Sometimes There Is a Void Read online

  He could no longer work in his fields either. Grandmother did all the farming with the help of the other villagers in work-parties known as ilima. But we were spoilt. We were never allowed to work in the fields like other village kids or like some of her older grandchildren. My siblings – who were already staying with my grandparents even before my banishment – and I were greatly distressed that we could not go to the fields. Ilima was so much fun – with food, songs and dances. Once we went with people who were taking food to the workers, but grandmother shooed us away.

  ‘Go away,’ she said. ‘You, children of Solomzi, will be scorched by the sun.’

  We took this as a punishment for being my father’s children. After all, we had seen how partial she was towards her other grandchildren – especially those who were the children of her daughters rather than of her sons. We had seen how she used to hide chunks of pork in her apron pockets for Cousin Bernard, while we had to eat porridge with peaches. We knew that Bernard’s mother, who had left the village for Johannesburg many years ago and never came back, did not send any money for his upkeep. Only my father sent money which my grandmother used to support hordes of grandchildren whose parents didn’t bother.

  That was why I told my father when he paid us a visit once that we were suffering and my cousins were getting preferential treatment at our expense. That afternoon he went to drink brandy with his friends and came back late in the evening. He was drunk and knocked at grandmother’s door, yelling that she did not treat his children well.

  The next day he was sober and remorseful. He apologised to grandmother for yelling at her, and then upbraided me for telling lies about his dear mother who was sacrificing so much to look after us.

  But that was not the end of that story. When my father’s younger brother, Uncle Owen, came visiting from Johannesburg many months later he punched me in the face and kicked me in the stomach even though I was already writhing on the ground, for lying about his mother to my father. And indeed my father’s oldest sister, Aunt Nontsokolo, who owned a general dealer’s store at ’Musong a few miles away, gave me a few choice words about my lies. Aunt Nontsokolo could afford to be self-righteous because she was the only one of my father’s five siblings who did not at any stage dump her children with my grandmother but was bringing them up herself.

  How could we not take our prohibition from ilima as punishment when we were forbidden even from looking after cattle? Granted, our grandfather no longer owned any cattle since the assassination attempt. Only disused kraals remained as evidence of his cattle-owning days. But we so much wanted to join herdboys from neighbouring homesteads in the fun and games that we knew took place out there in the pastures. As it was, our schoolmates who herded cattle after school and during weekends took us for sissies. Worst of all, we were not privy to their insider jokes and dirty stories whose settings were the great meadows and gorges where the cattle grazed, and the rivers where the boys moulded cattle from clay as the animals drank.

  I could only console myself by roaming within the confines of the estate and spelunking the caves that were only a short distance from the rondavels. I was fascinated by the Bushman paintings that were still vivid and I tried to reproduce them in my notebook. This was an illegal act according to my teachers, because notebooks were meant for nothing but notes. I was constantly punished for it – a few whacks on my knuckles with a ruler.

  THE REASON FOR RETURNING to this pink mountain is not to relive the past – though one cannot escape a little bit of nostalgia – but to visit the beekeeping project that I started with the village women a few years back. Gugu and I come here occasionally to see the Bee People, as we call them, and to admire the progress they have been making over the years. After taking us on a tour of the hives, especially the two supers that are in an enclosure of aloes between the graves of my grandfather and one of my aunts, we bid the Bee People goodbye and get into my car.

  The mountain road is rough and narrow. A Mercedes Benz sedan was not built to negotiate boulders on what passes for a road, and often the rocks that stick out cannot but scrape against the bottom of the car. Fortunately this is not a busy road; otherwise I would be at a loss what to do if another car approached in the opposite direction. I dare not move to the side for fear of rolling down the slope. There are no railings, and already I can see skeletons of cars that must have rolled down over the years. No one could have survived the impact on the rocks hundreds of yards below.

  There is a sigh of relief when we reach the village at the foot of the mountain.

