by Zakes Mda
There was a lot of anger among the elite of Lesotho because the peasants in the villages determined the future of the country by voting for an uneducated chief, and the BCP, a party of the towns and the more enlightened, took only second place with twenty-five parliamentary seats. The party of the country bumpkins ran to the winning post with thirty-one out of the contested sixty. Even if they went into alliance with the royalist Marematlou Freedom Party, which won the remaining four seats, they would not be in a position to form a government. Indeed, the Queen of England through her High Commissioner had called upon the BNP to form a government.
This anger played itself out in the shebeens we frequented. We cursed the apartheid government of South Africa for supporting Leabua Jonathan with maize that he distributed to the villages, as well as South African Afrikaner business tycoon Anton Rupert for pumping money into the BNP campaign. We consoled ourselves that Leabua was too stupid to run a country; soon his government would fall and the more intelligent and learned leader, Ntsu Mokhehle, would take over. As we sipped tots of brandy we laid bets on how long the government would last. I was of the opinion that it would not last longer than six months.
‘Who would allow a nincompoop like Leabua in the forums of the world?’ I asked. ‘Do you think a man like him can be at home in the company of Kwame Nkrumah and Abdel Nasser?’
The shebeen denizens all laughed and nodded in agreement; there was no way these great Pan Africanists whose names I had invoked would be seen dead with a lackey of the Boers like Leabua. I felt great that I was commanding the debate with these professional people when I was nothing but a seventeen-year-old high school dropout. It was never much of a debate, really, because everyone present was a BCP supporter. It was more like venting out after the defeat at the polls. If there was any disagreement at all it would be on the methods that should be used to overthrow the upstart from the seat he had usurped from Moetapele, Ntsu Mokhehle.
Ntlabathi and I always returned to the camp in the small hours of the morning in a sodden stupor. We staggered along the streets of Maseru singing Nana Mouskouri or Frank Sinatra or Edith Piaf at the top of our voices. These were Ntlabathi’s favourite singers, in addition to Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis Junior. It was not unusual for us to stagger along the streets of Sea Point grating the midnight silence with our poor man’s imitation of Dean Martin singing ‘Volare’.
Mongrels howled and yelped and growled and barked at our contorted Italian and slurred voices. We paid no attention to them. We were somewhere in Hollywood in the hell-raising company of the Rat Pack. Yes, the very Rat Pack whose barroom brawls and trysts with glamour girls Ntlabathi narrated with relish when he was not talking revolution.
We fell silent as soon as we entered the camp at Thakalekoala’s sprawling property. We tittered as we tripped on logs scattered on the ground. We tiptoed into the room so as not to wake up the sleeping soldiers.
On one such occasion I could not even take off my clothes by myself. I was tottering all over the place, and almost fell on the men who were sleeping on mattresses on the floor. Ntlabathi asked one of the men who had raised his head warily to help me undress and prepare my bedding.
‘Help him, son of Africa, he is a stranger,’ said Ntlabathi as he fumbled with his moccasins.
‘How can I be a stranger in Africa?’ I asked.
The soldiers cheered. Those who were asleep opened their eyes and were updated by those who had heard my question.
‘What did he say?’ asked one sleepyhead.
‘He said, “how can I be a stranger in Africa?”’ answered another. And then they all broke out into fresh laughter.
‘He is a true Pan Africanist,’ one said. ‘An African can never be a stranger anywhere on the African continent.’
Just that question was enough to gain me the men’s respect. They were eager to take me under their wing. This made me feel like a real soldier of freedom, although I had some serious doubts about the nature of the war they were fighting.
The doubts had started the previous year, before PK – that’s what we lovingly called Potlako Leballo, the secretary general and acting president of the PAC, because his other name was Kitchener – was kicked out of the country by the British authorities under the pressure of the South African government.
He had once sent Ntlabathi to call me to his office at Bonhomme House. I remember him sitting behind his desk puffing on his pipe, which was the trademark of all true African revolutionaries those days. Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, the jailed president of the PAC, smoked one too. As did a number of the leaders of the ANC. As smoke rings ascended above his head he had reminded me of the oath that I took when I joined the PAC in the presence of witnesses, particularly of John Pokela, who was my father’s friend and protégé from the same village of Lower Telle, and of Ntlabathi.
