by Zakes Mda
Some days later Rabonne told my father about the incident. I told my father that I found Litsebe eating the meat when I visited him; I didn’t know he had stolen it. He believed me.
The next time I met with Litsebe and Peter we laughed about the matter, even though Litsebe’s weals had not yet healed, not even on his face. Our exploits in the shebeens of Mafeteng continued unabated.
We were young and beautiful and shebeen queens loved us. One shebeen queen who was known to have a penchant for young boys was ’Matefo. She was in her mid-forties – about my mother’s age at the time – and was petite. She had a phuza face – a face ravaged by alcohol. Her method of seduction was a simple one; she fed young boys with a lot of beer then took them to her den where she treated them to her body.
I once tried to have my way with her. I found her in one of our regular shebeens and we shared a bench and I shared my pineapple beer with her. In no time we were fondling each other as the can of beer passed from her lips to mine. The denizens smiled knowingly; I was going to be her victim that night. But as the minutes ticked by I began to have second thoughts.
At about midnight I told her I had to go home otherwise I would be in trouble with my father. I thought that would send a clear signal that I had no plans of spending the night at her den. She offered to walk with me anyway, since we were going the same direction. As we staggered along the footpath she tried to convince me to sleep at her place instead of going home.
‘What’s the worst thing that your father can do?’ she asked. ‘You’re a big boy now; he’s not going to beat you up.’
‘You don’t know my father; he’s going to kill me.’
‘Rubbish, everyone knows that Ntate Mda is a very nice man.’
It was true. Everyone in Mafeteng knew my father as a compassionate and generous man. But I kept on walking.
‘You don’t have to spend the night,’ pleaded ’Matefo. ‘Just one hour, then you’ll go home.’
Still, I was going to have none of that. I had to go home. But ’Matefo did not give up.
‘Okay, we can do it here on the side of the road,’ she said.
It didn’t seem like a bad idea; there would be no passers-by at that time except for the drunks who had seen it all and wouldn’t give us a second glance. So, we did it. Not quite. I tried to do it but ejaculated immediately after penetration. And then of course I couldn’t go on.
She lay there on the ground as I stood and pulled up my pants. I staggered away from her and she yelled after me, ‘You messed me up for nothing, ntja tooe.’
I could understand her anger; I didn’t mind that she called me ‘you dog’. I only felt bad that my very first sexual experience – if you don’t count the incident with Nontonje at KwaGcina when I was only six years old – was a damp squib. There were no drum rolls, no flares, no fireworks, no flourishes. Nothing.
I blamed my penis for the fiasco; perhaps if I was circumcised it would help. No, not in the isiXhosa traditional manner where boys went to the initiation school on the mountains and came back as men. I went to Morija Hospital, about forty kilometres north of Mafeteng, where a beautiful young nurse shaved my pubis and a white doctor surrounded by more beautiful nurses cut my foreskin in a brightly lit theatre while I was under local anaesthesia. The next day, after the doctor had checked that the stitches were fine, I was discharged from hospital.
My father made such a big fuss of my circumcision, as if it had been the real McCoy traditional ritual, and invited some relatives from Herschel who sat on my mother’s Bradlows sofas and told me of the responsibilities of manhood while they chewed meat noisily and drank Castle Lager. I knew this was a charade on their part, just to please my father; according to their customs and traditions I was nothing but a coward to have gone to the hospital for circumcision instead of roughing it up on the mountain where my foreskin would be mutilated with a blunt instrument. But I didn’t give a damn because my life was not with the amaXhosa who still valued such customs that in my view no longer had a place in the modern world, but with the Basotho whose educated classes had long stopped the practice. In Lesotho only the illiterates in the rural areas continued with it. With the amaXhosa, on the other hand, right up to this day, most people – even the educated ones with PhDs and professional degrees – still hold the practice dear and send their children to the mountain for circumcision and initiation into manhood.
As soon as the greybeards had returned to Herschel I was back in the shebeens with my friends Litsebe Leballo and Peter Masotsa. At Mamolibeli’s shebeen I boasted about my newly circumcised penis to the envy of the habitués. I was not aware that Mamolibeli, an old lady in her fifties but famous in the town for her boy toy lovers, had designs on me. Just when we were leaving she called me to her room and suggested that I spend the night. I told her about my stitched wound which was still far from healed.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I heard you boast about it. We won’t do anything naughty. You’ll just hold me and then we’ll fall asleep in each other’s arms.’
I thought this was quite unscrupulous of her because my mother counted her as one of her friends. I didn’t tell her that, though. I wouldn’t want her think I was some kind of a mama’s boy. Instead I told her that a situation like that was still bound to cause me a lot of pain. What kind of a man would want to be in bed with her and do nothing? This flattered her, I think, and she gave me a broad smile and said that we would try next time when I had healed.
After that I gave Mamolibeli the widest berth possible.
That hot summer my activities were not confined only to carousing. Three women the likes of which we had never before seen in Mafeteng arrived in town and were based at Bereng High School, where they would be teaching. They were American Peace Corps volunteers and were all beautiful in their different ways. Marie Peterson was white and blonde, Patricia Eaton was African American with straight brownish hair, and Lois Saito was Japanese American with jet black hair.
