Dancing the Death Drill

by Fred Khumalo

  ‘I am not armed, so how can I harm you?’

  ‘You can run away and go alert your friends about us.’

  ‘I don’t even know where I am, so how can I run away? I have no weapon to hunt or protect myself with. I would probably die in the veld.’

  ‘Morena,’ said Ntate Motaung with finality, ‘we’ll have to keep you under close guard. For your safety, and ours too.’

  In the days and weeks that followed, the villagers were pleasantly surprised that De la Rey was friendly, open, and did not seem eager to go home, which assured them he was neither a spy nor a soldier sent on a reconnaissance mission. Nor did he seem bothered by the endless questions thrown at him, nor by what he was offered to eat or drink. He wanted to be one of them, it seemed. Like them, he wanted to stay in this wilderness that was still untouched by the war. Some of the old men who could speak the white man’s language thought he was not right in the head – sometimes he would start screaming about fire and guns. Nevertheless, they were impressed by his hunger for knowledge, his eagerness to improve his grasp of their language.

  For his part, De la Rey began to feel at home in the village, in Ntate Motaung’s compound. Ntate Motaung was clearly a man of means; his compound was almost a village on its own. It had many houses in it, for he had many wives. Sotho culture dictated that each wife be given an individual house for herself and her younger children. Over and above his many wives, Ntate Motaung had, over the years, acquired a number of hangers-on – relatives who had been displaced by the war, destitute widows of relatives, servants and their children, grandchildren whose parents had been killed in the war or were imprisoned in some concentration camp.

  And now, De la Rey himself had been added to the detritus that had gathered at Ntate Motaung’s door. Everyone called De la Rey Morena Rey – Morena being the local word for ‘sir’ or ‘chief’. People in the village, as elsewhere in black Africa, always treated strangers with respect and deference. They would make sure to feed the stranger before they themselves ate, for they believed their ancestors’ adage, which held: ‘the stomach of a traveller is as small as a bird’s kidney’ – feeding a traveller will not make you starve.

  Ntate Motaung took apart De la Rey one day and declared, ‘In this community, my dear Morena Rey, we don’t want men walking around with unruly beards and mops of hair where birds or snakes can nest. You have to do something about your hygiene.’

  De la Rey’s face turned red immediately, to the amusement of the chief.

  The following morning, De la Rey was woken up by a noise he hadn’t heard in a long time. But when it permeated his shelter, he recognised it immediately. It was the sound of someone sharpening a blade on a whetstone. It put his teeth on edge. When he pushed open the hut’s door – a flap made of intricately woven grass – he was startled by what he saw.

  Standing in front of his hut was one of the maidens of the huge household. All she had on was a skirt made of cowhide, which was not unusual, as it was how unmarried maidens were supposed to dress. It was, however, unusual for him to stand so close to what, in his culture, would be described as a semi-naked young woman. He tried to look away, but his eyes were arrested by her sharp-pointed breasts and flat stomach.

  She said in her language, too fast for him to understand, ‘You can’t leave until I deal with you.’ She had to repeat it slowly. Having grown up among the Basotho on his father’s farm, De la Rey had a good grasp of the language, but he was not as fluent as he was in his mother tongue.

  When the meaning of her short speech sunk in, he replied in Afrikaans, ‘What do you mean you have to deal with me?’

  She merely looked at him. He stared back at her. For the first time, he noticed she was carrying a sharp blade. So startled had he been by the sight of her, he had forgotten about the sound that had roused him. She explained, ‘It’s clean and efficient. I’ve just sharpened it. Papa said you can’t venture out before I shave your beard.’

  ‘What? No! A woman can’t shave me.’

  ‘I’m not a woman, I’m a girl. It’s my job to shave you, seeing that you don’t have a woman of yours here. My mother taught me how. Every time she shaves papa’s beard, she calls me to come and observe. I’ve shaved him under mother’s supervision – twice already.’

  ‘I’m not your papa. I’m not your relative either.’

  ‘Well, for as long as you stay here, you’re one of us.’

