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poisoned by the second family. It was like Game of Thrones with poor people. We’d go into
that house and my mom would warn me.
“Trevor, don’t eat the food.”
“But I’m starving.”
“No. They might poison us.”
“Okay, then why don’t I just pray to Jesus and Jesus will take the poison out of the
food?”
“Trevor! Sun’qhela!”
So I only saw my grandfather now and then, and when he was gone the house was in the
hands of women.
In addition to my mom there was my aunt Sibongile; she and her first husband, Dinky,
had two kids, my cousins Mlungisi and Bulelwa. Sibongile was a powerhouse, a strong
woman in every sense, big-chested, the mother hen. Dinky, as his name implies, was dinky.
He was a small man. He was abusive, but not really. It was more like he tried to be abusive,
but he wasn’t very good at it. He was trying to live up to this image of what he thought a
husband should be, dominant, controlling. I remember being told as a child, “If you don’t hit
your woman, you don’t love her.” That was the talk you’d hear from men in bars and in the
streets.
Dinky was trying to masquerade as this patriarch that he wasn’t. He’d slap my aunt and
hit her and she’d take it and take it, and then eventually she’d snap and smack him down and
put him back in his place. Dinky would always walk around like, “I control my woman.” And
you’d want to say, “Dinky, first of all, you don’t. Second of all, you don’t need to. Because she
loves you.” I can remember one day my aunt had really had enough. I was in the yard and
Dinky came running out of the house screaming bloody murder. Sibongile was right behind
him with a pot of boiling water, cursing at him and threatening to douse him with it. In
Soweto you were always hearing about men getting doused with pots of boiling water—often
a woman’s only recourse. And men were lucky if it was water. Some women used hot cooking
oil. Water was if the woman wanted to teach her man a lesson. Oil meant she wanted to end
it.
My grandmother Frances Noah was the family matriarch. She ran the house, looked after
the kids, did the cooking and the cleaning. She’s barely five feet tall, hunched over from years
in the factory, but rock hard and still to this day very active and very much alive. Where my
grandfather was big and boisterous, my grandmother was calm, calculating, with a mind as
sharp as anything. If you need to know anything in the family history, going back to the
1930s, she can tell you what day it happened, where it happened, and why it happened. She
remembers it all.
My great-grandmother lived with us as well. We called her Koko. She was super old, well
into her nineties, stooped and frail, completely blind. Her eyes had gone white, clouded over
by cataracts. She couldn’t walk without someone holding her up. She’d sit in the kitchen next
to the coal stove, bundled up in long skirts and head scarves, blankets over her shoulders. The
coal stove was always on. It was for cooking, heating the house, heating water for baths. We
put her there because it was the warmest spot in the house. In the morning someone would
wake her and bring her to sit in the kitchen. At night someone would come take her to bed.