Sometimes There Is a Void

by Zakes Mda

  When I brought up the matter of marriage all of a sudden Mpho was singing a different tune. She had realised, she said, that marriage to both of them would not work. She had discussed the matter with her twin sister and they had reached the conclusion that I could only marry Mpho. Well, she was the one who was pregnant, so she had the right to call the shots. The old deal was off; Mphonyane would have to look for her own husband.

  When I told my father that I had impregnated a girl and wanted to marry her he was against the marriage. He was quite calm though. He flared up about minor things such as my posture when I sat or walked, yet he remained cool and collected about such a life-changing event in my life. He hoped to make me see reason. I was still young, he said, and there was no reason to rush into marriage. We would support the child, but it was not wise to marry just because the woman was pregnant. For the first time I stood up to him. I was twenty-three years old, I reminded him, and marriage at that age was not unheard of. I was marrying for love, and not just because Mpho was pregnant. He had to relent. He sent his two sidekicks, Ntate Rabonne (the one from whom we once stole meat) and Ntate Ngope Leballo (my friend Litsebe’s father who was also Potlako Leballo’s brother) to Ha Qokolo, the magical village of twins, to negotiate for her hand in marriage. Her father had also come from Benoni to be party to the negotiations.

  The secondary school allocated me a four-roomed stone house with a red corrugated iron roof on campus. Mpho moved in with me as my common law wife since we had not yet officially married.

  A few months later my first son Neo was born. I also named him Solomzi after my father. As was customary, I asked my father to also give him a name of his choice. He named him Ndukumfa after some ancestor I knew nothing about. I thought it was a terrible name that went against everything I stood for. Whereas Neo means ‘a gift’ and Solomzi means the ‘eye of the homestead’, Ndukumfa means ‘a stick that beats one to death’. I was already developing some peacenik tendencies – well, only intuitively; intellectually, I believed in the armed struggle in a South Africa where black people had no democratic options and every peaceful protest was met with bullets. A name like this made me cringe. But I had to accept it. It was an ancestral name and my father had given it to him. Ancestors were warriors and lived in times when they had to be warriors to survive.

  When the second child came two years later – a very beautiful girl – I named her Nomso after a cousin of mine, Nomso Samela, who was the only one of my relatives who bothered to cross the raging river to come and see me when I was teaching at Likhakeng Secondary School and who had met the twins and liked them. Nomso means ‘dawn’. This time my father didn’t give the child an embarrassing name. He called her Thandiwe, ‘the one who is loved’.

  By this time I was no longer teaching at Hlotse Secondary School. I got myself a job at Barclays Bank after I wrote an essay on how the otters that were found in Leribe could be bred and harvested for fur, and minks could be introduced as well. Mr Phelps, the British guy who managed the bank, had been so impressed with what he referred to as original thinking that he gave me the job immediately. He announced to everyone that he saw a brilliant banking career in my future since I had the knack of identifying investment opportunities despite the fact that I had zero training in business economics.

  This clerical job came with a boost in salary – one hundred and twenty rands a month. No wonder everyone wanted a job at the bank.

  I had money to burn so I resumed my old habits of getting sloshed, this time not in skanky shebeens but at the private bar of the Mountain View Hotel. That’s where all the senior civil servants and professional people of Leribe spent their evenings. I accumulated a number of new friends, the most regular of whom was Hatasi who had been my junior at Peka. He had a clerical job at the district treasury and always had a lot of money for drinks. And he was quite generous too. When he entered the bar we knew that we were all going to get drunk until closing time without paying a cent. We wondered where he got all that money because it could not have been from his salary. Young civil servants with only high school education earned only thirty-three rands a month. There were rumours that his father was a millionaire who owned thousands of herds of cattle and goats up in the mountain districts. But one day we woke up to hear that Hatasi was in jail. He had been subsidising our bad habits with money he had embezzled from the government. Fortunately, we were not implicated in any way and Hatasi served a few years.

