Sometimes There Is a Void

by Zakes Mda

  So, that was the reason. I knew immediately that it was nothing personal. I was being crucified solely because I was a student at Peka High School, which was known far and wide as the breeding ground of Ntsu Mokhehle’s BCP. The party had been declared Communist by the Roman Catholic Church because it received support from Chairman Mao of China. The Roman Catholic Church had actively campaigned for Chief Leabua Jonathan’s BNP, which had contributed to the BNP’s winning the last elections. The Catholics were in the majority in Lesotho. The BCP, on the other hand, received most of its support from the Protestant denominations, which were much poorer and smaller. So, it was not only the urban/rural divide that was a factor in the BNP winning those elections; it was also the Catholic/Protestant chasm. Father Hamel was known to preach unashamedly against the BCP in his church at St Rose. That was why activists from the local branch of the BCP once kidnapped him, put him in a sack and abandoned him in the fields many miles away just to teach him a lesson. He became even more rabid after that.

  ‘It is not your church, you don’t own it, so I’ll be here again next Sunday and every Sunday for as long as I want,’ I said, looking down at him. He was a puny man with a bald pate and white tufts above each ear.

  Those who had gathered to listen were aghast at my defiance of the man of God. As far as they were concerned this was proof that I was indeed a Communist. Only a Communist would dare argue with a man of God.

  On my way back to school I rethought my defiance. Perhaps it was a good thing that I had been expelled from church. I hated going to church anyway but was forced to by school rules. Now I had a good reason not to go.

  On Monday I told the principal, Mr Tseliso Makhakhe, what had happened the previous day. I had hoped that he would leave it at that and it would be the end of my Sunday treks to St Rose, or any other church for that matter. But he did not. He ordered me into his Volkswagen Beetle and drove to St Rose. Father Hamel was strolling among the flowers. As soon as he saw us he walked very fast to his office and closed the fine mesh screen door. We stood outside on the steps and looked at him sitting at the desk facing the door.

  ‘Can we come in?’ asked Mr Makhakhe.

  ‘No,’ said the priest.

  I think Mr Makhakhe decided he was not going to demean himself talking to this man from the steps; he walked away. I didn’t follow him. I was rather annoyed that Father Hamel should treat my principal like an errant school boy.

  ‘You are very rude,’ I said to him.

  ‘You dare talk to me like that?’ he said. ‘You are beyond redemption. I give you an anathema.’

  ‘What?’ I asked in utter amazement.

  ‘You heard me. I give you an anathema.’

  ‘Come on, Mda,’ said the principal, already walking back to where he had parked his car around the corner. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘If that is a curse at all I’m giving it back to you, Father Hamel,’ I said. I was rather annoyed that he didn’t respond to this, so I added, ‘I give you a hundred anathemas. A thousand anathemas even. So, you take that and smoke it.’

  Thankfully, the principal did not hear me utter this curse. He would have been disappointed because he knew me as a quiet respectful boy who would not raise his voice to an adult.

  If I thought this banishment from the Roman Catholic Church would bring an end to my church-going days once and for all I was soon proved wrong. As we were driving back to school Mr Makhakhe said, ‘We are not going to beg Hamel to take you back in his church. You’ll go to the Anglican Church instead. Anyway, their services are almost the same as yours.’

  Although this was disappointing it was better than walking all those miles every Sunday. The Anglican chapel was on campus and the lay preacher who conducted the services there was my erstwhile English and Latin teacher, Mr A S Mampa, the one we called Scutum. He preached in English and Jama Mbeki was his Sesotho interpreter. It always amazed me how excellent Jama was in Sesotho even though he was a Xhosa from the Eastern Cape. At the time I was not aware of his deep Lesotho connections: his mother was a Mosotho from the Moerane family. The great maestro that I told you about was his mother’s brother. He knew how to translate Scutum’s jokes into Sesotho without losing the nuances that made them funny.

