Sometimes There Is a Void

by Zakes Mda

  As for my research, I was able to do most of it at Roma because my case studies were mostly my own theatre work. I had taken the job of Professor Andrew Horn who had established a theatre-for-development project at the university. With his group of students who were doing a Practical Theatre course he created plays on social issues and had them performed in the villages around the Roma campus. I took over teaching that course and continued with the theatre work he had started. This grew into a permanent theatre company that continued the work beyond the scope of the course – the Marotholi Travelling Theatre. Marotholi-a-pula means ‘raindrops’ and I got the name in Francistown that time I visited Ruth in Botswana. She had taken me on a tour in the northern part of the country where I was impressed by an arts and crafts and textile manufacturing establishment called Marothodi – the Setswana spelling of Marotholi. It was the name itself that I loved rather than the store, and I was glad to find so apt a use for it.

  After establishing the travelling theatre company I raised funds from donors in Europe and Canada and bought a brand new Volkswagen Kombi that the troupe used to travel far beyond the Roma Valley, to other districts throughout the country. We experimented with various modes of theatre, ranging from Brechtian epic theatre to agit-prop to Augusto Boal’s theatre-of-the-oppressed to other models that evolved in the course of our performances in some of the most inaccessible villages in the country. Sometimes we had to leave our vehicle miles away and travel on foot and on horseback to performance venues. My doctoral thesis, therefore, would examine the efficacy of the various modes of theatre and hopefully emerge with a theoretical framework for the analysis of such work. Although I was doing most of my research and writing in Lesotho I had to go to the University of Cape Town occasionally to meet the university’s residential requirements and also to consult with my supervisors.

  The first time I went to Cape Town it was by bus that took me through the Transkei. That was the occasion I took the train to Botswana to see Ruth. Now that I had my Toyota Corolla I drove to Cape Town. I went with Sebo who helped with the driving and navigation since she was a more seasoned traveller than I was. I wouldn’t have managed to drive all twelve hundred kilometres by myself that first occasion, but later on I made that trip many times on my own.

  We were booked at Serengeti self-catering apartments in Mowbray, one of the suburbs of Cape Town within walking distance of the main campus in Rondebosch. However my campus, the Hiddingh Campus, where the departments of fine arts and of drama were located, was in the city. I had to negotiate my way in the busy multi-lane traffic of Cape Town to get there. It was at that campus that Sebo introduced me to Richard Esterhuysen who was a student in the drama department. He is the fellow who later became a famous British actor under the name Richard E Grant. Sebo was at school with him at Waterford Kamhlaba College in Swaziland where Richard was born of South African Afrikaner parents. On the main campus Sebo also introduced me to Zindzi Mandela, Nelson and Winnie Mandela’s daughter, who was a student there. I had only read about her and her older sister Zenani because when I stayed at Nelson Mandela’s house Zindzi was not yet born – and her father was still married to Evelyn. We spent a lot of time hanging out at the home of Herbert Vilakazi who was a sociology lecturer. Both Zindzi and Herbert provided stimulating company, Herbert making intellectual observations about life in Cape Town and Zindzi offering a street-smart perspective of the same. All this to the smooth flow of Boschendal Chardonnay and the philosophical Whispers in the Deep by Ray Phiri and his band Stimela.

  Even though we were sharing a one-bedroom apartment my relationship with Sebo remained platonic. Of course I cannot pretend I didn’t have ungodly thoughts. What warm-blooded man wouldn’t with a woman like Sebo?

  After consulting with my supervisor, Professor Mavis Taylor, and making arrangements for a much longer stay next time, Sebo and I drove back to Lesotho.

  I continued to go to Cape Town every few months.

