Vocabulary:
cathartic (adjective)- providing psychological relief
through the open expression of strong emotions
obstinate- (adjective)-stubbornly refusing to change one's opinion or chosen course of action, despite attempts to persuade one to do so.
to harangue- (verb)-to lecture in a forceful manner
viable (adjective)- possible, as in viable options
bewilderment (noun)- confusion
petrol station- gas station
Zulu- powerful South African tribe, known for their strong warrior culture
Xhosi- A powerful South African tribe, known for their negotition skills
iwiasa- a type of spear used by Zulu people
RUN
Sometimes in big Hollywood movies they’ll have these crazy
chase scenes where somebody jumps or gets thrown from a moving car. The person
hits the ground and rolls for a bit. Then they come to a stop and pop up and
dust themselves off, like it was no big deal. Whenever I see that I think, That’s
rubbish. Getting thrownout of a moving car hurts way worse than that.
I was nine years old when my mother threw me out of a moving
car. It happened on a Sunday. I know it was on a Sunday because we
were coming home from church, and every Sunday in my childhood meant church.
We never missed church. My mother was—and still is—a deeply religious woman.
Very Christian.
Like indigenous peoples around the world, black South
Africans adopted the religion of our colonizers. By “adopt” I mean it was forced
on us. The white man was quite stern with the native. “You need to pray to
Jesus,” he said. “Jesus will save you.” To which the native replied, “Well, we do need to
be saved—saved from you, but that’s beside the point. So let’s give this
Jesus thing a shot.”
My whole family is religious, but where my mother was Team
Jesus all the way, my grandmother balanced her Christian faith with the
traditional Xhosa beliefs she’d grown up with, communicating with the spirits
of our ancestors. For a long time I didn’t understand why so many black people had
abandoned theirindigenous faith for Christianity. But the more we went to
church and the longer Isat in those pews the more I learned about how Christianity
works: If you’reNative American and you pray to the wolves, you’re a savage.
If you’re African andyou pray to your ancestors, you’re a primitive. But when
white people pray to aguy who turns water into wine, well, that’s just common
sense.
My childhood involved church, or some form of church, at
least four nights aweek. Tuesday night was the prayer meeting. Wednesday night
was Bible study. Thursday night was Youth church. Friday and Saturday we had
off. (Time to sin!) Then on Sunday we went to church. Three churches, to be
precise. The reason we went to three churches was because my mom said each church
gave her somethingdifferent. The first church offered jubilant praise of the Lord. The second church offered deep analysis of the scripture, which my mom loved.
The third church offered passion and catharsis; it was a place where you
truly felt the presence of the Holy Spirit inside you. Completely by coincidence, as we
moved back and forthbetween these churches, I noticed that each one had its own
distinct racial makeup: Jubilant church was mixed church. Analytical church
was white church. And passionate, cathartic church, that was black church.
Mixed church was Rhema Bible Church. Rhema was one of those
huge, supermodern, suburban megachurches. The pastor, Ray McCauley,
was an exbody builder with a big smile and the personality of a cheerleader.
Pastor Ray had competed in the 1974 Mr. Universe competition. He placed
third. The winner that year was Arnold Schwarzenegger. Every week, Ray would be up
onstage working really hard to make Jesus cool. There was arena-style
seating and a rock band jamming out with the latest Christian contemporary pop.
Everyone sang along, and if you didn’t know the words that was okay because they
were all right up there on the Jumbotron for you. It was Christian karaoke,
basically. I always had a blast at mixed church.
White church was Rosebank Union in Sandton, a very white and
wealthy part of Johannesburg. I loved white church because I didn’t
actually have to go to the main service. My mom would go to that, and I would go to the
youth side, to Sunday school. In Sunday school we got to read cool stories.
Noah and the flood was obviously a favorite; I had a personal stake there. But
I also loved the stories about 1) Moses parting the Red Sea, 2) David slaying Goliath, 3.)Jesus whipping the money changers in the temple.
