by Zakes Mda
When the tourists are introduced to me they are pleasantly surprised to meet in a Drakensberg mountain village this rotund fellow who is a novelist and a professor at an American university. Unfortunately Gugu and I cannot join them for the precarious drive up the mountain to the apiary. We need to be in Mafeteng, Lesotho, by the evening to see my mother, and then leave the next morning for Johannesburg. The Bee People don’t need us anyway. They welcome tourists all the time, ever since their project was listed as one of the major tourist attractions of the district. They are happy of course that by coincidence we were there when this particular group of tourists arrived and we have added some value to their experience since they only came to visit the bees, breathe the clean mountain air and, according to the brochure … enjoy a taste of the mouth-watering honey.
This last bit is not just hype. Telle Honey – the brand name with a smiling bee on the label designed by my son Neo, who is an art director at a Johannesburg advertising agency – is reputed to have a unique taste because of a combination of Cape aloes and other indigenous plants that grow only in that region.
Undoubtedly the tourists will also enjoy the view of both the Dyarhom and the eSiqikini Mountains with the steep cliffs, clear streams and white beehives speckling the green mountainside. Imagine if my grandfather’s orchard was still there. Imagine. Without anybody to prune them, the trees would have grown in all wild directions and the fruit wouldn’t be as large as it was when my grandfather cared for them. But in spring they would contribute a new dimension to the bee food that has made the honey unique and in summer would feed the passers-by with abundant fruit. Unfortunately, my Uncle Owen would have none of that. He murmured to himself ‘amandla ka tata akana’wudliwa ngabany’abantu’ – I’ll not have the sweat from my father’s brow benefit strangers – as he spent days on end chopping down tree after tree soon after the mountain dwellers were forced down to the lowlands by the apartheid government. When I heard how he chopped down all those fruit trees, I lost all respect for him. The spirit of my grandfather lived in those trees. Besides, I instinctively recoil from a person who is callous enough to chop down a tree – any tree, but more especially a fruit tree – without just cause. I am wary of any person who can be so emotionally stunted as to kill a tree without experiencing something inside him dying with the tree.
Gugu and I wave our goodbyes to the tourists as the Bee People’s truck leads their luxury bus up the narrow dirt road. Hopefully the bus driver is good enough to negotiate his way on the steep hill. The tourists had better not look out the windows otherwise they may freak out when they see hundreds of yards away all those skeletons of cars that have rolled down the mountain over the years.
Gugu and I get into our car and drive to the Telle Bridge into Lesotho. From the apiary the tourists will cross this bridge as well. And the tour guide will tell them about its significance in South Africa’s history. I noticed in the brochure that the bridge is one of the tourist attractions: Wind your way down to Telle Bridge, to see the historic border gate where in 1977 Donald Woods, the then editor of the Daily Dispatch, escaped into exile disguised as a priest. It is a story that was later told in the 1987 Richard Attenborough movie, ‘Cry Freedom’, featuring Denzel Washington and Kevin Kline, about the friendship between Steve Biko, the Black Consciousness leader who was murdered by the apartheid police, and Donald Woods, a white liberal who was hounded by the police as a result of that friendship. Woods had to go into exile in Lesotho, and later in England.
MORE THAN A DECADE before Donald Woods’ adventure – in January 1964 – I crossed the Telle River to exile. I was fifteen years old.
I did not cross at the bridge as Mr Woods did. I wouldn’t dare face the South African border police without a valid passport. Instead, I waded in the water following a man who was carrying my heavy trunk on his shoulder. I don’t remember who he was. Maybe I never knew who he was in the first place. I only remember him talking to my mother in whispers on the banks of the river. Then I hugged my mother. I didn’t want to let go. But the man said to let go; we didn’t have all night. Unless we wanted the Boers to catch us. God knew what would happen to all of us if the Boers caught us. I let go and followed him. My mother stood on the bank sniffling.
