Sometimes There Is a Void

by Zakes Mda

  When I read in the New York Times that a Lesotho government spokesman said, ‘The only reason why South Africa invaded Lesotho was Lesotho’s rejection of apartheid’, I knew that the romance between Pretoria and Maseru had come to an end. This was apparent even before the invasion when Chief Leabua Jonathan established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China, the Soviet Union and North Korea. He even invited North Korea to train his paramilitary force. As a bonsella they built him a brand new stadium.

  This was a one hundred and eighty degree turnabout for Leabua and Lesotho, and some of my comrades and I applauded it. In our view he was now taking a progressive direction and needed our support. We were prepared even to forgive him his brutal coup of 1970 when he refused to hand over power to Ntsu Mokhehle who had clearly won the elections. Lesotho was now plainly on the side of the ANC. BNP members, including the much-feared BNP Young Pioneers, saw themselves as revolutionaries. They accused the BCP and its armed wing, the Lesotho Liberation Army, of being reactionaries who were secretly supported by South Africa and the American CIA.

  But there were some of my old MaPeka comrades who were adamant that Leabua Jonathan’s government was illegitimate; they were determined to overthrow it at all costs. My brothers, the twins, who were regarded as MaPeka themselves although they did not matriculate at Peka High School, wrote me letters updating me on the events in Lesotho. They told me that the LLA was launching more attacks into the country from bases at Qwa Qwa, the Bantustan in South Africa designated for South African Basotho people. This gave credence to the claim that there was some South African collusion in the incursions, which surprised me no end because the BCP I used to campaign for was vehemently anti-apartheid; its raison d’être was the return to Lesotho of the land conquered by the Boers more than a century before. Leabua Jonathan had been the South African stooge, now all of a sudden he was on the side of the angels and Ntsu Mokhehle was the alleged South African lackey!

  I was shocked to hear that Jama Mbeki, my friend from the Peka days, had been killed by the Police Mobile Unit. I had no idea what Jama had been doing in Lesotho at that time. The last time I had heard of him he was practising as a lawyer in Botswana where a number of his BCP comrades were in exile. Of course, I had known that he was a member of the LLA from the MaPeka LLA members who had tried to recruit me into the guerrilla force in earlier years. I was greatly saddened by Jama’s death and recalled all our high jinks at Peka High School. It had been an age of innocence where there was a clear line of demarcation between politics and death.

  Although I was thousands of kilometres away in Athens, Ohio, and therefore physically cut off by distance from these events, I couldn’t insulate myself emotionally. It was obvious to me and my fellow African students at Ohio University that South Africa’s arrogance knew no bounds and that something had to be done about it.

  We therefore immersed ourselves in anti-apartheid campaigns. I worked closely with my fellow South African Simphiwe Hlatshwayo, who was an ANC member. I myself, as I have already indicated, was not a member of that organisation although I totally agreed with its philosophy. I could work with its cadres, but it was important for me to jealously guard my freedom to speak my mind without being constrained by party discipline. Another student who joined our activism and became the president of the African Students Union was the Rwandan Augustin Hatar.

  Our campaign focused on disinvestment and divestment. With the latter we aimed to force universities, including our own, which had shares in companies that operated in South Africa to dispose of those shares. Disinvestment was targeted at the companies themselves to withdraw all operations from South Africa. We campaigned against Ronald Reagan’s policy of ‘constructive engagement’ which was devised and strenuously defended by his undersecretary of state for Africa, Chester Crocker.

  We invited people like Congress Mbatha, who had been an activist of the ANC Youth League from its formation in the late 1940s, to address us. Mbatha, a member of ANC president Oliver Tambo’s three-man Syndicate of old, was Simphiwe’s professor when he was doing his undergraduate degree at Syracuse University.

  We also worked closely with Dennis Brutus, the poet and former Robben Island prisoner who had founded the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SANROC) which was achieving great success in getting South Africa kicked out of international sport. He was a master campaigner and he came to Athens to rally us to put pressure on our university to divest. I went on the road with Dennis Brutus to a number of campuses in the United States. My play, The Road, became the rallying tool. Extracts from it were performed at campus rallies to give the spectators an idea of what apartheid was all about since the American media had its own prevarications when it reported on Africa. A full production of the play was mounted at the Loeb Theater, Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, directed by Gerard Fox who has since become a film maker in the United Kingdom.

  When I arrived at the Loeb I was told that Dennis Brutus, who had been there two days before, had left me a message. ‘We must now wage a campaign against Athol Fugard,’ the note stated. The reason he wanted Fugard to be boycotted was that Fugard had been making statements against our campaign, especially the cultural boycott aspects of it. He claimed that sanctions, be they economic or cultural, would bring about a lot of suffering, not to the white ruling elite but to the black masses. Our position, of course, was that the black masses were already suffering. They were prepared to suffer a little bit more if it led to the overthrow of the apartheid system.

