A Strong, Unyielding Man
He was a strong, unyielding man, this father of mine, Victor Thamsanqa Ngqono. I looked up to him and adored him. He was a high-school teacher but every day when he got back from school he went to the fields to plough his mielies, pumpkins and other vegetables, and look after the fruit trees.
He channelled the water from a big river not too far away to make irrigation furrows for our gardens and fields. He used to tell us he could not stand the thought of anybody starving because, 'If you are a man, you should work to provide for your family.' So we were never hungry.
Endless Determination
If he went to bed early he would be up again at midnight saying, 'I'm just off to monitor all the irrigation hoses.' At two in the morning he might get up again, saying, 'I'm going to make sure the cattle haven't escaped from the kraal,' or 'I'm taking the tractor to the fields again.
' I knew he was up at these odd hours because I could hear him moving about and joking with my mother. 'Sweetheart, get up, get up. You've got to work, you know. You must work very, very hard,' he said. Then they would laugh. He may have liked to be funny but, phew, he had endless determination.
Money Lessons
Ten years before he died, he bought a house high on the hill, with a shop alongside it called Deckert's Hill Trading Store, from a white man named Mr Groenewald. It was a beautiful place, with a sweeping view of the mountains all around the valley and large fields all around it.
Even in 1995, the year he died as an old man, he was working hard on this land, growing sugar beans and other types of beans, pumpkins, peas, squashes, butternut, eggplant, cauliflowers and cabbages. He never had any workers to help him, so when we were young we learnt how to plough and hoe and grow all the vegetables. I liked that very much. Because all our food came from our fields, my father hardly used any of his salary.
Instead, he kept it all in a safe. There were no banks in those days so my father bought the safe, which we called his 'safety box,' for storing his salary. He almost never took anything out of it. He used to say to us, 'Never be a thief, nor a lender. Any money you have, divide it into three parts. One is for food, another for savings and the third for when people get sick at home.' So we always had enough.
Strict but Kind
On one occasion my father was transferred to another school and did not get paid for a year. That year, he did take money from his safety box to buy the things we needed, but we carried on eating the vegetables from our fields. When his back pay from the government eventually came, it was enough to pay for a lovely new John Deere tractor to plough his fields with, so he could expand them even further.
He had many cattle, which he ordered from the Transvaal, and they would arrive on the goods train. My father may have been very strict but he was also kind. He bought us new bicycles from the big town near Queenstown, so that if he needed to send us to the shop we could ride back quickly, without getting too tired. At the end of the month he would take us to Queenstown to buy us clothes at Bloomenthals and Sales House. We felt very special.
By Jo-Anne Smetherham