Sometimes There Is a Void

by Zakes Mda

  ‘She just came to make coffee,’ I said after introducing Tholane. ‘She is on her way to the tennis court.’

  This last bit of information was necessary to explain why her lacy panties were hanging out of her teensy-weensy white skirt. But Sister Yvonne just walked out without another word. Perhaps she thought she had been assigned to Sodom and Gomorrah.

  ‘What’s it with you guys and nuns?’ asked Tholane.

  ‘We guys? Me and who? And what are you talking about anyway?’

  ‘I saw the way you were looking at her. You desire her.’

  I didn’t know it had been that obvious. Although ‘desire’ was quite a stretch, I thought she was quite attractive. If I had any lustful look at all it must have been a reflex reaction.

  Sister Arnadene used to tell me that where she came from nuns did not wear the habit, whereas in Lesotho they were forced to be in tunics and white veils. Sister Yvonne was the first nun I saw in civvies. I was at the Maseru Holiday Inn Casino minding my beer at the bar counter while watching Mr Dizzy minding the slot machines, where he was losing a lot of coins that would otherwise have been useful in filling our stomach with beer and our heads with giddy mischief. And there was this beautiful white woman with a wistful look smiling at me. I smiled back even though I didn’t recognise her, though she looked vaguely familiar. It only registered later when she was walking out of the casino that she was none other than my new principal, Sister Yvonne Maes. What she was doing at night in civvies at the casino I never got to know.

  I have often wondered what happened to those beautiful nuns. Well, today you can look people up using any one of the search engines, and I did so for the purposes of this story. I discovered that Sister Arnadene Bean is still going strong as a nun in Oregon, minus the habit. She ministers to female prison inmates. But Sister Yvonne Maes is no longer a nun. She has written a book titled Cannibal’s Wife: A Memoir in which she tells the story of how she was sexually abused repeatedly by a priest who was her retreat director in Lesotho. When she reported the matter to the Catholic Church it was covered up and the priest was transferred back to England whence he came. Yvonne resigned from the convent and the church, after thirty-seven years as a nun, and now advocates for survivors of sexual abuse in Canada.

  I didn’t know this had happened to my principal. But I can easily believe it because the whole environment of the Catholic Church in Lesotho was sexually charged, sometimes perversely so and at other times in ways that were absolutely exhilarating. I have told you already about the pilgrimages of some of my pals to Maryland for orgies with the nuns. I watched as an outsider when these things were happening. But in two instances I became either an insider, or almost one.

  When I went to the shops or to the shebeens at the Location I passed through the premises of St Bernadette Primary School which was just across the fence from Mabathoana High School on one side and Lesotho High School on the other. From there I walked on the pristine stone-paved grounds of Our Lady of Victories Cathedral, where I used to take Attorney OK Mofolo’s candles for the blessings, between the imposing sandstone cathedral and a double-storey sandstone house that I figured served as the offices of the priests and the bishops.

  One day a friendly priest with sparse white hair and a white goatee approached me just when I was passing the steps of this building.

  ‘What is your name?’ he asked.

  I gave him my first name.

  ‘You were baptised with that name?’

  I don’t know why he assumed I was Catholic or even Christian at all. Perhaps he expected everyone who made these sacred grounds a thoroughfare to be at least a member of his faith.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘My church name is Kizito.’

  He seemed to find this quite fascinating. He told me he was Father Villa. He was an Italian, just arrived from Malawi where he had been working as a priest for many years. He was quite impressed to hear that at my young age I was the deputy headmaster at a prestigious Catholic school.

  After that, every time I passed by he would pop out of nowhere to talk to me. I began to dread passing there because I found the small talk a waste of time. But it was the shortest route to my destination. I don’t know how he knew I would be coming past because I didn’t keep regular times. Maybe he was spying on me from the window upstairs and could see me from a distance. He was like a spectre that haunted me.

  Then one day he invited me upstairs to show me something that he said would interest me. I followed him through the office where a middle-aged secretary was typing mechanically as if in a daze and then climbed the stairs to the rooms upstairs. It turned out that one of these was his bedroom. There was a single bed covered in a blue Basotho lesolanka blanket as a bedspread, a small dressing table with a number of newspapers on it and a nightstand with a lamp and book. On the bed was a pile of rosaries.

