Sometimes There Is a Void

by Zakes Mda

  I knew nothing much had changed in South Africa since my family left. Therefore nothing surprised me about that first visit. I interacted with South Africans all the time in Lesotho, those who were in exile themselves and those who came as visitors and returned home. I had been interacting with South African culture, not only through the visitors, but also through music, art, newspapers, the radio and other media, since my arrival in Lesotho. My return, therefore, did not present me with any culture shock. In any event, I was returning as a ‘celebrity’ who was surrounded by theatre people and journalists – both black and white – in an artificial non-racial bubble that was far removed from the realities of the Soweto of my youth which was still the Soweto of the day. Only now there was more resistance, more deaths from police bullets and, as the Black Consciousness artists – Matsemela Manaka, Maishe Maponya and Ingoapele Madingoane – who came to see me at the hotel and at the awards ceremony emphasised, more poetry and theatre and art in the bloody streets that both rallied the people to more action and gave them hope that a new day was bound to dawn soon.

  The day after the ceremony the headlines in The Star screamed: Lesotho teacher wins play award. The newspaper wrote of the play as a ‘poignant, witty observation of the South African migrant worker situation’.

  The play was first produced at the people’s Space Theatre in Cape Town to rave reviews. It was directed by Rob Amato and featured Nomhle Nkonyeni (now regarded as the doyenne of the South African stage), Sylvia Mdunyelwa (now an acclaimed jazz singer) and Natie Rula (who later became an enduring actress of soap operas). When the play went to the Market Theatre in Johannesburg it was greeted by the Sunday Times headlines: The mountain comes to the Market – Award winner ‘The Hill’ is in town. Another newspaper in the same stable, the Sunday Times Extra, had the headline: ‘The Hill’: best since ‘Sizwe’ and ‘Island’. This was a reference to the plays created by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona – Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island. Rob Amato made a point of seeing that the play came to Lesotho and it was performed at the Hilton Hotel and at the National University of Lesotho.

  Now that I had a passport and could go to South Africa I was able to reconnect with Keneiloe Mohafa, my childhood sweetheart from Sterkspruit. This, in fact, is what helped to rein in my rampant behaviour. She was the woman I had been yearning for all those years. I had continued to write poetry about her, even as her memory was fading in my mind. Now there she was, as beautiful as ever with her big round eyes, though now she was quite overweight and very much concerned about it. She was now a social worker, having qualified with a bachelor’s degree in the field from the University of the North in Turfloop some years before, and was working for the Johannesburg Child Welfare Society. She was renting a back room in Alexandra Township.

  She drove all the way from Johannesburg in her Volkswagen Golf to visit me in Maseru, and I took a plane from Maseru to Johannesburg to visit her in Alexandra Township. I could afford to do that because I had by then secured employment with the American Cultural Center on Kingsway as a Cultural Affairs Specialist. The Center was part of the United States Information Agency and ran a library and resource centre.

  Keneiloe, quite a heavy drinker in her own right, used to take me to some of the famous night spots for black people in Johannesburg. I got to know of Ha Kolokoti, a famous shebeen in Orlando, through her. She also took me to a nightclub that was always in the papers because it was patronised by the black elite, the Pelican, and introduced me to Kelly Michaels who owned and operated the place. Gugu tells me that she was one of the kids I saw peeping through the fence gawking at the celebrities who patronised the Pelican. I didn’t know then that one of those urchins would one day be my wife.

  Keneiloe also took me to Mabopane near Pretoria to visit her friends Alpheus and Mamathe Mosenye. I fell in love immediately with this couple because of their humour and the easy-going way they related to each other. I hoped Keneiloe and I would be like that, because surely we were meant to be together and, though I didn’t express that to her, we were going to marry and live happily ever after. Alpheus was one of the best artists I had met. I gave him all the poems I had written; most were about Keneiloe and my longing for her. He illustrated each poem. Years later I published the poems and the illustrations under the imprint of my own publishing company, Thapama Books. By that time I had lost contact with Alpheus Mosenye and he never got a copy.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  WE ARE RELAXING OUTSIDE our grass-thatched chalet at the Riverside Lodge in Aliwal North. This splendid holiday resort is situated on the banks of the Orange River, and from where we are sitting we can see the brown water flowing lazily around the bend. It hasn’t rained for quite some time so there are islands of sand and pebbles in the river. We can see the bridge that crosses to the Free State province floating in the fog. We rest our eyes on the distant hills that appear in grey and blue patches in the white mist.

