I'M STAYING Chapter 1

 

Chapter 2

 

AFRICA, MY HOME

The mountains of Lesotho

                                                         Becky Maseru 1968

                                           The Basutho Hat where my Mum worked

“I am NEVER leaving Africa!”  This was said with the confident voice of a 12 year old living in a small and peaceful African country in the 1960’s. 

I now know how blessed I was to spend my childhood in Africa, enjoying sunny carefree days with no understanding of the complication of politics throughout that continent nor a hint of what was to happen in the future.

I enjoyed a time of colour-blindness and the natural ability of a child to experience friendship for its own sake, oblivious to race or status.  I went to school with other expatriate children and the children of the Prime Minister, local doctors and businessmen and we all played together without any reference or regard to our background. The ignorance of childhood is truly bliss.

We lived at that time in the Mountain Kingdom of Lesotho which had gained independence from Britain in 1966, just a year before we arrived there when it was known as Basutoland. King Moshoeshoe II and Prime Minister Leabua Jonathon ran the country although I remember there was a great deal of political turmoil and for a time we even lived under curfew, much to the disgust of the expats who often ended up sleeping on the couches in the casino or club in order to continue their social lives.  However, being young and carefree it was simply another adventure for us as we looked down at the soldiers patrolling the streets from the safety of our tree-house high up in an old Gum tree on the boundary of our garden.

Anyone who grew up in Africa during those years will share these fond memories of walking barefoot along dirt roads, feeling the sun-warmed sand filtering through our toes, riding bicycles through the bush, trying to avoid thorn bushes and Meerkat holes, swimming in any water we could find, having hours of fun playing in the mud on the banks of a river.  I don't think sun-block cream even existed and our bodies were always well browned from the sun, our hair bleached or sometimes green from the chlorine in the swimming pool.

The Portuguese Café in the main street was most popular with us as they stocked all our favourite cheap sweets.  I remember walking barefoot along the warm sandy roads to buy a loaf of bread at the café for Mum. The smell of Russian sausages and oily chips together with rotting vegetables would assault our nostrils as we entered. The sweets were so tempting; Sugas, Apricot balls, Wilson’s toffees, Chappies bubblegum, big sticky dummy suckers and sherbet with a licorice straw. The loaf of bread cost 9 ½ cents and our change would be paid to us in Chappies (much to our delight). The bread was freshly baked and still warm and had a piece of brown paper wrapped around the middle section in order for us to carry it home. And nibble on the crusty edges as we walked.

All our spare time was spent outdoors because there wasn't anything else to do. TV didn't exist and the only movies we saw were the Saturday afternoon matinees shown at the club which were usually Westerns or something along the lines of Roman gladiators fighting in arenas.  We didn't mind as we were more intent on the piles of cheap sweets we bought at the little kiosk before-hand.  I can still remember the taste of the huge red gob-stoppers that left our mouths bright red for hours afterwards. And as we grew older and more interested in the boys there was always the back row, followed by lots of giggling and sharing of secrets in the ladies powder room with our friends later.

 

We didn’t have much to do with our parents.  Fathers were at work or at the sports club and mothers were out attending tea parties or shopping.  Evenings were for dinners or cocktail parties at the embassies. Our mothers had a wonderful collection of evening dresses, gloves and shoes with hats for garden parties at the palace.  If we could manage to sneak into our parents’ bedrooms unseen, we would spend hours dressing-up and wobbling around in silver stiletto heels.

The houses we lived in were large, rambling, remnants from colonial days. They were built from big yellow sandstone blocks with deep shady verandas, wooden floors and fireplaces in every room.  The grounds were vast by today's standards and there were numerous little abodes built on the perimeter that housed the servants, of which there were several.  The servants lived "in" so they could always be available for serving evening meals and washing up later, not to mention the baby-sitting whilst our parents were out socialising.  We were allowed to have friends sleeping over to appease our parents’ guilty conscience at leaving us alone again, so we didn't mind at all actually, as we had free reign of the house and the maid was rarely able to control us. 

“Haai Rebeeeekah, you must go to bed now” Agnes would half-heartedly try to coax us into some good behaviour before curling up in the corner of the bedroom wrapped in her thick Basutho blanket and falling straight to sleep, not at all interested in our raids on the pantry for midnight feast provisions.

The gardener was always our favourite of all the staff.  Although he spoke very little English and we spoke even less of his language, we always managed to communicate. His name was Moses and he had a shiny dark and wrinkled face with a few brown, crooked teeth and a huge smile.  Dressed in our father's old cast-off clothes he resembled an aging scarecrow with his trousers held up by a piece of string and his shirt sleeves rolled up to reveal skinny scarred arms.  He smiled all the time whether he was being thanked or given orders or chastised.  Probably because he just didn't understand a word of what was being said to him anyway, so he thought it best to answer with a smile.  It certainly worked because the whole family loved him.  We had a regular game of which he seemed to be a willing participant.  We would creep into the orchard to steal the unripe fruit and he would jump out roaring and chase us with a long bamboo stick.

Haai ,bana ba banyenyane. Ke tla tšoasa o!  Hey little ones. I will catch you!

We enjoyed the thrill of racing through the trees half expecting to be beaten across the back at any second but probably knowing deep down that the old man would never actually harm us.  Later in the day we would visit him in his room and watch him prepare his evening meal. The smell of oily meat together with paraffin fumes still conjures up childhood memories.  He would generously offer us a handful of stiff white stywe pap (stiff cooked maize meal) which we would roll into a round ball, pushing our thumbs into the middle to make a dent deep enough to scoop up some gravy from the old dented black pot on the stove. We always remembered to thank him “kea leboha Moses”

Then there was the “honey pot” and although an unpleasant subject, it does deserve a place in this chapter as it was a very regular part of our lives at this time.  As I mentioned, all of our houses had at least one, if not more servants’ quarters built on the premises and usually as far away from the main house as possible.  These rooms had no running water, electricity or plumbing but they did have a toilet with a bucket system.  These buckets were placed in position beneath the toilet seats to collect all deposits and could be removed through a small trap door at the rear of the building facing the road.  Regularly and probably on a weekly basis, the “honey pot” would arrive, this being a tractor and trailer carrying large open containers into which the buckets would be emptied by men wearing plastic bags to protect themselves from the splashes which judging from what was left behind on the roads, must have been plentiful.  Before one heard the sound of the tractor, one could smell the stench of human waste dribbling along the road and we would hear shouts sometimes travelling from one house to another;

“The honey pot’s coming!  Quick, everyone inside, close all the windows and doors!  Here comes the honey pot!”

 When I think of those poor men and what they had to endure, not only with the unpleasant task they had to perform but because of the way they were shunned by all because of the terrible smell which they must have carried home with them in the evening to their own homes.

As children we picked up the Sotho language easily and always greeted people we met on the road with “Lumela” (Hello) and “U kae?” (How are you?)  But being children we were more interested in the naughty words and spent a lot of time whispering “Masipa, masipa”  (Shit, shit).