey From Nowhere to Nowhere

Manzitha Sokupa

Published by Manzitha Sokupa, 2020.

While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

A JOURNEY FROM NOWHERE TO NOWHERE

First edition. April 15, 2020.

Copyright © 2020 Manzitha Sokupa.

ISBN: 978-0620806251

Written by Manzitha Sokupa.

A journey from

NOWHERE TO NOWHERE!

Based on a true story

Manzitha Sokupa

© Manzitha Sokupa 2019

A Journey from Nowhere to Nowhere

Published by Manzitha Sokupa

Contact Details [email protected]

ISBN 978-0-620-80624-4

eISBN 978-0-620-80625-1

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright owner.

Cover by Manzitha Sokupa

Layout and publication facilitation by Boutique Books

Acknowledgements

First of all, I thank the Almighty, my Creator, for the gift of life, good health, family, friends, love and all my abilities. I would not have been able to start and finish this project without Your grace.

I thank AmaSango amahle, ooNzitha, Nyandemnyam’eng-athwalwa ngabafazi, Phantsolo, Khwayikhwayi, Mlungwan’omnyama noThsanana, Manyathela ngentsimbi, Mgabhisa, Ngxwangxwa. Aaa! Sango! Nabo ooNyawuza, ooThahla kandayeni, ooHlamba ngobende amanzi ekhona, ooZiqelekazi, ooFaku, ooNgqungqushe, ooSiphunzi somthathi somthole siqutywa singeva, Aa! Ngcwangula! Tita! for guidance and clarity when sometimes I feel confused.

I thank my family for allowing me the space to write this piece, for understanding my cause and for supporting me throughout with facts where I was not so sure anymore. I would not have been able to finish this book without you.

My parents and my four siblings, I thank you for your love but most of all I thank you for understanding. To my two children, Simanye and Okuhle, thank you for your support – for the reminders and encouragement, especially the times when I didn’t feel like going on. You understood how important writing this book was for my well-being. The ideas and opinions around the book cover are appreciated. You are awesome and I love you.

To my best friend Mide, thank you for making me finally put it down on paper, for being the first to read it when it was still very raw, for your invaluable contribution and guidance. You also understood the importance of this book to my well-being and everyone involved.

I can’t overemphasise the extent of everyone’s support throughout this two-year-long project. I am honoured and humbled.

From my heart, Enkosi! ndiyabulela!

Prologue

Everybody goes through hard times, but there is nothing that can justify this cruel act! Shh! Don’t judge! It’s easy to say whatever you like when you are not on the receiving end, without knowing what really went down. Why are you even trying to rationalise this? Everybody has a decision to make at the end of the day – to whose advantage doesn’t matter at times. One’s got to do what one’s got to do!

I’ve always felt strongly about protecting my loved ones and sometimes even get biased, or perhaps more often than not. But one thing that really upsets me is seeing kids hurt… even way before I had my own. It just would literally stop my heartbeat and I guess it has got worse now that I have mine. The thought of them being lost somewhere or stranded, wondering where I am, just cripples me.

Hold on my dear! I touch my chest and literally feel my heart racing. Anxious as I am, I manage to sit down on the staircase at my workplace, looking around to see if anyone is looking. What’s most upsetting about some bad decisions that are taken for children, or about children, is that they are mostly about the decision maker; how they feel, how they are not able to do this or that. Sometimes I think it’s almost as if people think that children don’t have feelings. "Maybe you are just being a child yourself that’s why you feel like this, young lady. You know nothing about being in the shoes of a parent." Mhmm! Somebody once said that having children or giving birth to a child doesn’t make one a parent; it takes more than that, maybe that’s what I still need to find out and maybe then I’ll understand.

This conversation continued in my head for a while. ‘What would happen if I didn’t have my own children? Would I feel different, maybe? What on earth would make me leave my children behind and never look back? Poverty maybe…? Huh! Or struggling due to lack of employment, maybe? Well, I’m not convinced.

Maybe you should try and be in their shoes just for once! is what people will say. "Try not to judge. Maybe they are better than those who kill their children. Instead, they leave them for other people to find and raise when they themselves could not.’

