Sometimes There Is a Void

by Zakes Mda

  She was still teaching at Thelejane Middle School in Thaba Nchu, but we spent every weekend with each other, alternating between Maseru and Thaba Nchu.

  The baby was born at Pelonomi Hospital in Bloemfontein. We named him Zukile, an isiXhosa name whose meaning combined ‘serenity’, ‘tranquillity’ and ‘grace’. I was pleasantly surprised at the kindness of the nurses at this public government hospital. I was used to the nurses in Lesotho who were always rude and talked to patients, especially to birthing mothers, in a rough and inconsiderate manner. If a woman as much as moaned during the process of giving birth they yelled at her, ‘You shut up; we were not there when you were enjoying it. Didn’t you know that the child comes out where it got in?’ But in South Africa things were different. The nurses were very kind, and everyone went out of their way to be helpful. And they didn’t even know who we were. It was just their regular kindness and compassion.

  A few days later, after transporting my books and some household effects to Adele’s home in Leribe where her father had offered to store them for us, I flew to the United States to join the Southern African Research Program at Yale University. I was not alone. I was with Dini, the youngest of my three kids with Mpho.

  I MISSED ADELE TERRIBLY when I was at Yale. In my basement apartment in New Haven, Connecticut, I wrote her anguished letters professing my love for her and how life was impossible without her. She responded with her own letters, also professing her love for me and how she and the baby missed me. All this was snail mail correspondence because it was before the prevalence of email. I looked forward to the day she was going to join me in a few months’ time. She had a few things to do first in Lesotho, such as selling my truck which I had bought for my business at the Screenwriters Institute and raising money for her ticket and Zukile’s. I felt guilty that I could not help her with all these tasks, but she was a strong and resourceful woman and I knew she would cope.

  My anxieties were relieved by the demands of the Program. There were a number of scholars in various fields attached to it, and every Wednesday we gathered under the chairmanship of Leonard Thompson and critiqued that week’s presentations. These were papers that were assigned to us the previous Wednesday. I enjoyed discussing papers by such organic scholars as Achmat Davids who wrote extensively on the origins of the Afrikaans language. I marvelled at the copies of old documents with the first ever Afrikaans text – written in Arabic script. It was, of course, written by the early Cape Malay scholars who were Muslims.

  One thing that made Achmat Davids even more attractive was that he had a wife who simply loved to entertain. She cooked some of the most wonderful Cape Malay dishes that titillated our taste buds and sent our collective imagination wafting to the Cape Town suburb of Bo-Kaap where they had their home. Scholars of the Program looked forward to Mrs Davids’s invitations. So did Dini, who became their regular visitor.

  One thing that Leonard Thompson’s Program taught me was robust and rigorous multidisciplinary scholarship. I am normally not forthcoming in a big group of people where I am called upon to criticise others; I simply hate to hurt people’s feelings in public. I have always lived in my own namby-pamby-land and am comfortable there, thank you. But at Yale the environment encouraged brutal frankness and I relished the challenge. After all, I was my father’s son and he was known not to suffer fools gladly. I hated it when this characterisation was used with regard to me and therefore chose to withdraw into my cocoon. Until the Program forced me to come out.

  I remember on one occasion when I was the main discussant for Colin Bundy’s submission – a number of chapters which were part of the biography he was writing of Govan Mbeki. You may know Colin as the eminent historian and Rhodes Scholar who is currently the Principal of Green Templeton College at the University of Oxford. At the time he was based at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

  I went to town on his paper because just as we were about to sit down for the seminar he whispered to me: ‘I hope you didn’t find my paper onerous.’ I thought that was rather patronising and I said to myself: Onerous? I’ll show him onerous.

