Sometimes There Is a Void

by Zakes Mda

  At that point I had told myself: to hell with education. Life was beautiful without it and Mr Dizzy was living proof.

  Whenever we were very desperate for money, because even hippies needed to eat, we remembered that we were painters as well. We visited James Dorothy who lived a few blocks from Mr Dizzy’s home. James Dorothy was a famous artist who had trained under Father Frans Claerhout in Thaba Nchu where his family originally came from and his style was very much reminiscent of the Catholic priest’s Flemish Expressionism. We knew that we would get some art materials from him, and we sat in his living room which doubled as a studio and painted pictures – mostly watercolours and charcoals and pencils. James Dorothy himself was principally an acrylics man.

  This was the period in my life when I still had the obsession with my distant cousin, Sibongile Twala. She was a student at St Mary’s High School at Roma when I was at Peka High School. But when we were in Maseru we lived with our common aunt, Mrs Kolane, who was married to the Speaker of Chief Leabua Jonathan’s parliament. So, most of my paintings were portraits of Sibongile or had something to do with her. I must stress, though, that she was not a romantic interest. Even after all these years my romantic interest continued to be Keneiloe, though her image was becoming blurry in my mind. Sibongile was someone I had idealised as a goddess on some Mount Olympus of my imagination. I had mastered her dimpled face so well that I could draw it without looking at her or at her photograph.

  Keneiloe was the one I was going to marry; Sibongile was the Muse who guided my painting and my poetry. And for that I became the butt of all syrupy and mushy jokes among my artist friends.

  Living at the Kolanes – the epitome of Maseru high society and political elite – took me from one end of the social spectrum where I slept in a room with rows of sweaty guerrillas on the floor and on single beds, to a grass-thatched cottage in a garden with flowers and sprawling lawns all to myself. I could have my meals in the main house where Sibongile and my aunt’s beautiful children would pamper me. What I loved most was that I could come and go as I pleased. I even forgot that I was in enemy territory: my aunt and her husband were staunch members of the ruling BNP – hence he was the Speaker of Parliament – and I was a Pan Africanist who supported the opposition leader, Ntsu Mokhehle. I was too comfortable to feel like a traitor.

  When I saw any of the Poqo people in the street I would try to avoid them. If I spied a guerrilla coming down the street I would duck into some back alley. I had been avoiding them like that since the time I went AWOL when P K Leballo wanted to send me on a suicide mission to the Boer farms of the Free State.

  One day I was browsing at the comic books shelf in Maseru Café when I discovered they had in stock the new omnibus edition of Asterix. I had lately fallen in love with this comic by writer Rene Goscinny and illustrator Albert Uderzo, and I fervently followed the adventures of the tiny Gaul Asterix, and his sidekick Obelix, and all the colourful characters of Armorica, especially the druid Getafix. I particularly liked the premise that Julius Caesar had conquered all of Gaul, except for the Armorican village which was effectively withstanding the might of the Roman Empire, thanks to the concoctions of the druid which gave the villagers supernatural powers through which they always beat the Romans legionnaires to a pulp. I had a few last coins in my pocket and I was debating with myself whether I should buy the omnibus or save my money for a scale of pineapple beer in the evening. The ‘scale’ was the unit of measurement for home-brew in the shebeens of Lesotho – about one and a half litres in volume.

  I was startled by someone tapping me on the shoulder. It was Nqabande Sidzamba. He had just bought the Rand Daily Mail and The World, the two South African newspapers that we all read to keep up to speed with what was happening back home. He had recently been elected the PAC representative in Lesotho since the party had moved its headquarters to Tanzania after P K Leballo’s deportation. I certainly would have hidden from him but now it was too late. I had quite some deference for him, not only because of his position in the party but because he was a close family friend originally from Qoboshane, where my grandfather used to be the chief. He had been one of my father’s protégés, in fact. His younger brother Myekeni had been my friend when I was a little boy banished by my parents to my grandparents’ custody after my misadventures in Johannesburg, and his older sister had been my teacher at Qoboshane Bantu Community School where she was famous for using the cane on boys and girls at the slightest provocation – to the extent that students named her Ram-Beat-Again. So, you see, I had all the reasons not to want to meet this man at this delinquent stage in my life.

