by Zakes Mda
‘Shit is shit,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter who plays it.’
Two of the guys pushed Steve Belasco outside, but before we could see some fisticuffs Clemoski came between them and stopped the argument. One could smell the bad blood for a while after that.
Steve Belasco was a Peace Corps volunteer. But he was quite different from the normal Peace Corps men and women we had come to know. For one thing, he was not scruffy; he was always fashionably dressed in clean jeans and well-ironed shirts. Also, he knew something about jazz, so we spoke the same language, which couldn’t be said of the other Peace Corps volunteers who had never even heard of Dizzy Gillespie or Sarah Vaughn or a host of big-name jazz musicians. Steve Belasco knew them all. But I suppose as a white man from America he had no right not to like our music.
And our local jazz – by which we meant South African jazz – was going through a boom period. Some of the bands came to Lesotho and played at the National Stadium. After the show the musicians would congregate at Clemoski’s place or at Tom Thabane’s, one of Clemoski’s friends who, many years later, held a number of cabinet posts in various Lesotho governments. I remember once sharing a zol of marijuana with Gabriel Thobejane in Tom Thabane’s garden, after which Thobejane played the African drums like a man possessed by demons and Philip Tabane joined him with his guitar that wailed like a wandering spirit. These were the Malombo Jazzmen who had had a successful concert at the stadium the previous night when we danced ourselves to oblivion.
Thandi Klaasen was another South African jazz musician who would scat like nobody’s business at the Holiday Inn. And we would all drink together at Clemoski’s place before and after these shows. My prize memory was when the songstress was walking with Clemoski and one or two other hangers-on to her dressing room at the National Stadium, and I was following them carrying her sequinned dresses. The soft velvety and silky dresses were lying across my raised arms like an offering to some kinky deity. The crowd was roaring with anticipation as we worked our way among them to the back of the makeshift stage in the centre of the soccer pitch. I was proud that I was part of the history that was going to be made at that stadium, however minuscule my groupie role was.
MR DIZZY HAS A seizure and his hands are shaking violently. His eyes bulge out and then he shuts them tightly. I can see that he is struggling against the shake-shakes, as we used to call his condition. I am surprised to see that he still has it after all these years. It used to scare the hell out of me when it happened all of a sudden in the midst of our merrymaking. Come to think of it, except for the gaunt face, Mr Dizzy hasn’t changed much.
His gambling partner just sits there as if nothing is happening. He gets bored watching the shake-shakes, stands up and leaves; perhaps back to the slot machines.
Gugu looks at Mr Dizzy intently. Perhaps she feels sorry for him. He is a pitiable sight. But who knows? Maybe Mr Dizzy feels sorry for me for having settled for the humdrum life of American suburbia while he continues unabated with the hustling that we were doing when we were boys more than forty years ago. Oh, for the carefree life, unconstrained by the shackles of convention and respectability! Although he doesn’t look quite carefree now as he sits in the easy chair, eyes shut.
His shake-shakes subside until they stop. He doesn’t make any effort to open his eyes now that the storm is over but just sits there and sleeps.
‘Sies, you let him kiss you!’ says Gugu out of the blue.
‘Hey, are you ever going to forget that kiss?’ I laugh.
A security guard shakes him awake and drags him out. It is his life. It was our life. Card counting at the casino. Entanglements with the police. Addiction to alcohol and gambling. Nothing has changed with him.
‘You know, that could have been me?’ I tell Gugu. ‘It was just luck that I came to my senses and changed. It’s mostly thanks to my father. He was the one who brought me back from the brink.’
MY FATHER GOT REPORTS from such people as Nqabande Sidzamba, the PAC Lesotho representative, that I was living a wanton and reckless life in Maseru and he summoned me to Mafeteng immediately. Mr Kolane asked me to vacate my garden cottage. I think he was relieved that my father had asked him to kick me out; he had tolerated me long enough.
There was no way on earth I could defy my father. If he said I had to go back home, then I had to go back home.
