Dancing the Death Drill

by Fred Khumalo

  When she arrived at the farm closest to the road, she was met by a guard.

  ‘My child,’ the kind guard said, ‘we don’t have any job openings for now.’

  ‘No, sir,’ she responded, ‘I am not looking for a job. I am looking for my people. But the entire landscape has changed. I know this is where my village used to be, but I can’t seem to recognise anything here – not a tree, not a hill …’

  ‘Oh, you’re a descendant of the Bataung people who used to reign over this area? Sadly, shortly after the war, their land was taken over by the British government, and they were resettled.’ She specifically asked the old man where he thought her immediate family had been sent to.

  ‘Who was the head of your family?’

  ‘Ntate Motaung was my grandfather. But my uncle Disemba, who spent time in one of the concentration camps, was also quite well known around these parts. He could read the Bible and teach people things. He was famous for that.’

  The man nodded. ‘Ah, I remember Disemba very well. Before the village was destroyed, he started a school. I’ve heard that he moved to Bloemfontein, where he is running another school. I don’t know where exactly in the town. But if you go to any of the church people, they’ll be able to point you in the right direction. He now goes by the name Paul Ontong.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He goes under a mixed-race person’s identity. He is a very smart one, that man. If I were much lighter in complexion and if I had some education, I also would adopt a mixed-race person’s identity. Survival of the fittest, my dear child. Now, go back and find your uncle.’

  That was years earlier. Pitso had since grown up. He was doing quite well at school. But in the neighbourhood where he stayed, his life was a challenge.

  The black women who worked as washerwomen for local white families thought Pitso was a bad omen – a half person, neither white nor black. How would African ancestors in the land yonder communicate with these human bats? Yes, that’s what mixed-race people were: neither bird nor mouse. Bats. Unpredictable. They looked at the world from a different angle, from upside down. When bats came out, the world got disturbed. They brought unease.

  To the Salojees, Pitso was the child of a servant and therefore could not play with the boss’s children. To the white families, for whom his mother washed clothes over the weekend to supplement her income, he was a mixed-race skelm, who might pollute their own children’s brains. It did not help that Matshiliso herself was short-tempered and crossed swords with many women in the neighbourhood.

  ‘You see, she’s a kaffir like us, but she is behaving like mixed-race people who are always greedy,’ her detractors would say. ‘Why does she need so many jobs? It’s greed, if you ask me.’

  Matshiliso gradually lost the few friends she had around, preferring her own company.

  Observant and resourceful, Pitso had realised that their neighbourhood was infested with rats. Initially, he started whiling his time away hunting down these rats, whooping with excitement every time he managed to kill one. But in due course, he decided to take his interaction with rats to another level. Seeing that he had no human friends, why not turn his four-legged enemies into companions? He took his time gaining their trust. When he saw them behind the Koekemoer property, where his mother worked at weekends, Pitso would approach slowly. Under the watchful gaze of the rats, he would slowly, unthreateningly, throw pieces of food in their direction. Suspicious at first, they would stop and watch, their eyes alert, whiskers and ears standing out. After a while, they would begin nibbling at the pieces of food. Then he would find a rock or an empty tin on which he would sit and watch them.

  One Saturday afternoon he was in the company of his rat friends at the back of the Koekemoers’ residence, as usual, while his mother toiled somewhere inside the house. By now, the rats were furiously rolling all over the ground, fighting or playing, shrieking with anger or enjoyment. He smiled and sniggered happily. To intensify the excitement, he threw more food into the circle. There was shrieking and the swishing of tails as the furry creatures fought.

  Suddenly, a voice cried, ‘Rats! Rats! The verdomde bastard boy is breeding rats in our backyard!’

  It was Koekemoer himself, the master of the house. Pitso’s mother was summarily dismissed from her job, which meant a reduction in her earnings once again.

  But the Saloojees kept her very busy. By the time Pitso turned nine, his mother had finally managed to locate her uncle Disemba, who went by the name Paul Ontong and was a successful shop owner operating from just outside Bloemfontein.

  To her relief, Ontong was still very much a Motaung. He slaughtered beasts in the proper Sotho tradition and taught his children how to be good Basotho warriors who had to use the system to their advantage – even if it meant the temporary indignity of lying about their true heritage.

  Of course Pitso did not understand the constant fights that his mother and uncle used to have. Although he couldn’t follow most of what they said, the gist of it was that his mother wanted them to return to their village, while his uncle said they should stay put in Bloemfontein and be part of the coloured community. They spoke good Afrikaans, most of them, and they were light enough in complexion to pass for coloured. Even though he could speak Sotho, sometimes the elder people spoke a far more complex vernacular which seemed to confound even Uncle Disemba’s own children, who were slightly older than Pitso. His cousins had been born at one of the concentration camps during the war.

  Happy as he was to have connected with his uncle at last, Pitso’s world was about to become more complicated.

  CHAPTER 12

  When Pitso was around ten, he was subjected to his mother’s nightly performances of remorse and grief, grotesque pantomimes that would embed themselves in his young mind, haunting him in his adulthood. In later years, whenever he thought of a love that was lost, he would find himself harking back to his childhood.

