Sometimes There Is a Void

by Zakes Mda

  Often on my way to see my children and my mother in Mafeteng I drove past the church by the highway. Already the walls of our Jerusalema were crumbling and the tree was beginning to go flaccid. I slowed down a bit, and wistfully recalled how it used to be.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  WE ARE ON THE road again. Gugu and I. To see the Bee People in the Eastern Cape and my mother in Lesotho as usual. We are still in the Gauteng Province, driving towards the border with the Free State Province when I stop under a highway bridge to pick up a hitch-hiker. I have this dangerous habit of giving rides to people stranded on the road, especially if they look indigent. I have been rightly warned against it by my family and friends, and I have often promised that I would stop doing it. The concerns for my safety are legitimate because we know of instances where motorists have been robbed and even killed by hitch-hikers. In this case, the hitch-hiker is a thirty-something white man, a bit unkempt though his blue jeans and shirt are clean. He is on a journey, yet he is not carrying a bag or anything else, which is rather unusual.

  ‘Where to?’ I ask.

  ‘Welkom,’ he says.

  Welkom is a gold mining town many kilometres off the N1 freeway in a different direction from where we are going.

  ‘We are taking the Bloemfontein route,’ I tell him. ‘But we can drop you off at Kroonstad.’

  ‘Kroonstad will be fine,’ he says. ‘You’ll have cut my feet still.’

  Cut his feet? That’s a Sesotho proverb for shortening someone’s long journey by giving him a ride up to a point. And yet the man speaks with a heavy Afrikaans accent. He obviously has been interacting with the Sesotho language so much that he now subconsciously transliterates it into English, or perhaps into his native Afrikaans. I keep this observation to myself.

  We are silent for some time as we drive into the Free State. In the rear-view mirror I can see that he has a startled expression and turns his gaze from the road to Gugu to me and then back to the road. After a while I ask him where he has come from and why he is hitch-hiking.

  ‘I’m from Sun City,’ he says.

  I think he means the famous gaming resort in the North West Province and ask him if he has been gambling there and lost everything.

  He chuckles and says, ‘Gambling? I was serving a sentence.’

  It turns out the Sun City he is talking about is the Diepkloof Prison in Johannesburg. He served fifteen years for killing his friend in a drunken brawl. He was released that morning without any money or any means of getting back to his home in Welkom, three hundred and fifty kilometres away. I can see that Gugu is worried; we have a killer in our midst. I give her hand a reassuring caress. The man has been honest enough to tell us that he has been in jail; I don’t think he will kill us. He could have lied; he could have invented some mishap that portrayed him as a victim. I trust this man.

  I am curious about prison life and how he coped there as an Afrikaner in an establishment with an overwhelming majority of black inmates. He is reluctant to talk about his experiences there, except to say that he had never lived with blacks before but after fifteen years he has become one of them.

  ‘In what respect?’ I ask.

  He does not respond, so I press on again, ‘You’ve become one of them, you say. Is that good or bad?’

  Still he does not respond. He only shakes his head. After a while he says, ‘I don’t know if my people are still there in Welkom. Or if they’ll talk to me. No one ever came to see me in prison. I don’t know if they want to see me,’ he says.

  Before I drop the man on the outskirts of Kroonstad I give him two hundred rands in bank notes. He is taken aback.

  ‘Who are you, boss?’ he asks.

  ‘Never mind who I am. Just go and enjoy yourself, but don’t kill anybody again.’

  He is so moved that he wants to cry.

  ‘I never had so much money in my life,’ he says.

  As I drive away he just stands there looking after my car as if mesmerised.

  Gugu doesn’t say a thing about any of this. She knows and accepts that’s how I am. She herself is a giving person. If I were with Adele I wouldn’t have been able to assist the hitch-hiker with money. Or I would have had to hand it to him furtively.