  The cultural sanctions were my focus even more than the sports boycott and divestment and disinvestment work. It was my domain because I was a cultural worker myself – as artists were known those days. I therefore felt I would be more effective in that area.

  I could understand why Fugard’s advocacy for cultural engagement with South Africa infuriated Brutus. It infuriated me too. He was at the time regarded as one of the most important playwrights in the English language and his word would carry weight against what we were trying to achieve.

  But I disagreed with the boycott of Athol Fugard. I thought it would be counter-productive, and I told Brutus so when I phoned him that evening after a successful performance of my play.

  ‘Old Warrior,’ I said, ‘we’ll be fighting against our cause if we do that. We’ll be alienating a lot of our liberal supporters who think highly of Fugard and see him as an anti-apartheid playwright. Our campaign in the West – and we know that Western governments are the mainstay of the apartheid system – depends on the liberals, whether we like it or not.’

  Brutus agreed that we depended very much on the support of the liberals although at the same time we had contempt for them. But if Fugard got to know of our displeasure and saw the pickets outside his shows he might change his tune or at least shut up.

  ‘We are spread too thinly, Old Warrior, to be focusing on people like Fugard,’ I said.

  Although Brutus was not totally convinced by my argument, he gave up the idea of actively campaigning against Fugard because he realised that it was best to utilise our resources against the apartheid government and the American companies and universities that made it possible for that government to ride roughshod over the black population and to invade such weak neighbours as Lesotho. That was good enough for me. It was for that reason that I had opposed the picketing of Umabatha, the Zulu adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth by Welcome Msomi. The musical suffered greatly from the boycott both in London and in New York because my comrades felt that it and its creators shied away from politics and also played a public relations role for the apartheid state. Although I had not seen the play, I felt sorry for Msomi and didn’t agree that South African works abroad should be condemned for lack of politically correct content. In my view, we were doing exactly what the apartheid government was doing to our own works in the country – banning them and jailing people for reading them, as they had done with my anthology of plays. I felt that only those South African works t
hat actively promoted apartheid should be targeted. We should not campaign against art by South Africans solely on the basis that it was silent on apartheid and merely addressed social and personal issues as did the earlier work of Gibson Kente. Dennis Brutus disagreed with me very strongly on this position. He was a by-any-means-necessary kind of guy when it came to the overthrow of the apartheid state.

  In some respects, but to a lesser degree, I was like that too. I was once invited to make a speech at the College Green at Ohio University on Martin Luther King Day. It was at a time when we were still fighting for the day to be observed as a federal holiday. I upset the American liberals when I started outlining why in South Africa we had opted for an armed struggle instead of the non-violent path mapped out by Martin Luther King Junior and Mahatma Gandhi before him. It was the wrong occasion for such a speech and the more mature members of the audience – faculty, staff and townsfolk – were not impressed at all. Most of the students, however, thought it was quite a brave and revolutionary speech.

  On the personal side, things were looking up. Keneiloe was admitted to the MA International Affairs Program and had resigned from the Johannesburg Child Welfare Society to join me in Athens. And for a while life was great. Her only disillusionment was that there was no rhythm-and-blues in Athens. Just as I had been the envy of my friends when I left Lesotho because I was going to the home of jazz and would therefore be in the company of some mean cats, she had boasted to her friends in Johannesburg that she would be attending live concerts by the likes of Teddy Pendergrass. Alas, there was no Teddy Pendergrass in Athens.

  But her disillusionment was with more than Mr Pendergrass’s absence. It was with me. And with the city of Athens and its student population. She had come from Johannesburg where she was a high profile social worker socialising with the black elite of South Africa. Your lawyers and your doctors and your businessmen. Here, she was confined to this small town where our only entertainment was to sit in my apartment and drink beer or visit her friend Baratang Mpotokwane or my friends Macharia Munene or Mike Kirubi and drink ourselves silly. There were no nightclubs and no socialites in expensive Mercedes Benzes and BMWs. I didn’t even have a car, whereas in Johannesburg she could get into her Volkswagen Golf and raid the Pelican Club or Kolokoti’s tavern any time she felt like it. The only one of my friends here who had a car was Simphiwe, but even with his Volkswagen Beetle there was nowhere for a woman like Keneiloe to go. In Alexandra Township where she lived, and in Soweto where she was a regular, she could attend stokvel parties on Saturdays where she could eat her favourite fermented ting sorghum porridge with pulled beef. But in Athens she was a prisoner to our lack of imagination. She began to despise me for being satisfied with the life in Athens.

  I would hear her phone her brother Tseko in South Africa, or one of her social worker friends, complaining that I was an absolute failure.

  ‘At least Tseko has a truck and is making money even though he has no education,’ I once heard her say to a friend on the phone. ‘Zanemvula with all his education has nothing.’