  He was more like family than just a leader of our party. He was not staying at the Poqo camp at Thakalekoala’s estate, but had a house near Maseru Community Secondary School where he was principal. I had been to his house a few times and had listened to his records of the Manhattan Brothers, the Woody Woodpeckers, the Elite Swingsters, Count Basie, Duke Ellington and a lot of other band leaders of the swing era. I used to tease him that he didn’t have any bebop because it was too complicated for him.

  He took his responsibilities as a home-boy and a big brother quite seriously. And indeed he did not hesitate to express his disappointment that I was not turning out well and had abandoned the struggle for the ‘nice time’ of Maseru.

  ‘I have not abandoned the struggle, Bhut’ Nqabande,’ I said. ‘I am fighting it in a different way.’

  ‘By vagabonding with that Khaketla boy, getting drunk all over Maseru and disgracing AP?’ he asked.

  I didn’t know he knew I was vagabonding with Mr Dizzy. But then Maseru was a small town and people talked.

  ‘By writing and painting,’ I said. ‘Art is also an effective weapon of the struggle.’

  He was not convinced.

  ‘What do people say when they see you staggering in the streets unxilile?’

  Instead of answering that, I asked him about some of the guerrillas I knew and had not seen since I left the camp. He told me about those who went on sabotage missions into South Africa and never came back, and those who were smuggled out of Lesotho to the guerrilla camps in Libya and Uganda which PK had established since his expulsion from Lesotho. He also told me that my friend and mentor, Ntlabathi Mbuli, had left the camp for Mafeteng. I wondered why he had gone there. Did my father perhaps invite him back to help him at his office which was what he used to do when I first met him? Whatever the reason, it was comforting to know that once I was back in Mafeteng there would be someone more politically mature to socialise with, in addition to the mindless romps with Litsebe and Peter.

  Not that I had intentions of going back to Mafeteng any time soon. The life of a starving and hustling artist in Maseru was too alluring to abandon. I would rather be painting pictures at James Dorothy’s apartment with Mr Dizzy than living under my father’s strict discipline.

  After producing a few paintings and sketches Mr Dizzy and I went to flog them to the tourists at the new Holiday Inn Casino, as the Maseru Sun Cabanas was then called. We had to do these transactions surreptitiously because no soliciting was allowed on the premises of this hotel. We competed with prostitutes for the attention of rich Afrikaners from South Africa at the various bars both inside and by the swimming pool. The Afrikaners were there to sample the delights they were denied in their Calvinistic country where sexual relations across the colour line were forbidden. They were therefore not interested in looking at art, especially expressionist works (I was in my anguished Kandinsky phase) that meant nothing to the eye of a hard-boiled Free State farmer.

  We focused mostly on those men who were already safely ensconced in the company of our most beautiful prostitutes. Maseru was a much smaller city then, so we knew most of these women. We knew who their brothers were, or their husbands or their mothers. After all, we drank with some of them at the casino bar after they had scored big with their white johns.

  We operated more like small-time drug dealers.

  One afternoon, for insta
nce, I was sitting at the end of the long outdoor bar by the swimming pool nursing a glass of water because I couldn’t afford beer. Mr Dizzy was cracking jokes with a group of civil servants in suits and neckties a few patrons away from me. Mr Dizzy was always popular with everyone.

  I spotted a potential victim in khaki shorts and sandals plying a giggling prostitute with beer. He was an old man, an obvious pillar of the community in some platteland town. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he were a dominee, as the Dutch Reformed Church folks called their pastors. I had encountered quite a few dominees in the company of the ladies of the town at this establishment. Whether he was just a boer – a farmer – or a man of the cloth it didn’t matter; it was enough that he looked like the kind who wouldn’t want a scandal to follow him about his shenanigans with black women in this oasis of sin and iniquity, as Maseru was known among the upright white citizens of South Africa. Another thing that made him a prospective customer was that I knew something about the leggy brown lady he was with. I signalled to Mr Dizzy who excused himself from the civil servants, taking a beer they had bought him with him. He pushed his way between our potential customer and his lady of pleasure and whipped out rolled paintings from under his jacket, the lapels of which shimmered with dirt.