Those words have become common in our society. Over and over again, people find themselves having to understand the evil that other people do on a daily basis. Nothing can make me understand the hardships that a mother must have been through to abandon her children and to never look back, weighing it against how the children will be impacted by the decision and how the ones who discover these children must feel at that very first moment of finding them. Maybe they are better off; maybe they are not. Maybe I don’t know better…

I don’t really know to whose advantage this decision is, but I, being a mother, believe that I would never leave my children. I would never abandon my children... this can never be to their advantage. Agh! When mothers decide to abandon their children, people have to stop a bit and try to be in their shoes to try to understand, just for once. Why can’t the same principle be applied to the other side of the equation? Why can’t people stop a bit for once, and try to put themselves in these children’s shoes? For me, this principle should be applied to both sides or not at all. One would see the impact this has on both sides. After all, people react differently to situations and some demons seem to be better than others… it seems our society has learned to accept things and is able to measure which devils are better than others.

I’ve seen some children, mostly babies and toddlers, who have been tied up on the bed inside a shack and locked there by their mothers and left there to die. Had it not been for that angel who came to their rescue, they would have eventually died. Some of these babies end up with a deformity as a result of lying on the floor on one side of their face for weeks. In other instances, they get choked and thrown down toilet pits. I guess that this is where we find ourselves as a society on almost a daily basis; hence all these measurements of how evil one action is when measured against other horrific actions.

I won’t lie to myself: I’m angry with this woman called Jackie, and I won’t convince myself that I am not. I’m angry for my siblings, for their unimaginable pain and the answers that my entire family could not give them; the answers that I too could not give them. Not unless I could find her and bring her to come and speak for herself. The words we love you alone didn’t carry much weight anymore. Even I felt the emptiness of my words every time I spoke them. Even though I knew I meant them, it was not important as the people they were intended for found them difficult to believe.

1992

In a beautiful village called Ngcele, on the soil of Jamangile back in the Eastern Cape, is where I grew up as a little girl. My home is situated at the top of the village and, due to its exposure to the strong winds, my father had planted trees to surround the whole front part of the yard from one side to the other. He would trim these trees so beautifully to make them well shaped. The same trees would give nice shade when the sun was intense.

My parent’s house was four-roomed: two bedrooms, and an open plan kind of arrangement with a sitting room combined with dining room and kitchen. It had a veranda and there were three entrances to it: one leading straight to the kitchen, one to the second room and the other to the sitting room. If people were sitting in the kitchen, someone sitting in the lounge would still be able to see them and be able to have a conversation with them.

A few metres from this house was my granny’s house and a rondavel. We were a poor family – didn’t have much – but there was a warmth that just drew people from all over the place to come and stay there. My parents had a total of five children of their own, including me, but there would always be one or two extra children – cousins and strangers – boarding and attending a local high school.

Chapter 1

Day 1

It was after school hours one sunny afternoon. The schools were out and children were going to their homes. Playing touch, running, dodging and screaming was the order of the day. Some played upuca or sang and played hand clapping games; we used to call that game byshoza . This is a game that can be played by two or more participants, with a funny song or rhyme going with it. Some were playing my in or playing skipping rope games. We used to call skipping rope ugqaphu . Both boys and girls of my age, then, could play all the games. It’s just hilarious to actually realise that what was supposed to be am I in? had become my in! What is even funnier is that even a lot of kids of today still call this game my in.

Who even knows what the real name of the game we used to call byshoza is? In fact, I asked my children and nephews to play byshoza because I wanted to hear if the lyrics would make sense, because back then we sang almost anything, adding our own words that didn’t always make sense – and believe me, most of the time we didn’t understand them. Surely you can’t blame us for not knowing English and naming certain things in the vernacular. As I listened to them play the game, I couldn’t help but laugh. Nothing has changed. These kids still sing exactly the same way we did. I can’t argue with them because they are much more clued up than we were then. Anyway, my in also required that a certain pattern be drawn on the floor with numbers ranging from one to eight, if I remember correctly, but then a player would need to close their eyes or look up so as not to see the pattern and attempt to enter all those boxes in the pattern, asking the other participants on the outside if he or she is in.

As much as we’d be hungry and wanting to get home as soon as possible so we could eat, it was not possible to escape all the fun games. My favourite game was upuca, but I also loved playing touch because I was a master of running and dodging. I loved playing upuca because I could focus and I was fast in terms of the hand and eye coordination that was required by the game – which required throwing one stone up and getting the rest out of the circle and catching the stone that you threw up and taking those that you took out of the circle back to the circle and leaving only one outside the circle until all the stones that were in the circle have been taken out of that circle.

In all these fun games, falling and getting bruised was inevitable. From time to time, I would get home with either a bleeding knee or one of my toes cut open from tripping. Also, in between, there’d be a bit of fighting because tempers got lost in the middle of the games. Upuca was a bit of a time waster because we would need to sit down in order to play it, but I loved it nonetheless. This would irritate the learners who were older than us and those who came from the local high schools, as we would literally sit in the middle of the road – for obvious reasons, of course. One, you can’t draw the circle in the grass and two you can’t play with small stones in the grass. Remember that this type of grass is not the kind that you find in front of these nice yards we see in town; not lawn. I’m talking about the long grass that would be up to my waist at that time. The chances of losing school clothing items and books in all that were also very high.

