Academic and political analyst Tinyiko Maluleke’s memoir Faces, and Phases of Resilience: A memoir of a Special Kind eulogies great South Africans

By Giyani Baloi
Title: Faces, and Phases of Resilience: A memoir of a Special Kind
Author: Tinyiko Maluleke
Publisher: Tracy McDonald Publishing

An academia, author, researcher and intellectual, to mention just a few. That is how I can describe Professor Tinyiko Maluleke. He is someone who has seen it all academically. You can feel his excellence in his memoir, Faces, and Phases of Resilience: A memoir of a Special Kind

It’s a book that combines his background, profession, and the essays he wrote over a period of time.

His book got me embarrassed. Can you imagine sitting on a table, reading with your fellow lovers of a written word. Everyone is minding their own business. Suddenly, you start laughing uncomfortably. The people I was sitting with around the table thought I was going crazy. Some moved to go sit somewhere else.

What had tickled me about Tinyiko Maluleke’s book was a part where he was describing his relationship with no 216 Bree Street in Johannesburg. It’s a place where his father worked and also a place where he did his first part-time job as an assistant to a doctor. It’s a job his father had arranged for him.

His part-time job at no 216 Bree Street included opening files for the patients, giving them doctors cards, pin pointing to the doctor where a patient said, the pain is, marking a tooth that needed to be removed.

So, on marking a tooth that needed to be removed, he sometimes made mistakes, and a wrong took could be removed from a patient. He was the first contact with the patients, the majority of them Blacks. He could chat with them and ask them their necessary medical information, create a rapport as they were people of his race, and could speak their language.

A patient could tell Tinyiko that ” nibiwa hixi thlavi or ngzwa isihlavo.” Now he must interpret that to the white doctor in English, which may go something like ‘I am stabbed by blood’. Some would say, nitwa nyongwa or ngiphetwe hinyongo. Which may be interpreted as, ‘I am sick with the gallbladder’.

Medical training is not for the fainthearted because as you seek to save the patient’s life, you may be forced to cut patient as you operate operate on them. You may inflict pain on your patient as you remove a tooth. Another part of Maluleke’s job was to hold a patient down tightly for the white doctor to do his job. Some patients could scream and wail, calling Tinyiko to help them when they feel the pain. But he could also be holding them down. He said, that could tear him apart, as it would make him feel like he is holding black people down for a white person to inflict pain on them.

The book seeks to recognize and acknowledge black excellence, especially the people in academia. It acknowledges and eulogizes men and women who have achieved great things or contributed positively to society, like Winie Mandela, Mitchell Obama, Graca Machele, Tsakani Maluleke, Samora Machel, Pikita ka Ntuli,Thomas Chauke, Vusi Mahlasela, Eskia Mpahlele and others. He also mentions other societal ills, like gender-based violence (GBV), discrimination, and tribalism, among other things. You can tell that he researched the people he wrote about.

He also praises ordinary people like his grandmother and others who are doing greater things in society in the villages and farms away from the limelight who will never be praised or talked about in the news or TV.

But much as it is a very good book, well research and written. I didn’t quite understand it as a memoir because a memoir must detail someone’s life to a certain stage. Yes, he talked about his mother, who passed on mysterious when he was still young and she was also very young when she passed. His grandmother and the aunties who looked after and supported him until he grew up. He mentioned that his father might have had a hand on his mother’s passing. But, the details of that got lost or hidden in his good prose and satirical writing and left me only knowing Tinyiko Maluleke’s academic achievements more than his true childhood background and difficulties.