In times of mourning and healing, one misses the wise elders. Today I am missing my mogadibo (my darling) Melea Letsoalo, domestic
worker for the Hilton-Barber family for almost her entire life. She held me just
after I was born and I held her just before she died. She was my anchor, my
grandmother, my comforter, my friend. We really adored each other – despite the
rule of apartheid at the time, despite her servility in our household. Well
into my forties and her nineties, her favourite thing was letting me paint her
finger and toe nails post box red, while drinking sweet peach-flavoured champagne.
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| Long life! |
Melea cared for me through
happiness and heartbreak, through tragedy and trauma – my brother’s death, my
armed robbery, me being stabbed in the head. I cared for her too, after her own
daughter Carol died, and her son Harry, after her knee conked in and her
eyesight faded. Melea was wise and warm, with great humour and healthy streak
of anarchy. She was an irrepressible joller.
She smoked, she drank. She ran a small but lively shebeen from the alley in
Northumberland Avenue in Jozi where we lived for twenty years.
When I was writing my
matric (both my brothers had left home), my parents went overseas for a month
and Melea and I were left alone. We had the family Peugeot – and I had a
learner’s license - and Melea and I drove all around the suburb visiting my
friends and hers. Almost every nearby domestic worker and gardener came to sit
in the sun drinking all the stuff we’d raided from the liquor cabinet; as did
my friends, but we sat near the pool.
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| Colonial family photo 1947 |
Melea was born in ancestral Letsoalo land in Limpopo, in the green upper reaches of the Letsitele Valley, near Tzaneen. Her people were forcibly removed from there in the 50s. When the land was successfully reclaimed by the Letsoalos in the late 90s, Melea was at the handing back ceremony. “Bloody liar”, she shouted at land minister Thoko Didiza, “all governments are liars!”
Melea’s father worked
for my grandfather on Kings Walden farm in Agatha at the beginning of last
century; a skilled stonemason who built the original walls of the now famous gardens.
As a teenager Melea went to work on a nearby farm where the farmer tattooed all
his workers in case they ran away. Which Melea of course did. I will never forget
how I used to trace, with my baby fingers, the warm initials ML in Victorian cursive script on her
left inner wrist.
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| Not so colonial family photo 1986 |
Melea fled back to Kings
Walden where she went from kitchen ‘girl’ to nanny for my newly born mother
Tana. During this time she fell in love with the Portuguese farm foreman,
Fernandez, who had come from then Lourenco Marques in Mozambique to manage
Kings Walden. Melea and Fernandez lived in a little cottage (which later became
mine) and were arrested several times under the Immorality Act in 1948 (no Sex across
the Colour Line as it was known then) but continued as lovers ‘til his death in
the late 70s.
Melea eventually retired
to a cottage my parents built her in Direpeng Sreet in Lenyenye, down the road
from Kings Walden, with a couple of fabulously feisty gogos who smoked newspaper joints and hustled me for bucks to get hot
stuff from the local bottle shop. I visited her often there, bearing nail
polish, sweet stuff, mielie meal, chickens, eggs, clothes. I got to know her
family and relatives, and maintain contact with those still alive and kicking.
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| Melea and Tana testing the summer punch |
Born a few days before
the Titanic sank in 1912, Melea lived to be 102. I dreamed about her the night
before she died. Come quickly said her son Mickey when I phoned the next morning,
she is leaving us. I raced down to CN Phathudi Hospital near Lenyenye and saw
her for the last time, peaceful and paper thin on the hospital bed.
“I love you”, I said,
holding her tiny old hand. “I love you”, she whispered back.
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| Love you mogadibo forevah! |
