Sometimes There Is a Void

by Zakes Mda

  This is garbage of the century … AP’s Nationalism is well articulated in two statements, ‘African Nationalism: is it a Misnomer? ’ and a series of articles published in Inkundla entitled ‘African Nationalism’. I think he published two or three in a series. AP’s African Nationalism is very clear and unambiguous but liberals and radical liberals (Communists) find his positions too correct [I am not sure what Luyanda means here]. AP’s positions debunk their non-scientific and dogmatic approaches. In articulating his brand of African Nationalism he actually pooh-poohs Marcus Garvey’s notion of ‘Back to Africa’ and ‘Drive the White Men out of Africa’. These scholars know that, they deliberately seek to demean AP and African Nationalism and Pan Africanism.

  It suffices to say my father’s Pan-Africanism was inclusive rather than narrow.

  ‘I respect the rigorous research of American academics,’ my father told me, ‘but this Andrew Horn is a disappointment.’

  I knew that when he was talking of American academics he meant Gail Gerhart and Robert Edgar who had researched his life and politics extensively.

  I apologised for Horn’s inaccurate descriptions. I felt guilty because they were in my book. I feared that he would never be proud of that book because it contained such inaccurate statements about him. I felt like a traitor.

  While in Mafeteng I paid a visit to Mpho who was running a chicken farm in one of the townships. My father had given me a piece of land that he had bought some years back, hopefully to build his own house but decided against it. I had built a house on the land and established the chicken farm, as my father had done before me when I was a kid back at KwaGcina in the Eastern Cape. But this one was not a hatchery like his. Mpho ordered day-old chickens, raised them for eight weeks and then sold them as broilers. I saw that the business was not doing badly, though it would bring better returns if she extended it and ordered more day-olds. We discussed our divorce. We had separated years ago; it was high time that we were officially divorced.

  And indeed we were. It was a very amicable divorce presided over by the Chief Justice of the High Court of Lesotho, Mr Justice Peter Brendan Cullinan. Lawyers on both sides were family friends. On her side was Attorney Winston Churchill Matanzima Maqutu and on my side was Advocate Semapo Peete. The hearing did not last more than fifteen minutes. The judge gave me the custody of the three minor children with reasonable access to their mother. But he added a clause where he gave ‘care and control of the children to the parents of the plaintiff’. I was the plaintiff. The house and the chicken farm went to Mpho. All these arrangements were amicably agreed upon even before the hearing, which merely formalised them.

  Even after the divorce I was still in a pickle with women. I saw myself as an utter failure in relationships. Adele worked more than a hundred kilometres away in Thaba Nchu. I had given her my Toyota Corolla and she could drive to Maseru any time she felt like it. But it was obvious that neither of us saw any future in our relationship, so she stayed away for most of the time.

  However, I was able to spend more time with Gugu, not only at our Jerusalema this time; she also visited my house in Florida. I often sent my driver, Ntate Lelosa, to pick her up from Roma to spend the weekend with me.

  One thing about Gugu was that she hated cigarette smoke so every time I wanted to smoke I had to go outside. This was too much trouble for me so I decided to stop smoking altogether. This was a year after I stopped drinking. Oh, I didn’t tell you that on New Year’s Eve in 1989 I had drunk myself to an utter stupor, hoping that after a serious hangover on New Year’s Day I would be so sick that I would hate liquor and therefore stop drinking altogether! And indeed it happened that way. It would not be accurate to say that I hate alcohol, though; I am actually a wine collector. I just don’t drink it myself. Now, thanks to Gugu, it was time to give up another vice. For her I stopped smoking and have never touched a cigarette with my lips again.

