I wrote this piece earlier in the year, as part of a submission to a collection that was to be published around about now. The publication hasn’t happened yet but this piece on my mother became something very important to me, a way to honour her on what would’ve been her 70^th birthday today. So, I’m putting it up here unedited (with more than a little bit of anxiety I’ll admit) as my way of celebrating her enormous spirit that sits with me today. I hope you read it with love.

My Beloved

By Qarnita Loxton, Thursday 24 October 2024

I have incredible women in my family. Remarkably similar in the way of being strong, smart and independent, this piece could have been about any one of them. But from the moment I was asked to contribute to this collection I knew it would have to be about my mother, and I knew it was going to be one of the most difficult things I was ever going to write. She died years ago you see, and I believe that we only know the true impact of our mothers once they are gone, or maybe this is just me and my regrets showing face.

At first I wasn’t sure I could do it – the vulnerability of writing non-fiction is usually too much for me and this would be pressing straight into my heart. It was around Mother’s Day when I made up my mind. The shops were full of pink and we were all being reminded to celebrate our mothers. I also knew that publication of this anthology was anticipated in October – which is when my mother would’ve turned seventy. While it’s been eight years since she died and the grief is just something we live with, my heart breaks every year to not be able to give a Mother’s Day gift, and this year I know it will be an extra heartache not to share her seventieth birthday with her. These two things felt like the universe giving me a nudge, if you believe in that kind of thing. Whatever. I decided. I would write this as my way to celebrate my mother, an ordinary extraordinary woman, to honour her memory in love and appreciation for the tremendous impact her life has had on mine.  I know that no other woman will do more.

Let me introduce you.

She did not like her first name. ‘Too hard to spell and no one can pronounce it,’ she used to say. (If you’re wondering, it sounds like ma-boo-baa. At work she called herself ‘Mags’, yes, like the mag wheels on a car). But she also said that her father was the one who insisted on her name because it meant ‘My Beloved’ in Arabic, and she loved him deeply, so while she didn’t like her name she was also very proud of it. She was born on 24 October 1954, the first of two children. I assume she was born at home in Bo Kaap, an area in Cape Town known as the historical centre for the Cape Town Malays, where she also grew up. It strikes me now that I know where that childhood home is but I don’t know exactly where she was born.  It’s another thing I cannot quickly ask her.

My mother told me that as a child she felt deeply loved, she felt safe and close with her parents and her brother in the strong Muslim community they lived in. They were poor, she said, and her mother was sickly so could not work, but she told me frequently how connected they were. It wasn’t something she needed to say. Her love and devotion to her parents and her brother was something she lived, plain for me to see. She would regularly reminisce about how she learned to cook following instructions from her father while standing on a chair to reach the stove. She said her room was an alcove separated from their living space by a curtain. I loved hearing these stories, imagining my mother as a child.

She often told me that wished she could’ve stayed a child for longer.

My mother was pregnant when she married my father at just seventeen to his nineteen. It’s not something she talked to me about often. It would’ve been a shameful, embarrassing thing in the deeply conservative and religious community they lived in. In a tragedy that never fails to take my breath away, I was perhaps seven when I found out from a family member that there had been a baby before me … and that he’d died at forty days old. ‘It was a cot death,’ was all she said on the very rare occasions that she mentioned him. Fahmi was his name. I speak it now because I think she would have liked to hear it, towards the end of her life she talked about him to me more often than she ever had. She remembered that he cried a lot and that he looked most beautiful in a knitted yellow matinée jacket. There are no photos of him. I don’t know why she talked of Fahmi so much at the end, her death was sudden, none of us saw it coming. She said she had never visited his grave because it was too hard. I used to judge her for that but now I understand, since I’ve never been able to visit her grave either.  My mother once told me that she believed his death was God’s punishment for the sin and the hurt she brought on her parents with her pregnancy. It was only when my brother was born, a big healthy easy baby, that she said she believed it a sign of God’s mercy and forgiveness.

I don’t think she ever really forgave herself.

