TOWNSHIP HOLIDAY OF LAST RESORT

THE kids are having their first taste of a proper township Christmas holiday this year. By “township Christmas holiday”, I don’t mean they’ll be physically based in a township, even though I can see a hint of Mamelodi and Atteridgeville in their not-so-distant future when I perform some crystal-ball gazing. What I’m referring to is how most of us used to spend our holidays every year; just idling around the township for two months.

As I write this, these coconuts, who are used to whizzing to and from holiday destinations in December, are in the TV lounge with their tablets, Nintendo Wii, their Minions and The Lego Movie DVDs.

You see, their mom served divorce papers on her employer and is being subjected to that sentence called a “notice period” until early January. This means none of us is going anywhere until her release. It’s a solidarity thing in the mould of the Free Mandela Campaign.

The midgets are only a week or two into their Gauteng “incarceration” but they’re already borderline suicidal with boredom.

Growing up, I had no such challenges. This is because December holidays were like any other time of the year for me. Well, except for the part where I didn’t have to put on my school uniform and spend my days using my buttocks as the last line of defence against blows delivered by my teachers with a piece of hosepipe.

Due to a combination of all the legislation restricting our movements back then, and our folks’ notoriously shallow pockets, we’d spend those long summer days swimming in the nondescript stream called the Mnqadodo — on the periphery of my Hammarsdale neighbourhood — collecting bilharzia infestations and taking part in other fun activities.

We’d participate in spitting contests, catch catfish using sharpened tree branches as makeshift fishing spears, play four-hour football matches, hold boxing tournaments in which Ijuba sorghum beer cartons served as gloves, and commit genocide on avian life using rubber slings. It got so bad that, contrary to regular migratory patterns, birds would fly northward, away from my hood, to avoid untimely meetings with IFOs (identified flying objects, namely pebbles). Raiding the orchards of our less vigilant neighbours was also a popular December holiday distraction.

So it boggles the mind how, every January, we’d get to school and the first thing our English teachers would ask for was an essay entitled “My Christmas vacation”. In the words of the Twitter generation: WTF? It took restraint not to retort, “Hawu! Ma’am Mkhize, you live three houses from me. You know I was at home the entire time raiding your orchard. What vacation?”

My guess is that some sadistic education department official made this a compulsory annual essay in the Bantu Education curriculum for no reason other than to have a cheap giggle at all the essays detailing December holidays spent herding cattle, milking petulant cows and swimming in crocodile-infested rivers.

One year, a classmate called Patrick disappeared all December and returned in January three shades darker than his usual Kiwi black shoe-polish complexion. And then he wrote a beautiful essay about the wonderful time he’d spent in a paradise called Sun City, gliding down water slides, twirling around on merry-go-rounds and taking part in all manner of exotic activities. We were greener than the Incredible Hulk with envy.

Patrick would have got away with his fantastic tale. But he messed it up with an amateurish mistake. He used the word “scintillating” in the essay. No Bantu Education sixth grader could possibly know that word.

His younger sister was called as a witness in the ensuing tribunal and she sang like a canary. Patrick had actually spent December with his maternal uncle in Mthwalume village, south of Durban, herding goats and geese. The bulk of the essay had been lifted from a Sun International brochure that had come as an insert in this very newspaper.

I don’t know what became of Patrick, but I won’t be surprised if he becomes chairman of the SABC board one of these days.

I had a keen personal interest in the outcome of the Patrick case. I had spent about two weeks of my December holiday at my paternal granny’s house in the Valley of a Thousand Hills, a mere half an hour from my township. A portion of that time had been spent hunting red duikers, cane rats and rock badgers with the Duma brothers.

This presented me with a conundrum. Had I or had I not spent my December holidays in a game reserve? This is the debate I was having with my conscience.

In the end I utilised my Catholic sensibilities and opted to go with the game-reserve fib, making a mental note to offload my technical “sin” inside Father McKinney’s confession booth the following Sunday. Three Our Fathers and five Hail Marys seemed a small price to pay for a 90% score in the English essay.

But at least the following January I would have a decent story to share, because my mother had organised for us to spend about a week with my maternal granny in Verulam, north of Durban.

Until that point my brothers and I had never been on a long-distance train ride, so we looked forward to that bit almost as much as the holiday itself. Yes, I said travelling by train from Hammarsdale to Verulam was a “long-distance train ride”.

Thirty-odd years ago it felt as if we spent at least six hours on that train ride, munching mangoes, apricots and litchis we bought from vendors throughout the journey.

The stay in Verulam itself was also quite a refreshing change of scenery from the ho-hum, languid shape of previous holidays. Immersion in bilharzia-infested ponds was replaced by afternoons spent watching movies in an actual cinema, with seats.

And the highlight of my summer was my very first kiss on the lips from a girl called Desiree. All previous attempts at kissing girls had culminated in my being punched in the solar plexus or kicked in the shins.

Immersion in bilharzia-infested ponds was replaced by afternoons spent watching movies in an actual cinema, with seats

Fast forward 33 years and I can at least claim to have found my own peculiar rituals that make me a part of the pageantry that comes with that rotund, bearded fellow in red pyjamas.

I read somewhere that the origin of the word “holiday” is an ancient Mayan word, olid, whose literal translation is “time of year when one can open one’s first beer at 8am without being judged by spouse”. Even if that’s a hocus pocus definition, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

And it doesn’t matter whether we’re in St Lucia, Jeffreys Bay, the Cape winelands, Maputo or home in Gauteng, at some point I will always find myself in a T-shirt two sizes too small — à la Gwede Mantashe playing football in recent pictures — proving those ancient Mayans right with an amber liquid in my right hand at eight in the morning.

But this season I’m particularly looking forward to reading my offsprings’ “My December holiday” essays in January.

That should be fun.