Sometimes There Is a Void

by Zakes Mda

  In Amsterdam I frequented a number of jazz cafés listening to both unknown and famous jazz musicians. It became clear to me that jazz had migrated to Europe. I was surprised at the number of American jazz musicians who were living permanently in Amsterdam and other European cities. They told me that they couldn’t make a living in America.

  One evening as I sat at the Waterfront Jazz Club listening to Terence Blanchard’s wailing trumpet, the play crystallised in my mind. It was going to be set in Amersfoort and would involve the famous bells, an Afrikaner dominee or pastor who had been an apartheid security policeman and a black woman anti-apartheid activist exiled in Holland. It would address issues of peace, justice and reconciliation.

  Back in South Africa I went in search of the woman I had been told about at Vernon February’s house. She came from Herschel which was a district I knew very well. My search pointed to Qoboshane Village in the Lower Telle region which, as you know by now, is my ancestral village. I had not been there since I was a little boy staying at my grandmother’s home. I was struck by the beauty of the place. It was spring and the mountain was pink with aloe blooms. But I was also struck by the poverty that I saw in the village. Men who used to work in the mines of Johannesburg and the Free State had been retrenched. There was hardly any income-generating activity in the village. The land was parched and rocky, so it wasn’t good for agriculture. There were patches of subsistence farming among dongas that marred the beauty of the landscape.

  As I was driving back to Johannesburg I said to myself: That mountain cannot be beautiful for nothing. It’s got to yield something that will give life to the people.

  In my mind, the flowers on Dyarhom suggested bees, and the bees suggested honey. But I knew nothing about beekeeping. As soon as I got to Johannesburg I bought the Farmer’s Weekly and there, in the classifieds, was a beekeeper called William Dinkelman on the outskirts of the city – a place called Kibler Park – offering beekeeping training. I immediately enrolled for a two-week course at his Blessed by the Bees Apiary. The course was hands-on and quite intensive. We worked day and night, having lessons and getting practical experience on the very rudiments of beekeeping, on how to care for the bees and how to feed them in times of drought, how to catch bees from the wild, how to rear the queens in order to create new swarms, how to harvest honey, how to heat it and then bottle it, and how to market it. We also learnt about the diseases that often assail bees and how to treat them.

  The following month I went back to the village and asked the headman, Chief Xhalisile Nombula, and his councillor Morrison Xinindlu to give me back the land that used to belong to my grandfather on the mountain so that I could start a beekeeping project with those villagers who might be interested. The headman could not make such a decision on his own. He had to call a meeting of all the villagers. I had brought bottles of honey from Blessed by the Bees and I displayed them at the meeting as I addressed the villagers showing them the benefits of beekeeping to the community.

  After a long debate, with some villagers objecting because the mountain was used for the initiation of boys into men at certain times, and others because everybody who used to have property on that mountain would want it back if I was allocated the land that used to belong to my grandfather. But finally a consensus was reached. After all, the mountain was very big. Boys could still be initiated on other parts of the mountain that were more remote than the place I wanted for beekeeping. Also in my favour was the fact that I didn’t want the mountain back for my own personal gain but for the good of the community.

  The next step was to establish a cooperative society of all those who wanted to be part of the beekeeping project. About forty men and women registered their names.

  It took me a long time to raise funds for the project. Our major electricity utility company, Eskom, had a foundation that funded development projects throughout South Africa and they approved our application. They were willing to fund the training of ten of our members who would then train the rest on site. They also funded the necessary equipment such as overalls, helmets, veils, stainless steel smokers, supers, frames, containers and hive tools. In addition to all this, the Eskom Foundation paid for the first forty hives with swarms that we purchased from Blessed by the Bees, which was where the group of ten also received their training.