  My role at the seminar was to provide an assessment of the paper, raising questions that would stimulate debate. First, I noted that Colin’s was a very interesting study and I enjoyed reading it tremendously. It certainly would be a valuable contribution not only to our understanding of some aspects of the South African situation, but also to the body of work of the ‘life-history’ genre, which in South Africa was dominated by autobiography rather than biography. But I went on to point out that throughout the paper, which was supposed to be on the childhood and education of Govan Mbeki, I looked very hard for Govan Mbeki but did not find him. For most part, the paper presented a sketch rather than a portrait of Mbeki. Colin told us of African education in the Cape in the early twentieth century, and gave us a well-researched picture of various institutions, but there was very little about the man and his interaction with those institutions. Mbeki was not foregrounded in relation to the institutions, even though this was supposed to be about his life, and not that of Healdtown or Fort Hare.

  Most of the weaknesses of this paper, I asserted, were due to the fact that Colin was dealing with a period of childhood which would present any biographer with problems in selection and interpretation. He depended solely on literature and archival material for his sources, and as could be expected there was very little on Mbeki’s childhood from such sources. Oral reminiscences could be effective, I pointed out, if one was able to sift mythology from fact. I advised him to use the techniques of participant-observer in addition to historical record. After all, some of Mbeki’s peers and contemporaries were still alive at the time.

  I felt that the paper was an over-impersonal treatment of Mbeki since Colin did not recreate his private life. The biography was therefore more of a study of the period than of the man. Critical debates as to whether formal biography should include little homely details were settled in the seventeenth century, and since then it had become the practice even in political biographies to present the subject as a rounded character. Mbeki was a public man, but he still had aspects of a private life that impacted on the public life. He was a political animal, but he was not the one-dimensional figure that was being portrayed by Colin. He too was once a child with a childhood and a mother who played a role in his life. He fell in and out of love, and suffered all the petty pleasures and pains of daily life.

  Colin was visibly shaken. I think I had savaged him too much and I felt very bad about that. After my presentation no one else had anything to say. Even the most argumentative scholars were silent. When we were walking out of the building Leonard Thompson congratulated me and said mine was the best critique of biography they had ever heard at the Southern African Research Program. I didn’t thank him for the compliment because I didn’t understand why he was telling me this privately and hadn’t said it at the seminar. But as I walked home I cursed myself: I had acquired the pettiness of scholars. I was one of them now and was just as obnoxious and vindictive as the best of them. I would rather be an artist than an academic. I would rather create than destroy others as scholars are wont to do.

  A few days later Colin asked for my notes and I made copies for him of all twenty handwritten pages.

  Scholars from elsewhere sometimes attended our seminars. Among them were Simphiwe Hlatshwayo, with whom I was a student at Ohio University, and Mbulelo Mzamane of my old Maseru days. Simphiwe was a professor at some university in Pennsylvania – I just forget which one now – and Mbulelo was a professor at the University of Vermont. Steve Kalamazoo Mokone also came to visit. He was a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, but was better known as the first black South African to play professional soccer in Europe in the 1950s. He played variously for teams in Barcelona, Italy, England and Holland. A street is named after him in Amsterdam. He was quite a sensation with many hat-tricks to his name. Towards the end of his career he played for teams in Australia
and Canada and then moved to the United States where he was arrested at his Rutgers University office and served nine years in jail for domestic violence. He was keen that I write a movie script about his life.

  One of the regulars at our seminars was Bethany Yarrow. She had the most beautiful eyes I had ever seen on any human being and was dazzling overall. A friendship developed between us and I spent many a magical evening at her apartment. It was a platonic yet intoxicating relationship, at least for me. My days as a philanderer were over; I loved Adele and wanted my marriage with her to work. So, I sat in Bethany’s bedroom and admired her collection of paintings that she brought with her from Cape Town. She herself was a painter and a film-maker. She inspired me to paint again after many years and I created many pastel works with her.

  Bethany invited me to her elegant home in Manhattan, New York, and introduced me to her father, Peter Yarrow. I remembered him from the days of Peter, Paul and Mary, and he was amused when I told him that ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ was one of my all-time favourite songs. There is something beautifully sentimental about it. He reached for his guitar and played the song for me. But of course without Mary and Paul it was different. But I was happy to have had a command performance just for me by one of the three greatest folk music heroes of all time. Well, at least in my estimation!

