Kaffir Boy Family Quotes

The next day, as I nursed my wounds, while my father was at work, I told my mother that I hated him and promised her I would kill him when I grew up.

"Don't say that!" my mother reprimanded me.

"I will," I said stoutly, "if he won't leave me alone."

"He's your father, you know."

"He's not my father."

"Shut that bad mouth of yours!" My mother threatened to smack me.

"Why does he beat me, then?" I protested. "Other fathers don't beat their children." My friends always boasted that their fathers never laid a hand on them.

"He's trying to discipline you. He wants you to grow up to be like him."

"What! Me! Never!" I shook with indignation. "I'm never going to be like him! Why should I?" (5.13-20)

Pangs of hunger melted my resentment of my father away, and now that he was gone I longed night and day for his return. I didn't even mind his coming back and shouting restrictions at me and making me perform rituals. I simply wanted him back. And as days slid by without him, as I saw other children in the company of their fathers, I would cry. His absence showed me how much I loved him. I never stopped asking questions about when he would be coming back. (6.8)

While it seemed that no help was forthcoming, we resigned ourselves to the inevitable: eviction and starvation. Luck of some sort came when my maternal grandmother…came back unexpectedly. My mother told her of our plight. Granny had some money to spare.

She paid the rent a week before we were to be evicted; bought us bread, sugar and mealie meal; and gave my mother one hundred cents to take George and Florah to the clinic, where their sickness was diagnosed as advanced malnutrition and chicken pox. More money was required to continue their treatment, and Granny gave my mother three hundred cents. Thinking her rich, I proposed to my mother that we move in with her until my father's return from prison. My mother told me that that could not be, that Granny was already overburdened with looking after herself and her other children and could not afford to take us in. Moreover, my mother said, my father's relatives would never sanction such a move.

"Why?" I asked. "We're starving as it is, and they aren't helping us in any way." I had close to a dozen relatives on my father's side scattered all over Johannesburg; yet since my father's arrest none had come forward to help us.

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. (7.2-5)

By some stroke of luck my father got his old job back. Now armed with a steady job, he set out to rebuild our former life. We now ate full meals, and dressed in clothes slightly better than rags. But things were never quite the same; there was now a definite change in our life. We could not regain the past; it seemed gone forever. A definite sense of insecurity and helplessness had entered our life, to stay for years to come. My father was now a completely changed man; so changed that he now began drinking and gambling excessively, and from time to time quarreling with my mother over money matters and over what he called my mother's streak of insubordination not befitting "the woman he bought." But he still tried, in his own way, to be a father and husband.

One evening he came staggering home, drunk as a sot. It was a Friday. He called Florah, George and me to the table, saying he had a big surprise for us. We kneeled in front of him, as we were not allowed to sit at the table, and watched him unpack a brown paper bag. There was muhodu and mala (chicken feet, intestines and heads), a delicacy the equivalent of a steak; a packet of candles; a small bag of mealie meal; packets of salt and sugar; and then the surprise – a packet of fish and chips wrapped in paper. We children were overjoyed; it had been ages since we last had fish and chips; we danced and sang with delight. George and Florah ran up to my father and embraced him. He blushed; I could see he was happy. My mother smiled. That was one of the few times I was to see our entire family happy. (7.94-95).

"But we have to eat, Mama," I protested. I thought that regardless of the size of my father's debt, he should still borrow more. I don't know why I thought that. Maybe hunger made me. "We are his children, aren't we?" I repeated, implying that it was a father's duty to provide for his children no matter what.

"Why do you keep on saying, 'We are his children, aren't we?'" my mother said angrily. "Who told you you're not his children?"

"I heard him say that," I said, alluding to statements my father had often made when quarrelling with my mother. (Whenever the two went head to head, my mother would threaten to leave my father and take us children with her; and my father would retort: "Take those bastards with you, I don't care! I sometimes wonder if they're my children the way they disobey my laws!")

Before I knew it, my mother had given me a stinging smack across the mouth with the back of her hand…(10.40-43)

They seemed lost in their own little world of mud, pebbles and tins, and oblivious to my suicide attempt.

"They'll miss you very much," my mother sighed deeply. The tone of her voice had changed, suddenly, to one full of sorrow. "They'll have no big brother to help them and to protect them. They'll have no big brother to look up to. They'll have no big brother to help them go to school when they grow up. They'll miss you very much."

I was very much touched by what she said. I remembered the many times my sisters had turned to me for help whenever anyone harassed them. I remembered the many times I had told my mother that when I was done with school, I would go out and work so that I could help my sisters go to school and become nurses and teachers. Remembering all that made me start crying. (28.13-15)

Phineas was one of thousands of black migrant workers in Alexandra forced to live hundreds of miles from their families because of Influx Control laws, which discouraged black family life in what the government called "white South Africa." In the township, no other group lived as unnaturally as the migrant workers. Housed mostly in sterile single-sex barracks, they were prey to prostitution, Matanyula [sex with young boys, paid for in food], alcoholism, robbery and senseless violence; they existed under such stress and absorbed so much emotional pain that tears, grief, fear, hope and sadness had become alien to most of them.

Stripped of their manhood, they hated the white man with every fibre of their being. Anger would leap into their eyes each time the words white man were uttered. Rage would heave their chest each time something or someone reminded them that it was the white man who kept their families away from them. Each time I saw that anger and hate, I knew that they felt a pain so deep it could not be expressed; that though they laughed and chaffed with one another, as they tried in vain to drown their sorrows in gourds of liquor, something inside them was slowly dying.

There is a death far worse than physical death, and that is the death of the mind and soul, when, despite toiling night and day, under sweltering heat, torrential rain, blistering winds, you still cannot make enough to clothe, shelter and feed your loved ones, suffering miles away, forcibly separated from you. (29.103-105)

Impassively he stood there against the wall, in the shadow of the flickering candle, seemingly trying to awaken himself from some bad dream, some nightmare. I could tell from the look on his face that he found the fact that I was leaving hard to believe: I, his son, his firstborn, his own flesh and blood, the son he had watched grow, the son whom he had wanted to so much to be like him, but who had grown up to be so much different, was about to leave him suffering, gaunt, aging, helpless, hopeless, fearful of the future.

As I kissed him again, and embraced his emaciated body, a tear and a twinkle came to his eyes: he understood that despite my fanatical opposition to his way of life, despite all the shocks of childhood he had subjected me to, I still loved him, dearly.

"Take care of yourself, son," he said softly. (54.9-11).

I shuddered to think what life in Alexandra, in Johannesburg, in South Africa, in apartheid country, in the land of slavery, held for them. Did they have a future? Would the family remain together long enough for them to finish school, to grow up? Or would the authorities tear them from each other, deport some to the tribal reserves, arrest some, killing some? They were so young and unknowing; the same storms of life that had battered my life, warped my character and had stunted my growth they still had to face. Would they survive such storms? Would they live long enough to swim safely to the other shore? What shore? (54.20)