Sometimes There Is a Void

by Zakes Mda

  The maestro was one of the leading composers of choral music in southern Africa whose modern classics such as Sylvia and Tlong Rothothang are sung by choirs in the region even today. Unlike other famous composers of his generation, such as J P Mohapeloa, he had a degree in music and his compositions were not confined to choral music but included orchestral music as well. He is reputed to be the first African to compose a symphony. Although I never heard this particular composition, I heard that it was in four movements.

  I was a member of the Peka High School Orchestra too and played the flute. Although the maestro taught us the rudiments of staff notation, it was really Khomo Mohapeloa who taught me the more complicated major and minor scales. The orchestra played hymns on Sundays at the Church of Lesotho services, the Protestant denomination formerly known as the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society, about three miles from the school. But my best moments were when we played at school occasions such pieces as Boccherini’s Baroque ‘Minuet Célèbre’ and Jacques Offenbach’s ‘Barcarolle’ from ‘Tales of Hoffman’. The latter was my particular favourite because my flute had a dominant role throughout the piece, albeit a repetitive one.

  We practised thrice a week outside the maestro’s house or in the school hall and I looked forward to those moments. When the maestro was not there the woodwind guys played jazz instead of sticking to classical music. Khomo Mohapeloa would tell us all about John Coltrane and Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, also known as the Bird, and Stanley Turrentine and his wife, Shirley Scott, and a host of other jazz cats in all the different idioms. He would then make simpler arrangements of some of the numbers for us to play, and sometimes we would break into crazy jam sessions of bebop.

  Here we also dabbled in our own compositions. One composition that still lives in my mind was ‘Matebesi’s Farewell Blues’ by the same Khomo Mohapeloa. Yes, he had written a jazz number for the Latin teacher who was the reason for my deserting school for a number of months after I cheated in an exam. He was leaving Peka High School to study law in South Africa and he had been so popular with the boys that the band was going to play this composition at his farewell concert. And I was going to be part of that band even though I still had a grudge against him. I had returned to Peka High School to find him still there. It was as if the incident had never happened because he never mentioned it. It was a silly grudge anyway, I told myself as I rehearsed with the band, because it was not his fault that I had been so foolish as to be caught with a koantsanyane.

  Thanks to Down Beat magazine we became connoisseurs of jazz and started accumulating our own collections of LPs which we ordered from Kohinoor in Johannesburg. I had albums of Duke Ellington, Mackay Davashe, Count Basie, Dollar Brand, Chris McGregor and the Blue Notes, Johnny Hodges, Thelonious Monk, Early Mabusa, Sonny Stitt, Jimmy Smith, Milt Jackson, Sonny Rollins and Miles Davis. I identified mostly with Roland Kirk because he played the flute so well, in addition to the tenor sax and many other instruments. Later we were to discover Herbie Mann and ‘Memphis Underground’ became our anthem.

  Our tastes were quite catholic though. We also loved the soul music of the time; Booker T and the MGs, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding and of course Aretha Franklin. And when I visited Scutum’s sons John and Sammy at their four-roomed home on campus just a few yards from the Square where we had our dormitories, we listened to the blues of Champion Jack Dupree and to the pop of Tommy Jones and the Shondells.

  But of all the different kinds of music we listened and sang to, Coltrane’s ‘Love Supreme’ was sacred. To this day it has a powerful effect on me. I don’t go out of my way to listen to it. I don’t even own it. But on those very rare occasions when I hear it played I get goosebumps and am attacked by pangs of nostalgia.

  I was grateful to have returned to Peka High despite the shame that had made me consider going to a different school. My father would have none of that nonsense, especially because I could not give any good reason why I wanted to change schools. Anywhere else in Lesotho I would not have had the opportunity to immerse myself so much in the world of jazz and classical music – not only as a consumer but as a creator and interpreter through my flute.

  One day the maestro heard me play Dvorak’s ‘Humoresque 7’ and he was amazed that I had mastered it on my own even though it was not part of our repertoire.