  Sometimes Bethany would have screenings of her films in her father’s living room. After she completed editing a documentary she had shot in Cape Town titled Umama Awethu she invited me to one such screening. I in turn invited Steve Kalamazoo Mokone thinking that he would enjoy seeing some aspects of South Africa on the screen since he had not been in the country for decades. The movie was set in some informal settlements in Cape Town and looked at how women coped despite the problems of poverty and apartheid oppression.

  As we walked to the subway after the screening Kalamazoo expressed his unhappiness with the film. Not the quality or the production. It was quite good, he said. But he despaired at the fact that portrayals of South Africa in the West, even by such liberal and radical film-makers as Bethany, had prevarications. All they ever showed were ‘squatter camps’, poverty and suffering. No other aspects of South Africa were ever shown. One wouldn’t know that there were clean and beautiful cities in South Africa that compared with any in the Western world, and middle-class black folks who drove luxury cars and lived in posh houses in such townships as Dube Village and Diepkloof Extension. Even in the ordinary townships and villages of South Africa people lived, laughed, sang and danced. Kalamazoo told me that he was done with watching such films because they reinforced the American stereotype of South Africa. You see one of them, you have seen them all. The message was a simple one: the whole of South Africa was one massive squatter camp.

  I apologised for having invited him. I could see his point, though in Bethany’s defence she made a film about a subject that touched her most – women’s resilience in the face of adversity.

  I met Kalamazoo a few more times during my stay in New Haven. I was writing a film script about his life and I visited him and his wife Louise at their New Jersey home to get more material, especially the documents pertaining to his court case and prison term. I had interested some folks at 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, Spike Lee’s production company in New York, in taking a look at it. A soccer movie, they thought, might sell well to investors since the FIFA World Cup was going to be held in the USA in three years’ time, in 1994. Alas, Kalamazoo read the first draft and was very unhappy with the manner in which I portrayed him. I was interested in a story of a fall from grace and then redemption; he wanted me to paint him as a hero through and through who was a victim of the system and didn’t have any flaws of his own. I gave up on the project, and our relationship soured.

  Every time I went to New York I had to return to New Haven the same night because I had left Dini alone. Although he was fifteen years old I didn’t think he could cope on his own.

  I had rented a piano and enrolled him for piano lessons. He was doing well at school, although he was struggling with spoken and written English. He had spent all his life attending schools where Sesotho was the language of instruction in the early grades. But unfortunately I couldn’t afford to get him a tutor. With the measly stipend Yale was giving me I could barely survive. As was always the case when finances were tight, I fell back on my paintings. I found a gallery in a sombre part of New Haven that was willing to exhibit them and sell them on my behalf for a percentage of the price.

  After I had taken the paintings to the gallery I didn’t hear from them for a few weeks. I took a bus to the suburb where the gallery was located and found that it was closed. Through the window I could see my paintings displayed all over the shop. I went there many times, but the gallery was still closed. I was not going to give up, however, because my valuable paintings were in that shop. One day a passer-by told me that the owner of the gallery had gone bankrupt and it would not open again.

  How the hell was I going to get my pictures? I had no contact information other than the physical address of the gallery and the telephone number. I didn’t even know the name of the owner. I stood there for a long time looking longingly at my paintings. Some of them were intaglio that I had done almost ten years before when I was a student at Ohio University. I would never be able to create those again.

  I was sitting on a bench at the bus stop waiting for the bus and brooding about my paintings when a well-dressed and well-groomed African American gentleman sat down next to me.

  ‘You are not from here,’ he said.

  Normally people could tell from my accent but I had not uttered a word. And my manner of dress was not different from that of the natives.

  ‘How did you know?’ I asked.

  ‘You smiled,’ he said. ‘You looked at me and smiled. Black folks here don’t smile. They carry a big chip on their shoulder. They think smiling is a sign of weakness.’

