Mozambican war victims embrace
laid-out streets, brick houses of varying styles and sizes and RDP houses with electricity. Others have become integrated in the many villages in the area. But the majority of those from Hluphekani are in 14C.
“Home is here now,” says Shihlangu, sitting on the balcony of a L-shaped brick house overlooking a newly built RDP house in his yard. His wife, Paulina Ritshuri, sits nearby, cradling one of their grandchildren sleeping peacefully on her lap.
“We are happy here,” he says. He and his wife receive government pensions. Their surviving children live in different parts of the country and have started their own families with South African-born partners. Mozambique, to many like Shihlangu, is now a distant memory, a place of horror they wish to forget.
“Four of my children are buried here. I have built a home here. Why should I still look back?” he says, when asked whether he plans to return to his land of birth someday.
“We will be buried here,” he says, to the animated approval of Ritshuri.
But surely they must miss Mozambique? After all, everyone supposedly has this never-ending connection to the land of their birth?
“We miss nothing. We have fields. We plough and plant mealies. We will die here,” Ritshuri says emphatically.
In old Hluphekani, Esther Mlambo stands outside the corrugated-iron shack she shares with her mother and her five children. She was born in Mozambique 33 years ago. Her mother, Magdelina Ngoveni, who does not know her age, remembers that she carried Mlambo on her back when she fled from the war in 1986.
Mlambo has no recollection of Massingir, the Mozambican district where she was born. The only home she knows and loves is Hluphekani. Unlike her mother, who only speaks Xitsonga, Mlambo is fluent in Sesotho, which she learnt during a brief period in her early childhood when the family lived in Phalaborwa, where her father died and is now buried.
After South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994, as part of a special arrangement, many of the Mozambican refugees living along the eastern part of present-day Limpopo and Mpumalanga applied for and were given South African ID books, which made them South African citizens.
Yet those who were not old enough to qualify for IDs then, like Mlambo, now struggle to obtain IDs. She alleges they are often told by department of home affairs staff to apply for IDs in Mozambique. This is the lot of many of the young people of settlements like Hluphekani, 14C and other areas that have since become home to former Mozambican refugees and their offspring.
Without an ID, life is a struggle. Mlambo’s mother also doesn’t have one so she doesn’t receive a state pension.
Many of the youth like Mlambo have no recollection of Mozambique and have never set foot there since their parents fled. Those who were born here consider themselves to be nothing but South African.
Home to them is here and nowhere else, not even some place their parents often speak about with painful horror.
“I don’t know anyone in Mozambique. I don’t want to go