by Zakes Mda
As we debate this issue, Goretti asks why I decided to live in America when I have it made right here in my country: I drive a late model metallic grey Mercedes Benz, have a palatial suburban home with three garages, five bedrooms, two living rooms, a big dining room, a designer kitchen with all sorts of appliances and gadgets, a study, a gardener, two maids, a swimming pool and a back garden that is as big as a public park with swings, slides and jungle-gyms on which my kids played when they were young. I am obviously part of the new black elite of South Africa, enjoying the fruits of liberation, and I don’t need to be in America, she says.
She is not the first person to ask me this question. Friends have wondered what the point of living in the USA is when I return to South Africa every few months to work with the Bee People in the Eastern Cape, with HIV-AIDS infected youths in Sophiatown and with playwrights at the Market Theatre in Newtown in Johannesburg.
‘It is some kind of self-imposed exile,’ I tell her jokingly. ‘Exile of a special kind. One day you’ll know what happened because I am going to write about it in my memoirs.’
I tell her that until I took up the professorship at Ohio University I earned my entire livelihood from writing for the stage and television and from my fiction that has an international market. I worked as a full-time writer for seven years, thanks to the fact that dribs and drabs of dollars, pounds and euros become a small fortune when they are transferred to South Africa. But I have other skills for which I am highly trained. I can’t practise them in South Africa because all doors are closed by the vast patronage system and crony capitalism that has emerged in my beloved country. Doors were banged in my face, that’s why when the opportunity availed itself I left, though it was a difficult decision. We go to where our skills are appreciated first and foremost, and then of course rewarded.
It has everything to do with my outsiderness. I have resisted the centre and have always drifted towards the periphery of things. If you stay with me you’ll learn how, because of my being what Nelson Mandela called ‘too outspoken’, I found myself and members of my family marginalised in our society.
In fact, I always tell my adult children that when they apply for jobs in South Africa they must not mention that they are related to me. I remember drumming it into the head of my eldest son, Neo, a talented painter and a former art director at an international advertising agency, that in the South African job market it is a disadvantage to know me. But he never learns. When he goes for job interviews the question invariably arises: ‘Are you related to Zakes Mda?’ He always answers proudly: ‘Yes, he is my dad.’ And then of course they never call him back.
Well, he has the skills and the drive; he does not need a job from anyone. So, he starts his own advertising agency in partnership with some friends from Cape Town. He is a young black entrepreneur and through the government’s Black Economic Empowerment programmes there are opportunities for the likes of him. Here again, when he goes for interviews and presentations, the perennial question comes and he answers it honestly.
‘As long as you continue to tell them that we are related you will never get any contracts from the government, from parastatals and from the corporate world in general. The people who are unhappy with me have long tentacles.’
‘So, you want me to lie, Dad, and say you’re not my dad?’ he asks.
‘No, I don’t want you to lie,’ I tell him. ‘I am advising you to give smart truthful answers. When they ask, “Are you related to Zakes Mda?” simply answer “I’m told we are related” and stop there. They won’t ask any further.’
‘Told we are related? Come on! I’ll be misleading them into thinking that I don’t know for sure if we are or not, or I don’t even know you personally.’
‘If that’s what they think that’s not your problem because you didn’t say so. You can’t help it if they make that assumption.’
He shakes his head and laughs.
‘I’m told we are related?’ he repeats. ‘That would be a lie.’
‘That’s not a lie. You have no first-hand knowledge of your conception. You were told that we are related … by me and your mother.’
MY SON’S CONCEPTION WAS an accident. It started with my hesitating at a river. It was like going into exile one more time. Exile within exile. Two village men in Basotho blankets helped me with my suitcase and boxes of books, primus stove, pots, plates, blankets and groceries across the raging river. There was no bridge, they told me. The only way to and from the village of Likhakeng is to cross the river. I dread rivers. You will remember that my experience with them has not been a pleasant one. But I struggled on, resisting the force of the water, until I got to the other side.
We walked on a winding footpath among fields of maize and grazing lands until we got to the village. The men took me to a grass-thatched one-roomed house, my new home. The only furniture was a single bed, a table and a chair.
I was the new teacher at Likhakeng Secondary School in the Leribe District, in northern Lesotho.
The following week I met my students, all twenty-three of them. And that was the whole school enrolment. I didn’t expect that. In its previous incarnation as Harvey Secondary School it was a relatively big school with a reputation for debauchery. It was closed down after a students’ strike when I was still at Peka High School. Now, after a few years, the community of Likhakeng had opened it with this first group of boys and girls who were all doing Form A, as the first year of junior secondary school was called. I was here to teach English – both literature and language.
This is where I met the identical twins, Mpho and Mphonyane Seema. I was twenty-two, they were twenty. We fell in love. Me with both of them, and they with me. They dressed alike and everything about them was similar, down to their voices. For a long time I couldn’t tell them apart. But that didn’t matter because they were both my girlfriends. I think what initially attracted me to them was the fact that they were much more worldly wise than the ordinary village girls. I had not expected to meet such women in a remote village like that, who even spoke some Zulu. It turned out that they also had a home in Wattville, Benoni, near Johannesburg, where their father and two brothers worked. They spent a lot of time there. Their mother, however, lived in the village of Ha Qokolo, about ten miles or so away. She tended to the fields while the men worked in the factories of Johannesburg.
