Sometimes There Is a Void

by Zakes Mda

  The second researcher is Dorothy Steele, a sweet elderly lady from Cape Town who is writing my literary biography for a master’s degree she is doing with the University of South Africa. I have known her for a number of years now and she has become close not only to my immediate family but to my distant relatives as well. She has been to the Bee Place and spent some time with the Bee People, has been to KwaGcina where I was violated and she has spoken to Reuben Mkhwentla, one of the elders who knew my father well. She has gone to Kokstad to speak to my brother Monwabisi, and my cousin Nondyebo, who lives with my brother. She has also spoken to my ex-wife Mpho and to all our children, and has even attended some of the workshops I conduct for playwrights at the Market Theatre. She is quite thorough in her research, and is a beautiful kind soul to boot.

  Today Gugu and I are taking these scholars to Orlando West, Soweto, to visit my Aunt Ella. She is my father’s younger sister and was a PAC leader in Soweto in her own right. I love visiting her because she reminds me of my father; she resembles him so much you’d have thought they were identical twins. Bob wants to interview her about her memories of growing up at Goodwell at my grandfather’s estate – the present-day Bee Place.

  Aunt Ella’s house is only three streets away from Armitage Street where Gugu grew up, and two blocks from Vilakazi Street, where Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu had their homes. When we arrive we are welcomed by two of her daughters who are just as robustly built as she is. They tread on the floor with gravitas as they usher us into the living room. My aunt joins us and does not reprimand me for bringing visitors without warning. That’s how things are done among our people; you don’t call before, you just visit. If people happen not to be there it doesn’t matter, you’ll come unannounced another day.

  Bob wants to know about my grandfather and how life used to be those days on Dyarhom Mountain, which today I call the pink mountain. But my aunt is more interested in talking about the great work that Robert Mugabe is doing in Zimbabwe redistributing farms to the previously dispossessed and how South Africa will undergo an uprising if the ANC does not follow Mugabe’s example and reallocate the land to the masses. She says that Nelson Mandela sold out the African people. That is why he is the darling of the West. He has always been a sell-out from the days she knew him as a young man and neighbour. That was why he took the side of the Communists against the African Nationalists in the 1950s. Now he and the ANC are selling out the African people to corporate interests.

  I chuckle at the irony of a Communist selling out to capitalist interests. Then I remember that this is South Africa; some of our biggest black capitalists profess socialism and some of the leading members of the Communist Party are involved in the rampant accumulation of personal wealth. It was the same in Zimbabwe; Mugabe and his cronies were big on socialist rhetoric while they distributed hotels, farms and factories among themselves, without ever addressing the land question among the poor for all those years. It was only when there was a threat of real opposition that they started rendering their country ungovernable and throwing due process out of the window in a wholesale land grab, not only from the white settler community, but from those black Zimbabweans who did not support the ruling party. My son-in-law, Limpho’s husband, worked hard at McDonald’s in South Africa until he attained a management position.

  He bought his parents a farm in Zimbabwe which was duly confiscated by Mugabe’s ‘war veterans’. And, guess what, my son-in-law was not a white settler but a black Zimbabwean.

  Anyway, let me leave Mugabe and Zimbabwe alone and listen to Aunt Ella and her guests. I am aware of her sentiments because she has expressed them to me before. Although I don’t agree with her, especially when she praises Mugabe and condemns Mandela’s reconciliation efforts as a Western plot to deny the African people justice, I never argue with her. I become an unresponsive sounding board. I understand her anger and pain; one of her sons, Cousin Mzwandile, was a casualty of the liberation struggle. So were many others – friends, neighbours and relatives. And now she and her people have nothing to show for it. Instead, they are faced with escalating costs of utilities, discontinued water and electricity services, and chronic unemployment, while a minority of politically well-connected black fat cats is riding on what in South Africa is referred to as the gravy train – if you don’t mind our mixed metaphors. She reflects the anger that we often hear among our black people in the townships and in the rural areas where I work with the poor.

