Sometimes There Is a Void

by Zakes Mda

  But my father could be very diplomatic too. And wily. I saw this when my kid brother was arrested by the Boers and was sent to Grootvlei Prison in Bloemfontein.

  It all started when Limpho, Chris Hani’s wife, tried to smuggle a group of young men out of Lesotho for military training in the ANC camps in other African countries and abroad. The group was composed of my former Mabathoana High School students – Buti Moleko, Nelson Mogudi and my sister’s boyfriend Steve Tau. The fourth young man was my brother Zwelakhe. I was quite surprised to hear that he was in this group because his sentiments were strongly PAC. It was the case with the other young men in the group as well. But then those days things tended to get blurred sometimes and ideology and party loyalties became secondary to the goal of liberating South Africa. I have told you, for instance, that Limpho’s brother Sekamane was a commander in the Lesotho Liberation Army which trained under the auspices of the Azanian People’s Liberation Army – the PAC military wing – in Libya. Actually, Limpho herself used to be strongly pro-BCP, an ally of the PAC, when she was still Clemoski’s girlfriend before she married Chris. Well, don’t even try to sort that out.

  My brother told me later that what was uppermost in these young men’s minds was to get higher education abroad. It didn’t matter under the auspices of which one of our liberation movements.

  But they had not reckoned with the Boers. When they were crossing the Maseru border post with Limpho and the driver in the guise of a family going shopping in Ladybrand, they were arrested. Someone had snitched on them. Limpho and the driver were released after questioning because they were Lesotho citizens and there was no evidence at the time that they were not who they claimed to be. Their Lesotho passports were genuine. But the young men were clearly South Africans who carried false Lesotho passports. There was evidence that they had crossed the border illegally when they took refuge in Lesotho. They were taken to Bloemfontein where they were fortunate enough to be sentenced to only one year in prison.

  It worried my father no end that his last-born was in the hands of the Boers. The Boers, on the other hand, had their own ideas about Zwelakhe. They wanted to use him as bait to get my father to cross the Caledon River so that they could arrest him. They sent emissaries to Mafeteng with the message that they were willing to negotiate for Zwelakhe’s release if my father would meet them on the South African side of the border post. My father insisted that they meet by the river on the Lesotho side. He was accompanied to the meeting by Sechaba Kalake, a Mafeteng youth whose father was serving a long term on Robben Island, and by my brother Sonwabo. He instructed them to stand a few yards behind him as he negotiated with an Afrikaner police captain. The two young men pretended that they were armed in case the captain grabbed my father by force with the view of dragging him across the border.

  ‘You know, Mr Mda, we have nothing against you,’ my father later told us the captain had said. ‘We know that you’ve not been doing anything subversive since coming to Lesotho. Come back to South Africa. No one will do anything to you.’

  The captain promised that they would release Zwelakhe if my father undertook to return for further negotiations about his safe passage back to South Africa. My father promised he would return for further negotiations if they released Zwelakhe first.

  A few weeks later Zwelakhe was released from Grootvlei Prison, but my father never kept his word to the Boers, despite their gesture of ‘goodwill’.

  The next time I met Chris Hani I confronted him about this.

  ‘Bhut’ Thembi, how can you guys take my kid brother across the border without our knowledge?’

  ‘AP knew,’ he said.

  I was quite surprised. Was Chris just trying to shut me up?

  I still don’t believe that my father would allow his son to be taken out of the country for military training by the ANC. But then you never know. My father, though a Pan Africanist and a champion of African nationalism, had a very open mind and even affection for his old organisation.

  After his release from prison Zwelakhe gave up all ideas of going for military training and went to study for an LLB degree at the National University of Lesotho.