  It is more like a township than a village really, with modern bungalows, schools and shops. The biggest of the shops belongs to my Uncle Phakamile, or Press, as we call him. It combines a general dealer’s store, a restaurant and a tavern. The villagers call it eRestu. We use it to hold our meetings with the Bee People whenever we visit from Johannesburg or, in my case, from the United States where I now teach creative writing at Ohio University. Sometimes we just hang out to soak in the wonderful atmosphere created by drunken old ladies and various village characters, and by the smell of fish and chips and fat cakes deep frying in oil.

  Some of the inhabitants once owned homesteads on the mountain we have now turned into an apiary – at Goodwell. But the Boers – and when we talk of the Boers we actually mean the apartheid government of the time – forced them down from the mountain and resettled them near the Telle River. It would be easier to govern them there and to ensure that they did not hide guerrilla fighters, or terrorists if you like, in their midst.

  We branch off to eRestu to say goodbye to Press and his wife as we’ll be driving back to Johannesburg. It is a six-hour drive and the earlier we leave the better. I hate driving at night.

  ‘How are the bees doing, son?’ Press asks. He is only six years older than me at most, but basks in the glory of being the son of my grandfather’s brother. According to tradition, he is a peer of my father’s and therefore I am his son.

  ‘The bees are doing fine, Press,’ I say. ‘Although last winter’s snow was not kind at all. The harvest will be small.’

  ‘I do not know why you waste your time doing this honey business from which you gain nothing. You should have invested the money in my shop here. All I need is ten thousand rands to fill these shelves with goods. You would get your money back with a lot of profit.’

  He has said this before. We Mdas have worked hard to get where we are. Why should we care about these good-for-nothing villagers?

  ‘It is my time that I put into this honey business and of course my expenses to travel here from Johannesburg occasionally,’ I explain to him. ‘But many other people have contributed to its success.’

  ‘Johannesburg? But I hear you now live in America,’ he says. And he asks one of his daughters behind the counter to give us cold drinks of our choice and some biscuits.

  ‘Yes, I work there now. Just like the migrant workers who go to the mines in Johannesburg. After every few months I return to see my mother. I may as well use that time to see how the Bee People are doing as well.’

  Press is a hard-working business man who toiled in the mines in his youth because he did not have any education. To this day he is illiterate. He saved his money, and after a few years he came back to his home village to establish this business. Since he lifted himself up from poverty until he became the richest man in the village, he cannot understand why anyone should waste his time trying to pull others up.

  ‘You see, Press, that beekeeping project will enrich you too,’ I say, half-jokingly. ‘When the villagers have money they will spend it in your store.’

  ‘I hear you, child of my brother, but still …’

  ‘But still we must go now, Press. We have a long way to drive.’

  The stretch of dirt road from Qoboshane to Sterkspruit never fails to flood my mind with memories. That is why I turn to look at Gugu and say, ‘You know, I am a creation of women. Not only because for nine months I was part of a woman’s body, but for the simple
reason that every woman with whom I have intimately interacted has contributed something in the moulding – for better or for worse – of who I have become.’

  We are driving past St Teresa Roman Catholic Mission about sixteen kilometres from Qoboshane. A minibus taxi in front of us leaves a cloud of dust in its wake, and it remains hanging in the air for quite some time. The buildings look distorted through the combination of dust particles and the heatwaves, creating a very eerie image. I can see twisted nuns in black habits, ghosts of the past, walking silently in the grounds; pacing to and fro; muttering things to themselves; perhaps reading beads on their rosaries.

  Among these apparitions I can see Sister Eusebia. She is the only one whose name I can remember, for she was the principal when my father taught at this secondary school from January 1948 to June 1955. She is the one who is still smiling in black and white photographs in my father’s album – my only material inheritance from him. That and a number of LPs of Frank Sinatra, Marian Anderson, the Beatles, King Kong (the South African musical), Ella Fitzgerald, Satchmo, Handel’s Messiah, Dark City Sisters, Jim Reeves, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the Singing Bells and thirty or so others that he collected when he was a member of a record club from 1963 to 1966. The photo album is the only thing that I still have. The music albums went with my furniture and books when an ex-wife sold my stuff after an acrimonious divorce.

