The Quiet Architecture of South African Family Life

There’s a certain stillness that settles over a South African yard on a Sunday afternoon. The kind of stillness that isn’t quiet, but full, filled with the hum of gossip, the scrape of a spoon on a dessert bowl, and the occasional sound of someone dragging a plastic chair into a patch of shade that wasn’t there five minutes ago. These chairs aren’t curated. They don’t match. Some are cracked, some are stained, some lean just slightly to one side like they’ve also had a long week. But they are as constant as the smell of boerewors on the braai or the echo of children being told not to play too close to the gate.

They’re everywhere, these white plastic chairs. Not bought as a set, but gathered over time, like stories. You’ll find them at funerals and baby showers, under mango trees and on back stoep tiles, inside shebeens and outside churches. One might still have a blue paint mark from that time your cousin tried to do DIY. Another has a missing leg, held up miraculously by a brick, and no one dares move it. They’re not just chairs, they’re archives. They carry memory in the grooves, comfort in the repetition.

A South African Sunday doesn’t announce itself with elegance or grandeur. It arrives in the rustle of the City Press, in the rhythm of Zodwa washing last night’s dishes, in the way the older men sit in a circle and pass around a bottle they’re pretending is for sipping. Someone will eventually bring out the Tupperware. There’s always Tupperware. Aunty Thembi’s coleslaw, someone else’s trifle, maybe a sad-looking potato salad sweating in the heat. It doesn’t matter. The point isn’t the food. It’s the act of being together, seated, observed and observing.

Conversations bloom and wilt in these chairs. Uncles debate politics with that familiar fire that’s more theatre than belief. Children get called to come say hello to people they barely know. Mothers pretend not to be listening as they swap sly glances over who’s put on weight and who’s brought which man this week. At some point, the conversation will turn to someone who’s not there. “Eish, I heard he lost the job.” Or,  “She’s in Joburg now. Working for some call center. Yoh, she’s changed.”

And then there’s the silence. The good kind. When the meat’s finally done, the bellies are full, and everyone just leans back. The chairs creak. A plastic arm gets tapped rhythmically. A phone plays Brenda Fassie through tinny speakers. The sun tilts. Someone’s dozing, mouth open. A child is curled in their mother’s lap, fingers sticky from juice. The world turns slower from those chairs.

They’re the unsung architecture of South African family life. Not the fancy dining tables that get used twice a year. Not the couches wrapped in plastic or the display cabinets locked with keys long lost. It’s the plastic chairs that hold us up when we gather. They catch us at our most honest, before we’ve filtered the story, before we’ve wiped the sweat off our brows. They’ve seen heartbreak. The cousin crying quietly during a memorial service. The aunt who didn’t speak to anyone at the family meeting because of something that happened in 1997. They’ve held joy too. The teenage niece perched awkwardly as she introduces her new boyfriend. The roar of cousins bursting into laughter at an inside joke that refuses to die.

They are the stage for the ordinary, which is to say, the essential. You don’t notice them until they’re gone. Try replacing one with a camping chair and someone will complain. “Too low.” “Too soft.” “Not right.” Because plastic chairs are democratic. They don’t try too hard. They invite without pressure. Sit how you want. Lean back if you dare. Place your plate on the seat while you grab something from the fridge. They’ve become so ubiquitous that we barely register them, and yet, in their anonymity, they bind us. They remind us that family isn’t always perfect. That connection doesn’t need décor. That comfort is often plastic, slightly dusty, and shaped like home.

Years from now, when the old house is gone and the yard has been paved over or turned into townhouses, someone will spot one of those chairs in a second-hand shop or tucked behind a tuckshop. And something will ache. Something soft. A memory of mango juice and scoldings, of barefoot games and gossip you weren’t meant to hear.

And they’ll sit, just for a second, just to see if it still creaks the same. It will.