Sometimes There Is a Void

by Zakes Mda

  My immersion into boarding school life did not only confine itself to academically enriching activities. On some weekends I sneaked out of school bounds in the company of my older friends and protectors, Zwanya and Kittyman, to drink Sesotho beer in the village. I found the beer brewed from sorghum unpalatable with rough malt corroding my mouth, so I only pretended to drink. I was just happy to be in the company of these wise men who were also proud to be with their laaitie who was a sidekick of a Maseru gangster. I had to live up to my image.

  One day we went to a shebeen at what would pass as the town of Peka – where there were two stores, a café, the post office and one or two other small businesses – about six miles from the school. There were quite a number of us, not just Kittyman and Zwanya. The big boys drank until the early hours of the morning. When we left the shebeen we were all jolly and singing dirty songs. Even though I was the soberest of the lot, the drunkards had infected me with their good spirits. Moss, an older boy from Soweto whose father was a rich businessman there, was a few steps behind us with a drunken village woman he had picked up at the shebeen. Both were singing boisterously and the woman was leading in some of the songs. From time to time they stopped and kissed passionately.

  After a while I realised that Moss and the woman were no longer singing. When I looked back I saw that they were having sex on the side of the road. Moss hollered to the boys to join him and soon there was a line waiting to gang-rape the woman. I was horrified, but didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t stand up for her for fear of being ostracised by the group. I was the youngest and was honoured to have been accepted as a member of this group of popular boys. I didn’t think they would beat me up or anything, because of my alleged gangster connections in Maseru. It was being ostracised that I feared most. I decided to walk on. But Moss called me back while Kittyman was busy on top of the woman, who didn’t seem to resist but lay there lifelessly.

  ‘Come on,’ said Moss, ‘it’s going to be your turn after everyone has had a taste of her. We are initiating you into manhood.’

  When it finally got to be my turn I pretended I was getting on top of her and whispered in her ear: ‘Push me off and run for your life.’

  She just lay there motionless.

  ‘These guys will kill you,’ I said. I was getting frustrated and had to lie. ‘I know them. They are my brothers. They have killed before. Just push me and run, I’ll keep them at bay.’

  That seemed to animate her a bit. But still she didn’t have the strength to do what I was asking her. I rolled on the ground, pretending that she had pushed me away. She feebly stood up and staggered away. When the boys tried to stop her I screamed: ‘Let her go, please, Bra Kittyman … Zwanya … Moss, she’s not worth the trouble.’

  The boys let her stumble away. After all, they had had their fill.

  All the way back to school they laughed at me because I had been defeated by a drunken woman and didn’t get to have sex with her.

  This incident left me shaken and from then I abjured the company of these gentlemen.

  However, that was not the end of my errant behaviour. I was quite restless and when bands came to play at our school I left with them as a groupie and a gofer. I did this on two occasions, once with the Leribe Queens, a Lesotho band with singing and dancing girls that played the kind of popular music known as mbaqanga, and on another occasion with a soul group from Johannesburg called the All Rounders. I had struck up a friendship with two of its blind singers, Babsy Mlangeni and Koloi Lebona, and travelled with them as they toured Lesotho. I would have gone back to South Africa with them had I not been a refugee.

  And all that time my parents thought I was studying hard at school.

  I HAVE THIS RECURRING dream: I am in an exam room sitting at my desk staring at a mathematics question paper and sweating like hell because I can’t answer a single question. Everyone around me is writing away furiously. They hand in their papers to the invigilator and I am still sitting there. I am completely blank. Often I wake up in a sweat with figures and letters and signs and symbols floating before my eyes, and when I tell Gugu about the nightmare she laughs knowingly. She herself is haunted by the Ghost-of-Mathematics-Past; she gave up her medical studies in the first year because of the damned subject.

