Sometimes There Is a Void

by Zakes Mda

  I took a seat near the door next to two cowhide drums, hoping not to draw too much attention to myself. My landlady introduced me to the woman sitting on the bed with a baby in her arms. She was covered in a fat Qibi blanket. She was the owner of the pitiki. I merely nodded. Other women began to stream into the house singing and clapping their hands. Soon the door was closed and bolted from inside.

  An old woman with strings of white beads on her arms and legs began to dip a short broom into a small basin of water and to spray us with it. I think she was the ngaka or shaman of the group. The water had been mixed with the juice of aloes so it tasted quite bitter when I licked my lips where some drops had fallen. She made certain that most of the spray was directed at the mother and the child. Another woman began to beat the drums. The rest of the women – including the mother on the bed – undressed and remained wearing only very short pleated skirts. Some were so short that their undergarments showed. They were all topless, for they threw even their bras on to the pile of clothes on the floor. They stamped on the cow-dung floor with their feet and shook their waists in a fast rhythm. This was the ditolobonya dance I had seen the little girls doing outside, but these women gave it the weightiness of a ritual. Like the young girls outside, there was still some playfulness in their steps and a naughty gleam in some of their eyes, but there was also purposefulness. Their dangling breasts from which countless babies had suckled added more acoustics as they flapped against their bodies and swooshed in the air only to come back again to hit their stomachs. When they did this the women became gleeful. Some even giggled in the midst of song.

  The women mimed in pairs and in the course of the dance performed what I interpreted to be courtship, and then marriage. Then they danced closer to the bed while the mother laughed with a naughty glint in her eyes. At the same time she pretended to be shooing them away, as if she didn’t want to have anything to do with them. They began to chant: Re bonts’e he, u ne u etsang, u ne u bapala joang, ha ho tla ba tje. Show us, what were you doing, how were you playing when things resulted into this. The cowhide drums added to the din and to their shrieks of joy.

  The mother sprawled on the bed facing upwards and rolled the baby on her stomach. That’s where the name of the ritual came from – to roll the baby. She began to mime a sexual act and as the dance of the women became frenzied so did her act and her moans of pleasure. This happened until it peaked with a mimed orgasm. All of a sudden there was silence. The women had stopped their dance and were looking at the mother expectantly. And then the mother mimed pregnancy. In all her actions throughout the performance the baby was the prop. What amazed me was that throughout all this it did not cry. Even in her performance of pregnancy she rolled it on her stomach for it was now a prop for a fetus and it merely prattled in baby talk.

  The drums began again as did the ditolobonya dance. She mimed the pain of birth and then the ecstasy after the child was born.

  Everyone laughed and congratulated one another on the performance. I signalled to my landlady that we should leave; I had seen enough.

  ‘So, did you see what you wanted to see?’ asked the landlady as we walked home.

  ‘More than I thought I would see. I don’t know how I can thank you.’

  ‘You can thank me by just shutting up about it.’

  I didn’t ask her what the purpose of seeing it would be if I was just going to shut up about it. As soon as I got to my house I jotted down a few notes titled ‘Pitiki: the Theatre of Re-Birth.’ I was to write about it later in my doctoral thesis.

  This adventure did not bring me any closer to my landlady. She continued her life of noisy sex with travellers and I continued with my teaching of junior certificate English and reading for my thesis. I interacted more with members of the community, especially the abaThembu who were proud that there was one of them – by which they meant me – who was a teacher. There was quite a big community of these isiXhosa-speaking people and none of them had any formal education. I visited their homes and encouraged them to keep their children at school. They could afford to spare their daughters and send them to school. But their sons had to look after cattle, sheep and goats. And when they reached the age of manhood, after the necessary initiation rites, they had to cross the border to work in the gold and coal mines of South Africa. But then it was like that throughout the villages of Lesotho; girls went to school and boys went to work. That is why today there are more women than men who have formal education in Lesotho. Even as a teacher I observed that there were more girls than boys in my classes. There are more female university graduates than there are male ones.

  At the end of the month I took the plane to Maseru to unwind with my friends. They were all curious to hear about this strange place I had chosen as my hermitage. You would have thought Sehonghong was somewhere in China.

