Sometimes There Is a Void

by Zakes Mda

  Driving on the winding roads of the Eastern Cape I was struck by the beauty of the land and the colourful villages. I had never been in that part of the province before. I said to myself: This place is so beautiful it deserves a novel. I didn’t know what the novel was going to be about, but I knew that as soon as I completed the screenplay on Nongqawuse I would write it.

  My contact at Qolorha was Rufus Hulley who owned a trading store in the village. His family had lived there for generations and he was an expert on the history of the area. He was not at the store when I got there, but one of the clerks asked a young lady, perhaps in her late teens, to take me to him at his house which was behind the store. The young lady introduced herself as Boniwe Yako. She was a cleaner at the store. She showed me Rufus’s house but before she left she said, ‘I am not married.’

  I didn’t know how to respond to that statement. I just stood there looking foolish.

  She went on to say: ‘You may lobola me if you like.’

  Then she giggled and ran back to the store. She was just teasing, of course. I knew immediately that whatever novel I was going to write I was going to base my main character on her. On my subsequent visits to the village I sought Boniwe Yako out and she gave me a lot of information about the life of a young woman in the village. She even took me to her home and I met her mother, uNoManage.

  But on this first visit my focus was on Rufus Hulley who took me to various places of historical interest in the village. I knew then that although my novel would focus on the present it would have to be about the past as well – the days of Nongqawuse. Boniwe Yako could easily have been Nongqawuse. I loved her spunk. My novel would have to illustrate that the past is always a strong presence in our present.

  I drove back to Johannesburg highly inspired by the Eastern Cape and by the story I was going to write. As soon as I completed writing the screenplay and submitted it to the producers I embarked on writing the novel titled Ululants. The story shuttled between the present and the past. The past was informed mostly by Jeff Peires’s The Dead Will Arise. I did look at other historians who dealt with the period generally and with the Cattle Killing events in particular. But Jeff’s treatment appealed to me most, and suited the kind of magical story I wanted to tell because it was very romantic. I knew that some of his conclusions were questioned by some of his peers. But that was not my concern. I was writing a novel, a work of fiction, and not history. I was going to go with Peires’s version of history because it suited my fiction. Historical record was important in my storytelling, but the oral traditions of my mother’s people were crucial as well. They gave the history the magical environment that became a comfortable home for my fictional characters. I went out of my way to interweave my narrative with Jeff’s account in my historical segments of the novel, but most importantly with some of Jeff’s primary isiXhosa sources. The contemporary segments, however, were based solely on imagination. For instance, I created a new conflict between the believers and unbelievers, but now on more contemporary issues such as the protection of the environment and the preservation of the people’s heritage. In reality, I found no believers and unbelievers in today’s Qolorha.

  I was quite happy with the end result and I submitted it to Oxford University Press who had already paid an advance after I had submitted the first chapter.

  Kate McCullum, the managing director, phoned me to say that she didn’t like my title, Ululants. There was no such word, she said. Well, there is, although at the time I couldn’t defend myself because I thought I had invented it. According to Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary it dates to 1855 and it means ‘having a wailing sound’. In my novel there are groups of people who ululate and the title referred to them. But Kate was insistent that no one would know what it meant and therefore she would not be able to sell the book. I told her I would think of a new title.

  One day I was at the Market Theatre having a drink with a few friends at a bar called Kofifi. One of them was Kefuoe Molapo, Clemoski’s son. I told them of my dilemma about finding a new title for my novel. Kefuoe had read the manuscript and he said, ‘Why don’t you call it The Heart of Redness?’

  All the drunkards agreed it was a catchy title even though they had not read the book.

  ‘That will work,’ I said, even though I was the only sober one among them. ‘After all, the book is set among the red people, a reference to the so-called backward people. When they talk of intliziyo yobubomvu – the heart of redness – they mean a place where people are still ‘backward’ and practise their old customs and smear their bodies with red ochre and wear clothes dyed with the same ochre.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Kefuoe. ‘I’m a genius.’

  ‘Yes, you are a genius,’ I said.

  Everybody agreed and applauded his genius.

  I have regretted that incident ever since. That title has invited associations with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness which, by the way, I have not read up to this point. I have heard of papers that have been written on the intertextuality between the two texts. I do not dispute that there may be such intertextuality because you can find parallels between any two texts if you look hard enough. Writers write about life, and the human condition is the human condition in any culture or clime. The only intertextuality that I was conscious of was with Peires’s The Dead Will Arise and Jordan’s Ingqumbo Yeminyaya – the Wrath of the Ancestors. On reading the last chapter of my book, where I wrote of ‘pacification’, I could hear some influence from Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. But that does not mean there can’t be other intertextualities. Many of these would be unintended. For instance, whereas the intertextuality with Jeff Peires’s work was overt and intended, Jordan’s and Achebe’s influences just found their way into my work uninvited, solely on the basis that they were works I read and loved during my formative years.