I was scared of the river, ever since the ice-cold water of a flooded rivulet that we had to cross on our way from Qoboshane to Aunt Nontsokolo’s general dealer’s store in Mmusong nearly swept me away when I was a tyke. I was saved by my aunt who held tightly to my hand even as the raging waters struggled with her. After heavy rain brooks and streams tend to have the most forceful of waters. Fortunately, that night of my exile the water in the Telle River reached only to my knees and I could wade with ease. And it was not cold at all. The man struggled with the trunk; it was loaded with my clothes and books – I had to leave behind some of my comic books for lack of room. It made me sad to see my trunk bobbing in front of me as the man tried to find a foothold in the sand and rocks under the water. My mother had bought it for me soon after I had received a first class pass in Standard Six. It was the trunk I was going to use for boarding school at St Teresa’s. But here now it was crossing the river to a foreign country where I was going to live as a refugee with my strict father and was going to repeat Standard Six because the British education of Lesotho was superior to our Bantu Education.
A short distance away I could see the lights of cars that were crossing the border post at Telle Bridge. I envied those who were going in the opposite direction, driving into the country I was leaving.
I panicked when I saw the light of a torch flashing in our direction. I thought the Boers had discovered us and we’d surely be locked up. Or they might just shoot us dead and let the flowing waters clean up the mess. Boers were known to do such things. But the man with the trunk didn’t seem to be bothered. He walked purposefully towards the flashing light. My legs sank deeper as I got closer to the bank on the opposite side, and I slipped on the soft muddy sand and almost fell. The man with the trunk just walked on; obviously he had no time to nurse weaklings. As soon as he got to the shore he placed the trunk down and sighed deeply with relief. I straggled on until I joined him on land.
From a field of maize that ran right up to the river bank a short and solidly built man wearing glasses appeared and walked towards us, torch flashing. The men mumbled greetings and the one who had brought me went back to the river.
‘You hold the other handle of the trunk, Zani,’ said the man who had come to meet me. He called me Zani, which was what my parents called me. He must be close to my father to know that name, I thought to myself as we walked into the maize.
He told me his name was Ntlabathi Mbuli. He was originally from some village in the Herschel District, but had been a refugee in Lesotho for the past two years or so. I was later to learn that he was a Poqo cadre who was doubling as my father’s clerk at his law office. Poqo – an isiXhosa word that variously means ‘genuine’, ‘alone’, or ‘pure’ – was the military wing of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania, the PAC. Ntlabathi Mbuli was also a poet whose works created a great impression on me. What amazed me most about his poetry was that although the man was a guerrilla fighter his poems were not about war or even about the oppression and suffering of his people. He wrote about love and related passions – hatred, anger, desire, and lust. I also learnt that he was a scholar of the Romantic period. Though his poetry was free verse, you could hear Byron, Keats and Wordsworth in it as loudly as if they were in the room.
We walked uphill over a rocky terrain for what seemed like hours in silence. He spoke only when he asked if I wanted to rest a bit. And I did. The trunk was heavy.
Finally we reached a gravel road. An old bakkie – a pickup truck – was waiting for us. We loaded the trunk on the bed and both got into the cab. Without a word the driver, a scrawny man with a goatee wearing blue overalls, pulled away. I asked Ntlabathi if it was okay if I opened the window; there was a stench of beer. On the side of the road I saw a number o
f bottles of lager. Apparently the scrawny man was having a party by himself while waiting for us.
The road twisted and turned on the mountainside and in the dark I could make out shapes of huts and kraals. But there were no humans at that time of the night. Of the morning, in fact, for it must have been long after midnight. The man opened a bottle cap with his teeth and gave it to me.
‘I don’t drink,’ I said.
‘What makes you think I was giving it to you? You want Ntate Mda to castrate me?’ asked the driver.
Ntlabathi reached for the beer and took one long swig. Then he gave it back to the man who put the bottle between his knees and occasionally took a swig as he negotiated his way along the treacherous bends. He was nursing the pickup so slowly that the folk tale tortoise who won the race because of the hare’s over-confidence would have outrun this truck as well.
