AN EXCERPT · BORN INSIDE A LIE
My Father Wiped the Spit Off With His Bare Hand
By Nkanyiso Kai Madlala
I was a child who believed that justice was fast. That strength was loud. That a man who let an insult pass without consequence was a man who had lost something important.
I was wrong about all three. And it took me the better part of twenty years to understand what I had actually witnessed that afternoon in the parking lot.
Here is what happened.
We had moved into a beautiful home in a white suburb in Durban in 1995. South Africa was one year into democracy. The signs had come down. The law had changed. We were, officially, free. And in that freedom, on an ordinary afternoon, a white boy I had played with many times before rolled his tongue back into his mouth, leaned forward with genuine theatrical commitment, and launched a thick green projectile directly onto my father’s windscreen.
I watched it spread slowly across the glass.
I ran inside to call my father the way a child calls a referee. Urgently. Breathlessly. Certain that what was about to happen next would restore order to the universe. My father stepped outside. I walked beside him, pointing, explaining, practically vibrating with the expectation of justice.
“He did not shout. He did not threaten. He reached out with his bare fingers and wiped the spit off the glass.”
No towel. No cloth. No water. Just his hand, moving slowly, spreading the green mess across the windscreen until it was gone. Then he brushed his fingers on the side of the car and walked back inside.
I was humiliated on his behalf. I was confused. I was, if I am being completely honest, ashamed of him.
I carried that shame for years. Because I had been taught, without anyone ever saying it directly, that strength meant force. That dignity required retaliation. That a man who swallowed an insult had been defeated by it.
* * *
What I did not understand, at that age, was the calculation my father had already made before he even stepped outside.
To escalate a situation with a white person in 1995 Durban, one year into a democracy that was still finding its feet, was not a simple decision. The police could be called. Authorities took sides. And history had taught black South Africans, again and again, that the system had a very particular view of who was the threat in any given room. My father was not being weak. He was doing something that required far more discipline than rage.
He was choosing the outcome over the feeling.
Apartheid did not only take our land and our vote and our dignity in the visible, sign-on-the-door sense. It did something quieter and more lasting. It taught us to see ourselves the way the system wanted us to see ourselves. It told some people they were born superior. It told others they were born lesser. And when a lie is repeated for long enough, across enough generations, people begin to live as though the lie is simply the truth. Children absorb the fears of their parents the way soil absorbs rain. And what I absorbed that afternoon, standing in the parking lot with my chest tight and my fists ready, was a distorted picture of what power looked like.
My father knew something I did not.
He knew that the image of the olive branch, the one that goes back to an ancient story of a dove returning after a flood with a leaf in its beak, was not a symbol of surrender. It was a symbol of someone who had decided that peace was harder and more costly than war, and had chosen it anyway.
“Sometimes strength is loud. Sometimes it walks back inside and says nothing, and that is the harder thing.”
* * *
I grew up in a country that was born inside a lie.
The lie was this: that human beings could be divided, ranked, and separated according to the colour of their skin, and that this arrangement was natural, reasonable, and in some version of someone’s theology, ordained. Four and a half decades of law, architecture, language, economics, and daily ritual were built on top of that lie until it became, for many people, simply the shape of reality.
And then one morning in April 1994, when I was eleven years old, the lie was officially over.
I went to bed the night of the 27th of April 1994 with the absolute certainty that tomorrow would be different. Not different like a new season. Different like a new planet. I had watched the queues on television, rivers of people waiting to vote for the first time in their lives. My grandmother had wept, and she was not a woman who wept easily. So I paid attention. And then I went to sleep with a plan.
The plan was: wake up, and be free.
I woke up. I opened the curtains. The township looked exactly the same.
Same dust road. Same broken fence at old Mkhize’s house, broken since 1991, apparently immortal. Same smell of coal smoke and morning and dogs with strong opinions about everything. Same everything.
I waited. By lunchtime, the township was still the same. By evening, I had concerns.
That night my mother sat across from me at a dinner table in Albert Park and said the thing I would spend the next twenty years slowly understanding.
“Nkanyiso,” she said. “The law changed. The people have not.”
* * *
This book is about that gap.
The gap between the law and the people. Between the promise and the inheritance. Between the sign coming down and the belief behind the sign finally dissolving. It is about a boy who grew up inside a lie so thorough that he did not always know he was inside it. It is about what apartheid actually looked like, not from the outside, not as legislation, but as the invisible architecture of a childhood.
It is about my grandfather, who went to fight a war against fascism in Europe and came home to a country that had just elected fascists into government. It is about my grandmother, who prayed and fasted and wept and buried more than any person should bury. It is about the streets of Durban and Umlazi and Albert Park and the Natal Midlands and everywhere else that shaped a boy who did not yet know he was being shaped.
And it is, eventually, about the morning I understood what my father had done in that parking lot. What it actually cost him. What it said about who he was. What it took from him that I would never be able to give back, and what I could do, perhaps, in the years that remained, to honour the lesson he gave me without ever once explaining it.
“You cannot understand a country until you understand the people inside it. And you cannot understand the people until you have stood where they stood.”
I was born inside a lie.
This is my story of finding my way out.
THE BOOKS
Two volumes. One life. One country. One truth.
Born Inside A Lie
A Memoir of Apartheid and Awakening · Book One
Born Inside A Lie
A Memoir of Freedom and Its Cost · Book Two
Written by Nkanyiso Madlala · Born in Natal, South Africa · Now writing from America