In the first part of this highly personal series of articles (in two parts), Nontobeko Hlela tells her early story and how she became a student at KwaSizabantu Mission School.
I was born in Jabu Hlela and Johnson Hlela in 1978. My mother has always been a "church girl" and she grew up in the Methodist Church. In 1978, when I was pregnant, a friend of her invited her to participate in the "Renaissance" event, which was a church service in a tent in the sweet water district of Pietermaritzburg where my parents lived.
She was fascinated by the energy in the service and the white people who talked about isiZulu. After the revival, my mother has converted and became a reborn Christian, and joined the KwaSizabantu mission.
The father would drive his mother to service, wait for her in the car, and smoke a cigarette. After a while, he became curious about what happened in the tent and walked in. In this way, he also converted.
He stopped smoking, dancing and singing. He used to sing and dance in isicathamiya when he was a child
group. He will have friends over, they will sing and dance, and my sister and brother will join in.
When I was born, my family was already a member of KwaSizabantu. The life of the mission is everything I know. My earliest feeling was fear. I didn’t want to do anything to attract my attention. I didn’t want to do bad things. I had to keep in mind what I did and the person I talked to, especially to make sure that my actions did not affect my family and My mother had a bad influence.
Although his father's conversion was later than his mother's conversion, he eventually became the main supporter of the mission and the largest enforcer in the family. Since my childhood, life has revolved around the church. On Wednesday night, one of the houses will hold church services
(brothers). From 11 am on Sunday, my parents’ lounge or the garage where we moved to Imbali will provide Sunday service; there will be chairs on Sunday. At Claridge, the outpost in Pietramarizburg; sometimes it takes us 1 hour and 45 minutes to complete the task.
When I was young, I didn't mind going to perform tasks. This was an outing, and despite the long drive, I liked the food served in the dining room later. At some point, we started to participate in the Youth Service Corps, which will hold a week of activities during the school holidays in June and December.
KwaSizabantu is beautiful and peaceful. It has rolling green hills, dams and waterfalls. The soft mist enveloped the grass, while the animals chewed the grass gently, and the soft and beautiful rain fell again and again for a whole week.
Children from all over South Africa will participate in this mission. There will be buses and trucks and all kinds of vehicles gushing out. This is the first time for young people, or young people who look back and look forward to seeing the friends they met for the last time six months ago. I like to go to youth service because it is like a vacation, but there are thousands of people there. All the singing and gesture services led by Dubulile Zuma are very interesting. Her voice is amazing.
There was no auditorium at that time, so all services were held in a big tent. We slept in large dormitories with three berths each. There is a smaller part, a channel, a larger part twice the size of the smaller part, another channel, and then another smaller part.
The bathroom is separate, so if you need to go to the bathroom at night, you must go outside in the dark. My big sister and brother will be there too, so I am not alone because I have been following one of them.
After one mission, I didn't really meet my brother, but my sister and her friends were there and they took care of me.
In the youth service, one of my most interesting memories is that they showed us the video of this song when they preached on hell
Michael Jackson's film shows us demons and why we shouldn't watch and listen to this kind of "pagan music". Instead, the whole tent burst into singing, singing
, They ended the movie.
When I started to realize that something was wrong with the church, I must have been eight years old. My brother I admired was expelled from home, or he left alone in hopes of being expelled. He was "exiled" during the mission.
When he was 16 years old, he made a neighbor's daughter pregnant. That was one of the most serious crimes you could commit, so knowing this, he left the school and exiled himself.
When my parents found out, my father was very angry. This is a topic of conversation at home and a mission point for service in the coming months. We were told that we could not contact my brother and he was no longer part of our family. When my nephew's baby was born, we moved to a new house in Anbari. But I remember we once went back to Sweetwaters to attend church services, and then I went to have a baby.
I took the baby to the church and held him throughout the week. I can hear hiss and whispers from behind me
Because I dare to bring that sinful child into the church.
During the school holiday in September 1987, we participated in missions as a family. On the Sunday after work, when we drove home to Pietermaritzburg, my father drove to the side of the road somewhere near Kranskop, got out of the driver, and drove the back cover of the car.