  On February 11, 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from prison. We watched on television as he walked out of Victor Verster Prison hand in hand with Winnie Mandela. Other stalwarts of the liberation struggle such as Govan Mbeki, Walter Sisulu and Ahmed Kathrada had been released a few months earlier. We were moving towards achieving what we had been fighting for for so many years. Gugu went home to Soweto to visit, taking her friend Xoliswa Vumazonke with her. When she came back after the brief holiday she was excited because she had met Nelson Mandela who was her neighbour in Orlando West. This was before Mandela moved to the formerly all-white suburbs. She had shaken his hand and joked that she felt the ‘Madiba magic’ running through her arm like an electric current.

  By this time I was spending so much time with Gugu that I was convinced she was the woman I was going to marry. We looked out for each other as good couples did. When I was worried that I was getting vitiligo because I developed some white spots on my body she took me to a Nigerian doctor at Queen Elizabeth II Hospital who had made claims to the invention of a concoction that banished that skin disorder. Even though the doctor was working for a government hospital he charged privately for this remedy. It tasted like Beano, and I think it was a scam. I only took it once and then dumped it in the dustbin. The white spots disappeared on their own. I, in turn, took Gugu to Ingo’s mom when she was bothered by period pains. Ingo was a young German man who repaired televisions and installed aerials in Maseru. His mother made claims that she could cure most ailments using herbs that she got from the Bavarian forests. She had also learnt a few tricks from Basotho herbalists. We sat with Ingo’s mom on her veranda as she prepared her medicine. She advised Gugu to wear only cotton underwear, which she did in any case. When we got home Gugu tasted the mixture and it was awful. We poured it down the drain.

  So, you see, we have had our share of herbalists and their concoctions.

  Alas, that year Gugu completed her degree and went back to Soweto. We spoke on the phone occasionally. Then she got a teaching job at Mhlosheni in Swaziland, at the high school where she had done her Cambridge Overseas School Certificate. I once drove to Swaziland, my first and only visit to that country, to see her. Her house was on the campus of a very strict Protestant mission school and I spent the two days hiding in her bedroom so as not to be seen by the school authorities. Her mother, Josephine, came to see her and I had to sit quietly in the bedroom so as not to alert her to my presence. Remember, Josephine did not approve of our relationship from the day she got that telephone call from Adele claiming that Gugu was messing around with her husband. Thankfully, I was not discovered either by the school authorities or by Josephine before I drove back to Lesotho – after Gugu had taken me for a drive to see Mbabane and Manzini, the two bigger towns of Swaziland.

  The following year I went to Durham, England, as a writer-in-residence at the Cathedral there. I was the guest of an organisation called Lesotho-Durham Link which was itself linked to the Anglican Church. My brief was to write a play that would be performed in the Norman Cathedral as part of its nine hundredth anniversary celebrations. I was based at St Chad’s College just across the street from the Cathedral and I spent a lot of time taking long walks along the Wear River. It was during these walks that my character Toloki was born. This was after I had read J M Coetzee’s Age of Iron, which had just been published. In this novel I fell in love with a character called Vercueil who had the ‘stench of death’. I was fascinated just by that fact. I said to myself: if Coetzee can create a character that stinks like this, so can I. But mine, of course, had to stink for different reasons, while maintaining the important status of ‘angel of death’. Mine would be a professional mourner. At the time I didn’t know that there were cultures that have or had professional mourners. I thought I was inventing a new profession in the name of absurdity. I took pains to create the details of this character, even though I didn’t have a story for him. I thought that one day I would use him in a play.

  I wrote to Gugu constantly when I was in Durham, sending her humbug sweets which she liked very much. The British brands we
re much more minty and richer in flavour than the South African humbugs. I also sent her music cassettes and beautiful life-like bridal dolls that I discovered being sold from a wagon in the town square. She wrote to ask: ‘Do these dolls mean what I think they mean?’ She had decoded the message of the dolls and I responded positively. I waited for a yes! yes! for a long time, but all I got was silence.