  One day Chris Hani paid me an unexpected visit. He was with his two little daughters, as if it was a social call. He told me that my father had mentioned that I would be going to Cape Town that week. He asked if I could carry a small package for him to Cape Town. I had done something like that once before for Wonga Matanda of the Non-European Unity Movement, an organisation I didn’t give a hoot about. I was just doing Wonga a favour. I was quite happy to do the same for Hani, a man who was not only a family friend but a representative of an organisation whose principles I supported. My Toyota Corolla was parked outside, so I gave him the key and asked him to hide the package in the car. I did not want to know what was in the package or where it was hidden. This was important, because if I was searched by the Boers at the border post or anywhere else in South Africa I would truly not know what they were searching for or where it was hidden.

  I gave him the address where I would be staying in Mowbray and he told me someone would come for the parcel.

  The trip to Cape Town was a thirteen-hour drive and since I was driving alone without Sebo I was quite exhausted on arrival. I parked the car in the underground parking garage and went straight to bed in my apartment. In the morning I waited for a while but when Hani’s contact didn’t arrive I went about my business at the university. This time I had brought some books for Mavis Taylor. I had mailed her my reading list so that she could catch up on the scholarship of what I was working on, but unfortunately she couldn’t get most of the books. I had them all because I had brought them from the United States for this very purpose. I had suspected that most of them would not be available in South Africa.

  In the evening I was having dinner by myself when there was a knock at the door. I opened it to a bald-headed Coloured man who was well dressed with a whiff of Aramis about him. I knew that scent because it was the cologne I had used at some stage. He told me his first name and showed me his ID document. I didn’t bother to look at it because it didn’t mean anything to me.

  ‘You have something for me from Maseru,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know what you are talking about,’ I said.

  I put the car keys on the table in front of him.

  ‘Brown Toyota Corolla with Lesotho number plates,’ I said as he took the keys.

  ‘I know,’ he said and left.

  A few minutes later he came back holding a foolscap-size jiffy bag. He put the keys back on the table.

  ‘Tell them in Lesotho that we’re still alive,’ he said as he walked out of the door.

  I drove the car a few times in the city before the long journey back to Lesotho. For a while I hoped the car would not explode while I was driving it. You never knew with the Boers. What if they had intercepted Hani’s communication with his contact person and the Coloured man was not Hani’s contact but a member of the notorious South African Bureau of State Security? When nothing happened after driving a few times between Mowbray and the campus in the city I soon relaxed and forgot all about my role as courier.

  Back at Roma, I was walking one day from the Oppenheimer Building, where my office was located, to the BTM Lecture Theatre. Suddenly a woman running towards the building that housed the offices of the Dean of Humanities caught my attention. Perhaps she was late for something because she looked quite flustered. I was struck by her dark complexion and her features which looked more like those of West African beauties. I have always been partial to dark beauties. The second thing that struck me about her was the hairdo. The hair had not been treated with chemicals or straightened in any way. It was a natural finely combed afro. She reminded me of the Angela Davis of the 1960s. A darker-complexioned Angela Davis. The hair spoke of progressive political consciousness. I detested the fashion of frying the hair with chemicals in order to straighten it because I thought it smacked of self-hate. In my view, it ranked with skin-lightening creams in the black people’s quest for whiteness. So, to see a woman with an afro or dreads or braids in the midst of all the straightened hair on campus was an inspiring sight.

  I said to myself:
That woman is going to be my wife.

  I didn’t know who the woman was. I had never seen her before, and had no idea I would ever see her again. But I somehow knew she was going to be my wife. She went her way and I went to class to teach African Drama.

  I didn’t give the woman another thought until one day, two weeks later, she walked into my office. She told me that her friend Phaee Monaheng was a member of my travelling theatre troupe and she was wondering if there might be a vacancy for her. Unfortunately, there was no place because I only took those students who had done my Practical Theatre course. But of course I couldn’t let her go without finding out who she was and if there was any chance of seeing her again.

  She told me she was Adele Mafoso. That surname in that form, a Sesotho corruption of the Nguni Mavuso, was not common in Lesotho. Surely she would know Willie Mafoso, who had been more like a brother to me when I lived at his home in Mohale’s Hoek in my early years in Lesotho.

  ‘Yes, Willie is my brother,’ she told me.