He reached into the car, took my sister's suitcase, and put it on the side of the road. Then he reached out again to pull my sister. A cousin, I tried to pull her back and let her stay in the car, we were screaming, crying, yelling, leaving her alone. In the end, he pulled her out, closed the van, returned to the driver's seat and drove. My mother has never moved.
Later I learned that when we were on a mission, a boy called my sister on an internal phone in the kitchen. My sister never spoke to this person, so she didn't know who it was or why they called her. But the person who answered the phone reported that there was a call from a boy, which was enough to leave her abandoned by the roadside, dropped out of the 9th grade (11th grade), and lost two years of life. . It changed her entire life process.
In 1988, when I was 10 years old when I was 9 years old, and I was about to start the Level 3 standard (5th grade), we were told that we were going to the Domino Servite School (DSS) for missions. I don't want to leave home, leave my mother and friends, but this is not a choice or a question of discussion. We were just told that it was happening.
My half-brothers who were in high school at the time, my half-sisters who were the same age as me, and my younger brother who was six and seven years old at that time all went to missions. School, and many children of Maritzburg KSB (KwaSizabantu) branch. We were all put in my father’s backpack with our storage boxes-I have a blue aluminum suitcase-and our van on the road: homemade fried chicken,
(Steamed bread) and homemade biscuits.
When we arrived at KwaSizabantu, it was very different from the previous atmosphere when I came to attend the Sunday service and the youth service in June or December. There are fewer people there, and I know I won’t go home within a week. By this time, the school had been running for two years.
After arriving at school, the first thing I remember was being told to go to the school auditorium. When we got there, the colleagues-who lived and worked in it and were the backbone of the mission, the people you went to consult-were wearing a pile of clothes on the floor and telling us what we can wear and what is not. I think Thofozi (Lidia Dube) is one of them, but more later.
Someone tells us that any clothes with logos and words are "pagan" clothes and are not allowed. The use of logos such as Kappa (representing a naked person), Apple (a half-eaten apple is a sign of the devil) and D&G (it is said to be a devil's text) is prohibited. We should not wear clothes of any fashionable or fashionable length, that is, above the knee or above the ankle. The girl's skirt or skirt must stop between the calf. Women wearing pants are not mentioned at all. Assume that girls never dare to wear pants.
After that, the next traumatic event was told that all girls of level 3 and above must go to the waiting room.
The waiting room is located in a building on the left side of the mission’s main road (when coming in from the school), and on the right is the airstrip, so any passing cars can see it, and people passing by the mission also walk over. There are girls, African girls, standing in a row, waiting for someone to go. When you walked into the small room, there were three old women I had never seen before. The air smelled of Savlon disinfectant. There is a small disk on the floor with water and Savlon on it, and a red cushion, like a sofa.
Two of the women will be sitting on the sofa, one standing. They will tell you to take off your underwear and lie down, put your legs on the red cushions, and then open them. The standing woman will crouch on you, hold your labia, open you, and move your lips in this way. I think other women will come closer. I don't know, I always close my eyes. Then they will tell you to get dressed and then tell the next girl to come in.
The girl's snake swept itself into the waiting room all day, walked by the sun and the boy's glare and giggled because they knew what was going on. From then on, I knew what the waiting room was, and I was afraid of the beginning of the semester, because it inevitably meant visiting that building. There is no doubt that a dear friend of mine will be told that she is naughty,
,
Her parents will be required to perform tasks. When we were nine years old, we had been sexed and we were told that sex life was terrible, and sex life was always the fault of women.
Every morning, the school starts with an assembly and preaching there. Each lesson begins and ends with the teacher's prayer. From the first year I was there, the reign of fear began. We will sit in the classroom during the evening study period, which is from 6.30pm to 8.30pm every day, except Saturday, when someone will say: "Standard 3 or higher is called
(New double-storey building). "
After this happened for the first time, every time we received a message that someone in the new two-storey apartment wanted, my heart would ache. We went there for the first time and I don't know what happened. When the elementary school students arrived there, the high school students were already sitting there.
