Open Writing

I didn’t so much as meet Boniface Magwaza but rather I came across him in the lift on my way down from the Store Manager’s office. He was dressed in a faded blue, polyester, Security Guard’s uniform and he was chatting with Philemon Kumalo in their native Zulu.

“Hayibo, have you heard what the ‘wise ones’ at head office are sending us now? The new Personnel Manager, she is not even a woman but a girl. She has just twenty-one years. I’m certain she thinks she’s swanky ’cause she’s White. She won’t last here long time. The sea, it is quick to spit out the rubbish.”

“Ngempela, sizobona,” I answered from my corner, unable to restrain a grin. “Bakohlwe ukukutshelile ukuthi ngiyasazi ukukhuluma isiZulu.”

“Hawu! Hawu! Hawu!” Boniface exclaimed, slapping his hand over his mouth, his eyes open as wide as the jaws of a yawning hippo.

“What exactly DID you say?” chuckled my sister as we exited the lift.

I translated for her, “Indeed, we shall see. They forgot to tell you that I speak Zulu.”

**

As Personnel Manager, my first dealing with Boniface proved to be rather tricky.

“That Boniface is stupid I tell you, stupid!” yelled an angry Ron Pearson as he stomped into my office. Ron was in charge of maintenance and he was known to be the least tolerant of people of other skin colours because, as far as he was concerned, the Blacks had chased him out of Zimbabwe. He was known amongst the staff as ‘when-we’ because he was forever starting his sentences with, “When we were in Rhodesia …” He complained so much about the status quo of South African politics that, behind his back, he was sometimes jokingly called ‘where-to-next?’

I called Boniface into my office. He and Ron were so angry with each other that neither of them could bear to sit down.
“Right,” I said, “tell me exactly what happened.”

Ron fired off first. “I used quick drying glue on a new key rack to stick it against the wall for the storage of security keys and I told Boniface not to touch it until it was dry. So what does he do? He hangs some keys on it straight away and, of course, it fell down.”

Boniface stood there, looking at the ground and shaking his head from side
to side.

“It is not so,” he said, quietly defending himself. “I say, ‘Mustn’t touch?’ and Mr Pearson he say, ‘No’. To me, in Zulu we say ‘No, you MAY touch it.’ If Mr Pearson, he does not want me to touch it, then he should say, ‘Yes, yes -you MUSTN’T touch it.’ Why he doesn’t say what he mean?”

Despite the tension, I found myself smiling at the confusion and misunderstanding. Carefully, I explained to Ron about the double negative in the Zulu language and he began to laugh.

“Oh my gosh,” he said, apologising to Boniface, “now I understand but in the future I am never going to remember whether to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’.”

“It’s okay”, Boniface said, graciously forgiving him, “from now on we start afresh.”

**

Boniface was extremely vigilant and it was his reputation for being one of the best security guards around which gave him both his self-esteem and the respect of all the staff. Company policy stated that only a female staff member could search a female shoplifter and so it was that Boniface beckoned me over one day to carry out this unpleasant and awkward task.

“Mantshingeyana!” the victim spat at him contemptuously – referring to the night adder which lies unseen on the dark, village path, waiting for its unsuspecting prey. It was intended as an insult to a traitor but Boniface chose to see it as a compliment to his observational prowess.

I pulled voluminous amounts of stolen merchandise from the woman’s underwear and as a result her apparently ample bosom became rapidly depleted. Once the police had left with the unfortunate captive I was intrigued enough to ask Boniface how he had spotted the thief. Always a man with an eye for the ladies and therefore an avid student of female anatomy he explained to me, “She come in the front door with a flat pack (buttocks) and i-freeway (bosom) and she try to go out the back door with a caravan and i-Drakensberg.”

