by Zakes Mda
We also had to water his peach trees of different varieties that lined the plot and bore fruit most seasons of the year. Even in winter some trees produced big smooth red nectarines. What amazed the people of the township was that the trees were short, about the height of a man, whereas the peach trees with which they were familiar grew taller than a house. Once or twice a year, depending on the variety, Old Xhamela pruned our trees so well that the fruit they bore was gigantic.
We knew that at night Bomvana and the kids from the poor side of the township stole our peaches, but we said nothing about it. They boasted about it when they waylaid us on the way from school, but we couldn’t tell on them for fear of the further violence they would unleash on us.
I liked to watch Old Xhamela work in the garden. Quite often I joined him with my sketch book and crayons, and drew our house from the vantage point of the garden. I loved drawing the red-brick house because its architecture was unique. Whereas the house next door, Nikelo and Xolile’s home, was a Spanish-type bungalow with yellow rough-cast walls, ours had a red-brick grass-thatched rondavel that was linked to the rest of the red-brick house by a plastered cream-coloured corridor. It was roofed in black-painted corrugated iron. At the other end of the building there was a porch with a red stoep and a glass door that opened into my father’s office.
I never tired of drawing the house from different angles, and Old Xhamela never tired of giving me his feedback. He was quite an art critic too; in one drawing he pointed out that I had drawn the chimney on the roof even though from the angle where we were standing it could not be seen. You would only see it if you went to the back of the house where the kitchen was located. I had only placed it there, he added, because I knew of its existence from memory, but the drawing was not realistic because I should depict only the things that the eye could see.
His comments were just as useful when I drew the peach trees, the gigantic tomatoes bursting with redness, and the ujiza birds – both the blackchested and the brownspotted prinia waving their tails from side to side. Sometimes a pair of thickbilled larks visited and perched on the fence. I painted them, exaggerating their speckled heads and wings. Here again, Old Xhamela noted my misrepresentation. He was a stickler for realism. I never had the heart to tell him that the distortions were deliberate, that I found the birds boring in their natural dull brown colours and thought they needed some vamping up.
MY FATHER WAS A disciplinarian. It was a badge he carried with honour. I often meet his former students – those he taught at Roma College, as the National University of Lesotho was called in the late 1940s; at St John Berchmans Catholic School in Orlando East, Soweto; and the boys and girls, now of course old men and women, of St Teresa. They are always excited to meet AP’s son, and gush how they learnt a lot about English literature from him. Some talk about his love of music, and how he conducted mass choirs; others remember how he initiated them into the politics of the ANC, and later of the Pan Africanists. Those he taught at St John Berchmans bring yet another side of him that has to do with soccer. They remember how the present-day Orlando Pirates, one of the leading professional teams in South Africa, was started by his students who gave the team that name because they were reading Treasure Island in his literature class. So you see, all these folks revere my father for different reasons. But one thing that they all remember is that AP was a disciplinarian.
The nuns at St Teresa admired him for that reason too. One of the documents in the photo album that makes me sneeze because of the dust mites that have accumulated in it over the decades is a testimonial written by Sister Eusebia, the principal, when my father left the school:
To whom it may concern: This is to certify that Mr Ashby Peter Solomzi Mda has been employed as assistant teacher at St. Teresa’s Native Secondary School from January 1948 till June 1955. Mr Mda has done excellent work as a teacher and educator. He is a man of good character, of outstanding ability, honest, painstaking and self-sacrificing in his duty to a high degree. He is a very good disciplinarian and a first class choir master. In him the school loses a teacher hard to replace.
‘AP does not suffer fools gladly,’ people said, and they made a point of choosing their words very carefully when they spoke to him. Which explains why we chuckled uneasily at his jokes even when he was all smiles and laughter.
He would call us around the kitchen table, all five of us kids (me, the twins Sonwabo and Monwabisi, our sister Thami and our baby brother Zwelakhe, even though the latter was only six years old), my mother and the ‘mother who looked after us’ (a euphemism for a maid and nanny). He would then tell us about the liberation struggle. He would sing for us in his mellow tenor: USobukwe ufun’amajoni, ufun’amajoni, ufun’amajoni enkululeko. Imikhosi yenkululeko, yenkululeko, yenkululeko. Sobukwe needs soldiers, he needs soldiers, he needs soldiers to fight for freedom. Armies of liberation, of liberation, of liberation.
I saw myself as one of those soldiers. I would one day go out to fight for freedom.
We knew all about Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe. Pan Africanist leaders like John Nyathi Pokela, who was from Hohobeng, a village near our Qoboshane, spoke about him all the time when he visited. He was the president of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania, known as the PAC for short, a party that broke away from the African National Congress in 1959. My father was regarded as the ‘founding spirit’ of the PAC, though initially he was not in favour of the breakaway. He believed that the Africanist group should change the ideological direction of the ANC from within. But in the end the young militants who opposed the ANC Freedom Charter – particularly clauses in it that declared that the land in South Africa belonged to all those who live on it – won the day and walked out of the mother organisation.