  ‘Psss … I have something to show you,’ he whispered to the Afrikaner as he unrolled the rubber band that held the paintings together. He had to do all this under the counter so that the bartender and the waiters didn’t see that he was peddling contraband to the patrons.

  The woman knew Mr Dizzy’s tricks and she pleaded with him in Sesotho, ‘Dizzy, please don’t spoil my business.’

  ‘I’ve got to survive too, Liepollo,’ said Mr Dizzy.

  ‘Then go and get your own white man,’ said the woman.

  ‘I don’t want to sleep with the guy,’ said Mr Dizzy in Sesotho. ‘I just want to sell him a painting.’

  ‘Get lost, Sechele,’ said the woman. She used Mr Dizzy’s real name; she was certainly annoyed and had no time for nickname endearments. The john was also getting restless.

  ‘I don’t want any paintings,’ he said in Sesotho. ‘Please do what the lady is asking and leave us alone.’

  I was listening to all this and I chuckled to myself; Mr Dizzy should have known better than to assume he could discuss the white man in his native tongue without the customer getting wise to what he was saying. He must have been one of those Afrikaners from the border farms in the Ficksburg, Ladybrand or Wepener districts who spoke Sesotho like they were born in a rondavel on the Maluti Mountains of Lesotho.

  It was time to save the situation. I went to join them.

  ‘Liepollo,’ I said in mock surprise, ‘what are you doing here?’

  She sneered and looked at me in surprise. ‘And who are you?’

  ‘Is there a problem, Sweet Pea?’ asked the Afrikaner, now getting agitated.

  ‘Sweet Pea?’ I said. ‘This is my cousin, and now she pretends she does not know me because she’s doing something naughty.’

  The woman was adamant she did not know me, and the man threatened to call security if we didn’t leave them alone. We knew this was a bluff. The rule against soliciting also applied to prostitution. They were sitting there pretending to be a happy couple and wouldn’t have liked it if we exposed them as hooker and john.

  I ignored the man and said to the woman, ‘I bet your mother doesn’t know you are turning tricks at the Holiday Inn. I sing with her in the church choir, you know? I may casually mention it at our next rehearsal.’

  I didn’t sing in any church choir, but her mother did. Her soprano at the Lesotho Evangelical Church choral society was legendary. I didn’t know her personally but as a keen follower of choral music, a love I inherited from my father, I had attended a few concerts where I was mesmerised by her voice.

  I turned to the man and said, ‘You see, this poor man is an artist. He does something with his hands. He doesn’t steal, he doesn’t rob, he doesn’t cross the border to a foreign country to sleep with prostitutes. He’s an artist. The least you can do after screwing my cousin is to buy his painting.’

  ‘Hey, I haven’t done anything yet with your cousin,’ he said.

  The woman snapped at the john, ‘I am not his damn cousin!’ And then she turned to me and asked pleadingly, ‘What do you want from me, heh? What do you want?’

  ‘Ask your boyfriend to buy just one painting and I’ll say nothing to your mother,’ I said.

  ‘This is robbery,’ said the man. ‘I don’t want no bloody painting.’

  ‘You know I can easily go to the reception and phone your mother,’ I said.

  ‘How much? I’ll buy the painting so that you leave us alone,’ said the woman.

  ‘You’ll buy no painting, Sweet Pea. I’ll buy it for you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, and went back to my bar stool to resume nursing my glass of water.

  ‘Le masepa, lea tseba?’ the woman yelled after me. You’re full of shit, you know that?

  Mr Dizzy haggled with the man, and finally came back with a twenty rand note, which was quite a lot of money. Remember, those days the South African rand was worth one and a half times more than the American dollar.