  When a graduate student told her supervisors at one Italian university that I claimed I had never read Heart of Darkness, the professors laughed derisively. ‘How can he say he has not read Conrad?’ they said. ‘Everyone has read Conrad. Even Chinua Achebe has commented on Conrad. And Mda is a professor in an English Department to boot.’

  I am sorry to be boasting of my ignorance. I may be from an English Department but I teach creative writing and world literature courses that have nothing to do with Conrad. Not everyone in an English Department has read Conrad. I grew up in Lesotho and South Africa, and Conrad was not part of the canon there. At high school I read Achebe, who put me off Conrad. And then I wrote The Heart of Redness and there was all this talk of intertextuality with Conrad. I decided I would stay ignorant of Conrad for a while so that instead of saying ‘I had not read Heart of Darkness when I wrote The Heart of Redness’, I can safely and truthfully say ‘I have not read Heart of Darkness’. Period. Of course, I have no intention of staying ignorant of this canonical text for ever. One day I’ll read it and marvel at the intertextuality between Conrad’s great novella – I’ve heard some call it a long short story – and my humble novel.

  That was a digression; I have no intention of writing a polemical autobiography. I was telling you of how productive my return to South Africa was turning out to be. Through my workshops at the Market Theatre Laboratory I was making it productive for others as well. I had some of the most wonderful and talented playwrights and I meant to fulfil Barney Simon’s declaration: if you find me black playwrights I’ll produce them. But the participants in my workshops were not only black South Africans; there were Afrikaner writers such as Neil Sonnekus and Jaap de Villiers as well. Some of my writers had already made a name for themselves internationally. Bongani Linda, for instance, had his own theatre company called Victory-Sonqoba based in Alexandra Township; it had become a staple in European theatre festivals. It had also travelled to the Far East and Australasia. All the plays the group performed had been penned by him. Xoli Norman had also written some plays before and came to these workshops with a degree from the prestigious Wits University School of Dramatic Art. Xoli anno
unced at one of the workshops that he had learnt more at my workshops than he had learnt in all the four years of his degree. Ntshiyeng Sithe was a talented woman who had written a runaway success at the Market Theatre titled Umdlwembe before she joined my workshops. Yet she felt the need to sharpen and refine her skills.

  If only Barney Simon were there to see what had resulted from my flippant question.

  One thing I cherished about the workshops was that they became a forum for debate on some of the contentious issues in the new South Africa. Some views were shaped and long-held prejudices eliminated. For instance, one of my favourite participants was a young man from Soweto called Mpumi Njongwe. He no longer lived in Soweto though; he had been cast out by his own people at an early age because he was gay. He shared a flat with an older white lover in Hillbrow. I got to know the couple well and they sometimes visited me at my house and took a dip in my swimming pool.

  At the workshop Mpumi was writing a play based on his experiences as a young gay man growing up in the highly prejudiced environment of Soweto. Bongani Linda, a proud Zulu man, had no sympathy with people like Mpumi. He thought that homosexuality was a trend and a fashion statement of the new South Africa. It was an abomination that no true African man should tolerate.

  ‘It is one of the terrible things that were brought to Africa by the white man,’ he said.

  I had heard this argument before, advanced especially by Africans from other parts of Africa, that our progressive laws on gay rights were a result of Western influence. I reminded Bongani that the new human rights culture was not introduced by whites or by the West in South Africa. There were no human rights in Africa under Western colonialism. Instead, we had patriarchal, racist and sexist dictatorships where the word of unelected colonial officials was final. Under the West as represented by white English and then white Afrikaner power, South Africans were the most oppressed people in the world. Gay people were the lowest on the social rungs. There were strict sodomy laws and many homosexuals suffered dehumanisation and imprisonment for loving each other. In fact, the sodomy laws that prevail in most African countries were enacted by the colonial masters. In Western countries they persecuted and prosecuted their homosexuals relentlessly. Ask Oscar Wilde, if you don’t believe me. You say that’s the past. Okay, ask American gays in the military and in states where they can’t exercise their human right to marry and be miserable like the rest of us.

  In 1994 a black majority government undid all those oppressive laws for the simple reason that we fought against oppression for centuries and we were not going to turn around and oppress others. When we put sexual orientation as a protected right in our Constitution we were not mimicking the West because none of their Constitutions had such a clause. We realised that gay rights were human rights, a lesson we learnt the hard way during the struggle from those comrades who happened to be homosexual. They helped us banish our own prejudices.

  Mpumi told us about his life: how he suffered as a child not understanding why he felt different from other boys, his first crush on a boy, how he was chased in the streets of Soweto and called such derogatory names as setabane, how his own parents condemned him as a cursed child who would go to hell, and how he left home in his teens to be free to love. Bongani came to the conclusion that gays were born that way; no sane person could subject himself to all that pain and humiliation for a trend or a fashion statement.

  I was grateful that my playwriting workshops were playing such a crucial role in transforming staunch homophobes into more tolerant people.