  I had been so deep in the doldrums I had not been aware that I had smiled at him.

  Letters from home were always a source of great joy, especially those from my mother and my children. My daughter Thandi was at Bereng High School in Mafeteng, still staying with my parents. She was seventeen years old. My son Neo was at FUBA Academy in Johannesburg studying visual arts. He was nineteen. He was staying with my sister Thami in her flat in Hillbrow. Thami was working for the mining company Anglo American at the time. I was getting letters from her that the boy was giving her many problems and that I was not sending enough money for his support. And this was true. Some months I didn’t send any money because I didn’t have any. She couldn’t understand how it was possible not to have money when I was working in America. I couldn’t understand it either, but there it was, long before the end of the month the Yale stipend was gone. People who knew said I should have negotiated a better deal for myself before accepting their offer. I was so dumb I didn’t know one could negotiate about these things.

  One question I dreaded in my mother’s letters: Have you found Sonwabo yet? I had not found him. You will remember that he left almost ten years before for Ohio University, and never returned. None of us, including his wife and four beautiful children, had heard from him for years. I contacted people I knew in Athens, Ohio, and they told me that he was indeed once there but he left before completing his degree. They had no idea where he had gone. Cosmo Pieterse, the Namibian/ South African playwright teaching in the English Department at Ohio University, told me that to his knowledge Sonwabo had been an ANC activist in America and after the release of Nelson Mandela and the return of exiles he was recalled to South Africa by the ANC. I contacted Lindiwe Mabuza, who was the ANC’s United States representative, but she knew nothing about him. Thobeka Mda, one of the lovely daughters of the highly esteemed lawyer Mda Mda, had met him when she was doing her PhD at Ohio State University. At least that gave me some idea that he was somewhere in the Columbus area. I used the missing persons bureau of the Salvation Army who tried their best but came back with the respo
nse that they were able to find only those people who wanted to be found. I informed my mother of all these attempts. In one of her letters she pleaded: Please, Zani, try very hard to find my son. I must see him before I die. I wrote back to say: Come on, mama, you’re not going to die any day soon. You will see your son before then.

  I enjoyed letters from my friend ’Maseabata. I had left her in Lesotho managing Gonzalez Scout in our one-hander, In Celebration of Our National Arrogance. Now Gonzalez was at Durham to complete my residency there. He was rehearsing my Durham play, By Way of the Rock, which he was going to perform in the Cathedral as part of the nine hundredth anniversary celebrations of that majestic Norman building. Scout was bombarding me with letters about the lousy time he was having. ’Maseabata on the other hand had also moved to Britain, not for theatre this time but to study for a master’s degree in pharmacy. She wrote about her experiences in England and how she missed theatre.

  The greatest source of joy, however, was the arrival of Adele and Zukile. I couldn’t contain myself when I took a train from New Haven to meet them at JFK Airport. The boy was only two months old and looked very much like me in pictures when I was that age. I made up my mind that with this kid and any other kids I had with Adele I would never again be an absentee father. I would make up for all the sins I committed in bringing up my older kids, who had very little of my guidance. I would be a hands-on father. I would also be a loving and faithful husband.

  Although this was the first time she had been in the United States, it didn’t take much time for Adele to adjust and settle. I had made it clear to her even before she came that our living conditions would not be the same as in Lesotho where I had a big four-bedroom house provided by the university and servants who cleaned and cooked – though even in Lesotho I preferred to do my own cooking. She therefore didn’t complain about the basement apartment. Though it was small it was like a love nest for us. We were happy. I told her once that I was the happiest I had ever been in my life. Not only did I have a beautiful family, but I was also having a fulfilling time at Yale, writing and presenting papers that were critiqued by my peers at the weekly seminars. I had just presented a paper titled ‘Politics and the Theatre: Current Trends in South Africa’ and Theater, the prestigious journal of the Yale School of Drama and Yale Repertory Theatre, was keen to publish it. The seminars inspired more creativity in me.