  As for me, my high school days would have been happier if it were not for mathematics. Though I had one of the most respected teachers of the subject, Selometsi ‘Maloro’ Baholo, he failed to make any headway with me. He tried to drum into my head all the formulae of Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry and a horrid subject called Additional Maths which was composed of nothing but Calculus, to no avail. I have no idea why I decided to take Additional Maths since, unlike the ordinary maths, it was not mandatory. But foolishly I did and suffered the consequences for the whole year. At the end of it all I had an F in everything to do with mathematics.

  Another subject that gave me problems was Latin, a subject in which I had no business to be hopeless since my father had mastered it in no time when he was preparing for his law studies. Those days in South Africa Latin was a prerequisite for a law degree. I imagined that one day I would follow in my father’s footsteps and become an attorney. I therefore needed Latin, and had to stick with it even though it frustrated me.

  My first Latin master was Mr A S Mampa. We named him Scutum, Latin for ‘shield’. He was a rotund fellow with a balding head. He was always jolly and full of jokes, most of which were a lighter shade of blue. He lived on campus in a four-roomed house with his two sons John and Sammy. The oldest son, Moss, was already at university when I got to Peka, but later his beautiful lyrical poetry brought us together. Even though I became close friends with Sammy and John and spent many hours in their bedroom listening to pop music on Lourenço Marques Radio, I never got to know what happened to their mother because they never spoke of her.

  Scutum also taught English, both Literature and Language, and knew how to make his lessons enjoyable. He loved my essays and read them to the rest of the class. He was the first to prophesy that one day I would be a writer.

  We all looked forward to his English classes. But, for me, he just couldn’t bring Latin to life. The first thing I couldn’t wrap my head around was the notion that of the three genders – male, female and neuter – mensa which means ‘table’ was female and not neuter. And then of course there were the silly declensions that we had to recite: mensa (nominative) table, mensam (accusative) table, mensae (genitive) of the table, mensae (dative) to/for the table, mensa (ablative) by/with/ from the table, mensa (vocative) O table! O table? Were the ancient Romans so daft as to address their tables? (Years later I was to catch myself addressing inanimate objects in my own writing in extravagant displays of pathetic fallacy.) And this was only the first declension. There were four more noun declensions that I had to memorise. And all of them presented me with illogical moments of their own.

  Thankfully, during holidays I had someone in Mafeteng to help me, especially with translations of Latin sentences into English and vice versa. No, not my father. I wouldn’t have dared ask him for help. On looking back now, perhaps he would have been pleased to give his assistance. But I was too terrified of him. In any case he was always busy with his files and law reports and clients. Perhaps I should have mustered the courage as I carried his bag when he walked to Hani’s restaurant to hide from those clients who were bent on hounding him even at home, wanting his help for their relatives who were in jail and urgently needed bail.

  Help came in the form of Bhut’ Thembi, also known as Chris Hani, the guerrilla commander of Umkhonto weSizwe. The ‘Bhuti’ (in full) is from Afrikaans boet which means brother. In isiXhosa it is commonly used to address a young man who is older than you rather than the original isiXhosa word mkhuluwa.

  Occasionally Bhut’ Thembi visited his father at the restaurant, and if that coincided with my holiday in Mafeteng he would roll up his sleeves and get to work on my exercise book. He had studied Latin in the Eastern Cape to a much higher
level than my junior secondary school grade, so he was able to translate with ease the simple sentences that gave me problems. At first he had told me, ‘I am a bit rusty, Zani,’ but when he saw my exercises he sailed through them. I tried very hard to follow what he was doing, but with my fuzzy understanding of declensions, I was up a creek. So he ended up doing all the work for me.

  The second year of high school Latin got tougher with verb conjugations for all the tenses and all the silly exceptions to the rules. I now had a new teacher, Mr Matebesi, who was one of the three young Xhosa men from the Eastern Cape who taught at Peka High. The other two were Mr Mdutshane, who also taught Latin and History, and Mr Makiwane, who taught General Science, which included Physics, Chemistry and Biology – subjects I did not care about but had to do willy-nilly.