  ‘Willie is my brother too, sort of,’ I said. ‘We grew up together in Mohale’s Hoek. We did many naughty things together.’

  I thought she would at least chuckle at my lame joke; she didn’t find any humour in it and just looked stern.

  In Western culture, Adele would be referred to as Willie’s first cousin; their fathers were brothers. But in the Basotho culture he is her brother. When I lived at Willie’s she was one or two years old and lived with her parents in a village in the northern district of Leribe. That was why I did not know her.

  Soon Adele and I began to see each other quite frequently. She had a boyfriend, a young man from the blue blood House of Molapo. This was the family of the ruling classes of Lesotho. One of its leading lights was the prime minister Chief Leabua Jonathan. But she began to see less of the Molapo boyfriend and more of me, until he faded out of the picture.

  Some days she drove with me in my car to spend the night at my house in Florida. I was taken by the very idea of dating Willie’s sister. I regarded him as a brother even though we were not related at all. But here was the opportunity to strengthen our ties and become relatives; we would be brothers-in-law if I married his sister. I know that is a stupid reason to marry anyone but, hey, I am quite prone to stupidity sometimes. I didn’t believe that I would be marrying her just for that reason. Actually, at the time I didn’t think Willie had anything to do with it at all. After all, I had decided she was going to be my wife long before I knew who she was. It was only on looking back and trying to analyse what contributed to my rash decision that it became clear to me that Willie had been a factor. At the time I believed there was genuine love between us. Indeed, quite early on in our relationship we began talking of marriage.

  I discovered that she was humourless and had no time for my silly jokes and childish pranks. But that didn’t bother me. Her positives far outweighed that little flaw. She was serious and ambitious and solid and would certainly bring stability to my life. She also had a very strong sense of family.

  What bothered me was her political outlook. She was a staunch BNP member even though the rest of her family, including Willie, were BCP members or supporters. This on its own wouldn’t have bothered me. After all, we had come to accept the BNP as a de facto government which was in alliance with the ANC. It was no longer the old BNP that was supported by the apartheid government, but had actually come out blazing against South Africa, to the extent of declaring that Lesotho was at war with the apartheid state. At that stage, therefore, I wouldn’t have viewed her BNP membership as a cardinal sin. But what brought fear to me was her membership of the BNP Young Pioneers, then just known as the Youth League, which was armed. It was trained by troops from North Korea which were stationed in Lesotho for that purpose.

  The Youth League used its North Korean training effectively by making every civil servant toe the party line. This was the group that marched senior civil servants out of their offices at gunpoint and up and down Kingsway, the main street of Maseru, shaming them in public with searing insults and threats of removing them from the face of the earth if they didn’t display their support for Chief Leabua Jonathan. This happened a lot to those civil servants who shunned Chief Leabua’s political rallies. Quite a few of them were seen being frogmarched and whipped in the streets of Maseru by the Youth League. I once saw the governor of the Lesotho Central Bank, a fellow I knew well from my youth in Mafeteng, suffer the same fate because the youths felt he was becoming too much of an independent thinker.

  Adele was surprised that I didn’t have a gun in my house.

  ‘How do you live without a thoboro?’ she asked.

  She called it a thoboro, an onomatopoeic term of endearment for a machine gun. She thought I was a sissy when I told her the sight of guns, never mind touching them, made me cringe. The last time I touched a real gun with my hands I was a teenager who was being used by adults to commit their dirty acts of assassination. Even when I lived at the Poqo camp I never messed around with guns because whatever arms and ammunition was there was hidden so that the police didn’t find them; the camp was in an urban environment and everyone in town knew about it. There were never any arms lying around there.

  ‘Maybe you’re right, I am a sissy,’ I said. ‘But I don’t want a gun in my house. I hate guns wholeheartedly. Even our kids, when we have them, will not play with toy guns.’

  Those were the days when I thought I could lay down the law!