  ‘Let me go, girl.’ He put his foot forward, but there was no way he could leave the hut without having to touch her body, to push her away. That he was not about to do. What if this was a trap? He had heard that these people had strange rules. In the native community, he had been told, you could be sentenced to death for looking at a person the wrong way.

  Now he realised he was desperate to take his customary morning leak. But this girl was standing firmly in front of the entrance.

  ‘I need to go and relieve myself.’

  ‘Give me your word you’ll come back so I can shave you. Because if you don’t then I’ll be in trouble with my mme. She said I had to shave your beard. Today.’

  ‘Do you want me to relieve myself here in front of you?’

  She giggled, covering her mouth with one hand, and made way. He ran towards the wood on the periphery of the yard. He saw some girls emerge from a section of the wood, laughing out loud.

  When he came back, the maiden was waiting under a tree. She had an old enamel basin with water in it. Next to it was an upturned drum which she had covered with a cushion for him to sit on.

  ‘Sit,’ she said sternly. One of the girls from earlier came towards them carrying a bunch of fresh green leaves. She gave the leaves to the girl with the blade, then left.

  De la Rey sat down gingerly. The girl put her blade on a piece of cured cowhide. She took a handful of leaves and rubbed them vigorously together. Some sap oozed from the crushed leaves into the basin. She stirred the sap into the water, working up a lather.

  One other girl brought another basin, a smaller one, with water in it. She placed it in front of the girl with the blade, who knelt on a sheepskin in front of De la Rey so that their faces were only a few centimetres apart. Her musky smell entered his nostrils.

  He blurted out, ‘How do the men around here manage …’

  ‘How do men manage what?’

  He wanted to ask: How do the men around here manage not to get aroused when they see women and girls walking around bare-breasted? But he kept the thought to himself.

  The girl shook her head. She scooped a bit of water and started wetting De la Rey’s face, gently, careful not to flood his lap.

  Next, she scooped a handful of lather and started applying it into the thick tufts of hair on his face. Her fingers penetrated the thick knots of beard, reaching the skin, rubbing and massaging it in deft strokes. He relaxed, closed his eyes, his back against the tree. She kept working the lather onto his face until it had formed stiff peaks.

  Then she got up and took two steps back and stood there, admiring her handiwork. He opened his eyes, disappointed that the soothing finger play on his face had come to an end.

  She instructed, ‘Stay put. I am coming back. The lather must sink in. Sit still.’

  De la Rey frowned. Who was he now? Where was he? Allowing himself to be touched so intimately by one of them. By leaving him stranded, helpless among the godless ones, maybe God was punishing him for deserting, betraying his people.

  When the young woman came back a few minutes later, he asked her name.

  ‘Matshiliso. Everyone calls me Tshili.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Fifteen.’

  He muttered to himself in Afrikaans, ‘I would have thought eighteen, even twenty.’

  ‘And how old are you?’

  ‘I’m twenty-five.’

  ‘Iyhoo!’ she exclaimed. ‘That old?’

  De la Rey let out a short laugh, never having been called old before in his life. ‘Do you go to school?’

&
nbsp; ‘Have you seen any school around?’

  ‘But you can count?’

  ‘Yes I can. I can count to a hundred. Can you count to a hundred?’

  Of course he could count to a hundred. Not only could he count to a hundred, he could also read the Bible, or at least some passages in Dutch. He had been told that there now existed a Bible in the Afrikaans language, but he had yet to see it. His mother frowned every time somebody mentioned the Afrikaans Bible. ‘Ag, nee, Afrikaans is but a new language. I was born speaking Dutch. Now they want us to read the Word of God in Afrikaans. I wonder if God has learned Afrikaans yet. I’ll stick to my Bijbel.’

  When he recovered from his reverie, he realised that she was staring straight into his eyes.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

  ‘Your eyes.’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘I hadn’t noticed their colour before … They’re so … grey. So fierce.’

  ‘So do you like them?’

  ‘They look like a cat’s.’

  ‘That’s not a nice thing to say.’

  ‘At night, do they shine like a cat’s? Or do they shine like a lion’s?’

  De la Rey decided to ignore her. He concentrated, instead, on her hips and firm legs.

