The late, great, Jeppe Street Post Office

The oldest Public Building in Johannesburg burned down two nights ago. It stood opposite the Gauteng legislature, for the past 10 or more years, with a fence around it, in a vain attempt to stop vandals, thieves and homeless people from entering it and living inside it.

Recently, it has been used as a place for film shoots and suchlike. Some years ago, someone stole the clock. The wooden windows were left to rot and bit by bit, this beautiful building just crumbled and decayed.

It was rumoured, at one point, that a Saudi firm had bought it and were going to turn it into a hotel. No sign of any Saudis. Even less of any hotel. There it stood. Every morning, as I drove into work in the city centre, I would see it, with the clock tower ignominiously wrapped in some kind of sheeting, to protect it from the elements. That stayed on so long, that a tear developed in the protective covering, which became a gash, which eventually let the elements right back in.

Politicians from all sides of the house could not have failed to see the building, everytime they entered or exited the Legislature. It was just there, assailing the eye for years and years and years. They did nothing about it

Now it is gone. Forever. It is a crying shame. It is a Provincial and National disgrace. It is a blight on the whole lot of us.

Suicide, assisted and otherwise - 2. Learning how to grieve

This is another of the articles I wrote, soon after the suicide of my partner, 10 years ago. The issue is, of course, not the people who kill themselves. That is a decision they have made, and they are dead. The issue is how do the people who are left behind cope with that decision.

Obviously there is a huge difference between coping with the death of someone who is terminally ill, or elderly, or who has at least discussed the matter with those whom s/he loved, (or are likely to find the body) - and that of the sudden shock of discovery of someone who gave no sign that they were planning to kill themselves.

This piece was written really about the journey I found myself on - of coming to terms with my partner's shocking, and to me, completely unexpected decision - and learning how to grieve properly.

Learning how to Grieve

There was a time, not so very long ago, before urban sprawl and megacities and afforestation, when it was expected, without very much qualification, for people who had lost someone close to them, to mourn for a fairly extended period of time. When I lived for a time in rural Lesotho, I was extremely interested to see how traditional Basotho dealt with death. If the man in the family had died, for instance, the woman would be placed on a mattress in a room. She would have two or three supporters, who would be with her constantly. She would be required to say nothing and to do nothing at all. She would just sit on the mattress and weep, or not weep, as she felt fit. Wave after wave of sympathisers would be ushered into the room. The story of how the man died, what had happened; who said what; when; how - all the questions would be dealt with and answered in the telling of the story. And the story would be told over and over and over and over gain - for a week!

This is not my culture, of course, but in many ways I wish it were. One of the things I found necessary, when my partner died by hanging himself was this constant re-telling of the story. People who knew Brian needed to hear it. And somehow, the re-telling of it over and over again dis seem to have something of a healing effect. But it was extremely emotionally exhausting and it would have been very nice if there was someone else to do it for me and I could just sit on a mattress somewhere listening or weeping as the case may be.

Then there is the business of how we actually deal with the dead. The woman who worked for me then wanted badly to come to the funeral. She was originally from Malawi. She eventually plucked up enough courage to ask me why I had simply left Brian lying in the crematorium. She found this to be the strangest thing in the world. I explained to her the whole business about cremation and scattering the ashes, but she still looked at me more than a little incredulously. I could see us peering at each other across a very wide cultural gorge. It is not that she didn’t accept what I had done, it was simply that it didn’t in any way comply with the steps she understood to be necessary for the grieving process. “You have to see the person buried”, she said. Who knows, maybe she is right. I hadn’t really given the matter much thought before then.

When I was working as a priest in Manchester many years ago, one of the real difficulties of the job was the extraordinary amount of funerals I was required to do. It verged, sometimes, on 8 or 10 a week! The difficulty was that I very often had no idea of who it was that I was burying. Frequently, it was me, the undertaker and the coffin at the funeral. I often was left to ponder the tragedy of a long life, now over, with no-one to mourn its passing. I was often left to wonder about a society so compartmentalised, so lacking in community, that here could be the lonely sight of a body, a priest and an undertaker with not a single interested soul beyond them. That must be the saddest thing.

But I also frequently had no idea of what the person looked like that I was burying. In Britain, there was never any filing past the open coffin, as is frequently the case here in Africa. I once found myself in a very strange situation. I was informed by the undertaker that a woman, some way up the street where I lived, had died. Now, I lived in a street which was just two very long rows of front doors with windows on either side. It was difficult enough to get onto speaking terms with the next door neighbour, let alone someone down the road. Anyway, this woman had died and she didn’t have any relatives living with her, so it would have been useless to go to the house. I tried to picture where she lived and who she was. Ah yes! I remembered her. I often used to wave at her and sometimes used to exchange pleasantries on my way to work. She was an old lady with callipers who walked with some difficulty and she liked sitting in the sun outside her front door.

