Sometimes There Is a Void

by Zakes Mda

  ‘So, why are you keeping her scrapbook if there is nothing between you?’ asked Adele.

  ‘I’m her fan, that’s why.’

  And that was Gospel, if you’ll allow me to borrow from the vocabulary of the believers.

  She never mentioned Gcina Mhlophe again, perhaps because for some reason she did believe that there was nothing between us. But she kept on hammering me about Gugu. When she felt like making me worse of a scoundrel than I really was, she would throw ’Maseabata’s name into the mix as well.

  One day I received a letter from Zwelakhe. He never wrote to me normally, so I knew immediately that there was something drastically wrong. The letter was on his official letterhead and he had attached a photocopy of a letter that Adele wrote to my mother. I had no knowledge of this letter, but I was shocked by its contents. I could deduce that Adele’s letter was a response to a letter my mother wrote to her enquiring about a radio that I had left with Adele to give to my eldest son Neo. Adele had allegedly given the radio to her sister instead and my mother was trying to get it back for her grandson. In her letter Adele gave my mother a piece of her mind, telling her that she was being judgemental of her; even though she was poor, she would not steal a radio. In any case, she would pay for that radio as soon as she got a job. She added that she would like to live in peace with my mother but it seemed they were both failing in that regard. At the end of a long tirade she asked: How is Ntate Mda? We heard that his health is not so well. Hope he recovers sooner than later.

  Zwelakhe took great offence at this letter, but I think what infuriated him most was this last line. Adele knew that my father was ill, yet she wrote this kind of letter to my mother. By the time my mother received it my father was dead. She was reading Adele’s rude letter in her bereavement. After outlining his grievances against Adele, Zwelakhe concluded his letter to me thus:

  In view of the fact that Adele is demonstrably vicious and malicious towards my mother she will always cause her great harm if her behaviour is not properly checked and monitored. Consequently, I have decided that she should not communicate with her in any manner whatsoever neither is she to come anywhere closer to her – physically or otherwise. At this juncture I should disclose that other members of the family associate themselves entirely with my decision. Finally, I wish to underscore the fact that I will readily act, and promptly so, in protection of the best interests of my mother, whenever the circumstances so dictate – especially now that my father has been laid to rest; I am her sanctuary. This should not in any way be misconstrued as any form of an indictment against you. But I have considered it wise to make our position clear without equivocation.

  It was not lost on me that in his letter Zwelakhe was talking of his mother and his father as if these people had had no part in creating me. I did not respond to his letter; instead I wrote to my mother apologising for Adele’s letter and relating to her the kind of life I was living with her.

  Adele became the martyr in this matter. She told me that she knew all along that my people hated her.

  ‘And yet you are keeping your rubbish in my father’s house,’ she added. ‘You must go and take your rubbish from my father’s house.’

  The rubbish she was talking about were the books and some household effects that her father had agreed to store for us during our sojourn in the United States.

  Adele became nice when she wanted help from me. Like when she was invited to give a presentation on South Africa at the county prison and she asked me to come along with my paintings and talk about art, which I did. We presented a united and loving front to the inmates. What amazed me about this prison was that half the inmate population was African American. Yet you could walk in Burlington for the whole day without meeting a single African American. Where did these inmates come from? Was that where they kept their African American population – in the county jail? I was impressed by the fact that this seemed to be a co-ed jail. In the canteen where we held our presentation there were both male and female inmates. We were told, though, that they were locked up in different wings of the prison.

  One young man, barely out of his teens, told me that he was particularly happy to meet us because he was a Zulu. Just as we were becoming excited about seeing someone from South Africa, we learnt that he had never been to South Africa. None of his parents or grandparents had any South African connection. They were descendants of slaves.

  ‘But my father told me that we were Zulus back in Africa,’ he said proudly.

  It would have been cruel to burst his bubble. His was part of the sad African American search for an African identity.

  Back at our house – not a basement apartment this time but a three-bedroom house – the bickering resumed. I moved out of the bedroom to sleep in another room. Dini could not bear it any more. He moved out to stay with a friend’s family in the neighbourhood. Although I had never met the family I couldn’t stop him because I knew that the atmosphere at home was toxic. When he came to visit and Adele was at school there would be tears in his eyes as he expressed his sorrow that his father was subjecting himself to this kind of treatment. He just couldn’t understand why and how I could stand it.

  ‘Well, Dini, I’m paying for all the women I have mistreated in my life,’ I said jokingly. ‘Now it is my turn to be mistreated. It is payback time, my boy.’

  For a moment I believed myself. She must have been sent to me as an avenging spirit for all my misdeeds in my long career as a failed lover. This was some kind of atonement. Perhaps it would pass when I had paid the price and there would be peace and happiness again in the home. On second thoughts, this was bunkum, influenced by that part of my subconscious that still yearned for spiritual solutions.