  Two of the friends I met occasionally were Mpho and her twin sister, Mphonyane. Mpho and I were not officially divorced, although we had been separated for a few years. I often visited them at their house at Ha Thamae Township and we talked about the old times. Mpho confessed to me that when we were still together she and her twin sister had continued with an affair with a Catholic Brother – a Brother is a Jesuit monk who has not been ordained as a priest – that had started long before I met them. I remembered that they used to talk about this Brother, and I had just taken it as an innocent friendship. I had no hard feelings about it; I was just glad that finally we were being honest with each other although it was too late to save our marriage. But I knew that we would remain friends for ever. I still kept many boxes of my documents at her house since I had no place of my own in Maseru.

  Mr Dizzy was still in town. He had a steady job as an illustrator for the study materials produced by the Lesotho Distance Teaching Centre which conducted correspondence classes for junior certificate students throughout the country and for those Basotho people who were working in the mines of South Africa and wanted to advance their education. We went out to drink; this time not at the home-brew joints but at Lancer’s Inn or the Maseru Sun Cabanas, as the old Maseru Holiday Inn was now called. We were now moneyed gentlemen and didn’t have to sing for our beer or peddle our paintings to tourists. Or I was the moneyed gentleman who bought him the beer. He was always broke because he paid shebeen debts and gambled all his money as soon as he received his salary.

  Other friends had dispersed to other parts of the world. Litsebe Leballo had completed a junior degree at the National University and was a hard-drinking and hard-living civil servant in Maseru. Peter Masotsa was no longer in Mafeteng working for the priest at St Gerard but was now working for the Catholic printing press at Mazenod. My brother Monwabisi had completed his LLB degree in Edinburgh and was working as a lawyer in Maseru while also lecturing at the National University of Lesotho’s law school. His twin brother, Sonwabo, was at my alma mater at Ohio University where he had been admitted for an MA International Affairs degree. He had left four beautiful children with his wife Johanna, who was teaching at the National Teacher Training College. I stayed with them when I was in Maseru from Sehonghong. Ntlabathi Mbuli, my Poqo friend and mentor, was in the United Kingdom doing an MA degree at the London School of Economics. He was extremely unhappy there because his professors despised Marxist theory and were a bunch of laissez-faire free marketers who didn’t even want to listen to his arguments. This bothered him so much that he wrote many letters to me about it. After a while he stopped writing and I heard that he was hearing voices calling his name in the streets of London.

  One place I never failed to visit whenever I flew in from the mountains was Lesotho High School. Although Clemoski was long dead, Bra Saul was still there. And Mxolisi Ngoza, my thoroughly gay friend who used to be my colleague at Mabathoana High School, was now teaching at Lesotho High School and had a house on campus. We all drank at his house or at Bra Saul’s. Bra Saul was still a stalwart of the PAC and at his place I socialised with some of the leaders of the movement, even though my political orie
ntation was now different. One of them was Thami Zani, a famous Black Consciousness leader and former colleague of Steve Biko’s who joined the PAC in exile. I had a few drinks with Thami at Bra Saul’s while we listened to jazz. Although he was the PAC representative in Lesotho he didn’t confine himself to diplomatic work but was a hands-on guerrilla. I was saddened to hear later when I was back in the mountains that he and five of his comrades had been killed in an ambush by Chief Leabua’s Police Mobile Unit while they were smuggling arms and explosives. You may remember that this was the same paramilitary force that killed my friend Jama Mbeki.

  Every time something like this happened I felt very guilty and very depressed. Not only because I knew the guy so well as a kind-hearted and generous gentleman, but mainly because someone else died for my freedom while I fooled around with women, alcohol and jazz. Someone else took up arms for my liberation while I only wrote about liberation. But what could I do? I didn’t have a strong enough warrior gene. I was becoming more and more squeamish about anything that smacked of violence, even though intellectually I knew that our armed struggle was essential. My whole emotional make-up was leading me towards the path of pacifism despite myself.