  Without wasting time, she reached for the blade. ‘When I’m done with you, my brothers will stop calling you Makhupakatse.’

  ‘What exactly does Makhupakatse mean?’

  She laughed out loud. ‘You like the sound of it?’

  ‘Makhupakatse. Makhupakatse.’ De la Rey rolled the words on his tongue. ‘Maybe. What does it mean?’

  ‘It means: man who’s holding a cat in his mouth. On account of your big whiskers, you see.’

  He could only laugh.

  ‘Sit up straight now. Don’t move, or we cut your skin.’ Then she muttered in her mother tongue, ‘Cat’s eyes.’

  He opened his mouth to say something.

  ‘Shhh,’ she immediately said. With her left hand, she pulled tight the area of his left cheek where she was to apply the blade, while her right hand dragged the blade across his skin. He was tense, his eyes watering. After a few strokes, however, he began to relax. He leaned back against the tree, eyes closed and was soon asleep.

  The blade worked: whap-whap. A cow mooed out there in the distance. The blade worked: whap-whap. A cock crowed. The blade worked: whap-whap.

  Deep in dreamland, De la Rey tensed. Matshiliso paused, lest she cut his face. The bad dream passed and he relaxed again. She resumed her task.

  A little later, when her cousins and friends who’d been watching from their hideout had long since left, having lost interest, Matshiliso stood up and admired her handiwork. She was entertained by the contrast between the areas she had just shaved and the rest of his face. The newly shaved places were very light, while the rest of his face was darker, leathery.

  The shave had softened his looks. But the huge mane of hair spoiled everything, it had to go. She’d never seen a white man with a clean-shaven head. It was a look that worked quite well among members of her own community – in fact, it was especially favoured by younger men. This man wasn’t too old. Wasn’t even married, from what she could tell. She decided to get rid of that unseemly fiery bush of hair.

  She started stealthily hacking at his hair, unsure of how he would react. But she felt that the unruly locks of dirty hair, which smelled of wood smoke and God knows what else, and were possibly crawling with lice and other wildlife, undermined her artistic efforts. She wanted to be able to take unreserved pride in her work, to be able, when she saw him walking down to the river the following day, to point him out proudly to her sisters and friends.

  When the long, flowing mane was gone, and the hair was shorter, but crudely and unevenly cut, she started working lather into his scalp. He snored away peacefully, so gentle was she. Then the blade started working again: whap-whap. She was humming a lullaby, softly under her breath, as she continued working the blade: whap-whap-whap. Pause. Hum. Whap-whap.

  Finished, she stood up, stepped back and surveyed the results. She was struck by the fact that without the locks of hair, he looked just like somebody she knew. If she could apply some ochre to that face, it would look just like a regular Mosotho face. Pity she couldn’t carve the nose into submission. She stepped forward and touched his left cheek, running her hand smoothly over it.

  His eyelids fluttered open. He sat up quickly, confused, and touched his face. ‘Ah, yes, you were shaving my beard. Feels good.’

  Smiling, she backed away from him, creating a safe distance. He wrinkled his nose. Then his hand flew to his mouth, a feminine gesture that made her snigger. ‘Oh, no, oh, no! No, you didn’t. You did not. My moustache! What have you done? You said you were going to shave my beard, not my moustache. Not my moustache.’

  She picked up the water basin and started backing away from him. He paused, feeling an itch on his head. His hand flew to scratch the itchy area. Then his two hands patted his head. ‘My Here!’ he cursed in Afrikaans. My dear God! Then he switched back to his brand of Sesotho: ‘What have you done? What have you done, you Jezebel, you Delilah?’

  He stormed towards her. She immediately emptied the bucket of water into his face, laughing uproariously. Blinded by the suds, he halted and rubbed his face with his hands. Like a gazelle, she started running in zigzag fashion. Boiling with righteous indignation, he started after her, the wind whistling in his ears and caressing his bare scalp – an unfamiliar and not too unpleasant sensation. He was pelting her with his choicest insults as he bumbled after her: ‘Bloody Dingaan’s concubine! Queen Victoria’s evil cat!’ He was determined to get his hands on her. She deserved a serious spanking. How would he face the world without a moustache?

