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    Song for Sarah: Lessons from my Mother
    Song for Sarah: Lessons from my Mother
    Song for Sarah: Lessons from my Mother
    Ebook133 pages2 hours

    Song for Sarah: Lessons from my Mother

    By Jonathan Jansen

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    About this ebook

    In this, Jansen’s most personal and intimate book to date, South Africa’s beloved Professor contemplates the stereotypes and stigma so readily applied to Cape Flats mothers as bawdy, lusty and gap-toothed – and offers this endearing antidote as a praise song to mothers everywhere who raise families and build communities in difficult places.As a young man, Jansen questioned how mothers managed to raise children in trying circumstances – and then realised that the answer was right in front of him in the form of Sarah Jansen, his own mother.Tracing her early life in Montagu and the consequences of apartheid’s forced removals, Jansen unpacks how strong women managed to not only keep families together, but raise them with integrity.With his trademark delicacy, humour and frankness, Jansen follows his mother’s life story as a young nurse and mother to five children, and shows how mothers dealt with their pasts, organised their homes, made sense of politics, managed affection, communicated core values – how they led their lives. As a balance to his own recollections, Jansen has called on his sister, Naomi, to offer her own insights and memories, adding special value to this touching personal memoir.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookstorm
    Release dateApr 7, 2017
    ISBN9781928257301
    Song for Sarah: Lessons from my Mother
    Author

    Jonathan Jansen

    Prof Jonathan Jansen is a leading South African educationist, commentator and the author of several books including the best-selling 'Letters to My Children'. He is the former vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State, where he earned a reputation for transformation and a deep commitment to reconciliation. He is married with two children.

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      Book preview

      Song for Sarah - Jonathan Jansen

      Huisvrou)

      I

      Under this roof

      I cannot recall when I first tired of the much-peddled image of the Cape Flats mother, except that it was a long time ago. In the media she was always loud and vulgar, permanently dressed in check overalls while hanging out of the house window with hair in rollers. In real life or fiction, the Cape Flats mother embodied the well-worn stereotype – foul-mouthed, semi-drunk, clownish, over-sexed and gap-toothed, with artificially straightened hair. En route to motherhood she dropped out of school, flirted with boys and fell pregnant before taking a job at one of those factories that peeled off the suburban railway line somewhere between Steenberg and Salt River stations.

      Reminds the poet, Ronelda Kamfer:

      Good girls don’t live on the Cape Flats

      Comedians found rich material in these flattened images, whether as Auntie Merle in Marc Lottering’s stand-up routines or as Auntie Katie in Leon Schuster’s slapstick comedy. There appeared to be no limits to excoriating the soul of the Cape Flats mother. Nomakula (Kuli) Roberts went further than most in her Sunday World column, ‘Witches Brew’, ending her diatribe against ‘Jou ma se kinders’ with this sickening line: ‘Besides, only in the Cape would you hear somebody screaming out Jou ma owe jou hond sex geld’ (Your mother owes your dog sex money). ‘With a bit of editing,’ said the online editor of a more respectable newspaper, ‘it would have been funny.’ From Saartjie Baartman in the early 19th century, mothers of the Cape are simultaneously the object of mirth and derision from which comedians make money, newspapers sell stories and with whom every horny man seems to have a good time.

      If she was not downright disgusting, the Cape Flats mother is portrayed as helpless and pitiful, the victim of circumstances beyond her control. She does what she can and then becomes what she can no longer fight. That mother image is represented in Ellen Pakkies, the Lavender Hill woman whose tik (meth)-addicted son stole from the family and abused his mother until one day she ‘snapped’ and strangled her own child to death. Such is the sympathetic account of this Cape Flats mother given in Sylvia Walker’s book Dealing with Death. Magistrate Van Leeve went on to issue a suspended sentence after declaring that Pakkies was ‘a victim’ who was ‘not prison material’ but rather ‘a loving mother’.

