Sometimes There Is a Void

by Zakes Mda

To cap it all, at the end of the year Otis Redding died in a plane crash.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I HAVE KNOWN GUGU for more than twenty years. Even before we got to know each other well we discovered that we shared common values in a very uncanny manner. As if we had been brought up in the same family. I would utter something and it would sound so familiar to her she would ask: ‘Are you sure you’re not Josephine’s child?’ Josephine is her mother. It turned out that, like me, she would insist on buying her kids black dolls – this was long before she had kids of her own – and would never let them play with toy guns. We love the earth and we value all sentient life, a position that led us to become squeamish about meat, even though we came from a strong meat-eating culture. Remind me later to tell you of the ducks that forced us into vegetarianism. We are against the death penalty, and celebrate the fact that our country did away with it, but deplore the lenient sentences that our criminals get from our courts. We are pro-choice in so far as women’s reproductive rights are concerned and believe that gay rights are human rights. We celebrate the fact that these rights are enshrined in our country’s Constitution, one of the very few in the world that spells out sexual orientation. We believe in these rights so strongly that we have at various times involved ourselves in campaigns whenever they were infringed. Gugu is more of an active gay rights activist than I am and attends LGBT activities on our campus. To crown it all, she has undertaken the arduous task of educating and counselling a neighbour who is the parent of a beautiful gay son but, much as she loves him, is ashamed of him because of his sexual orientation.

  We both recoil at homophobia in all its manifestations.

  So, we walk into the spacious bar of Maseru Sun Cabanas this particular evening and order a drink. We are both teetotallers so she asks for a glass of water and for old times’ sake I order a non-alcoholic passion fruit cocktail that I remember the barmen here mixing so well. We are both bushed after the long drive from the Bee People.

  And there is Mr Dizzy sitting in an easy chair counting a lot of coins that he will obviously be sharing with a scruffy partner who is sitting opposite him. The two gamblers must have won the money in the slot machines in the next room. He doesn’t see me; he is too engrossed in stacking the coins into two piles. At the same time he is trying to stop his gambling partner from grabbing a stray coin that rolled on the thick carpet and lodged itself near the leg of the coffee table.

  ‘Hey, Mr Dizzy,’ I call him.

  He looks up and squints his eyes to make sure that what they think they are seeing is indeed what they are seeing. He forgets all about his slot machine winnings and comes over to the bar counter where we are already seated.

  ‘Hey, you Saferi! You Sopete! You Masoba-a-Lieta!’ he says, calling me after bumbling cartoon characters whose exploits we used to follow decades ago in Moeletsi-oa-Basotho, a Catholic Church newspaper. He is so excited to see me that he gives me a hug and kisses me – smack! – on the lips.

  I see the disgust on Gugu’s face.

  After some small talk – me trying to find out what he has been up to in the years that we have not seen each other and he waffling something that I cannot understand because he is too drunk – Mr Dizzy goes back to the serious business of counting coins.

  ‘Sies,’ says Gugu. ‘He kissed you on the lips.’

  ‘Yes, he did,’ I respond. I am quite amused.

  ‘And you seemed to enjoy it,’ she says, even more disgusted.

  ‘Yes, I did,’ I say. Of course, I did not; the man reeked of beer, although his lips were surprisingly soft for someone so alcohol-ravaged.

  I break out laughing because I didn’t think she would look so serious about a simple kiss from a friend. I have many female friends who are ravishingly beautiful. There is Nakedi Ribane, for instance, tall and graceful. She used to be one of the two black South African models who attained fame on international ramps and magazine covers some years back. She would have been called a super model if that term had been coined at the time, and of course she has lost none of her looks. And then there is Motshabi Tyelele, one of our leading actresses of stage, film and television, whose playwriting career I have mentored. Whenever I meet these women after I have been away in the USA for an extended period we kiss squarely on the lips. And that has never bothered Gugu. She has actually kissed them on the lips too.

  So, why is she aghast at Mr Dizzy’s kiss? I don’t ask her. But clearly it is because Mr Dizzy is a man and convention dictates that real men don’t kiss. We may be anti-homophobia rationally but some of the prejudices of our upbringing may continue to linger under our skin, only to crawl out at unguarded moments.

