Registration Week, And The Only Thing I Owned Outright Was Parked Outside

The letter

She read it out loud in the kitchen, twice, because the first time she read it she was crying too much for any of us to understand her.

Wits. Chemical engineering. My daughter, Kgomotso, who spent Grade 10 doing her homework on a paint tin in the back room because we did not have a desk for her, was going to Wits to be an engineer.

I have not been that happy since the day she was born. I am not going to pretend otherwise. I picked her mother up off the floor of that kitchen.

And then, about forty minutes later, when everybody had calmed down and gone to bed and I was standing in the dark drinking water at the sink, I read the second page.

The second page

The second page is where they tell you what an offer costs.

There was an amount that had to be paid on registration. There was a date, which was the last day of January. There was a line saying that no student could register without it. And there was a smaller line about the difference between the initial payment and the fees for the year, and I read that line about six times before I understood that the first number was not the big number, it was the door fee.

I sat down at the table and I did what everybody does, which is arithmetic that I already knew the answer to.

I am a foreman at a company that installs shopfitting. I have been there for fourteen years. I earn what I earn. My wife works at a pharmacy. In January, in this country, in a household with two other children still at school, there is no money. January is the month everybody in South Africa is quietly ashamed of. School uniforms, stationery, the December that you spent because you had to be a human being for two weeks, the electricity, the tyre that finally went.

My bank balance had four figures in it and the first one was a two.

What I tried first

I want to write this part carefully because I think it is the part that people skip, and it is the part that matters.

I did not go looking for a loan first. Nobody does. You go looking for dignity first.

I went to my employer. My boss is a decent man and he listened and he told me the truth, which was that an advance of that size was not something the company did, and that if he did it for me he would have to do it for everybody, and he was right, and I told him he was right, and I sat in my car afterwards for a while.

I went to my brother. My brother has more than me, which is a sentence with forty years of history in it that I am not going to unpack here. He said yes, and then he phoned me back the same evening and said he had spoken to his wife, and he said no, and the way he said no meant we did not speak properly for about two years afterwards.

I went to the bank. I have banked with them since 1996. They ran the numbers and my affordability came back short, and the woman was kind about it, and it took eight working days for them to tell me no, and I had used up eight of my eleven days.

I went to NSFAS forums and university funding pages at eleven at night. Everything I found was for the year ahead, or the application had closed in September, or the bursary was for a different faculty. The world is full of help that arrives at the wrong time.

Three days left.

The thing in the driveway

I have a 2013 Toyota Hilux. Single cab. I bought it second hand in 2018 and I finished paying it off in 2022 and there is a photograph somewhere of me holding the settlement letter in front of it like an idiot.

It is the only thing I have ever owned outright in my life. Not the house, the bank owns most of the house. Not the furniture, half of it is my mother's. The bakkie.

And on the Tuesday night of that week, sitting in my kitchen at half past eleven with my phone in my hand, I typed the words "get money using my car" into Google and I felt like the worst father in the world.

What I actually found

I want to say something to anybody who is where I was that night, at that hour, with those three days.

You are going to find a lot of things that are not what you want. You are going to find people who will buy your car outright, and that is not what you want, because you need to get to work on Monday, and you cannot install shopfitting without a bakkie, and selling the thing that lets you earn is not a solution, it is a slower version of the problem.

What I did not know existed, and what I read about for two hours that night, is the arrangement where you pawn car and still drive it, where the vehicle stands as the security for the money but stays with you and you keep working.

My first honest reaction was that it sounded like a trick.

I want to be very open about that. Everything in my upbringing said that if a thing sounds too convenient, somebody is going to eat you. I have watched people in my street get destroyed by loans they did not read. I have a cousin who is still, today, paying for a lounge suite that was repossessed in 2019.

How I made myself less stupid

So I did the only thing I could do in the time I had, which was to be extremely boring about it.

I wrote down every question I had on a piece of paper, in pen, and I refused to phone anybody until I had all of them written down. This is the single best decision I made and it came from my daughter, who watched me pacing and said, "Papa, write it down, you always do better when you write it down."

My questions were these. What is the total I pay back, in rands, not in percentages. What is the term. What happens if I am late by a week. What happens if I am late by a month. Who is holding the papers of my car and where physically are they. Am I insured, and who pays for that, and what happens to the insurance if I miss something. Is there a fee just for asking. Can I settle it early and if I do, does it actually cost less.

Then I phoned, and I asked all of them, and I wrote down the answers next to the questions.

The first place I phoned would not give me a total in rands. They wanted to talk about a percentage and a "structure" and they wanted me to come in and sit down. I did not go in and sit down.

The second place gave me a number in rands, on the phone, in the first eight minutes, and it was more than I wanted to hear and it was honest. And when I asked what happens if I am late by a month, the man on the other end did not soften it. He told me exactly what happens.

That is what got me. Not that the deal was good, because a deal like that is never good, it is expensive, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling something. It was that the bad news arrived early and without decoration.

What it cost

I borrowed less than I could have.

That is the other thing I want to put on the record, because when you are in that state, and somebody says you could take more, the temptation is enormous. You think, well, while I am here, let me also fix the geyser, let me also do her books, let me also breathe.

I borrowed the registration amount and nothing else. Not one rand more. Then I went home and I told my wife exactly what I had done, with the paper in my hand, which was not a comfortable evening, and I would rather have had that evening than a secret.

It took me nine months to pay it back. It cost me real money in interest that I would rather have spent on almost anything else. I ate at home for nine months. I did overtime that I did not enjoy. I did not fix the geyser.

I have friends who look at what I did and say I was reckless. I have other friends who have quietly asked me, at braais, in the corner, how it worked, because they are one bad month away from the same kitchen table, and the whole business of taking loans against your car is a thing people do far more often than they admit at a braai.

Here is what I tell them.

It is expensive. It is not free money and it is not clever money. It is a hammer, and you use a hammer when the thing in front of you is a nail. If you are borrowing to survive a month, the same month is coming again in thirty days and the hammer will not save you. If you are borrowing against a date that will never come again, and you can see clearly how you will pay it back, then it is a tool, and it is not shameful to use a tool.

Registration day

We drove up on the Wednesday. She had a folder on her lap with everything in it, arranged by colour, because she is that kind of person, and she did not let go of it for the whole trip.

There was a queue. Of course there was a queue. We stood in it for two and a half hours in the Johannesburg heat and she talked non stop from nerves and I did not hear a single word of it.

And then she was in.

She came out and she was carrying a piece of paper and she was walking differently, and I do not know how to describe the way a person walks when they have just become the thing they were going to be, but I saw it, and I will have that for the rest of my life.

The bakkie

It is outside now. It is eleven years older than the day I bought it and there is a dent in the left rear panel from a security boom in Randburg that I have never bothered to fix.

Kgomotso is in her third year. She works in a lab in the holidays. She sends money home which I do not want and which I take because refusing it would insult her.

Sometimes people ask me if I regret it, if I was scared to have put the one thing I own on the line like that. And I understand the question, and I know the whole idea of choosing to pawn car for cash sounds, from the outside, like a man doing something desperate.

But that is not how it sat with me, then or now. What I had was a vehicle worth a certain number of rands, and eleven days, and a child with an offer letter from Wits.

You do not get many moments in your life where the exchange rate between what you own and what you love is that clear.