  We felt like millionaires. A scale of pineapple beer was five cents. We could get four hundred scales from this amount. We could drink this for days on end. But then we also had to buy Russian sausages and chips to sustain ourselves. Even then man did not live by beer alone. That evening we drank at the casino instead of our regular shebeens. With that kind of money we could even afford Scotch whisky. Though I hated the taste – I had always been a brandy or rum or beer or red wine man – it was good for impressing the rest of the patrons, especially the female ones. Soon I was drunk. I staggered home, which was less than thirty minutes’ walk from the Holiday Inn.

  Early the next morning Mr Dizzy came knocking at my cottage door. I didn’t like it when he did that because I didn’t think Mr Kolane and my aunt would enjoy the sight of such a dodgy character in their immaculate garden. The way he looked they wouldn’t have guessed that he came from a family that had an immaculate garden of their own. As soon as I let him in he told me that he had lost all the money at the slot machines and roulette tables. The fool had also lost the rest of the paintings.

  The problem was not what we were going to eat. I could eat at the main house at the Kolanes, and he could eat all he wanted at his home at the other end of Maseru West. The problem was what we were going to drink.

  Later in the day, after a long nap, I put a few sketches together and once more Mr Dizzy and I went to peddle them, this time among the commercial travellers and tourists at the Lancer’s Inn. The Holiday Inn would have been a lost cause at that time of the day.

  After many attempts without anyone showing interest, when we were about to give up and make for the shebeens with our trusty guitar, an old white woman who was standing outside the front entrance as if waiting for someone looked at the works with a beaming face. A black and white pencil portrait caught her eye – the only work of realism in the portfolio.

  ‘I’ll buy this one,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry, I am not selling this one,’ I said.

  It was a portrait of Sibongile Twala.

  Mr Dizzy glared at me as if I had lost my mind. Or something worse.

  ‘He’s just joking, ma’am,’ he said. ‘We are selling everything here.’

  ‘Not this one, Mr Dizzy. I’ll never sell Sibongile.’

  ‘You’re not selling your fucking cousin, man. It’s a picture and you’ll draw another one.’

  ‘Yes, I’ll draw another one. But even that one, I won’t sell it.’

  ‘Then why did you bring it with you?’

  ‘For luck; she’s my Muse. Plus it looks after the rest of my paintings.’

  ‘Muse? Are you crazy? Are you living in some stupid Greek mythology or what? What the fuck is a Muse for an African artist?’

  ‘We’d have money now if you had not
gambled it away. I’m not parting with this one.’

  All this time the old lady was peering at the two unkempt black kids arguing about a Muse. Finally she burst out laughing and said, ‘Okay, okay, I’ll buy a different one.’

  She only paid five rands for a charcoal sketch; it was better than nothing.

  One couldn’t stay mad at Mr Dizzy for too long. Soon we were laughing and walking up Kingsway to Lesotho High School to visit our friend Clement Kobo.

  Clemoski, as we called him, was an English Literature teacher at the high school and lived in a six-roomed brick house on campus. The youthful elite of Maseru gathered at his house to listen to jazz and soul, and to drink brandy and beer and talk about the state of the world. It was a far cry from the home-brew dives that Mr Dizzy and I frequented. Here we had the more learned citizens – civil servants and teachers. My former English Literature teacher at Peka High School, Gordon Tube, was a frequent guest. It was great to sit down with him and talk about literature in this convivial atmosphere.

  In the shebeens the habitués argued about soccer and women; at Clemoski’s it was all about politics, jazz and boxing. Muhammad Ali was world heavyweight champion and his rhyming fervour was setting the world alight. Copies of Ring magazine were lying all over the living room alongside copies of Down Beat.

  Sometimes the arguments got so heated that men almost came to blows. Like when Steve Belasco voiced an unpopular view that one of Hugh Masekela’s Sesotho jazz numbers about herdboys who must be careful that the cattle they were driving to the veld did not catch cold was shit. Now, Hugh Masekela was our hero, a premier trumpet player who was making his name in the highest echelons of jazz in the United States after being exiled from South Africa. Some of Clemoski’s friends took offence, but Steve Belasco stood his ground.