I grew up in a home with very little exposure to popular
culture. Boyz II Men were not allowed in my mother’s house. Songs about some guy
grinding on a girl all night long? No, no, no. That was forbidden. I’d hear the
other kids at school singing “End of the Road,” and I’d have no clue what was
going on. I knew of these Boyz II Men, but I didn’t really know who they were. The
only music I knew was from church: soaring, uplifting songs praising Jesus. It was
the same with movies. My mom didn’t want my mind polluted by movies with sex and
violence. So the Bible was my action movie. 4.) Samson was my superhero. He was
my He-Man. A guy beating a thousand people to death with the jawbone of a donkey?
That’s pretty badass. Eventually you get to Paul writing letters to the
Ephesians and it loses the plot, but the Old Testament and the Gospels? I could quote
you anything from those pages, chapter and verse. There were Bible games and
quizzes every week at white church, and I kicked everyone’s ass.
Then there was black church. There was always some kind of
black church service going on somewhere, and we tried them all. In the
township, that typically meant an outdoor, tent-revival-style church. We usually went
to my grandmother’s church, an old-school Methodist congregation,
five hundred African grannies in blue-and-white blouses, clutching their
Bibles and patiently burning in the hot African sun. Black church was rough, I
won’t lie. No air conditioning. No lyrics up on Jumbotrons. And it lasted forever, three or
four hours at least, which confused me because white church was
only like an hour—in and out, thanks for coming. But at black church I would sit
there for what felt like an eternity, trying to figure out why time moved so slowly.
Is it possible for time to actually stop? If so, why does it stop at black church and
not at white church?
I eventually decided black people needed more time with Jesus
because we suffered more. “I’m here to fill up on my blessings for the week,” my
mother used to say. The more time we spent at church, she reckoned, the more
blessings we accrued, like a Starbucks Rewards Card.
Black church had one saving grace. If I could make it to the
third or fourth hour I’d get to watch the pastor cast demons out of people.
People possessed by demons would start running up and down the aisles like
madmen, screaming in tongues. The ushers would tackle them, like bouncers at a
club, and hold them down for the pastor. The pastor would grab their heads and
violently shake them back and forth, shouting, “I cast out this spirit in the
name of Jesus!”
Some pastors were more violent than others, but what they all had
in common was that they wouldn’t stop until the demon was gone and the
congregant had gone limp and collapsed on the stage. The person had to fall. Because
if he didn’t fall that meant the demon was powerful and the pastor needed to come
at him even harder. You could be a linebacker in the NFL. Didn’t matter.
That pastor was taking you down. Good Lord, that was fun.
Christian karaoke, badass action stories, and violent faith
healers—man, I loved church. The thing I didn’t love was the lengths we had
to go to in order to get to church. It was an epic slog. We lived in Eden Park, a
tiny suburb wayoutside Johannesburg. It took us an hour to get to white
church, another forty-five minutes to get to mixed church, and another forty-five
minutes to drive out to Soweto for black church. Then, if that wasn’t bad enough,
some Sundays we’d double back to white church for a special evening service.
By the time we finally got home at night, I’d collapse into bed.
This particular Sunday, the Sunday I was hurled from a
moving car, started out like any other Sunday. My mother woke me up, made me
porridge for breakfast. I took my bath while she dressed my baby brother
Andrew, who was nine months old. Then we went out to the driveway, but once
we were finally all strapped in and ready to go, the car wouldn’t start. My mom
had this ancient,broken-down, bright-tangerine Volkswagen Beetle that she
picked up for next to nothing. The reason she got it for next to nothing was
because it was alwaysbreaking down. To this day I hate secondhand cars. Almost
everything that’s ever gone wrong in my life I can trace back to a secondhand car.
Secondhand cars made me get detention for being late for school. Secondhand
cars left us hitchhiking on the side of the freeway. A secondhand car was
also the reason my mom got married. If it hadn’t been for the Volkswagen that
didn’t work, we neverwould have looked for the mechanic who became the husband
who became the who became the man who tortured us for years and
put a bullet in the back of my mother’s head—I’ll take the new car with the
warranty every time.