  This Eastern Cape town is famous for its hot springs, but that’s not why we are here. Our destination was Lady Grey where we had a meeting about the finances of the beekeeping project with Aubrey Fincham who had been appointed by the Kellogg Foundation to manage their donation to the project. His wife was a goldsmith in the tiny town situated in the foothills of the Witteberg Mountains. We also wanted to talk to the local hotel that stocks the honey to find out what their guests think of it. We were pleased to see bottles of Telle Honey/Ubusi baseTelle, which is the brand name under which the Bee People market their honey, on display at the reception. Aliwal North is only fifty-five kilometres from Lady Grey so we decided to drive here and spend the night.

  ‘It’s a beautiful town and a wonderful view,’ says Gugu.

  ‘It’s a nice lodge too,’ I say. ‘But my memories of this town are not about the beauty. The only time I was ever arrested by the Boers was in this town.’

  THABO SETHATHI, MR TOP and I had come to Aliwal North for Clemoski’s funeral. He died of liver cirrhosis, as did a number of our alcoholic friends before him. Great warriors fallen at the altar of Bacchus. He originally came from this town, from its black township of Dukathole, to be exact. He had initially gone to Lesotho to attend the university at Roma, then known as Pius XII College. After his Bachelor of Arts degree and Postgraduate Certificate in Education he got a job teaching English at Lesotho High School and decided to stay permanently. But in death our people believe we must all return home, to our places of origin, and be buried on the stomping grounds of our ancestral spirits.

  Thus I had crossed the border using my newly acquired Lesotho passport to pay my last respects to my dear friend with whom I had spent wonderful drunken moments at his Lesotho High School house. Or at the shebeen owned by the woman who was also his secret mistress, ’Mamojela. Now Clemoski was gone, leaving us dispirited and dismayed. He was also leaving his six-year-old son Bataung, his estranged wife ’Mabataung, and two or three other children he made with various girlfriends over the years. One of the children, Kefuoe Molapo, now a big man who is an actor and film maker in New York, subsequently became a protégé and a friend. You’ll get to know how in later years this same Kefuoe retitled my novel from Ululants to The Heart of Redness, and how I have lived to regret that ever since.

  At Clemoski’s funeral I met Thabang Mohafa, Keneiloe’s sister. She told me she was a teacher at one of the schools in the town. I had not seen her for many years, since the days we used to play dibeke in the street in front of her house in Sterkspruit. I reminded her how I had hit her on the head with a stone and her father had frogmarched me to my home where he lashed me with a belt in the presence of my mother. We laughed about it. She invited me and my pals – Thabo and Mr Top – to her house where we had drinks. Soon more people came from the township and we had a jolly good time getting drunk. She introduced us to her teenage daughter or niece, I don’t quite remember. I think it was a daughter though.

  As we were imbibing and reminiscing about Clemoski’s greatness and telling the locals how th
e man they called Abuti Sima, using his birth name, had been my mentor from the days I was at Peka High School, a young man sauntered into the room. One of the locals at the table told us he was the teenager’s boyfriend from the Coloured township. He demanded that the teenager go with him, but the girl said she would not because it was late. It was already after midnight and I wondered what parent would allow a girl that age to go out with a boy at that time. The young man became abusive and started dragging the girl by the arm. Thabang and another woman, who had been introduced to us as her housemate, yelled at the young man, asking him to leave the girl alone. The young man responded by slapping the girl.