Up to that point, the only Americans we had seen were in the movies or in the magazines that Peter Masotsa bought relentlessly, or in the stories of the escapades of the Rat Pack which Ntlabathi Mbuli used to tell me. But here were live Americans walking the streets of our dusty little town and making friends with everyone without putting on airs.
At first we were wary of these women. I remember one day we were discussing their presence in a shebeen and as usual I was occupying centre stage since I knew all about American imperialism. I was telling the habitués how President Kennedy founded the Peace Corps about five years before to advance the USA’s imperialist agenda in the world. This was in line with the Basutoland Congress Party’s way of thinking; the party had vehemently opposed Prime Minister Leabua Jonathan when he invited the Peace Corps to work in Lesotho.
‘It’s one more proof that Leabua is a sell-out,’ said Litsebe. His politics was always diametrically opposed to his father’s.
‘What did you expect from a man who was put in power by the Boers?’ I asked. ‘He obviously would be in cahoots with their American allies.’
‘What do you expect from a man who has only passed Standard Six?’ asked another drinker.
Peter said nothing. He avoided political discussions. We knew that it was because he worked for the Catholic priest and was most likely sympathetic to the BNP.
But soon enough the American women disarmed us with their friendliness and we forgot that they were imperialist agents. I found myself visiting the shebeens less and spending more time with these women at their house at Bereng High School. They were in their twenties and were university graduates; I was only a teenager and a high school student, so I never thought of them romantically except in my wet dreams.
Through one of them – I don’t remember which one – I discovered a poet called LeRoi Jones. The Dead Lecturer was the book and I took it with me everywhere I went. On the occasions when I went to the shebeens with my friends I quoted for them from The Dead Lecturer as we passed the can of pineapple be
er around: Crow Jane, Crow Jane, don’t hold your head so high. You realize, baby, you got to lay down and die. In this epigraph to a series of poems about Crow Jane he was quoting Mississippi Joe Williams. These poems became my mantra. ‘Your people/ without love.’ And life/ rots them. Makes a silence/ blankness in every space/ flesh thought to be. First light,/ is dawn. Cold stuff/ to tempt a lover. Old lady/ o f flaking eyes. Moon lady/ of useless thighs. These lines reverberated in my mind, and in the shebeens of Mafeteng as those on whom they left a deep impression repeated them long after I was gone. Or sometimes quoting from the fifth Crow Jane poem ‘The dead lady canonized’: The lady is dead, may the Gods,/ those others/ beg our forgiveness. And Damballah, kind father,/ sew up/ her bleeding hole.
I didn’t know what LeRoi Jones was on about here, but whatever it was I liked it. So did the habitués of the shebeens of Mafeteng. The main reason we found this poetry so evocative was that we were schooled only in the poetry of the Romantics where metre and rhyme reigned and The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold/ And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold. We never imagined that poetry could sound so much like jazz as did LeRoi Jones’s.
I have often wondered what happened to Marie Peterson and Patricia Eaton. I know exactly what happened to Lois Saito. She married one of the teachers at Bereng High School, Mr Sebatane, and I was to meet them and their beautiful children many years later when I became a lecturer at the National University of Lesotho. They were both academics there as well.
On Christmas Day – actually from Christmas Eve – all the gallivanting had to stop. I could not visit the beautiful Peace Corps women or shebeen crawl with Litsebe and Peter. My siblings and I all had to be home in our brand new clothes for a big Christmas lunch of rice and chicken and vegetables and beetroot and custard and jelly. After lunch we lounged around listening to Handel’s ‘Messiah’, Bach’s ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’, Marian Anderson, the Singing Bells and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
A few weeks earlier my father would harness all of us in the house to address envelopes for the Christmas cards that he sent to a long list of friends. He also received hundreds of Christmas cards from them. We hung all these on strings stretching from one wall to the other, forming rows and rows of Christmas decorations. This was one of the few activities that we performed all together as a family. And this was the only time we ever saw my father doing something other than preparing for cases with stacks of files and law books on the table. Actually, I don’t remember my father ever being there for my mother. He was either at his office or in court. Whenever he was at home he was still buried in his work. He worked at home a lot and no one could speak to him then. There had to be silence in the house. I don’t remember ever seeing my parents sitting down on a sofa having a conversation. Perhaps they did have conversations when they were in their bedroom at night. There were never any public displays of affection. Everything seemed so serious all the time.
This made a lasting impression on me, especially when I visited other families and saw mothers and fathers behaving like old buddies and laughing and ribbing each other.
Another thing that was a source of resentment for us kids was that we seemed to be rather poor for the children of a lawyer and a registered nurse. We were renting our house in the shabby part of town among peasants and blue-collar workers rather than on Hospital Road where all the rich business and professional people lived. We didn’t even own a car. I was more resentful when one day a car salesman parked two fancy convertibles in front of our house and tried to interest my father in buying one. But my father wouldn’t even look at them. All hope died in me and my siblings that we would ever have a car.