  I was supposed to be in Durham for a few months – I don’t remember how many months exactly – but I cut my stay short because I developed an anal fissure and the British health system put me on a waiting list for months for the surgery. In the meantime the pain was killing me. I also received a letter from my mother telling me that Dini, my last born, was developing some behavioural problems. I flew back to Lesotho to address that, and then drove to Johannesburg for the surgery.

  I completed the play I was supposed to write in Durham as soon as I was settled at Roma. It was a verse play titled By Way of the Rock loosely based on the history of the Durham Cathedral and the relations between that region and the Kingdom of Lesotho.

  My return coincided with a period of great change in South Africa. Negotiations were going on between the apartheid government and the liberation movement for the establishment a new democratic non-racial and non-sexist South Africa. The New Nation, an independent newspaper edited by Zwelakhe Sisulu, one of the sons of Walter and Albertina Sisulu, organised a big writers’ conference in Johannesburg at which South African writers, some of whom had been in exile for decades, were invited to participate. There were also writers from the African diaspora of Britain and the United States, and those writers and scholars who were in solidarity with our struggle from countries as far off as Japan. This was where I first met my friend Keiko Kusonose who is a professor of African literature at Kyoto Seika University. This was also where I first met young South African writers like Zaccharia Rapola and Raks Seakhoa who were on some of the organising committees of this conference. I had not known of them because my only contacts in South Africa were theatre practitioners like Gcina Mhlophe, Matsemela Manaka and Maishe Maponya. And of course the writers I met in Lesotho such as Ingoapele Madingoane and Duma ka Ndlovu.

  I was accommodated at the Johannesburger Hotel in the city with other writers. The first thing I did was to phone Gugu in Swaziland. I wanted her to come and join me in Johannesburg to see some of the writers whose works she loved, such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Dennis Brutus, Ngugi wa Mirii, Lewis Nkosi and many others who were in South Africa for the first time. I had met most of these writers before in my travels abroad, but for South Africans it was a new experience. I phoned the office at Gugu’s school, and the secretary answered. She told me Gugu was nearby and she called her to the phone. Gugu didn’t sound pleased to hear from me.

  ‘Hey, I am in Johannesburg at the New Nation Writers’ Conference and I’d like you to come over and join me,’ I said.

  And then the line just went dead. She had hung up on me. I dialled again and once more the secretary answered.

  ‘May I speak with Gugu?’ I said.

  The secretary hesitated a bit, and I could hear whispers in the background.

  ‘She’s not here,’ the secretary said.

  ‘But I was speaking with her only a few seconds ago,’ I said.

  The line went dead again.

  I knew then that Gugu did not want to speak to me. There could be only one reason, she had found someone else and wanted to end our relationship. She didn’t have the courage to tell me.

  A fleeting thought crossed my mind: I could go to Swaziland and fight for her if my instinct that there was someone else was right. After what we had gone through, both the bad and the wonderful times, I would most likely prevail. But I certainly would not demean myself. I made a decision right then that I would let her go. I would not go to Swaziland to try to make her change her mind. Instead, I would go back to Lesotho and mend fences with Adele. Adele was a more solid, family-values person. She was also Willie’s sister.

  My sister Thami had a flat in Hillbrow at the time. It was only a few streets away from the Johannesburger Hotel. I skipped some of the conference events and visited her. I needed to speak to someone other than a bunch of writers. Thami liked Adele but had never met Gugu. When I told her what had happened between me and Gugu she said it served me right. She took it upon herself to call Adele even though I kept telling her that I didn’t think she would want to have anything to do with me since our relationship had gone cold. I did not want to resuscitate a relationship with her on the rebound, but would rather wait until I returned to Lesotho.

  ‘You and Adele were made for each other,’ Thami said. ‘She is family already; she’s Willie’s sister.’

  I spoke with Adele on the phone and she said she would come to Johannesburg immediately. And indeed the next day she was there. We attended the sessions of the New Nation Writers’ Conference together, and throughout that period she was a very pleasant and lovable person. She did not yell at me once or start a quarrel about some petty thing. We joined the writers’ tours to Soweto and the surrounding informal settlements. Normally she was stern and unyielding, but in the city of lights she was relaxed as we goofed about in my hotel room.

