Sometimes There Is a Void

by Zakes Mda

  One thing that everyone was excited about was the first post-independence elections. We rarely discussed politics at Mr Mahamo’s shebeen since Mr Mahamo himself and most of his police patrons were all supporters of the ruling Basotho National Party, and of course Ntlabathi and I were Pan Africanists and therefore Basutoland Congress Party sympathisers. Nevertheless we were indeed looking forward to the change that we hoped would come with the elections. I had not participated in the BCP campaigns as I had done in the first elections in 1965 because Chief Leabua Jonathan’s government had been effective in silencing South African refugees. They could no longer participate in Lesotho politics, unless they wanted to be deported from the country. I have told you already how Potlako Leballo, the PAC leader, was deported – even though he was actually born in Mafeteng and should then have been a Lesotho citizen by birth. A few others of our people were forced out of the country in a similar manner. So now we could only be sympathisers of the BCP and not vocal supporters.

  The habitués at Mr Mahamo’s knew exactly who we were, but that didn’t bother them at all because we never commented on political issues. We had been cowed into silence. At least at this particular shebeen. When some leaders of the Young Pioneers came and started snooping around I suggested that perhaps we should start patronising a different shebeen. After all, Mafeteng was a BCP town and in most shebeens we would regain our freedom of expression.

  ‘What can we do?’ Ntlabathi said. ‘Mr Mahamo is our employer and we owe him a lot of money. We have no choice but to patronise his shebeen.’

  The Young Pioneers were the youth wing of the BNP, inspired by the brutal Young Pioneers of Kamuzu Banda’s Malawi Congress Party. Not only were they inspired by the Malawians, they were actually trained there. The cosy relationship between Leabua and Banda did not surprise anyone. They had both turned their countries into client-states of South Africa. Banda had gone further than Leabua; he was the only African leader who had diplomatic relations with apartheid South Africa.

  The Young Pioneers leaders who had now taken to prying at Mr Mahamo’s shebeen were recently arrived from Malawi and carried themselves about with a swagger that told everyone that they were a law unto themselves. We heard stories of how they were going around threatening people that if they did not vote for the BNP they would rue the day.

  ‘They have told you that your vote is your secret, but we have eyes everywhere,’ they told prospective voters. ‘Our eyes can penetrate the secret ballot.’

  After the elections we sat at the shebeen listening to the results on Radio Lesotho. The atmosphere was rather strange because our police companions were nowhere in sight. We took it that they were busy guarding polling stations and generally keeping good order.

  According to Radio Lesotho, the BNP and the BCP were running neck-and-neck. Every time they announced a constituency won by the BCP they would announce a constituency won by the BNP. And it dragged on like that, until the announcements stopped. They were replaced by a bouncy song by a South African mbaqanga band: Leabua ke mmuso ngoan’aka. Whether you like it or not Leabua is the government, the group sang in the popular idiom of South African dance music. As soon as we heard the song we knew something was wrong. Not that the song had been scarce on the airwaves before. It was a staple and was played after every news bulletin. But now it was playing over and over again for hours on end. There was some defiance about it. In the Sesotho idiom, it was as if someone wanted to rub something into someone else’s face.

  Later in the day listeners were warned to await an important announcement. This was followed by martial music. Then Leabua himself spoke. He was declaring a State of Emergency and was suspending the Constitution. He advised the populace to remain calm. There would be a 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. curfew throughout the country until further notice.

  It became clear to us that he had lost the elections but was refusing to hand over power to Ntsu Mokhehle’s BCP. This was a coup and it was happening right here in Lesotho – a country famous for its greeting khotso, which means ‘peace’. A country whose motto was Khotso, Pula, Nala – Peace, Rain, Prosperity.

  We had heard of coups in other African countries; we were still reeling from the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah, our Pan Africanist leader in Ghana. But we never thought we would actually see one happening right here where we lived. It was a coup of a special kind; the party that lost the elections was refusing to hand over power. Nothing like it had been seen in Africa.