I am not trying to suggest here that we ever went hungry. All our basic needs were taken care of – a roof over our heads, good food and decent clothes. We were certainly better off than our neighbours. But they were not our point of reference. Perhaps even Mafeteng was not our point of reference, but the bourgeois families of Maseru. We thought that our father’s attorney-at-law title should have earned us the right to be like those kids who were fetched from Peka High School in posh cars by their mothers and fathers while we had to ride on buses.
Of course as we got older we got to understand our father better. He was totally dedicated to the struggle for the liberation of South Africa and to his clients. He charged the clients very little money to defend their cases, and sometimes no fees at all. Basotho people knew already that if you came with a sob story Mda would take your case for nothing. Yes, he would ask them to promise that they would pay when they got some money, but they never did. In one of the corners of our bedroom there was a folding bed that was left by a client who had promised to retrieve it after paying the fees. He won the case but never came back. My father believed in serving his people, and he did this at the expense of his family. He expected his family to sacrifice just as he did, and would feel wounded if any of us complained. That was why he never had any family time either, with us or with my mother. And that was why he never accumulated any personal wealth.
I remember once when he criticised his colleagues, T T Letlaka, with whom he had served articles under George Matanzima in the Transkei, and Wycliffe Tsotsi, who was in partnership with Letlaka in a lucrative law practice in Maseru. The two attorneys had just bought brand new Mercedes Benz sedans that looked exactly the same. My father felt that they were showing off, which would alienate the people of their host country who couldn’t afford such cars.
Oh, yes, my father’s key trait, which used to annoy me at the time, was humility. He was also the most generous and the most compassionate of men. Today, of course, these have become my guiding values. In many respects I am now my father. Well, a less smart version of him.
YOU CAN SEE ST Rose Mission from Leabua Highway as you drive out of Peka. Eucalyptus and pine trees surround sandstone buildings that are roofed with red corrugated iron sheets.
‘That is the place,’ I point it out to Gugu when we drive past on our way from the Bee People of the Eastern Cape. ‘That’s the place where I was given an anathema.’
At the time I didn’t know what an anathema was. I still don’t know what it entails ecclesiastically, or whether a small-time parish priest has the authority from the Holy See to give the likes of me an anathema, as did Father Hamel of the St Rose Catholic Church in 1967. At the age of nineteen I carried it on my shoulders with pride and boasted to the boys in our dormitory, ‘Hey majita (guys), I have the anathema.’
We all broke out laughing about it.
It was only Peter Mofolo who looked at me disapprovingly and told us that it was no laughing matter. I put it down to the fact that Peter Mofolo, a grandson of the great Sesotho novelist Thomas Mofolo, was just jealous because he didn’t have an anathema of his own. Or maybe he just wanted to get even after I had tried to embarrass him in front of his friends a few days before. We had just read Thomas Mofolo’s novel Moeti oa Bochabela (The Traveller from the East) which was a set book in our class when I hollered at him: ‘Hey Pinky, your grandfather wrote shit, man!’
We called him Pinky because like a lot of his Bataung clan who are descendants of the Khoikhoi he was light in complexion.
‘Oh, yeah?’ he said. ‘And what did yours write?’
That shut me up. My grandfather had not written a damn thing. All he knew was to make shoes.
I liked Pinky a lot, even though he was now being dismissive of my anathema.
This is how the anathema came to pass. I was in church singing hymns and minding my own business. It was not my choice to be there. School regulations forced every student to go to church on Sundays. Although Peka High School was owned jointly by the Protestant Church of Lesotho and the Anglican Church, the authorities were so liberal that they allowed students to attend their own denominations, as long as they were in the vicinity of Peka village. Since I was a Catholic, I walked to St Rose – about ten miles from the high school – for my weekly dose of obligatory religion.
I noticed that as Father Hamel conducted the Holy Mass he kept looking in my direction. After a while he beckoned the catechist and whispered something in his ear, just as he was preparing for the Sacrament. The catechist tiptoed to me and whispered in my ear.
‘Father Hamel wants you to leave his church right away,’ he said.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Because you are from Peka High School.’
He was looking at my green blazer with the yellow badge. The badge was my pride because I had designed it for the school that very year. I took particular pleasure in the open book with a flaming torch and the motto: Luceat Lux Vestra – Let your light shine. That’s how the priest knew I was from the high school – the green blazer with the yellow badge.
‘No, tell him I’m not going anywhere,’ I said.
The catechist was taken aback that I was defying his boss. He stood there for a while staring at me. But I did not budge. I focused on the hymnal instead. He tiptoed back to the priest.
The time for the Sacrament came and I joined the line. When it was my turn to receive the body of Christ the priest skipped me and gave it to the next person. ‘Well, he can keep his Sacrament,’ I said to myself and went back to the pews.
After the service Father Hamel rushed out in full gear, without first taking off his surplice and stole as he normally did. As the congregation streamed out of the church he was already waiting outside the door, a thing he had never done before. He was not in the habit of greeting his congregants at the door after the service.
It turned out he was waiting for me.
‘Why did you refuse when I ordered you out of my church?’ he asked.
‘Because I didn’t understand why you wanted me to leave,’ I said.
‘Because you are a Communist, that’s why. I don’t want Communists in my church.’