Siya Kolisi: 'It's hard to explain hunger to people who've never experienced it'

Our house had four rooms: a kitchen, a living room and two bedrooms. The kitchen floor was made from black and white blocks which didn’t stop the water rising through them when it had been raining heavily.

The roof was always leaking, and the curtains were so thin that the house was light as soon as dawn broke. Four rooms might sound spacious enough, but not when you consider all the people who were living there.

There were usually six or seven, sometimes more. It was cramped and we were always on top of each other. My bed was a pile of cushions on the floor, and most nights I could hear the rats running around and feel them as they scampered over me. If I got up in the night, I’d have to tiptoe round various sleeping bodies just to get to the door.

My parents were both teenagers. My mother Phakama was 18 — for a long time I thought she was only 16 when she had me, but recently I’ve discovered otherwise — and my father Fezakele was 15. They weren’t much more than kids themselves.

My mother was beautiful, bubbly and vivacious. She was the life and soul of things; she used to light up every room she went into, and she’d light up whenever she saw me, taking me round to all her friends.She lived with her own family, including two old men I used to call “grandpa”. They both loved me and would give me whatever money they had spare when I went round. I would visit whenever I could.

She used to wash me at an outside tap in the yard when I was a small child, and sometimes my uncle would sneak up with a rubber snake and scare me. I’d scream and run stark naked at top speed all the way to my father’s house. My mother thought this was the funniest thing ever.

It was decided very early on in my life that my father’s mother would look after me as my father was away working so much. He was a house painter and he went where the work took him, often as far away as Cape Town, where he’d stay for weeks or even months until the job was done.

This was a very common arrangement in Zwide, and many children were raised by their grandparents. There have been many important people in my life over the years, people who have guided and shaped me, but none more so than my grandmother. I called her Auntie, and without her I wouldn’t be here.

That’s not a figure of speech. She was always there for me, no matter what else was going on: always positive, loving, supportive and protective. She carried herself well and always made sure she looked good no matter the circumstances, not because she was vain but because she wanted people to know that the Kolisi family had standards.

For a while she worked at the Shatterprufe glass factory in PE, which gave us a steady income, and she’d help out other people when she got paid. Like most of Zwide’s residents, she did the best she could for as many people as she could. For such a poor place, there were very few beggars in Zwide: people looked out for each other and gave what they could, even if it wasn’t very much.

There’s a lot less inequality when no-one’s got a lot to start with. When someone had a job and was earning steady money, they’d often help other people out, knowing that one day the tables might be turned. The help came by way of food as much as it did money: there’d be large communal pots of meat and vegetables with a side of mielie pap, and whoever was hungry could take their share.

My grandmother eventually lost her job at Shatterprufe, though it may just have been that they were reorganising rather than anything she had or hadn’t done. She started cleaning other people’s houses, but the money was neither as good nor as regular as it had been before.

I did what I could to help: I was selling alcohol and vegetables on the street, and sometimes making bricks too. I can’t have been more than eight or nine. Sometimes we didn’t have enough money for my school fees, even though they were only R50 — three dollars — each year.

Once, when we didn’t have enough money to buy me a new pair of shoes, I wore my aunt’s shoes to school, and the other kids teased me about it for months. We were certainly too poor to afford toys. I used to use a brick and pretend it was a car. It was the best thing ever. And I spent as much time with my grandmother as I could when both of us were at home.

But she was also getting older, and so she could work less and less, which of course meant that sometimes we didn’t have enough money for food. When she went to visit friends, she’d bring back whatever food they’d given her, whether it was biscuits or bread or anything like that, and give it to me.

When times were hard, she’d go without food for days on end in order to ensure that I ate. Even if it was just a teaspoon of sugar, that was better than nothing, and she would make sure I had it rather than her. I used to see her struggling, but she never cried and she never took anything for herself unless there was enough for me too.

Even so, hunger was a big part of my childhood. During term time, I knew I’d get at least one meal each day at school. Sometimes it wasn’t much — powdered milk and a thick slice of white bread smeared with peanut butter, perhaps a plate of chicken with rice or samp — but it was better than nothing.

Outside of term time, I didn’t even have that safety net. When there was no food in our house, I would hang out at the neighbours’ places and ask for food. They’d give whatever they could, sometimes allowing me to keep my pride — and more importantly my family’s — by getting me to fetch something from the store and then giving me food as a reward. But there were many times when even this wasn’t enough.

It’s hard to explain hunger, proper hunger, to people who’ve never experienced it. Hunger is not just being hungry, the brief sensation of discomfort which lasts only a few hours until the next meal. Being hungry is easy and commonplace. Hunger is different. It’s all-consuming. It was all I could feel and all I could think about. My stomach seemed to twist in on itself, and the more I tried to ignore the pain there, the worse it got.

When there was no food in our house, I would hang out at the neighbours’ places and ask for food

Eventually, my grandmother couldn’t work at all. She would forget stuff: I’d walk into the kitchen and she’d be just staring into space as if she didn’t know where she was. Sometimes she’d vanish and not come back for hours or even days.

When my grandmother got really bad, I’d have to wash, feed and sit with her the whole time, so much so that I couldn’t go to school for a while.

She’d say things that didn’t make sense and there was nothing I could do: just be with her and hope she understood that I loved her as much as she did me. One day she walked into the kitchen, smiled, gave me an affectionate slap on the cheek, and fell over. It happened almost in slow motion, and I caught her as she fell.

I put her down on the floor and she just lay there, totally still. I didn’t know what to do. There was a pastor living next door, so I ran to get him and practically dragged him back to the house. He knelt by her body and felt for a pulse, just like people do in the movies, and he told me she had passed.

The one person who’d loved me unconditionally had gone, and without her, Zwide could seem an even scarier place than before. Neighbourhoods like this are always plagued by crime and violence, and Zwide was no exception. Along with the hunger, the violence is one of my strongest and most visceral memories of my childhood.

People fought, all the time. Men fought with men, men beat women — my mother and other women in my family were subjected to violence — and men and women beat children.

People were angry, sometimes they were drunk. When everyone is prepared to resort to violence at the drop of a hat, it becomes totally normal, that was just how it was. Often I’d be woken in the night by screams and shouts outside, and when I went to the window I’d see brutal beatings happening in the street. Sometimes it was my dad, and the sounds of him crying and screaming used to go straight through me and chill me to the bone.

The police never got involved, of course. Crime, punishment, retribution, justice … they were all done by Zwide people inside Zwide’s boundaries. That’s where it started, and that’s where it ended.

There was an occasion in the Oom Cola Tavern — the place where I ended up watching the Springboks win the 2007 World Cup Final — when a man beat up his girlfriend for going out without him.

He kicked her, smashed her face against the wall and then dragged her out of the bar by her hair, and no-one intervened. There were hundreds of people there, and not one of them did or said a thing.

Only when something was seen as affecting the whole community did people take action. There was one guy who’d been in a gang but had got out of it and got his life together. He was working, he had a job, he was doing well for himself. Then someone saw him wearing a new pair of shoes and just presumed he’d stolen them or bought them with gang money.

It was at a time when the community had had enough of gangsters, and all they knew was that this guy had a reputation and a flash pair of shoes. They didn’t know he’d gone straight, and even if they had known they probably wouldn’t have cared.

They set on him with rocks and stoned him to death. His mother was watching, and even that didn’t stop them. I saw a girl of about 11 or 12, not much older than I was at the time, pick up a rock and throw it at his head, just like everyone else had done. I watched this man as the life went out of him: I saw him pass from life to death, I saw the moment the last breath went out of him.