Back in Mafeteng I discovered that he had fallen out with his landlords, the Thathos, and we had moved to a much smaller house that he was renting in the slummy Phahameng Township. It was a small stone building with rusty corrugated iron roofing and no ceiling. It had no indoor plumbing and no electricity. The toilet was a pit latrine outside and we had to draw water from a communal tap a few streets away. My mother and the maid used Primus stoves or a coal stove to cook our meals.
My siblings and I lamented the fact that instead of moving up we were going down the social ladder. We felt that we were the only lawyer’s children who lived that kind of life in the whole world. Of course we only said these things among ourselves and would never have voiced them to our parents. Our father would have put us in our place. He would have looked on us as ungrateful children who should be counting their blessings for having been granted political asylum by the Basotho people instead of complaining. His view was that we were of the people and should live with the people. His fulfilment came from serving the community selflessly instead of accumulating wealth.
We felt that our poverty was self-inflicted. To us, it did not make sense that he charged a man who had the means to pay proper fees thirty rands for a divorce case that dragged on for six months at the High Court when other lawyers charged thousands of rands for the same service. What irked me most was that this client, Nthethe was his name, joked in all the shebeens in town that my father had charged him such a small fee. Instead of being grateful, he was laughing about it. But my father continued charging a pittance. And then after that he would be so broke that if there was any emergency he would have to borrow money from friends. Yet he worked so hard. All the time. Until past midnight. And demanded silence in the house, even from our mother. He would yell at our mother as if she were a child if she spoke while he worked at the dining room table in the flickering light of paraffin lamps reinforced by candlelight.
I felt very sad when he yelled at our mother like that. Or even angry. Some of my anger was directed at her. I couldn’t understand why she should accept such treatment. Why she should be whispering in her own house, and sometimes even suffer rebuke for the softest of whispers, when he felt he needed absolute silence. We could live with that, we were kids, we could tiptoe our way in silence, but she was a woman, an adult, our mother. She, on the other hand, began to join our little conspiracies. If the twins and I went out to the disco at Hotel Mafeteng until the early hours of the morning we would tell her the truth about it and count on her not to inform our father. Often she covered for us kids when we did something wrong. She would reprimand us, yes, but never inform the old man.
The tradition of family meetings continued. We sat at the dining room table and our father analysed the current events for us, while at the same time giving us lessons on how to be upright citizens with discipline and dedication. Those were his key words. We listened attentively and punctuated each one of his sentences with ‘ewe, tata’ – yes father – even if at that time our minds were wandering out there in the dens of iniquity.
Ben Maphathe arrived in the middle of one such meeting and my father asked him to sit down. He was a family friend whose mother gave us accommodation at her house when we first came to live in Mafeteng. His father, then divorced from his mother, was the local doctor who also owned some businesses in Mafeteng and Maseru. I was quite embarrassed to be repeating ewe, tata all the time in his presence because this had actually become a joke among my friends. They didn’t have such military discipline in their homes. So, I was a bit slack about my ewe, tata responses and my father misinterpreted that for lack of interest in what he was saying. He sn
apped at me right there, in the presence of a visitor. If only the floor had opened up and swallowed me!
Sometimes my father would discuss literature at these meetings. He would ask us what we thought of the set books that we read at high school such as Silas Marner by George Eliot, Great Expectations, David Copperfield and Oliver Twist, all by Charles Dickens, and some of the plays of Shakespeare. When he expounded on these works I could see that he missed the days when he used to be a high school teacher and a university lecturer. I didn’t tell you that before I was born, in 1947 and 1948, he taught at Pius XII College, Roma, Lesotho.
‘What do you think of Things Fall Apart?’ he asked once.