A teardrop rolled down my cheek. Just one drop. I rubbed it off quickly before the men could notice. I was thinking of my mother. And of my brothers: Sonwabo, Monwabisi and Zwelakhe. And of my sister Nomathamsanqa, who we called Thami for short. I was thinking of Cousin Mlungisi, Nikelo and Xolile. Anger swelled in my chest when I remembered how we used to hang out together and talk about soccer, and how Nikelo used to regale us with his exploits with some of the most beautiful ladies at St Teresa’s and then later at Healdtown in the deeper Eastern Cape where he was enrolled for his high school education, how I was no longer part of that camaraderie when the three guys returned from the initiation school. I was thinking of Keneiloe. I was wondering what she was up to at that moment. Of course she was in bed. But what about the next day? And the next? She was likely to find herself a new boyfriend. What song was she going to compose for him? He might not be knock-kneed so the song she’d composed for me would not apply to him. She’d better not sing my song to him. That would be the worst betrayal.
My thoughts constantly returned to my siblings. I regretted that I took them for granted when I was with them, as if they would always be there. There was a big gap of almost ten years between Zwelakhe and me, and I was six years older than Thami. Also, for the most part they lived with my mother in Johannesburg when I was banished to my grandparents’ place, so I never got to bond with them. The twins, on the other hand, were only three years younger. They were part of my world because they also lived at Qoboshane for some time. In Sterkspruit we had a lot in common as well. Not only did we sleep in the same bedroom where we played snakes and ladders in the candlelight and laughed at the antics of Chunky Charlie, we also played soccer together on the township playground – which was in the street near Keneiloe’s home. Whereas my best friend was Cousin Mlungisi, theirs was Cousin Bobby, Cousin Mlungisi’s younger brother. We therefore visited their home together and basked in the attention of all those beautiful Tindleni daughters. On Sundays after church – and after a lunch of chicken, dumplings, rice, beetroot, potatoes, spinach, pumpkin, jelly and custard – we played my father’s His Master’s Voice gramophone and danced to the Manhattan Brothers, Lemmy Special Mabaso, Miriam Makeba and the Skylarks, Spokes Mashiyane, Dolly Rathebe, the Woody Woodpeckers and Dorothy Masuku.
The Boers had smashed all those wonderful days to smithereens. And I had done nothing to deserve this. People were getting killed, arrested or exiled because they planted bombs to overthrow the system. Or they just raised their voices too high in non-violent protest. I was going into exile because I was my father’s son. All I ever did was to shout slogans at white motorists.
SOMETIMES THERE IS A VOID.
MY FATHER LIVED IN Quthing – the southernmost Lesotho town where the ghost hotel I have told you about is located. It was, of course, decades before the days of the ghost hotel. In fact, there was no hotel of any kind in Quthing in those days. He rented a one-roomed house from the Moleko family – no relation to that other Mr Moleko, the principal of my primary school in Sterkspruit who preached on the folly of questioning the authority of the white man after my father’s arrest.
Quthing those days was just as miserable, although it was not as bustling as it is today. It has grown into a town built haphazardly on a hillside, with motley houses crowded against one another right up to the mountain top where the ghost hotel is located. But in 1964 the landscape was stark and the only ghosts were the grey people in grey blankets teetering on unpaved paths, some driving grey donkeys burdened with grey sacks of maize to the mill or to exchange at the general dealer’s store for sugar and paraffin.
As my father was at his office or in court for most of the day one of the grey people from a neighbouring homestead kept me company – a boy in a grey blanket, shoeless feet as hard as a rock with cracks so deep they could hide a one-cent coin, and long matted hair. I shared with him some of the Eskort beef or pork sausages that were a staple at home because my father never cooked even for a single day. I often wondered why my father’s mother never taught him how to cook when mine had taught me. We depended on canned sausages and bread during the week and on Sundays he employed a woman to cook a full lunch for us, which was never like the lunch that my mother cooked. I warmed a can of Eskort sausages in a pot of boiling water the way I had seen my father do, opened it and soaked bread in the fat from the can and gave it to the grey boy with one or two pieces of sausage. He chewed with relish, the grease running down his grey arms with abandon.
