Kaffir Boy Tradition and Customs Quotes

Soon after George was weaned my father began teaching him, as he had been teaching me, tribal ways of life. My father belonged to a loosely knit group of black families in the neighbourhood to whom tribal traditions were a way of life, and who sought to bring up their offspring according to its laws. He believed that feeding us a steady diet of tribal beliefs, values and rituals was one way of ensuring our normal growth, so that in the event of our returning to the tribal reserve, something he insistently believed would happen soon, we would blend in perfectly. This diet he administered religious, seemingly bent on moulding George and me in his image.

[…]

Born and bred in a tribal reserve and nearly twice my mother's age, my father existed under the illusion, formed as much by a strange innate pride as by a blindness to everything but his own will, that someday all white people would disappear from South Africa, and black people would revert to their old ways of living. To prepare for this eventuality, he ruled the house strictly according to tribal law, tolerating no deviance, particularly from his children. At the same time that he was force-feeding us tribalism we were learning other ways of life, modern ways, from mingling with children whose parents had shed their tribal cloth and embraced Western culture. (5.3, 5.5)

"Everybody does rituals, Mr. Mathabane," my mother said. "You just don't notice it because they do theirs differently. Even white people do rituals."

"Why do people do rituals, Mama?"

"People do rituals because they were born in the tribes. And in the tribes rituals are done every day. They are a way of life."

"But we don't live in the tribes," I countered. "Papa should stop doing rituals."

My mother laughed. "Well, it's not as simple as that. Your father grew up in the tribes, as you know. He didn't come to the city until he was quite old. It's hard to stop doing things when you're old. I, too, do rituals because I was raised in the tribes. Their meaning, child, will become clear as you grow up. Have patience."

But I had no patience with rituals, and I continued hating them.

Participating in my father's rituals sometimes led to the most appalling scenes, which invariably made me the laughing stock of my friends, who thought that my father, in his ritual garb, was the most hilarious thing they had ever seen since natives in Tarzan movies. Whenever they laughed at me I would feel embarrassed and would cry. I began seeking ways of distancing myself from my father's rituals. I found one: I decided I would no longer, in the presence of my friends, speak Venda, my father's tribal language. I began speaking Zulu, Sotho and Tsonga, the languages of my friends. It worked. I was no longer an object of mockery. (5.27-33)

My mother explained that my father's relatives would not allow us to move in with any of her relatives because according to tribal marriage customs we were my father's property – her, myself, my brother and my sister; therefore, as long as my father was alive, regardless of his being in prison, we had to stay put in his kaya (house), awaiting his eventual return. (7.5)

Then suddenly I remembered snatches of long dreary conversations between my mother and father, in which my mother told my father that because of the hard times we had been experiences continuously over the years, despite repeated sacrifices to tribal gods, it was high time we looked for new ways of dealing with our poverty and suffering, and that maybe Christianity might be one such way. (9.16)

The evangelist, by denouncing tribal religions, had entered the forbidden zone upon which my father stood guard. No one dared do that with impunity. And my father had support. A group of tribal men nearby heaved their massive chests in anger and clenched their fists.

[…]

Seemingly unaware of the mounting opposition to this sermon, the cross-eyed evangelist said, in an even louder voice, "Believe in ancestral spirits is sheer nonsense and hogwash. Those dead people you revere and worship are impotent and wouldn't harm a fly. I repeat: Christ is the only true God. So let all those with pagan hearts accept Him tonight and be saved."

At that, my father and several of the men from the tribal reserve leaped up and shook threatening fists at the evangelists…(9.37, 39-40)

Though my parents differed on many things, including the usefulness of Christianity to black people, they agreed on one thing: the power of witchcraft. Both believed that many, if not all, of our household problems were somehow the result of bad voodoo inflicted upon us by evil-minded and jealous neighbours, and that a powerful witch doctor was needed to remedy things. There was no room for bad luck or chance in their lives. My mother thought that her inability to find jobs in the white world was not only due to her papers not being in order, but also because some neighbour out there simply did not want her to better her lot. We children were led to believe that the world was steeped in voodoo, witchcraft and sorcery. (11.1)

My mother's vast knowledge of folklore, her vivid remembrance of traditions of various tribes of long ago and her uncanny ability to turn mere words into unforgettable pictures, fused night after night to concoct riveting stories.

On some nights, she would tell of chiefs, witch doctors, sages, warriors, sorcerers, magicians and wild, monstrous beasts. These stories were set in mythical African kingdoms ruled by black people, where no white man had ever set foot. She would recount prodigious deeds of famous African gods, endowed with unlimited magical powers; among them the powers of immortality, invincibility and invisibility, powers which they used to fight, relentlessly and valiantly, for justice, peace and harmony among all black tribes of the Valley of a Thousand Hills.

[…]

As we had no nursery rhymes nor storybooks, and, besides, as no one in the house knew how to read, my mother's stories served as a kind of library, a golden fountain of knowledge where we children learned about right and wrong, about good and evil. (12.3-4, 9).

Another thing that awed me was their almost total lack of information outside their own milieu. They never stopped asking us about goings-on in the city and about the world of white people. Even though I had never been beyond the confines of Alexandra to know what Johannesburg was really like, I told them secondhand stories about it. They believed me completely, and thought me vastly knowledgeable; I felt superior to them. The way they went about their daily life reminded me of my mother's stories about primitive tribes, and I felt a slight revulsion at being connected, through my father, to what everyone in the city called a "backward" way of life. My father, on the other hand, seemed very much at home; I wondered why. (15.8)

On the day that my father and I returned from the tribal reserve my mother gave birth to a baby girl, my third sister. In keeping with tribal tradition, she and the baby remained in seclusion for about two weeks, and for that period my father, George and I had to be housed by neighbours, for the presence of males was forbidden during seclusion. The day the baby was born, I spied, in the dead of night, midwives, under a cloak of great secrecy, digging small holes near the house. When I asked what the holes were for, I was told that "sacred things from my mother and the new child" were being buried to prevent witches from taking possession of the stuff and using it to affect the well-being of both (16.1).

It soon became evident that the reason my father lived for the moment was because he was terrified of the future – terrified of facing the reality that I was on the way to becoming a somebody in a world that regarded him as a nobody, a world that had stripped him of his manhood, of his power to provide.

Years of watching him suffer under the double yoke of apartheid and tribalism convinced me that his was a hopeless case, so long as he persisted in clinging to tribal beliefs and letting the white man define his manhood.

His suffering convinced me that there was no way he could come to understand reality the way I did, let alone understand the extremes of emotions which had become so much a part of me and were altering my perspective toward life, that I no longer seemed his son, and he, to me, seemed no longer the father whose blood still ran in my veins.

By pining for the irretrievably gone days of drums, of warriors, of loinskins, of huts and of wife-buying, I knew that he could never travel, in thought and in feeling, the course my life was embarking upon, because everything he wholeheartedly embraced, I rejected with every fibre of my being.

The thick veil of tribalism which so covered his eyes and mind and heart was absolutely of no use to me, for I believed beyond a shadow of a doubt that black life would never revert to the past, that the clock would never turn back to a time centuries ago when black people had lived in peace and contentment before the coming of the white man. (33.31-35)