A Grand Mother

There is so much about her that I don't know... that I will probably never know. She grew up in a time so foreign to mine, when this culture of ours was still uniquely itself, before the march of the steel and glass towers now stood amongst the acacia trees and thorny scrub of the land, and before this air was filled with the squinting glare of incandescent lights and the buzzing sounds of great machines at work. In all the years I have known her she has never made mention of a father, and her mother passed long before I was born. She did have many siblings in her early childhood, this I know, though she never talks about the ones that passed. Families grew big in those days - it was expected of every woman to marry young and mother five? six? seven? or even eight children... it was a pattern that belonged to that old serpent called tradition, who sometimes is sage and at other times is a devil. But, it was uncommon to have all these children survive. Sickness and circumstance always swung around to claim their dues - so the toll for fertility was all the lives thus reclaimed. My grandmother was one of four siblings that found long life. For the other three siblings, she still carries the weight of their loss in silence and dignity - such is her manner and strength.

A long, long time ago my grandaunt whispered a story as a thunderstorm rumbled on outside, curling us silently up in fleece blankets around flickering candlelight and the sound of water droplets tapping into a bucket from a leak in the corrugated zinc roof. According to that singular tale, far too strong and stubborn was my grandmother when her womanhood came to pass, to accept the life sentence of living beneath any person's thumb. In my culture, there's a proverb to the tune: "lebitla la mosadi ke bogadi", which translates to: "marriage is a woman's grave". In other words, it is the pit from which a woman can never be allowed to escape once she has climbed down into it. The indignity of this particular death was at odds with her character - never could a woman of such stubbornly independent mind willingly surrender her self-determination to a husband, to his family, or to anybody else that dared to demand it from her. So in the end she never got married, though like so many women in our culture I have no doubt she faced constant pressure to do so, or otherwise become a shame to your own family. In any case, she did have four children, the first of whom would grow up to be my mother.

As a high school teacher grandmother was one of the first modern educators our country ever had. She has always had such a fierceness to her temper, so I can only imagine the air of discipline that would've filled her classrooms. Though I have to say I've only ever been subject to the softer side of her, personally - no doubt a touch of privileged affection for her first grandchild. As I grew bigger and taller leaving infancy behind, things around me changed ever and ever more with the ceaseless march of time. Several hundred kilometres south of my village a new city was rising up - a rippling mirage from amongst the arid scrub. Like so many bees on the scent of fragrant springtime flowers, every capable young person was swarming to the virgin metropolis to fulfil hopes and dreams of nectar and honey. Amongst them was my young mother - chasing higher education and work.

I, meanwhile, remained in the village under my grandmother's care. And so the sturdy bosom that my cheek would kiss as I rocked to sleep under starry nights was hers. The breath that breezed to the final flight of candlelight as I lay to bed was hers. In the early hours at the rooster's crow was the sound of her voice and the camphor spice of her body calling me to wake for kindergarten. The taste of her porridge lingered in my mouth on the sunny pilgrimage to school, and her coarse yet loving hands washed me clean of dirt and dust, mud and grass, after hot or wet afternoons at play with all my cousins and friends. In all my earliest memories the woman who most frequently appears is my grandmother. But it was not only I that she mothered in this way - she has done it for all the children of her three daughters and for the children of her late sister - who fell victim in the earlier days of that great modern epidemic virus.

I cannot imagine what strength it took for one woman alone to see more than ten kids through their first few years of life; all the more remarkable to consider that half of them she cared for on a single leg, having suffered a bad fall and broken an ankle in old age that never did find it's way back to health. Nevertheless, I am sure that whatever the tenacity, the patience, and most of all the love needed to do this, it all resides in abundance within her. The spring of my grandmother's love has watered the seeds that have grown into the people I find closest to my heart, my family. But it seems a universal law that at one point or other, on some unknowable cosmic circuit of staggered intervals, tragedy must circle round to strike all families in all places. Without exception; always unannounced.

It happened suddenly that she lost her second daughter, my auntie, along with her unborn child at the violent hands of a husband whose troubles of mind were deeper than anyone had realised. The pain of grief was laced weightily across my grandmother's limbs, apparent in her every movement and palpable in the sighing of her breath. For three full days, through day and night, the family home was host to multitudes painted in various shades of mourning. Yet still, I never did see her shed a tear for even then she was the pillar against which others laid their own heads. Her tears, I believe, were shed neath the lonely cover of darkness away from the eyes of we who have always depended on her seemingly boundless stores of strength.

When she retired from a lifetime of teaching, my grandmother received a national honour from the president of the country in recognition of her contribution to the education of our young country. I remember the extended family huddled up in front of an oversized cathode-ray television which occasionally convulsed under the possession of a relentless static noise demon... but a bang or three to the side usually made for an effective exorcism. On that day my young self was in such splendid awe of the whole affair: a stadium full of people in applause and a shiny gold medal being laid upon a bosom that I so surely felt to be mine. I have always remembered that moment, and I always will. What it symbolised to me, was much more than just her professional achievements. No, I saw it as a moment of glorious celebration dedicated to the most heartful and loving woman in my life. In her silences, she taught me restraint; while from her speech I gained knowledge. With the sweat of her brow, she taught me diligence; whilst from her stubbornness, I gleaned the value of independence. From her unquestioning support of others, I learnt compassion, and in looking at all she has achieved I came to appreciate real patience. Above all, she has been to me a lifelong spectacle of one whose life has been an outpouring of true love, a mother like no other.