I had a chat with a friend the other day, and what we were speaking about was that my friend was not aware of my background and my culture. He had always known me as the guy who speaks with an accent and studied at Wits. But believe it or not friends, I have a past and a culture that is different from that of many of my black friends who grew up in the townships of Johannesburg and very different from that of my white friends. See I grew up in rural Eastern Cape, and that perhaps is where I should stop, but I will continue. Where I am from, the chapters of one’s life story are not broken down by one’s birthdays, but by the cultural rituals that one goes through. You could be 50 years old and still be considered a boy, where I am from, depending on whether or not you have; firstly gone through all the necessary cultural rituals and secondly, whether those rituals were performed in the correct sequence.
Over the next few weeks then I will regale you with stories of my own cultural/ritualistic experiences. I will try to be as informative as possible. In the end all I am hoping for is that you learn a bit more about the Xhosa people, a people I hold so dear to my heart, who I want to show off to the world. I am going to call these series of stories “I am not a coconut”.
So let’s begin then with the day I was born.
On June 17th 1987, I let out a raucous roar at Madwaleni Hospital in rural Eastern Cape. Madwaleni hospital is in the village that my mother is from. And the reason I was not born in my father’s village and my home is because women where I am from are not allowed to give birth at their husbands’ home. And so a month or so before I was born, my mother had to pack her stuff and go to her own people, who would help her give birth to and nurse the child for the first 3 months of its life. This actually still happens today.
I am not sure if I would ever want to be away from my wife after she gives birth to my child. But for 3 months after I was born, my parents had to stay apart, because culturally, it would have been wrong for them to stay together.
Years later when I was older, I remember asking my grandmother why my uncle’s wife had to go back to her people to give birth to her first child. My grandmother’s answer was that my mother had done it as well. To which my response was; but why? So my gram gave me this reason: When a Xhosa man’s family goes to pay lobola for a woman, they have to pay an extra cow, aptly called “the milk cow”. The “milk” here refers to the woman’s milk. The reason behind the milk cow is to bless the soon to be wife with fertility. So before the woman gives birth, they have to go to the place where their milk cow is, which is her maiden home. It is believed that the milk cow will stay close to home on the day that the woman goes to labour. I didn’t believe this much, but my grandmother insists. Also, if the milk cow were to die before the woman gives birth to her first child, then they would be rendered barren.
So my first ritualistic experience was a trek to my mother’s village a month before I was born.