  I didn’t spend much time with Mpho and the children. Much time? I spent no time at all. I was either at work or in a bar. If I happened to be at home I was always irritable and snapped at everyone. It was the only way I knew how to be a father. I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to live with me.

  Though I was an absent father and an irresponsible husband I wasn’t unfaithful to Mpho, even though the opportunity availed itself hundreds of times. I am not saying you should give me a medal for that. I am just mentioning it because every one of the guys I was carousing with had a mistress or two on the side. For instance, two of my friends, Teboho and Shabe, often invited me to accompany them to Maryland to have sex with the nuns. Teboho was a salesman who travelled throughout the country selling dress-shirts from a catalogue directly to the customers. Shabe was a civil servant in Maseru. On weekends these gentlemen came to Hlotse and we all drank together at the Mountain View Hotel. After that they went to Maryland, a Catholic mission station just a few kilometres out of Hlotse, and had orgies with the nuns under the bluegum trees that surrounded the campus. They were not the only people who indulged in such orgies. Quite a few guys from Maseru came for escapades with the nuns of Maryland who had gained a reputation for generosity.

  I cannot say I was never tempted to join them at Maryland. But I have always been gutless; you know that by now. Or perhaps I would rather occupy the position I have always been comfortable with – that of an eternal outsider. In fact I admired these guys for bonking the nuns and I would have done it too if I had the gumption.

  Instead I sat in the bar and made more new friends over Castle Lager. One of them was Mafu Sutu, the District Administrator of Leribe, the political appointee who was in charge of the whole district. He and his wife became fast friends of my family and the only time I socialised with Mpho was when we were visiting them or when they returned our visits. Another friendship that was cultivated in that bar was with Ali Semmelink, a young Afrikaner man who was looking for a new life in Lesotho after escaping apartheid in South Africa. He was not a political refugee as such and could return to South Africa whenever he wanted to.

  At first we thought Ali was a spy. Why would an Afrikaner want to escape apartheid when it was created specifically to serve his interests? He spoke freely about his background. He was originally from Cape Town, although he went to university in Pretoria and then worked at the notorious pass office in Albert Street in Johannesburg. He was one of the officials who were enforcing apartheid laws. He became disillusioned when he saw at first hand what the influx control laws were doing to break up families of black people. It was at this office that blacks were endorsed out of Johannesburg to ‘homelands’ they had never seen in their lives. He was soon disenchanted with his job. He made friends with some of the black people he met there and started visiting Soweto and socialising with folks in the black townships. That was illegal and he feared the law would catch up with him. He needed his freedom and so he found his way to Lesotho.

  His family in Cape Town was not pleased with him. After all, they were highly respected in the Afrikaner community and were even related by marriage to Andries Treunicht. You will remember him as the staunch ultra-conservative Afrikaner political leader who was advocating an even more stringent apartheid regime. But Ali paid no attention to them. He had tasted freedom in Lesotho and there was no going back for him.

  He got himself a teaching job and married a local Mosotho woman, Tseli.

  Ali and I became very close and continued our drinking partnership. It is one of the
very few friendships of my youth that have stood the test of time, right up to this day when we are doddering grandfathers. The drinking stopped many years ago, and now we can only look back and marvel at the folly of our youth. But those days of getting sloshed were what defined our manhood.

  All this drinking didn’t stunt my ambition to be somebody some day. Ali Semmelink and Mafu Sutu gave me their full support when I resigned from Barclays Bank and started an advertising and promotions business of my own. I published brochures with photographs by a famous Lesotho photographer, David Ambrose, who was also a lecturer at the university at Roma, depicting some of the tourist attractions of Lesotho. I also formed a pen-pal club called Bongo International where members from all over southern Africa joined for a fee and then at a later stage when friendships had blossomed undertook a group tour of Lesotho. I rented a suite of offices just across the street from the bank where I used to work and became my own boss.

  Life couldn’t have been better.