  Since it had taken me months to raise the money, many villagers who had initially registered had lost interest. We remained with about twenty, including Morrison Xinindlu and my Uncle Owen. It was good to have Uncle Owen in the group because he was the most educated of the lot and could handle the records and correspondence. The meetings were held at his house. I heard that in my absence he tended to be a dictator and pretended his word was final, whereas in fact the project was owned and operated by its members through the office bearers they had elected and no single member owned it and could have the final word. I called him to order as soon as I got the report.

  Part of the funds from the Eskom Foundation was used to initiate literacy classes for those members who could not read and write. We also got the services of the Mineworkers Development Agency to hold classes on small business management.

  At the Kellogg Foundation offices in Pretoria was a woman who had read my novel The Heart of Redness and had liked my ideas on rural development. She told me that they had funds which they could allocate to us, provided they were channelled through a well-established agency with a track record of handling a sizeable budget. I discovered the Herschel Development Agency based in Lady Grey and went into partnership with them. Indeed, the Kellogg Foundation gave us one hundred thousand United States dollars. The money was used to construct two buildings on the mountain, to purchase a truck, furnish the buildings, and buy equipment for extracting the honey from the combs, heating it and then bottling it. We also bought the bottles and printed the labels that William Dinkelman had designed. Dinkelman delivered more hives with swarms and trained the members to catch swarms from the wild. The Herschel Development Agency gave us a Lady Grey farmer, Aubrey Fincham, to manage the project while training the members to operate it themselves. The Department of Agriculture of the Eastern Cape provincial government was approached by Uncle Owen and they assisted by fencing the part of the mountain that had our hives and buildings.

  That was how the brand Telle Honey/Ubusi base Telle was born. The honey that the project produced soon gained a reputation among connoisseurs of honey for its unique taste, which was the result of the fresh unpolluted air of Dyarhom Mountain and the indigenous herbs, bushes and aloes that grew on that mountain.

  I learnt a lot about bees and beekeeping from this project, and I used that knowledge in the novel I was writing at the time, The Madonna of Excelsior. Bees play a big role in the development of some of my characters’ conflicts. So you see, there is a symbiotic relationship between my writing and my community activism. My trip to Qoboshane in search of a story gave birth to a community project that is changing people’s lives; the community project gave birth to aspects of a novel.

  Let me add that even though I never found the woman I was looking for – she had moved to other places – I did write the musical play titled The Bells of Amersfoort and it was a resounding success. Directed by Aram Adriaanse, it toured Holland and South Africa, and was presented at the National Festival of the Arts in Grahamstown and the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town. Because the powers that ran the Market Theatre at the time refused to present it there despite the fact that I was their dramaturge, in Johannesburg it was performed at the Theatre on the Square in Sandton. I never got to know what the Market Theatre’s problem was with Phyllis Klotz who was co-producing this musical with the Dutch. Nevertheless the play was performed to full houses and standing ovations in Sandton, which was the Market Theatre’s loss.

  I composed all the music for this play, except for one number which was a traditional wedding song.

  The play was later to be published by Wits University Press in a collection titled Fools, Bells and the Habit of E
ating – my earlier plays Mother of All Eating and You Fool, How Can the Sky Fall? were also in this anthology.

  The writing of The Madonna of Excelsior proceeded well, with Debe Morris and Sara – Teresa Devant’s and Albio Gonzalez’s daughter in Barcelona – giving me wonderful feedback. I was having a great time narrating my story through the paintings of Father Frans Claerhout, a Flemish expressionist I once visited with my daughter Thandi, and nieces Limpho, Thembi and Mpumi – my brother Sonwabo’s kids – in Tweespruit, a small town about twenty kilometres from Excelsior. We were all inspired by the priest and his paintings.

  During this period I also travelled abroad extensively, giving readings and lectures and participating at literary festivals. For instance, I took a group of writers to Reykjavik, Iceland, where we attended and conducted workshops on writing for children with writers from Norway, Denmark, Finland and Sweden. Since I was organising this event I made a point of having writers who roughly represented the demographic groups of South Africa. One of the writers was my former colleague at the National University of Lesotho who was at that time a civil servant in Bloemfontein, Mpapa Mokhoane. Together we wrote Penny and Puffy, which I illustrated. It was published by Aeskan in Reykjavik. We repeated these workshops in Cape Town, with most of the writers participating again.

