Tumisang

Today Tumisang contacted me by WhatsApp, sent me this phone photo made by a friend (I converted it to B&W and cropped and edited it), and told me the good news: he might finally achieve his dream of being a chef/baker.

I met him in Lesotho when he was a small boy and I worked with his grandmother (Extra 1, with her), and I last saw him in 2010, when I took him, a cousin, and his grandmother to see the ocean in Scottburgh, South Africa (Extra 2). He was his grandmother’s favorite of thirteen grandchildren: her daughter’s baby. His mother worked as a live-in maid in South Africa, so his grandmother reared him in Lesotho.

As we sat on the beach in Scottburgh, just before I made that photograph of him, he told me he hoped to get a job working in a kitchen, washing dishes, stirring pots, anything at all to be near a chef, so he could learn. There was no money for him to go to school, but he believed he could learn by watching. He said he always wanted to cook for others. He had been hungry all his life, and he thought being near food, cooking food, and offering it to others would be amazing. His dream.

He migrated to South Africa and worked in several kitchens doing menial work, scrubbing pots and hauling garbage, but he never got near a chef. He began to despair and started drinking. His health suffered. During the Covid lockdown kitchens closed, and he got a job in a bakery, where he saw how a “machine” (I suspect an electric mixer) was used to make bread and biscuits, but his job only paid R500 ($28) a month, not even enough for food. He was living with his brother, but when his father in Lesotho died, his brother went back there to run the small farm, and Tumisang had to make his own way.

He quit the bakery and got a job as a security guard, and he started saving to buy himself a machine to make biscuits. Now he has put down R3000, and he is paying each month on the machine. It must be a very fine one, because in USD it would be $576. By March, he thinks it will be paid for. Then he has to save enough to buy the ingredients for the biscuits he wants to make, and he hopes to sell them in small shops where people in the Location buy their daily supplies. 

“Do you need help with money for the machine?” I asked, thinking that was his reason for contacting me.

“No thank you, M’e. I have to do it by full force myself. Tough and rough, but I want to do it on my own. Then when I have a successful business, I will know I made it myself.”