My mother went on to have me when she was twenty, my brother at twenty-three and my sister at thirty. I look at photos of her in those times. The thick long dark hair (straightened with an actual iron swept over paper covered hair, she said) before children, then the short hair I knew her with for the rest of her life. In all the photos she looks impossibly young to me.

My mother was beautiful.

She went to Chapel Street Junior school (I think it was called) then Trafalgar High School in District Six, completing only her Standard Eight (Junior Certificate, those older than me might nod in recognition. Grade Ten in today’s world). It was perfectly acceptable then I’m told, but I always felt my mother had a sense of shame and inadequacy about it. She never seemed to feel good enough compared to my father’s matric and beyond, never a match for his lifelong sharp mind for numbers. I’m not sure how it happened – or her exact path to it – but she got herself into a fashion design school, learnt to draw, and to make patterns.

And here is where things start to get a little extra, career-wise, for the girl from Bo-Kaap.

She worked for my paternal grandfather, a tailor, for a little while. Then some other places and I’m not sure how she made the jump (she would’ve hustled herself in, she was that kind of woman) to the Cashworths / Spracklens group. I don’t know what happened to the stores but then it was a popular women’s clothing chain and she worked for them until I was around fifteen. She was one of a small team of fashion designers and they travelled to Europe and London – two weeks at a time – to see the fashion shows and to look at what was in the shops for the next season.

I’m stunned when I think that this must have been the very early eighties. Apartheid South Africa. What must it have been like for her? A Muslim woman of colour travelling into the world, leaving her husband and children behind. Her peers in her community, if they worked outside the home, most often had jobs. Not careers. And not ones in fashion where many of the clothes were what many Muslim women would not feel comfortable wearing.  Apparently, a journalist who happened to sit next to her on a plane interviewed her once. I heard that there was an article. What I would give to see it.

As a child I never thought about what she was doing then, it was normal for me. It was just what my mother did. She dressed up (and how!) and went to work. I remember hanging on to her arm in the airport after she came back from a trip and a colleague congratulated her on her new pregnancy. That was news! I had no idea my sister had been busy baking in there while my mother travelled Europe. I know she went back to work weeks after my sister arrived prematurely, the baby in a carry cot on the design room table. My memory of this time? Apart from the absolute joy of having a sister – somehow I remember that my mother bought a dishwasher around then too. It seemed to be a scandal to some women who came to visit.

Before she died, my mother told me she had so much regret about how driven she had been. For years she missed my brother’s birthday because the fashion shows overseas were at the same time. Would things have been different if she hadn’t worked so hard, she asked?

She cried when I told her that as a child I’d been proud of her.

It was the truth so it was easy to say as an adult. I’d felt special to have a mother who worked and travelled, who talked of a world I could hardly imagine, one who wasn’t like the other mothers. My teachers often asked after her, ‘Where is your mother visiting now?’. I think there was more than curiosity hidden in those questions but it never stopped me from being proud of her. She had stories that enthralled me. Flying on the Concorde from London to New York. Shopping eclairs in the food hall at Harrods. The unbelievable number of floors of toys at Harrods. Her astonishment that a white man at the hotel had called her ‘ma’am’. To this day I can hear her practicing to ask for ‘omelette au fromage. Non jambon’ – cheese omelette, no ham. The photos of her at all the famous landmarks, in the Metros, and so many taken in front of the clothing stores they were sent to look at. The giant escargot shells she’d wrapped in a maroon serviette and brought all the way home so we could see this crazy thing she’d eaten (hmm, I think now, I don’t know if those snails would’ve been halaal. And it makes me smile because my mother had the deepest faith of anyone I know). Oh, the treasures her suitcases gave up. The shoes she brought home because they were her obsession. The presents for us and my dad. The days of exhaustion after those trips where she would slot right into work and home as if she’d never been away.

I’ll tell more about her career in a bit, but I can tell you right now that my mother worked harder, was more focused, more single minded, than anyone I have ever met.

My parents divorced when I was around nine, my brother seven, my sister just a baby.