  The BNP nullified the elections and refused to release the official results. But we did finally get all the figures based on declarations at polling stations: out of the sixty seats of the National Assembly the BCP had obtained thirty-six, the BNP twenty-three and the MFP only one.

  Despite the curfew, Ntlabathi and I continued to teach at the night school. But the numbers of students were dwindling. We got reports that the police had beaten some of them for breaking the curfew. We did not believe these reports. The police in Lesotho were not thugs who beat up people. They would arrest wrongdoers rather than beat them up.

  We continued to patronise Mr Mahamo’s shebeen and stayed until the early hours of the morning as if nothing had changed. But things certainly were different. All of a sudden our police friends were wearing camouflage uniforms instead of the well-pressed khaki. They were carrying machine guns instead of their World War I 303s. There was the roly-poly figure of Roll-Away hovering over us boasting of his brand new Uzi submachine gun.

  ‘See how this baby shines,’ he was saying. ‘Direct from Israel.’

  He was like a little boy with a new toy.

  Even Mphahama showed some braggadocio. When I tried one of our old jokes about his beauty he glared at me cheekily. He had a submachine gun of his own and was showing us how he could dismantle it and put it together again with his eyes closed. The habitués cheered and laughed at his antics, but I was getting quite uneasy. Guns generally make me nervous, perhaps from my early experience when I went out to assassinate Marake Makhetha. What if something went wrong? One couldn’t trust these guys with these new Israeli machines. I didn’t think they had even had adequate training to use them.

  ‘You’re going to shoot yourself in the foot, Mphahama,’ I said, half-jokingly.

  Another change was that now instead of these guys buying us liquor as before, Mr Mahamo and the other civilian patrons were falling over themselves giving them shots of brandy. And when they were drunk they boasted that Leabua Jonathan’s government was here to stay. We learnt for the first time that Leabua himself wanted to hand over power to Ntsu Mokhehle in keeping with how democracies should function, but Fred Roach stopped all that nonsense. Fred Roach was the commander of the paramilitary Police Mobile Unit (Lesotho didn’t have an army at the time). He was, in fact, the instigator of the coup.

  I was not surprised to hear this from Roll-Away. I knew Fred Roach from my Peka High School days. At that time he was the police commissioner in charge of the Leribe district and he once invaded our high school when the students were on strike. He had surrounded the campus with his troops and had addressed us with a megaphone from the top of one of the police Land Rovers. We had responded with our own song, milling around defiantly, and calling him a British dog born in New Zealand and sent to Lesotho to oppress Basotho children. His men aimed their guns at us and we had to retreat. He successfully suppressed our little rebellion, and later that night his convoy of Land Rovers drove back to Hlotse, the district capital, in triumph. There he was, Her Majesty’s subject, subverting democracy in Her Majesty’s former colony of Lesotho when the prime minister was keen to hand over power.

  I thought the coup would not last, but it did. Ntsu Mokhehle was arrested and King Moshoeshoe II was placed under house arrest. The various radio stations of the South African Broadcasting Corporation came out in support of the coup. Commentators commended Leabua for saving Lesotho and the whole subcontinent from the Peking-supported Ntsu Mokhehle and his Communist cronies. Hennie Serfontein, an Afrikaner journalist who had b
ecome Leabua’s adviser wrote extensive articles in the Johannesburg newspaper, the Sunday Times, in support of the coup.

  After classes as we sat at Mr Mahamo’s shebeen we often heard women screaming and we knew exactly what was happening. There were stories that the police, the paramilitary guys and the Young Pioneers had gone on the rampage, invading homes without any provocation, beating up the men and raping the women and children. The Young Pioneers particularly were quite merciless. We decided that it was too risky to spend our evenings at the shebeen, so when we finished our classes at the night school, which was at about eight or so, we went straight home. Mr Mahamo got us permits from Roll-Away that allowed us to break the curfew. But still on occasion we had to run for dear life from the Young Pioneers. One day, just after walking out of the school yard, there was a glare of headlights. It was too late to escape and armed uniformed men jumped out of a Land Rover and charged at us.

  ‘Hey, Mphahama, it’s us, man,’ I said when I recognised one of the men as our dear friend.

