Remembering Tata-Part 1

I miss my grandfather. He died on the 21st of December 1994. It was a long time ago, and the years that have passed have turned him into a collection of sepia-stained, faded memories as opposed to a real man who raised me during the formative years of my life. I think, with no real way of knowing of course, that if he were around today, I'd be a completely different person. I hear stories about him , when the family is all together; when bottles are opened (much to my mzalwane Gogo's dismay) and the noise of nostalgia fills the room. I wish that I could have known him. This will not be a memoir. My memory is faulty and untrustworthy. This will be a picture of a man, who shaped my world, who sits in ancient creaky rocking chair, in the back of my mind.

I stayed with my grandparents until I was five years old. At 17h00 everyday, Tata would return from work in his ox-blood red Peugeot as Gogo left for her nightshift job at a Portuguese knitting factory. That was our special time. Him, on his tattered brown lazy-boy, me on his lap. Condensed milk sweetened tea. His in a chipped teacup; me sipping from the saucer. We'd watch in silence as Stephanie plotted and planned her revenge against Brooke, (who, even to my young mind, was a verifiable slut.)

This was the constant dichotomy of the man. Rough, welders hand. Sickenely sweet tea.  A panel-beater, a policeman, a bookie,a truck-driver and a loan shark. I would sit up with at the living room table, "helping" him calculate all his outstanding debts; and then we'd go, Tata and I, hand in hand down the dusty darkened streets of Jabulani, Soweto; collecting money from his buddies who usually managed to wangle him into a card game or two while we were there.

Everyone called him Tata(Xhosa for father). The boys who played dice games at the corner of the street. The woman who'd come to him when their new husbands had come home reeking  of foreign perfume and alcohol. His wife, his children, his grandchildren. He preferred to be referred to by his clan name, Maduna, and would correct me every time I called him Tata. "I am not your father!" he'd say to me, "Ndingu Maduna mna"
"Yes Tata," I would respond , " finding child-like joy in mixed reaction of frustration and amusement that would come from him. Everyone called him Tata, because he was a father to everyone who knew him.

The stories I hear are of a harsh, principled man who never let his kids chew gum or go out with people he didn't know. A man who hinged his life on the importance of family, to the point of overemphasis, who at the end of his life; had strained relationships with most of  siblings. He never suffered fools, and for this reason, he was the man that people would run to when the boy at the end of the street was giving the community problems again. He was also the man that people would run from if they erred on the wrong side of ethical behaviour. This is not the man I knew.

The man I knew, would take us(his grandchildren) with him on grocery shopping days, buying, along with the monthly necessities; extra loaves for the crazy man who lived in the park in the Roodeport where we would have our weekly picnics. He'd buy food for the family, bones for his dogs, snowballs and bubblegum for his grandchildren, and breadcrumbs to feed the pigeons in the park. And we'd sit under a large Pine tree, being regaled and terrified by Xhosa folklore tales of  uZim and the giant. These are the same stories that would lead us to pile into his bed, all four of jocking for the right to sleep closest to him, partly so he could tell us more tales over more sugary tea until we dozed off, partly because the stories had us too afraid to sleep on our on. In my mind, when he'd tell the stories of the giant who used to terrorise the village, and the demigod man who would stop him dead in his tracks, and have him flee back to his sordid, filthy cave in the forest, he was that man. The Xhosa Hercules who from knee-high vantage point, seemed to never end. He was the biggest, strongest man in the world.

A few years ago, driven by sentimentality induced by a visit to his grave, we drove to the Park in Roodeport. The crazy man was no longer and the tree had been cut down when the movement to rid South Africa of foreign vegetation began. I hear that there are plans to build an office park there now. I'm almost outraged by this. They will pave over our memories; digging out and discarding the spirit of a time that can never be retrieved, and empty words and leaky memories will never be enough to immemorialise it.