  Their evenings would always follow the same routine. After supper, and a short session of storytelling, his favourite part, his mother would suddenly snap shut. Then she would start talking, first in a plaintive tone: ‘I know, my dear Cornie, it was I who drove you away from me, from us. But, Cornie, you have to forgive me now.’

  Her monologue would rise in pitch as she suddenly collapsed onto her knees, pounding the hard dirt floor with her fists until the knuckles were red. Every night, without fail, she would punish herself for her effrontery and impudence towards her man, her presumptuous nature in thinking the man she loved could stand up to his mother, or to the neighbours, and declare his love for Matshiliso and their young child. God knows she had tried to forget about him, to move on. But how do you unlove? How do you uncommit? How do you uncry the tears of hope?

  It never occurred to Matshiliso that her outpourings of remorse and endless tears and sometimes unintelligible fulminations subjected her young son to unspeakable suffering. That each night’s performance sent a dagger through him – daggers that he would wish to plunge into the person of his father if he were to meet him one day.

  These long monologues that he was forced to endure, night after night, which constantly re-enacted his father’s flight from the family nest, reminded him, perhaps unfairly, that his father had been a coward; he had run away from responsibilities. Daytime offered Pitso some respite from this reality. But at night-time, thanks to his mother’s performances, the message was drummed into his head that he did not have a father and because of it he was a half-being, if not a complete nonentity. He would have liked to console his mother, or to politely ask his mother to be quiet, or even to shout back at her for her selfishness and pointless self-immolation.

  Even at that tender age, thanks to the many hours he spent by himself, he had come to the realisation that thoughts needed to be dressed in appropriate clothing before being sent out to do the speaker’s bidding. He had many thoughts that he wished he could communicate to his mother, but he was not mature enough to spin the appropriate words in which to dress them
.

  He also lacked the passion with which his mother’s nightly doses of self-pity were delivered. So, while she raged and cried, he sat quietly and thought of other things. He thought of his rat friends, to whom he spoke endlessly, without fear.

  He would be rudely awoken from these reveries by his mother violently reaching out for him and smothering his face with kisses. It happened every night without fail: tears streaming down her cheeks, her body heavy with fresh, warm sweat from her recent exertions, she would start kissing him all over, muttering to herself, ‘Cornie, my dear Cornie, this boy is going to grow up to be a man. Just like you. You must see how big he is. He is going to go places, Cornie. Soon enough, he will be looking after me. But we still need you back, Cornie, to give this young man direction. We need you back to lead us, Cornie. I am a vile creature for having insulted you. Now my child plays with rats because you are not here. I deserve to die, Cornie.’

  Then she would sob, ‘Cornie, you remember the things you did back in my village. The boys you taught how to hunt. The girls and boys you taught how to grow food on our plantations. Come back, Cornie.’

  At long last, when every bit of energy had been sapped from her body, she would kneel beside her bed, read from the Bible and say a prayer. She prayed with a sombre, solid voice devoid of her earlier emotionalism. After that, they would go to sleep.

  But then, suddenly, everything changed: his mother grew big with child. There were whispers in the neighbourhood, accusing fingers jabbed in her direction when she was not looking. Who was the father, who was the father?

  When the child, a girl, was finally delivered, she looked Indian. Saloojee and his family immediately left town, and Pitso’s mother was taken to a place for the mentally ill. After only three months in the terrible conditions at this facility, Matshiliso passed away. Soon thereafter, Pitso and his younger sister were taken to the place of safety for coloured people where Pitso had been attending school. The girl died at the age of two, from tuberculosis. The death of his sister, his only remaining family, plunged Pitso into an abyss of depression. He would go for days without eating, and he had endless nightmares in which his mother was always lamenting, apologising for leaving him all by himself, asking him to be strong.

  By the time Pitso had reached his teens, the character of Bloemfontein and its environs had changed. Mixed-race people had suddenly come out of the woodwork. Like him, they were taught how to read, write and make things with their hands. They were trained in carpentry. They learned the art of the blacksmith, helping local farmers with horseshoes and other related requirements.

  The centre where Pitso lived was laid out on a large tract of land. The residents kept livestock – pigs, cattle, mules, sheep and some horses. They grew their own food too: spinach, cabbages, carrots, potatoes, sunflowers, the lot. From a young age, children were drilled in the milking of cows, the grooming of horses, working in the vegetable fields. Pitso wasn’t of much use in the vegetable fields, but he had to pitch in; it was the law of the centre.

  ‘By the time you leave this place, you will be independent, self-sufficient adults,’ the overseer, a man by the name of Fouché, would tell his charges. He was coloured, but so light-skinned many mistook him for a white man. He revelled in blacks cowering before him, calling him baas.

  One of the survival skills the boys were taught was swimming. Mr Fouché personally trained them in a dam that had been constructed for irrigation purposes. Some teachers raised concerns that the water might not be clean, but Mr Fouché ignored their fears and took his charges to the dam, where he drove them hard. It riled Pitso that he never won any of the races that the boys organised among themselves. His boast, however, was that he could swim for the longest. Everybody agreed he had strong lungs.