  Father Villa took a newspaper from the dressing table and showed it to me. It was from Malawi, he said, from the diocese where he ministered.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s a wonderful newspaper?’ he asked, coming very close to me.

  It was just your standard Catholic paper and I didn’t see anything wonderful about it. He started to breathe very hard and began to caress my thigh. I removed his hand and moved back a little. He came closer still and his body touched mine. His hand was busy on my thigh again. I pushed him away. He started to whine, I think overcome with desire.

  ‘You can choose any rosary you want,’ he said, almost out of breath. ‘I can give you as many rosaries as you want. Look at this one.’

  At this he went to the bed and picked one rosary with shimmering red beads.

  ‘Isn’t it beautiful? Come and get it.’

  The old bugger was dangling the rosary, trying to entice me to come closer to the bed. But I was not about to do that. So he leapt at me by the door, grabbed me and breathed into my ear.

  ‘You know my car?’ he asked.

  I had seen the white Volkswagen Beetle parked outside and on a few occasions I had seen him driving it in town.

  ‘I can give it to you ultimately if you come here occasionally and we do fun things,’ he said with a naughty glint in the eye. ‘I can do wonderful things for you.’

  He reached for me and tried to plant a kiss, but I turned my head. Then I pushed him away so hard that he fell on the bed. I heard him moan ‘Kizito, please Kizito’ as I walked out of the room. Downstairs in the office the secretary was typing away, seemingly oblivious of what was happening upstairs.

  As I walked away I wondered how many young men – perhaps some of them children – he had lured into his lair with his trusty rosaries.

  In the evening I was sitting at ’Mamojela’s shebeen with Clemoski and Mr Top, whose real name was Thabang Thamae. He was the Principal Secretary in the Ministry of Finance. I had taken to patronising this particular shebeen lately because it was just across the road from my high school. Clemoski, who had become my best friend more than anyone else, was a regular there since he was sleeping with ’Mamojela behind the back of her regular boyfriend. Also, I had been terribly savaged by dogs one night on my way home from the distant shebeens at the Location. I could stagger back from ’Mamojela’s to my house in the small hours of the morning without some mutt getting ideas about the taste of my flesh.

  So there I was, sitting with these honourable gentlemen guzzling Castle Lager and telling them of my close encounter with Father Villa.

  ‘Rosaries! How cheap does he think you are?’ asked Clemoski.

  ‘Well, he did raise the stakes and offer me his Volkswagen Beetle. “Ultimately” I would own it, he said. It means I’ll have to be his permanent mistress before I get it.’

  Everybody laughed at this.

  ‘You don’t have a car,’ said Mr Top. ‘This was your chance to own a car.’

  ‘Well, he should make the offer to Mxolosi,’ I said.

  Mxolisi Ngoza was our thoroughly gay friend who taught mathematics at Mabathoana High School. The ‘thoroughl
y’ part stems from the fact that most of the gay guys we associated with in Maseru, some of whom were senior civil servants, were either bisexual or lived a lie. They even married women to give a semblance of ‘respectability’. Though Mxolisi never broadcast his sexual orientation to anyone he did not pretend to be anything but gay.

  The exhilarating moments were the result of Sister Cathy’s magical company. She was a nun of the Sisters of the Holy Names in a well-pressed grey tunic and snow-white veil, a beautiful Mosotho woman, quite big in stature, full-figured, with a large bosom that heaved wistfully when she sighed. And she sighed quite often when she was with me.

  Sister Cathy taught Bible Studies at Mabathoana High and ran a girls’ club where they got together and sang and talked about Jesus and how to live a clean, sin-free life.

  I spent a lot of time with Sister Cathy, to the extent that I neglected my duties as deputy headmaster. I sat on the veranda with her and listened as she played her guitar and sang for me. Sometimes I brought my flute and we played together. These were very simple ditties, the type that she sang with her girls.