  Jama completed high school ahead of me, so I took over as Scutum’s interpreter when he left. But I could never match his voice that undulated in keeping with Scutum’s emotions as he narrated some apocalyptic event in the Bible that had to be taken as a warning lest we went through the same mess if we didn’t heed the word of God.

  I also led, as Jama had done, in the singing of hymns. The Spirit took possession of me as I sang ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ or ‘Rock of Ages Cleft For Me’. These were Scutum’s favourite hymns and he joined in his basso with gusto as did the all-boys congregation in four-part harmony.

  I took a break from these sacred tasks only on those Sundays when our school orchestra was required to play at the Church of Lesotho. There again I would play my flute in praise of the Lord.

  It was quite ironic that I, an atheist, was playing such an active role in spreading the Gospel. But then I was not a dogmatic atheist who would have nothing to do with religion. For me, all the rituals of Christianity were an act – a performance – that we could all enjoy in the same way that I enjoyed creating plays, participating in them or just watching them. God and all the members of his family were characters we had created and interacted with in our histrionic routines on Sundays. It was the sense of community that I relished in the rituals of worship, even though I knew that whatever or whoever was being worshipped existed only in our collective imagination. Why not play along if the performance gave one solace and fulfilment?

  My scepticism about religion evolved over time. Even as I served as an altar boy years before I was beginning to have some doubts about God. The question that kept on nagging me even as a child was: if God created the world and everything on it, who created God? And then who created that creator … ad infinitum? If everything must have a source, what is God’s source? Of course I would never raise these questions with my mother, let alone with my father.

  And then from the Peka High School library – the very library that had introduced me to such British and American playwrights as Joe Orton, Harold Pinter, Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee – I came across a book on world religions. I immersed myself in the world of Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Baha’i, Judaism, Sikhism, Shintoism, Zoroastrianism and a host of others, including some African Traditional and Diasporic religions. It struck me that the adherents of each one of these religions were adamant that theirs was the correct path. Yet all these religions, even those that were monotheistic, professed different philosophies and values. They might have similarities in some of their messages, but they differed significantly in particulars. Sometimes they even worshipped different deities.

  I wrote an article for the school magazine, Lux Vestra, titled: ‘Who Has the Right Path?’ What I was really asking, in fact, was what arrogance makes Christians think that they are right and everyone else is wrong? I went further to question the whole notion of God, and came to the conclusion that he was a human creation. When pre-scientific societies couldn’t deal with natural forces over which they had no control, and when they couldn’t provide answers to the mysteries of the universe, they had to attribute them to some supernatural power.

  I shared this article with my father during the holidays. He read it there and then, looked at me and said, ‘What is the point of this?’

  I was disappointed. I was hoping for praise from this man who had been extremely tolerant even of rigid atheists like John Motloheloa. I thought I was growing up to be an independent thinker, but he was dismissive of the whole effort, which proved to me that like most Christians he was so certain of the correctness of his faith that even raising the kind of questions my article was trying to put on the agenda was foolhardy, if not downright reprobate. And this from a man I had never seen go to church or pray even for a sing
le day.

  I began to read extensively, trying to find answers to these nagging questions. I read books that tried to explain and simplify Charles Darwin’s theories of the evolution that resulted from the process of natural selection. Surely the world could not have been created in six days!

  Later Gordon Tube, another teacher of English Literature, introduced us to Androcles and the Lion by George Bernard Shaw which was a prescribed text for drama. My leap into atheism was complete. Our class loved the play, an adaptation of the old story of Androclus, a slave in ancient Rome who was escaping from the cruelties of slavery and took refuge in a cave, into which a lion with a thorn in its paw came. The lion was in great pain and Androclus extracted the thorn. He was later captured and thrown into the arena to be devoured by the lions as a spectacle for the ladies and gentlemen of Rome. When the lion came into the arena it recognised Androclus as the guy who saved it from the thorn and, instead of eating him, it caressed him. Shaw made Androcles a Christian and in his play martyrdom and persecution were portrayed through comedy, some of which I found to be slapstick.