  At about this time John Nyathi Pokela was released from Robben Island after serving thirteen years. He was my father’s protégé from the village of Qoboshane – the Bee Place. While he was in transit to Tanzania to take over the chairmanship of the PAC he stayed at Bra Saul Manganye’s house at Lesotho High School. Bra Saul was another friend of mine who taught commercial subjects at the high school and had come to Lesotho some years back as a refugee from Lady Selbourne in Pretoria. Lady Selbourne – and the neighbouring Pretoria townships – was the headquarters of jazz in South Africa, so one of the pleasures of hanging out with Bra Saul, besides his nostalgic reminiscences about launching the PAC in Pretoria, was listening to jazz. Also, he was the only person I knew who had a TV in those early days of South African television.

  I went to Bra Saul’s home to pay my respects to Pokela. He looked fine despite the years he had spent working in the lime quarries on Robben Island. I remembered him from his youthful days at eHohobeng, which was the name of his sub-village at Qoboshane, and then when as a refugee he taught at Maseru Community School. He was present when Potlako Leballo swore me into the PAC. He was very happy to see me and remarked that I had not changed one bit. He was being nice, of course; I had gained quite a few kilograms since the last time we met. I paid him the same compliment. He told me that my plays were smuggled into Robben Island and he and his comrades from all the political parties had staged readings of them. Dark Voices Ring resonated particularly with them. I was quite moved to hear that my work was giving hope and solace to those who had been condemned to spend their precious lives behind bars for our freedom.

  ‘We of the PAC boasted to the rest of the prisoners that these plays were written by one of our cadres,’ he said.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I no longer saw myself as a PAC cadre, despite the fact that I never officially resigned from the party. I was more inclined towards the ANC line of thinking. When I had mentioned this to Bra Saul he thought it was because of the influence of the ANC guys who had become my drinking buddies. Top among them was Zingisile Ntozintle Jobodwana, or Jobs as we called him, who had his law practice in Maseru. Even though these ANC guys were his friends too, Bra Saul dismissively called them Charterists because they subscribed to the Freedom Charter, a document that was adopted by the Congress of the People at Kliptown, Johannesburg, in 1955. This document had played an important role in bringing about the final split that resulted in the formation of the PAC.

  I was disillusioned with the PAC, though I still believed in two of its three guiding principles, namely continental unity and socialism. It was with the leadership’s interpretation of the third principle, African nationalism, that I had a problem. It was quite different from the way my father used to outline it for us at one of his family meetings. His was not a narrow nationalism. It was all-inclusive of all South Africans who identified themselves as Africans and paid their allegiance first and foremost to Africa. But the way my PAC comrades understood the concept it became clear to me that that the rights of citizenship of a future Azania, as they called South Africa, would be limited only to black people of African descent. In the meetings that we attended, especially when I was staying at the Poqo camp, the leaders did not make any bones about that. I, on the other hand, did not think any modern race-based state was viable or even desirable. I saw this position as a misrepresentation of the tenets of African nationalism as propounded by my father.

  The PAC wrote extensively against tribalism; African nationalism was essentially about embracing Africans regardless of which cultural, linguistic or ethnic group they belonged to. But our PAC and Poqo cadres in Lesotho, who were predominantly amaXhosa, had a negative attitude towards their Basotho hosts. They viewed themselves as naturally superior to other ethnicities. I used to get very embarrassed when I met one of these cadres late in
the afternoon and he would greet me by saying: molo, mAfrika, yazi oko kusile ndiqal’ ukubon’umntu ngawe. Greetings to you, African, you are the first person I have seen this whole day. Obviously, according to him, the rest of the people he had been interacting with throughout that day were not really people because they were Basotho.

  Another thing I observed was that the PAC promoted chauvinistic and patriarchal values in the name of Africanism. The movement had a very static view of what it meant to be African – an archival one that advocated for a return to some glorious pre-colonial past. Culture meant the way Africans used to live, rather than the way they live today.

  What scared me most about my comrades was their social conservatism particularly on gay rights – ‘homosexuality is unAfrican’ – on reproductive rights – ‘abortion is unAfrican’ – and on the issue of the death penalty – ‘an eye for an eye’. These were positions they shared with the American right, the Catholic Church, fundamentalist Protestants and fundamentalist Muslims. It seemed to me that the PAC were birds of a feather with these intensely patriarchal, retrogressive and conservative organisations. But of course I continued to like what the PAC used to stand for: pan-Africanism (which the ANC appropriated so effectively), identification with the peasants and their struggles, and the concern for the return of the land to its rightful owners.