  ‘Hey, Mphahama, it’s us, man,’ he said, mimicking me in a mocking voice. ‘You think that because you are educated little fools you can just break the law?’

  Then he lashed out at me with a whip. The three men with him took the cue and began to lash out at us as well. Ntlabathi and I took to our heels in different directions. I jumped the school fence back into the yard. I hid among the dustbins at the back. They didn’t come after me, nor did they chase Ntlabathi, who had disappeared past the hedge that fenced in the cemetery that used to be reserved for white colonists back in the day. I could hear the cops laughing as they jumped back into their vehicle and drove away.

  Oh, yes, the beautiful Mphahama had become so vengefully brutal that from that day on we gave him the widest berth possible.

  A few months later Roll-Away was recalled to Maseru because Commander Fred Roach thought he was too soft in a notoriously BCP town like Mafeteng. He was too grandfatherly, so Roach replaced him with a dark stubby man called Potiane who led the raids with a sadistic sneer. Under Potiane’s regime we were afraid to walk in the street even during the day. We gave up going to school altogether and Mr Mahamo had to close it. He was quite a buffoon, Potiane, and would march up and down the streets of Mafeteng in full camouflage gear and a bandolier, brandishing an AK47 and an Uzi at the same time. Children would shout: ‘Thunya Potiane! Batho ba u shebile!’ Shoot, Potiane! People are watching you! This meant that they were spectators waiting for the rat-a-tat-tat thrills. He would smile and wave at them.

  To the children he was just entertainment. But to BCP members in the district of Mafeteng he was no joke. He led raids into their homes and commanded his subordinates to shove pokers into their anuses or tie their testicles with wire and tighten the wire with pliers. The soldiers – now the Police Mobile Unit guys called themselves soldiers – boasted in the shebeens how they invaded the home of a prominent BCP-supporting businessman, Mr Malahleha, and forced him to watch as they raped his wife and two daughters. I must add that the elder of these daughters was a very close friend of mine – someone I would have dated had I not been so cowardly in propositioning girls. After ten or more soldiers had had their fun discharging their filth into the women they raped them further with the barrels of their guns, now and then threatening to discharge the bullets. After that they drenched the man’s beard with petrol and then set it on fire.

  The fearless newspaper of the Lesotho Evangelical Church, Leselinyana, reported on this event and many others throughout the country. Later its editor, Edgar Motuba, was murdered.

  Mr Malahleha’s daughters were scarred for life. The older one became a wanderer, sleeping rough on store verandas and abusing herself so horrendously that it seemed she was competing with the abuse that she had received from the men in uniform with their deadly weapons.

  A new culture of brutality was being cultivated right in front of our eyes. Mafeteng had lost its innocence.

  A deep sorrow invaded my body and sat inside my chest like a granite rock. It weighed me down and all I did was to sit in the room I shared with my three brothers and grieve. It made no difference that no member of my family was directly affected – we were never invaded, the soldiers stayed clear of our house because politicians of all parties, including the BNP, had this reverence for my father. Mafeteng was bleeding. Her grief was mine. I wanted to escape. But I had nowhere to go. I was already in exile.

  Some relief, not quite the escape I yearned for, came in the form of a new temporary job at one of the two local high schools. I was recruited at Bereng High School to take over the classes of the Sesotho teacher, Mrs Mohapi, who had gone on maternity leave. Here I had my first taste of teaching at a regular high school where I interacted with other teachers in the staffroom. The principal was Moses Mampa, Scutum’s son – you remember my first Latin teacher at Peka High? We hit it off immediately, especially because he was a poet whose lyrics moved me no end. Especially during those times of war. Another colleague who became a close friend was Mpho Malie. At the time we had no idea that one day he would become an important politician and a Minister of Commerce and Industry in a subsequent Lesotho government after peace had returned.