  GUGU, GORETTI AND I. We are reminiscing about the bees and the Bee People while having a meal at a restaurant at Cresta, one of the numerous shopping malls that mar Johannesburg’s suburbia. A man whose name I don’t know, but who I suspect I met at one of my book launches, spots me and comes smiling to greet me. I stand up to shake his hand. He expresses his pleasure that even though I am supposed to have emigrated to America I return to South Africa every year to work with the community projects I founded.

  ‘Well, I don’t know if I have emigrated as such,’ I tell him. ‘I see myself more as a migrant worker in the USA.’

  ‘I am glad to see that you are still proudly South African,’ he says.

  I am quick to respond that I never said that I am proudly South African or proudly anything.

  ‘My South Africanness speaks for itself. I don’t have to decorate it with modifiers. I don’t think pride is an attractive quality in any case.’

  He looks puzzled. He didn’t expect such a rude answer. Obviously he does not understand what could have offended me in what he thought was praise. I can be so brutal in my frankness sometimes, and only later do I think maybe I should have been more tactful.

  ‘South Africanness is just one of my identities,’ I continue nonetheless. ‘I’m also a human being and I think my humanness trumps my South Africanness any day of the week. If this was not the case I would be saying South Africa right or wrong, just like some American patriots say about the USA. If my South Africanness was the paramount identity, then I’d be a jingoist.’

  The poor fellow did not bargain for a lecture. He was just trying to be friendly, that’s all. That part of my father that does not suffer fools gladly still lives in me. I am trying very hard to fight against it. Oh, how I’d love to suffer fools gladly like any normal human being!

  I have since realised that I am not wise enough to be impatient with foolishness. That is why most times I resort to silence.

  The man excuses himself and leaves.

  THAT’S WHAT EVERYONE SAID about my father: AP does not suffer fools gladly. And sometimes it embarrassed me when he did not mince his words with anyone, including such close friends as Ntate Hani and Elizabeth Mafikeng – the two ANC members at whose café he did some of his work. Or even with the magistrate in court. I used to be his interpreter sometimes at the magistrate’s court in Mafeteng. The court proceedings were always in Sesotho. My father understood Sesotho very well, but was more comfortable cross-examining witnesses in English. So, when Ntate Leboela, the regular court interpreter, was on leave I would be summoned to the court and sworn in as the interpreter for the day.

  One day he became so impatient with the magistrate, who kept on interrupting his line of cross-examination of a stock theft witness, that he threw one of his South African Law Reports at him. It didn’t hit the magistrate though, but fell just in front of his bench. I was afraid that there would be consequences for this rash action; maybe he would be charged with contempt. I don’t know how they sorted this out with the magistrate, but the next day they were laughing about the whole incident.

  The magistrate, as did everyone, held my father in great awe.

  I always wanted to follow in my father’s footsteps and study law. So while I was working for Barclays Bank and then at MDA Enterprises, my advertising and promotions company at Hlotse, I enrolled for a correspondence law degree with a British institution that was preparing candidates for the Inns of Court. I very much wanted to be a Barrister of Gray’s Inn. The problem, of course, was that Lesotho was a Roman-Dutch Law country due to its proximity to South Africa. Even though it used to be a British colony, the country did not subscribe to English Law. Yet the whole idea of being a barrister in the English tradition was quite attractive to me.

  I decided to transfer my business to Maseru, where I rented an old building on Kingsway and hired a woman from Mafeteng to run it while I focused on my studies. A local attorney, Mr O K Mofolo, gave me a job as a clerk. He advised me to register for Attorney’s Admission with the University of South Africa, or Unisa as it was called, because English Law wasn’t going to take me anywhere in Lesotho. It was exactly what my father and all his lawyer friends, such as George Matanzima and T T Letlaka, had done, so I happily changed to the Attorney’s Admission Examinations course work. It was before South Africa introduced BProc – Baccalaureus Procurationis – as the degree for attorneys.