  I FIRST MET SECHELE Khaketla, also known as Mr Dizzy after Dizzy Gillespie and after Tommy Roe’s pop song, in the mid-sixties soon after his return from England where his parents had sent him for his high school education. His father was B M Khaketla, the famous Sesotho novelist who was also the secretary general of Marematlou Freedom Party and a member of the King’s Privy Council. His mother, ’Masechele Khaketla, was even more famous as a novelist and playwright. She was also the founder and owner of a prestigious private school. They had a palatial home in Maseru West, in the same street where the artistic Mohapeloa brothers with whom I was at high school lived. They were the elite of Lesotho who sent their kids for private piano lessons; hence Sechele and his sister were accomplished pianists. They were the bourgeois kids I felt my siblings and I should have been had our father not nailed his colours firmly to the mast of a proletarian ship.

  Mr Dizzy didn’t give a hoot for his good breeding. He had no intention of living up to his parents’ expectations. Many Basotho people went to England or America for university degrees, especially graduate degrees, but it was unheard of for parents to send a boy all the way to England just for high school. Only the Khaketlas and King Moshoeshoe II did that. But over there Mr Dizzy didn’t pay much attention to his studies. Public school was a waste of his precious time. So, he played the piano in skanky nightclubs and bars and drank himself into a sodden mess. No one was surprised when he flunked his A-levels. When his parents got wind of his capers they sent for him. He eluded the emissaries and went underground, sleeping rough with hoboes. It took his father months to track him down and bring him back to Lesotho.

  That’s when I met him, fresh from his merrymaking in London. What brought us together was art rather than music. He was a wonderful painter and I still have a vivid memory of one particular oil painting of his: an ashtray overflowing with stubs of cigarettes. It was not so much the subject but how it was rendered that fascinated me. The way the old impressionists of a century ago would have done it, using unmixed primary colours to play with light and shadows on the tablecloth, the ashtray and the smoke rising from a smoldering cigarette. I was also impressed by the fact that he could make such a mundane subject interesting. How many of us had seen ashtrays with cigarette stubs and never thought of painting them?

  There was a strong community of artists in Maseru those days, led by Meshu Mokitimi whose work had first come to my notice, as I mentioned earlier, in the form of cartoons in the BCP organ, Makatolle. It turned out when I got to know him personally that drawing political cartoons was just a sideline for him; he was actually one of the very best painters in oil, acrylics and pastels that I have ever met. I remember earlier on when I was still at Peka High School that he used to give art lessons to a whole bunch of us. There I was with my brother Sonwabo, who was also artistically gifted, and Santho Mohapeloa and his girlfriend Rebecca ’Nau and Mr Dizzy painting murals in the small room he rented at the home of one of our beautiful St Mary’s High School friends, Mokone Tlale.

  Meshu introduced us to the nuns and monks at Mazenod who specialised in watercolour landscapes of the Maluti Mountains and to another Lesotho landscape realist, Paul Ncheke, whose work of the mountains and rivers and aloes and huts of Lesotho was exhibited internationally. Paul Ncheke was so much impressed with my charcoal sketches titled ‘No Peace With
out Justice’ that he exhibited them alongside his work in Edmonton, Canada. It was my first exposure to the international art world. He brought me some cash from Canada; my charcoals had been bought. I don’t remember now how much it was, but it was the first money I earned from my artwork. The excitement reminded me of the first money that I earned from my writing before I left Sterkspruit for exile.

  All this art activity prompted Chief Leabua Jonathan – the prime minister that we despised so much for winning the elections against our hero Ntsu Mokhehle – to establish a museum of art in Maseru with Reggie Senkoto as its curator. It housed collections from such South African artists as Father Frans Claerhout, Percy Sedumedi, Dubile Mhlaba and Ephraim Ngatane. These artists also came to Lesotho occasionally to work with us.

  Our creativity involved a lot of political activism as well. A war had broken out in Nigeria in 1967 after the Governor of the Eastern Region, Colonel Ojukwu, announced a unilateral secession of the region, then named Biafra, from the Nigerian federation. General Gowon, who was the president of Nigeria, would have none of it, and he sent his federal forces to invade Biafra and bring it back into the fold of the federation.