  The truth of the matter was that I felt trapped. I went to see a divorce lawyer but his fees were too high. Also, I didn’t meet the residency requirements of the state. I toyed with the idea of a Las Vegas divorce. I heard that Reno required only six weeks’ residence. That still would have been too expensive for me. I took to reading the classifieds in tabloids looking for cheap non-residential divorces in foreign climes.

  I got some form of therapy from the second novel that I was writing. Titled She Plays with the Darkness, it was based on my experiences working with the Maseru lawyer OK Mofolo, who specialised in third party insurance claims for motor vehicle accidents. My main character was an ambulance-chasing charlatan who didn’t have any legal qualifications. The novel was also informed by some of my experiences in the mountain village of Sehonghong. One of my major characters was a woman called Tampololo who was in many ways a fishwife and a harridan who bullied her husband; a lot of her dialogue came directly from Adele’s utterances towards me. I found it healing that every time she yelled at me I would use that in my novel. At least her insults were good for something.

  My mother read each chapter of She Plays with the Darkness and as usual sent me her feedback. She loved the Tampololo character and had her suspicions on whom she was based.

  The academic year was coming to a close, and South Africa was preparing for its first democratic elections. Fortunately, in Burlington we could get the Canadian television stations which, unlike the USA television channels, covered the events of the world. On CBC we saw some of the election campaigns. I remember looking at Nelson Mandela talking to a group of people at a rally, many of whom were children. He was making promises, as politicians are wont to do: ‘All of you here will get houses if you vote for the ANC. Each one will have a house.’ He was laughing when he said that, as if it was a joke. I began to despair. Why was he making these extravagant promises when he knew that they would be impossible to keep? Why was he raising expectations that would certainly not be fulfilled?

  On election day I took a train to Canada and went to vote at the Ukrainian Center in Montreal. Every South African of voting age, whether a registered voter or not, qualified for two votes: one for the national government and the other for the provincial government. If you were voting in a foreign
country you could choose any province you liked. I cast my national vote for the PAC on behalf of my father, even though I was an ANC supporter. He had died only a year before, without seeing this day. He would have voted for the PAC. I chose Natal as my province so as to stop the Inkatha Freedom Party and cast my provincial vote for the ANC.

  Back in Burlington, things were getting worse between Adele and me.

  A saviour came in the form of Professor Ian Steadman, the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg – or Wits University as it is generally known – who offered me a position as a Visiting Professor in the School of Dramatic Art. This was the chance to return to South Africa I had been yearning for. And I grabbed it with both hands. My intention was that as soon as I got back to South Africa I would initiate the divorce.

  Adele said she would stay in Vermont to complete her degree but insisted that I should take Zukile with me. Of course, it was easier for me to take Zukile, given that Adele was studying and I had a support system in South Africa, but he was eighteen months old at this time and was still breastfeeding. I begged her to wean the child so that he would not give me problems crying for his mother’s breast when I was travelling with him on the plane. But she said she would not do that. It would serve me right if he gave me problems on the plane. This was her final revenge.

  Dini also decided to stay with his friends and continue his studies and his job at McDonald’s.

  I left Burlington, Vermont, with my little boy and took a train to New York, and then a plane to South Africa. I had bought a lot of fruit juice which I gave to the boy every time it seemed like he would cry for his mother’s breast. But he did not cry. Throughout that long flight he did not cry. Not even once. Not even when I was changing his diapers in the toilet. It was as if he knew that his daddy was in trouble and he didn’t want to make things worse for him.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  WE PAUSE AT VENTERSBURG as usual. It is a pit stop on our way to or from the Bee People. We are regulars here to the extent that the women who work at Steers have got to know us and look forward to our visits and our liberal tips. At first they were surprised to see black folks who did not eat meat. We always ordered vegetarian burgers and they felt very sorry for us because they thought we were suffering from a deprivation imposed on us, perhaps by some religion or weird belief. They praised us for having the willpower to resist the temptation of meat. Gugu patiently explained that we didn’t need any willpower at all to stay away from meat. We are squeamish about it and if we were to be forced to put it in our mouths we would throw up. They have come to accept us as their nice weird customers who look like them and speak like them and are therefore of their culture, and yet have the bizarre custom of not eating anything that had a face or that once had a mother – which is how Gugu explained it to them.

  One of the women is an ardent listener to Lesedi, the Sesotho radio station of the South African Broadcasting Service. She says she often hears me commenting on the political situation of Lesotho and South Africa.

  ‘How do you do it when you are so far away in the USA?’ she asks.

  ‘The SABC phones me whenever they want my opinion on the various issues,’ I say.

  ‘I know they phone you. I have heard you commentate on the American elections, which I can understand because you live there. But how do you comment so incisively on what is happening in Lesotho or in South Africa when you live so far away?’

  ‘I’m here now, am I not? And I have just come from Lesotho.’

  ‘But most of the year you are in America.’

  I have heard this question before, even from my brother Zwelakhe. The answer is simply that with all the technologies and the media that are prevalent today, including social networking, it is possible not only to know what is happening in any part of the world but to be an active participant in the dialogue that shapes the events there. I was an occasional SABC Sesotho service radio commentator long before I went to the USA. Since I left, whenever they think they need a brutally frank opinion on a specific issue which is within the scope of my expertise they continue to phone and interview me.