  Though we all admired Shaw’s humour in the play, it was really the Preface whose polemics captivated me. I was struck by the fact that the Preface was longer than the play. Through a long examination of the Gospel Shaw put Christianity on trial and, after reading it, religious belief, and theism itself, sounded quite ridiculous.

  Shaw’s atheism gave me permission to be atheistic without any apology. It confirmed what I had suspected all along: there is no God! For the first time I realised that I was not alone in my unbelief when I read:

  The first common mistake to get rid of is that mankind consists of a great mass of religious people and a few eccentric atheists. It consists of a huge mass of worldly people, and a small percentage of persons deeply interested in religion and concerned about their own souls and other people’s; and this section consists mostly of those who are passionately affirming the established religion and those who are passionately attacking it, the genuine philosophers being very few.

  We debated these issues in Gordon Tube’s class, and even explored another of Shaw’s plays, Saint Joan, based on the records of the trial of Joan of Arc by the Roman Catholic Church. Shaw concludes that there were no villains in this matter because everyone acted in good faith – what I later described in one of my novels as ‘the sincerity of belief’. This play and its long Preface reinforced what had been planted by the earlier play.

  Gordon Tube was the most popular of all the teachers because in his class we debated issues unhampered by convention and taboo. He empowered us with the vocabulary to articulate our ideas. He liked the essays that I wrote and, like Scutum before him, read them to the rest of the class. But what made him most popular with the boys was that he was streetwise and spoke the tsotsitaal of Johannesburg. This slang, born of the urban streets and based on a mixture of Afrikaans and other indigenous languages, with a sprinkling of invented words, gave him the sophistication that many of us could only dream of.

  I must add that Gordon Tube became my friend and drinking partner. But that was later, after I had completed high school and was carousing in Maseru. At Peka High School he became a mentor who encouraged my writing. After writing my first poem I gave it to him to critique.

  Perhaps I should tell you how I came to write this poem since I never really planned to be a poet. In fact, apart from the essays that my teachers read to my classmates, and the articles and jokes that I wrote for Lux Vestra, I had not written anything creative since my isiXhosa story, Igqirha laseMvubase, in Sterkspruit.

  The sleeping muse was awakened by the death of my dear friend Santho Mohapeloa. Don’t confuse him with clarinettist Khomo Mohapeloa who taught me a lot about reading and composing music, or with Kingston Mohapeloa the artist who created cartoons for Lux Vestra. They were cousins. Santho Mohapeloa was a gifted artist in his own right. We used to sit on the banks of the Caledon River painting landscapes of the Boer farms across the river. I used to tell him, ‘One day we’ll own those farms.’ But he was not interested in politics. Instead we talked about girls. One thing I envied him was his girlfriend Rebecca ’Nau, who at that time was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. She was herself an artist. We spent our weekends at Scutum’s house listening to music in John and Sammy’s bedroom. Sometimes I visited his home in Maseru and we socialised with the beautiful girls from St Mary’s High School.

  Unlike other boarding schools, Peka High School did not have a boarding master. Two students chosen by the principal and staff served as Head Prefect and Deputy Head Prefect and performed all the functions of a boarding master. At this point I was the Deputy Head Prefect – a post that I held for two years – and shared a room in the Square with Lesupi, the Head Prefect. Our room was known as the Cell because it looked like and was as small as a prison cell.

  One night there was a knock at the door. It was the Health Prefect with the news that Santho was ill. I was too lazy to wake up so I said, ‘Give him an aspirin; I’ll see him in the morning.’ And I went back to sleep.

  In the morning when I walked out of the big gates of the Square I saw Santho accompanied by the Health Prefect. Although he looked pale and drained he was walking without assistance. The Health Prefect told me he was taking him to the Seventh Day Adventist Hospital at Mapoteng.

  ‘How are you feeling, man?’ I asked.