As much as I loved church, the idea of a nine-hour slog,
from mixed church to white church to black church then doubling back to white
church again, was just too much to contemplate. It was bad enough in a car, but
taking public transport would be twice as long and twice as hard. When the Volkswagen
refused to start, inside my head I was praying, Please say we’ll just stay
home. Please say we’ll just stay home. Then I glanced over to see the determined look on
my mother’s face, her jaw set, and I knew I had a long day ahead of me.
“Come,” she said. “We’re going to catch minibuses.”
Make sure you have read to this point by Friday.****************************—
Monday..background information on Nelson Mandela
*****************************************
My mother is as stubborn as she is religious. Once her
mind’s made up, that’s it. Indeed, obstacles that would normally lead a person to
change their plans, like a car breaking down, only made her more determined to forge
ahead.
“It’s the Devil,” she said about the stalled car. “The Devil
doesn’t want us to go to church. That’s why we’ve got to catch minibuses.”
Whenever I found myself up against my mother’s faith-based
obstinacy, I would try, as respectfully as possible, to counter with an
opposing point of view. “Or,” I said, “the Lord knows that today we shouldn’t go to
church, which is why he made sure the car wouldn’t start, so that we stay at
home as a family andtake a day of rest, because even the Lord rested.”
“Ah, that’s the Devil talking, Trevor.”
“No, because Jesus is in control, and if Jesus is in control
and we pray to Jesus, he would let the car start, but he hasn’t,
therefore—”
“No, Trevor! Sometimes Jesus puts obstacles in your way to
see if you overcome them. 5) Like Job. This could be a test.”
“Ah! Yes, Mom. But the test could be to see if we’re willing
to accept what has happened and stay at home and praise Jesus for his wisdom.”
“No. That’s the Devil talking. Now go change your clothes.”
“But, Mom!”
“Trevor! Sun’qhela!”
Sun’qhela is a phrase with many shades of meaning. It says
“don’t undermine me,” “don’t underestimate me,” and “just try me.” It’s a
command and a threat, all at once. It’s a common thing for Xhosa parents to say to
their kids. Any time I heard it I knew it meant the conversation was over, and if I
uttered another word I was in for a hiding—what we call a spanking.
At the time, I attended a private Catholic school called
Maryvale College. I was the champion of the Maryvale sports day every single
year, and my mother won the moms’ trophy every single year. Why? Because she was
always chasingme to kick my ass, and I was always running not to get my
ass kicked. Nobody ran like me and my mom. She wasn’t one of those “Come over here
and get your hiding” type moms. She’d deliver it to you free of charge.
She was a thrower, too. Whatever was next to her was coming at you. If it was
something breakable, I had to catch it and put it down. If it broke, that would be my
fault, too, and the asskicking would be that much worse. If she threw a vase at me, I’d
have to catch it, put it down, and then run. In a split second, I’d have to
think, Is it valuable? Yes. Is it breakable? Yes. Catch it, put it down, now run.
We had a very Tom and Jerry relationship, me and my mom. She
was the strict disciplinarian; I was naughty as shit. She would send
me out to buy groceries, and I wouldn’t come right home because I’d be
using the change from the milk and bread to play arcade games at the supermarket.
I loved videogames. I was a master at Street Fighter. I could go forever on a
single play. I’d drop a coin in, time would fly, and the next thing I knew there’d be a
woman behind me with a belt. It was a race. I’d take off out the door and through
the dusty streets of Eden Park, clambering over walls, ducking through backyards. It
was a normal thing in our neighborhood. Everybody knew: That Trevor child would
come through like abat out of hell, and his mom would be right there behind
him. She could go at a full sprint in high heels, but if she really wanted to come
after me she had this thing where she’d kick her shoes off while still going at
top speed. She’d do this weird move with her ankles and the heels would go flying and
she wouldn’t even miss a step. That’s when I knew, Okay, she’s in turbo mode
now.