What is funny now is that I never used to understand why it was such a big deal to Mom if I lost a shoe or jersey in that process. As a kid, it’s very easy to lose clothing items and unfortunately you don’t have a clue how they got lost. The only thing that is on your mind when the bell rings is to grab your plastic bag with your books, and your jersey will either be tied around your waist or put on your shoulder with one arm hanging loose while everybody competes to get to the school gate. If that jersey falls off in the process of running, you won’t feel it. Plus, with all the buzz, if your plastic bag has a hole in it and one of your shoes falls out you won’t notice – not unless someone who really cares sees it and alerts you to it, but there are very few chances of that. In fact, most if not all the time I’d only find out that I had only one shoe the following morning, when I wanted to put them on for school.

My younger sister and I, together with some children from my village would get home eventually, covered with dust, looking as if we hadn’t had a bath or even seen water for a number of days, let alone since the morning before going to school. It would get even worse if particular attention was paid to just above the mouth area. Sunny or cold, some would have a running tap over there, and others would have dry white lines, like the dusty paths in the village. I remember our teachers would shout at you for either having a umlungu peeping out from your nose or for having that dusty path that was an indication that the umlungu they were talking about had not just peeped out from the nose but had actually exited and left a mark there. Sometimes I still wonder why the mucus was called an umlungu and still is. I often hear my nephews tease one another about having one peeping out from the nose, even now.

The parents and other adults who were fortunate and had jobs would still be at work and some who were not working would have gone either to the river to do their washing or would be busy in their gardens. You would find both women and young men, especially the high school boarders who attended a local high school in my village at the river, washing their blankets, school uniform or queuing to get water. Jamangile High School was popular because it produced quality matric results and attracted multitudes of learners from the neighbouring towns and villages. Many of them boarded in our homes for a monthly rental of twenty to thirty Rand per learner per month. In summer, some people would spread their blankets and mats on the grass or on those huge rocks that grace the river bank in order to dry them before they took them home.

Fortunately, my home was in very close proximity to the river; hence carrying the wet washing wasn’t as much of an issue as it was for some other villagers. The problem with this idea of spreading the mats and blankets on the grass or rocks by the river bank was that sometimes there were cows that would not be driven to the veld by their owners and they would harass the people and eat the washing. Once a clothing item has been chewed by a cow, one can never get it right again, so these people had to actually be on the lookout for the cows, even if they had to leave the items and go home to do other chores while things dried.

I had just turned seven years old. Out of five siblings I was the fourth child and also the first girl after three boys, followed by my sister, the last born. My sister was yet to turn five later in the year. We attended the same school, where I was busy with Standard 1 and she was in Sub A. We would walk together to school in the mornings, joining many other children who were also going to the same school as us and others who were going to the other schools.

Ngcele is a big location with quite a number of schools. In my village there was a high school called Jamangile S. S. S, and then you had Ntywenka with Mabandla J. S. S and Magwaxaza J. P. S, Mtshezi with Ntaba J. S. S, eDown with Ngcele J. S. S, my school, Ngxaza J. S. S and Thandisizwe High school at Mountain. This number of schools alone should indicate the amount of the traffic to school on a normal day. Going to school in the morning was always a mission. We would always be late because, one, the school was far away and I think that any seven-year-old or any five-year-old can only do so much in terms of walking fast. And, two, the legs are just too short – and of course playing would also play a big part on the delay.

Sometimes the mornings would just be marred by tears. Either I don’t want to go to school because I didn’t have a pencil, or I had lost my book and I was afraid of that certain horrible teacher, or I wanted twenty cents to carry to school so my sister and I could buy two spoons of Morvite that was sold at a spaza shop beside the school, and my mother didn’t have the money. So many reasons, and sometimes we would even end up getting a hiding for toyi-toying in the mornings.

On this particular day, my younger sister and I were coming home from school along with other learners – tired, hungry and with a distance of twelve kilometres to walk back home. It took us almost two hours and sometimes even more to get home from school every day, as we were playing with other kids and taking rests along the way. We got home, looking forward to finding out if there was something to eat, to taking off our school uniforms, to looking for our granny and then going off to play. As usual, there was no one at my mother’s house. The house was closed and locked, but we knew the spot where we’d find keys on the veranda just as we did every day. But today,