FAIR ENOUGH TO WORK.

Eskia Mphahlele was born in the slums of South Africa but become one of Africa's best-known writers.

He trained as a teacher but was banned from the classroom as a result of his protest against separate education for black people.

This is a article that discussed about his early life from his autobiography, Down Second Avenue.

"The woman made a lovely path from the gate to the front door, which branched off to the back of the house. This was skirted on either side by small mud walls, and the floor was paved with mud smoothened with a slippery stone and then smeared with dung. Small pebbles had been worked in, in repeated triangular patterns. A small wall separated this path from our ash dump, where we constantly scratched for coke to use again in our braziers.

The ash was then poured into the garbage can. Towards the front end of our yard, facing Barber Street and Second Avenue, we often planted maize. From this patch we harvested exactly seven cobs most years.

I did most of the domestic work because my sister and brother were still too small. My uncles were considered too big. I woke up at 4:30 in the morning to make fire in a brazier fashioned out of an old lavatory bucket.

I washed, made breakfast for the family and tea for grandmother as she did not take coffee. 'That's how I stopped taking coffee,' said grandmother, telling us the story of how when she was a girl, someone hit her with a stone and drew blood from the temple. She had picked up the stone and a witchdoctor had treated it with some medicines, but this hadn't helped because since then she had been unable to eat beef or drink coffee. They made her so sick.

After morning coffee, which we had often had with mealie-meal porridge from the previous night's left-overs, we went to school. Back from school we had to clean the house as Aunt Dora and grandmother did the white people's washing all day. Fire had to be made, meat had to be bought from and Indian Butchery in the Asiatic Reserve. We were so many in the family that I had to cook porridge twice in the same big pot.

We hardly ever bought more than a pound of mutton in weight. Week-days supper was very simple: just porridge and meat. When there was no money we fried tomatoes. We never ate vegetables except on Sundays.

We never had butter except when we had a visitor from Johannesburg. Same with custard. And then I don't remember ever seeing a pound of butter.

We bought a tickey's - three pence worth - when we did. On such days we, the children, made a queue to have grandmother smear a sparing layer of butter on one slice only of bread.