At the round-table family meetings that my father called to analyse the state of the struggle he emphasised that the PAC had his full support. He outlined to us his philosophy of African Nationalism which he formulated in his famous debates with his friend and roommate Anton Lembede, and which he then developed further when he was the president of the ANC Youth League in 1948. He had initiated Lembede into the politics of the ANC when the latter first came to Johannesburg from Natal. My father talked about the Programme of Action which he drafted and which was adopted as the policy document of the ANC at their conference on December 17, 1949. The fundamental principles of the Programme of Action were inspired by the desire to achieve freedom from white domination and the attainment of political independence. The document did not focus only on the political rights of the oppressed African majority, but on their economic rights and their right to education.
What impressed me most were the cultural rights. My father talked at length about the necessity of uniting the cultural with the political struggle. His unfulfilled dream was the establishment of a national academy of arts and sciences.
When he addressed us on these issues we all had to sit still. If anyone fidgeted or scratched himself my father became quite irritated because that indicated that the culprit was not interested in the proceedings. He was the only one who talked at these meetings, which turned them into lectures rather than discussions. Ours was to listen and punctuate his sentences with ‘ewe, tata’ – yes, father – to prove that we were paying attention.
According to my father, the ANC had gone wrong when it fell under the influence of the Communist Party of South Africa, and by extension of the Soviet Union. At that age I couldn’t understand why his cardboard boxes were full of books by Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin – these were never kept in open bookcases as they were banned material – while at the same time he was so much opposed to the Communist Party, which he called anti-revolutionary. Despite his anti – Communist Party stance he was apt to expound on dialectical materialism and to outline in most admiring terms the history of the Bolsheviks in Russia. Of course none of us at the table knew what dialectical materialism was all about. He never seemed to notice or even care if we were out of our depth as long as we continued to repeat ‘ewe, tata’.<
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When he was not poring over his clients’ files and law reports, he was reading Das Kapital and quoting from it, or from Friedrich Engels’s Anti-Dühring. Yet he believed, like the other youths who broke away from the ANC to form the PAC, and like Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, that Africa should follow a policy of ‘positive neutrality’, allying herself to neither the Soviet camp nor the American camp. Black people, he said, should determine their own future.
‘We can take the best from the West and from the East,’ he said. ‘And as Sobukwe said in his inaugural speech, we can do that while maintaining our distinctive personality and refuse to be stooges of either power bloc.’
By the East he meant the Soviet bloc and mainland China from which he believed Africa could learn how to run a planned economy. So you see, even though he was anti-Communist Party he was a socialist nonetheless. From Western nations, Africa could learn the establishment and maintenance of viable democratic governance. He completely abhorred what he referred to as totalitarianism in China and the Soviet Union.
My father believed that one day there would be a United States of Africa, which would be a socialist democracy – stretching from Cape to Cairo, Morocco to Madagascar.
And that became our slogan. When Cousin Mlungisi and I wanted to provoke white motorists on the main road I would shout: ‘Cape to Cairo, Morocco to Madagascar’, and then run away. I doubt if they knew what it was all about. If they heard us at all from their speeding cars they most likely associated the Cape-to-Cairo bit with Cecil John Rhodes.
‘Remember, my children, there is only one race on earth; the human race.’ That was my father’s statement at the end of the meeting.
My siblings and I got a grasp of these issues quite early on because these round-table meetings were frequent, almost weekly. We dreaded them; they took us away from our soccer games in the street, and me from my cavorting with Keneiloe. However, I did appreciate the fact that they left me with greater political awareness than my peers. When there were new developments in the news my father briefed us about them, and how they were going to impact the liberation struggle for better or worse. We were therefore fully briefed when Nelson Mandela was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for leaving the country illegally. Even then my father was already talking of the role of the CIA in his arrest two months earlier disguised as a man called David Motsamai (his client’s name) after he had disappeared for seventeen months. It turned out he had visited a number of countries garnering support for the overthrow of the apartheid government.
My mother was quite distraught about the sentence, but my father said, ‘Nel is quite fortunate to get such a light sentence.’
Though he and Mandela had taken two different ideological roads, my father was ecstatic that the ANC was finally turning to what he had been advocating since 1948 – the armed struggle.
Of course, he didn’t know at the time that the five years would soon become a life sentence for Mandela after the Rivonia Trial. The lightness of the sentence did not console my mother. I had noticed that she had a very soft spot for Mandela, although not as much as she had for Walter Sisulu. Although she spoke of Bhut’ Walter with some reverence, she made many jokes about Mandela. I often heard her and her nursing sister friends gossiping about Nel or Nelly. They called him a ladies’ man. They giggled about it, which gave me the impression that they were talking of an admirable trait. Although I didn’t know what a ladies’ man really did, if it was someone as handsome and urbane as Nelson Mandela then I wanted to be one too.