  I intended to nurture Mpumi into the artist he yearned to be. I took him to arts events. I remember once taking him to a book event at a restaurant in Newtown – I think they were giving some writer a prize, but that’s not what I remember about the occasion. What I do recall is that I met author Miriam Tlali and her daughter Moleboheng at this event. I had not seen them for many years, not since Moleboheng was a statistics lecturer at the National University of Lesotho and was my neighbour in Florida. She and her boyfriend lived an enviously carefree life and one day Miriam Tlali arrived unexpectedly and found them totally smashed. She blamed me for not looking after her daughter and for not guiding her into responsible adulthood. She did not know that those years I was just as irresponsible as her daughter, if not more.

  But I was telling you about Mpumi. He went on to become an actor. He was part of a team that made a television documentary on pre-colonial homosexuality in South Africa. Most people learnt for the first time of women who married other women in some of our ancient kingdoms and of institutionalised homosexuality in some of the sangoma traditions among our spiritual healers and diviners.

  I mourned Mpumi for a long time after he died of AIDS.

  Another significant event in my association with the Market Theatre was the creation of the play Broken Dreams whose performances continue to this day. It has been seen by millions of students in the Gauteng Province, but also in many other provinces of South Africa.

  The play came about as a result of the concerns of a pharmaceutical company called Glaxo that their drugs for the treatment of TB were no longer effective in South Africa because of HIV and AIDS. They financed the Market Theatre Laboratory to create a play that would mobilise people against both TB and HIV/AIDS. A nurse who was employed by Glaxo – shamefully, I forget her name now, and none of the people I worked with can remember it – identified child sexual abuse as one of the major problems in South Africa, cutting across all races and all social classes. It was one of the causes of the spread of AIDS among children. She wanted the play to link the three subjects: TB, HIV/AIDS and child sexual abuse.

  I put together a team of actors which included Keke Semoko, who had been my student at the Wits University School of Dramatic Art and has since become one of the leading actresses in South Africa and who has appeared in many international movies; Kefuoe Molapo, Clemoski’s son who you are beginning to meet quite often in this story; Sello Motloung, another actor who has since done well for himself and has been seen in international movies; and a woman called Rosetta who would have gone far if she had pursued her acting career as rigorously as the others did.

  I sent the actors out to the townships and suburbs of Johannesburg to find out about child sexual abuse. They interviewed children, teachers, social workers and parents. They came back from these expeditions and told harrowing stories of young lives destroyed mostly by men – and an occasional woman here and there – who preyed on them. And in most cases these predators were in the family – fathers, brothers, uncles – or neighbours.

  As we sat there in the rehearsal room creating a play from these stories we related our own experiences of abuse. Rosetta, for instance, had her own disturbing stories from her childhood. I had mine too. I told them about Nontonje, the red woman who abused me sexually when I was a small child. It was the first time I had talked about this. Even when I was healed through my relationship with Tholane when I was at ’Mabathoana High School, I had never told her about it because I had not associated my sexual problems with it. I had never told anyone until that day when I sat with my actors and we wept at some of the stories we heard. I realised for the first time how that sexual abuse at KwaGcina – that I had even forgotten about until then – had had such a great impact on my life and how it had resulted in my dysfunction as a man, husband, father and human being. I had not realised this because I never had flashbacks about it, I never had nightmares. Right from the beginning I had dismissed it as water under the bridge. Yet subconsciously it took its toll on me.

  Here was theatre acting as psychotherapy in a very practical sense.

  After every hectic day I went home to my four children in Westdene. I didn’t tell you that Dini had returned from the United States and was staying with me too, in addition to Zukile, Thandi and Neo. I was living a fulfilling celibate life. Occasionally I thought about Gugu. I wondered where she was and what she was doing. One day I decided to write to her. I addressed the letter to the old address t
hat I used to know. If she had moved they would forward it to her. I told her about my life with Adele, and that I was planning to consult lawyers about a divorce. I would wait until she returned from the United States though, so that I did not burden her with extra worries while she was busy studying for her MEd degree.

  A few weeks later I received Gugu’s response. She was still in Swaziland and was happily married with a beautiful daughter called Nonkululeko – Mother of Freedom. She advised me very strongly not to divorce Adele. It was the easy way out. I should remember that we had a child and we should try to work out our problems for the sake of Zukile. In any marriage there were bound to be problems, she went on to say, but running away from them was not the solution.

  There was a lot of sense in what she was saying. Divorce was the coward’s way.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE TWO RESEARCHERS ARRIVE at Gugu’s apartment at the Twin Oaks townhouse complex in Randpark Ridge, Johannesburg. Bob Edgar is a professor at Howard University in Washington, DC, but spends a lot of time in South Africa because that’s his area of scholarship. He even has property in Cape Town. He is usually pushing his handicapped son Leteane in a wheelchair. He adopted him in Lesotho when he taught at the university there as a Fulbright Scholar many years ago, which was where I first met him. But Leteane is not with him today. Bob is an authority on my father; he and Luyanda ka Msumza, my father’s former protégé, are compiling and editing a book of my father’s writings.