Sometimes There Is a Void

by Zakes Mda

  One day Mphonyane, my wife’s twin sister, arrived with two guys in a black Valiant, a car much beloved by taxi drivers and mine workers. The men didn’t go into the house. They parked the car in the street some distance away but I could see it from the window. The twins conferred outside for some time and when Mpho came back into the room she told me that she was accompanying Mphonyane. She did not tell me where Mphonyane was going or why she needed to be accompanied.

  ‘Who are the two guys?’ I asked.

  ‘They are Mphonyane’s boyfriends,’ she said. I had heard that line before. When we were still staying at Hlotse and I was running MDA Enterprises at Kokobela Building I once passed Mpho standing with a boy on a path near the woods. She looked glorious in a pleated mauve dress I had bought her from a mail order house in Johannesburg where I purchased her special clothes. The two were talking animatedly and giggling like teenagers. They saw me but didn’t seem to mind. I didn’t think much of it at the time and went off to work. After about two hours I left my office for a pub lunch at Mountain View Hotel. Mpho was still standing by the woods with the boy. Still I said nothing. When I asked her later that evening who the boy was, she said he was Mphonyane’s boyfriend. I took her at her word, although I wondered what she was talking about with Mphonyane’s boyfriend for more than two hours.

  Here now, again, I was looking at Mphonyane’s boyfriends through the window.

  ‘Both of them? And why are they out there? Why are they not coming in?’

  She didn’t answer.

  The twins left and I stayed home with the kids. That night Thandi, the daughter, was crying for her mother. I held her in my arms and paced the floor with her and sang a lullaby. That didn’t stop her. She bawled even louder for most of the night, until her voice was hoarse.

  In the morning she whimpered, and then was quiet for some time, and then she sighed, and then cried again. I raised the volume on the portable radio to listen to the morning news. A police station had been attacked at Mapoteng in the Berea district. Masiu’s body was found nearby riddled with bullets. It could have been me, I thought. Thanks to my resistance to insiderness I was still alive.

  Mpho did not return until the following evening. And nine months later she had a baby boy. We named him Dini, which is isiXhosa for ‘sacrifice’.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE BEE PEOPLE ARE very angry. We are sitting on the grass in Uncle Owen’s yard. I am here at the Bee Place – that’s what we now call Qoboshane village – without Gugu; it is as though a limb is missing. But I am here for an emergency meeting. I came as soon as I received a telephone call from ’Makamohelo Lebata, the chairperson of the beekeeping collective, and now we have before us the shame-faced elder Morrison Xinindlu. He is tall and wiry in his neat grey pants, woollen skullcap and a heavy sweater despite the heat. He has to endure the humiliation of answering to us, we who could be his children and grandchildren.

  Upbraiding an elder is not something I relish. But Old Xinindlu deserves our wrath. Two days ago he took off in the project’s Toyota pickup truck and drove to Sterkspruit. He was utterly drunk. When he sped past St Teresa the vehicle was zigzagging all over the dirt road, and soon after Dulcie’s Nek it capsized into a roadside donga. Fortunately it did not roll over the rocky slope; otherwise we would not be having this meeting today but a wake instead, and the truck would have been totalled. Still, the truck needs panel-beating which will cost the Bee People thousands of rands.

  ‘There is no point in behaving like the wronged party here, Tat’uXinindlu,’ I tell him as he stares at me sulkily. ‘These women are the wronged people. You had no business driving their truck while drunk. It was very irresponsible of you.’

  ‘I think he has heard, Ntate Mda,’ says ’Makamohelo, addressing me. ‘It was a mistake. Let us forgive him. He is our father.’

  The rest of the Bee People are mumbling their agreement. My Uncle Owen does not say anything. I know why. He is Morrison Xinindlu’s friend and age-mate – both are in their eighties – and like Xinindlu he is quite partial to his brandy. It could easily have been him instead of Xinindlu.