  I ask that Gugu and I be excused from the meeting. While they continue with their interview, we take a sentimental tour of the township. We go to the nearby Hector Peterson Museum and talk to the vendors of arts and crafts, and to a PAC stalwart called Ali Hlongwane who runs the museum. We drive past Gugu’s former home at Armitage Street and wonder who owns it now. Her parents sold it some years back. Gugu’s friends and playmates of old still live next door, but unfortunately they are not home today. We decide to buy spykos – or junk food – of fried dough cakes known as amagwinya and the pickled mango called atchaar. I never leave Soweto without tasting the spykos. This one is particularly meaningful because we buy it from the same little café which we used to patronise when we were kids – albeit in different years. Those days we would also have added fish crumbs and battered fishbone. But now, of course, we wouldn’t buy that even if they still sold such fare.

  We always find Soweto – particularly Orlando West and Orlando East, and for me Dobsonville – very inspiring. It takes us back to our childhood. This is the area and the youth that I captured for posterity in my novel Black Diamond. These were also my father’s stomping grounds during his ANC Youth League days. The Mda Street that we drive through is named after him.

  After about two hours we go back to pick up Bob and Dorothy. I don’t know if their trip has been fruitful. For me and Gugu, just breathing the air of this part of Soweto is satisfying enough.

  ONE THING I REGRETTED about leaving the Wits University School of Dramatic Art was that I would not be able to continue my visits to Soweto with my students. As part of our Theatre in Education course, which I subverted by adding elements of Theatre for Development to it, I had started a programme where once a week I took the students to Dobsonville to work with township kids who were members of the Dobsonville Arts Association, which was led by its founder, Maswabi Legwale. At first my students, who were mostly white and had never been in a black township before, were apprehensive about venturing into a foreign world that conjured only images of crime in their collective imagination. But soon they were enjoying it and were looking forward to the visits, first in Legwale’s own backyard and later at a cultural centre called Kopanong. Though I would no longer be going with my students, I hoped to keep my connections with the group.

  I couldn’t keep to that undertaking on a regular basis because my time was swallowed by efforts to make a livelihood as a full-time writer. Not only was I reviewing and editing manuscripts for Albert Nemukula’s Vivlia Publishers, but occasionally I undertook some writing projects for television. I also continued to express my views in the columns of newspapers.

  The Sunday Times engaged my services to write a weekly column called ‘On the Small Screen’ reviewing programmes on South African television. Since I travelled abroad extensively I also commented on overseas programming in comparison with South African television. My columns did not only confine themselves to television, but I used them as a springboard to comment on social and political issues affecting broader society. For instance, President Nelson Mandela was shown on television lamenting the death of Sani Abacha of Nigeria. He said his death was a great loss to Africa. I wrote a scathing column attacking Mandela for being ‘economical with the truth’. He was being ‘an African statesman’ in a situation that demanded honesty and not glib diplomacy, I wrote. Africa would not miss Sani Abacha one bit because he was a dictator, a murderer and a thief. I think I was even more biting in my article because two and a half years before this same Sani Abacha killed a dear friend of mine
, Ken Saro Wiwa. Ken was a Nigerian writer, television producer, environmentalist and political activist who I had met on a few occasions in Europe. South African poet Don Mattera and I had spent wonderful moments with Ken in Bayreuth, Germany. We admired him for his relentless struggle against the oppression and exploitation of his Ogoni people in particular and of Nigerians in general.

  Many people commented on what they regarded as my ‘attack’ on Nelson Mandela. Some noted that this was not the first time I had been critical of the great leader. When the Deputy Speaker of Parliament, Baleka Mbethe, a woman I admired very much for her poetry and her leadership in the liberation struggle, was accused of obtaining a driver’s licence through fraudulent means in the corrupt Mpumalanga Province, Mandela had come to her defence even before he knew the facts of the case, calling her a woman of integrity. I criticised him for his blind loyalty to his comrades, which led to the condonation of corruption.