The late Mr. Alpheus Mdlalose and Mr. Michael Ngubane were there. They are members of the school board and almost always take disciplinary actions against students there. It seems that some high school students have a relationship or are suspected of having a relationship, and they were questioned.
This is one of the main crimes you may be expelled from school. This has already been stated in the school rules we read to us: there is no relationship between boys and girls. At some point, the orange water pipe or wire came out, and the children were beaten over and over again. Many times, some girls were told to take off their underwear in front of all of us, then walked to the front of the room, lay on their hips and were beaten. In fact, the purpose of interrogation and "punishment" in front of the entire school is to make the rest of us feel scared, so even if you are not involved or involved in what is happening, you will think twice. Do something similar.
After arriving at school, I found my sister was left on the side of the road in the sugar cane field as a class. Apparently, my father arranged for Mr. Michael Dlamini, a colleague of the mission, to pick her up. They have arranged to leave a 17-year-old girl on the side of the road to scare her and teach her a lesson. When I was educated at DSS, my sister who was now living in mission was one of the serfs. As part of the punishment, she worked in the field, caring for the chickens, cleaning the chicken coops, slaughtering them, and making jams for consumption in mission groups and sold in mission shops.
Celimpilo Malinga and my sister are friends. One day, someone talked about Selipanlo at a school meeting,
, (A brother and child from Maritzburg) His colleagues had been to his home, and there was a boy. I know they are talking about my sister because there is a group of colleagues living in Pietermaritzburg on the weekends in my parents' house.
After school, my half-sister and I went to the mission team to find my sister. We told her what she said at school. She went to her adviser, Thofozi, to learn the truth about the matter and why they were talking about her at school. The counselor is the cornerstone of the mission’s attempt to strengthen its ideology. They are colleagues whom all sympathizers must confess. A hodgepodge person either chooses a colleague to confess or chooses one for them to choose. Periodic confession is strongly encouraged. The frequency or lack of confession determines your sanctity.
A few days later, I was surprised to see my father in the mid-week semester assignment. He called us to Rondavel where he lives. When we got there, I had a conversation with me and was beaten for talking about "school affairs" with my sister. He told me that he had to apologize to my mother (the second highest official in the mission) and seek my forgiveness, because they were going to deport me because of my actions. Remind me again that I must act with caution and with a pious attitude.
When I reached the 4th grade (grade 6) standard in 1989, one of our themes was health. Some children in our class received new health books, while other children received old books. When they opened the new book, there was a picture of a pregnant woman with a label. The child is a child, and they start to show each other pictures of pregnant women. Miss Wilson, who was our health teacher, came in to see what the children were doing. She took all the books away. When these books came back, all pages related to copying were sealed together or written with a black coca pen.
In the same year, a netball game was held in which we played girls under 18 (we call them open girls) with some female teachers and colleagues. As far as I can remember, the girl in the Open beat the teacher and we are all happy, that's it. On the second day of school, Ms. Bouvier, one of the teachers who used to be Afrikaans and participated in the net basketball game, attended the class. She greeted us and said that only the boy responded and the girl did not. She thinks we are boasting because the women's team won, and we are laughing at her. We apologized and greeted loudly, and thought the matter was resolved.
When we were asked to go to the school auditorium that night, we were in the dormitory. I remember that I was already wearing pajamas, just wearing pajamas because someone told us that we didn’t have time to change clothes. When we arrived at the school hall, the high school girls were already in the hall. Now how to do?
The interrogation began. Those of us schoolgirls are dismissive and boastful about winning a netball game. The orange pipe came out, and we were beaten countless times, passed from one person to another. I remember a teacher, Mr. Radbe, our Zulu teacher and later the vice principal gave me extra whipping because he knew my father.
In the same year, another child reported that I had a relationship with a boy because he was wearing one of my woolen gloves. My brother and I received winter wool gloves from my mother. I have a red one, and my brother has a navy one. One day off, he took one of mine and I took one of his, so each of us has a pair of blue and a pair of red gloves. At some point, he gave one of his gloves to one of his friends who was wearing it. Assuming that we are in a romantic relationship, this resulted in me being beaten and asked to confess.