‘Azania wants your service in the true spirit of our motto: Service, Suffering, Sacrifice,’ he had said.
Pride had swelled in my chest. Azania needed me!
Perhaps he wanted me to go and interpret for Ntsu Mokhehle again among the stubborn Bathepu people in the southern district of Quthing. Of course Quthing was not Azania, the PAC name for South Africa. But anything to help Ntsu Mokhehle and his BCP win the elections was a step forward towards the liberation of South Africa. For one thing, if the BCP won, Lesotho would be a base for our Poqo forces to launch guerrilla attacks into South Africa. Yes, most likely PK wanted to send me to the village of Mjanyana in the Quthing district to work with the Mokhehle people in the enemy territory of the Bathepu. I was looking forward to joining my old friends, especially Blaizer who continued to be Mokhehle’s faithful driver. This time I was going to drink those wonderful guys under the table; the last time I was with them I was not yet an imbiber of the ‘waters of immortality’ – as my Poqo comrades called brandy, quoting from a famous isiXhosa novel, Umzali Wolahleko by Guybon Sinxo.
But Leballo had soon shattered my daydream of debauchery among the red-ochre Bathepu maidens in the gullied valleys of Mjanyane when he said, ‘I want to send you to the Free State.’
I had not been to South Africa since I crossed the Telle River and was whisked into exile by Ntlabathi. Why would the leader want me to go back there?
‘You are going there to advance our cause,’ he had answered the question I had only asked in my head. ‘I want you to get work as a labourer on one of the farms. Many Basotho boys your age cross the border illegally to work as casual labourers especially at harvest time. I want you to join those workers. There’ll be others from our forces, but you’ll only know them later.’
I remember being gripped by sudden panic as he outlined his cockamamie scheme: he was recruiting me to join his secret force that would kidnap Boer children from the Free State farms to the mountains of Lesotho where he would hold them as hostages for the liberation of South Africa.
I had known immediately that I would not be up to the task. I certainly would not have the heart to kidnap children. But they were enemy children, I had argued with myself as I walked out of Bonhomme House to sunny Kingsway with throngs going about their business. Those kids were going to grow up to be big Boers with hairy arms and FN rifles; they would be kicking down doors of township houses and arresting my people for the crime of being in an urban area without the appropriate papers that permitted them to be there. They would be shooting down peaceful demonstrators as they did in Sharpeville and Langa townships only four years before, on March 21, 1960. At least sixty-nine people were killed in Sharpeville and two in Langa. Our leader Sobukwe was languishing in Robben Island Maximum Security Prison for leading those demonstrations, so I was still seething inside against the Boers for that and for all the injustices they had committed against my people over the decades. Hell, I was in exile, having left a wonderful life and the most beautiful girl who ever walked this earth in Sterkspruit because of the Boers, while they were having a great time with their children in the South Africa they were bent on denying me. So, why did I have
to feel so bad about kidnapping a few Boer children for the liberation of the suffering millions?
I had concluded that perhaps I was a weakling and a sissy.
The more I thought of PK’s assignment the more doubt and fear built up in my chest. I was the little twerp who had bungled a simple assassination back in Mohale’s Hoek. Where on earth would I find the guts to kidnap innocent kids? Well, yes, they were going to be guilty sooner or later, armed to the teeth and kicking our collective black ass, but at that point in their lives they were innocent. You didn’t punish people for a crime you thought they were going to commit in the future. Some of them might even turn out like Patrick Duncan, the white man who had recently joined the PAC, or any of the white people who were actively participating in our liberation struggle.
PK was expelled from Lesotho – which was rather strange to me because he was born there – before he could carry out his scheme, and I breathed a sigh of relief. After that I had doubts about the strategies of the Poqo forces in Lesotho, though I strongly believed in the armed struggle, as did my father as far back as the late 1940s when everyone else was still talking of passive resistance. But it was obvious that I didn’t have the stomach to carry it out myself. I would fight in other ways, using my pen. And my paint brushes.