  Often I would open my cupboard in the staffroom and find cookies wrapped in paper serviettes. I knew immediately that Sister Cathy had brought them for me from the convent. From the cookies we graduated to the missal wine that she stole for me from the cathedral every Monday. In most instances it would just be half a bottle, but on one or two occasions it was a full bottle of red wine, sealed. I feasted on the cookies and on the blood of Christ when I got back home after school. I told Mpho, my wife, that the treats were from the convent but she didn’t see anything to be suspicious or even jealous about.

  I must say that I was absolutely smitten with Sister Cathy. If I had not been married to Mpho at the time I would have asked Sister Cathy to elope with me. I toyed with the idea. I don’t know if I would have made any headway. She was married to Jesus. Unlike Jesus’ love, mine was not pure and innocent. It was dripping with sinful lust. I imagined Sister Cathy in all sorts of ungodly positions. Our relationship, however, was never consummated, except in a play that I wrote many years later, The Nun’s Romantic Story, that had its premiere at the Johannesburg Civic Theatre. What I feared most was that I would arouse the devil in her and leave her unfulfilled. Remember the little problem? So, all we ever did was to hold hands, gaze into each other’s eyes, smile and then peck quickly and shamefacedly. She would then strum her guitar furiously as her bosom heaved in one sigh after another.

  We sat for hours on the veranda of the junior block where the staffroom was located, until Sister Yvonne Maes looked at us with stern and disapproving eyes. Then we took refuge in the school library and sat there and gazed at each other while pretending to be reading. Even there, Sister Laurent-Marie, the aged librarian, displayed her disapproval with a stern gaze of her own.

  After my daily encounters with Sister Cathy I needed a cold shower. But instead of taking one, I either went to ’Mamojela’s shebeen or to the Lancer’s Inn. I never gossiped about Sister Cathy even when I was with my boisterous drinking buddies who boasted of their conquests. I felt ours was a sacred relationship. It could not be tainted by cheap gossip.

  On Fridays I would go to poetry readings at the British Council. At least there, in the midst of the rhythmic voices promising a forthcoming victory over the Boers and the drums throbbing like AK47s, I was able to forget about Sister Cathy. When there was no poetry reading organised on some Fridays it was just good to be with the dynamic guys from Soweto. Many of them were teetotallers, dedicated only to the struggle and to poetry. I drank less or not at all when I was with them.

  I remember one day I was hanging out with Duma ka Ndlovu in front of Maseru Café when Chris Hani came hobbling along on crutches after yet another assassination attempt on him. His house at Qoaling on the outskirts of Maseru had been set on fire by a petrol bomb, but he and his family were able to escape. It amazed me that Chris was hobbling about town without even a bodyguard so soon after the bomb attack.

  ‘Hey, I heard the Boers almost killed you,’ Duma said, teasing him. ‘This wouldn’t have happened to you if you had me as your bodyguard.’

  ‘You’d be the first one to kill me,’ said Chris Hani.

  It was a joke of course and he chuckled after saying that. But it might also have been a parapraxis – the ANC harboured a lot of distrust towards those Black Consciousness firebrands who had not chosen to join the ANC in exile. And Duma ka Ndlovu was hardcore Black Consciousness. Not all of the new exiles stayed faithful to their original philosophy though. Most of them joined the ANC, with a smaller number joining the PAC. In fact the ANC now had a much stronger presence in Lesotho than the PAC, which used to be the dominant South African movement in the country. The ANC now had many vibrant young activists and no longer depended on the Communist lawyers like Joe Matthews and Robin Cranko to represent its interests. In fact both these lawyers had left Lesotho some time back. Robin Cranko for sure was deported by Leabua Jonathan’s government. I don’t remember how Joe Matthews left, but we heard he was now living in England.

  The young exiles – be they aligned to the ANC, PAC or Black Consciousness – gathered together to create poetry and theatre. No one cared what ideology the individual artists espoused. Even local Basotho artists became part of the mix.

  I was never so energised in my life, and I was forever grateful to the Class of 76 – as these new exiles were called – for coming to Lesotho to recharge our batteries which had almost gone flat.

