My great-great-grandfather, Captain Veldtman Bikitsha, was a renowned and revered leader of the AmaMfengu. According to historian Tim Couzens and academic Andrew McGregor, he was among a delegation that went to meet Queen Victoria and Cecil John Rhodes to demand the right of the AmaMfengu to bear arms and own land in the Nqamakwe area of the Eastern Cape where they’d settled after they’d been harassed and chased away by both the AmaXhosa and AmaZulu.
Now different versions of this tale have been passed down from generation to generation in my family with what I believe to be varying degrees of truth and cupfuls of exaggeration. As a young girl, I once sat in awe as an elderly and inebriated uncle explained the provenance of the Bikitsha name. It went along the lines that Captain Bikitsha had been such a brave and valiant fighter that he once killed a lion with his bare hands. Such were the fantastical proportions of the legend of Captain Bikitsha.
However, through fate and a serendipitous internet search by my technosavvy 63-year-old mother, I’ve now made the most fascinating discovery of all: besides his prowess as a fearless defender of the AmaMfengu, he was instrumental in building one of the oldest missionary schools in the country, Blythswood, together with Scottish missionaries in 1873.
According to records kept by a former headmaster, Andrew McGregor, Bikitsha rallied his people to raise £1 500 to match the offer made by the Scottish so that they wouldn’t be beholden to the Scots, but would also have a sense of pride and ownership in the school. (In today’s BEE parlance, I think it’s what might have been called a 50/50 joint venture.) Now I was really in awe of the great Captain.
How this all comes to light, by the way, is because my mother came upon a blog (as she explained to me, her technophobe daughter), where a 65-year-old man named Tony McGregor, brother of the late jazz legend Chris McGregor, described how he grew up at Blythswood playing with his best friend Boy Bikitsha, my late father. Being curious about someone who had known her late husband, she made contact with him immediately.
Excited by this fortuitous encounter, Tony and his family joined us for our family Sunday lunch. What a surreal and special meeting that was. His father, Andrew, was the headmaster while my grandfather, Gladstone, had been boarding master and taught at the school in the Fifties.
The two men’s children grew up together in the rural Eastern Cape, playing on the sprawling grounds of the school. We spent a divine Sunday afternoon with Tony and his family as he regaled us with stories of their mischievous boyish exploits at Blythswood. Tony’s father had captured the history of the school since its inception in 1873.
Andrew McGregor was booted out of the school, however, when he refused to segregate the staffroom when the National Party came into power and had introduced Bantu education. That’s when the two friends parted and lost touch until now.
Reading through McGregor’s account of the history of Blythswood has left me bursting with pride, but also feeling morose and with a deep sense of loss over the rich lives that South Africans could have and should have had, had it not been for the institutionalised racism of apartheid and the oppressive yoke of colonialism. It is in a way the same kind of loss that writer Mark Gevisser ascribes to Thabo Mbeki’s family in his biography of the former president, The Dream Deferred.
So when Prince Mashele challenges those named in the Mail & Guardian‘s top 300 young South Africans with this question: ”Where were you and what did you do when South Africa began to degenerate?” I look back at the history of my ancestor in awe at what he tried to do for his people. I’m curious about whether future generations will look back at me with the same wonder?
After reading Mashele’s caution to our generation, I’ve decided to heed the clarion call and intensify my work. I would not want to be found wanting.
I’m afraid that while we mark June 16 this week many of our generation don’t seem to be guided by any broader notion of who and what we want to be. We should constantly be seized with what kind of society we want to become.
That navel-gazing shouldn’t be limited to just the kind of input we make when it comes to our chosen careers, but also what kind of parents and partners we are; that too will contribute to what kind of country we become. Sadly, many of us have become a generation obsessed with ”things” and not ”thoughts”.