When I chuckled at these ingenious comparisons he said, with an almost embarrassed smile, “Well, I have to look at something the whole day. With my job I can’t be reading a book to make the hands of the clock speed faster.”
Perhaps because he had so much time to fill, Boniface was skilled at the art of apt comparison. Ron, who had skinny legs and bulbous knees, made the mistake of wearing a safari suit to work one day. On being confronted with this unusual sight, Boniface was quick to dub him ‘old sparrow-knees’, causing a gale of laughter from the womenfolk who were standing around near their lockers. Poor, unsuspecting Ron had no idea that he had just been the butt of a passing joke.

The manager’s wife was rather anaemic and stayed out of the sun because she was covered in a dangerous plethora of dark moles. She was instantly named ‘potato skin’. This was never intended as an insult, more as a matter of fact. It was a sort of backhanded compliment. She was supposed to be honoured that she had actually been noticed and studied.

If, in Boniface’s eyes, someone appeared to be aspiring to something above their position in life or wore something too ostentatious he would ask them, “What are you trying to do? Make yourself like a European?” He failed to see that by saying this he was reinforcing the exact racial hierarchy which he usually fought so hard against.

On occasion it would be my job to try and find out who had broken, misplaced or even stolen something. It was useless probing Boniface for information as to who this person might be as he was determined to be loyal to his own people - that is unless, of course, they were shoplifters in his store.

“It must have been uSomebody”, he would say. “The trouble with uSomebody is that he is seen by nobody.”
This was his signal to me not to question him any further.

**

Boniface had a sweet, young wife who visited him at work occasionally, the latest baby cocooned tightly on her back with a blanket. He always referred to the youngest child by the literal terms ‘isinyabulala’ - one who excretes while lying down or ‘uthunjana’ - the end of the gut, the latter word remaining from the days when the belief was that that is where children originated from. He had three daughters but he made no secret of the fact that he desperately wanted a son. I noticed that he also had a mistress who would conveniently appear at the rear, staff entrance during many of his lunch breaks. When I asked him, “Why?” he was quick to reply, “Every month, for five days my wife is no good to me. Also, she can’t make a boy.”

Philemon was the exact opposite and was completely devoted to his wife. He was ridiculed by the other men for his faithfulness and they would tut-tut at him, “Eh, you two are like tongue and spit - never separated.” One day, as the men sat around in the courtyard, rolling their own cigarettes with tobacco and newspaper, Philemon had had enough of the constant jibes.

“Okay, I tell you why only one woman take me,” he finally offered. “On my first day in the big city I try to cross the road. I was shaking because the cars were many. My cousin he warn me. When you cross the street you wait for the green man and all the motors will stop. Then you move quickly before the red man come. I wait for the green man but when I am half way the red man start to flicker. I freeze like a chameleon in the middle of the road. I was come upon by fear so that I don’t know what I must do. I turn around and run back to the pavement where I come from but it is too late. The scooter it was coming and it hit me, strong like the kick of an ostrich, between the legs. When I wake up in hospital my python is already taken by the cutting doctor and I have only plastic private parts.”

The men laughed so hard that they fell off their milk crate stools, holding their sides and rolling on the floor. Of course it was an inventive tale told simply to stop the men from pestering him but, from then on, I only ever heard Philemon called by his instant, new nickname - uPlastik.

**

I was acutely conscious of the extreme difference in wealth and privilege between myself and the majority of the staff. I tried to disguise the fact as much as possible by wearing the same uniform as the shop assistants, instead of dressing in my everyday clothes as I was entitled to. We all knew, but no-one spoke about it, that I went home, driving my own car, to a house with space to spare, electricity and running water. Most of the others had to fight their way home on ageing buses or taxis to overcrowded shanty towns where the only sources of light were paraffin lamps and candles and water had to be collected in buckets from a communal tap.

With this ever-present in my mind, I squirmed one day when my father pulled up outside the store in his luxury vehicle. Boniface, who was on guard at the entrance, spotted him immediately and quickly realised who he was when he observed us chatting together. Soon after my father left, Boniface called me aside.

“Your father, what work does he do?”

“He is a doctor,” I cringed.

“Eh, THAT is why he drives a Jaguar.”

