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FUFI
A month after we moved to Eden Park, my mother brought home two cats. Black cats.
Beautiful creatures. Some woman from her work had a litter of kittens she was trying to get
rid of, and my mom ended up with two. I was excited because I’d never had a pet before. My
mom was excited because she loves animals. She didn’t believe in any nonsense about cats. It
was just another way in which she was a rebel, refusing to conform to ideas about what black
people did and didn’t do.
In a black neighborhood, you wouldn’t dare own a cat, especially a black cat. That would
be like wearing a sign that said, “Hello, I am a witch.” That would be suicide. Since we’d
moved to a colored neighborhood, my mom thought the cats would be okay. Once they were
grown we let them out during the day to roam the neighborhood. Then we came home one
evening and found the cats strung up by their tails from our front gate, gutted and skinned
and bleeding out, their heads chopped off. On our front wall someone had written in
Afrikaans, “Heks”—“Witch.”
Colored people, apparently, were no more progressive than black people on the issue of
cats.
I wasn’t exactly devastated about the cats. I don’t think we’d had them long enough for
me to get attached; I don’t even remember their names. And cats are dicks for the most part.
As much as I tried they never felt like real pets. They never showed me affection nor did they
accept any of mine. Had the cats made more of an effort, I might have felt like I had lost
something. But even as a kid, looking at these dead, mutilated animals, I was like, “Well,
there you have it. Maybe if they’d been nicer, they could have avoided this.”
After the cats were killed, we took a break from pets for a while. Then we got dogs. Dogs
are cool. Almost every black family I knew had a dog. No matter how poor you were, you had
a dog. White people treat dogs like children or members of the family. Black people’s dogs are
more for protection, a poor-man’s alarm system. You buy a dog and you keep it out in the
yard. Black people name dogs by their traits. If it has stripes, you call it Tiger. If it’s vicious,
you call it Danger. If it has spots, you call it Spotty. Given the finite number of traits a dog can
have, pretty much everyone’s dogs have the same names; people just recycle them.
We’d never had dogs in Soweto. Then one day some lady at my mom’s work offered us
two puppies. They weren’t planned puppies. This woman’s Maltese poodle had been
impregnated by the bull terrier from next door, a strange mix. My mom said she’d take them