So I spoke at the funeral about the difficulties she had faced so bravely. I spoke about her lovely little garden that she seemed to be so proud of - and then rambled on in a very general sort of way about conversations we had had and that sort of thing. You can imagine my surprise, then, when I saw her sitting the next day outside her front door, soaking up the sun! I had buried the wrong person. I have no idea what the family made of what I had to say. In a strange, very British sort of way, it didn’t seem to make very much difference.

To get back to my point, I don’t think we white western types know how to grieve very well at all. It all seems to be tied up with nonsense about stiff upper lips and “just getting on with things” and “pulling oneself together” and “putting the past behind us”. Of course, all of this is true. And it is certainly not that people don’t care or that there is a lack of support. It is just that there is a sense in which we often tend to deal with grief as an inconvenience rather than a necessity. What I have come to see, which I did not see before as clearly as I do now, is that the only grief which does not end, is the grief which has not been fully faced. That can happen in a number of ways: By idealising the deceased person; or by suppressing one’s grief; or, conversely, by hanging onto feelings of sorrow and failing to resume one’s life fully at some point after the death. There will be some who see perpetual sorrow as a testimony to their love. Consequently it is easy to get stuck in time, believing that by holding onto the pain, you are holding onto the memories. What is true, though, is that sadness is a natural part of life, but self-pity immobilises.
The psychological boffins tell us that there are basically three stages to the grieving process and it doesn’t really matter what cultural persuasion one comes from. The first stage is basically shock. The second is a period of suffering and disorganisation. The third is a period of reorganisation. It does not really matter how long it takes to move from the first to the last, but it is critically important that there is movement. After the trauma of the second stage, with its sense of numbness; its preoccupations with last encounters and unfinished business; its feelings of abandonment and guilt and anger and blame, it is important to move on. Or even if one cannot do that immediately, at least it is important to know that this is the direction in which one should be moving.

What I learnt over the few months after the death was that it is crucial to experience all the feelings which the death has brought about for me, but it is equally crucial to say goodbye and to resume my life. That does not mean the end of the love or the memories. It does mean that I did learn to accept the death and in time, the pain and the sorrow lessened as well. And eventually (and this I do believe), in the words of Mother Julian of Norwich, “All things will be well, and all manner of thing will be well”.

Trans-racial parenting

My children are black. That is an accident of their physiology, as much as my relative paleness is of mine.

We have, in our employ, a childminder, who comes originally from Venda. Venda is famous for, amongst other things, Mopani worms. One day, I arrived home from work to find my eldest child chewing on a large, seemingly juicy Mopani worm, which he had demanded from her plate. My personal reaction was revulsion – but he seemed to be enjoying it, so no harm was done and I made no comment. I notice that today, 7 years later, Mopani worms do not seem to feature on his list of favourite foods. They could, because they are still infrequently present in our household, but they don’t.

When we were living in Johannesburg, our children attended a mostly black pre-primary school. The accent of the eldest child was that of a non-model “C” black South African. Very unlike mine, which, although not Queen’s English by a long shot, has been accused of being slightly “posh”. Our other son, who attended the same school, seemed to have an accent more like ours. When we moved to Cape Town, it took two weeks before the eldest child spoke in a broad and immediately recognisable “Cape flats” accent. The other maintained what he had before. Both children again went to the same school.

My point? Culture, and everything that goes with it, is learned behaviour. It is not somehow connected to one’s DNA. Their culture isn’t somehow connected to their colour. If my eldest child doesn’t eat Mopani worms, it is not because he hasn’t been exposed to them, but because the dominant culture in which we live, as a family, doesn’t expose him to them often enough for him to want them. If he is now speaking with a Cape flats accent, it is because that is the dominant accent he is exposed to at school and one which appears to help him fit in, whereas the other child doesn’t seem to have the same kind of needs.

When we adopted the children, the legal wording of the adoption order was, for me at least, very important. It said that this child was now “as if born to you”. The ancestors of that child, (and the state) for whatever reason, handed him over to me and my partner. They were not “abandoned”. They were consciously and lovingly handed over. Those children are now mine - “as if born to me”. They now have two white fathers.