  Sister Eusebia, a group of other nuns and the secondary school students in gym-dresses and white shirts still smile at me in black and white whenever I don a surgical mask to page through the photo album. The mask is essential because the dust mites that have accumulated between the pages over a period of more than five decades make me cough and sneeze and cry and itch all over whenever I visit those venerable pages. The mask, however, does not prevent the pain I still feel when I look at the angelic picture of a smiling Father Sahr – he of the Order of Mary Immaculate. His car killed my dog Rex when he drove through Goodwell once. Rex liked to bark at cars that drove on the dirt road in front of my grandfather’s estate. And Manqindi – the name we gave to the German Catholic priest because one of his hands did not have fingers, the result of an incident in some world war – did not even stop his car after killing my Rex in cold blood. I vowed I would never own another dog for Father Sahr to kill. Since then I have never had another dog, though of course I have long stopped blaming the poor priest.

  What strikes me as I drive past the Catholic mission is that it still looks the same. In fifty-five years nothing has been added; nothing has been taken away. All the stone buildings with red roofs are exactly as I remember them. Even the house where we lived when I was born. My father must have celebrated his new job at St Teresa’s Native Secondary School with my conception, for I was born on the sixth of October, 1948, nine months after he joined the staff.

  I wasn’t born in that house, though, but at Mlamli Hospital a few kilometres from the mission station. My father named me Zanemvula, which has the double meaning of ‘the rain bringer’ and ‘the one who has been brought by rain’. I do not think the heavens opened up and wept when I was born. Rather, I was named after a character in Ingqumbo Yeminyanya, the isiXhosa novel by A C Jordan that was published in 1940 and years later translated into English by the author as The Wrath of the Ancestors. It was hailed as one of Africa’s finest novels. It captivated readers because of its lyrical prose and its treatment of Western intrusion on the culture of amaXhosa. But what captivated my father most was that the novel was about our clan, the amaMpondomise people.

  Father Sahr would not baptise me into the Roman Catholic Church without what he called a Christian name, which had to be a saint’s name. But my father, an ardent Pan Africanist, insisted that he would not give me a ‘white name’, so he opted for Kizito, after the youngest of the Ugandan Martyrs. Although Kizito had only been beatified at the time and was not yet a fully fledged saint (he has since been canonised), the priest approved. My third name, Gatyeni, was my father’s way of giving a nod to his ancestors by naming me after one of them.

  My earliest memory resides in that house. I was three years old when mother and father came home with two babies in fluffy white. They were the twins, Sonwabo and Monwabisi, fresh from Mlamli Hospital and smelling of Johnson’s Baby Powder. They were not my favourite people because they seemed to grab all my parents’ attention. These usurpers spent a lot of time crying or sleeping. When they were sleeping and there was no one else in the room I opened their eyes with my fingers and inspected their eyeballs. Then I poked their faces just for the heck of it. This practice continued on a daily basis until I heard the radio telling on me as soon as my father switched it on to listen to the news one evening. It was the same radio that once interrupted Glenn Miller’s ‘String of Pearls’ with ear-shattering static and then ratted on me that I had stolen sugar and condensed milk. Fortunately, on all the occasions it decided to be a tattle-tale no one else paid attention. Both my parents carried on with whatever they were doing as if they had not heard it. But I decided to stop all my criminal activities because I knew that one day the radio’s snitching would ring loud and clear in their ears and I would be in deep trouble.