We all loved that novel. It was the first time in all our education that we were reading a book by an African author for the Cambridge Overseas School Certificate. So, you would have thought I would gush with praise for Chinua Achebe’s work. But I instead I said, ‘It’s just a novel.’ This didn’t mean much, but fortunately my father didn’t press for a forthright answer. You see, I had heard him discuss Things Fall Apart with my former principal, Tseliso Makhakhe, a few weeks before when the principal gave us a ride in his car from Maseru. My father had asked the principal the same question: ‘What do you think of Things Fall Apart?’ and the principal had gone all out in praise of the book. I was surprised to hear my father attack the novel as reactionary in its depiction of Africans. It could only serve the interests of neo-colonialists, he said. No wonder the British had deemed it fit to prescribe. And I had thought it was such a progressive novel! I remember making a note to myself to ask Ntlabathi Mbuli next time I met him why my father thought Things Fall Apart was a reactionary novel. But Ntlabathi did not know either, since he did not share that view; he could merely guess that perhaps it was because in the book Africans lose their country to a colonial power through their own foolishness. So, when my father asked us at this meeting I was not forthcoming with my answer because I didn’t want to say something that would contradict his view of the novel.
One thing I remembered very well even as we read the book at high school was that the main character, Okonkwo, reminded me very much of my father. Not the Okonkwo who is ashamed of his father, for my father was immensely proud of his father, but the Okonkwo who was impatient with failure and ruled his family with an iron rod. Did my father perhaps see himself in Okonkwo, hence his condemning the book?
I was happy to see that my father had taken to drinking some beer on occasion, a habit he had given up decades ago. At least once a fortnight or so he drank Castle Lager as he worked at Hani’s restaurant. He came home drunk and was happy with everyone. That’s what alcohol did to him. It made him so euphoric that he would be cracking jokes and singing and telling us stories of the revolution. We wished he could stay drunk for ever. But no such luck; the next morning he would wake us up very early, looking remorseful for having been so unguardedly giddy the previous night. ‘Wake up, you fools,’ he would say. We would then start cleaning up the whole place. Everything had to be spick and span when he was suffering from a hangover.
Fortunately, he never kept us prisoner at home. He allowed us to come and go as we pleased when our chores were done, as long as we reported to him or our mother where we were going and when we would be back. So, our social life did not suffer one bit despite our domestic circumstances. And in Mafeteng social life meant drinking.
My brother Monwabisi had become quite a socialite and was active in organising social gatherings. We went for picnics at the Tsalitlama Lake with the beautiful Mafikeng girls whose mother owned the restaurant with Chris Hani’s father, and we drank ourselves silly.
My friends Peter Masotsa and Litsebe Leballo were over the moon that I was back in Mafeteng. They exclaimed that I had gained a lot of weight and I was quite happy about it. Actually the weight gain started in my last year of high school because I drank a lot of sqo – the Basotho home-brewed beer made of sorghum and reputed to make people fat. I didn’t know that for years to come I would be fighting a losing battle against weight; I was just happy that the guys called me ngamla, which meant rich man. No one would ever call me moketa again – a name given to a cow so emaciated you could count its ribs. And indeed I carried myself about like the rich man I was supposed to look like.
And this time my ballooning figure did not only strut around in the shebeens but at Hotel Mafeteng. Yes, our little town now had a hotel, owned by a son of Mafeteng no less. Mpho Motloung had been a businessman in Johannesburg where he had made a lot of money. He and his beautiful wife Maggie decided to invest it in his home town by building a hotel. We had watched with anticipation as the octagonal double-storey structure rose from the ground. When it was finally opened we were agape at the kind of people who came from Johannesburg and graced our dusty town. These included such socialites as Dr Joe Jivhuho and Lefty Mthembu, a big-time gangster whose exploits we often read about in The Golden City Post and in Drum Magazine. They were all Mpho Motloung’s friends and spent many a weekend drinking Bacardi Rum and cavorting with the model-type women in mini-skirts and gigantic afros that they brought with them from the City of Gold. We went to the hotel and watched them enviously and said to ourselves: ‘One day we are going to live like that.’
We still patronised our home-brew shebeens because liquor was too expensive for us at the hotel. The trick was to get ourselves drunk at the shebeens first, then later go to the hotel and play big there with one or two beers. Later we would go to dance the night away to James Brown’s ‘Please, Please, Please’ at the disco. Hotel Mafeteng had the hottest disco in the whole country and people even came from as far as Bloemfontein to release tension and taste a little bit of freedom. Remember, it was during the days of apartheid and black people were not allowed in hotels in their own country, so Lesotho became the place to socialise with dignity.