  I had also featured on a BBC radio programme where I expressed fears about the deification of Nelson Mandela. I commended him in that programme because he did not go along with that, and in fact opposed any notions that he was a saint. I went on to say that most of the problems that we had in Africa began with the deification of our political leaders. They had fought for our liberation and as soon as they took over government we gave them such titles as the Messiah and the Redeemer. Why would they not have a Jesus complex? Megalomania developed, cultivated in them by us. We the intellectuals became useful idiots in the service of the petty dictators. When they began to loot the coffers of the state we turned a blind eye. They deserved a little reward for the decades they suffered on our behalf, some spending years in colonial prisons and in exile. Soon they thought they could do no wrong. They became all-powerful and all-knowing without becoming all-loving. No one could touch them. They inspired nothing but fear and became even worse than the colonial masters they replaced. They jailed and murdered even the mildest of opposition. They became agents of neo-colonialism, selling the riches of their countries to the West for their own self-aggrandisement.

  I went on to say South Africa showed promise of going against that trend. We resisted the deification of the leaders. Staunch members of the ruling party were the first to go out in the streets to demonstrate against their own comrades in the government when they did not make the right decisions or did not perform to their satisfaction. We had a very strong civil society and a robustly free press which was always vigilant. Hopefully, things would stay like that and the gains we had made would be safeguarded.

  My column in the Sunday Times became very popular. The English Academy of Southern Africa awarded it the Thomas Pringle Prize for 1998. I had to give up the column, however, because I was becoming increasingly involved in producing television programmes. I could not be a referee and a player at the same time. Also, it was becoming very difficult for me to hurt other people’s feelings, especially the young producers and directors and even actors, who were doing their best and were wary of this mean person with a powerful pen who was always ready to pan their efforts. Another thing was that I was tired of fighting battles with the sub-editors of the Sunday Times who were ready to mess up my copy with their bad English and ignorance of historical and political facts.

  At this time my novels and plays were also garnering some awards in South Africa. Ways of Dying received the M-Net Award, She Plays with the Darkness was awarded the Olive Schreiner Prize for Fiction and The Nun’s Romantic Story won the Olive Schreiner Prize for Drama. Ways of Dying also got a Noma Award Honourable Mention. This in itself would not be worth mentioning, except for the fact that the judge was none other than the publisher who had turned the novel down as ‘feminist diatribe’.

  I was quite happy with my writing life, and with the fact that I had reconnected with my friend Sebolelo Mokhobo, or Sebo. She and her husband now lived in Johannesburg where she worked for a government department in the education sector. I occasionally met her for a drink at one of the pubs in Randburg, and she was surprised that I had become a teetotaller. She was still on to her beer, and I remembered fondly the old days when we used to pub-crawl in Maseru. I still had a very soft spot for her and I was sad when she told me how unhappy she was even though she had an important government job. I convinced my publisher Albert Nemukula that he should commission her to write the study notes for my novella for youth, Melville 67. The cover of the book was a painting by my son Neo, as was the case with the cover of She Plays with the Darkness.

  Happy as I was as a writer and dramaturge at the Market Theatre, I also had other skills that I thought would serve my country well if only I could get into a position where I could use them. Matsoho mohomeng, the Basotho people say. ‘All hands on the hoe’ is the direct translation. All hands on deck! All hand to the pump!

  My hands were needed on the hoe to eliminate the weeds that had resulted from decades of apartheid’s absurdities. I owed my country that. That was the main reason I was back here. I could write my novels and plays anywhere in the world, but I needed to contribute more, in practical terms, at a physical workplace where I could make a difference. I had returned home with qualifications and experience that my country would certainly find useful. Matsoho mohomeng!