Now, just because of the fact that these children happen to be black and me white, do I need to start a course in gumboot dancing? Should I rush off and get myself circumcised? Should I have a regular supply of Mopani worms in the house to make him feel secure? This is as crazy as it is bizarre and it reveals, I am afraid, just how far we are away from a really non-racial society, where colour is the least significant thing about a person.

No, we are not there yet. And yes, I have no objection to “exposing” my children to cultures other than my own, (which is the reason, by the way, that we were at a friend’s ancestor do!) But I also have no illusions about the difficult path they will need to tread. They need to be secure, not in some fantasy culture from somewhere else, but in their own skin, for who they are. And force-feeding them Mopani worms may not make it easier for them. It may make it a whole lot worse.

Are my black children white?

I was pleased to be invited to a colleague of mine’s family ‘do’. “Exactly what kind of a family ‘do’ was it going to be?” I asked. “Oh”, he said breezily, “we will be introducing my youngest son to the ancestors”. I looked seriously at him. “Are there going to be any animal slaughters on the front lawn?” I asked as lightly as I knew how. “Because if there are going to be, then I’m not coming”.

He assured me that the hapless goat had already been killed, and that all that was required was for us to gather round and perform some kind of ritual or other. I thought that would be good, and so, with the aid of my GPS, ventured for not the first time into Gugulethu – (or, as some locals refer to it “Sjoojoolehtois”). Without a GPS, I have to tell you, it would be an impossible exercise. There are no street signs. And the streets themselves are named “NY121” and “NY122” etc. Why NY? Oh, it was explained to me, that stands for “Native Yard”.

Anyway, my two children and I – my two very white children with black skins – arrived. The men were in the garage, being men - and the women were in the living room. I seemed to be an honorary woman, so that is where I stayed for the while. I had noticed on the way in, (as did my saucer-eyed children) that there was the head of the hapless, slaughtered goat, lying next to a small fire that was burning on the front lawn. I noticed too, by the by, that the ground of the front lawn was so waterlogged that the house seemed to be floating. Such is normal, I understand in the Native Yard area.

At some point, a grass mat was produced and mother and child sat on it, were smeared with something red (I didn’t ask!) and all of us, sitting in a circle around them, were asked to take with our right hand, two small beads from a bowl and hold them in our left hands. Then the bowl collected the two beads from everyone’s left hands. These were the same beads that were made into a necklace and placed around Junior’s neck. The string of the necklace was bits of rubbed together Achilles tendon of the hapless goat. I was told that he would wear it until it fell off.

Just prior to this, the hapless goat was brought into the lounge in which we were all sitting, boiled, cut up and in a very large enamel bowl. My children looked at me with very large imploring eyes and said, very definitely, that they were not hungry.

When, later, I asked one of the elders, with whom I was sitting (by virtue of my age, I suppose, and the greying colour of my hair), what the bead ritual had all meant, I was told that the right hand takes, and the left hand gives, and so we are all involved in what that child is, because we all add something to him – to his life, to his being.

That, it seems to me, is a pretty important – fairly dramatic sort of statement. I’m not completely sure how it works out in practise, because obviously, the proof of the pudding must be in the eating, but it is a serious enough, laudable enough sort of principal. And it sure isn’t the way my culture deals with children! There is no way in hell that I could call anyone else’s child mine – and there is very little that I could do influence the way that child grows up. I see this in my own family. It is almost as though other people’s children are some kind of sacred domain. I can’t (and don’t) say when I disapprove of their behaviour, nor would it be expected that I should take any kind of responsibility for them, if they got themselves into serious trouble. And if I did get involved, it would not be because I see the children as mine, but because I would have some sort of connection with the parents.

So, I asked – what did Tata Mkhulu (grandfather) think of my adopted children? Are they white or are they black? Should I be worrying about whether or not to slaughter a goat for them, or not? Predictably, he said that they were not genetically mine, and that culture relates to genes. I said nonsense, in the nicest possible way, of course. And that they are as much my children as if they were conceived by me. And, to cut a long discourse short, we agreed to disagree – because our cultures are so completely different.

It all took me back to when I was living in Lesotho, with the dominant culture so vastly different from my own. With me feeling like I was on Planet Zog, and the Basotho behaving like I was just someone who had, over a period of centuries perhaps, just lost my way.

So, should I be slaughtering goats for my kids? And making bead necklaces for them to wear? I think not. Mine and my partner’s are the only ancestors around – and you know what? That’s what these kids have landed up with. And in my culture, ancestors don’t interfere. And to my children’s great relief, the goats are made of plastic.