  ‘What do you mean we should forgive him?’ I ask.

  ‘He will not do it again,’ says ’Makamohelo.

  ‘How do you know he will not do it again? Did he say that? Did he ask to be forgiven, or are you so generous with forgiveness you want to dish it out free?’

  I hate to be so hard on the old man, but his obstinacy angers me.

  He and my Uncle Owen were the two men who accepted the beekeeping idea with great enthusiasm when I first introduced it in the village. As an elder he was a councillor to the headman Xhalisile, a descendant of the man who tried to assassinate my grandfather and left him mentally unstable. Thanks to Xinindlu’s advocacy the villagers gave us the mountain and soon our beekeeping project was under way. He was one of the few men who were members. They have all fallen by the wayside – some just giving up when the benefits were slow in coming and others dying of AIDS. Now the Bee People are all female, except for the two elders, Uncle Owen Mda and Morrison Xinindlu.

  The women are soft-hearted. They insist that the old man should be forgiven. I am against the idea because the elder has not apologised. All he said was ‘I didn’t do it on purpose.’ That’s not an apology. Also, I feel there need to be consequences for such irresponsible behaviour. But I am outvoted, although there is no formal vote. It is obvious to me that the consensus is that we should just let the matter rest, so I give up. They don’t say so, but I suspect that they are fearful of alienating the old man lest they lose him as a driver. I have been urging the women to take driving lessons so that they can drive their own truck instead of depending on the men, but they are afraid. Perhaps it is not out of self-interest that they want to forgive the old man; perhaps they are just being respectful towards the elder as young women who have been brought up in the isiXhosa and Sesotho traditions.

  ‘I don’t see how you can run a business this way,’ I tell them nevertheless, trying not to appear a sore loser. ‘When it comes to the affairs of your business you are all equal. We continue to respect each other as is the custom, but in the boardroom there is no man or woman or child or elder. We have the same voice, equal to everyone else’s, and the fact that we are elders does not give us the right to do things that will end up destroying our project. Now a lot of your money will be going towards repairing the vehicle just because an elder has behaved like a delinquent. That’s a few steps backwards for your business.’

  I am quite ashamed of upbraiding the elder like this. Quite embarrassed, in fact. But I feel that it has to be done.

  After a brief discussion on housekeeping matters I go to greet my Uncle Press at his general dealer’s store, otherwise known as eRestu by the villagers because it is also a restaurant and a tavern. He’ll be coming soon, I’m told, so I while away the time looking at the items behind the counter. It is a well-stocked shop. The shelves are full of various items of groceries ranging from canned meats, fish and vegetables to household utensils. There are drums of paraffin, stacks of white bags of maize meal and bread flour, cans and bottles of cooking oil, and packets of candles. There are also shelves that are stacked with the fluffy white blankets each with a single black stripe that the men wear during traditional ceremonies such as initiation rituals and ancestral feasts. On the counter there are basins full of fat cakes, fried fish and salted dried snoek fish. The store supplies all the needs of the villagers and they don’t have to go to Sterkspruit just for groceries. Uncle Press has done well for himself, although I have never seen him work behind the counter. His wife is at the cash register come rain or shine, and his sons and daughters serve the customers.

  When Press arrives I notice that he is wearing single strings of white beads on his wrists and on his head. He even has anklets of a single strand of white beads. I know immediately that he has been called by the ancestors and is now a diviner and shaman, or igqirha. I had no idea that he had undergone the thwasa
process, the first stage of the calling. He managed to keep his calling a secret known only to members of his immediate family. No wonder he had been absent lately. Sometimes I would come to the village and leave without seeing him and no one wanted to talk about his whereabouts. He was undergoing training and initiation into the world of spirits and now he is a fully fledged traditional healer.

  I congratulate Press on his entry into the world of healers. He seems to be shy about it. Or even embarrassed. I don’t think this is something he wanted for himself. He must have been forced into it by some physical illness or some mental dis-ease. That’s what the ancestors do to you; they drag you kicking and screaming into serving them. That is what the believers say.