  Among the many countries I visited was the United Kingdom where I was on tour with other writers, including Ama Ata Aidoo whose short stories and plays I enjoyed when I was a high school student. I had been with her before in Germany with Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and somewhere else, I don’t recall where exactly, with Miriam Tlali and Buchi Emecheta. Maybe it was Germany again on another occasion. Come to think of it, I have been to many places with these more mature and more powerful African women writers. Somehow organisers of literary events always harnessed me with them. But what makes me recall this particular case with fondness was an incident that took place in Bath where we had a reading.

  When we arrived at the venue we found that there were posters all over the place of a charity organisation that was asking for donations; the funds would be used to educate the children of Africa. I was quite uncomfortable with this, though I said nothing about it. When we were about to take the stage the organisers told us that, before we began, the charity organisation would like to make a brief speech asking for donations. I found it very embarrassing that they were using us for fund-raising purposes when they had not told us anything about it. When they invited us to their festival they hadn’t mentioned anything about fund-raising. But I would not have said anything; I would just have gone along with it, even though I was unhappy about it. I wouldn’t have wanted to be ungracious to our hosts. But not Ama Ata Aidoo. She put her foot down and said no, we hadn’t come to England to beg for anyone’s money.

  ‘But it is for a good cause,’ said the white-haired lady from the charity. ‘We pay for many children who would otherwise have no opportunity for education … especially girl children.’

  Ama Ata Aidoo was not impressed.

  ‘Why don’t African governments educate African children?’ she asked. ‘Why should that be the role of English people?’

  I could have kissed her. But, of course, that would have been too forward. We treat our elders with respect. We don’t just grab them and kiss them, even when they have said something brilliant.

  ‘African countries are poor,’ said the woman frantically. ‘They don’t have enough money for education.’

  ‘Oh, no, they have the money, but they don’t spend it on education because they know that you are there with your charity,’ she said. ‘You will educate their children for them.’

  She knew what she was talking about, this wonderful Ama Ata Aidoo. She had been the Minister of Education in Ghana. She knew of the millions that went to the military instead of to education and health services. And of those other millions that went into the Swiss bank accounts of corrupt leaders. She couldn’t last as a cabinet minister because she was too honest and frank to be a politician.

  Thanks to Ama Ata Aidoo, we did not become writers with begging bowls that evening. She was indeed an African leader after my own heart. I had written extensively – and also in my book When People Play People – against the dependency mentality that had been created by Western aid to developing countries. I am not talking here of humanitarian assistance when there are disasters and occasional catastrophes, but of regular aid that went into the day-to-day survival of the country. I have noted in some of my writings, and in the same book, that food aid from America and the European community has smothered to death the agricultural sector in a country like Lesotho. The peasant farmers have no incentive to produce food from their patches of land because more food will come from America or from the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations.

  Another trip that stands out in my mind was to Chile, where I was on a literary tour of Santiago, Valdivia and Valparaiso with South African writers Nadine Gordimer, Wally Serote and André Brink; Chilean writers Ariel Dorfman and Antonio Skármeta; and Australian writers Peter Carey, Helen Garner and Roberta Sykes. In addition to these writers, we were accompanied throughout the tour by a man who was introduced to us as Gordimer’s official biographer, Ronald Suresh Roberts.

  During this tour we were entertained by government ministers and presidents of universities. We spent some time at the home of the late poet Pablo Neruda and also visited Salvador Allende’s wife, Hortensia Bussi Allende, and their daughter, Isabel Allende – not the Isabel Allende who is the author of magical realist novels. I stress this because when I came back to South Africa and wrote an article about this trip for the Mail & Guardian the woman who was editing it argued with me, saying that I was wrong, the magical realist novelist and the Allende daughter I met were one and the same person. Yet I was the one who had met these people in Chile! I knew what I was talking about. When the article was published the editor had left out the contentious relationships. The main thrust of my article, however, was the Mapuche people, the natives of Chile, and their struggle to regain their land. I met a Mapuche writer in Valdivia who told me how his people were marginalised by the broader Chilean society and how they had suffered under General Pinochet, and continued to suffer under the new democratic government.