  In Sehonghong my depression continued unabated. Until one day Mr Ndumo, a colleague at Sehonghong Secondary School, took me to the Cave of Barwa. We walked from the school down a steep rocky hill until after an hour or so we got to a stream of clear water running on smooth sandstone. Just above the stream was the mouth of a big cave, the home of the Bushmen of old, referred to as Barwa in Sesotho. I was enthralled by the paintings on the walls, but was saddened by the names of people who had visited the cave and then signed their names with chalk for posterity. Some of these names were even signed across the paintings themselves. I could recognise some of them. They belonged to important people in the government and the church. I couldn’t understand how they could indulge in such acts of vandalism solely for the vanity of having future visitors see that they too once trod these sacred grounds.

  Thanks to the man who introduced me to the Cave of Barwa, I made regular pilgrimages there and sat in the cave for many hours just meditating. I could feel the presence of the ancient people, which made me question my non-belief. The Cave of Barwa could not but make me talk in terms of a spiritual connection. At the same time, I knew that the brain was capable of creating magic to palliate the pain of the present. We draw within ourselves to comfort our sorrows and to heal our pain and we call it God. We are the originators of our own spirituality. Yes, I am a spiritual being, thanks to the power of imagination. The Cave of Barwa had a calming effect on me. When I wrote my second novel, years later, I recalled my communion with the cave. Part of the novel, titled She Plays with the Darkness, is set in Sehonghong even though I don’t use that name in the story.

  It was after the novel had been published that I learnt something of the history of the great cave, which would otherwise have featured in my novel and would have taken my fiction in a different direction altogether. What I learnt was that the cave was also called Soai’s Cave after a Bushman chief of that name. Chief Soai was killed by Chief Joel Molapo’s men who accused the Bushmen of cattle theft in 1871. The cave was then occupied by a Bushman chief called Sehonghong – after whom the village was named. But Chief Sehonghong himself was murdered by Chief Jonathan Molapo in 1873. I would have brought these murdered chiefs back to life in my narrative, if I had known about them at the time.

  You’ll note that I keep referring to these vanquished people as the Bushmen instead of the politically correct term that is used for them today, the San people. The reason is simply that these people never called themselves the San. They had no generic name that encompassed all of them. They merely referred to themselves as ‘people’ in the various languages of the tribal groups. The clans or tribes did indeed have names: the !Kwi, the /Xam and so on. The San label has the same weight as Barwa or abaThwa or Bushmen; it was what other people called them. They were called the San by the Khoikhoi people (who did call themselves the Khoikhoi) and the name referred to those people who were vagabonds and wanderers and didn’t own cattle. The Khoikhoi even called fellow Khoikhoi who were poor and didn’t have cattle San. So the name, though generally accepted, has derogatory origins.

  Anyway, this is just a little digression from my story. After discovering the Cave of Barwa I spent close to three months without going to Maseru. I didn’t find the need to socialise with my human friends because I got satisfaction from socialising with the spirits of the cave. When I finally did fly to Maseru and visited Lesotho High School I discovered two new teachers who had come to Lesotho as refugees from Uganda. I took to John Zimbe, who taught science, and Patrick Nkunda, who taught history, immediately. Nkunda had actually trained as a lawyer but couldn’t practise in Lesotho. I don’t know if I have mentioned this before, but I have always had a great affinity for Ugandans, even though I’ve never been to their country. Perhaps it is because of my Ugandan name, Kizito.

  I had noticed that the Ugandan fellows were close friends with a very beautiful local woman called Sebolelo Mokhobo. But I had never met Sebolelo, though I had seen her from a distance. So, one day I was drinking at Chinese Palace with Zimbe, and maybe Nkunda, I don’t quite remember. I was thinking of how beautiful their friend Sebolelo was and how I would like to know her better. I decided there and then to send Zimbe to her house to call her. I don’t know what gave me the bravado, or even conceit, to think that I could just summon a woman from her house to come and talk to me, a stranger, at a bar. But lo and behold! Zimbe came back with her and we sat at the bar and had a few drinks. Later she told me that she came because she was quite intrigued by my chutzpah.