One morning, after a particularly hectic night in the shebeens of Maseru, I was walking down Kingsway to Kingsway Café to buy some fish and chips and fat cakes when I heard a shrill voice call me: ‘Hey, wena Mda!’
A short fat woman was waddling towards me. I knew exactly what she wanted. My first instinct was to run away. But there were too many people in the street. Maybe some of them knew me. She was going to yell and holler and embarrass me for the entire world to see and laugh. Some might even chase me down the street thinking I was a thief.
‘When are you going to pay for that nip of Martell that you owe me?’ Martell was the brand name of our favourite brandy.
‘Calm down, Mmamosadi,’ I said with a broad smile. ‘I will pay you at the end of the month.’ Mmamosadi was the name by which denizens of shebeens called every shebeen queen. It translates as ‘mother-in-law’.
‘Do you think I am stupid?’ asked the shebeen queen at the top of her voice. ‘You have been owing me for more than two months now.’
Passers-by are always starving for a spectacle. They stood and watched. She grabbed my arm. ‘I am taking your watch,’ she said. ‘You’ll get it back when you have paid for my nip.’
It was a Rotary watch that I had got as a present from my father. Everyone who had seen it envied me for it because it was as flat as a twenty-five cent piece. I let her take it without any resistance. I didn’t want to give the gawkers more entertainment than they deserved. I was going to retrieve my watch somehow.
I forgot all about fish and chips and rushed back to the camp.
Ntlabathi was sitting next to a mountain of coal in front of one of the rows of houses that accommodated the Poqo freedom fighters, playing draughts with two other men. Some of the Poqo fighters were wood and coal merchants; that’s how they earned some money to send home to their families in the Eastern Cape. As soon as he saw me he left the game and came to meet me.
‘Hey, where is the fish and chips?’ he asked when he realised that my hands were not carrying a greasy paper bag.
‘The shebeen queen took my watch,’ I said. ‘And my father’s going to kill me if he finds out.’
‘AP would never kill anyone,’ he said laughing. ‘I bet he has never even meted out corporal punishment to you.’
‘Of course, he is not a beater but a talker,’ I said. ‘But that’s not the point.’
He borrowed some money from one of the coal merchants and covertly gave it to me. I immediately went to the shebeen and paid the woman for her damned nip. But she said I should come the next day for the watch because her boyfriend had borrowed it.
The next day I went back to the shebeen. Once again I didn’t get my watch back. The shebeen queen gave me another flimsy excuse, something about misplacing it somewhere in the house and she was too busy serving her customers to look for it. I just stood there powerlessly.
‘Get out of my house,’ she yelled. ‘Unless you have money to buy another nip,’ she added with a smile.
The men sitting at the table with bottles of Black Label Lager laughed.
As I scampered out of the house and the yard littered with plastic bags, dirty papers and beer cans I knew that I was never going to see my watch again. I had lost an expensive Rotary watch, a gift from my father, for a nip of cheap brandy.
Just then it dawned on me that I was not cut out for the hard-living and hard-drinking life of a revolutionary. I needed to get back to school, get educated and become a lawyer like my father.
THE RUDENESS OF LESOTHO officials to visitors is legendary. It is not just because of one or two isolated incidents that I have decided only an emergency or some really important occasion that has to do with my family will bring me back here after my mother has gone to join the ancestors. But today takes the proverbial cake. We are crossing the Maseru border post back to South Africa in my son’s Nissan four-wheel-drive twin-cab truck. My son Neo stops in the parking lot and the three of us – we are with Gugu – walk into the building to have our passports endorsed. After paying the toll fee, completing the immigration and customs forms and having our passports stamped, Gugu and I wait outside near the door while Neo goes to get the truck from the parking lot. There are two young men in police camouflage uniforms armed with AK47s sitting on chairs a short distance away. Gugu and I are holding hands as we normally do when we are together. I see that the police guys are looking at us curiously but I pay no particular attention to them. We just banter as usual. She says something funny and we laugh while I embrace her. One of the policemen stands up and says, ‘Hey, we don’t do that here.’
We are both taken aback.
‘Do what?’ I ask.
