I was born in Soweto at Baragwanath Hospital. I actually don’t remember a time when that hospital wasn’t understaffed, overcrowded, or both at once. It has gotten worse over the years and yet miracles still happen there. You might remember that Baragwanath is the hospital where the Siamese twins Mpho and Mphonyana were separated. And in a sense, proper birth is a miracle there. How can it not be when people die in queues waiting to be attended to? So my coming to being was a miraculous occasion.

I left Baragwanath Hospital screaming like most babies, I am told. Other than that, I don’t remember much of my first three to four years in this life. I am told that it was hard for my parents to find a house then, as you can imagine. The pass laws, which required every black South African to carry an identity book (a pass) at all times, were still a major part of the South African legal system. The pass shaped lives, ruined some and forced others to be over-determined to survive with or without it in the big city. My father spent some time in prison for ‘pass offences’ (being caught without a pass) before he eventually qualified for and was granted one and, with it, a house permit which allowed him to find a house for his family to live in. He and my mother were among the lucky few.

The house they got was a semi-detached three-roomed house in Meadowlands, one of the sections Soweto is divided into. I remember the address clearly: 901 B, Zone 5, Meadowlands. My brothers and I slept on sponge material laid out on the floor. There were weeks in which I only saw my father for a maximum of three to five seconds. The lounge, where us kids slept, had no door, and if I was lucky to be awake at 5 a.m. I would catch a glimpse of him passing the doorframe on his way to the railways where he worked as a ticket examiner. He’d be fixing his cap – part of his ticket examiner’s uniform – and that would be the end of that for the week. Often, when he came back from work, we kids would be sleeping.

Our street was called Tshidzumba, a Venda name, because Meadowlands and especially Zone 5 was mainly a Tsonga and Venda area. That’s how the National Party divided Soweto. There were Zulu sections, Sotho sections and so on and so forth. Even today there’s a Zulu section in Diepkloof.

However, our street was somewhat of an exception. Our neighbours on the one side were Venda. I remember Sansan, their son. I remember many nights that we spent listening to him tell us about boarding school, the movies they watched there and, as he reached fifteen years or so of age, the girls.

On the other side we had Zulu neighbours. The women there found the idea of my mother, who is Xhosa, speaking to my brothers and I in Tsonga, absolutely appalling and told my mother so. My mother made sure we never knew this and we kids got along perfectly fine, unaware that our parents differed to the point of disliking each other intensely at times. Beyond this neighbour’s house was a Sotho family. My most vivid memory of that family is the snobbery. I also remember the man there winning the ‘Pick Six’ and collecting what was purported to be eleven thousand rands – a lot of money in those days – at the horse races. The man extended their house despite the fact that it was semi-detached to the Zulu neighbour’s house. This was a very proud Sotho family. All the houses in our street were semi-detached but we still felt lucky to a certain degree. If you went farther into Zone 5 towards Zone 4, where the Tsonga school I went to was located, you passed whole streets of attached houses so that, except for the corner houses, you always had to pass through the house to get to the tiny backyard.

My memories of those early days in Soweto are some of the best I’ll ever have. Staying out late at night was not allowed by any of the houses in our immediate vicinity. But we often sneaked out when there were visitors and hoped the folks missed us. Often they wouldn’t call us back simply because there was no way we could sleep when the visitors were around. There was no space.

In winter we made ithezi, a fire made from paper, plastic bags, tyres and whatever else we could pick up that could burn. To be allowed to share the fire you had to bring any or a combination of the above ingredients to contribute. And, of course, the guys who started the fire had to like you. And, as is typical of most childhood situations, the bullies never contributed and they were never turned away. They were the ones to send us small ones to fetch more fire material. Around the fires would be the local glue-sniffing group. I remember ‘Goofy’. From as far back as I remember those street fires, he sniffed glue. And I remember Tshepo. I think Tshepo was Goofy’s sister’s child. Ja, I think he was Goofy’s nephew. Tshepo later sniffed glue as well. If you didn’t sniff glue you were often getting enticed to try it and told about the wonderful highs you could experience from doing so. If you were not too well liked and your family was not too well respected, you were simply forced to try it. I never sniffed glue. One of the reasons was that I didn’t stay late enough for the group to get too used to me. At about 8 p.m., at the latest, my mother would shriek out my name and I’d have to go indoors. Also, I wasn’t one to follow the general trend. If too many people were into doing something, I would generally be put off by it. And, I guess I was well liked or else I had a family that was well respected because nobody ever forced me to sniff glue.

Those fires were, to a large degree, very central to my upbringing. That’s where I saw people sinking into nothingness. That’s where I observed tensions building up and sometimes ending with some boy being beaten up. That’s where I learned a lot about people. That’s where I learned to appreciate simple pleasures like good choral singing and the art of storytelling.

Around those fires, people related Terrence Hill and Bud Spencer cowboy bioscopes. They related Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee movies, complete with the soundtrack, sound effects, and made-up dialogue, as most of the narrators could not remember most of the English words they read or heard while watching the movies. But you still got very vivid depictions of how the movie started, what happened in the middle, and how it ended. You might not get the entire story, but you always felt like you had been to see the movie, too. It was great. And often, the evening would culminate in singing. We sang naughty songs like the one that went, ‘Vagina get ready, the penis has arrived.’ We also sang sad prison songs like ‘You who only arrived yesterday, don’t cry, mommy’s not here. Don’t cry, you who only arrived in the big city yesterday.’ But we were generally a happy bunch.

Early evenings were often spent playing hide and seek. I think some of us lost our virginity while playing that game. Saturday afternoons were spent challenging other streets to soccer games with balls made of plastic and paper stuffed together. The girls would challenge each other to singing competitions and ibanti, a game which is beautiful and a little complicated to explain. To play it you needed different size tins that you stacked up one on top of the other, a tennis ball, and a minimum of three players. It was a kiddies’ game, and more specifically a girls’ game, in which two players stood opposite each other bouncing the tennis ball as they threw it at each other past the player in the middle whose main focus was to avoid being hit by the ball. The players throwing the ball aimed to hit the player in the middle while trying not to hit the stack of tins which, if they fell, would allow the player in the middle to run from one thrower’s position to the other’s like they do in a game of cricket. The player in the middle would also attempt to take a few runs if one of the ball throwers missed the ball when it was thrown at her and it went far behind her. If the player in the middle got hit by the tennis ball, then she would take the place of one of the players throwing the tennis ball and thus the players would take turns to amass runs. The player with the highest number of runs at the end of the game won.