  ADELE AND I WERE on a road trip to Mafeteng. We were going to inform my parents of our decision to marry. We were both ecstatic about it. I had banished all thoughts that our relationship had been largely toxic before this, and was looking forward to a happy future with her. She was the dark beauty who was carrying my child and I loved her. Also, she was a hard-working woman who would build our family. I was playful and whimsical; she had no time for frivolities. Maybe her sternness and serious approach to life was exactly what I needed to bring stability into my life. She was very nice to other people, and I had no doubt that she would learn to be nice to me too when she was secure in the knowledge that we were married. To crown it all, she was Willie’s sister.

  Somewhere between Bloemfontein and Wepener I saw an old couple and a boy standing on the shoulder of the provincial highway. The woman’s seshoeshoe dress used to be blue, but had now become an uneven grey colour from the unforgiving sun. The old man’s and the boy’s khaki pants and shirts had patches of different coloured cloths. The three of them looked like farm labourers, perhaps from one of the farms through which the highway ran. The old lady feebly flagged down my car and I stopped. She came over and asked for a ride for the old man and his grandson. They were going to another farm in the Wepener area to attend the funeral of a relative and didn’t have enough money for the bus. Although I could see in Adele’s face that she was not happy about this, I gave them a ride. When we got to Wepener I bade them goodbye and good luck, and gave them a hundred rand note. The old man thanked me profusely. With eyes lifted to the heavens, he asked the Good Lord to shower me with more blessings.

  ‘What did you do that for?’ asked Adele as we drove towards the border post.

  ‘Just a helping hand for the funeral,’ I said.

  ‘Whose funeral? You don’t know those people.’

  She was much more practical than I was. Much smarter. She was certainly going to bring stability and good judgement into my life.

  ‘Yes, I don’t know them, but that’s not a good reason for not helping them.’

  ‘So now you’re a do-gooder bleeding-heart, are you? You are just doing it for your own selfish reasons, so that they can talk about you and spread the news that you gave them money. You’re buying your own fame.’

  She said this with so much venom that I was taken aback. And we had been so ecstatic just a few minutes before. Inwardly, I cursed myself for my habit of generosity to strangers. But still I had to defend myself.

  ‘Buying fame, eh?’ I asked. ‘How is helping those people going to make me famous? They don’t know who I am. I didn’t give them my name; I don’t see how they are going to spread it among the miserable farms where they work that I am a bleeding-heart.’

  Although she was wrong about the fame part, her position was a rational one. You cannot dish out your money to all and sundry while you remain poor. Become Warren Buffett first, and then you can afford to be a philanthropist. In any case, as Oscar Wilde observed, philanthropy recreates the problem it tries to solve. But what the heck – I am a sucker, and happily so! It was also true that my generosity was for selfish reasons. I was not a true altruist because I got something back from giving – joy and satisfaction. It made my day when I made someone else’s day. Just the look of utter amazement and thankfulness in the eyes of the receiver gave me something akin to an orgasm, although in this case it was not of a sexual kind. Let’s call it a platonic orgasm. After an act of generosity I became effervescent for the rest of that day. So, you see, it was for my own happiness that I gave.

  But that’s not what I told her. I had to make peace with her before we got home to Mafeteng so I patiently explained to her that I gave for religious reasons. By giving, I was hoping that God would give me more. I was banking
on the fact that she had no idea that I was an atheist. I was hoping as a Christian woman herself who professed the Catholic religion she would get off my back about doling out money. God can be a convenient tool even for atheists.

  I reminded her of this sacred reason every time I got the urge to be generous to my fellow human beings in her presence, although in the long run she stopped buying it. I had to develop clandestine ways of generosity.

  When we got to Mafeteng my father was watering his vegetable garden. We all went into the house and took our seats at his dining room table. My mother was not there. I think she was working at one of her two cafés. I announced to my father that Adele was pregnant and we had decided to marry. He congratulated us and then asked us to kneel down. The three of us went on our knees on the hard linoleum floor. He prayed, asking God to guide and protect us and the baby. We had his blessing to marry.