  A child was conceived at the Johannesburger Hotel.

  After the conference I returned to the university at Roma. I had made up my mind that it was time to return to South Africa. I was only coming back to the university to serve my notice.

  I applied for the job of Chief Executive Officer at the Community Arts Project in Cape Town which had been run by the famous cultural activist Mike van Graan, who had resigned to take on other challenges. I flew to Cape Town for an interview, which was successful. The Weekly Mail trumpeted my impending return with the headline: Mda puts some snap into Cap. Playwright Zakes Mda is coming home to the city he loves – and bringing with him a wealth of knowledge on development theatre and some challenging new ideas for the Community Arts Project in Cape Town.

  You can understand then why I felt like an utter turncoat when it turned out that I would not be taking this job after all. The reason for disappointing the people of Cape Town who were so much looking forward to my taking the reins of this premier arts and cultural organisation was that I had received an invitation from the renowned historian Leonard Thompson to join his Southern African Research Program at Yale University as a Research Fellow. This came out of the blue because I had not applied for the position. But I could not turn Yale University down even though I loved Cape Town so much. So, with sadness, I wrote to Bulelani Ngcuka who chaired the board of trustees of the Community Arts Project informing him that I would not take up the position and apologising profusely for wasting their time.

  I had just one more European trip before packing my bags for the United States of America. I accepted an invitation from Teresa Devant and Albio Gonzalez, who had since left Lesotho and returned to Sweden. Teresa was continuing with her work of producing and directing my plays in that country. On this occasion, through the auspices of the Swedish anti-apartheid movement, she invited me and Mandla Langa to tour Sweden. Mandla Langa was at the time representing the ANC in the United Kingdom. Teresa and Albio presented my play The Road, first at the Kulturhuset in Stockholm and then at the Backa Theatre in Göteborg.

  One thing I remember about this tour was that at one time Mandla and I were stuck in Umea, which is in northern Sweden. Everything was covered in snow and we were marooned in our hotel rooms for days, cold and miserable. I joined Mandla in his room and watched him as he sat there and drank whisky. He was quite disgusted with me because I wouldn’t join him in demolishing the bottle. He lamented the fact that I had changed from the brandy and beer swilling reprobate of his Maseru days.

  I gained a lot of love and respect for Mandla in that hotel room. I discovered that he was quite a sensitive soul. I believe sensitivity is an essential ingredient for great art. Let me quote from a letter I once wrote to the writer Aryan Kaganof who had expressed embarrassment at being so s
ensitive that he had been hurt by some of my very mild criticism of his work:

  Sensitivity is a baggage that comes with being an artist, Aryan. It is because of the very sensitivity that as an artist you observe and give us insight to things that other people take for granted. The more sensitive you are, the greater an artist you become. It comes with the job. And I suspect it makes one a better human being. Not necessarily a stronger human being but a better one; a more compassionate and caring one.

  In that hotel room in Umea I discovered that this could easily apply to Mandla Langa, though not because of any criticism I had made of his work. He was just a sensitive soul generally. Maybe that’s why he drank so much. One had to suppress the pain somehow, even if temporarily. Or one had to relieve it through some artistic expression.

  We talked about our lives, our families, our loves and losses. In the name of the struggle he had gone through a lot of hardship and even lost his brother at the hands of his own comrades. Yet he continued with the struggle because it was bigger than him and his personal loss. Mandla sat there and cried. I admired him immensely as a hardened guerrilla fighter who nevertheless was sensitive enough to cry.

  Those were some of the humbling moments of my journey. There would be many of them in the future. They could not but transform me. But none of them could completely fill the void. I returned to Lesotho after a successful tour of Sweden and after performances of my play that was well received by audiences. Yet the void continued.