Indeed, life in Mafeteng was so beautiful that I asked myself what the heck I was doing in Maseru where I had to hustle for money when I had it made right here at home with my parents feeding my dirty habits, though they didn’t know what I was doing with the ‘pocket money’ they gave me. To crown it all there was Ntlabathi Mbuli. When I returned from Maseru I found that he had settled in a room he was renting from a local businessman and he was sleeping with a young white Peace Corps lady who had recently come to town and was teaching at the Catholic ’Masentle High School. She was nothing like the three beautiful Peace Corps women who once graced our town: Marie Peterson, Lois Saito and Patricia Eaton. Nothing like Steve Belasco in Maseru who was so sophisticated that you forgot he was Peace Corps.
This one was always dishevelled and her clothes were dirty and her feet were caked black with filth. I often visited her at the tiny brick house she was renting just outside the school premises, and it was always untidy with clothes strewn all over the place and with plates and pots dirty with mouldy food. I felt sorry for the room for I knew it in its heyday when it was clean and fresh. It used to be a café and I would hang out there with Bra Bullet who managed it for his father, Mr Mokhethi.
Ntlabathi only slept with this girl when he was drunk. Invariably in the morning she would come knocking at my door. My brothers and I all slept in the same room and we would be nursing hangovers of our own as she sniffled and complained that Ntlabathi was only interested in sex whereas she wanted a meaningful relationship.
‘Why do you allow him?’ I asked. I felt bad for her because she was so much impressed by Ntlabathi’s intellectual wit and desperately wanted him to take their affair seriously. But he was only interested in what today is known as a booty call.
Ntlabathi’s presence in Mafeteng tempered our hedonism with some intellectual pursuits. He was a poet, so some nights we sat in his room reading and discussing poetry. I had written more poems after that one about the death of my friend Santho Mohapeloa, and Ntlabathi would critique them. Litsebe and Peter found such activities a waste of the time they could be spending profitably drinking pineapple beer and sleeping with shebeen queens and the
ir daughters, so they sneaked out. But another friend, Motake Malefane, joined us and read his own poems.
Wantonness was further tempered when Bra Zero Mosisidi completed his BSc at the university at Roma and rented a room in the same township as Ntlabathi. This was another place to hang out and listen to jazz. Bra Zero introduced us to Oscar Peterson’s ‘Canadian Suite’ to which we listened endlessly because we loved it so much. Later Bra Zero was to leave this room to me when he went to work for the government in Maseru. This was the place I lent to Babsy Mlangeni and the All Rounders when they came to town.
Mafeteng was not only the home of drunkards like us; it was also the abode of writers. I have already told you of our neighbour, Sebolai Matlosa, who wrote some wonderful Sesotho novels in addition to being our neighbourhood butcher. But there was also Mosebi Damane, a nationally celebrated Sesotho poet and a scholar of Lesotho history and literature. I discovered in his book Marath’a Lilepe that my revered ancestor Mhlontlo featured in the praise poetry of early Lesotho chiefs and kings. So I crossed the road to his house to talk about it, hoping to learn more about Mhlontlo, perhaps some of the things that my grandfather never told me.
Thanks to the oral tradition of Sesotho poetry, and Damane’s interpretation of it, I learned that the magistrate Hamilton Hope, who incidentally had been a magistrate in Quthing, Lesotho, before being posted to Qumbu in the Eastern Cape among my amaMpondomise people, had asked Mhlontlo and his people to surrender their guns – part of the British pacification efforts. My revered ancestor pretended that he was going to comply with that order and lured Hope to his Great Place, as a paramount chief’s headquarters was known, where he killed him. Damane knew the exact date of these events – October 22, 1880. Mhlontlo escaped to Lesotho and found succour in the village of Phiring near Phamong. I knew both these places. I had been there a few years before when I was campaigning for the BCP with Ntsu Mokhehle and Potlako Leballo. I had goosebumps when I realised that I had walked on the same soil as my revered ancestor who was hiding from the mighty wrath of the Queen of England.