  Mr Matebesi’s approach was quite different from Scutum’s easy-going jolly-good-fellow one. In class he never messed up his well-chiselled face with a smile. He was strict and took no excuses from any boy who had not done his homework. By this time I had mastered all the five declensions but, alas, conjugations still gave me problems. And here we were no longer translating simple sentences but long passages written by Julius Caesar himself. Hitherto I had not been aware of his authorship. I knew him only as the guy who was assassinated in William Shakespeare’s play. But there he was, writing about Gallic Wars in his difficult Latin. And there I was, going through hell translating his penmanship into English. And this was only Book 1. By the time I reached the final year of high school, the Cambridge Overseas School Certificate, I would have translated five of his eight books and also some stuff from Virgil’s Aeneid.

  Next time I went to Mafeteng I had my De Bello Gallico by one Iuli Caesaris with me. A guerrilla leader was going to translate the damn thing for me at his father’s restaurant. We would sit at one of the rickety tables covered with a plaid plastic table ‘cloth’ and he would render Caesar’s warrior words into the Queen’s English. Although the book had 52 chapters in all, it was a very slim book. Each chapter was nothing more than a paragraph. I didn’t expect Bhut’ Thembi to help me with the whole book. Just a few chapters. It would be enough to boost my grade.

  Unfortunately, Bhut’ Thembi was not there. It did happen like that sometimes because he actually lived in Maseru, although he paid regular visits to Mafeteng. I thought he would come as usual, but his father told me he had been away for almost a month and would not be back for many more. I knew immediately he had gone to fight his guerrilla wars against the Boers and I was left with no one to help me with Caesar’s Gallic Wars. I stared at the first lines: Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, quarum unam incolunt Belgae, aliam Aquitani, tertiam qui ipsorum lingua Celtae, nostra Galli appellantur. Hi omnes lingua, institutis, legibus inter se differunt. The words floated before my eyes, just as mathematical figures and letters and signs and symbols sometimes do in my recurring dream. I struggled on, and could barely make out that the great general and dictator was telling us how Gaul was divided into three parts inhabited by the Belgae, the Aquitani, and the Celts, all with different languages, laws and customs.

  Back at Peka High it was test time. June half-yearly exams. I sat at my desk and waited anxiously as Mr Matebesi handed out the question papers. I was quite prepared this time. Not by memorising the declensions and conjugations, but by writing them on a piece of paper that I smuggled into the exam room in my sleeve. This was the famous koantsanyane that I had learnt from the older boys at the Smoking Spot. The word refers to a weapon of war of ancient Basotho warriors, but students appropriated it for the prevalent practice of confronting dreaded tests with cheat sheets.

  ‘Why bother memorising mathematical formulae and Latin conjugations when you can just arm yourself with a koantsanyane?’ a senior called Pilato asked.

  I thought it was a great idea. My Latin mentor had gone to war; I was desperate.

  Normally I could never complete a Latin exam. The invigilator would announce ‘time up’ while I would still be struggling halfway through translations. This time I was able to answer all the questions, but not before consulting my notes for each one of them. After about two hours I was one of the last students to hand in my paper. Mr Matebesi took the paper and then said, ‘Come here.’

  I approached him warily, but not too close. He grabbed my arm and reached for my notes where I had tucked them up my sleeve. He looked at them, shook his head and said, ‘You get a zero for this paper.’

  And that was all. He said nothing more. I walked out slowly; I thought I was going to pee in my pants. Or even defecate. I was sick for the whole of that day with diarrhoea. I reported to the health prefect and insisted that I needed to go to hospital.

  In no time I was in the school kombi on my way to the Seventh Day Adventist Hospital at Mapoteng, about twenty miles away. I vowed to myself that I wasn’t going back to Peka High School. I would not be able to look Mr Matebesi in the eye.