  That was enough for me. I stood up and hit the young man on the jaw with my fist. He fell down and I kicked him on the head and in the stomach. Soon the other people in the house, particularly the local women, joined the assault. I just couldn’t stop myself even though the guy was bleeding all over the place. I think it was Mr Top who stopped the mayhem and helped the young man up. He staggered away crying and vowing that his broers, or brothers, would come and give us a taste of our own medicine.

  ‘He will never even dream of assaulting another girl again,’ said Thabang, as we went back to our merrymaking. I felt like a hero when she said that. But soon, even as I joined in the banter, I wondered at the violent streak in me, the existence of which I had not been aware. I was never a fighter. I could rant and rave when someone made me mad, but it would never deteriorate into a physical brawl. How did it come to this? How did I come to this? Even in my drunken state I began to worry that there was a thug hiding in me waiting to burst out.

  The next thing I knew the battered young man was back with four white policemen and a whole lot of angry folks from the Coloured township.

  ‘There he is,’ he said pointing at me. ‘And this one too,’ he added, pointing at Thabang’s housemate.

  The policemen arrested us and loaded us in the back of a police van. They did not handcuff us though.

  I don’t know where they took Thabang’s housemate, but I was locked up in a cell with a bunch of petty criminals who were so nice that they shared their lice-infested blankets with me. There were no beds or bunks in the cell, so we rolled the blankets and sat on them. For a toilet there was a bucket in the corner. Up on the high ceiling was a naked bulb that was on all the time.

  I sobered up very fast in that cell. I was regretting my rash action. In two weeks’ time I was supposed to go to America to study for a Master of Fine Arts degree in playwriting. While working at the American Cultural Center organising cultural exchanges between Lesotho and the USA I had come across an advertisement in a theatre journal for the Ohio University School of Theater Playwriting Program and had immediately applied, sending them my banned book of plays. I had been fascinated by the fact that it was possible to do a master’s degree in playwriting, a field in which I was already proficient, by all accounts. I had not even known that there was such a degree anywhere in the world. I was from the British tradition where university education in literature and drama meant studying the English canon, not writing plays. When the head of the playwriting program, Seabury Quinn Junior, responded offering me a place on their three-year MFA program and a tuition waiver I was ecstatic. It had not mattered to me how I was going to survive in America. All I needed was a one-way ticket. I had then approached a cabinet minister in Leabua Jonathan’s government, Desmond Sixishe, for assistance. I had known Desmond from Sterkspruit where he had been a taxi-driving playboy and one of the older guys we looked up to. I had not known at the time that he was born in Lesotho. Then later I had trained him on how advertising agencies functioned on commission from the media when he started his own advertising agency, patterning it on my old company MDA Enterprises. His business had become more successful than mine had been, but he left it when he was appointed Minister of Information and Broadcasting. Now he returned the favour by approaching the National Manpower Development Secretariat to give me a loan for my one-way air ticket. They emphasised that was all I was going to get from them; no full scholarship for me because according to them I was going to study something that would not contribute to national development. The ticket was good enough for me and I was looking forward to flying to America in a fortnight’s time.

  But here I was languishing in a South African jail for some stupid act of violence.

  These thoughts of recrimination were interrupted from time to time by prison guards who opened the iron doors and ushered us out to squat on the ground while a stern Afrikaner warder shouted our names for roll-call. We each responded ‘Yebo Nkosi!’ Yes, Chief. And then we were ushered back to our cells. The same happened when we were being fed. I didn’t eat the pap and vegetables that the guards slid along the floor to each of my five cellmates. I was given fish, chips and Russian sausages that I assumed Thabang had brought for me. They did allow awaiting-trial prisoners to receive food from outside. But I had no appetite even for that. I gave it to the other prisoners.

  In the cell I listened to the petty criminals boasting about the housebreakings they had committed. One was a habitual criminal who specialised in the theft of car batteries. He was looking forward to being sentenced and sent to prison where he would meet his old friends. He was already planning his life there and the other prisoners were contributing their wisdom as to how to handle particular situations, especially with prison gangs. When it came to my turn to relate my crime I told them I had beaten someone almost to death and I was likely to be given a life sentence. It was necessary to stress the violent nature of my crime and exaggerate it a bit so that none of these grubby guys should think I was a pushover who could be raped at will.

