Summary
Mandisa takes us to where she was the morning of the murder. She paints a picture of her typical workday cooking and cleaning in the home of a white family, the Nelsons. She works hard, arriving early and leaving late, following Mrs. Nelson's orders while completing her typical daily tasks. On Wednesdays, Mrs. Nelson has her day off, and Mandisa is able to do her daily tasks in peace. Mandisa gives us a run through Mrs. Nelson's day off, painting a picture of a rich life. She goes to the gym in the morning, gets breakfast at an expensive restaurant with her best friend, and then goes shopping. While she is out of the home, Mandisa cleans the home, does laundry and cooks.
But today is different. Mrs. Nelson comes home early to take Mandisa home. Although she protests about having cooking left to do, Mrs. Nelson is insistent. She rushes into the home and demands that Mandisa promptly leaves with her: "Trouble in Guguletu, my girl! I think you'd better go" (21). This is alarming to Mandisa, who knows that it must be very big trouble because Mrs. Nelson is not making small talk about her day. She ushers Mandisa into the car to drive her to the train station.
Mandisa's trip home is difficult. The lines are long: "The queues were gigantic columns of ants disturned into disarray" (21). People are frenzied and desperate to get back to their townships. It is not that unrest in Guguletu is uncommon—a fellow train rider comments to Mandisa that it has been "two whole weeks with no trouble in Guguletu" (22)—but this seems to be bigger trouble than usual. Snippets come: she learns that schoolchildren are rioting. Mandisa is angry: "These tyrants our children have become, power crazed, at the drop of the hat, they make these often absurd demands on us, their parents" (22). She is hustled onto a bus with little control of what direction she is moving in. "Passed along from bodies to bodies," Mandisa writes, "with no volition or direction on my part," and she builds an important contrast between her life and that of Mrs. Nelson. While Mrs. Nelson drives her own car and lives a life of complete autonomy, the older woman paints a picture of a life with little control over her own experience. The bus is packed full of passengers, piling in and elbowing each other.
As she enters Guguletu, Mandisa spends time describing her township. Mandisa writes that there has been trouble in Guguletu ever since blacks were forced to relocate there in 1968. Mandisa opens her descriptive section: "No big, smiling sign welcomes the stranger to Guguletu. I guess even accomplished liars do have some limits" (23). She compares the township to a "tin of sardines," and mocks its name "Guguletu," which means 'Our Pride.' Residents call the township Gugulabo—"Their Pride." Guguletu is large and cramped: "Hundreds and hundreds of houses. Rows and rows, ceaselessly breathing on each other" (24). Mandisa's personification of the houses here is important, as her description of the homes mimics the language she uses to describe its residents fighting to get home: "Tiny houses huddled close together. Leaning against each other, pushing at each other" (24). Guguletu is run-down and poorly maintained. There is little to no positive state presence in the township.
Blouvlei, Mandisa's original home, stands at sharp contrast to Guguletu. It was a place where parents were involved in their children's lives. Neighbors looked out for each other and worked to build a community with what they had. When it was dismantled, Mandisa's family was unable to save any of their belongings. People reached out to their neighbors with help; Mandisa's family brings in the son of a woman who had given birth the day before. Guguletu was not prepared for their arrival. Not enough homes had been built, and there were not enough schools to accept all the children. The township is built on sand, which won't support any plant or animal life. There is a vicious wind that whips through homes by day and howls at night and blows the sand everywhere. It is a bleak new reality. They are left to their own devices to figure out how to survive: "There were just too many natives, said the government. How was that its fault?" (25). The people were left to suffer, and something in them irrevocably changed: "Guguletu killed us... killed the thing that held us together... made us human" (28).
Back in the present, Mandisa pieces the story together through snippets she picks up from other passengers. She learns of a fight—"the schoolchildren beat up the students from the university"—which people debate about for some time. A witness of the event pipes up: "A car carrying UWC students was stoned, overturned and set alight" (29). She learns the event happened near a bridge, which plummets Mandisa into anxiety. The description fits two bridges, one near her home and one not. She worries about her children, but particularly Mxolisi.
Analysis
Naming is an important part of Mandisa's culture, something we will see arise again with Mxolisi's naming as a child. People are named according to characteristics they might have, or the family might hope they have. Names often change according to one's family, as we see when Mandisa is referred to as Mama kaSiziwe (Siziwe's mother). Mandisa's boss has no respect for her name, choosing to call her Mandy instead, citing a difficulty with the clicks in the Xhosa language. Mandisa is scornful of this: "MA-NDI-SA. Do you see any click in that?" (19). This is proof of how disrespectful Mrs. Nelson is of Mandisa and tells us a lot about how little regard white people have for black people and their customs in South Africa.
In this chapter, we are able to look at whiteness through Mandisa's eyes. As she describes Mrs. Nelson's day off, she shows a new perspective on activities many people take for granted. For example, Mrs. Nelson goes to the gym on Wednesday mornings. Mandisa has never been to a gym, and describes it thusly: "She says it's a big hall where everybody jumps up and down so they will not get old or sick or fat" (19). Not only does Mandisa misunderstand Mrs. Nelson's motives, she feels as though Mrs. Nelson is misguided in her choice: "Madam's very scared of getting old... She doesn't know it comes quietly, when she's fast asleep, or when she's busy eating all those zimuncumuncu that she likes so much" (19). After the gym, Mrs. Nelson goes to have breakfast with her best friend, Miss Joan. Although Miss Joan tells her of it, Mandisa has no point of reference for the restaurant: "Unless we work there, we never go to restaurants or hotels or any nice places like that" (20).
Fire emerges as a motif many times in this chapter. Building off of the image of the burning bus from the previous chapter, Mandisa uses fire to describe people's frenzied actions in response to the murder. When Mrs. Nelson rushes in to get her out of the house, Mandisa writes: "One would think someone told her the house was on fire" (20). Later, in the train station, Mandisa utilizes the image of fire again, this time in relation to children: "The queue was a messy affair, not unlike the intestines of a pig that children are roasting over an open fire: jumbled and confused and everywhere all at once" (21). The image of fire, its heat and chaos, follows Mandisa home as she pieces together the story of what happened that day and reminisces on her move to Guguletu as a child.
In Mandisa's childhood, she experienced a massive forced migration of black Africans away from the cities and into massive housing projects. Disguised as a 'slum clearance' project, the government moved millions of Africans out of their homes. The true incentives of the plan were to move black people out of "black spots" in white areas, as a part of apartheid. Made to abandon their communities, people were forced into these new townships, massive, cramped, and unable to host all of them. People were left homeless, and many children were left without school. Parents were forced to work tirelessly, commuting to the cities in order to work for white people. The children, without a community to rely on and resentful of the government, grew more and more militant in this bleak new reality. By the time Mxolisi is born, the situation has ripened and worsened, until the eruption of violence became inevitable.
