My Parents had a Life before I was Born
True story
Beeeep. Beeeep. Beeeep.
He stares at their alarm clock and the bright red “5:30” stares back at him. It provides the only source of light in the room. She lays awake beside him. By now their weekend routine is ingrained in their bodies — the alarm is only a formality.
They lay together for a few minutes, reciting out loud their morning prayers.
Notre Père qui est aux cieux, que Ton Nom soit sanctifié…
They rise out of bed. He heads to the shower while she walks routinely down the corridor to the neighbouring bedroom where their 10 month old daughter still lies fast asleep. The family of three are three weeks into their new home: a two-storey 81 square meter house furnished with a second hand double bed, beanbag chair and a hand-made coffee table built from the spare wood of a shipping crate. The roof over their heads and the mortgage that comes with it are covered by his 2400 Rand monthly salary ($700 USD in those days) as an entry-level engineer.
By 6:30AM father, mother and daughter are packed in their plain blue 1981 Opel Kadett station wagon leaving their home in Green Oaks. Father drives, while mother sits beside him in the front seat. Daughter sleeps in a baby’s car seat in the back. First stop is the day care, baby Christiane’s resting place for the day. Next stop, the open air market at the taxi rank on the corner of Bird Street and Merriman Avenue in Stellenbosch. Jean had started selling t-shirts out of the back of their family car a few weeks ago, only to be reprimanded by the municipal police for not having a permit. With momentum building towards a unified South Africa after 45 years of an oppressive apartheid regime and Nelson Mandela’s release from Robben Island Prison 3 years prior, “Peace in our Land” t-shirts were selling like hotcakes and provided an extra source of income for the recent immigrants from DR Congo.
Permit in hand, Annie jumps out first at the market where she sells the R5 t-shirts at twice-cost, pocketing a 100% profit margin. The air is buzzing with the sounds of music booming from the waiting taxis and hawkers competing to sell their merchandise. The sound of boerewors and hotdogs sizzling in food stands nearby accompanies the familiar smell of meat on the fire. With her t-shirts on display, Annie sits patiently at her stand waiting for customers to arrive. Her calm and quiet demeanour contrasts the scenes around her. Her skin bakes under the December Western Cape sun, darkening more and more over the weeks to come. Yet despite the heat, she welcomes the coastal air after spending the week attached to her desk, deep in her textbooks studying religiously for her medical exams.
Jean parks the Kadett a few minutes down the road at the flea market opposite the Standard Bank on Bird Street. He sets up his wooden folding table which he covers with a white table cloth and one by one begins to unwrap his delicate malachite ornaments from their newspaper packaging, his fingers moving slowly and methodically so as not to drop them. The vibrant green copper gemstone found in the DRC anchors him to his birth country as he and his wife make a life for themselves in this foreign land on the southern tip of Africa. Beside his merchandise, Jean places a folded copy of the most recent Sunday Times newspaper and a pocket French to English dictionary, wrinkled by the journey from Kinshasa and years of diligent use — they are his pass time for the moments when business is slow. He takes every opportunity available to improve on his fifth language.
Jean and Annie were entrepreneurs by necessity. The bank loan for their new home was a gamble based on Annie’s future income as a doctor. But the bills didn’t wait for her to pass her registration exams. With their first mortgage payment of R1800 due at month end, Jean had an idea.
“Your dad, he likes to take chances!” Annie says to her daughter and two sons at the dinner table almost 30 years later in her francophone English accent.
On December 21st Jean had received his pay check. The next day he drove to the factory shop in Cape Town and purchased 180 “Peace in our Land” t-shirts in bulk, worth a total of R900. By December 31st Jean and Annie had sold their last shirt. On January 1st they paid their mortgage with an extra R900 in their wallets, more than doubling their disposable income.
Come Easter, Jean had relocated his business to Hermanus, a small beach town about an hour drive from their Green Oaks home. Though it was a quiet retirement town for wealthy Afrikaners, Hermanus attracted many tourists who came to watch the whales swimming in the Indian Ocean. In one day in Hermanus, Jean sold more than three weeks’ worth of product compared to Stellenbosch. His side hustle had turned into a small business, to the point that Jean had hired an employee to sell his merchandise during the week while he was at his day job. It was there in Hermanus on a sunny Saturday afternoon that a Canadian tourist found Jean at his wooden folding table, notebook in hand, selling his malachite items amongst a sea of hawkers. Intrigued, the tourist took a picture of Jean and at his request the tourist printed an extra copy and sent it to him by post. The picture arrived in Green Oaks a few weeks later.
Today, Jean and Annie sit at the dinner table in Canada retelling the story to their three children. While it was Jean’s new job that took him and Annie to South Africa all those years ago, her medical career is what brought them and their young family halfway across the world to the great white north. The couple don’t use an alarm clock anymore. They have long since done away with the formality. Every morning they wake up according to their biological clocks while their iPhones sleep in the living room downstairs. If you stand outside their bedroom door early enough in the morning, you can still hear them reciting out loud their morning prayers in French.
Time has changed their circumstances, taking them far since their first blind adventure to Stellenbosch, but Jean and Annie remain unchanged. Though she no longer bakes under the Western Cape sun, Annie endured the Saskatchewan winters while attached to her desk yet again studying for her Canadian registration exams with the same diligence as she did in South Africa. Jean is still the same risk taking entrepreneur who appreciates the significance of each moment. The irony is not lost on him that it was a Canadian who took his picture in Hermanus.
Baby Christiane is now full grown alongside her two younger brothers. This isn’t the first time they have heard the story of their parents’ days making ends meet on the streets of Stellenbosch, though as their parents get older, they seem to remember more and more details that make the story feel new each time it is told. Since moving to Canada together the family of five is usually apart, scattered across the country and the world, each person residing in a different city. These moments together at the dinner table are rare. Most are still nothing out of the ordinary, but every now and then a story emerges that reminds us of the two reasons why we are where we are today.
Thank you to Mama and Papa Boroto for allowing me to share one of their many stories with the world, and for providing the details, pictures and corrections to make the story come to life. Incidentally, the picture I chose as the cover for this piece happens to be from my mother’s baby shower a few weeks before my birth. Go figure.
