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  • MaSosiatie
  • Maggie Messitt (bio)

Author's Note: The manuscript from which this excerpt has been pulled is a multithreaded narrative, following the lives of three generations inside the rural South African community of Rooiboklaagte.

I.

Thoko Makwakwa married a man who filled milk pints at Dairy World, just after she turned sixteen. The two were wed long before her days of connecting with the ancestors and selling traditional beer to customers; in between her first and second stint in the banana fields; before the crinkles snuck in beside the corners of her eyes; and before her long legs and torso met in the middle with maternal hips. Thoko was stunning. She had the height of a giraffe, the structure of wispy summer grass, and eyes as wide as ripe marulas. Thoko had her father's figure and her mother's beauty.

After her marriage, she lived in a two-room mud-packed house in Rooibok with her infant son Patrick. She would only see her husband at the end of each month for a few days, and, even then, he would come and go as fast as a summer storm. Sometimes he wouldn't come at all. The month Thoko received the note that changed her life he hadn't come to visit. What did arrive, though, was a belated letter. Thoko doesn't remember the [End Page 69] contents of the letter very well. All she was willing to store in her memory was that he no longer wanted to be her husband. He no longer wanted Thoko to be Mrs. Makwakwa. And he was preparing to marry someone else.

Thoko only looked at the letter once, tore it apart, and gathered her things. She moved herself and Patrick into her parents' home and started to plan. She devised how she might survive on her own and provide Patrick everything she had originally hoped for.

A forty-two-year-old, long-limbed, rawboned woman with two missing front teeth, Thoko was born in Magwogwaza, a community where the land was open and the people were less crowded. Her grandparents had lived there for many years, and their home consisted of several clusters of buildings. Her father worked as a security guard for the mountainside forestry mill, just north of what would later become the homelands border. The year Thoko was born (1959) South Africa's apartheid government passed the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act. This classified black South Africans into eight ethnic groups. Each group was assigned a homeland by the apartheid government, which in that same year put an end to blacks, "coloureds" (or mixed-race South Africans), and Indians attending white universities. The apartheid government ostensibly allowed each homeland its own government departments, officials, and tribal system. The homeland lines took years to draw, and the recognition of those lines and the systems within them were often questioned or ignored entirely. Essentially, the homelands forced relocation along racial and tribal lines.

In 1964 families living in Magwogwaza were called to a meeting by homeland government officials and informed of their need to move. Thoko was only five at the time. She remembers being told that the family had to leave, picking up right away and relocating to Rooiboklaagte A. Her oldest sister, married at the time, remembers differently. Once they were told to move, they were given the chance to visit with the local tribal chief of Rooibok, choose a housing plot, and then given the time to build their new home. That drastic transition from their established home to a two-room tin mazenge for nine people had been seared in her memory. Once their home was finished, they moved, but the day her family moved from their [End Page 70] shack into a new four-room cement house built on the same plot seemed to leave little mark.

The reasons behind their move are confusing. Everyone has an answer, but very few can actually agree upon what that reason is. In 1950, before Thoko was born, the South African government already had passed the Group Areas Act, the centerpiece of apartheid strategy. This legislation declared that there must be a physical separation (or "apartness...

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