  Over and above their work in the fields, the children at the centre were made to read the Bible every day. Some of the children hated the Bible, but Pitso didn’t. He’d grown up on it. He loved the stories. They took you to places you’d never been. They told you everything was possible: you could walk on water. You could see trees that burned ferociously, without ever being consumed by the flames. You could pass through the eye of a needle. You could build a ship so huge it could accommodate every animal on earth. It was a great book. That’s why he also read the Bible in his own time. He knew other children would laugh at him if he told them that. They would think him strange – they already were finding him strange. He had the lightest complexion at the centre, yet he continued to speak Sesotho, against the advice of all the senior people, who encouraged the children to stay away from the native languages.

  ‘English and Afrikaans are your future,’ the teachers would say. ‘Mainly English. African languages will only take you back to the bush. And remember one thing: we are a special people.’

  Of all their activities at the centre, Pitso’s favourite was when they sang church songs to the accompaniment of the church organ. Whenever he could get an opportunity, Pitso would tinker with the organ. Because he was everyone’s favourite in this new environment – all the coloured people there admired his complexion and impressive build, similar to his own father’s – no one minded that he was always fiddling with the revered instrument. In fact, they encouraged him to play and sing, which he did with gusto. In due course, he became the church organist’s assistant, which meant that during the older man’s absence, Pitso would play the organ. It was his duty to keep it polished to a shine. When the centre for coloured children acquired a second-hand piano, Pitso was naturally the first person to play it. The official organist did not like this instrument with its funny short notes and less resonant sound, so it was left to Pitso to teach others how to play this new instrument. Soon, the coloured youth there had formed themselves into a formidable singing troupe. When Pitso was not playing the organ at the centre, he trifled with the accordion given to him by his mother years before.

  He used to attract a small crowd on weekends as he took the long walk to his uncle Paul Ontong’s house on the outskirts of Bloemfontein, playing his accordion and singing as he went, ‘Mangoane nthekele serantabole sethiba letsatsi … serantabole serantabole sethiba letsatsi.’

  CHAPTER 13

  A few months after the arrival of the piano, the teaching staff at the centre was joined by a woman straight from France, Madame Clinquemeur. She had been brought to teach history, English, Latin and music. She was slight of build, with long blonde hair and piercing blue eyes behind her spectacles. Immediately popular with both staff and pupils, Madame Clinquemeur took a special liking to Pitso. Long after the other children had left choir practice, Pitso would stay behind in the piano room, practising. Madame Clinquemeur remained in the room as well, so she could get an understanding of how much the students already knew. She believed she could glean this from Pitso, who seemed to be the students’ obvious ambassador.

  The friendship between the two soon grew beyond the music room. What Madame also enjoyed about this giant boy was that he had an aptitude for languages. She’d been at the centre for only a few months, but she could already detect that Pitso was picking up French and Latin faster than everybody else there.

  During the day, the two of them could be seen sitting under a tree, drinking lemonade, talking, quizzing each other, laughing. Sometimes they took long walks in the sunflower groves on the periphery of the school. Walking next to a lumbering Pitso, the teacher looked tiny. Other teachers started talking: it was good to be friendly with one’s pupils, but Madame Clinquemeur was going too far. A teacher couldn’t and shouldn’t allow her pupils to be too familiar. They must know their place: there was a fine line between familiarity and a reduced sense of respect for one’s teachers. If these complaints ever reached Madame Clinquemeur, she ignored them.

  Yet, for Pitso, these were possibly the happiest days of his life. As happy as he had ever been with his mother. In fact, Madame Clinquemeur, in a way, reminded him of his own mother. When not consumed by self-pity, Matshiliso had also encouraged him to come ou
t of himself, to articulate his thoughts freely without being self-conscious, to dream aloud without feeling guilty.

  ‘When you go back overseas I should go with you,’ he told her one day.

  She laughed. ‘But why?’

  ‘I want to be a voyager, I want to travel on ships, I want to discover new places, engage in long conversations with strangers, play with ideas, experiment with things.’

  ‘But you don’t need me to do that. You can get up right now and sail for India, for America, for Europe, all on your own. I know you’re capable of taking care of yourself.’

  ‘I need you by my side, madame. I want to explore the world with you.’ He had not meant to say that. He bit his lip, feeling how tense the moment had become. Neither of them said anything more.

  One evening they were together again in the piano room, singing and playing the piano. When they took a break, she said, ‘You know what I like about you, Roelof?’

  He looked at her, a question in his eyes.

  ‘It’s that you are not afraid of anything. You are not afraid of work. You are not afraid of challenges. You work hard in the field. You were the first to confront this monster of an organ, and gradually you are beginning to tame it. You sing out loudly, without fear. How did you become so versatile?’

  ‘I don’t know, Madame Clinquemeur …’

  ‘Maybe it’s because you have the blood of adventurers flowing in your veins. You have French blood.’

  ‘But how can that be? I am Afrikaans. At least, a part of me is Afrikaans. Our connection to Europe, as far as I know, is through the Dutch.’

  ‘See? You still have a lot to learn. First of all, you, like me, are of French Huguenot stock, even if your people have been here for a few generations. Me? I came directly from France just after the war.’