By: Thabang Mokoka

We keep them on the room divider, those family albums. The leather is cracked, the gold lettering has faded to a whisper, but the weight of them is sacred. When we gather, someone pulls one down, and the dust motes dance in the afternoon light.

We open it to laugh at the uncle’s bell-bottom trousers at a wedding in ’85. We pause to sigh over the Christmas where the table was too small for everyone. The album is the vault of us. 

But have you ever noticed how, over the years, the (e) pictures alter? Look very closely, a square of yellowed cardboard with four corners of stale glue where a photograph used to be. Someone has been here before us. Someone with scissors, or a firm thumb of irritation towards a perceived “Persona non-grata”, the thumb has decided that specific memory no longer fit the narrative they wanted to tell. Perhaps it was a cousin who left in anger. Perhaps it was a fight that soured a decade of Sundays. The empty space remains, a phantom limb of memory.

This is the dilemma of our public memory. We treat our national story less like the untorn fabric it is, and more like that family album on the room divider, constantly curated by the very last person who felt slighted.

I am reminded of a meeting of the minds and hearts, marriage. Not a political alliance, but letshato ka mpela, in the truest sense of the word. It was a union celebrated under the African sunset, a union that produced children, the synced melody, "tswang, tswanng, le boneng, ngwana o tswana le le coloured" of revolutionary hope. For decades, the family album was full.

Page after page, showed this couple building a home not just a house, weathering all sort of storms both internally and externally, laughing at the kitchen table while the come cover stove warmth’s up the house, and weeping at the funerals of comrades. They raised children together, three very specials offsprings, Freedom Charter, Liberation le National Democratic Revolution. The album was thick with the texture of a shared life. 

And as is the way with divorces that turn bitter, the story was rewritten the moment the decree was initiated. The ex, wounded and furious, took the family album and sat down with a pair of scissors. Out came the pictures of the happy years. Out came the memory of the father at the school sports day, the husband nursing the sick child. The narrative was collapsed into a single, devastating phrase wa mobona o “One door in, one door out."

He was no longer the man who had helped build the home but was now the stranger who had just slammed, the door on his way out, irrespective of previous efforts. This was blasted out into the ears of family’s members, friends, to the enemies, to anyone who ever would listen, the story was told anew of a deadbeat, a traitor to the hearth. The rich, complex history of the marriage was replaced with a single, angry snapshot. 

Now, that man is today is late. He has gone to the ancestors. And suddenly, the album is brought out again. This time, the tears are for the founding father, the familys own colourful elder. We are told of his immense contribution and his stature within the family and extended reletives. A top of the art funeral, a class befitting of a giant, is dusted off. The tone is one of profound loss, pain is felt through the withheld tears in the corner of the eyes.

The ex speaks of him, but the words are carefully chosen, a eulogy for a stranger, not the complex history of a spouse. We celebrate his departure in recognition, but we refuse to acknowledge the life shared the spouse. We mourn him loudly, but we have already erased him from the family tree. The children of that union, the ideas, the movements, the followers, stand at the funeral and hear a version of their father that bears no resemblance to the man whose pages were torn out. Which story is true? 

The tragedy is not that the pages are gone but the painful tragedy is that we are the ones who tore them out, and in doing so, we have erased the only map that could ever show us the way home.

Perhaps, given the chance to reflect, that is the cruellest cut of all history as we shall know it because a map torn to pieces cannot guide your back. It cannot navigate you the path to the meeting place of our kraal when the sun goes down. Now that the family has been scattered, a wedge driven between each member by unresolved personal in my view not ideological, factual or not, but the silence in the album is a deafening verdict. It speaks of a family that has forgotten how to gather.

But as I stare at these empty spaces, I hear the echo of an old voice, a gran’s suggestion from that deep well of wisdom, the glue that holds generations together. She has seen it all; she has been part of this family through its many family battles. She has observed everyone arriving and showing their last respect, irrespective of their own differences, all stood in laughter and celebratory of the life of late spouse. Yes, all in the same proximity. With sheer concern of family value, a painful tear at the corner of her eye, as she often holds it back, asks the question that lingers in the dust: What went wrong?

She asked herself on the golden days, speaking to her own inner person gazing at the sundown that is truly so difficult to forgive each other, for the sake of our children? This hatred, this betrayal, it is destroying us, dissolving the very glue that once held the album together. Why can’t we swallow our pride, just once, and forgive? Why can’t we make peace and move forward?

This unfortunate gathering of the spouse lost, sad it may be, is an opportunity to really teach us something. It reminds us that mohlomong mokete, or perhaps a family reunion, must happen. Not a political rally, but a true gathering to resolve personal matters, for the sake of the clan name and its family values. If we still wish to salvage the reputation of this legacy before it perishes entirely, we must unite every member who went their own way. Ke bohloko ba family; it is the pain of the family that calls out the loudest.

We stand here, staring at the full album and the empty spaces, mourning a man whose pages some tried to tear out. And in the silence, all we can do is whisper the only prayer that fits a family so fractured:

Morena boloka setjhaba, o fedise dintwa le matshwenyeho.

Rest now, old man. You have taught us, finally, that the blank spaces you leave behind are not voids, but a mirror reflecting our own stubborn hearts.

Robala ka kgotso, ho tswa ho rona.

Disclaimer: Thabang Mokoka writes in his own personal capacity