  Culture was not only invigorated by the new exiles, but a lot of overseas acts came to Maseru to garner South African audiences. These artists couldn’t perform in South Africa due to the cultural boycott. Stars like Sarah Vaughn and Eartha Kitt became the regular nightly acts at the Maseru Holiday Inn. As one of the cultural elites of Maseru – a big fish in a small pond – I was invited to meet them all. I remember wasting the afternoons away with Jimmy Witherspoon drinking beer at the Victoria Hotel beer garden. And when Jane Fonda – a hero of ours because of her position against the war in Vietnam and her general opposition to what we regarded as American imperialism – came to visit I was invited by her promoters to have dinner with her at the Maseru Hilton Hotel, an association that paid great dividends years later when I was stranded in America and she came to my rescue. I’ll tell you more about that in the next chapter.

  All this flurry of activity revived my creative juices and I started writing plays again. My three plays that were later published by Ravan Press in a collection titled We Shall Sing for the Fatherland and Other Plays were written during this period. The ‘other plays’ of the title were Dark Voices Ring and Dead End, the earlier version of which I had written when I was at Peka High School and then put away in a trunk full of all the junk I was hoarding.

  One day I read in the Rand Daily Mail about a new competition for playwrights in southern African, the Amstel Playwright of the Year Award, sponsored by the South African Breweries. I mailed the manuscript of We Shall Sing for the Fatherland to the address in Johannesburg and forgot all about it. I was surprised to get a letter a few weeks later informing me that the play had been granted the Merit Award of the Amstel Playwright of the Year Society, which was in fact a runner-up prize to the joint first prize winners John Pank and James Ambrose Brown.

  Mpho went to Johannesburg to accept the prize on my behalf at a gala event. She came back star-struck after spending the evening with the South African celebrities we only got to see in newspapers and magazines. She also brought me the prize money – a cheque for two hundred and fifty rands.

  Maseru was further energised by the arrival of another South African playwright who was not really a political exile but came to Lesotho in quest of creative freedom. He was Dukuza ka Macu and I had read about his plays – such as A Matter of Convenience and Heaven Weeps for Thina-Sonke – in the newspapers. It was a thrill to be working with him, helping revive a Lesotho production of A Matter of Convenience with some of my students acting in it. Duk
uza was a new breed of playwright who had moved away from the influence of the Gibson Kente musical and was creating a highly intellectual yet entertaining kind of theatre, replete with symbolism and metaphor. I was impressed by his mastery of the language. What amazed me most about him was his history; he had never been to school in his life. He grew up looking after goats and cattle in Natal and taught himself how to read and write. He developed into a voracious reader, not of comic books like me, but of great works of philosophy by the likes of Kant, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein.

  Some of the best acting I have seen in my life was in Dukuza’s production of The Park, an adaptation to a South African setting of Amiri Baraka’s play, The Dutchman. Dukuza himself performed in this play with an English woman who was my colleague at Mabathoana High School, Sarah Walton. Amiri Baraka was the new name of LeRoi Jones, the African-American poet who had captivated and influenced me in a new direction of poetry a few years back.

  One day a stranger came to my house at Mabathoana High School. He was a white man from South Africa called Nicholas Ellenbogen. He invited Mpho and me for dinner at the Holiday Inn where he had booked for the night and told us that he was the founder of the Amstel Playwright of the Year Award. He had come to negotiate for the rights to have my play performed professionally in South Africa. But because it was a one-act play he wondered if there were any other plays I had written so that We Shall Sing for the Fatherland could be presented as a double-bill. Indeed, from my junk trunk I was able to dig out Dead End and Dark Voices Ring.

  We Shall Sing for the Fatherland was first produced by the Federated Union of Black Arts as a double-bill with Dead End – a two-hander about pimps, johns, and abortion. It was the least political of the three plays. We Shall Sing for the Fatherland, on the other hand, looks at the life of the veterans of the liberation struggle who are now marginalised in the new society they helped to bring about. It is the most enduring of my plays and continues to enjoy revivals by various groups in South Africa and abroad to this day. In post-apartheid South Africa they call it prophetic because the marginalisation I was writing about has come to pass. It was not difficult to be ‘prophetic’ about post-liberation South Africa. Remember, I was living in an already independent Africa where some of these things were already happening. It was obvious to me that the dominant black classes in South Africa would hijack the liberation project to serve their own class interests, as they had done in Kenya and in other independent African countries.