  While I am explaining this to her, and Gugu is ordering our favourite burgers, a distressed woman comes to enquire if anyone may have found her purse which she forgot in the ladies’ bathroom. She is with her daughter who is about eight or so. The purse has all her money and credit cards in it. She only realised after filling up with petrol and wanted to pay for it that she didn’t have it with her. She remembers placing it on the floor next to her while sitting on the toilet seat. Apparently when she was done she just stood up and left, forgetting about the purse.

  Gugu and I know immediately that the chances of getting her purse back are next to nil. Unless she is extremely lucky and it is found by someone with enough decency and honesty to hand it over to management. But up to now no one has done so; the woman had better forget about it.

  She is panicking. What is she going to do? How is she going to get home? Johannesburg is more than two hundred kilometres away.

  ‘We must help her,’ Gugu says.

  ‘Don’t worry, ’m’e, you will get home,’ I tell the woman. ‘And as soon as you get to Jo’burg report your cards to the bank so that they stop payment.’

  I pay for the petrol and give her extra money so she can buy some food for herself and her little girl. She thanks me and drives away in her gleaming late-model BMW.

  She never got to know who the stranger who helped her was.

  A STRANGER. THAT’S HOW I felt. Though in reality I was flying into my own country. I was a bit apprehensive of Johannesburg. Remember, I had not lived there since I was a little boy in Orlando East and then in Dobsonville. I had visited occasionally after getting the temporary indemnity to receive an award or to hold playwriting workshops for the African Writers Association and later for the Congress of South African Writers. But this was different. Now I was here to stay. I had lived in many countries, and in all of them I was viewed as a foreigner. Even in Lesotho, where I had practically grown from a child to a man, where the leaders had given me citizenship and a passport in order to represent the country, where the Lesotho Ambassador, Mr Reggie Tekateka, had declared me a national treasure during one of my European tours, I was still seen as an outsider, as a Mothepu. Even though everywhere I went I was proud to say I was a Mosotho from Lesotho. Now, for the first time in my life I was not a foreigner. I say ‘for the first time in my life’ advisedly because even though I had lived in South Africa until I was in my mid-teens, during the days of apartheid the South African government regarded me and all black people as foreigners in our country of birth. According to them, we all belonged in some barren patches of land they called Homelands or Bantustans. Now I was flying into my own country, where no one would call me a foreigner.

  But why did I continue to feel like an outsider?

  Through the plane window I could see palatial homes, all with swimming pools shimmering blue in the sun. I pointed them out to Zukile: ‘One of those is going to be ours,’ I told him. Of course he didn’t understand what I was talking about.

  I was met at the airport by Maishe Maponya and Jerry Mofokeng. I had met Maponya a few times before on my previous visits. He was one of the two most revered playwrights of the Black Consciousness generation; the other was Matsemela Manaka. I had not met Jerry before, but had read that he was one of the hottest new theatre directors in South Africa. He came to my attention particularly when he directed Vusi Kunene in my play The Hill. It was Vusi Kunene’s first experience as an actor, and today he is one of the premier South African actors of screen and stage. Both of these guys were lecturers at the School of Dramatic Art at Wits University and were going to be my colleagues.

  Maishe and Jerry couldn’t get over the fact that I was on my own with an eighteen-month-old baby. How was I going to cope?

  ‘Will you be taking him to your mother in Lesotho?’ Maishe asked.

  ‘Oh, no, I am
going to raise him myself,’ I said.

  We were still at the airport when my eldest son Neo arrived. He was now a man rather than the boy I used to know. I was grateful he responded to my call. He was going to help me to take care of the baby. Zukile looked very much like him.

  I pushed Zukile to the parking lot in a stroller while Jerry, Neo and Maishe helped with the luggage. It was July 1994 and I could see the euphoria of the new South Africa reflected on the faces of the people – especially the black people. I was going to be part of it. I was getting infected by the elation already. I was going to play my role in making the new South Africa a success story. I was returning home at last and I had skills that would contribute in whatever small way to building the great country that the progressive policies of the party that had won the election, the ANC, were bound to bring about. I was going to be part of the reconciliation that the new president, Nelson Mandela, was talking about.

  I could have kissed the ground I was walking on. But I was not the Pope.

  My friends drove me to my new quarters – a splendid university house in Parktown in the vicinity of the Wits Business School. This was temporary accommodation for the first two months or so, until I found a place of my own.

  When Thandi arrived from Lesotho a week later I was a totally fulfilled man. I was with two of my sons and my daughter – just the four of us – and I was going to make up for the years I had spent without the two older ones. Neo was still at FUBA Academy studying visual arts and Thandi soon joined him there to study drama. The founder and principal of FUBA was the renowned novelist and poet Sipho Sepamla. As soon as he heard that I had returned to Johannesburg he roped me into joining the board of trustees of the school.