When I was little she always caught me, but as I got older I
got faster, and when speed failed her she’d use her wits. If I was about to
get away she’d yell, “Stop! Thief!” She’d do this to her own child. In South
Africa, nobody gets involved in other people’s business—unless it’s mob justice, and then
everybody wants in.
So she’d yell “Thief!” knowing it would bring the whole
neighborhood out against me, and then I’d have strangers trying to grab me and tackle
me, and I’d have to duck and dive and dodge them as well, all the while
screaming, “I’m not a thief!I’m her son!”
The last thing I wanted to do that Sunday morning was climb
into some crowded minibus, but the second I heard my mom say sun’qhela
I knew my fate was sealed. She gathered up Andrew and we climbed out of the
Volkswagen and went out to try to catch a ride.
—
I was five years old, nearly six, when Nelson Mandela was
released from prison. I remember seeing it on TV and everyone being happy. I didn’t
know why we were happy, just that we were. I was aware of the fact that there
was a thing called apartheid and it was ending and that was a big deal, but I
didn’t understand the intricacies of it.
What I do remember, what I will never forget, is the
violence that followed.The triumph of democracy over apartheid is sometimes called
the Bloodless Revolution. It is called that because very little white
blood was spilled. Black blood ran in the streets. As the apartheid regime fell, we knew that the black man was
now going torule. The question was, which black man?
Spates of violence
broke out between the Inkatha Freedom Party and the ANC, the African National
Congress, as they jockeyed for power. The political dynamic between these two
groups was very complicated, but the simplest way to understand it is as a
proxy war between Zulu and Xhosa. The Inkatha was predominantly Zulu, very militant
and very nationalistic. The ANC was a broad coalition encompassing
many different tribes, but its leaders at the time were primarily Xhosa. Instead of
uniting for peace they turned on one another, committing acts of unbelievable
savagery. Massive riots broke out. Thousands of people were killed. Necklacing* was common.
That’s where people would hold someone down and put a rubber tire
over his torso,pinning his arms. Then they’d douse him with petrol and set
him on fire and burn him alive. The ANC did it to Inkatha. Inkatha did it to the
ANC. I saw one of those charred bodies on the side of the road one day on my way to
school. In the evenings my mom and I would turn on our little
black-and-white TV and watchthe news. A dozen people killed. Fifty people killed. A
hundred people killed.
Eden Park sat not far from the sprawling townships of the
East Rand, Thokoza and Katlehong, which were the sites of some of the
most horrific Inkatha–ANC clashes. Once a month at least we’d drive home
and the neighborhood would be on fire. Hundreds of rioters in the
street. My mom would edge the car slowly through the crowds and around blockades
made of flamingtires. Nothing burns like a tire—it rages with a fury you
can’t imagine. As we drove past the burning blockades, it felt like we were inside an
oven. I used to say to my mom, “I think Satan burns tires in Hell.”
Whenever the riots broke out, all our neighbors would wisely
hole up behind closed doors. But not my mom. She’d head straight out, and
as we’d inch our way past the blockades, she’d give the rioters this look. Let me
pass. I’m not involvedin this shit. She was unwavering in the face of danger. That
always amazed me. It never mattered that there was a war on our doorstep. She had
things to do, places to be. It was the same stubbornness that kept her going to
church despite a brokendown car. There could be five hundred rioters with a blockade of
burning tires on the main road out of Eden Park, and my mother would say,
“Get dressed. I’ve got to go to work. You’ve got to go to school.” “But aren’t you afraid?” I’d say. “There’s only one of you
and there’s so many of them.”
“Honey, I’m not alone,” she’d say. “I’ve got all of Heaven’s
angels behind me.”
“Well, it would be nice if we could see them,” I’d say.
“Because I don’t think the rioters know they’re there.” She’d tell me not to worry. She always came back to the
phrase she lived by: “If God is with me, who can be against me?” She was never
scared. Even when she should have been.