  I DON’T KNOW WHY the recurring dream is never about Latin but always about mathematics. After all, no one had any expectations from me in so far as mathematics was concerned. We were a family deeply rooted in the law and the arts. Law ran in our blood, from the days of our revered ancestor Mhlontlo the slayer of magistrate Hamilton Hope who, as King of the amaMpondomise, presided over disputes at his Inkundla, to my grandfather Charles who had his own Inkundla near the big rock in Goodwell, and then to my father who became an attorney after a stellar career as a teacher. Today, two of my three brothers are lawyers – Monwabisi is the chief magistrate in Kokstad in the Eastern Cape and Zwelakhe is an advocate in Mafeteng, Lesotho. Even Sonwabo, Monwabisi’s twin brother, who went to America more than two decades ago and never returned home, read some law and politics. So, it was natural to see myself practising law one day. But here was Latin bent on scuppering my plans of following in my father’s footsteps.

  No doubt that present and future generations of lawyers in southern Africa are grateful that the mandatory Latin requirement no longer obtains.

  After the cheat sheet fiasco I didn’t have to worry about Latin or maths or any subject any more. My father took me to Dr Joel Molapo in Quthing to treat me for whatever was ailing me, which turned out to be nothing he could place his finger on, but was obviously not as serious as the typhoid that the hospital at Mapoteng had suspected. I convinced my father that I could only go back to high school the following year.

  I had six months to kill, and then I would hopefully go to a different school where there would be no Mr Matebesi.

  I spent most of that time with my mentor, Ntlabathi Mbuli, in Maseru. The PAC was renting a big yard with rows of connected single-storey, one-room dwellings from a sympathetic BCP-supporting businessman, Mr Thakalekoala. This was the camp where Poqo guerrillas who were in exile in Lesotho lived. Ntlabathi shared a room there with a group of Poqo men who had led the Pondoland Uprising in the Eastern Cape in November 1960 and had escaped to Lesotho after a country-wide manhunt by the Boer forces. I shared his bed.

  This was where my drinking habit started. I was a man among hardened men of war, and it was incumbent upon me to behave like all hardened men of war. Like everyone there I was subject to the military discipline of the camp, which included morning drills, a jog to the soccer field near the Stadium Hotel, about a mile away, and a rough game of rugby on the soccer field. This was my least favourite part; I would have been more at home if we played soccer. Back in Sterkspruit I used to be a star goalkeeper for our township soccer team and I still have scars on my knees to show for it. But, of course, the Poqo people were mostly from the deeper Eastern Cape and in that part of South Africa the predominant sport among black people was rugby, not soccer. The fact that I was the youngest and was the worst rugby player that ever walked on to a field saved me. None of the men wanted me in their team so I stood on the sidelines and chased the ball when it went off the field. And then later, when thirty or so swarthy and smelly men jogged back to the camp, I was in the middle of the group.

  The
evenings were pretty much free. Ntlabathi and I spent most of them in the shebeens of Maseru drinking brandy. As far as my father was concerned, I was in Maseru to attend art classes at the British Council so he gave me some money for the fees that the white art instructor lady charged and for food. He did not know that I only went to art class once and was soon bored by the still lifes we had to draw. I used the money for brandy and cigarettes. When the money ran out I bought the brandy on credit. My partner in crime had long-standing credit of his own in a number of shebeens at the Location, at Sea Point and at Moshoeshoe II, three of the Maseru townships where we used to drink.

  Shebeens were the sites of some of the most heated debates. Here we met some of the leading lights of Maseru, ranging from teachers to lawyers to senior civil servants to nondescript gangsters. Most of the patrons in every shebeen were supporters of the BCP, which had narrowly lost the elections to Chief Leabua Jonathan’s Basotho National Party. There was bitterness all round because Ntsu Mokhehle who had fought for freedom over the decades would not have the honour of becoming Lesotho’s first prime minister. That honour was denied even Leabua himself because he lost in his constituency of Kolonyama, his home village. The BNP deputy leader, Chief Sekhonyana Maseribane, became the first prime minister of Lesotho. Leabua only took over as prime minister two months later after Mokone Mothepu resigned his safe BNP seat at his Mpharane constituency, making room for Leabua to win it back in a by-election. I had campaigned for the BCP in that by-election, which was in the Mohale’s Hoek district.