  Those were wonderful times except for the little problem that I was teaching Sesotho Literature and Language, in which I had little expertise. I had studied Sesotho at Peka High School where my teacher was Matlatsa Mokhehle, Ntsu Mokhehle’s brother who was also in the BCP leadership in his own right. I had excelled in written essays, grammar and proverbs, but my spoken Sesotho left much to be desired. The students complained that I was teaching them their language in English. Fortunately, they took their complaints to my mother at home rather than to the principal. I think this had become a joke among them. I was relieved when Mrs Mohapi’s maternity leave was over after three months and she came back to take over her classes.

  I had to say goodbye to my staffroom friends, to my students and, most sadly, to my job. Once more I was plunged into the world of unemployment, of wasting away in the skanky shebeens of Mafeteng, and of dodging patrols of Potiane’s Police Mobile Unit and the Young Pioneers who had tasted so much blood that when they didn’t find curfew-breakers they created them by dragging targeted men and women from their homes to the streets and then beating them up for breaking the curfew.

  I watched at first hand the new culture of impunity that was taking root throughout the ranks of the Lesotho Mounted Police, the paramilitary Police Mobile Unit and the civilian militia of the ruling BNP known as the Young Pioneers. Corrupt politicians used these organs to suppress the populace in the most savage way, and these organs became a law unto themselves.

  That was the beginning of what we see today.

  EVERY TIME WE RETURN from a visit to the Bee People Gugu and I are brimming with euphoria. Yes, the Bee People and the mountain of Dyarhom are euphoriants. The joie de vivre of the underprivileged, the scents of the shrubs mixed with the aroma of honey, the crispness of the mountain air, the clearness of the streams, the imposing cliffs, the frolicking of the rock rabbits, cannot but leave their spell on us until we get to the exhaust fumes of Johannesburg. We are also pleased that our guest, Goretti Kyomuhendo, was able to see other parts of South Africa which are quite different from the city of Durban where she lives for the duration of her studies.

  Back at my house in Weltevredenpark – a suburb that was all-white during apartheid and mostly Afrikaner; the name is Afrikaans for ‘well-contentedness’ – I share with her some articles that I have recently written for South African newspapers on issues ranging from crime to criticism of the corruption of some of our political leaders. I have been a frank commentator on the social and political scene and have made quite a few powerful people unhappy.

  The next morning we go shopping for groceries at Pick-n-Pay at the Randpark Ridge Mall. Goretti is astonished that we pile our trolley with foodstuffs of all kinds, including varieties of cheese. She marvels at the fact that the black people of South Africa eat chees
e. Everyone else in the supermarket – both black and white – is pushing a trolley laden with groceries.

  ‘You people live lives of extravagance here in South Africa,’ she says. ‘In Uganda we only go to the shop to buy the item we need at that time.’

  Later, as we have a meal, she criticises one of my articles on crime for omitting the fact that the guns that were brought into the country by the guerrilla war waged by the liberation movement have contributed a lot to violent crime in South Africa. I see her point, but the focus of the article was on how in urban black communities we grew up lionising criminals, and how that has resulted in the present environment where crime is rampant and the communities are helpless. I wrote in the article that during apartheid the outlaw was the man. He challenged the law. The very law that was vicious towards us. That raided our homes in the middle of the night and reduced our mothers and fathers to whimpering bundles of shame. That locked up our fathers for not carrying a dompas – the ID documents that were carried only by blacks to ensure that they were confined to their designated areas. The law that uprooted families, burying them alive in barren places called ‘homelands’, far away from places of employment. That whipped us and mowed us down with bullets. Yet these outlaws laughed in the face of the law. They spat at the law. They beat the system. They were the enemies of our enemies. They were on our side. The law was our enemy. It was not on our side. We would therefore not have anything to do with anything that had to do with the law. Even if we knew who the outlaws were in our midst and where they were hiding we would not tell. The worst thing any black township person could be was a snitch – or impimpi. The snitch was on the side of the law, and therefore the snitch was the enemy. A culture of shielding criminals and giving them succour and lionising them took root and continues to this day, even though the heavy boot of apartheid is no longer on our neck and we are now supposed to be running our own affairs. In my article, published in South Africa’s Mail & Guardian, I come up with concrete suggestions on how this culture can be rooted out, using the family and community structures that are preyed upon by the criminals.