I was expecting some sort of bitter, resentful comment about the unfairness of life. Boniface could never have afforded a car on his meagre wages. I felt that this show of obvious wealth might spoil the respect which was slowly building between us. To my enormous relief he grinned at me, showing his un-dentisted, nicotine-stained teeth and exclaimed, “iJaguwaa - king of the road!” and the matter was never discussed again, at least not to my face.

We had been in that same Jaguar the day before when we came across an ‘only-in-Africa’ sight. A truck, which was laden with sacks of flour, had been in front of us as it laboured down the hill. Forced to drive slowly behind it, we noticed that there was a Black man riding dangerously on the back of it. Obviously the cab was full, so he was obliged to hitch a ride by hanging onto the ropes which bound the flour sacks while his feet rested precariously on the back bumper. He looked most uncomfortable as he bounced along, facing outwards and staring at our car which was next in line. The desperate man suddenly had an overwhelming urge to urinate so he undid his fly and, with a look of enormous relief, proceeded to spray the road right in front of us! The splashback was whipped up in the wind and blown into the sacks of flour. On seeing this sight, Granddad, who was in the back seat, had muttered, “I think I’ll be going gluten free from now on.”

I had wanted to share this story with Boniface as my family had found the whole situation hilarious but instinctively I knew that I must not do so as it would be considered inappropriate for me, as a woman, to talk about such crude things with him. If I had been male then there would have been no barrier to us sharing a blokey guffaw. I had been extremely honoured to be allowed to listen to the ‘uPlastik’ story as the men had known that I was present at the time, but that storytelling incident had been at their discretion and it was not for me to reciprocate.

**

Boniface was always trying to better himself and improve his language skills. He was rather contemptuous of his Indian workmates and did not trouble himself to learn Hindi or Tamil. When safely out of earshot he would call them ‘the hananahas’ - an onomatopoeic referral of how their languages sounded to him.

No, English was the tongue which he would concentrate on because, as far as he was concerned, it was the language of the educated man. One day he called me aside.

“This English, she is very confusing. What about this word ‘bed’? It can say three different things. How are you supposed to tell the meaning?”
This was news to me but I continued to listen.

“You say, ‘There is a bed flying in the sky’, ‘You have been a bed boy’ and ‘Go lie on your bed.”

After a moment’s puzzlement I realised that they were actually three different words which he was hearing identically: ‘bird’, ‘bad’ and ‘bed’. I wrote them down for him and pronounced them carefully so that he could hear the variations. He beamed at me with new clarity and gratitude. The confusion of thirty years was lifted in an instant.

How many of the country’s difficulties, I wondered, were not due to problems of race but rather as a result of a break down in the ability to communicate with one another? I, for one, was coming across them daily.

**

Perhaps because his uniform looked similar to that of a policeman, Boniface took it upon himself to monitor management extremely carefully, making sure that no-one was ripped off in any way. He would study rosters and notices which were pinned to the staff notice board in fine detail, although the time he took over this was, in part, because he had only had five years of schooling.

He was a stickler for time and insisted on being on the early shift so that he could be home, “by the time of the blunting of the eye - you know that time when the sun is in your face and you need to put on your ‘dimmers,’” he said to me, referring to the sunglasses which hung permanently from his belt. Up until then I had presumed that the glasses were merely a statement of ‘coolness,’ hung strategically to cover up the fact that there was actually no gun in his holster. At precisely 4 p.m. Boniface would tap his watch and disappear, even if he was in the middle of a staff meeting. He was not letting anyone have a minute of his time without them paying him for it.

He would corner me when I was most rushed and query me about the latest directive from head office, flattering me with, “As for you, you speak the facts, but as for them, sometimes they tell untruths.” It took weeks of discussion to convince Boniface that having one’s pay directly deposited into the bank was not a management plot to avoid paying the staff and that it was in fact far safer than taking the cash home in his pocket on the perilous taxi vans at the end of each month.