  It is like that with many of my people. A number of close relatives have become diviners and traditional healers. I told you about Cousin Bernard who didn’t complete the training and was therefore rendered insane by the ancestors. I have other cousins at ’Musong who are traditional healers. My revered ancestor himself, Mhlontlo, was known for his magical powers. He even turned the white man’s bullets into water. Others, such as Cousin Nondyebo, may not necessarily be fully fledged healers and shamans but they are adherents of isiXhosa traditional religion and whenever the family gathers they want to introduce rituals that have to do with paying homage to the ancestors.

  Usually this does not go well with those of my relatives who have found Christ. And I have quite a few of those too. In fact, members of my family – both immediate and extended – are finding Christ all over the place. Even my younger brother Monwabisi, a magistrate who used to be a hedonist of the first order, is a lay preacher at his church. My nephew Dumisani, my sister’s only son, is doing youth ministry work in the United Kingdom where he married an English rose. My sister-in-law Johanna and some of her children are saved and born again, and when I visit her she does not hesitate to tell me about prophecies of the end of the world which is always just two years away.

  I respect their choices and love them dearly, as long as they don’t assume the arrogance of thinking that theirs is the right path and everyone else is wrong. I value both the ancestor-venerating and the Christ-worshipping sides of my family as long as they don’t try to convert me into subscribing to the weird notion that mythologies – especially foreign ones in the case of Christianity – are objective reality. My people should grant me the right to go to hell, if that is where unbelievers go after death.

  In the same way that I am tolerant of those who believe differently, and I am even not averse to participating in their rituals if it makes everyone happy, I expect them to grant me the same kind of tolerance. As an atheist, I don’t have rituals of my own for them to participate in. I just need to be left alone with my beliefs. But it is difficult for some of them to understand this because Christianity, like the rest of the Abrahamic faiths, is a very intolerant religion. You are either with them – their brand of Christianity – or you fry in hell. Period. Strangely, the only Christians who were ever tolerant towards my unbelief were a bunch of American Catholic nuns with whom I worked at Mabathoana High School in Maseru some years back.

  MABATHOANA HIGH SCHOOL WAS named after the Archbishop of Lesotho, the Right Reverend Emmanuel Mabathoana OMI, the first black Roman Catholic archbishop in southern Africa. It was run by nuns of the Holy Names, most of them hailing from Canada and the United States of America. They were more liberal than the local nuns we had come to know so well. For instance, at Mabathoana there was no morning assembly before school started where prayers and announcements were made. When the bell rang in the morning students went straight to their classrooms and lessons began without any prayers. All announcements were posted on the bulletin boards at both the senior and the junior blocks. This was very unusual for Lesotho where schools of every denomination, including government-controlled schools, had a tradition of morning assembly with prayers and readings from the Bible.

  Another unusual thing about Mabathoana was that all the cleaning of the classrooms and the surroundings was done by employees. After school in Lesotho girls had to take turns to sweep the classrooms and boys kept the school grounds clean. The Basotho teachers at Mabathoana, especially the older female teachers, complained that the American nuns were spoiling Basotho children who needed to be brought up under the strict discipline of prayer and work – ora et labora. But the nuns were adamant that the children had not come to school to work but to study, and if they wanted to pray at all they could do it at their homes or in church. Religious education, they insisted, should be left to the parents and the priests, except in those instances when it was taught in the classroom as a subject for those who opted for it.

  I was impressed by this philosophy when I joined the school as a teacher of Literature in English, following in the footsteps of short-story writer Mbulelo Mzamane, who had taught there after completing his BA degree at the University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland at Roma and my younger brother Monwabisi – the one they called Thabiso – who had taught there immediately after obtaining his secondary teacher’s certificate at the Morija Training College.

