An Ounce of Practice

by Zeilig, Leo;

  Immediately Viktor and Anne-Marie stood, released their hands and faced the group striding towards them. Nelson’s arms were spread out. He was already speaking. When they reached the couple, Lenin took over: ‘Comrade Viktor, we wanted to give these things to you.’

  As Lenin named the gifts, Stalin passed them to Nelson, who in turn passed them to Viktor. And what was conceived as a simple farewell became a solemn rite. The seriousness of the ceremony surprised all of them.

  ‘The T-shirt,’ Lenin declared, passing the garment to Stalin.

  ‘The membership card.’ Before the card was passed to Viktor, Lenin read the wording printed on it, squinting and straining: Viktor Isaacs, Member of the Society of Liberated Minds.

  ‘The CD.’ Stalin handed the disc to Nelson. Viktor accepted the gift and held it together with the others.

  ‘The newspapers,’ Lenin announced.

  From under his arm Nelson brought out a bundle of papers and took a step towards Viktor. ‘Comrade—’

  Lenin interrupted, holding out his hand for the newspapers. Nelson sighed and surrendered the papers. ‘These,’ Lenin announced, ‘are original copies of our paper, Liberated Minds, covering the uprising in the nineties. The general strike in ninety-six, the food riots in ninety-seven, the student protest in ninety-eight. See?’ Lenin spoke quickly, pointing to the top copy of the paper tied down with string: ‘Jambanja Now: Remove the Dictatorship.’

  ‘Can I speak?’ Nelson asked.

  ‘In a minute,’ Lenin responded curtly. Viktor took the papers and put them on his bag. Lenin straightened himself and stood tall. ‘The photo.’

  Stalin looked at Lenin, then Nelson. ‘I don’t have it,’ he said after a pause.

  Nelson pulled out his keys and gave them to Stalin, who turned from the group and ran to the car.

  The friends were silent. Nelson looked at his hands. Lenin maintained his stiff, military pose.

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ Anne-Marie said finally. ‘Can’t we speak?’

  ‘In a minute!’ Lenin answered. Nelson shrugged his shoulders. They could hear the car door being slammed repeatedly, Stalin swearing and then, as he ran, his trainers wailing on the tiled floor.

  ‘I couldn’t close the door,’ Stalin said.

  ‘It doesn’t close,’ Nelson replied.

  Everyone sniggered and fought to hold in their smiles. Lenin repeated sternly, ‘The photo.’ Stalin gave him a large envelope, then Lenin handed it ceremoniously to Nelson and Nelson passed it to Viktor.

  ‘Do you want me to open it?’ Viktor asked.

  ‘Of course. Yes,’ the men answered together.

  Viktor peeled open the seal and removed a folded, padded frame.

  ‘You have to unfold it,’ added Lenin.

  Viktor dropped the paper envelope and opened the frame. Inside were two photographs. One showed a group of people: Viktor’s head at the back, his unsmiling face staring at the camera, looking as though he had been scratched onto the photograph as an afterthought. The other photo was of Biko, standing with his hands on his hips, staring into the distance with a sly, insolent smile.

  Lenin came forward and pointed to each photo. ‘That’s us at the funeral and that’s you at the back, see? And this is Biko,’ he said, as though introducing Viktor to himself and Biko for the first time. He stepped back into his place beside the other men.

  Viktor put his fingers over Biko’s photo and dropped his head. His stomach turned. He felt his swollen, digested life lift, his breath rise and move out of him. His mouth opened. His whole existence reached his head and throbbed and ached.

  He spoke in a mumbled torrent of words. ‘If only I hadn’t gone, if I wasn’t in Bulawayo. If I hadn’t been there, if I hadn’t sat with him in that café. If I hadn’t come to Zimbabwe.’

  Anne-Marie put her hand on his shoulder and whispered to him, ‘Mudiwa, it’s not your fault.’

  Then each of them spoke, all at once, over each other, so that what they individually had to say couldn’t be easily deciphered. Each tried to make their voice, their reassurances, their own grief heard. Viktor’s head was still bent, his body obscured and circled by the group. Anne-Marie pressed herself to him, knowing that, better than her words, unheard anyway, would be the warmth of her skin, the heat of her life next to him.

  Gradually the clumsy shuffle of words and sentences reached Viktor. ‘No, comrade, are you saying that we should never demonstrate? Never protest, set up parties, take on X-Party, in case they kill us? It was the jackals, the dictatorship ... Biko was murdered, com, you know it, and you tried to save him, we all did ... Biko knew what you were doing ... It is Y-Party that tells us we can’t fight, that the regime is too strong. Biko never accepted this logic ... Biko never gave an inch. Like you, comrade, he never stopped.’

  Viktor wanted to tell them to stop; he needed to block his heart, choke off his throat, prevent more life, regret, sadness from falling out of him onto the frame and smearing the photo of Biko, clouding the smile on his frozen face, running down his body, polluting with doubt Biko’s doubtless, certain soul.

  Finally Lenin spoke. ‘Comrade, Biko isn’t dead if we remember how he fought. If we don’t yield – if we act like him, with his arrogance, his confidence.’