  There was the week she was invited to join South African students in Lansing, Michigan. When she came back she was even more dissatisfied with Athens. They had partied there in South African style, a thing that we didn’t know how to do in Athens. She kept on boasting to me that in Lansing they knew how to live, whereas in Athens we were all dead alive.

  Obviously my life in Athens, Ohio – particularly my poverty – did not meet her expectations of the hot-shot playwright she had been reading about in all the major newspapers in South Africa.

  One thing that troubled her most – and understandably so for a woman who had been independent all her life – was the fact that she had no income of her own when she was here. As a professional woman who always had her own money, the dependency bugged her no end and she then took it out on me. At the time I couldn’t understand what the farce was about since we wanted for nothing and I had even made her a joint-signatory to my bank account, but now I do. She never touched my account even though she had access to it. We tried to get her a scholarship and by the time she got it from the United Nations it was too late. She had already left for South Africa after her father, Teboho, died. I knew she wasn’t coming back and that would be the end of my lifelong dream to marry my childhood sweetheart.

  The disillusionment with Athens was not peculiar to Keneiloe. I saw it many times with some of the South Africans who came here. For instance there was Danisa Baloyi and Tselane – I don’t recall her last name – who came to Ohio University on scholarships and were so disgusted with the place that after only a few months Tselane gave up her studies and returned to South Africa. Danisa was too smart to do that. Instead, she got a transfer to Columbia University in New York where she completed her degrees. I bet she was more at home in New York. Today she is one of the new Black Economic Empowerment millionaires in Johannesburg. I never heard of Tselane again.

  But there were other South Africans who made the best of their stay in Athens. Simphiwe was one of them. After his PhD at Ohio University he became a professor somewhere in Pennsylvania. Then there were Audrey Molise and Zanele Mfono. Both stayed in Athens without any fuss, with Audrey returning for the second time to complete another degree. Zanele did not even have a scholarship. She had to work at all sorts of menial jobs to pay for her education. I admired her because she was quite different from your spoilt black South African student who had it all made thanks to anti-apartheid donor funding. Today Audrey is another leading Black Economic Empowerment business woman in Johannesburg, while Zanele is a leading academic at Fort Hare University.

  After Keneiloe left I was crushed for a while. But life had to go on. My poverty was relieved by a Fulbright award. I was invited to Ronald Reagan’s White House and to the Capitol with a group of other southern African Fulbright scholars where we were given tours and listened to talks on how the American government functioned.

  My life changed when a new group of students from Botswana arrived to do their master’s degrees at the Ohio University School of Education which had established ties with the University of Botswana. It was like being back in Lesotho again because culturally there are many similarities between Basotho and Batswana. Once more, in the company of Ruth Monau, Itah Kandji and Sis’ Dudu, I gradually forgot about my doomed love for Keneiloe.

  On the rebound, I fell in love with Ruth Monau.

  She was a true lady, Ruth. A no-nonsense slender woman who was not only a teacher but looked like one. It didn’t take long for us to move in together in the basement apartment I had shared with Keneiloe on East Carpenter Street. We had a wonderful time together and I thought I had undoubtedly found my mate for life. Only a few months into our relationship I asked her to marry me and she said she would, provided my parents went to Botswana and asked for her hand in the traditional manner. I knew my father would never do that. Not only was he a refugee in Lesotho, but he was disgusted with my promiscuous ways and with, especially, my separation from Mpho. He would not even entertain the idea of sending relatives to Botswana after what I had put the family through. It would be like encouraging my wayward behaviour. And I told Ruth this, but she insisted that she would never be able to live with herself if we didn’t go through the cultural route.

  ‘We are both adults,’ I said. ‘And both of us have been married before. Surely we can marry right here in Athens and inform our parents later.’

  She had told me about her previous marriage, and I had seen photographs of her beautiful children, a boy and a girl. I had shown her photographs of my three beautiful children too.

  ‘I’m a Motswana girl,’ she said. ‘My parents would never forgive me if I did that.’

  What stays in my mind about Ruth is something that I am so very ashamed to narrate. Although we lived a life full of love and fulfilling intimacy, sometimes we quarrelled about extremely petty things. In most cases, it was my own childish irritability coming to the fore. One day we quarrelled over an iron.
I wanted to use it first but she was holding on to it because she wanted to use it too. As we struggled over it the ironing board fell and hit my toe. I lost my cool and slapped her. Yes, me who was once jailed for beating up a man who had slapped a girl! Immediately, I knew it was something that would haunt me forever. Even though she forgave me and that very evening we were in each other’s arms, I knew I was stained forever; from then on I could never truthfully say, ‘I have never raised my hand to a woman.’

  I lived happily with Ruth until I completed my MFA in Theater, with the focus on playwriting, and then went on to do a second MA with the School of Telecommunications, focusing on radio and television, with special emphasis on scriptwriting for film and television.

  I was with her when I was inducted into the International Understanding Honor Society with Charles Ping, who was the president of Ohio University.