  On the other hand, from my discussions with the likes of Jobs it became clear to me that the ANC was much more progressive on these issues and was more inclusive in its definition of both Africanness and of South Africanness. Thabo Mbeki’s post-liberation ‘I am an African’ speech is a product of that tradition of inclusiveness. I found the values enshrined in the Freedom Charter – the very document my Africanist comrades were derisive about – quite attractive. It was obvious to which camp I naturally belonged, although I would never officially join a political party again. I was too much of a free spirit to toe a party line.

  ‘Whatever happened to you, son of Africa?’ Bra Saul would ask whenever I took Jobs’ side in a debate on these issues. ‘Jobs has made you a Charterist.’

  ‘Don’t blame Jobs,’ I would reply. ‘Blame my sensibilities and sensitivities.’

  The wonderful thing about the Lesotho exile was that we talked across party and ideological lines as we quaffed large quantities of alcohol. There were no recriminations.

  For me, the swilling combined very well with what my friends cutely called womanising. I was renting what the Americans would call a mother-in-law apartment in a large and modern stone house belonging to the Lebotsa family. I was wifeless since parting ways with Mpho, though not divorced, and my three children were staying with my mother at Holy Cross Mission in southern Lesotho. I could go on the rampage as I pleased at ’Mamojela’s, at the Lancer’s Inn, at Clemoski’s, at Bra Saul’s. At my apartment the rampage included women. Motena Mokoae, a daughter of a cabinet minister in Leabua Jonathan’s government, was a very special girlfriend. But there were many others who came to my house, mostly the Soweto girls who were students at various schools in town. I have only a vague memory of most of them. I was almost always in an alcoholic and sexual daze.

  But I do have a memory of Nono. She was a tall and slender Mosotho woman I met at the bar in Mafeteng. We soon hit it off even though she told me she was married to a white man. She used to drive to Maseru every week and we made furious love. She would phone me on a daily basis and tell me how much she missed our lovemaking. (Well, she didn’t put it in those words, but, you know, I must go easy on any X-rated language; my kids will be reading this book as well.) Even when I was in Mafeteng visiting my father she would come and snatch me away, to my father’s consternation, and would only bring me back in the morning. Obviously to Nono and the rest of the women I had become quite a stallion. They didn’t know that it was because I was a late bloomer. I was still marvelling at the wonders of sex and at what I had been missing all the years I had been encumbered by Nontonje’s enfeeblement.

  One December morning Nono arrived unannounced and found me in bed with Motena. The room had the stench of the night and of beer. She just sat on a sofa next to the bed and engaged in some small talk as if nothing had happened. Then she said goodbye and left. She got into her brown Opel Kadett, drove away and never came back.

  I missed Nono, but life had to go on. Plus Dizzy was in town. Not my Mr Dizzy who was a feature of Maseru, but Dizzy Gillespie. He came to headline a jazz festival at the Maseru Stadium. With him were the Jazz Professors from Rutgers University as his sidemen and Marc Crawford, who was a professor of creative writing at Rutgers. But he was more famous as a staff reporter for Life magazine who also dabbled in public relations for B B King and Johnny Mathis.

  Dizzy Gillespie and the Jazz Professors held jazz clinics for us and Marc Crawford conducted a creative writing workshop at the Maseru Holiday Inn. I had never been in a creative writing workshop before and didn’t even know that writing could actually be taught. Crawford made us gaze into each others’ eyes for a minute or so and then furiously write anything that came to our mind. After that we read to the rest of the workshop participants what we had written and giggled at the silliness of it all. I don’t know if we gained anything from the workshop, but I for one was quite satisfied with the fact that Crawford read my poems and told everyone that they were great. He even read one of the poems to the group.