I didn’t have much in common with him and I would have preferred to be left alone to draw pictures and reread the few comic books that I had brought with me, but he insisted on sitting on the doorstep and singing for me: There was a lady sitting on the corner, and a gentleman smoking cigarettes. Oh, my darling, I am coming. I am coming to kiss you twice. It was the same song every day – my reward for feeding him Eskort sausages – until I accepted him as a fact of life and appreciated his presence. It served a useful purpose when I decided to compose my own song and try it on him. Mine, of course, was about Keneiloe. I didn’t tell you that her name is Sesotho for ‘I have been given’. And so I sang: Keneiloe ngwanana e motle. Lebitso la hae ke Keneiloe. Keneiloe wa me, wa me, ke wa me. Ke mo rata ka pelo yaka yohle. I have been given (a pun on her name) a beautiful girl. Her name is Keneiloe. She is my Keneiloe; I love her with all my heart.
The grey boy thought it was a brilliant song.
On occasion he overstayed his welcome until my father came home. My father asked him about the health of his parents and his siblings whom he knew by name. He joked with him and teased him about his uncombed hair. If I had hair like that I would have been in big trouble with him, yet here he was pretending to admire it on the grey boy. And the grey boy didn’t freeze in his presence as I did. My father and I spent our evenings without exchanging a word. We didn’t ask of each other how our day had been, and he buried himself in his files and South African Law Reports as soon as he got home, right until I went to bed. He woke up early in the morning and went to work, even on Saturdays and Sundays. But I realised that he was quite a jolly fellow with the neighbourhood children and was not strict with them at all. They spoke of Ntate AP as if they were speaking of a friend.
One morning when my father was at the magistrate’s court, or had travelled to another town to defend his clients, I sneaked out of the Moleko yard with the grey boy and he led me along the dirt road among the stalls of women selling various wares and foods, to explore a world with which I was not familiar. A world populated by blanketed men and women chattering in high-pitched tones. In Sterkspruit we did live with Basotho people – even Keneiloe’s family were Basotho, although Hopestill was Xhosa – but our Basotho did not wear blankets come rain, come shine. They did not wear cone-shaped grass hats either. I wondered what was cooking in the women’s pots in the stalls. Perhaps horse meat. And donkey meat. The Basotho people were reputed to be partial to horse and donkey meat. The smell of meat cooked in onion wafted towards me and I suddenly felt nauseous. Of course it might have been beef or mutton, but in my prejudiced mind it was horse and donkey, animals that were too cute to eat and I fel
t very bad for them. The grey boy was surprised that all of a sudden I wanted to go back home, even before we had explored further up the hill where the big general dealer’s store was beckoning.
As we walked down the dirt road on our way back to the Moleko yard I saw a light-green Wolseley car that looked familiar. When it got closer I noticed that the driver was Mr Mdolomba and the white woman next to him was Mathutha, a name that the people of Sterkspruit gave to Dr Dutton. She was my doctor and the doctor of the multitudes that lined up at her clinics located at various major centres of the Herschel District. Mdolomba, in his white coat, was her driver and her general assistant who also dispensed medicines from the trunk of her car. Dr Dutton had always been my inspiration. When curious adults asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I immediately said a doctor. I knew that I was going to be a writer, but I didn’t think it was something that one could do on a full-time basis. I would need a real job, and medicine would suit me fine, thanks to Dr Dutton. When one of Methodist Reverend Mbete’s sons became a medical doctor my resolve was reinforced.
When the car passed I waved frantically. Both Mathutha and Mdolomba waved back. But I couldn’t read any recognition in their faces. Children generally waved at them in the villages; perhaps to them I was just one of those children. They didn’t see in me the boy who, on his last visit with a bad chest and incessant cough, had black dirt spots on his stomach, a result of shoddy bath-taking. This had embarrassed my mother; she had long stopped inspecting my ablutions thinking that I knew how to wash myself thoroughly. And there I disgraced her in front of the white woman – she, a nursing sister of all people. Later that evening she took a lot of flak from my father about my lack of cleanliness. He took to teaching me how to bathe properly himself … yes, at that age! Dr Dutton herself had given me a serious lecture on hygiene that day.