  ‘We’ve got to play this together some time,’ he said. ‘I’ll accompany you on the piano.’

  I thought he was just talking. But sure enough, months later he called me to his studio in his big stone house and we started rehearsing for the end-of-year concert. He invited Shadrack Mapetla to join us with his clarinet. He had recently taken over as bandleader after Khomo Mohapeloa completed high school and went to the University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland where we heard to our consternation that he had abandoned music for mathematics.

  My performance of ‘Humoresque’ with Shadrack Mapetla and Maestro M M Moerane accompanying my flute haunts me to this day. It was my first public performance and my last – apart from playing the hymns in church. I brought the house down with an instrument that the musically challenged boys never thought highly of because all they had ever heard from it were the trills as it accompanied the ‘Barcarolle’. I can still hear the applause and the whistling from a standing ovation.

  Years later, when I was teaching at a Roman Catholic high school in Maseru, Maestro M M Moerane came to see me. He talked fondly of the performance and wanted us to play together again, more than just the Dvorak. I was excited about the prospect, though I thought I was a bit rusty. I looked forward to it. As soon as he left I fetched my flute which had been lying idle in some cupboard for years and started playing again. I played the kwela music that I used to play on a pennywhistle on the verandas of the stores in Dobsonville when I was a little boy. I also played Dvorak’s ‘Humoresque’. Over and over again. I could already hear the maestro’s piano in the background. Tinkling sounds like drops of rain. I could already see a mesmerised audience, and then the kind of standing ovation that we received at Peka High.

  But only a few weeks later I heard that the maestro was dead. I was devastated. It was the death of music. I decided that since I couldn’t play with him I would never play in public again.

  Today I play only for myself and members of my family.

  DECEMBER HOLIDAYS WERE THE best of times and the worst of times, a period of wisdom and of foolishness all rolled up in one hot season, to hijack the opening lines of a Charles Dickens novel the seniors were reading.

  It was the worst of times because I was at home in Mafeteng under the strict regime of my father. Though my siblings and I didn’t do any chores except water the garden because we always had maids – euphemistically referred to as helpers or workers – we had to help my father find his files in his office for the following weeks’ cases. I was always irked by the fact that his filing system was non-existent. His files did not have reference numbers; they were all piled on the floor, each folder fastened with twine. We had to go through stacks of these files looking for specific cases on the list. Then we had to do the same with volumes of The South African Law Reports which were also stacked haphazardly on the bookshelves, the table and the floor. Lesotho courts still got most of their precedent from cases decided in South African courts; that’s why Lesotho’s system was based on Roman Dutch Law even though the country was a former British colony.

  I wondered how my father knew which of the volumes to read to get precedent for the specific cases he was preparing for. I never understood why he never had these books bound in leather according to number and volume as other lawyers did in Maseru.

  Sometimes we performed this task in the evening, one of us holding a paraffin lamp or a candle while others knelt on the floor reading the clients’ names on the folders.

  But these worst of times were ameliorated by the fact that we were having a wonderful time as a family, especially when my father was in court, at his office or travelling the country defending stock thi
eves, murderers and sundry criminals. I was able to spend a lot of time with my mother, the twins Sonwabo and Monwabisi – who were now called Thabo and Thabiso by everybody since the names that I had given them had stuck while mine, Motlalepula, had long fallen into disuse – my sister Thami and the youngest of my brothers, Zwelakhe. The twins had just completed primary school and were going to join me at Peka High School the following year. So, I took pride in playing older brother and giving them back copies of Lux Vestra so that they could acquaint themselves with the ways of boarding school.

  I never really became close friends with my siblings and we rarely talked about girlfriends and the good life out there in the shebeens. I was not much into girlfriends anyway, and I continued to hanker after Keneiloe. With the passing of the months and the years she had acquired a mythical stature in my imagination, a goddess akin to those of the Greeks and the Romans. I did have a local girlfriend though – Rhoda Mafikeng, the daughter of the trade unionist Elizabeth Mafikeng who owned a café and restaurant in partnership with Chris Hani’s father.