‘Hold women like that in public,’ he says. ‘We don’t do that sort of thing in this country.’
‘Says who?’ I ask.
‘Are you arguing with me?’ he asks moving towards me threateningly.
I am getting really angry now. ‘I want you to tell me what law says it is illegal for a man to hold his wife in Lesotho.’
At this time Neo arrives with the truck.
‘Let’s go, Dad,’ he says.
‘No, I am not going,’ I shout. ‘I want this man to arrest me for giving my wife a hug.’
I then grab Gugu and plant a kiss on her lips.
‘There, now I have committed an even worse crime. Did you see that, sir? I kissed her.’
I don’t think she welcomes the kiss. She is afraid for my life and would rather I jumped into the truck and we left. I can sense that Neo is of the same opinion. He is a brawny iron-pumping man in his late thirties and he visits Lesotho regularly enough to know that you don’t argue with an armed Lesotho policeman. They once locked him up in prison for a few days for some minor traffic violation.
‘Please, let’s go, Dad,’ he pleads again.
But at this point I am a raging lunatic. Even as I demand to be arrested and taken to jail forthwith I am aware I am being stupid. What if the cop obliges? He will load us into the police van and take us to the charge office where he will have to manufacture some charge because this one of hugging or even kissing my wife won’t fly with his superiors. I will finally prevail but only after our whole day has been wasted. So, why don’t I just shut up, get into the truck and go? But there is no stopping myself at this point. My people are already in the vehicle and I can see the impatience on their faces. And the fear. Only a fool argues with an AK47. But I demand that they give me a cellphone so I can call my lawyer. It is a bluff, of course; I have no lawyer in Lesotho. Well, my brother is one of the top advocates in the country, but I wouldn’t call him for anything. To put it mildly, we are not the best of friends.
The policeman just stands there looking foolish. His partner
breaks out laughing. He saves his partner’s face by ordering me to go because we are blocking the road. ‘Tsamaea, ntate, o koetse tsela mona.’ Obviously he has not come across such a round-the-bend South African traveller before and he would like to see me disappear immediately, especially because I am embarrassing him. He saw our truck’s South African number plates and thought we were just tourists whose ignorance of the laws and customs of Lesotho he was going to exploit, only to find that I am making a fool of him. Well, hard luck for him; I grew up here.
Finally, I get into the truck and we drive away. I fume for quite some time while Gugu keeps on saying ‘Sorry’ as if she was responsible for the conduct of Lesotho cops. I keep on muttering to myself: ‘Motherfuckers.’ Until Elvin Jones shakes me out of the world of arrogant policemen into another realm with a gong followed by cymbal washes. It is a Radio Metro jazz programme. Jimmy Garrison soon joins with his four-note double bass, with McCoy Tyner on the piano. When John Coltrane comes in with his tenor sax solo I am transported to an age of innocence … well, a world of less guilt … forty-three years ago. I chant along with Coltrane: A Love Supreme.
I am back at Peka High School.
I WAS INTRODUCED TO John Coltrane by Khomo Mohapeloa, who was two classes ahead of me. His parents were educationists and lived in the exclusive suburb of Maseru West, where their house was famed as one of the most beautiful in the city. I had long admired his brother, Kingston Mohapeloa, the artist who also drew cartoons for Lux Vestra. I hoped one day I would follow in his footsteps and draw the funnies for the school magazine. Both brothers were tall and handsome with very smooth faces. They were well-groomed and clean-cut. They very much reminded me of Willie Mafoso from my Mohale’s Hoek days in the way they paid particular attention to sartorial elegance.
Khomo Mohapeloa played the clarinet in a big band in Maseru, the Studio Orchestra, led by the seasoned bandleader Lesiba Mamashela. The band played mostly from Glenn Miller’s sheet music. At high school he joined Maestro Michael Mosoeu Moerane’s orchestra which was composed only of string and woodwind instruments: violins, violas, cellos, clarinets, oboes, and flutes, owned by the maestro himself rather than by the school. It was known as the Peka High School Orchestra, though. In no time he became the bandleader because he was a much more sophisticated musician than all of us put together.