  On the third day I was taken out of the cell to another building where I was interrogated by a team of white policemen, both in civvies and in uniform. They did not ask me anything about my crime, but were interested only in my activities in Maseru and in the people I associated with. I could see the glee in their eyes. Obviously they had initially thought they had caught a petty ruffian who had been engaged in a drunken brawl, but had discovered that I was someone who wrote books that were banned by the government and that I associated with the kind of people they would like to lay their hands on.

  ‘We know that you know Chris Hani,’ their chief interrogator told me.

  I couldn’t lie and say I didn’t know him.

  ‘Yes, I know him. But I don’t move in the same circles as he does or any other political figure.’

  I was lying on that score because people like Jobodwana and other ANC activists were my close friends and drinking partners. And before them I had that intimate connection with Poqo and lived with them and trained with them and was even sent on a botched mission with them. I was hoping the Boers would not have any of that information in their files. They should continue to view me as some small fry son of a PAC man who had been rendered ineffectual. I was hoping that if there was any information at all in their files about the Latin lessons with Chris Hani they would not interpret them as a code for something more sinister that would be a threat to the whole Afrikaner race.

  Fortunately they did not go there at all. Instead one of the officers told me, ‘Do you know the boy you assaulted is in a serious condition in hospital? He may die any time and when that happens you’ll face a murder charge.’

  I suddenly wanted to go to the toilet with a running stomach. It didn’t occur to me that when the victim of my violence came with the police to point me out he didn’t look anything like a walking corpse.

  ‘If you cooperate with us we may make things easy for you,’ said the officer.

  They left me sitting in the interrogation room for a while, supposedly to think things over. I passed the time by looking at pictures on the walls. Most were maps of Angola and Mozambique with yellow and red pins indicating the location of ANC guerrilla camps. I had no idea what distinguished the yellow from the red camps.

  After three days without making any headway, because in truth I had nothing
to cooperate about, the chief interrogator said, ‘We have decided to release you on condition you report to Brigadier Cornelius van Wyk at the Maseru Bridge next week.’

  I said I would certainly do that. They gave me the day and the time I was required to report to the police at the border post. On my word of honour, Thabang’s housemate and I were released from jail. She told me they just kept her in the cell with other female prisoners and only interrogated her once – not about the assault, but about me and what I was doing in Aliwal North and who I had associated with when I was there.

  I wondered how these Boers could sacrifice justice for the guy who was assaulted, especially if he was dying in hospital as they claimed, but I learnt from Thabang that the guy had not been that seriously hurt at all. He was seen walking about in town with nothing more than a slight limp and a bruised face.

  All I wanted was to disappear from that town, especially because I heard that the thugs from the Coloured township were gunning for me. I took a train to Wepener and from there got a minibus taxi to Maseru without even going to Mafeteng first. I was not aware that my father knew about my arrest. I only learnt when I got to Maseru that Thabo Sethathi and Mr Top had sent a message to Mafeteng as soon as they arrived in Lesotho.

  I heard that my father was furious with me. He had instructed a firm of lawyers in Zastron called Snyman and Malherbe to defend me. They were the lawyers who, years back, were pitted against Nelson Mandela, who was my father’s lawyer in the case where my father had sued the headman Steyn Senoamali and the Native Commissioner of the Herschel District for defamation. And I didn’t even have the decency to go home and inform him that I had been released. When I finally went to Mafeteng he had a few choice words for me about my irresponsibility and ingratitude.

  Back in Maseru, the American Cultural Center also had their say about my arrest. I was summoned to the American Embassy where I was subjected to further interrogation by a woman I assumed was a CIA agent. I had never seen her before in the few times I had gone to the Embassy about visas for our candidates for exchange programmes. Or when I had gone to get our fortnightly salary cheques since we were paid from the Embassy. She must have been posted, maybe from the American Embassy in Pretoria, to interrogate me. She wanted to know why exactly I was arrested. When I told her it was on account of some drunken altercation she didn’t believe me.