  There clearly was no way he could catch her. He was a big man, and she was tiny and light on her feet. But his anger impelled him to carry on. As he put his right foot forward, it caught on a stump of a tree that had been chopped down a long time ago. He stumbled, almost landing face first on uneven ground, but he righted himself just in time.

  ‘I’m going to chop your hands off, you donkey’s jaw. You devil’s daughter!’

  She was laughing as she zigzagged forward, making him dizzy. Then, playfully, she turned to him and pelted him with her own choice insult: ‘Marete a mmao!’ – Your mother’s testicles!

  She was running down the slope, with the river shimmering in the distance. Huffing and puffing, he thought he was catching up with her. The last time he had engaged in this kind of physical exertion was when a group of them – four, five members of the Boer commando – got chased by an enraged buffalo as they were walking to camp.

  A group of boys driving their cattle from the river saw the man chasing the girl and shouted, ‘Hey, who are you? Why are you chasing her?’

  They pulled out their slingshots and started attacking him, but missed with each shot.

  One of the boys recognised him. ‘Stop shooting, stop shooting! He is the white man that lives with the Motaungs. But what’s happened to him? He’s got no hair. The beard is gone. Hey, Ralefahlana!’ The other boys took up the chant, a popular insult for a bald man, ‘Ralefahlana, Ralefahlana, who stole you hair?’

  Hearing the derisive taunts, De la Rey turned his eyes towards the boys. It was then that he lost his footing. He tripped on a rock, fell, and started rolling downhill, landing with a painful thud along some rocks on the riverbank. He staggered to his feet, dazed. There was blood on his left cheek where a rock or a sharp tree stump had cut him. He touched his face, and saw the blood on his hand. He shook his head as if to clear his thoughts. He blinked repeatedly and saw Matshiliso standing fearfully on the bank.

  She approached him, apologising. ‘Morena Rey, tswarelo, tswarelo!’

  He smiled at her. ‘I don’t know what I was doing playing children’s games.’

  ‘Come, let me clean that wound.’

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s nothing.’

  She looked at
him sternly. ‘I said come!’

  He obeyed. She made him kneel on a rock near the water. She took off his shirt, tossed it on the grass, then scooped some water with her hand and washed the cut. Thankfully, it was not deep, it was only a negligible graze. ‘You people have weak skin. It bleeds so easily. I thought it was a serious wound.’

  When she’d cleaned the wound, she started washing his bare scalp. He enjoyed the feel of her fingernails as she raked them across the naked skin.

  ‘Tsamayang, lona!’ Matshiliso shouted at the herd boys, who were watching closely, to make them go away.

  The boys did not move. She got up and picked up some rocks, which she hurled at them with deadly accuracy. Every time she threw a rock, it found a target. The boys went helter-skelter.

  ‘Hey, you, Kamogelo, come here!’ she said, addressing one of the boys.

  ‘But you are going to hit me with a stone!’

  ‘No. Peace time now.’ She let the stones fall from her hands. ‘Come here. I need to talk to you about something important.’

  The boy hesitated, but then he came down the slope, running.

  When the boy reached her, she spoke deliberately fast and in obscure Sesotho, so De la Rey couldn’t understand. Kamogelo’s eyes went big. Then he ran up the slope.

  Matshiliso turned to De la Rey. ‘Your clothes stink. Take them off.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, take off your clothes so I can wash them here.’

  ‘I’m not going to do that.’

  ‘Then you’re not going home.’

  ‘Why not?’

  She picked a pebble from a mound she had quickly collected and threw it at him, hitting him on the chest. It stung. ‘If you don’t take off your clothes I am going to pelt you until you bleed.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Take …’ she threw a pebble at him, hit him on the shoulder, ‘your …’ another pebble, ‘clothes …’ another pebble, ‘off.’ She hit her target each time.

  ‘Okay, okay, but what am I going to wear while you wash my clothes?’

  ‘My brothers are bringing you a new fresh, beautiful outfit.’