  He smiled wanly and sang something to the effect that next time I saw him he wouldn’t look the same. This was a line from Champion Jack Dupree’s ‘Death of Big Bill Broonzy’. Dupree had made a promise to his friend Big Bill Broonzy that if Big Bill were to die first, Dupree would write the blues of Big Bill Broonzy, but if Dupree died first, Big Bill would do the same for him. This was comforting because it told me that Santho could still joke about his illness. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be that bad.

  I responded with another line from the same song.

  So, they took Santho away. Later that evening as we were having dinner in the school hall the principal came to announce that Santho was dead.

  I was devastated, and I don’t think I ever really recovered from this. Not only was this boy my friend and confidant, but he died on my watch. I was gnawed by the fact that I had been too lazy to wake up.

  The next day I wrote the poem in his honour, ‘Death of an Artist’, in the same way that Champion Jack Dupree wrote the blues for Big Bill Broonzy.

  But this didn’t salve my feeling of guilt. And of loss.

  Santho’s death relaunched my writing career.

  At about that time there was a buzz in Lesotho; Gibson Kente was coming to Maseru with his musical play Sikalo. We had read about this play in Drum magazine, and The World and The Golden City Post newspapers and felt honoured that Mr Kente did not forget Lesotho in his southern African tour of his musical. People hired buses from all corners of the country to the Catholic Hall in Maseru to see such stars as Kenny Majozi, Ndaba Mhlongo, Mary Twala and Zakithi Dlamini in live action.

  I was in that audience. At last I would make up for Gibson Kente’s first play, Manana the Jazz Prophet, snippets of which I saw in Sterkspruit years before, but never got to see the whole performance.

  I was impressed by Gibson Kente’s music and choreography, but I was rather disappointed by the storyline. It lacked substance and was nothing like the plays of Wole Soyinka and Harold Pinter that I read in the school library. The dialogue seemed inane and the acting was too exaggerated. I thought I could write better plays.

  As soon as I got back to Peka High I wrote my first play, Zhigos, about a gangster of that name. I had fallen in love with the name from the stories that Peter Masotsa told the habitués of the shebeens of Mafeteng about the exploits of a ladykiller called Zhigos who was a student with Peter at Pax Secondary School in Northern Transvaal. Later that year I wrote another play titled A Hectic Weekend. Gordon Tube read both plays and declared that they were wonderful works of art. Too bad I can’t locate them any more. It would have be
en interesting to read them today and see what was so wonderful about them. The only thing I remember about them is that A Hectic Weekend was a musical for which I composed the music – I sometimes catch myself singing one of the songs, the only one I still remember – and Zhigos was set partly in Nigeria. My characters sailed in a love boat from Port Harcourt to the island of Fernando Po. It didn’t matter that I had never been to Nigeria. Mphunyetsane Thatho, from whose parents we were renting our home in Mafeteng, had worked there for some years and told me how he used to spend idyllic holidays on the island of Fernando Po. In any event Nigeria was very much alive in many of us, made so by Chinua Achebe’s novels and Cyprian Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana and People of the City. For any African literature written in English to be valid it had to be set in Nigeria – or so I thought.

  These plays were never performed and I kept the manuscripts for years but, alas, they got lost in one of the many times that I have moved house in my life.

  If I imagined these creative activities would take my mind off Santho Mohapeloa it soon became clear that I was deluding myself. He haunted me and I saw him everywhere I went, especially at night. And every time he sang the line from Champion Jack Dupree.

  I spent long periods just sitting on my bed in the Cell playing the flute. Or painting portraits of my distant cousin Sibongile Twala, about whom I was obsessing at the time. She was a student at St Mary’s High School and through her I had cultivated friendships with some fantastic girls from that school. One of them was Ray Setlogelo with whom I exchanged constant letters like lovers, even though our relationship was platonic. So when I was not playing the flute or painting Sibongile in pencil and charcoal, I was writing letters to Ray.

  Sibongile and Ray had become my Muses. But despite their constant presence in my imagination I got no respite from my melancholy and the spectre of Santho Mohapeloa continued its visitations.