  Yes, the grounds of the mission station are exactly as I remember them when I played with my friend Bernard Khosi on our tricycles, and when I followed my father around on a path between the buildings, a newspaper in my pocket. Even though I could not read I always carried a newspaper with me, just like my father. Or a book. Any book from his shelf. It didn’t matter that none of its pages was illustrated. The fact that I was walking around with a big book in my hand, just like father did, was satisfaction enough. It could be Abou Ben Adhem and the Angel, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar or a tome by George Eliot or one of the Brontë sisters that my father taught in his English literature classes, or the William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley poetry that he made his students recite. During these walks father would himself recite Mark Antony’s oration or something from Macbeth. I had no idea what the words meant and he never bothered to explain, but his voice still reverberates in my head: ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time …’

  My father was also an ardent gardener, and the staff quarters at St Teresa did not give him the opportunity to consummate his relationship with the soil. So, he rented a house at the nearby village of KwaGcina and we moved there. He cycled to work every morning, and after school he worked in his garden, particularly on those days when he was not conducting the school choir. When he was too tired to water the flowers and vegetables he sat on a chair on the stoep and drew pencil portraits of the twins and me and anyone else who happened to be around. People always marvelled at how he was able to bring out a person’s likeness exactly as the person was.

  Later, he bought a number of Jersey cows and employed village women to churn butter in big jars that were normally used for bottling peaches. I remember rows of women, some in the red-ochre isikhakha attire and big iqhiya turbans of the abaThembu people, sitting in front of the hatchery and shaking the jars to the rhythm of four-part harmonies. Occasionally a woman would be carried by the spirit, stand up and flaunt a few oscillations of the waist and shoulder, and then sit down to resume churning the butter.

  In the hatchery there were batteries of incubators. Father encouraged villagers to raise chickens for meat. They bought day-old chicks from his hatchery.

  When my mother got a job as a nursing sister in another village called Dulcie’s Nek my parents employed a nanny to look after us. Nontonje was initially a red girl, which meant she wore the traditional red-ochre clothes, but she was soon socialised into floral dresses that were mostly hand-downs from my mother.

  I didn’t know of my father’s activities besides his teaching and farming. Sometimes he was away for extended periods. We heard adults talking about how he had been banned by the Minister of Justice, C R Swart, from attending any gathering in any place within the Union of South Africa. The
n we heard that there was a big problem between him and some local villagers, particularly the village chief, Steyn Senoamali, who was supported by Mr Fihla, the primary school teacher. We never got to know the nature of the problem exactly, but it was somehow related to a civil action in which my father was suing Steyn Senoamali for calling him a communist and the Native Commissioner of Herschel, our district, was in full support of the village chief. Perhaps Fihla was going to give evidence on behalf of Senoamali and the Native Commissioner and tell the court that they were not being libellous since my father was indeed a communist as confirmed by his membership of the African National Congress. Anyone who fought against apartheid was regarded as a communist and was likely to be banned under the Suppression of Communism Act, even if he was as anti-communist as my father was. Most likely, Senoamali and Fihla were being used by the Commissioner to spy on my father.

  There was so much bad blood between my family and Senoamali that he haunted my dreams. He was reputed to be a powerful ixhwele – medicine man – and I feared that he was going to harm my father with his wizardry. Nontonje, who understood these issues better, kept me and the twins abreast of events, particularly on Senoamali’s prowess in the field of magic. She painted a vivid picture of a stick that he used to cast spells, which was also capable of transforming into a snake. His name, which is Sesotho for ‘the one who drinks blood’ or, even more ominous, ‘the blood-sucker’, added to my anxieties about the safety of my family.

  One night I was woken up by a loud knock on my bedroom window. And there was Senoamali’s stick peeping between the curtains. ‘Hello, Kizito,’ it said. ‘Ndiyeza ngapho – I’m coming over there.’ Behind it out there I could see white horses dancing in the dark, flames raging from their hoofs. The next morning I told Nontonje about the visit, and she confirmed that indeed that was clear evidence that you don’t mess with an ixhwele of Senoamali’s stature. Two decades later I wrote a poem titled ‘Dance of the Ghosts’ based on the incident. It begins: I dream/ And my dreams/ Are dreams of ghosts/ I see them prancing/ And gamboling/In the moonlight/ Their eyes glow/ With impish pride/ And their feet dance/ To the rhythm/ Of no music.