Johannesburg – Early one January morning in Limpopo, I was dreaming of smiling goats and singing cows when my maternal grandmother stormed into the rondawel.
She yanked away the donkey- hide-coloured blanket underneath which I lay sleeping in foetal position.
By the time I was fully awake, I and her were standing in the registration queue at the local primary school.
Of the journey from home to school, I only remember the two of us bursting into the school yard, me being dragged on the stony ground, kicking and yelling.
I was seven years old.
I hated school.
I had seen the lacerations, regularly inflicted by teachers, on my brother’s buttocks.
Wrinkles of pain criss-crossed my brother’s forehead, whenever he was cramming his Afrikaans recitations – Amakeia; Lui Lett a; Muskiete Jag – with tears welling in his eyes – that poor child of my mother!
At the mere mention of ‘Mussolini’, the cruellest teacher in his school, my brother’s neck veins would dilate visibly and he would shake like someone possessed by the spirits of the dead. That is how school and I became enemies.
But Madzivandlela Ntavasi Valoyi, my feisty grandmother, had other plans.
Having been denied education on account of her gender, she was determined that her grandchildren would go to school, regardless of gender or class.
She had seen the benefits of education in the lives of her two younger brothers – Ridonga and Khazamula – who became policemen and breadwinners for the extended Valoyi family.
Grandma Ntavasi was born on June 12 1914, just over a month before the outbreak of World War 1.
She was the second child, and the only daughter, among the four children of Ms Phoseka Gaveni, who was the second of the three wives of Dick Valoyi.
In time, grandma Ntavasi was married off as the second wife of a migrant mineworker named Mhlava Jack Xiviti – old enough to be her father.
My own mother was the first of the two daughters born out of that union.
The Shiviti homestead lay smack in the middle of Xinyami, a village that used to be perched upon the fertile tract of land on the northern banks of the Levubu river, below the Zoutpansberg mountains. But the apartheid regime forcibly removed the residents of Xinyami to the southern side of Levubu, much further away from the river.
Where Xinyami used to be, a set of white farmers of citrus fruit and vegetables were installed. Unflatteringly, the whole area was renamed “New England”.
Having lost land and livelihood, many of the former residents of Xinyami went back to the place they used to call home – now called New England- with their tails between their legs, in search of employment as farm workers.
The “un/fortunate” among them became labour tenants in farms located on the very spots where their former homes used to be. When her husband, Jack Xiviti, passed away, grandma Ntavasi had no choice but to become one of the New England farm workers herself.
That is how she raised her two girl children.
Annoyed by grandma Ntavasi’s frequent breaks so she could suckle the girl infant whom she carried on her back, one day the white farm owner offered grandma some chilling advice: “Why don’t you throw that baby into the Levubu River, so you can focus on the work for which I pay you?”.
Later, she met a famed herbalist named Dumazi Jan Maswanganyi.
He promised to take care of her and her children so she wouldn’t need to work on the farm, if she became his fourth wife.
When Maswanganyi died, he left her with two more mouths to feed. And back to New England she went, which is how she funded the primary schooling of my siblings and I.
Grandma Ntavasi is no struggle celebrity.
She led no revolution – industrial or liberational.
She raised no metaphoric fists at nobody.
She registered no historic firsts either in the arts or in the charts.
There never was reason to throw her into political prison. However, if going to prison was the only way her grandchildren would have had an education, she would have gladly handed herself over to the nearest jail. Every black family has a grandma Ntavasi.
It is time we recognised her alongside the conventional female icons.
Hers is the story of millions of black women.
But alas, one century later, girl children still live at the mercy of men and the weather.
When grandma Ntavasi died in 2011, she left neither requests nor bequests.
But because of her, we walk taller, straighter and firmer, every single day.
• Professor Maluleke is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Pretoria Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship. Follow him on Twitter @ProfTinyiko.
Click here to read more political analysis from this week’s newspaper.
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