—
That carless Sunday we made our circuit of churches, ending
up, as usual, at white church. When we walked out of Rosebank Union it was dark and
we were alone. It had been an endless day of minibuses from mixed church to
black church to white church, and I was exhausted. It was nine o’clock at least.
In those days, with all the violence and riots going on, you did not want to be out that
late at night. We were standing at the corner of Jellicoe Avenue and Oxford Road,
right in the heart of Johannesburg’s wealthy, white suburbia, and there were no
minibuses. The streets were empty. I so badly wanted to turn to my mom and say, “You see? This
is why God wanted us to stay home.” But one look at the expression on
her face, and I knew better than to speak. There were times I could talk smack to
my mom—this was not one of them.
We waited and waited for a minibus to come by. Under
apartheid the government provided no public transportation for blacks, but
white people still needed us to show up to mop their floors and clean their
bathrooms. Necessity being the mother of invention, black people created their
own transit system, an informal network of bus routes, controlled by private
associations operating entirely outside the law. Because the minibus business was
completely unregulated, it was basically organized crime. Different
groups ran different routes, and they would fight over who controlled what. There
was bribery and general shadiness that went on, a great deal of violence,
and a lot of protection money paid to avoid violence. The one thing you didn’t do
was steal a route from a rival group. Drivers who stole routes would get killed.
Being unregulated, minibuses were also very unreliable. When they came, they
came. When they didn’t, they didn’t.
Standing outside Rosebank Union, I was literally falling
asleep on my feet.Not a minibus in sight. Eventually my mother said, “Let’s
hitchhike.” We walked and walked, and after what felt like an eternity, a car
drove up and stopped. The driver offered us a ride, and we climbed in. We hadn’t gone
ten feet when suddenly a minibus swerved right in front of the car and cut
us off. A Zulu driver got out with an iwisa*,
a large, traditional
Zulu weapon—a war club, basically. They’re used to smash people’s skulls in.
Another guy, his crony, got out of the passenger side. They walked up to the
driver’s side of the car we were in, grabbed the man who’d offered us a ride, pulled him
out, and started shoving their clubs in his face. “Why are you stealing our
customers? Why are you picking people up?”
It looked like they were going to kill this guy. I knew that
happened sometimes. My mom spoke up. “Hey, listen, he was just
helping me. Leave him. We’ll ride with you. That’s what we wanted in the first
place.” So we got out of the first car and climbed into the minibus.We were the only passengers in the minibus. In addition to
being violent gangsters, South African minibus drivers are notorious for
complaining and haranguing (agressively nagging) passengers as they drive. This driver was a
particularly angry one. As we rode along, he started lecturing my mother about being in
a car with a man who was not her husband. My mother didn’t suffer lectures
from strange men. She told him to mind his own business, and when he heard her
speaking in Xhosa, that really set him off.
The stereotypes of Zulu and Xhosa women
were as ingrained as those of the men. Zulu women were well-behaved and dutiful.
Xhosa women were promiscuous and unfaithful. And here was my mother, his
tribal enemy, a Xhosa woman alone with two small children—one of them a mixed
child, no less. Not justa whore but a whore who sleeps with white men. “Oh, you’re a
Xhosa,” he said.“That explains it. Climbing into strange men’s cars.
Disgusting woman.”
My mom kept telling him off and he kept calling her names,
yelling at her from the front seat, wagging his finger in the rearview
mirror and growing moreand more menacing until finally he said, “That’s the problem
with you Xhosa women. You’re all sluts—and tonight you’re going to learn
your lesson.”He sped off. He was driving fast, and he wasn’t stopping,
only slowing downto check for traffic at the intersections before speeding
through. Death was never far away from anybody back then. At that point my mother
could be raped. We could be killed. These were all viable options. I didn’t
fully comprehend the danger we were in at the moment; I was so tired that I just wanted
to sleep. Plus my mom stayed very calm. She didn’t panic, so I didn’t know to
panic. She just kept trying to reason with him.