  OK Mofolo had been a society lawyer in Durban and had returned to open his practice on the third floor of the 60-Minutes Dry Cleaners Building just across the road from the Cathedral of Our Lady of Victories. He specialised in third party insurance road accident claims and only went to court when insurance companies contested the claims, which was not often. He trained his chief clerk, Lazarus Mpota, to complete the claim forms and assess the damages, so Lazarus did all the work while OK sat at his desk and dozed away. His practice was bringing in a lot of money because Lesotho is notorious for its road accidents, so he lived very well. His house in Maseru West was a smaller version of the prime minister’s palace. He was a staunch supporter of Leabua Jonathan’s Basotho National Party, which was normal for an ardent Catholic like him. He once chastised me very strongly when he found a BCP pamphlet lying on my desk.

  One of my weekly tasks was to take a packet of candles to a rotund Mosotho priest at Our Lady of Victories Cathedral for his blessing. Every afternoon before we closed the office OK left a burning candle on top of his office safe. We extinguished the flame the next morning when we started work at eight-thirty. I never knew why he did that but I think he believed that God would give him more money. But then the only way God could give him more money was if God created more road accidents so that OK could lodge claims for the casualties. The more serious the accident, the more money he made. Road deaths brought more money for the heirs, and OK took quite a big share of that, in addition to the fee that the insurance companies paid him for lodging the claim. I wonder how other lawyers in Lesotho missed out on such a lucrative, effortless business. My father, for instance, had to drudge, going to court defending thieves and murderers for a pittance, while OK just dozed at his desk, Lazarus and I completed the forms, and money rolled in.

  Every time I went for the candles to be blessed I found the rotund priest shooting doves with a pellet gun. He strolled on the paved path around the cathedral and when he spotted a dove he aimed carefully and fired. Thankfully, he was not a crack shot; he missed quite often. But he was getting better all the time and sometimes a dove would be cooing happily one moment and spinning in the air until it crashed on the ground the next. The priest would almost dance with glee as he reached for the dead bird. I wondered how a man of God could enjoy killing birds. If I arrived while he was aiming his rifle with strained concentration I would will the dove to fly away. ‘Fly away, little bird, fly away before he pulls the trigger.’ I said this under my breath. The dove would heed my warning and fly away. The priest would then look at my smirk, reach for the packet of candles in my hand, make the sign
of the cross around the candles and then give them back to me. That was all it took for them to have the sacred power to be the guardian of the riches in OK’s safe.

  One day I came back from the priest with a packet of newly blessed candles and I met Sibongile Twala outside our office building. She was with two very handsome and fresh-looking boys. They were well dressed in expensive-looking jeans and shirts. Sibongile, my cousin and Muse, had matured into a very beautiful and sophisticated lady. I reckoned the boys were fellow students at the university where she was studying for a Bachelor of Science degree. I had not seen her for years, not since the days we lived at my aunt’s in Maseru West and I was prancing around Maseru with Mr Dizzy.

  She looked at me and I saw pity in her eyes. Or maybe I just imagined it. I was self-conscious about my threadbare clothes and especially my shoes. They were in tatters and the soles were held together with wires. I was ashamed that Sibongile saw me like this. She smiled, kissed me, and left with her beautiful friends.

  Things had not been going well for me financially. OK Mofolo was only paying me twenty-five rands a month even though I worked for him full-time.

  ‘You are here for the experience because you want to be a lawyer,’ he said. ‘Anyway, you have your own business.’

  Well, I didn’t have it any more. I had had to close my business because it went bankrupt for lack of proper attention.

  I was renting a one-roomed flat from the Sehlabo family in a township called Qoaling on the outskirts of Maseru where I lived with Mpho and our two children. Sometimes I didn’t have money to buy them food and I had to borrow twenty-five cents from a neighbouring shebeen queen to buy them a loaf of bread. Whilst I was at it, I would also drown my sorrows in pineapple beer which the shebeen queen gave me on credit. I only went home to sleep, stinking like a sewer.