Initially I had thought that my girlfriend was Mpho, who I later learnt to distinguish as the slightly bigger and more serious of the two. But the girls laid down the law: they had always shared everything, including boyfriends, and I should learn to see them as one person.
‘So what are you going to do when you get married?’ I asked.
‘We’ll marry the same man,’ they said in unison. They spoke like that quite often, as if each one knew what was in the other one’s mind. It was either in unison or they completed each other’s sentences. At first this spooked me out, but soon I learnt to like it.
Having two girlfriends was not a bad arrangement for me at all. They liked to cook, and since we were far away from ‘civilisation’ we depended on canned beef and fish. I learnt from them about a spice called mixed masala which could transform the dullest corned beef into a gourmet’s delight when fried with tomatoes and scallions. As village girls of Leribe, they knew a lot about all sorts of masalas since they had lived with Indians all their lives. The British colonial rulers had confined the Indians to only two of the nine districts of Lesotho – Leribe and Butha Buthe – because they didn’t want Indian traders to compete with English traders. In their statutes, of course, they claimed they were protecting small Basotho traders who would be smothered to death by the savvy Indians. But it was the English colonists and not the Basotho traders who had large general dealers’ stores throughout the country, and therefore needed protection from competition.
The twins served the corned beef with macaroni, a starch we never ate at home where we were more rice, wheat bread, pap and samp kind of people. This was another way the
twins found the route to my heart, via my stomach.
I spent most of my time with the twins; I lost all desire for alcohol. The year that I spent in that village I never even got to know where the shebeens were located. It was satisfying enough to imbibe the twins’ presence and become intoxicated by it. And to engage in lovemaking with them in nightly turns. Though I suspected that it could not have been that much of a satisfying experience for them because of my old dysfunction – premature ejaculation.
About two months into our relationship the twins wanted to introduce me to their mother. We walked on the village path through fields of emaciated corn and across dongas and rivulets to the village of Ha Qokolo on the foothills. Their mother, Mme Mmapolo, welcomed me with open arms and slaughtered a hen for me which Mpho immediately cooked with her masalas. We ate it with the theepe wild spinach. I had announced how much I liked it; I had experienced it when I lived with my grandmother at Qoboshane, so Mme Mmapolo sent a little girl to harvest it from the veld.
Neighbours and a few relatives came to see the visitor and I was struck by the fact that many of them were identical twins. I later learnt that Ha Qokolo was a village of identical twins. Every other family had at least one set of identical twins. I met some of them when my twins took me to a general dealer’s store owned by twins who were my twins’ friends. And each set I came across dressed alike. Even those who were old ladies with tuba-tuba scarification marks on their faces – testifying to the fact that they belonged to an earlier world of traditional practices – wore tired seshoeshoe dresses that had similar patterns and colours. Another thing that struck me was that most of these twins were females – I didn’t see a single set of male twins. My twins told me that there were some families with male twins but one could count them on the fingers of one hand.
I had never seen nor heard of anything like this before and I wanted to write a magazine article about it. But I never got around to doing it.
We returned to our village quite late.
Some weeks later I got a surprise visit from old friends, people I had not seen for years. At first I did not recognise them because they were wearing heavy Basotho blankets and Basotho grass hats. They looked like any man you would meet in the village. But soon I realised that it was Sabata, the friend with whom I was once sent on an assassination mission by a leggy woman, and Masiu, who I had met at Peka High School. He was doing the final year of the Cambridge Overseas School Certificate when I was doing my first. When I returned to the high school after I had suspended myself for using cheat sheets in Latin, he had already left. The last time I heard of him he was searching for riches up in the mountains, a place called Letseng-la-Terai, where people acquired strips of land from which they mined diamonds.
‘What are you doing hiding here when the country is on fire?’ asked Sabata. ‘Our leaders are in jail and the King has been exiled to the Netherlands.’
‘Since when do you care about the King? Are you a Marematlou now?’ I asked.
Masiu got to the point. They had come to recruit me for a guerrilla army that the BCP was planning to form to overthrow Chief Leabua Jonathan’s illegitimate government. It had been more than a year since Leabua’s coup and already pockets of resistance were emerging in some villages where police stations were being attacked. A lot of Peka High School old boys were involved and some of them had been arrested. Even Ntate Khoto, the huge man who used to be our school minibus driver, had been involved in acts of sabotage and was in jail.