  We were fully in support of Biafra and we held art exhibitions to raise awareness of the plight of the Igbo people.

  By 1969 Biafra was under siege from the federal forces and we heard of the terrible famine because Gowon would not let any food supplies into the region. We organised a big art exhibition in Maseru titled ‘The Children of Biafra’. I remember oil paintings by such renowned painters as Phil Motsosi of Loretto and Paul Molefe portraying starving children with swollen kwashiorkor bellies. Both Mr Dizzy and I had our paintings in that exhibition.

  What was the basis of our support for Colonel Ojukwu? I have often asked myself this question. After all, we were staunch Pan Africanists who believed that one day the continent would unite into the United States of Africa despite the setback the Pan African project suffered when Kwame Nkrumah, the one we called Osagyefo the Saviour, was overthrown in a coup by a bunch of CIA-supported soldiers. We lionised Mwalimu Julius Nyerere for working towards this Pan African goal by uniting Tanganyika, Zanzibar and Pemba into the Republic of Tanzania. We believed that instead of dismantling the colonial borders carved at the Berlin Conference of 1884 by breaking the colonial states into smaller ethnic-based national states, we should work towards uniting neighbouring countries into bigger and bigger federations until we had reached the ultimate goal of a United States of Africa. And Julius Nyerere had shown us how it could be done.

  And yet there we were supporting an ethnic group, the Igbo people, when they formed their own ethnic-based state – we who adamantly wrote and preached against tribalism. It dawned on me that our support for the Igbo became apparent as early as 1966 when we heard that they were being massacred by other ethnic groups in Nigeria. And why did we take this massacre so personally when normally massacres are just statistics on the pages of newspapers? Because we identified very closely with the Igbo. It was almost like they were our own people. We knew a lot about them, whereas we knew nothing of the groups that were involved in the conflict with them. The Yoruba, the Hausa and everyone else were just names of ethnic groups, whereas the Ibgo were real people. We had lived in their village of Umuofia and knew of their customs and traditions, we had participated in their ceremonies and rituals, we had eaten their food, and we had enjoyed their proverbs and even greeted each other in their language: ‘Umuofia kwenu!’ a boy would shout when he arrived at the Smoking Spot, and the rest of the boys would roar back ‘Yaaa!’ while puffing on their zols or hand-rolled cigarettes. Yes, we were the Igbo people. We were the sons and daughters of Okwonko and the siblings of Nwoye, Ezinma and Ikemefuna. Of Obi and Clara.

  It was obvious whose side we would take if the Igbo were at war with anyone, whatever the reason was and whoever was in the wrong. Thanks to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease, the Igbo were our flesh and blood and Colonel Ojokwu’s cause was our cause. We rooted for Biafra’s victory and were outraged at the siege. The dream of the United States of Africa could well stay in abeyance if it meant our Igbo people should remain in a federation where they were being oppressed and even massacred.

  That’s the power of narrative for you. We always sympathise with those whose story we know. Sometimes the cause is good, as I believe it was in Biafra, sometimes it may not be so noble. I remember as kids we watched a lot of Tarzan-type movies in Dobsonville. We always sided with the white hero against the ‘savages’ because we knew the white hero’s story, his family background, his trials and tribulations. The white hero had history; the ‘savages’ did not. We didn’t realise that those ‘savages’ were us. Narrative manipulated us against ourselves.

  The Biafran War was not the only war that we made our business, although it was the only one where we were active in doing something about it. The Six Day War was another one. I remember when it broke out we, the Peka High School boys, were at the bus stop in Maseru waiting in the bus that was going to take us back to school when Mohlomi Ramonate, a former Peka High student who had now gained fame as a newscaster for Radio Lesotho, came into the bus and announced to us that we were on our way towards winning the war. We, in that case, were the Arabs. We were the forces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Remember we were Pan Africanists and the president of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, was one of the major leaders of that movement. Why, Kwame Nkrumah our Saviour had even married a woman from Egypt to seal the Pan African bond. So, we cheered when Mohlomi Ramonate announced our impending victory. As a newsreader for a national broadcasting station he was an authority on such matters, and throughout that bus journey we sang songs of victory. But only a few days later we heard of the defeat of the Arabs. The Israelis under General Moshe Dayan had captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip. We cursed Mohlomi Ramonate for promising us a victory he could not deliver.