Someone told me that I cannot join the choir because I am guilty and only pure people can sing in the school choir. For a month or more, I was one of the "naughty" children who had to sit in a separate classroom during the choir practice. At some point, under duress, I "admitted" that I had a relationship with the boy. I think he was beaten again because of my confession.
When I met Monika Greef, I was at standard 4. Monsie or Mons is the eldest daughter of missionary Oom Koos Greef, and Tante Estelle Stegen, the daughter of Uncle Frieder Stegen, brother of Uncle Erlo Stegen, the founder of missionary.
We wandered around before the bell rang, waiting for the morning shift in the school hall. Monsie and I reached an agreement almost immediately and we became friends for life. I like to go to Monsie's house, this is my chance to escape the madness of school and mission. On Saturday morning after breakfast, I went to their house while they were still in a room in one of the mission buildings. Later, when they moved to one of the houses on the other side of the airstrip, I went.
The house is very beautiful, full of light, laughter and love. I have never seen a family interaction like this, a father sitting and laughing with his family. No screaming. There is no fear or condemnation. It is strange to me to see children playing with Oom Koos because I have never played with my father.
If he is not locked in the room, we will only see him when our father comes to condemn us because we have committed some Christian omissions. Or, when he stood before the congregation's preaching, what we heard in the mission was the same flame, sulfur, and vision of God. By then, my father had become a trusted member of KwaSizabantu and was called Baba Hlela from Maritzburg.
I was attracted by the warmth, love and family in Grave's home. I looked at Oom Koos intently, but I was also very scared and shy because I associate adult men and fathers with fear, severity and blame. Since then, I think I have been trying to find my Oom Koos, but without success. But everything about KwaSizabantu is intertwined with its ideology. I recently learned that Oom Koos was cooperating with the Apartheid Military Intelligence Service while still on duty.
As the years passed, I learned that I had to hold the card close to my chest. I learned that I can’t trust anyone, because associating with someone will cause you trouble. I learned to say the right words and admit the right things, because you may admit the same thing or the same thing wrong over and over again. I learned to say something to say, for example I was thinking about a boy or having a bad idea, so every time I confessed, I would commit a different sin. They seem to like it, and then I won't hide.
My primary school counselor would sometimes beat me in the old double-storey building, and then she would leave me there and turn off the lights. I will have to try to find my way out of the messy beds and mattresses stored there in the dark.
When I was in high school, I was tired of all the beatings and making up stories. So I went to Ms. Dorothy Newlands, the principal at the time, and asked her to be my advisor.
With Ms. Newlands as a consultant, my life has become easier. Yes, she is very strict, but she is also kind to me and very good to me. I used to make up stories with her, but it was usually due to something that happened at school when we were all troubled by one thing or another. But in general, I don’t mind consulting with her, because we can sit down and chat, it doesn’t have to be about sin, even though I know I must confess guilt regularly.
As a ten-year-old child, I intuitively realized that the white members of the church have a significantly different and better life than most black mixed-race children, and they definitely have better lives than black schoolchildren.
This is a trivial matter, just like the fact that most white children live at home with their parents. Even the children whose parents do not live in the missionary do not live with us in the big dormitory, and enjoy a special place in the missionary accommodation. I think this is one of the reasons why I prefer the Graves and Ms. Newlands because my life is different when I am with them.
In the first few years of my entry into Domino Servite School, my brother was still in exile there. But about a year later, he went to eSikhawini in the northern KwaZulu-Natal province, where he completed matrix studies and found a job. During this period of time, despite the fact that he paid his penance for staying in the mission and losing his education, we were still not allowed to talk or meet with him. When he starts to live in eSikhawini, he will try to go home during Christmas, like everyone else who is going home.
We are very happy to meet him and will sit there and chat for a few hours. But as soon as my father comes home, everything will change. He would start screaming, asking why my brother was there, and condemning my mother for letting him in. My brother is still forbidden to go home because he committed the crime of giving birth out of wedlock. My father would scream: "Get out!" We would cry and scream for my brother, so stay. My mother stood quietly or asked softly: "What crime did he commit? This is something no one else has ever committed. Did he kill a person?"
I hate Christmas.
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