  It was strange to see my father praying because he rarely did it. Well, perhaps in private he prayed quite often, I wouldn’t know about that. Although he never went to church – at least not since the days he was a teacher at St Teresa’s Catholic Mission and conducted the church choir – he was clearly a believer. I remember on one occasion when I was about to undertake a long journey – perhaps it was when I went to America for the first time – we knelt down and he prayed for me.

  When we left Mafeteng Adele was elated. She said that for the first time she felt welcome in my family, thanks to my father’s prayer. On the road to Johannesburg I made certain that I didn’t pick up hitch-hikers lest I spoil the good mood.

  The following week we went to Leribe to the village in the hills where Adele was born. Her parents, Ntate Thesele and MaNhlapho, or Hlapho in short, were a wonderful loving couple who tilled the land and kept a few animals in the kraal in front of the homestead which comprised a rondavel and a flat-roofed house built of solid rock. Most of their livelihood came from the old-age pension they collected at the end of every month across the border in the South African town of Ficksburg. It was the same with thousands of citizens of neighbouring countries who survived on old-age and disability government grants meant for South Africans, but that the foreigners were able to access because they either once worked in South Africa and acquired the old South African reference books known as the dompas or had fraudulently obtained South African identity documents that qualified them for such pensions. Ntate Thesele and Hlapho fell in the former category; they once worked in South Africa in their youth, and now were part of the refrain that could be heard in the border towns of Lesotho and Swaziland, and to a lesser extent in Botswana: ‘It’s the end of the month; we’re crossing the border to eat Mandela’s money.’ As a result they were quite well-off compared to their neighbours.

  They were particularly proud that the wedding would be at their homestead.

  On the wedding day a marquee was constructed in front of the homestead. That’s where the wedding took place. Adele and I were dressed in isiXhosa traditional clothes: she was in a red isikhakha dress and a black iqhiya turban, and I was in black pants and a red Afro-shirt made from the rough calico of the isikhakha dresses, and embroidered with the black patterns that are normally found in isikhakha. The hundreds of villagers who gathered were astonished that Adele was not wearing the customary white with a veil and I was not in a stuffy suit.

  I heard Ntate Thesele tell his friends, ‘That’s what I like about these Bathepu people, they are proud of their customs. Even when they are so highly educated like my son-in-law here they still wear their traditional clothes with pride.’

  My Uncle Owen represented my father. He was the only member of my family who attended my wedding. My brothers and sister were not there. Even Zwelakhe whom I had personally invited in writing did not attend, nor did he respond to my letter or send a message of any kind. My mother was the only one who told me she would have come but her health was beginning to deteriorate. A number of my friends from Maseru and my colleagues from the university did attend though, and we all had a wonderful time with villagers performing traditional dances.

  What impressed the guests most, besides our wedding attire, was the fact that we did not go to church to make the vows but the priest came to Ntate Thesele’s homestead to officiate under the marquee.

  ‘He must be a very important man, this man who is marrying Thesele’s daughter, for the priest to come all the way from Maseru to conduct his marriage,’ I heard one villager tell the others. They did not know that it was not because of me that the priest came. He was Adele’s friend. The Reverend Father Khasoane was based at Our Lady of Victories Cathedral in Maseru but got permission from the Maryland parish under which Adele’s village fell to conduct the wedding. What almost presented a problem, though, was the fact that I was a divorcee. As far as the Catholic Church is concerned once you are married you are married for ever. I was still married to Mpho in their eyes because they did not recognise our divorce.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said to Adele. ‘We can have our marriage solemnised by civil authorities. The District Administrator will gladly do it for us.’

  But Adele didn’t want a civil ceremony. She wanted to be married by a priest of the Roman Catholic Church. She was an ardent Catholic who had converted to that denomination for the purposes of schooling but became a true and firm believer in their doctrine in the process.