  At the Smoking Spot the intellectual Phanuel Ramorobi said, ‘Anyway, you guys know that those Arabs enslaved Africans long before the Europeans and Americans did. They are not our friends.’

  I don’t know if that consoled us at all.

  BACK TO MR DIZZY and me. I often sat in his parents’ living room listening to him playing the blues à la Champion Jack Dupree on the piano. Or to his sister, Sekamotho, playing Chopin or Schubert. Here I enjoyed the plushness and the cosiness that was absent in my father’s house. It was different here in other ways as well: his mother was the one who did not suffer fools gladly, rather than his father. The mother’s strictness reminded me very much of my father. When she walked into the room we all better sit up straight. No slouching. My father exactly.

  Mr Dizzy looked out of place in those surroundings.

  He was more at home in the shebeens strumming his guitar for appreciative patrons. Often we spent days on end drinking home-brewed beer, be it hops or pineapple, from one shebeen to the next. Because we were always broke his guitar fed our habit. When we walked in everyone was happy because they knew they were going to listen to Mr Dizzy’s humorous songs. A denizen would yell, ‘Hey, Mr Dizzy, play us “Tell me, tell me why”,’ by which she meant Jeremy Taylor’s ‘Black-White Calypso’ made famous by the long-running Johannesburg show, ‘Wait a Minim!’ The denizens, including me, thought it was Mr Dizzy’s own composition, and he never disabused us of that notion. Instead he would oblige with relish, rendering in his bluesy voice the song that left everyone in stitches about advertisements in Drum magazine for skin lightening creams to make black people white, and in The Star for sun tan lotions to make white people black. We all chuckled in anticipation when he got to the next verses about advertisements in Zonk magazine for ointments to make black people’s curly hair straight, while white people were at the Rosebank Beauty Parlour trying to make their straight hair curly. Everyone in the house would join the chorus that demanded an answer as to why black people wanted to be white and white people wanted to be black.
We almost climaxed at the last verse that provided the solution: black and white folks should stop wasting their money on creams and lotions to change their complexion but should instead marry and give each other a little black and a little white in the night. At this the denizens would break into ear-shattering applause and cheers and whistles and then ply us with beer.

  For days on end we did not sleep; we merely dozed off on the benches between gulps of the home-brew. We were never bothered by the stench of malt, rotting pineapple fruit, and hops emanating from the cauldrons in the corner of the room or those that were produced by our unwashed bodies. We drank and farted and laughed and sang until the next morning, and then moved on to the next shebeen. Sometimes a shebeen queen would refuse to open for us, especially if all the drinkers had left and she was trying to catch up on much-needed sleep or perhaps on some lovemaking. In that case we staggered on to the next shebeen. You only had to walk a block or two and there would be another.

  On looking back, what amazes me is that we never got into drugs at all. Well, once in a while Mr Dizzy would have some LSD and would get psychedelic all over the place. Or sometimes he would have marijuana. I once tried it too, but it did nothing for me. I puffed on and on but didn’t get high at all, though I did get the munchies. I decided there was no point; I’d rather stick to my home-brewed beer. As for hard drugs, I never saw them with my naked eye. Only the strips of paper with colourful butterflies and rainbows that Mr Dizzy chewed because they had LSD on them. I never tried them. Not even once. I was scared of the stars and other psychedelic patterns that he claimed he saw after chewing and even swallowing the strips of paper. I’ve always been dead scared of losing total control of myself.

  We saw ourselves as part of the international hippy culture. Make love, not war. Janis Joplin was our chief prophetess. ‘Mercedes Benz’. That was my song asking God to buy me the luxury German sedan. The one that I sang as Mr Dizzy strummed the guitar. I never learnt how to strum it myself, so he strummed it for me. And hummed along. Another prophetess was Joan Baez with her folk songs. And the prophets were Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix with his psychedelic rock. When we were around the shebeens of Maseru reverberated with some of their music instead of the traditional Sesotho songs that were a staple of drunken sing-alongs. And Mr Dizzy strummed his guitar.