They remarried each other when I was mid-teen, and then divorced again when I was in my thirties. She used to joke that she and my dad were like Elizabeth Burton and Richard Taylor in their ups and downs. She married someone else in the years just before she died but it didn’t last. It still saddens me to know that at the time of her death she didn’t have the partnership she so deeply wanted.

            My mother was a single working mother for a few long years and it was during this time while I was a young girl that I truly came to understand her resilience and determination. She was a dreamer but once she decided to do something, she would move mountains to make it happen. We’d left the family home and the neighbourhood I grew up in, to move next door to my uncle and grandfather (my grandmother had died years before). They were no longer in Bo-Kaap and had moved to Athlone. My mother ultimately wanted to move back to our old neighbourhood of Walmer Estate, which was closer to our school and the city, and where properties were more expensive. The house hunting began. Hard to think now that my mother was so young, probably around thirty-three with three children, as she drove us around in her blue two-door Mazda to stare at the houses. She eventually found one on Chester Road, Walmer Estate – the same road we’d lived in and where my dad still lived.  On our way to school she would drive us there and we would sit outside and marvel at it, though there wasn’t honestly that much to see. It was set square and slightly below street level, the house forming part of a deceased estate and a little dilapidated with an overgrown garden reaching up and over the chicken wire fence.

But my mother had imagination.

 ‘Look at that bay window’ ‘See the frangipani tree’ ‘We’ll have space for a cat’

‘We can sand the wooden floors’ ‘One day we could have a pool’ ‘You’ll be close to Daddy’

She built dreams in our heads so that we were cheering and waving the minute we rounded the corner, before we even caught sight of the house.

The catch was that it was late eighties, and the Group Areas Act was in force. Before we moved we’d lived on the side of Chester Road in the demarcated ‘coloured’ area of Walmer Estate. The house my mother wanted was in the demarcated ‘white’ area of University Estate. She was not allowed to buy it.

My mother found out about an arrangement to circumvent the Group Areas Act. She could buy the house in a Closed Corporation (or “CC” – an unlisted legal entity, it’s shares held by private individuals, it has since been phased out in SA). The scheme was that a person of colour would pay the full purchase price but would only hold 49%, while a white partner would hold 51%. The property would be registered in the name of the white-owned CC while the non-white shareholder lived in the property. There were stories of neighbours complaining and fallouts with white shareholder partners forcing houses to be sold or worse; the white shareholder taking over the property without paying for it.

My mother went ahead with the deal.

One of my strongest memories of that time is of the day she took us and her father (our Boeya) to visit the neighbours of the faded house. She’d already bought it but I heard her ask our new white neighbour, the local ward councilor, if he and his wife were okay with us living next door. I couldn’t hear what Boeya said but he addressed the man, decades his junior, as ‘Sir.’ Sir looked us over. ‘Yes, it will be fine,’ he said, ‘but we don’t like a lot of noise.’  My mother and her father laughed about that when we got home but the reality that a white ex Rhodesian had more rights than they, born South Africans, must have stung. I’ve often thought about what my mother did. I’m not sure the CC scheme was a risk I would’ve taken as a single mother of three. It all worked out in the end. She took full transfer of the house when the Group Areas Act was abolished and she loved that house until her death.  And yes, she did sand the floors and put in a pool among many other things on her wish list.

And it was where we all lived when my parents remarried.

Back on the career track.

My mother left Cashworths / Spracklens when I was somewhere in high school due to business and management changes. It was devastating for her at the time. She never said it out loud to us, but that is how it seemed to me. She picked herself up and started a business from home, designing and manufacturing women’s clothing for her own shop. The first one was in Muizenberg, then in Mitchell’s Plain, another in Nyanga. Most mornings I’d wake for school only to find that my mother had already been in her workroom for hours; making patterns, cutting fabric ready for the seamstresses. Her fingers would often be bandaged as she nicked her fingers on the industrial fabric cutter regularly. Afternoons and weekends would be spent on deliveries, going to the shop, talking to customers. As a teenager I helped in production and watched first-hand all that she did to keep the business going. Then it was normal to see, I think now that I don’t know how she did it all. Her work ethic was tremendous.