“I’m sorry if we’ve upset you, bhuti. You can just let us
out here—”
“No.”
“Really, it’s fine. We can just walk—”
“No.”
He raced along Oxford Road, the lanes empty, no other cars
out. I was sitting closest to the minibus’s sliding door. My mother sat next to
me, holding baby Andrew. She looked out the window at the passing road and
then leaned over tome and whispered, “Trevor, when he slows down at the next
intersection, I’mgoing to open the door and we’re going to jump.”
I didn’t hear a word of what she was saying, because by that
point I’d completely nodded off. When we came to the next traffic
light, the driver eased off the gas a bit to look around and check the road. My mother
reached over, pulled the sliding door open, grabbed me, and threw me out as far as
she could. Then she took Andrew, curled herself in a ball around him, and leaped
out behind me.
It felt like a dream until the pain hit. Bam! I smacked hard
on the pavement. My mother landed right beside me and we tumbled and tumbled
and rolled and rolled. I was wide awake now. I went from half asleep to
What the hell?!
Eventually I came to a stop and pulled myself up, completely
disoriented. I looked around and saw my mother, already on her feet. She turned
and looked at me and screamed.
“Run!”
So I ran, and she ran, and nobody ran like me and my mom. It’s weird to explain, but I just knew what to do. It was
animal instinct, learned in a world where violence was always lurking and
waiting to erupt. In the townships, when the police came swooping in with their riot
gear and armored cars and helicopters, I knew: Run for cover. Run and hide. I
knew that as a five-year-old. Had I lived a different life, getting thrown out of a
speeding minibus might have fazed me. I’d have stood there like an idiot,
going, “What’s happening,
Mom? Why are my legs so sore?” But there was none of that.
Mom said “run,” and I ran. Like the gazelle runs from the lion, I ran.The men stopped the minibus and got out and tried to chase
us, but they didn’t stand a chance. We smoked them. I think they were in
shock. I still remember glancing back and seeing them give up with a look
of utter bewilderment on their faces. What just happened? Who’d have
thought a woman with two small children could run so fast? They didn’t know
they were dealing with the reigning champs of the Maryvale College sports day.
We kept going and going until we made it to a twenty-four-hour petrol station
and called the police.
By then the men were long gone.
I still didn’t know why any of this had happened; I’d been
running on pure adrenaline. Once we stopped running I realized how much pain
I was in. I looked down, and the skin on my arms was scraped and torn. I was
cut up and bleeding all over. Mom was, too. My baby brother was fine, though,
incredibly. My mom had wrapped herself around him, and he’d come through
without a scratch. I turned to her in shock.
“What was that?! Why are we running?!”
“What do you mean, ‘Why are we running?’ Those men were
trying to kill us.”
“You never told me that! You just threw me out of the car!”
“I did tell you. Why didn’t you jump?”
“Jump?! I was asleep!”
“So I should have left you there for them to kill you?”
“At least they would have woken me up before they killed
me.”
Back and forth we went. I was too confused and too angry
about getting thrown out of the car to realize what had happened. My
mother had saved my life.
As we caught our breath and waited for the police to come
and drive us home, she said, “Well, at least we’re safe, thank God.”
But I was nine years old and I knew better. I wasn’t going
to keep quiet this time. “No, Mom! This was not thanks to God! You should have
listened to God when he told us to stay at home when the car wouldn’t start,
because clearly the Devil tricked us into coming out tonight.”
“No, Trevor! That’s not how the Devil works. This is part of
God’s plan, and if He wanted us here then He had a reason…”
And on and on and there we were, back at it, arguing about
God’s will. Finally I said, “Look, Mom. I know you love Jesus, but maybe next
week you could ask him to meet us at our house. Because this really wasn’t a
fun night.”
She broke out in a huge smile and started laughing. I
started laughing, too, and we stood there, this little boy and his mom, our arms
and legs covered in blood and dirt, laughing together through the pain in the
light of a petrol station on the side of the road in the middle of the night.