  I don’t think we benefited that much from the jazz clinics either. Well, maybe the Lebentlele brothers who were advanced players did. It was just great that we got to hang out with Dizzy Gillespie, the Jazz Professors and Marc Crawford. Dizzy Gillespie talked a lot about a prophet called Bahaullah from whom he drew his strength and hope for humanity. I had not known that he was of the Baha’i faith. He told us that one could not play great jazz if one was not spiritual, whatever form or religion that spirituality took. For him jazz was an expression of spirituality.

  You may wonder how I found time to write with all these goings-on, particularly the unbridled promiscuity. But I did. I had started writing a play about migrant workers titled The Hill when I was still at Mabathoana High. I had gone to stay on the hill opposite the high school where men from all over Lesotho spent their nights in the Caves of Mpokho waiting for contracts to go to the mines of South Africa. I had also read a pamphlet titled Another Blanket written by an ecumenical organisation that investigated the problems of these migrant workers from the time they left their villages, the humiliation they suffered at the recruitment centres where labour recruiters demanded bribes before they would sign the men on, the months they spent in Maseru scrounging a living doing ‘piece jobs’ and raiding the dustbins of wealthy Maseru West, right up to the degradation they suffered in the mines. My play was largely based on my experiences interacting with these men.

  It won the Amstel Playwright of the Year Award in 1979. André Brink and Barry Ronge were the judges. The Lesotho government granted me citizenship so that I could qualify for a passport and go to accept the award in person. My father was concerned that if I returned to South Africa I would be arrested; I had left the country illegally and I had been involved in politics in Lesotho, and of course the Boers had eyes everywhere and knew exactly what I had been up to. But the deputy prime minister and minister of the interior, Chief Sekhonyana ’Maseribane, who had been urging my father for years to take up Lesotho citizenship, assured him that nothing would happen to me because with Lesotho citizenship I was under the protection of the Lesotho government.

  ‘Your son has brought pride and honour to Lesotho,’ ’Maseribane, who I regarded as an odious character because it turned out he was the first member of Leabua’s government to join Fred Roach in instigating the savage coup of 1970, told my father. ‘He must go accept his prize as a Mosotho. Have no fear of Maburu.’

  I believed him. His government was in bed with the Boers – or Maburu as he called them in Sesotho – and the apartheid government would not want to upset an ally by bothering with small fry like me. After all, I was not involv
ed in any direct guerrilla action as other exiles like Chris Hani were. I was a mere talker and writer.

  My father reminded me that the apartheid government had banned my book, which meant that they had a file on me.

  ‘Those fellows have a long memory,’ he said. ‘’Maseribane must give us some guarantee that nothing will happen to you.’

  I was prepared to take the risk, but dared not defy my father and go to South Africa without his blessing. Chief ’Maseribane kept his word and contacted my father with a message that he had it in writing: the Maburu had given me temporary indemnity, so I must go there and represent Lesotho and continue to put it on the map.

  In November 1979, after fifteen years as an exile, I went back to South Africa as a Lesotho citizen to accept my award. I thought returning to South Africa after all those years would be a big deal, but I was preoccupied with the award I was going to receive rather than the fact that I was back on South African soil. Perhaps if I had returned by road, crossed the border post in Maseru and rode in a taxi or bus through the Free State I would have had time to ruminate and interact emotionally with the land and the people. But I took a plane from Maseru to Jan Smuts International Airport, which was just a one-hour flight. Once my passport was stamped and I walked out of the terminal building I found Nicholas Ellenbogen and a bunch of journalists waiting for me. They interviewed me as we drove in a Kombi to the five-star Hotel Braamfontein in the city, and once again I had no time to take in the fact that I was actually in a South Africa I had left all those years ago because of apartheid, and that I was now back but apartheid was still in place. I was only able to stay at this hotel in the city because it had been granted ‘international status’ by the government and therefore ‘foreign’ blacks like me could be accommodated and served there.