3. Pretoria, 1976 - Stupid resting

In which Eleanor wonders, "Why do adults need so many rests?"

In the stillness of the afternoon, Eleanor creates her own magical realm. While another toils.  

Eleanor

Mummy is, as always, in her room, resting. And I am required to stay in my room and stay quiet so that I don’t disturb her. Mummy’s rest time is sacrosanct. And I detest it with a passion. Everything revolves around Mummy’s afternoon rest. She won’t let Becca stay and play with me either, because Mummy says she needs her rest too. Nursery school friends can’t come over because we will make too much noise and it will “disturb both our rests.” I can’t go home with a friend, because Mummy can’t come and pick me up…because she will be resting. 

Stupid, stupid, stupid resting. Now that Tig is in school, I don’t even have him to play with. 

So I lie on my tummy on the cool parquet floor, my legs up in the air, swinging from side to side, while I concentrate on drawing. 

At least there is always drawing. 

Daddy brings home thick stacks of computer paper, folded like an accordion. Rows and rows of numbers and words that don’t make any sense on the green banded side, glorious blank plain white on the reverse side. I make necklaces and bracelets from the perforated tear off edges. 

On the cool parquet floor, while silence descends on the house so that Mummy and Becca can rest, I draw. And draw. And draw. I people my afternoons with the dwellers of my mushroom village. Gnomes and fairies and other fantastical creatures fill the lonely silence. 

While Mummy rests. 

Kelebohile (Rebecca)

Kelebohile¹ closes her door and sinks down onto her bed gratefully. She’s not that tired—not really. She’s used to the rhythm of work now, and the Madam’s hours aren’t unreasonable. But this quiet time in the afternoon? She does need it, before she goes back into the house for afternoon chores like ironing, to prepare dinner, and do the clean-up afterwards. 

She has a soft spot for the little madam, though, with her big pleading brown eyes and soft round face. The Madam must have seen she was about to relent to Ellie’s pleading, and had said kindly, but firmly, “She’ll be fine for an hour and half, Rebecca. She’s old enough to entertain herself for a little bit. You need your rest too.” She had turned to Ellie and said, more sternly, “And Eleanor, you’re not to disturb Rebecca. Promise me.” Eleanor had nodded, pouting petulantly and putting her thumb in her mouth. The Madam had made a disapproving face, but let it be. 

Kelebohile looks around her room. She’s one of the lucky ones, she knows. It's better than many of the houses in Mamelodi². A white person could even live in this room. And what some of the other maids are forced to live in? She shudders. Some of them are worse than a dog’s kennel—she’s seen them. Not even a cement floor. The Master and Madam had this house’s servant quarters entirely rebuilt when they bought the house, she knows. She has her own, small, but proper bathroom. A tiny kitchenette area where she can prepare her own food so she doesn't have to eat white people's food the whole time. It’s even big enough that her children can sleep with her when they come to visit. 

And the Master and Madam are kind enough. They treat her with respect at least. She hears the stories, she sees the marks. She’s done her own share of stitching up wounds, taking painkillers from the Madam’s bathroom to give to her friends so that they can go back to work. She knows she should be grateful. But it’s still hard, with her husband away in the mines³ and her children in Mamelodi with her mother. But with not even a high-school certificate, this is the only job she can work in apartheid South Africa. She doesn’t like it, but she’s her own children to think about. She works so that they can finish school, unlike she could. 

Maybe, one day, it will be better for them. 

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Bonus Materials

• Eleanor and Kelebohile: in photographs

• The Music of On the Road to Jericho: South Africa has a rich musical history. To listen to it’s music is to develop much more appreciation for South Africa in all it’s nuance and complexity and richness. Indeed, for me certain chapter just have soundtracks. And this is one of them. This story cannot properly be told without the music that goes with it.

• Mines, music, dancing and apartheid: Mining was brutal. Workers evolved ways to cope. Music and dancing were some of them.

• At Home with Apartheid: Domestic workers and the white families who were family…but not family.

1. Most black workers, men and women, were given, or chose, “white” names by their white employers.

2. One of the black townships outside of Pretoria. Under apartheid, every city in South Africa had its black and Indian townships. Only white people were allowed to live in cities.

3. “The migrant labour system was an historical system used to reconcile the conflicting need for cheap labour in the mines and cities, with the apartheid ideology that workers should not reside there on a permanent basis. Labourers were housed in a unique accommodation type that developed from the Kimberley Closed Compound into the Witwatersrand Mine Compound and ultimately the migrant labour hostel. During the late colonial and apartheid periods, the mining compounds and the migrant labour hostels, which formed a key element of this system, were designed (and functioned) as tools of control and repression. In time they became synonymous with violence, overcrowding and squalor.” (Source: Vosloo, Christo. (2020). Extreme apartheid: the South African system of migrant labour and its hostels. Image & Text, (34), 1-33. https://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2617-3255/2020/n34a1)