OMPHITLHETSE MOOKI
SHE SITS on the front porch of her modest house with her grandchildren, trying to catch the last rays of sunshine.
Despite her advanced age, Mme Gabaipone Mogoeng is able to see us entering her yard from 30m away and immediately orders the children to get chairs for us.
One look at her and it becomes evident the quest to find Constitutional Court Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng’s ancestral home has come to an end.
President Jacob Zuma’s nominee for the court’s Chief Justice bears a striking resemblance to the 75-year-old woman.
“He is the eldest of my three boys,” she says, reaching out her wrinkled but steady hand to greet us.
She breaks into a hearty laugh, recalling the time she had collapsed on to her kitchen floor upon hearing a news bulletin announcing that a young man had been found dead by the side of the road in Durban.
Justice Mogoeng was studying for his LLB at the University of Natal at the time and the description of the young man fitted her son’s.
“I was drinking tea and I heard on the afternoon news that a young man carrying a rucksack was found dead near some road. They described the rucksack and it was just like his,” she said as sun rays lit her face.
The 50-year-old judge was born in Goo-Mokgatlha, a village north-east of Zeerust.
He grew up pushing wire cars in the dusty village, but making one was a task he left to his two brothers.
“He couldn’t make one to save his life,” his mother chuckles at the thought of her eldest son weaving strings of wire to make toy cars.
“God cannot give you everything. He was more into books. He’d come back from school and get busy with his schoolwork. He was never the kind of child who put friends first. He’d go out to play soccer with other boys, but it was never for a considerable amount of time,” she says.
Her serene facial expression belies the stern tone she uses to admonish the two teenage boys seated at the other end of the porch.
They try hard to compose themselves, but as soon as their granny lets out a joke, they crack up.
Just about a kilometre or two from the Lutheran Church, Justice Mogoeng was baptised into and confirmed in, lies the house of his former teacher, Naomi Tlhapileng Modisane.
She smiles and mumbles something about our presence to her son as she leads us to her neat lounge. This is the woman who wiped the chief justice nominee’s nose, buttoned up his shirt, tied his shoe laces and, most importantly, taught him how to write his name.
“I taught him how to hold a pen… how to write. I taught him in Sub A… way before we had Grade 1,” Modisane says.
“I can’t remember clearly if he was one of those I taught underneath a tree, but during those days we held classes in intervals. Some children (would) come in the morning, then others would come in the afternoon.
“We made use of the church and sometimes even gave lessons underneath a tree because we did not have enough classrooms.”
Now retired, Modisane says she hopes for a day when schoolchildren would be as well behaved as those she taught back in the 70s when Mogoeng started his schooling.
“He was well behaved and he performed really well. We didn’t have to beat them at that young age because you risked scaring them away from school. They were like our children.
“We wiped his nose. Sometimes he’d come to school with his shirt not properly buttoned (up), as his mother had to wake up early to go to work in the farms. We tied their shoes… fixed their pants.”
Modisane was dozing off on her couch while listening to the evening news on Tuesday when she caught glimpses of Justice Mogoeng’s picture on her small TV screen.
It was only the next day that she got the full story as word of Justice Mogoeng’s nomination spread across the village.
“I was so happy. I’m so proud of him and I pray that God will keep watch over him, guiding him on the task that (lies) ahead.”
As darkness falls, Mme Mogoeng and her three grandchildren make their way into the warmth of her modest home. She balances on her stick, jokingly remembering how her son had been a “shy and reserved boy” before going to “Zululand”.
“You’d swear he was not part of this family. His brothers would chat happily, cracking jokes and poking fun at each other, but he would just sit there. All he did was laugh.
“But after he left to go to study in Zululand, he came back a changed man. He would relate stories of his life there to his brothers, tell them about his studies and just open up.
“He was a bit more talkative. His dad and I concluded that maybe people in Zululand talked a lot, or (had) asked him why he was too quiet when he was a man,” she says.
Inside the house, a newspaper clip bearing the picture of former Constitutional Court justice Pius Langa seated with current deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke occupies pride of place on Mme Mogoeng’s dining room wall.
Behind the two legal heavyweights stands her son.
“We always knew he was going to make it. His father, a factory worker, would say that he did not want any of his sons to push steel pipes for a living like he had done.
“My parents would say we are wasting money by sending him to school as they believed he had enough education to go work or look after our livestock (after secondary school). But we refused,” she says.
It was that determination that saw the Mogoengs sending their son off to live with a woman they knew little about so he could further his studies.
“One day I was visiting him in Tlokweng and this woman was scolding him for making the sour porridge too sour. I was so angry at this woman. But my son, being the kindhearted person he is, just politely said ‘Mom, if it were you, would you be happy to eat such porridge?’ This left me frozen,” she says.
She has always been overprotective of her son and it broke her heart when he got a job “too far from home”.
“When he climbed onto that bus, I cried. He was so tiny and I thought he was going to work with older people who would probably take advantage and abuse him,” she says.
Villagers in Goo-Mokgatlha, about 15km away, say they have been receiving countless phone calls from grandchildren inquiring if the Justice Mogoeng everyone is talking about is from their village.
Seated in a tribal kgotla, or court, old men with walking sticks sat discussing the matter. It does not matter to them that the judge is not from this village. What matters is that he is from their region – a youngster who made it.