  The next time I visited Mohale’s Hoek with Adele I expressed my reservations to Willie about his sister’s involvement with Chief Leabua’s lawless bands of armed youths. He didn’t seem to take it that seriously because he thought it was just a phase that was influenced by her relationship with the Molapo boyfriend. Now that I was in her life, he said hopefully, she would give that up. I took his word for it. But I didn’t take comfort in the fact that when we sat down for lunch he teased her about the activities of the Youth League and they laughed about it as if it were a joke.

  Although Adele continued to be a staunch BNP member she stopped participating in the activities of the Youth League. She also had to accept that she was now involved with a man who would have nothing to do with thoboro or any other weapon of death.

  Nevertheless, I was very proud of Adele and I wanted to introduce her to all my friends. I once took her to meet Ntlabathi Mbuli – my Poqo friend and mentor. The last time I told you about him he was losing his mind in England where he had gone to study for an MA degree. He did complete the degree at the London School of Economics and returned to Lesotho to work for the Lesotho Christian Council while he was trying to get a lecturing job at the National University of Lesotho. He had built himself a nice concrete block house in one of the townships on the outskirts of Maseru where he lived with his wife and children. I don’t remember exactly how many children he had but I think there were three. Adele knew his daughter from a previous relationship in Mafeteng; she was a fellow student at the National University of Lesotho before the daughter went to study medicine at the University of Cape Town. She was therefore quite keen to meet her friend’s father.

  We found Ntlabathi running up and down his living room with his arms outstretched; he was ‘flying’ like an aeroplane and making the appropriate sounds. He stopped long enough to express his joy at seeing us and to acknowledge the woman I introduced as Willie’s sister, and then he resumed his ‘flight’. His wife Karabo came to join us and asked him to settle down and attend to his visitors.

  He told us about the voices that kept calling his name. They started while he was in England battling with conservative dons who were dismissive of his Marxist approach. Now the voices had become worse. I didn’t say this, but it was obvious to me that if he were a believer in African traditional religions he would have interpreted these as a call from the ancestors to become a diviner, a sangoma or an igqirha – a traditional healer. But unfortunately as an unbeliever he had to settle for a mundane diagnosis – that of schizophrenia. That
of course was my own tiekieline diagnosis which I shared with Adele on our way back home. I don’t think he had sought any medical advice since he didn’t see that there was anything wrong with him. He had become paranoid and we listened while he told us of enemies who were bent on destroying him.

  Before we left he gave me manila envelopes of his manuscripts – most of them true manuscripts since they were in longhand. But there were some typed pages too. These were his poems and short stories. I didn’t want to take this material because I didn’t know what to do with it. But he insisted. Later, when Ntlabathi returned to South Africa after our liberation in 1994 and was teaching at a high school there, he sent me another envelope of manuscripts. They were accompanied by a letter listing a number of attempts he had made to get the material published and asking me to keep them and maybe in future he would self-publish them after getting my comments. I still have all that material. I never gathered enough courage to read it after I got the news that Ntlabathi had died from an undisclosed illness. I am hoping to give all this material to his heirs when I get around to attending to that.

  My relationship with Adele was tempestuous from the word go. I played some part in creating the initial storm. For instance, one day I was on campus with members of my theatre company, most of whom were also her friends. When she arrived to join us the first thing that struck me was her new hairdo. She had obviously come straight from a hair salon because her hair was relaxed and set in some fancy style.

  I called her aside and said, ‘What did you do to your hair?’

  Even before she could answer, I added, ‘I can’t go with you when you are like that.’

  She was perceptibly shocked by my outburst and looked very hurt. I knew immediately that I had been tactless and insensitive. But she didn’t say a word in her defence. Instead of apologising immediately I went back to my troupe and continued with whatever I was talking about. Her friends didn’t make things any better for my feelings of guilt when I overhead them admiring her new hairdo and asking which salon she had been to and which particular hairdresser, so that they might go there themselves. I heard her tell them sadly, ‘He doesn’t like it. I did it for him but he doesn’t like it.’