  ‘His bloody cheek,’ Anne-Marie added, smiling.

  Each of them laughed, relieved that their earnest bid to hold Viktor up, to dam his pain and their own questions, was now over.

  None of the men wanted their farewell, this necessary salute to Viktor, who was leaving them, who had come to help and was now returning, to end like this. Nelson had driven his Toyota wreck to the airport. Lenin made no allowances for the car journey, urging, arguing: ‘Comrade, doesn’t this car, this damn car, go faster?’ Arguing and shouting to each other, Nelson continued a point made the day before. ‘No, the road to Harare is through Johannesburg. We need the mighty South African working poor to kick out the ANC, and then we can reckon with ZANU. The people will remember how to fight, relearn their history, find the confidence to stand up.’

  Stalin joked, ‘Yes, Biko was more stubborn than Mugabe.’ They laughed harder.

  ‘What bloody audacity! Look at that smile,’ Nelson said, pointing at the photo. ‘Behind his bravado, more bravado. Remember when he postered Harare Central Police Station with “Stop Police Brutality”? Remember? Remember?’

  To Viktor their laughter seemed to scatter the marble, the great iron-framed terminal, the airplanes, the officials, the customs desks, until they stood under the sky, the burning sun low enough for them to feel the day on their skin. Viktor laughed so his stomach hurt and made him want to rest on the floor. He felt all of them together in the colossal, borderless world, the wind blowing sand from the beaches in the south, chafing their ankles, stinging their legs. He wasn’t sure any more where he was, where he began, where all of this ended. He knew that his friends – Tendai, Nelson, Anne-Marie, Moreblessing, Biko – were standing somewhere close to him, even those he couldn’t see. They were there. All of them together in a world swept free of distance, borders, despair. Their hearts beat and circulated life to a single rhythm.

  *

  Viktor sniffed in his tears, wiped his nose and eyes on his sleeve, found his footing again and felt his life slip back into his body, his head clear. Something tugged on his hand, insistent, strong. Rosa had answered the door and taken his hand.

  ‘Daddy, you have been away for ages,’ she said.

  Acknowledgements

  I am tempted to claim that all errors in the text are collective, and that responsibility for blunders, contradictions and mistakes must be shared jointly with all editors, readers and friends. After all, isn’t work as ‘private’ as a novel or as ‘public’ as teaching equally collective? However, as much as I would like to, I cannot incriminate those who have read and commented on earlier drafts of An Ounce of Practice – I alone am to blame.

  Still this long and arduous project has been immeasurably assisted by friends an
d comrades. Sarah Grey has been a constant support, reading, prompting, editing earlier versions of the book, insisting on sometimes painful changes. HopeRoad, who have long published vital and important titles from the ‘margins’, have been indispensable to the book. Rosemarie Hudson was an enthusiastic supporter of the project from the start, encouraging and urging me on. Jenny Page’s deft editing has improved the manuscript, cutting away much of the book’s excesses. Joan Deitch’s excellent and detailed proofread (and our noisy occupation of the British Library) gave the manuscript an indispensable final polish.

  The Royal Literary Fund has saved me from total ruin on a couple of occasions; for this, I am enormously grateful. The Fund knows, as do all materialists, that food and shelter is a prerequisite for cultural production.

  I also owe thanks to my comrades in Zimbabwe who for years, in incredibly challenging circumstances, have refused to bow to the dictatorship despite terrible repression. As Colline sings at the end of Puccini’s La Bohème, as he pawns his coat to save Mimi’s life, ‘you have never bowed your worn back to the rich or powerful. You held in your pockets poets and philosophers ...’

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

  Leo Zeilig is a writer, researcher and the editor of the Review of African Political Economy who has written extensively on contemporary African politics and modern history. He has written books on working-class struggle and the development of revolutionary movements and is a biographer of Africa’s most important political thinkers and activists. His debut novel, Eddie the Kid (2013, Zero Books), was critically acclaimed and won the 2014 Creative Work prize in South Africa. Leo Zeilig has lived and worked in Zimbabwe, and been a university lecturer in the UK and Southern Africa. He currently lives in the UK.

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

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  Eddie the Kid (Winner Creative Work Prize, University of the Western Cape, Cape

  Town, South Africa)

  Non Fiction

  Voices of Liberation: Frantz Fanon

  Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of Third World Liberation

  Voices of Liberation: Patrice Lumumba

  African Struggles Today: Social Movements Since Independence with Peter Dwyer

  Class Struggle and Resistance in Africa, editor

  Africa’s Lost Leader: Lumumba

  Revolt and Protest: Student Politics and Activism in Sub-Saharan Africa

  Congo: Plunder and Resistance with David Seddon and David Renton

  HopeRoad Publishing Ltd

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  www.hoperoadpublishing.com

  First published in Great Britain by HopeRoad 2017

  Copyright © 2017 Leo Zeilig

  The right of Leo Zeilig to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in

  accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or

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  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-1-908446-58-9

  eISBN 978-1-908446-64-0