Month end was pay day for the criminals too and life was cheap. You could be murdered for ten rand or less. Your body would lie on the pavement, bloating up in the humidity with the crows pecking at your eyes and mincemeated entrails, commuters stepping over you, holding hankies to their noses to keep out the smell. Sometimes the body was unidentified because the thieves would steal the Passbook too. This hated document, also known as a ‘stinker’, was a source of identification and control and if you changed the photo it could prove to be beneficial as it might then entitle you to work in a different jurisdiction. The area where you were allowed to work was determined by where you were born and which chieftain you ‘belonged’ to.

It went without saying that bribery was rife and if you had sufficient money you could belong to the clan of your choosing. The chieftains whose jurisdiction covered the city were wealthy men. Stealing a Passbook off a corpse might save the expense of a bribe and also prevent you from having to hide when the hated ‘blackjacks’ blitzed your place of employment to check work permits.

Even if your life was spared and you were merely pick-pocketed it was still a dreadful situation for those living so close to the poverty line. As Boniface succinctly put it to others, once he was convinced that direct deposits were beneficial, “If your pay is stolen are you not dead while still living?”

**

After several years I announced that I was leaving, emigrating to Australia to get married, moving to a country where my Zulu language skills would be as redundant as a foreskin after initiation.

Boniface was very concerned that I was going so far away. “You are going so far to the other side of the world that if you go any more east you will start to come back again,” he said indignantly. He had a point there.

“You be careful,” he cautioned me, “dogs are present in all countries.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that nowhere else in the world did I feel more vulnerable than when I walked past the taxi rank each morning, a solitary, pale skin emblazoned against a mass of brown bodies, jostling competitively like buffalo around a diminishing waterhole. The only protection I ever carried was my clicking, bilingual tongue.

“How did he ask you to marry him?” Boniface wanted to know.

“He just said, “Would you marry me?” I answered.

“ Eh, these White boys they have no way. Zulu men we say, “Would you be prepared to light the fire for my mother in the morning?”

I looked confused for this was not the same “light your fire” that I associated with newlyweds. Boniface explained, “This is because the youngest woman in the house must get up and make the fire to warm the house and cook breakfast for the others. When a mother is getting old then it is difficult to get up early in the cold and dark and she needs a younger woman to do it for her. It is not good for a mother when her son is slow to take a wife.”

“Has this young man paid your father any cattle for your hand in marriage?” was the next question.

“No”, I replied, “but he has given me this gold ring.”

Boniface was not impressed. What use was a ring, especially if you weren’t supposed to sell it?

He tried a different line of questioning.

“Has he got a TV?”

“Yes, and a fridge and a bed and a sofa,” I answered, listing all of my fiancé’s worldly goods.

“Hawu!”, he exclaimed, feeling more satisfied for me now, “you have indeed caught the jackpot!”

**

It was my last day at work and I was stressed, trying to finish off everything and have it ready to hand over to my replacement. It was 5p.m. and the store had just closed to customers. Suddenly, Boniface appeared in the doorway.

What was he still doing here so late, I wondered?

“I need to talk to you, in the training room. It is very important,” he whispered.

Why now of all days? The training room was the only soundproof room in the store so it was reserved for discussing matters of the utmost confidentiality. What could possibly be so urgent? Reluctantly and bad humouredly I followed him to the training room. With a flourish he swung open the door.

---- balloons, streamers, cakes, drinks, grinning staff ----

“For you, intombi yakithi (child of ours), I make the party!”

I had never seen that proud man hold his head up quite so high.

**

It has been twenty-five years since I last saw Boniface Magwaza and I wonder, in post-apartheid South Africa, does his name now adorn the store manager’s door? Certainly he was savvy enough and he left no doubt in anyone’s mind that that was the position that he aspired to. He frequently used to mutter, not-so-under his breath, that he could make a better job of it anyway.

But, pre-Mandela days were also pre-AIDS days and I suspect that his name is far more likely to have been scratched onto a roughly made cross on a forgotten grave or, like so many of his people, is simply forgotten and blowing in the wind with those of his ancestors.