  I therefore started applying for positions that were advertised in the local press. In all instances I was shortlisted for interviews. After the interviews the interviewers expressed their satisfaction. But then I would never hear from them again. I applied for various advertised positions at the South African Broadcasting Corporation, at the Independent Broadcasting Authority, at the various government and parastatal agencies that needed someone with mass communications, telecommunications and media arts skills. In all instances I was interviewed, and in all of them someone else with fewer qualifications but with strong party affiliations was employed. In many cases the people who ended up getting those jobs had no qualifications in the field at all, save for the fact that they were close relatives of important people in the government or were known ruling party apparatchiks.

  In one instance, after an interview for the position of the director of a government communications agency for the Gauteng province, one of the interviewers – I won’t tell you her name because she’s going to be victimised; she’s still in government – told me when I met her some days after the interview: ‘It was the best interview ever; you are getting this job. We were unanimously impressed with you.’

  I didn’t hear from them for months. The woman who had told me I had the job avoided me whenever I saw her at a social event. One day I cornered her and she admitted that she was embarrassed I didn’t get the job after giving me the assurance that I would. She shouldn’t have done that before the appointment had been ratified by the presidency. The presidency had vetoed my appointment.

  I told her not to worry, it was not her fault. But I wondered why civil service appointments had to be approved by the presidency. Who exactly in the presidency made such decisions and what clause in our Constitution gave them such power? Shouldn’t the presidency rather be concerned with heavy matters of state than with keeping little me from serving my country?

  I began to investigate this phenomenon and discovered that there were some highly qualified black people who were leaving the country because they could not get jobs. I wrote an article for the Mail & Guardian about it, mentioning the names of those who had left and also those who were still in the country but were being sidelined because they didn’t have the approved party affiliation.

  I also discovered that the patronage system extended to the corporate world which had become a big network of crony capitalism. The ruling party was able to ‘deploy’ its people even in the private sector where they implemented the unwritten policy of exclusion against those whose names did not resonate with the powers that be. Their tentacles were so long that they had the final word even in scholarships and research bodies and independent trusts and foundations. I wrote about that too.

  The last straw was when I was
nominated for the board of the South African Broadcasting Corporation. As was the practice, I had to be interviewed by members of parliament, those who were on the portfolio committee responsible for broadcasting. I flew to Cape Town for the interview. In parliament I fielded questions from the Honourable Members who represented the different parties. The hearings were chaired by Saki Macozoma of the ANC who I respected as the man who could advance the Mandela legacy – judging from some of the articles he wrote in the newspapers. The questions ranged from the mundane, such as Pieter Mulder of the Freedom Front asking me which was my favourite sitcom (it was Seinfeld at the time – I had read somewhere that it was his too) to more serious questions from Suzanne Vos of Inkatha Freedom Party about my views on provincial broadcasting for both radio and television. I supported it, of course, in the same way that I supported community broadcasting. It gave the people at local level a voice, which was stifled, often inadvertently, by the SABC since as a national broadcaster it focused on national and international issues. The SABC was dominated by events in Johannesburg and, to a lesser extent, in Cape Town – both news and entertainment – as if these metropolises were the whole of South Africa. I knew at the time that the ANC was wary of provincial broadcasting because it advanced the federalist ambitions of the Inkatha Freedom Party and would give that Zulu-based party a mouthpiece in KwaZulu-Natal which was under its rule. So, the ANC’s opposition to provincial broadcasting at the time was political rather than principled. Nevertheless, after the interview I received an ovation from all the members present – including those of the ANC and PAC.

  And indeed a few days later my name was on the list of those who had been chosen by the South African parliament to be on the governing board of the South African Broadcasting Corporation. The list was published in all the newspapers. I received congratulations from staffers at the SABC and other colleagues. Some even said they suspected Nelson Mandela would appoint me chairman of the board. ‘Don’t jump the gun,’ I told them. ‘He still has to approve the list chosen by parliament.’