  Rhoda was very beautiful and the parents on both sides seemed to approve of our relationship. Our mothers could already see in some distant future a marriage between our PAC and ANC families. But I neglected Rhoda and was not an attentive boyfriend because those days I would rather spend my time in the shebeens drinking home-brewed pineapple beer with my friends Peter Masotsa and Litsebe Leballo. So, after an exchange of love letters – even though we lived in the same town – and after a lot of patience from her our relationship fizzled out.

  I never got to know Peter’s age but he looked much older than us, although he was so scrawny you’d think the wind would blow him away. And he walked as if he was in a constant battle with a gale force wind. His face had razor bumps so he shaved perhaps every day, whereas Litsebe and I had not yet grown a single whisker. Peter was more mature in other ways as well. Whereas both Litsebe and I were still students at junior high schools, he had completed his secondary school education years before and was working full-time as a clerk for the priest at St Gerard Catholic Church. He also ran a pen pal club. He advertised in the classified section of South African tabloids and people sent him money to join the club and be introduced to fellow club members from different parts of southern Africa. Every day he received a stack of two rand postal orders that he cashed at the post office. So we always had a lot of money to buy beer and magazines with half-naked girls in them. When we were not drinking we spent a lot of time reading Scope, Drum and other magazines of that ilk in the room he rented in a big stone house opposite the Catholic Mission where he worked.

  Litsebe, on the other hand, was about my age. Maybe a year older. His father, Ntate Ngope Leballo, was a staunch supporter of Chief Leabua Jonathan’s BNP and never let anyone forget that his own brother Potlako Leballo, the leader of the PAC, was a disgrace to the Leballo clan. ‘When I cross the border to South Africa I get interrogated by the Boers, thanks to Potlako,’ he would say. Despite his hostile attitude towards the PAC he was my father’s trusted sidekick, a testimony to my father’s open-mindedness and tolerance of all those who held different views.

  Indeed, colourful characters from all political persuasions – both on the left and the right of the PAC – visited my father at home. Comrade John Motloheloa, the founding secretary general of the Communist Party of Lesotho, would preach his gospel according to Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin from the doorstep of my home. Passers-by would gather in front of our house to heckle him and provoke him with questions about God. He was a vehement atheist and would shout back: ‘There is no God, you fools. Religion is the opium of the people.’ People always laughed at this; it was obvious that they treated anyone who denied the existence of God as a joke. It was thanks to him that the only thing that the people of Mafeteng knew about Communism was that it was the wayward belief that God does not exist.

  When John Motloheloa was encountering problems in his work as the leader of the Communist Party he confided in my father, even though my father was known to utter hostile statements against Communists. I remember one morning when Motloheloa came to my house fuming that Joe Matthews, the Communist lawyer in Maseru whose main claim to fame was that he was the son of the revered Professor Z K Matthews, had betrayed him. Apparently Joe Matthews had been instrumental in either the establishment or the revival of the Communist Party of Lesotho by providing the money, since he was a conduit of funds from Moscow. But all of a sudden Matthews had turned against his party and was now supporting the Marematlou Freedom Party, whose ideology had nothing to do with scientific socialism. It was in fact a Royalist party supported by the King himself and by most of those chiefs who were not already in Chief Leabua Jonathan’s BNP camp. Motloheloa blamed the African National Congress for this turncoat behaviour. They were opportunists who hoped to strengthen their weak presence in the country by throwing in their lot with the MFP because the stronger BCP was already in alliance with the PAC, and the BNP with the apartheid government of South Africa.

  My father always gave Motloheloa’s rant a sympathetic ear. Often he offered his perspective of the situation for he was known for his insightful political analysis.