When Uncle Owen paid us a visit from his Ndzunga Restaurant the brothers spoke about the old days in Johannesburg, about the revolutionary activities of the Sons of the Soil, by which they meant the Pan Africanists. We heard of names like Z B Molete and P K Leballo and other radical youths who were ‘organising’ all over the Transvaal. Leballo was the secretary general of the PAC, and even then I got the sense that my father didn’t think highly of him. He was less of an intellectual and more of a demagogue. My father respected intellectuals like Sobukwe. ‘He is a thinker, that Sobukwe,’ he often said and then, paraphrasing Rudyard Kipling, he added, ‘He is a man who talks with crowds and yet keeps his humility; who walks with kings but never loses the common touch.’
Though my father was an African Nationalist I observed that he maintained his friendship with people who were in different political camps. For instance, his friendship with Oliver Tambo, who used to be his deputy when he was the president of the ANC Youth League, continued at this time and the two kept in contact. Another person whose ideological outlook had developed in a direction that was diametrically opposed to my father’s was George Matanzima, a paramount chief of abaThembu. I remember how resentful I was when he visited our home in Sterkspruit to consult with my father. At that time he and his older brother Kaiser were getting a lot of publicity in the media as the leaders of the first Bantustan to be established by the apartheid government in the Transkei. My father had served his law articles under George Matanzima at Engcobo in the Transkei. So had another PAC leader, Tshepo Tiisetso Letlaka, who also occasionally visited and the men would debate in the living room into the early hours of the morning.
At first I was embarrassed that Matanzima came to our house; in my book he was a traitor. But he always redeemed himself with his charm, particularly with his remark when I came to greet him in the living room that I was quite a handsome fellow. He was Nelson Mandela’s nephew, and like his uncle he seemed to be appreciative of handsomeness. Vanity won over the little matter of political commitment, and after that I was very comfortable around George Matanzima and laughed at his jokes, even though I had to turn my face so that the adults in the house did not see I was enjoying adult-oriented jokes.
Another regular visitor was Mr Mather, the rich white man who owned a general dealer’s store, a wholesaler, a garage with a petrol station, a restaurant and many other businesses in town. People said he owned half of Sterkspruit. Mr Mather was never received in the living room, but in the office, which indicated that he was my father’s client rather than a social caller. But still his visits as a white man made us uncomfortable, especially because whenever his car was parked in front of our house township children crowded outside the gate and gawked at the car and at him when he finally left the office. Mather’s visits enhanced our prestige with our peers, none of whom would even dream of having a white man visit their homes. But Uncle Owen, who thought himself a radical who once ‘organised the masses’ with the PAC firebrand Josias Madzunya, saw an inconsistency with Africanist ideals from the visits rather than prestige. Not only was Mather a white man; he was a capitalist exploiter of the black masses. When Uncle Owen raised his concerns in a courteous and cautious manner, as he always did with my father, my father said, ‘Well, O, there is something very important that I have in common with Mather. We both belong to the human race.’
THE ONLY OTHER WHITE people who came to my home on one occasion were three boys from the white suburb of Sterkspruit. Cousin Mlungisi and I had met them the previous day when we walked through their suburb playing a game of picking nice houses and cars and claiming ownership of them. Whenever I spotted a beautiful house I would shout, ‘I’m picking that house!’ It would be the same with the cars that drove by, with their drivers looking at us suspiciously. Cousin Mlungisi would do the same if he saw a house or car he liked. The idea was to be fast in your picking before your competitor picked the property. At the end of the walk we would tally our acquisitions, and the one who picked the most beautiful houses or cars won the game. And of course if you were too fast to pick an approaching car only to find that it was in fact ugly, you couldn’t recant. You were stuck with it and it would count against you when the tally was made. I once fought with Cousin Mlungisi because I wanted to ‘unpick’ a car I had picked before I saw that it was a rickety old model.
The white boys were pushing a bicycle and they told us they were selling it. I had always wanted a bicycle but was afraid to ask my father. The
last time I owned anything like that was at St Teresa when my friend Bernard Khosi and I rode our tricycles on the paved path between the houses and the school. I told the boys I wanted to buy their bike. The price seemed reasonable.
‘Can you afford it?’ the bigger boy asked.
‘Of course he can,’ said Cousin Mlungisi. ‘His father is a lawyer.’
After exchanging names and addresses the boys gave me the bike. The next day they would come for the money. Triumphantly, we pushed it back to Tienbank.
I was crushed when my father told me he would not buy the bike and that I must return it to the owners. It was falling apart, he said, and was not worth the money the boys were asking for it. In any event, how did I know the boys had not stolen it, or that they had their parents’ permission to sell it?
The next day the boys came to fetch their money. They were angry that I had changed my mind about buying the bike. But still they could not hide their surprise that kaffirs, as they called us, lived in such lovely houses, especially Mr Magengenene’s house next door which was more beautiful than most of the houses in the white suburb. He was a school inspector and the father of my friends, Nikelo and Xolile. Mr Magengenene’s new and shimmering Ford Zephyr that was parked in his yard exacerbated the boys’ anger against me.
‘You lied to me,’ said the oldest. ‘You went against your word. I should be donnering you instead of taking my bike back. I should be forcing you to pay me for it.’
‘Why don’t we? Why don’t we?’ said the middle one.