Special Hearings — Women's Hearings — 1997-07-28

MS MATHOPENG: My chest, I am not in a good frame of mind to say anything today.  All I can say is, it's good news that a - it's good that I came here and to hear what Sheila has to say.  I genuinely, most of the things, I did not know.  For instance, to be exact, I stayed alone in my house when my husband was in prison and Sheila had three children.   I had no child to send.  I had - up to now I've got three hip replacements.  So you can imagine the suffering plus depression and everything.  I asked Sheila to give me one of the children, not this one, there's a bigger one whose in Switzerland now.  That child has always been closest to my heart, that was the second born.
 And Sheila - I could see she wasn't willing.  One time she would say;  I've got to - go and ask my husband.  Then I said no, what tradition now are you dishing me up.  We don't go to husbands.  We go through - the way to a man's heart is through his wife.  So if I talked to you, you'd represent me well to your husband.  I can't go to your husband.  If you want to talk to your father and ask for money, you've got to through me.
 I mean that's the education we were brought, you see, into.  So I was trying to show Sheila, no I can't go there.  You can talk to your husband.  But it never materialised and I know I had a child, but one day when she was in spells of anger, throwing bottles, breaking my glasses and telling me off;  the first time in life Shiela ever talked to me.
 It is very recent.  I think it is recently that she had gone to a psychiatry doctor.  Then I began to see Shiela talking, telling me, you know as a teenager, you know teenagers tell their parents where to get off and what they want to do.  This is me and it's not you.  
 We have never had such experience in the house.  So now Sheila was telling me all those things.  I said, oh so, now you are a teenager today.  Now you know they cheek their parents and just tell them off.  
 But she told me and said;  me, not one of my children,  I can rather eat porridge without meat, drink water and I go to bed.  You can eat chicken and spice and what not, but no child of mine will stay with you.  
 That is when I learned that all these years I have been a liability to my daughter.  Perhaps even to my other children.  I didn't know.  I'm happy to also to hear when she says there was nobody who came forward when I was depressed, I needed somebody to say;  not this one, or let us go out and to forget about this.  It was me alone there, because the police were harassing me and nobody would come to my house.
 So then I acted alone and I didn't know whether I was right or wrong, but I had to make a decision.  After all, I was a mother and father and god of the house.  I had to look after my children.  And I've looked well after them.
 Today we're all stressful and that is why I feel one thing among other things with the TRC, my family needs counselling.  That's what I feel.  We need counselling.  Sheila has brought us closer to it, but it is not enough.  As she says I have also suffered, but I didn't put it so grossly as that I suffered as a child.
 All I meant is, I didn't get certain things like the children of today can get.  Like we, as children, we didn't have to carry lunches of R10,00 rand and get onto taxis and all that.  We had to get a slice of bread, buy it from the (... indistinct) of our town for a penny and that was enough.  That was all we had for the day until tonight.
 Well, those are sufferings.  But I didn't put them so badly as that I was being abused.  One thing I wasn't abused.  The only thing is just that my - we were only three children and I was the eldest at home and I lost a father at the age of six, when I was the eldest child.  And I had to go and stay now with my grand-people.
 And you know what it is when you stay - I was born right in Johannesburg.  I had to go to Bloemfontein outside and stay with other people there and I think the treatment was never good there.  That's what I was trying to say.
 Perhaps other things could have happened, but in short that's what I meant.  Yes, because ...

MS SEROKE: Thank you Mrs Mathopeng.  I wasn't challenging you.

MS MATHOPENG: Yes.

MS SEROKE: I just wanted to bring out that the suffering that women have gone through under the system, also can really bring problems to a family, especially when there is stress of harassment and so on.  And that it was in that line and mood that I asked that question.

MS MATHOPENG: Yes.

MS SEROKE: To show what the system could do to families, especially mothers in their relationship to their children.
Thank you very much.

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you Sheila and thank you Mamma Mathopeng.  I think that what you've said today, is really something that's very rarely spoken of.  That often in the homes of activists, the people who are the most needy, are the children.  And activists usually look after everybody else and they don't really concentrate on their home.
 And so one finds with a lot of children of activists, that they actually block out in the early years, the whole question of politics, not realising that it's in fact part of our lives.  And because there isn't time to talk about them, because the figures are always seen as these very superior beings, there isn't really room to criticise them and to talk about your own perspective of them.
 I think this is one of the problems of the legacy of the past; that in fact people need to get the space to talk about these issues.  But you also eluded to, I think a much more difficult problem, which is the fact that the family system has really been broken down by apartheid.
 I think one of the major challenges of the Truth Commission in the days ahead when we talk about rehabilitation, is how do we restore the role models.  You alluded, Sheila, to the role models not being present there.  I think the fact that they want mothers to teach their children or grandmothers, about the womanly aspects of growing up into young womanhood, what to do;  these are problems and challenges for the TRC and for our society as a whole, because we know that we have groups of young people, who've grown up with no adults.
 Nobody to teach them about morality, about ethics.  And I think we've seen the effect of that in the criminality that's taking place in our society.  Because the biggest legacy of apartheid, is the breaking down of the family tradition and the family system and the fact the women were taken away from their households, often meant that there was nobody to guide young people.
 It is a challenge.  Not just for us, because we'll be there, we'll be coming in for a moment and by next year we'll be gone.  But our society needs to think very, very hard about what we're going to put into place.  How we're going to ensure that counselling facilities exist in places where counselling is a myth and a dream, rather than a reality.
 It's a challenge that we need to look forward to in the next few months, because it's all our problems.  Crime is all our problem.  The breakdown of society is all of our problem.  It's not Government's alone, it's not the Commission's alone.
 But I thank you for having the strength to come forward today and to confront your own ghosts, because that I think we need to break the silence, because all of us have ghosts that we keep and we live with. I think you did something very important.  You touched what nobody wanted to talk about;  the myths that exist in our own homes. Thank you very much for sharing, both of you.
 I'm going to ask that we now break for tea and that we come back at five to 12, please, thank you.

SHEILA MASOTE: I'd like to say, I don't know how much all this has meant to me or it means to me.  Especially, we really kiss with my mother, we really hug, but we have started and today is one of it, we've done it in public.
And thank you very much.