I began to question myself: what was I doing with my life when my Peka High School colleagues were sacrificing theirs for freedom? Those who were not participating in the fomentation of insurrection had gone to further their education at the University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland or somewhere overseas. Jama Mbeki had gone to study law in England and the BCP had arranged for scholarships for a group of others to study in the Soviet Union. These included Dugmore Hlalele who was studying medicine and my St Mary’s High School Muse, Ray Setlogelo. For a while I had kept up a correspondence with her in Kiev where she was studying international law. Later Dugmore and Ray were married and I regretted that I had been too cowardly to express my feelings for Ray during our long years of platonic correspondence. I suspect she had long been ready to take our friendship to a more romantic level. Since the nuns at St Mary’s read all the students’ incoming letters she had even devised a ruse for me to send her letters to a boy at the neighbouring Christ the King High School who would then take them to her. Why would she do this if she didn’t expect the letters to contain something the nuns shouldn’t hear? And yet despite the subterfuge my letters had remained innocent, even though in truth I had yearned for her. She must have given up on me as a lost cause. Now she had gone to Russia and Dugmore had married her. And I was marooned in a small village teaching twenty-three students at a nondescript secondary school.
Masiu talked non-stop about Jama and Dugmore and many others, some of whom I didn’t know because they were there before my time.
‘You seem to know about all the MaPeka … where they are and what they are doing,’ I said to Masiu. ‘How have you been keeping tabs on everyone when you are busy digging for diamonds up in the mountains?’
MaPeka are students of Peka High School – past and present.
‘I am active in the underground, that’s why,’ he said. ‘And it’s all thanks to you.’
‘Underground? I never belonged to any underground.’
He told me that all his years at Peka he had not been interested in politics, until I came when he was doing his final year. He used to listen to me debate at the Smoking Spot and he read some of the pamphlets I used to distribute.
‘You won me over,’ he said. ‘I joined the BCP and the PAC and I work covertly for the organisations even when I am up there digging for diamonds. Actually, part of my mission there is to mobilise the miners against the regime of Leabua Jonathan and his Boer masters.’
Sabata, on the other hand, was quite reserved. As if he was brooding over something. He never used to be a brooder when I knew him back in Mohale’s Hoek. He used to be bubbly and was always on the prowl for cheap sex. Now he looked so mature, but in a sad way. I tried to reminisce about some of our escapades in the BCP, especially the one where we botched an assassination mission.
‘And you tell me you’ve never been in the underground,’ said Masiu laughing.
‘That was no underground. That was Keystone Kops,’ I responded, also laughing.
But Sabata did not laugh.
‘So what do you say about what we came here for, Motlalepula?’ he asked impatiently.
He was calling me by my Mohale’s Hoek name. And he had no time for small talk. He was all business. A warrior’s warrior. I gathered that he never went to high school but instead worked in the gold mines of South Africa. Gold dust drained him of all flesh and blood, most of which he coughed out in phlegmy fits. Now all he wanted was to go to war against Leabua and his Boer masters.
I was not prepared to leave the paradise I had created for myself with the twins to go fight a futile war.
‘I want to focus on my studies so at the moment I have suspended my involvement in politics,’ I told them.
I was not lying. I had enrolled for associate membership of the College of Preceptors, a professional organisation in the United Kingdom that offered distance learning courses internationally to teachers who wanted to improve their qualifications. I was focusing on the Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages.
This was the good reason for turning them down. But the fact remains that I didn’t have the stomach to invade police stations and fight pitched battles with Leabua’s paramilitary. I was not ready for suicide. You have already seen in more than one instance that I was not much of a warrior.
My friends and recruiters left the next morning, much disgusted that they had come to my house and all they drank was tea. They had eaten well because the twins cooked their corned beef and macaroni speciality, but I ha
d not offered them a single beer because I had no idea where one could get it in the village. I had not made any attempt to find out because I was nursing my few remaining coins.
Money was the main reason my village paradise did not last. It was tight. The school depended on the fees paid by the twenty-three students and could not afford to pay me the measly thirty-three rands a month. Some months I went without a salary and had to ask my father to send me money for my survival.
I took a new job at Hlotse Secondary School, which was in town – the administrative capital of the Leribe district. The salary at fifty-two rands a month was better than at Likhakeng because the principal, Mrs Ntsekhe, took into account the few courses I had done in the Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages, even though she was not employing me for that. I was the new mathematics teacher! Don’t ask me how I was always getting myself into such situations.
I prepared painstakingly for each lesson and taught maths with confidence. No one complained. I must have been doing something right because one of the leading mathematicians in Lesotho, Tholang Maqutu, was one of my students at Hlotse Secondary School. Unless, of course, he became brilliant in mathematics despite getting his early foundation in the subject from me. Another famous person to whom I taught mathematics at that school was Aubrey Moalosi. Well, he didn’t become a renowned mathematician but an actor of stage and screen in Johannesburg.
We discovered that one of the twins, Mpho, was pregnant. Although the conception was an accident I was ecstatic. I had planned ultimately to marry the twins anyway. I had even taken them to Mafeteng one holiday to introduce them to my parents, without mentioning the intention of marrying both of them. That would have been ludicrous to my parents – especially to my father. My mother was quite broadminded about many things. I don’t know if she would have been broadminded about polygamy – a practice unheard of in my family even in past generations.