  One thing that moved me on this trip was a visit to the Avenue of Memory at the General Cemetery where the remains of Salvador Allende had been transferred in 1990 after lying for almost twenty years in a private grave in Santa Ines Cemetery at Vina del Mar. The General Cemetery is truly the city of the dead with towering tombs, some of which are multi-storey. We stood at Allende’s grave and observed a moment of silence. People came, prayed for him and left. But one man broke down and cried. Ariel Dorfman reached for him and embraced him. They sobbed in each other’s arms. Ariel didn’t know who the man was, nor did the man have a clue who Ariel was. They were just two Chilean men sharing their grief at events that happened two and a half decades ago, but that had left untold suffering that would be felt in Chile for generations. Some of the writers standing around Allende’s tomb, including me, couldn’t help but shed tears as well.

  It is one of the images that lived with me long after I returned to South Africa.

  When a Chilean cabinet minister visited South Africa I was invited to the banquet given for him in Pretoria. That’s where I had a very brief chat to Nelson Mandela. We didn’t talk about the letter that I wrote him or some of the snide remarks I made about his being ‘economical with the truth’ in his statements in praise of a dead Sani Abacha. Instead he asked me: ‘Tell me, Zakes Mda, are you one of the twins?’

  ‘No, the twins are my younger brothers, Sonwabo and Monwabisi,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, yes, you were the quiet one,’ he said. I thought he would add: how did you become so vocal? But he didn’t.

  Obviously, I had not made much impression on him when I lived at his house forty-four years before, but the twins had. I can understand that; I was a reserved, introverted little boy.


  Now, let me tell you ow I had a falling-out with my publishers, Oxford University Press. It started when I wanted to have an agent after a Japanese publisher to whom I had submitted Ways of Dying, hoping he would get it translated and published in Japanese, advised me of an agency in London, Blake Friedmann, which represented a number of South African writers. I wrote to one of the partners, Carole Blake, who told me her company was keen to represent me. In fact, she said, a member of the agency, Isobel Dixon, had approached Oxford University Press enquiring as to whether I didn’t need their representation, and my publishers turned her down. I was offended when I heard this. Who the hell did they think they were to turn an agent down without consulting me? Did they think they owned me or something?

  I immediately engaged the services of Isobel Dixon as my agent. My publishers opposed the move because they said they were capable of looking after my interests without an agent. I only realised at that point that they owned all the rights to the two books they had published, Ways of Dying and The Heart of Redness. I owned nothing of those books. They wanted to continue in the same vein with all the books I was going to publish with them. The contract that I had signed with them placed me in their bondage, so that they had the right of first refusal for my next book, and it was going to be like that for each book I wrote in perpetuity. That’s what happens when, as a new writer, you are just happy that a publisher is interested in your work and you sign a contract blindly. You may not even be aware that the terms are always negotiable, it is never a matter of take it or leave it, and you don’t have to sell your soul to get published. I had sold mine and they were the sole decision makers on my work.

  No wonder they didn’t want me to have an agent.

  I had a protracted email correspondence with Daphne Paizee, the publishing director of Oxford University Press, which ultimately turned very acrimonious. She was adamant that they would not tolerate my having an agent because that would eat into their heavy investment in me and my work, and I was insisting that an agent would in fact broaden the market, bringing in greater returns for their investment. She told me that my prospective agent had ‘painted a rosy picture’ because there was nothing she could do for me that they were not already doing. And yet they were not able to market my work abroad. Even the French and Spanish translations of Ways of Dying were due to my own efforts when I was travelling in Europe. I wrote: