by Zakes Mda
After the show the socialites went to the Hilltop Hotel for drinks in the bar and the lounge. Of course at that time a boy of my age with strict parents would not witness these activities. He would be at home tucked in bed. But Cousin Mlungisi, who was my age and lived four houses from my home, would be a secret spectator at some of them. His father, Mr Tindleni, was a director in the district education office, and was famous for having spawned many beautiful daughters. His mother was my father’s distant cousin, hence she was my aunt and that’s how Mlungisi got to be my cousin.
Either they were not too strict at his home or he was sneaky enough to be able to steal away at night and attend events that my mind associated only with adults. He was often caught sneaking into Bhunga Hall to watch the gentlemen of Sterkspruit – teachers, taxi drivers and policemen – and their ladies practise ballroom dancing on Saturday afternoons. The dance instructor finally got tired of shooing him away and let him watch, as long as he didn’t invite other urchins into the hall.
‘We are not dancing for an audience here, you little twerp,’ said the instructor, who was also a teacher at our Tapoleng Primary School.
Cousin Mlungisi was the one who came back with the report of how wonderful it was at Bhunga Hall where he had listened to the whole of Manana the Jazz Prophet through the window (he could not see the stage) and of how afterwards he followed the socialites to the Hilltop Hotel and saw Uncle Owen kiss his girlfriend in his blue Opel Kadett. He was close enough to observe that he had actually put his tongue in her mouth, a yucky practice Cousin Mlungisi referred to as a French kiss. He revealed to me that he himself had done it with some of his girlfriends.
I couldn’t believe Cousin Mlungisi could sink that low. I knew that he was having sex already; I once caught him in a donga on the way from school on top of a girl and I averted my eyes and took a different direction. I never understood how he got the girls to agree to have sex with him. I was still a virgin, if you don’t count my experience with Nontonje at KwaGcina, and such adventures with girls were the furthest thing from my mind. Secretly, I envied Cousin Mlungisi’s pizzazz, which resulted in his popularity with girls, but putting your tongue in a girl’s mouth was the most revolting thing imaginable.
I didn’t know that only a few days later I would experience it.
COUSIN MLUNGISI AND I were walking on the shoulder of the road from the town to our township of Tienbank. We were having a wonderful time infuriating white motorists with political slogans. It was before the road was tarred, but the gravel that was occasionally hurled at us by the speeding tyres did not deter us. We were too much involved in political action to be bothered even by the dust that left our heads looking like our khaki shorts. Whenever we saw a white motorist we raised our thumbs up and shouted, Mayibuye iAfrika! This was the slogan of the ANC – Let Africa come back! Sometimes I would add, ‘From Cape to Cairo’.
Most motorists ignored us and continued on their journey. But one day we saw a motorist who had zoomed past make a U-turn and drive back towards us. We didn’t wait for the burly white man to stop but fled to the nearby eucalyptus and pine woods. The man parked the car on the roadside and got out with pompous deliberation. He didn’t come after us though; he just stood there looking in our direction and then got back into his car.
I was relieved.
We could see the white man from our hiding place as he drove away.
‘Let’s go back and provoke some more Boers,’ said Cousin Mlungisi.
‘Oh, no,’ I said. ‘I’m not going back there.’
When he laughed at me and called me a coward who would never be a freedom fighter I had to follow him back to the battlefield. Mercifully, before we got to the road we saw Kili walking back from town with a paper bag of groceries on her head. She was a tall and robust girl, perhaps in her late teens or early twenties, who lived in a village beyond Tienbank.
At the same time, two men in the colourful and shimmering pants of mineworkers known as phelephatshwa, matching miners’ helmets with lamps and all, and black gumboots, were trotting towards her to the rhythm of the harmonica played by one of them. When they got close to her they stopped and one recited a poem in her honour: Dudlu! Nongena nkomo uyayidl’inyama, nongena ntsimi uyawudl’umbhona. Nongen’a mazi uyalusel’ubisi. Dudlu! Ide nalomhlab’uhamba kuwo ingath’uthandazelwe! Ndiyakuthanda ntombi ndingazenzisi! O! Voluptuous one! Even those who don’t have cattle do eat meat; one doesn’t need to have fields in order to eat corn! One doesn’t have to own the cow before one can drink its milk. O! Voluptuous one, even the earth you walk on has been blessed! I love you, girl, and I am genuine about it!
Kili looked at them cheekily, arms akimbo, the paper bag balanced on her head, and then walked on towards us. The men merely laughed, performed a small jig to the rhythm of their harmonica and continued with their boisterous journey without looking back once. So much for being genuine. I wondered why Kili did not become outraged that strange men told her to her face that even though she did not belong to them they were entitled to her; that to them she was as good as a piece of meat that could be eaten by anyone who happened to desire it. But girls those days took such uninvited attention in their stride and walked on. Some actually found it flattering.
I would have felt resentful if Kili had rewarded the men’s poetry with the slightest smile because unlike the men I had some measure of ‘entitlement’ to her. Kili was our ‘mommy’ – mine and Cousin Mlungisi’s. Those days cute little boys like us used to have ‘mommies’. Older girls approached younger boys and girls and asked them to be their ‘babies’. Your ‘mommy’ bought you sweets and even shared her song book with you, from which you copied lyrics of the latest pop songs into your own song book. ‘Mommies’ were worldly wise, so you learnt a lot of tricks from them, which you were later going to apply in your own romantic relationships when your time came. I had met Kili some weeks before on the same road to town and she asked me to be her ‘sonny’. I agreed even though I did not know who she was. I only learnt later that Cousin Mlungisi was her ‘sonny’ too.
Kili screeched with joy when she saw her two ‘babies’. I for one was happy that she would draw our attention away from our roadside revolutionary mission.
‘Come here, my babies,’ she said as she put her paper bag on the ground and reached for Cousin Mlungisi. She held him tightly to herself and kissed him. She put her tongue in his mouth and rolled it a few times. His eyes were rolling in a daze, and he staggered a bit when she finally released him from her embrace. Then she reached for me and stuffed her tongue into my mouth. As one would expect, she reeked of fish. It was the custom of village girls to treat themselves to fish and chips whenever they were in town. I could taste the fish in her mouth and could feel the pieces between her teeth. I broke free and ran away, while spitting out a lot of saliva. She and Cousin Mlungisi just stood there, obviously wondering what was wrong with me.
When Cousin Mlungisi came back after walking Kili halfway to her village he had a packet of Bakers Assorted Biscuits, and rubbed it in that I would be munching my own biscuits too if I had not been such a milksop.
I could never live that down. I was the boy who ran away from a French kiss. Cousin Mlungisi made a point of spreading the news in the streets of Tienbank where we played our soccer and at the playgrounds of Tapoleng Primary School where we were both pupils.
Even my girlfriend Keneiloe got wind of the news and that was even more embarrassing. To her, I had posed as a man of the world, and had pretended that the fact that we had never kissed – and here I am talking of an ordinary peck on the lips or even on the cheek – was only because I was protecting her innocence; I was being a gentleman. Now she might suspect the truth; that it was really my innocence I was protecting; that I was petrified to ask for a kiss.
I was fourteen and I had never kissed a girl!
Keneiloe was my first love. Not just a crush as before, but a real girlfriend. I actually proposed to her and she said yes. She had made things easie
r for me by teasing me and singing a song about my knock knees and dancing to it. Sitshu madolo a jongeneyo, sitshu madolo a jongeneyo – Alas, the knock-kneed one, the knock-kneed one! So I reckoned she liked me and there was no danger of rejection. Women don’t compose songs about your knock-kneed gait if they don’t like you.
It turned out she did like me.
She was three years younger and the most beautiful girl in all of Sterkspruit. She came from the rich Mohafa family, just three houses from my home. Her father Teboho owned a fleet of buses, and her mother Hopestill was a nursing sister with my mother at Empilisweni Hospital. They were best friends.
After Keneiloe heard of the incident with Kili she laughed at me on the way from school. As did the hordes of other kids who walked the two kilometres or so between Tapoleng Primary and Tienbank. But I walked on with stoicism with the twins, Sonwabo and Monwabisi, in tow, feeling betrayed that my own Keneiloe was part of the riff-raff that was mocking me.
Yet I spent a lot of time with Keneiloe. Some force drew me to wherever she was, and somehow she found her way to wherever I was. Even though she lived three houses from my home and we saw each other every day we wrote letters to each other. It was during this great romance that I honed my letter-writing skills. My letters became famous for their lyricism and highfalutin imagery. At recess, girls sat under a tree and cheered and laughed and sighed deeply and vented exclamations of envy as she read them one of my letters.
When I passed a group of giggling school girls it was not unusual to hear one of them utter a stage whisper to the rest: ‘There he is, the boy who writes such wonderful love letters.’
Every day after school and on Saturdays we played hopscotch, dibeke, and rounders in the street that divided our section of the township with its sprawling bungalows and landscaped gardens from the poor side with shacks and dilapidated adobes. We – the children of lawyers, nurses, school inspectors and businessmen – were quite snobbish towards the kids from the ramshackle side of the township and rarely played with them. One of them, a coloured boy named Bomvana, old Page’s son, got even by waylaying us with his gang of dirty boys on our way from school and pelting us with stones.
DESPITE THE POOR SERVICE and the rude receptionists who view guests as more of a nuisance than a source of their salaries, the night in the musty bedroom of Hilltop Hotel is much more pleasant than our experience at the ghost hotel. In the morning Gugu and I get into the car and we cruise towards the township of Tienbank. Before we drive the eight hours or so to Johannesburg I want to show her those physical landmarks of my life that may have survived the ravages of time.
Tienbank looks quite shabby today. The luxury homes look rundown and zimbhatshile, which means their once-bright colours have faded. Although the Mohafas and the Tindlenis still live here, most of the black elite have long emigrated to the formerly white suburb closer to town. I point out what used to be my father’s house to Gugu and we park just outside the gate. Somehow it looks lonely and lost. The thatch on the rondavel looks like a nest that has been abandoned by a mother bird. I wonder what the lounge under that thatch looks like today. I remember the display cabinet with lots of glass and mirrors where my mother kept her special tea set and bric-a-brac and where I once placed my First Class Standard Six Certificate for all the world to see, to the embarrassment of my mother who left it there for a while to humour me and then later gently asked me to remove it so that she could keep it safely for me. Then there were the sofas that she had bought from Bradlows in Johannesburg, upholstered in light grey heavy-duty fabric. Those sofas outlasted my childhood. Many years later when I was a lecturer at the National University of Lesotho they were still at my home in Mafeteng, being used by my ageing parents, in their original upholstery.
I know Johannesburg is a long way and we don’t want to reach home at night. But somehow I am unable to will myself to step on the accelerator and drive away. The engine is still running, though. I wonder who owns this place now. Whoever they are, they don’t have any appreciation of the work my father put into the garden decades ago. It is overgrown with weeds. I take a long look at the rondavel one more time, and my eyes penetrate through the brick wall.
I can see my mother sitting on the Bradlows sofas with Hopestill, Keneiloe’s no-nonsense mother. It was not unusual for the two friends to sit in the living room and gossip over tea and scones.
One day I came back from a gruelling street-soccer game, where I played my usual role of goalkeeper with catlike agility, only to be summoned to appear before the two ladies relaxing – or so I thought – on the Bradlows sofas. I almost wet my pants when I saw what my mother was brandishing in her hand. A letter. The very letter I had written to Keneiloe proclaiming that she was ‘the queen of my heart’. Such a declaration was meant for her eyes only and perhaps for the ears of adoring audiences at those recess-time letter-reading sessions. Not for Hopestill’s eyes. Not for my mother’s eyes either.
‘Yintoni lento, Zanemvula?’ my mother asked. What is this, Zanemvula?
When she called me Zanemvula instead of Zani I knew that she was not pleased with me at all.
Hopestill was staring directly into my eyes, as if waiting expectantly for an answer that would be some kind of a revelation. Her eyes were bulging, big and round like Keneiloe’s. Her gaze did not shift even when she reached for a biscuit on a saucer on the coffee table, delicately placed it in her mouth, and then reached for a cup of tea which she sipped with equal delicacy.
I averted my eyes and looked at the wall. I focused on the round plaster of Paris casts of red roses, thinking what a smart idea it was of my mother’s to have round pictures on a round wall.
‘I have asked you a question, Zanemvula,’ my mother said, forcing me to return my gaze to my tormentors.
Silence. The best defence. She looked at Hopestill helplessly. Hopestill continued with her steadfast gaze. I diverted my eyes to the letter in my mother’s hand. I could see very clearly the logo that I had designed which was on every letter that I wrote to Keneiloe. I could see the ornate letters KM, enclosed in a big heart. I couldn’t see the smaller letters that followed the big K so that it became the first letter for both Kizito and Keneiloe, nor could I make out the letters that came after the big M, making it the first letter of both Mda and Mohafa. But I knew they were there. This was my logo all right. Keneiloe liked that logo although she laughed at it because she thought I had invented the name Kizito so that I could also have a name that began with K. She never believed me when I told her that I was actually baptised Kizito in the Roman Catholic Church in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
‘I am sorry,’ I said, almost in a whisper. ‘I will never do it again.’
Even as I uttered these words I knew I was lying. I just couldn’t see how I could resist writing to Keneiloe. The highlight of my week was when I received a letter from her. Always short and to the point. Without any flowery language. But the fact that she took the trouble to write to me was fulfilment enough.
The women conferred aloud, both agreeing that I had done a very despicable thing. Hopestill said that she had actually given her daughter a hiding about this letter, and she expected my mother to do the same to me. My mother made a solemn promise that she was going to give me the hiding of a lifetime. My mother was such a beautiful soul that I couldn’t see her lifting her hand to me. The only time she ever did was the incident I told you about when I was caught loitering on a store veranda with that knife stolen from her ivory-handled braai set in Dobsonville many years before. I knew she would not fulfil her promise to Hopestill, and she never did.
‘You write such dirty letters again to my little girl, Teboho will break your neck. You’re lucky that Rose has pleaded with me not to show him the letter this time.’ That was Hopestill’s parting shot.
After this confrontation things cooled a bit between me and Keneiloe. I even got myself another girlfriend, Nombuyiselo Jafta, who lived next door to Keneiloe. But things never really took o
ff between us. Her main problem was that she was not Keneiloe. The fact that her father was a member of the South African Police Force didn’t help our relationship. There was a stigma attached to anyone who associated with that family to the extent that we were reluctant to play with their kids, even though the Jafta girls were all so beautiful.
I was glad my father never got to know of my crimes. I don’t know what he would have done but we always trod lightly when we approached him. Like my mother, he abhorred corporal punishment. But he knew how to use words that caused invisible weals on your body that would be as painful as the welts of flagellation. He had a way of making you feel not only that you were a disappointment to yourself and your parents, but you had also let the whole continent of Africa down – from Cape to Cairo, Morocco to Madagascar. ‘Africa cannot afford to have people who do such things,’ he would say.
He was busy with his law practice, spending all day long in his office which was a room in our house with a separate entrance. Or at the magistrate’s court in town defending clients in both civil and criminal matters. In the evenings he spent hours in his garden, which had been landscaped by Old Xhamela who had been imported from KwaGcina for that purpose. My siblings and I were resentful that every evening – when all the kids of the township were playing games in the street – we had to go home to work in the garden. We had to draw water with watering cans from the communal borehole just outside our yard and line them up for him to do the watering. He did not believe we were capable of watering his tomatoes, spinach, cabbages and carrots without making a mess of things so he preferred to water them himself. He was so obsessive about watering his garden that even when it had rained, we still had to draw water from the borehole for him to water the plants.