Making It
Yesterday my daughter Tulani celebrated her ninth birthday by having an organic party at home. She invited a small group of her closest girl friends.
The night before she joined her mother Azra with excitement to bake cakes and biscuits (They had made elaborate invitation cards using recycled bits of card and Azra’s tattered shalwar kameez). My job was to move the furniture around to create the largest floor space in our living room, where Tulani had decided everything was going to take place. This is where she and her friends were going to sleep on the floor in their sleeping bags, watch a scary movie, hold a disco and play a variety of made-up games. This was all Tulani’s own idea, gladly supported by Azra and me, given our precarious financial situation occasioned by recent family tragedies.
As Tulani helped me secure a hastily bought cheap mirror ball – with just an hour to spare before her guests were due to arrive - I was inspired to recall my own childhood in a squalid, violent township on the outskirts of Durban in South Africa. Growing up in poverty, my many siblings and I watched our father and mother exercise creativity in alleviating our condition. Nothing was wasted. We pre-dated the fashion of ripped jeans and colourfully patched baggy pants. We children emulated our parents’ innovative way of dealing with adversity by making our own toys. We would combine our natural creative skills to design a whole car, with brakes, steering wheel and even a hood, and race it down the inviting steep hills (The township of my childhood was called Indunduma, which is Zulu for Thundering Hills). Our inventions were so beautiful that the White apartheid-cosseted society would steal our ideas and reproduce them in factory built versions, which were then sold on the commercial market at prices we Black people could not afford. An example of this naughty manoeuvre is the wire cars we made as kids, which, again, had all the detail of the real thing that most African families could only dream of. White people would take these designs and re-issue them in refined plastic-coated versions to appease their children’s envy.
So it gave me a very special feeling to hear my daughter praise me and her mother for our creative ways of always being able to add a gusset to life’s threadbare garment. Her excitement was echoed by her friends as they danced to the colourful patterns reflected onto the ceiling and walls of our modest living room. I quietly sang praises to the young Asian boy who had led me to the cheap LED light that was designed to randomly change colour. The girls couldn’t contain their joy. With my ears resonating to choruses of “You’re good!” and “Wow, your dad is so clever…” I left the party to the little ones. As I turned to close the door behind me I caught a glimpse of my daughter’s dappled face: She was wearing the warmest of smiles. I gave her a quiet wink.
Bring on the credit crunch!
Eugene Skeef 121008
The night before she joined her mother Azra with excitement to bake cakes and biscuits (They had made elaborate invitation cards using recycled bits of card and Azra’s tattered shalwar kameez). My job was to move the furniture around to create the largest floor space in our living room, where Tulani had decided everything was going to take place. This is where she and her friends were going to sleep on the floor in their sleeping bags, watch a scary movie, hold a disco and play a variety of made-up games. This was all Tulani’s own idea, gladly supported by Azra and me, given our precarious financial situation occasioned by recent family tragedies.
As Tulani helped me secure a hastily bought cheap mirror ball – with just an hour to spare before her guests were due to arrive - I was inspired to recall my own childhood in a squalid, violent township on the outskirts of Durban in South Africa. Growing up in poverty, my many siblings and I watched our father and mother exercise creativity in alleviating our condition. Nothing was wasted. We pre-dated the fashion of ripped jeans and colourfully patched baggy pants. We children emulated our parents’ innovative way of dealing with adversity by making our own toys. We would combine our natural creative skills to design a whole car, with brakes, steering wheel and even a hood, and race it down the inviting steep hills (The township of my childhood was called Indunduma, which is Zulu for Thundering Hills). Our inventions were so beautiful that the White apartheid-cosseted society would steal our ideas and reproduce them in factory built versions, which were then sold on the commercial market at prices we Black people could not afford. An example of this naughty manoeuvre is the wire cars we made as kids, which, again, had all the detail of the real thing that most African families could only dream of. White people would take these designs and re-issue them in refined plastic-coated versions to appease their children’s envy.
So it gave me a very special feeling to hear my daughter praise me and her mother for our creative ways of always being able to add a gusset to life’s threadbare garment. Her excitement was echoed by her friends as they danced to the colourful patterns reflected onto the ceiling and walls of our modest living room. I quietly sang praises to the young Asian boy who had led me to the cheap LED light that was designed to randomly change colour. The girls couldn’t contain their joy. With my ears resonating to choruses of “You’re good!” and “Wow, your dad is so clever…” I left the party to the little ones. As I turned to close the door behind me I caught a glimpse of my daughter’s dappled face: She was wearing the warmest of smiles. I gave her a quiet wink.
Bring on the credit crunch!
Eugene Skeef 121008
|