  But I digress. I was telling you about my high jinks with Peter Masotsa and Litsebe Leballo. I was eighteen so my father let me come and go as I pleased at any hour of the day or night, as long as I reported to him or my mother before I left, and as long as I had performed the only chores that we had, looking for his files and watering the garden. So much for his famous strictness. I am sure he didn’t expect that I had gone drinking when officially I was supposed to be discussing creative writing with old man Sebolai Matlosa, the Sesotho novelist who was our neighbour and from whose butchery we bought our meat. His novel Mopheme, about scallywags, scoundrels and rogues, was at that time being serialised as a radio play on Radio Bantu and so having conferences with him either at his place of business or at his home across the street made sense. He was a nice, accommodating man though he didn’t look anything like I imagined a writer would look.

  Usually I only went to Matlosa’s place to say hello so that if anyone asked him if he had seen me that day he would say yes, and proceeded to Peter Masotsa’s place.

  Our bedroom – the four Mda boys’ – had a separate entrance that opened to the green stoep of the green-roofed stone house that my father was renting from the Thatho family. I could stagger home in the early hours of the morning without my parents being any the wiser that I had been away all that time. They never caught me drunk.

  My father trusted me so much that he did not even believe a report from a certain Rabonne to the effect that one day he found me in the company of thieves who had stolen his meat from a boiling pot. Yet it was true. I was in cahoots with the thief, also known as Litsebe Leballo. You see, during our drinking sprees we often got hungry and bought smiley from the shebeen queens. Smiley was a term of endearment for a boiled head of a sheep which was a delicacy for connoisseurs of home-brewed beer like us.

  On this particular occasion we visited Rabonne’s shebeen as part of our shebeen crawling expedition. I knew him very well because, like Litsebe’s father, he was one of my father’s flunkies, some kind of a gofer who was always there for him whenever he needed assistance with something. We found him and a few men who were wearing traditional Basotho blankets in all their colourful splendour playing dice. They didn’t pay any attention to us as Peter Masotsa bought a billycan of pineapple beer and took a few gulps before passing it to me. I guzzled it. It was very good as usual. Rabonne’s wife had a beautiful hand that knew how to brew, as the Basotho would say. I passed the can to Litsebe. But he was not there. I didn’t think much of it; he might have gone to blind the lizard, a Sesotho idiom for taking a leak. So I passed the can to Peter, who passed it to another man sitting on the opposite bench. People share in a Lesotho home-brew establishment. After a while Litsebe appeared at the door.

  ‘Let’s go, guys,’ he said.

  ‘What’s th
e rush?’ I asked. ‘Don’t you like Rabonne’s pineapple?’

  ‘Come on, let’s go,’ he said. He was already leading the way down Rabonne’s many steps.

  We went to Litsebe’s home, which was only a few houses away. As we sat down on the benches in the kitchen he took out a steaming smiley from under his jacket. He had stolen it from a pot as it was cooking. It had the smell of undercooked meat, but in our drunkenness it was good enough to eat. All we needed was to season it with a lot of salt and we greedily went for the ears and the tongue and the fat that cushioned the eyes. We were not bothered by the taste of rawness. We congratulated Litsebe for his resourcefulness as we masticated the rubbery flesh until our jaws were sore.

  We were planning our next move, for the night was still too young to halt our shebeen crawling, when Rabonne burst into the house without even knocking. We had only managed to eat half the head, and the rest was on the table in front of us, jaw bones and all. He was wielding a whip and he looked at the evidence of our crime, shook his head sorrowfully and went straight for Litsebe. He didn’t bother with me or with Peter. He lashed out blindly at Litsebe. ‘You bloody thief,’ he yelled. ‘I am going to kill you.’

  Litsebe tried to find refuge between the cupboard and the Welcome Dover stove, but Rabonne’s sjambok reached him there. He was bawling and asking for forgiveness. We thought it wise to take cover even though Rabonne didn’t seem to be interested in us. Litsebe finally found his way to the door and ran out screaming. Rabonne ran after him. But we knew he was never going to catch him.