  Fortunately Father Khasoane discovered a loophole in my first marriage. It had not been solemnised in the Catholic Church but by civil authorities. Mpho had not been a Catholic either but belonged to some Protestant church. Therefore the Catholic Church did not recognise it as a marriage at all. Presto, I had never been married before!

  Father Khasoane looked beautiful in his white and gold Roman Catholic regalia when, on February 22, 1991, he solemnised the marriage of a happy couple in red traditional isiXhosa costumes under a marquee in a homestead in a remote Lesotho village.

  Soon after the wedding I took Adele to Qoboshane village in the Eastern Cape to introduce her to my relatives. They knew her quite well because she had been there before. But now of course she was officially my wife so it was necessary that Uncle Press and his wife and my grandmother’s people, the Mei family, meet her in her new status.

  Adele, as a family-values person, was happy that I had taken this step. She was particularly pleased when they called her MaMiya. That was her clan name where she came from. It’s always been like that with my people, and in fact with all the Nguni people of southern Africa. A woman was called by the clan name of her own father; she didn’t adopt the clan name of the family into which she was marrying. The practice of women taking the surnames of their husbands was introduced to my people by the British with their patriarchal colonialism. Remember, we did not have surnames in the Western sense before we were colonised. Men were identified by both their fathers’ names and their clan names. For instance, my great-great-grandfather was Mda son of Gatyeni, my great-grandfather was Feyiya son of Mda, my grandfather should have been Gxumekelana son of Feyiya, my father should have been Solomzi son of Gxumekelana, and I should have been Zanemvula son of Solomzi. The over-arching familial identity of all these generations would have been the clan name, the Cesane branch of the Majola House – uMajola kaCesane. But as you can see, we got stuck with the Mda surname – and some of our relatives got stuck with the Gatyeni surname – when the British forced us to have the kind of surnames that they could understand, that were passed from generation to generation.

  Similarly, the wives had to come from different clans, and they kept their clan names in marriage. After colonisation the British made laws that forced women to adopt their husband’s surnames. But my people retained the practice of calling the women by their clan names and it continues to this day. That was why my relatives in the villages called Adele by her clan name, MaMiya. This was an indication to Adele that they gave her full recognition and honoured her as a daughter-in-law of the Majola kaCesane clan.

  Back in Maseru, a pregnant Adele was the sw
eetest person ever. We became inseparable and walked in town hand in hand. I had found happiness at last and the void had been filled. I was never ever going to be unfaithful to her, and I was happy that she was always around.

  Even when I went to rehearsals of a one-man play I had written and was directing, In Celebration of our National Arrogance, she was with me.

  The play looked at the corruption in the public sector in Lesotho and the culture of impunity that resulted in the second highest per capita number of road accidents in Africa. I had written it especially for Lesotho’s premier actor of the time, Gonzalez Scout, who performed it to music provided by guitarist Mafata Lemphane – who has since emigrated to Canada – or sometimes to Sam Moeletsi’s piano. Sam Moeletsi was a well-known piano teacher in Maseru. In my work as director of this play I was assisted by my old friend ’Maseabata Ramoeletsi, who stage-managed it and also acted more in a producer capacity. I had been close to ’Maseabata from the time she was with Meso Players, Teresa Devant’s group that specialised in my plays. Another person who became quite close to me was Deborah Mpepuoa Mokitimi. She had assisted me in my office at the Screenwriters Institute. I used to hang out with her a lot, and enjoyed her company. She had a lot of stories to tell about her neighbours and friends, some of which found their way in the early novels that I was to write. I later learnt that Deborah was the daughter of Kittyman, my protector from savage ill-treatment at Peka High School. That brought me even closer to her.

  I never noticed any jealousy from Adele about my association with these women. I took it that she understood that I had a history with them, and what brought us together was nothing more than theatre.