Learning exemplary journey
Rajie Tudge’s biography offers insight into the struggle for a better life
RAJIE Tudge’s wedding pictures proudly gushed off her niece’s ipad. They showed a woman very much in love and having a new burst of life after the death of her beloved. The next day her autobiography, Teaching the Canna Bush: My Journey Through Apartheid and Beyond arrived at my office.
Utterly charmed that she had personally delivered it, I rang her to say how I was looking forward to reading it. Being a public servant consumed by endless meetings, it was a pity I could not offer the courtesy of personally greeting her. Courtesy, charm and a cutting wit sometimes liberally salted with sarcasm are the traits I best remember of Tudge during the several years we shared at the University of Durban-westville. The university features as one of the central actors in her life story.
The 300-odd page read starts out with her life beginning in Clairwood and an astrologer’s predication about her birth. “Your child will be happy with a pleasant disposition but she will have a hard life. She will serve her people. Her name must start with the letter Rah.” And so it came to pass that the daughter of Govindsamy and Subamma of Ganesh Road was give the masculinesounding name Rajamma.
Years later, she was to officially shorten that at Home Affairs to
Rajie when another spirit medium suggested that her name was responsible for her misfortunes. She writes of that episode: “The psoriasis and hives worsened. … The countless visits to doctors, psychologists, dermatologists, temples, nyangas did not help. We even tried a numerologist who suggested that I needed to change my name to get rid of the ‘bad luck’.”
In spite of the trials of the Pillay household they were blessed with a “regiment” of boys and girls. “On the first six attempts Subamma gave him bright eyed and lush black-haired girls. Undaunted they soldiered on.” She writes about her parents desperate attempts for boys who would mind the stall in the market, the garden with turnips and other households responsibilities once the girls had married and left.
It was the girls however who were to shoulder the bulk of the burdens. Poignantly she captures the diligence of her older sister and the oil rag existence of the household: “Devi scrounged around the garden to find lunch and supper for 13 siblings and for her parents. She cooked a giant pot of mealie rice and the daily ration of dhal.”
Being the first graduate in the household, first with a teaching qualification from the Springfield College of Education and later a slew of degrees culminating in a PHD, it was she who her father asked to promise to educate the boys, Deena and Cass.
Poverty did not deny the Pillay children the virtues of thrift. “The day after Deepavali each year
Dhano called a meeting in the girl’s room. We all crowded around her on the big bed in the centre. She ceremoniously took out her black hard-covered book and opened to the last page. She read what each of us had saved that year to explain why we got the fireworks we did.” That vignette explains how throughout her life she was very careful with money and almost frugal when it came to spending on herself. Tudge was an outstanding pupil at school excelling at every level. The luxury of completing matric full-time was something she was forced to give up as she took a clerical job at Homeleighs. “I wore my green paisley print dress with the Peter Pan collar to my inauguration at Homeleighs, the week after I had first walked into Mr Cohen’s office. No fanfare, no pomp, no ceremony.” In no time she rose to become a star employee. She also writes that the girls who went to Homeleighs became a woman.
“I yearned to dress like the ladies in the office: elegant and smart. I made up my mind to save harder to afford good clothes.” Much later in 2005, Tudge graduated in a rich silk sari that was the perfect accompaniment to her scarlet academic gown as she received the university’s highest qualification.
She passed her matric thanks to the largesse of a principal and teachers who kept her on the school’s register.
Working her way to college on a bursary, clothes were again to feature prominently in her recollection of the time: “Wearing my figurehugging peacock blue cotton knit dress, my two-inch platform high heels and carrying my fashionable leather bag, I arrived in Daintree Avenue at the Springfield Training College for Indians.” That very soon gave way to jeans and T-shirts.
Ballroom dancing features everywhere in her life at college. When her love of 30 years, Alan, passed on, one of her laments was that there was no one to take her out dancing. Her college love interest disappeared almost as quickly as he had arrived together with the VW Beetle they had bought together. Her teaching qualification in Afrikaans saw her posted in the first year in Chatsworth and then as head of department to Cape Town and the ugliness of apartheid separate development. The children who were initially hostile, warmed to her as she become immersed in their resistance politics, all the while taking care not be noticed by the Department of Indian Education.
In Cape Town while out with her boyfriend, she falls in love with the eyes of a handsome biker who she eventually tracks down to his workplace at her alma mater in Clairwood. Their love across the colour line is taboo. Her mother turfs her out of the house when she announces she is pregnant. The child cements the love she shares with a wonderful man whose only other interest was beer. He encourages her to take a degree as a night student while he takes care of the child.
She goes from being a graduate of the university to a staffer to a trade unionist and a senior executive.
Some of the chronology does not match my own. The make-up of some of the characters is harsh in places but she writes of her lived experience and that cannot be faulted.
Tudge’s life starts with a prediction by an astrologer. Later on, another seer predicts that she would marry again at 66 or 67. Just midway through her 66th year, her late husband’s best friend proposed. Their start was not a good one when 30 years earlier he refused to invite the pregnant Rajie into his home. In both their later lives, she was to find a place in her heart for him. Tudge’s autobiography is an eminently readable journey, a tear-jerker in places but a triumph of the human spirit everywhere else.
Kiru Naidoo is the author of the memoir, Made in Chatsworth available at www.madeinchatsworth.co.za. Rajie Tudge will present her autobiography, Teaching the Canna Bush at today’s Durban Book Fair at Mitchell Park at noon (which according to an astrologer is a “good time”).