She had that business for a long time and I’m not sure exactly what caused her to close it. The pressure, I think, of constant manufacturing and sales combined with the influx of cheap clothing in the shops. In her late fifties she tried to retire but she got bored and depressed – she missed getting dressed up and having to go somewhere she said – so she went back to work, this time for other small businesses. There was always a side-hustle on the go. On the morning of the day my mother had that brain aneurysm she sent me a photo of her and a friend at the Simons Town market. They’d started a clothing business. ‘Mags & Me’ read the label.

It was the last message I got from her.

I can’t talk to you about my mother without telling you about her faith.

It was the thing that grounded her life. If I could I would weave her faith into every word in this piece, so truly was it part of her. She didn’t necessarily look it on the outside. She’d performed her haj but she didn’t always cover her hair and she didn’t make her daughters do so either. She wore a scarf around her neck and in her later years she would wear it most often styled in a turban. ‘Styled’ is the key word here, it was never just tied around her face, and it always matched her outfit. She had a disdain for those who appeared ultra-religious. She raised her daughters with the mantra that we must be independent, to think and act and do for ourselves. Do not rely on anyone – any man, is what she meant.  My mother was not traditional relative to the women of her time, but she had deep faith in the grace and protection of God. It was her constant refuge and her saving in times of difficulty. She was a Muslim first, before anything else, including being a mother. She had conviction and she made decisions according to those convictions.

In November 2016 my mother was at a function at a Muslim old age home where she’d been volunteering in her free time. I’m told that she laughed and joked with the people there and that she was happy. While giving a speech she fell to her knees as the aneurysm struck. I’m not sure exactly what happened then or how she got to Vincent Palotti hospital but I remember my brother’s exact words when he called me. ‘There’s been an incident with Mom.’

She suffered a brain aneurysm little more than a month after she turned sixty -two. She’d been fit and strong. I’d given her running shoes for her birthday. On that birthday she’d sent me a photo of herself on Table Mountain, the sky glorious blue, her turban matching the day.

She didn’t die on the day of the aneurysm. There was an operation. But she was never fully conscious after that. Her eyes opened but she didn’t recognize us, couldn’t track us. She was paralysed to the extent of not being able to swallow. She had no awareness, the extent of her brain damage severe.

My mother was gone.

It was a mercy that she died of a chest infection on 25 December 2016. There’s a lot to tell about that time and about her funeral, that day the house she loved and the street outside was choked full with the grief of her friends and family. But I am keeping this part of the story short. I want to write about how she lived, not how she died.

Here’s some more things about her.  

She loved animal print. In our house there was a whole lounge decorated in it.

She loved red cars.

She made jam swiss rolls for school bakes sales and they always sold out first.

She celebrated every occasion she possibly could.

She loved her birthday, and would plan many parties. 

She had many, many friends.

Strelitzias were her favourite flowers.

She could plan a million outings for one day, and do all of them.

That woman never sat still.

She had secrets.

She was the most impatient person I knew.

She had the sharpest tongue.

She and I were very close, and then we were not, and then we were a little bit better. We disagreed on small things, and on some very big things. I disappointed her greatly. I am not doing everything she taught me, but I learned something about everything from her.

I’m a mother myself now and I sometimes think about what my children can know of me, what they will remember when I am gone. I realise that no matter how much they think they know, there will also be so much they will not be able to understand of my life before them, even the deep wishes and circumstances that brought them to life will be a mystery to them. What they know will be from how I live with them, the stories I tell, and from the snippets others have dropped. I’m saying this because this piece about my mother is exactly like that. Some she told me about, some I’ve lived, some I heard through others. There is of course a lot more that could be said, and I imagine that others who knew her would add in more or remember differently. I hope I do not cause anger in my memories.

But in the end, this was my mother to me – an ordinary extraordinary woman who was indeed My Beloved. She will live on deep in my heart and mind until the day I die.

Happy 70^th Birthday Mummy.

I think of you.