      Sarah in her late teens or early twenties in Montagu

      In Rehana Rossouw’s novel What Will People Say?, there is the well-meaning Cape Flats mother, Magda Fourie, who loses the trust of her children and the control of her only son to the gangs of Hanover Park. The thirteen-year-old boy’s initiation includes participation in the gang rape of his sister’s friend. Mrs Fourie, the factory seamstress, is a decent, conservative and church-going mother who is very concerned about outward appearances, as the title of the book suggests. Despite her best efforts, the mother finds herself overcome by the social and political turmoil of the 1980s. Magda’s personal and family life eventually tears apart in the context of violence, despair and destruction, which the novelist expresses in the vulgar language of the streets. The dutiful mother divorces and her son is murdered on the instructions of a gang leader. The people obviously had a lot to say.

      The book of poems by Kamfer under the title Hammie gives a raw and intense account of the relationship between the poet and her mother where they lived in the northern areas of Eerste River and Blackheath. Here the Cape Flats mother is the absent presence, detached from her daughter physically – during her growing-up years with grandparents on a Grabouw farm – and emotionally. The daughter experiences her mother as sleepwalking through life even as the vulnerable young child is forced to navigate her way around paedophile uncles, jailbird relatives and neighbourhood gangsters. Growing up, the sensitive and observant daughter waits in vain for Hammie to learn how to raise her children. The insecure Hammie, on the other hand, feels constantly overwhelmed by hard living and rejected by all around her. She remains in a broken marriage for the sake of ordentlikheid (decency). Throughout their lives together there were moments where mother and daughter haltingly reached out to each other, withdrawing for periods of time, and then reaching out again. But they never quite found solace in each other, even after Hammie dies:

      Ek dra my ma se trouringe

      Maar dit maak my vingers seer

      I wear my mother’s wedding rings

      But they make my fingers ache

      Of course the novelists, poets, comedians and journalists are not entirely off-target in their portrayal of these varied images of the Cape Flats mother. There are indeed those mothers who are loud and vulgar (allevrou/every woman), helpless and pitiful (Pakkies), concerned but overcome (Fourie), as well as self-absorbed and detached from their struggling families (Hammie). But as with all part-images, they throw both light and shadows on the challenges of motherhood in difficult places.

      Here the shadows are favoured images, especially the ones about the loud and vulgar allevrou who enjoys so much media attention. You will seldom find in the creative work of these image makers that other Cape Flats mother who simply does not fit the mould of violence, victimhood and vulgarity that stereotypes the ‘typical housewife’ from this part of the country.

      The other Cape Flats mothers

      A television programme called Reis Na Gister (Journey into the Past) wanted to shoot images from my childhood home in Retreat, which lies in the southern areas of the Cape Flats. While the cameras were being set up that weekday morning I looked across the road from our corner house and there it still was after several decades – the home of the Sedras family on the upper floor of the old two-level, four-house, block-flats structure that the City Council no longer builds. The technicians were still planning details of the shoot so I decided to quickly ‘pop in’ at the neighbours.

      The perfectly wired gate was still neatly painted and the small patch of green grass was evenly laid out. I marched up the bright red stairs that looked as if they had just been polished. I looked through the open door and in that small front room everything was in place. The doilies on the dressing table. The Holy Bible with open pages on a side table. The modest but neatly ironed curtains with the see-through layer of silk behind it. A bowl of flowers and the polished legs of the chairs. Not a speck of dust in sight. Exactly as I first saw this house as a boy where after school we played hide-and-seek with the Sedras children while our parents were slogging away at work.

      You would be hard pressed to find the image of Mrs Sedras in swearing novels, racist columns and saucy newspaper accounts of sex, drugs and gangs on the Cape Flats. Like countless other Cape Flats mothers, Joan Sedras was not vile, violent, nor a victim of her circumstances. This mother was never an alcoholic and if this evangelical Christian was dependent it was on something, or rather someone, bigger than herself. She raised a family of children and yet none of them joined gangs, slept around or found themselves enslaved to drugs. In fact the children became leaders in the church, professionals in their fields and upstanding members of the community. The grandchildren would race up the red staircase and encounter the same love and devotion that their parents enjoyed from this doting grandmother and faithful wife.

      What I saw in Mrs Sedras I still see in the countless number of other Cape Flats women who raised children and held together families against

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