  The first time I met Mbulelo Mzamane I was buying a loaf of bread at Maseru Café. It was already sliced and was neatly wrapped in cellophane, which was quite a new way of packaging bread because before this we bought bread unsliced and unpackaged. I heard a voice behind me, ‘Hey, don’t you have a bread knife at your place?’ I didn’t even know who this tall guy was who had just pounced on me asking me this silly question. I bet he didn’t know who I was either, and I resented his forwardness. He was with some guys I knew, the Lebentlele brothers who were jazz musicians. He was introduced to me as one of the talented young South African writers exiled in Lesotho. He turned out to be such a lovable guy after all. He was quite an activist in organising cultural events, and some of his students at Mabathoana had formed a band, the Anti-Antiques, led by a scrawny boy called Semenkoane Frank Leepa. This was the band that later became Uhuru and then gained international fame as Sankomota. Now Mbulelo Mzamane had resigned from the high school because he was going abroad for higher education.

  My brother, on the other hand, had left the high school after he had been at loggerheads with the nuns on some matter that I never got to understand. That helped him because he went to university to study law, and at that time he was doing his LLB degree at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

  In February that year, 1976, I had completed a distance-learning degree with a Swiss private fine arts academy that had started as a learned society but was then offering courses for artists who wanted to qualify for its membership. The International Academy of Arts and Letters has, unfortunately, long since closed down with the demise of its major funder, the International University Exchange Fund (IUEF).

  I had been studying law, as you might remember, while working for the attorney OK Mofolo. Because of the measly salary he was paying me I had gone back to painting and flogging my works to tourists at hotels with Mr Dizzy and sometimes with James Dorothy. I had found myself spending more time painting and less time studying law. I had also reestablished relations with the older artists such as Meshu Mokitimi, Paul Ncheke and Phil Motsosi. Most of us were starving artists, but to me the life of a starving artist was much more fulfilling than the life of the lawyer I was going to be on obtaining my Attorney’s Admission. I decided to give up on law altogether. I did not tell my father about it because he would have been very disappointed. Although he had always been careful never to push me into law, or in any other direction, he had been proud that at last I was making something of myself, especially in a noble profession that had become a family tradition.

  Unlike my fellow artists who were happy just being artists, I yearned desperately for a formal qualification. It didn’t matter what it was or how much recognition it had, as long as it allowed me to put the letters after my name. That was one reason I had previously attempted the courses of the College of Preceptors in London – on qualifying I would have been an Associat
e of the College of Preceptors, or ACP, and would continue with them until I became a Fellow, with an FCP after my name.

  I came from a family of learned people where degrees were valued for their own sake. Even if I were to sell lots of paintings and make millions of rands, there would still be a gaping hole in my life that could only be filled by a university degree. And of course I was not making the millions. I could barely survive. Once in a while I would sell a painting but the money would not be enough to pay rent. I was still renting a room on the outskirts of Maseru, at Qoaling, where I lived with Mpho and the kids. Occasionally I had to borrow money from my mother who was then working as a registered nurse at Holy Cross Clinic, a Roman Catholic mission station in southern Lesotho. I was too ashamed to ask for assistance from my father.

  One day an artist from Pretoria, an old white man called Walter Battiss, paid a visit to the Lesotho Museum that Leabua Jonathan had established in Maseru. What impressed me about him, besides his very unconventional looks with his mane of white hair and flamboyant style of dressing – a flowing white caftan – was the fact that he was not just an exuberant abstract painter but a scholar of art. Indeed, he had retired from a professorship of art at the University of South Africa a year or so before. I was in awe of artists who were also academics because they were not the sort of people one usually met in our circles. He was a Fellow of the International Institute of Arts and Letters (IIAL), a learned society in Switzerland, and I wanted to see letters of that type follow my name as well. So, Walter Battiss introduced me to artists in Switzerland who were operating the distance learning International Academy of Arts and Letters. They were financed by the International University Exchange Fund which was in turn funded by the Swedish government.