  Sebolelo, or Sebo as she was generally called by her friends, became a close friend. In fact, she became one of the landmark women in my life. These are the women who shaped my life for better or for worse; who had such a profound impact on my life that I would have been a different person without them. They begin with Sis’ Rose, the nurturer who gave me life, the beautiful and munificent daughter of the Cwerha Gxarha clan, descendant of the Khoikhoi people. I am talking here of my mother. She was followed quite early on as a landmark woman by Nontonje, the red woman who sexually abused me when I was but a tyke. Other landmark women followed after that: Keneiloe, my childhood sweetheart; Mpho, my wife and mother of my three children; Tholane, the one who healed Nontonje’s damage; Ruth, the Botswana woman who left me with wistful memories.

  Now here was Sebo. We became inseparable. She was very popular with the guys because she was just like them. Except for the fact that she was smarter by far than all of us. She was a teacher at Life High School and was well read in literature. I was at home discussing my writing with her. But I also felt comfortable baring my soul to her. Though I was an open book to her as far as aspects of my life were concerned, one page was always closed to her, the page that contained all my feelings for her. It was an unrequited love.

  When I met Sebo she was already married. Her husband, Zukile Nomvete, lived in Ethiopia, where he was an aircraft engineer for Ethiopian Airways. He was a refugee from South Africa and an activist of the ANC. I envied Nomvete for having a wife who could hold her own in any company and commanded attention when she spoke about any topic, and was incredibly beautiful to boot. I wished I had met her before he got to know her.

  One thing I had in common with Sebo was that we were both ANC people – she a member and I a supporter – who came from PAC families. Her father, a medical doctor in Mmabatho, had been a staunch PAC man before he joined the Bophuthatswana government as one of Lucas Mangope’s cabinet ministers.

  One thing we knew how to do expertly with Sebo was to pub crawl. She introduced me to watering holes I wouldn’t have visited by myself. One of them was a shebeen owned by the jazzophile Moruti Mphatsoe, and there we drank and talked literature, jazz and politics till the wee hours of the morning. Because we were always together many people thought we were lovers. But we were not. No
t in the normal sense. We were buddies. I wasn’t seeing anyone at that time and didn’t even wish to be in a romantic relationship, and she had a husband who was many countries away.

  So, we kept it platonic and partnered each other on social occasions and in community activism. For instance, she would be with me when Frank Leepa, the genius founder and guitarist of the band Sankomota, invited me to prison when the band was playing there. I think Frank got the idea of playing free for the prisoners when his brother was arrested for car theft and sentenced to a term of imprisonment. Sebo and I visited Maseru Central Prison with Sankomota to keep up the spirits of the prisoners as part of some rehabilitation programme. I remember exclaiming to her that I was not aware that some of the guys I used to know and had not seen for years, were hiding themselves in prison.

  I felt sorry for these guys, though I knew that most of them were there for some criminal activity. At that very time my own Aunt Nakiwe, one of my father’s four younger sisters, was serving five years in prison in Kroonstad for drug dealing. She and my cousins had been smuggling dagga from Lesotho and Swaziland and selling it in Cape Town. As with these prisoners that I visited with Sebo and Sankomota, I could only imagine what my aunt was going through, much as I deplored her crime. I occasionally sent her money to make life a bit more comfortable for her.

  Sebo and I also founded a theatre company in Maseru. Lesiba Players, according to a write-up in New African magazine, attracted some of the country’s best talents. These included Wonga Matanda, who came from Port Elizabeth where he had been a member of Athol Fugard’s Serpent Players, and Julian Borger, who had been a member of Oxford University’s Experimental Theatre Company in the United Kingdom. My Ugandan friends, Patrick Nkunda and John Zimbe, were also members. The latter brought his lighting designing skills from his experience working with various East African theatre companies. There was also Thabo Moholi who had gained tremendous experience in television camera work and cinematography in Swaziland, but was quite useful in aspects of theatre management. Lesiba Players’ first production was The Road, the play that premiered at Ohio University under the direction of Seabury Quinn Junior. In this two-hander about race relations in South Africa, Wonga Matanda played the role of the Labourer and Julian Borger was the Farmer.