The Heart of Redness: A Novel

by Mda, Zakes

“You didn’t come here to talk about my father, did you?”

  “I came to ask for ityala . . . for credit. . . I need a tin of beef. And some tobacco for my pipe.”

  Dalton shakes his head, and takes out a big black book from under the counter. After a few pages he finds Bhonco’s name.

  “You see,” he says, “your ityala is already very long. You have taken too many things on credit, and you have not paid yet. You promised that you were going to get your old-age pension soon.”

  Dalton’s wife, who is simply known as Missis by the villagers, thinks it is necessary to rescue her husband. She firmly steps forward and says, “He is not getting any more credit, John.”

  Bhonco does not take kindly to this interference. He raises his voice. “Let’s leave women out of this!”

  Fortunately Missis understands no isiXhosa; she is a Free State Afrikaner. Dalton met her when he attended the Cherry Festival in Ficksburg many years ago. She was the Cherry Queen, although it would be hard to believe that now—what with her rotten front teeth and all. The trouble is that she eats too many sweets. Her saving grace is that she hardly ever smiles. She still finds it difficult to understand her husband’s cozy relationship with these rustics.

  Bhonco adopts a new tactic and becomes very pitiful.

  “Ever since Nongqawuse things were never right,” he laments. “Until now. They are becoming right a bit now, although not for me. They are becoming right for others. Me . . . no . . . I am still waiting for my nkamnkam.

  “This is my seventh year waiting. My wife came here as a child . . . she is many years younger than me. But she now gets nkamnkam. I am very very old, but the government refuses to give me my pension.”

  Then he goes into a litany of the troubles he has gone through working for this country. He began to work half a century ago at a textile factory in East London, then at a dairy, then at a blanket factory, then . . . He even worked at the docks in Cape Town for more than eight years.

  He became permanently crippled—although it is impossible to see any sign of that now—when his sister pushed him down a donga, shouting, “When are you going to mourn for your father?” Since then he has never been able to work again.

  Why won’t the government give him nkamnkam like all the old men and women of South Africa who are on old-age pensions today? Is it fair that now, even though ravines of maturity run wild on his face, he should still not receive any nkamnkam?

  “Maybe it is not fair,” says Dalton. “But how are you going to pay me since you get no nkamnkam? Are you going to take your wife’s money to pay for your tobacco and luxury items like canned beef?”

  “Did you not hear? My daughter is now the principal. I’ll pay you.”

  It is late in the afternoon when Bhonco arrives home. NoPetticoat is busy cooking the evening umphokoqo—the maize porridge that is specially eaten with sour milk—on the Primus stove. When the white man has smiled—in other words, when NoPetticoat has been paid at the Blue Flamingo or has received her nkamnkam—she cooks on the Primus stove rather than outside with a three-legged pot.

  “I didn’t know that the white man has smiled at you,” says Bhonco, as he puts the can of corned beef on the table. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have humiliated myself begging for ityala from that uppity Dalton.”

  Before NoPetticoat can admonish him for piling debt on their shoulders, Xoliswa Ximiya walks in. She looks like the “mistress” she is—which is what pupils call unmarried female teachers—in a navy-blue two-piece costume with a white frilly blouse. She has her father’s bone structure, and is quite tall and well proportioned—which is good if you want to be a model in Johannesburg, but works against you in a village where men prefer their women plump and juicy. And indeed this is the language they use when they describe them, as if they are talking about a piece of meat. She has a charmingly triste face, and brown-dyed hair that she braids with extensions in Butterworth. But people never stop wondering how she is able to walk among the rocks and gorges of Qolorha-by-Sea in those high heels.

  She has just come to see how her parents are doing. She takes it as an obligation to see them occasionally. Her parents—especially her mother—were not happy when she moved out a year ago to stay in a two-room staff house in the schoolyard. At first they insisted that no unmarried daughter of theirs would live alone in her own house. It was unheard of. They had to relent when she concocted something to the effect that as a senior teacher she had to live at school or lose her job. It really frustrates her that her parents insist on treating her like a child.

  Bhonco and NoPetticoat are all over Xoliswa Ximiya, congratulating her on her promotion.

  “You are going to be the best principal that school has ever had,” says her father proudly. “At least you’ll be better than that uncircumcised boy the community kicked out.”

  Such talk makes Xoliswa Ximiya uncomfortable. But she ignores it and announces that although she appreciates the honor of being principal of her alma matter, she would very much like to work for the government.

  “But you are working for the government now as a headmistress, are you not?” says Bhonco.

  “As a teacher are you not being paid by the government?” echoes NoPetticoat.

  “I want to be a civil servant. I want to work for the Ministry of Education in Pretoria, or at the very least in Bisho.”

  “Bisho! Do you know where Bisho is from here? And Pretoria! Pretoria! No one in our family has ever been there,” cries Bhonco. He is choking with anger.

  “You want to kill your father?” asks NoPetticoat.

  “I know where Bisho is, father,” responds the daughter in a cold, sarcastic tone. “It is the capital town of our province. I have been there many times. And Pretoria is the capital city of our country. I have not been to Pretoria, but I have been much farther, father, where none of my family has ever been. I have been to America . . . across the oceans.”

  “You see, Bhonco, you should never have allowed this child to take that scholarship to America,” says NoPetticoat tiredly.

  “So now it’s my fault, NoPetticoat?”

  “If you like towns and cities so much, my child, we have never stopped you from visiting Centani or even Butterworth.” NoPetticoat tries to strike a compromise.

  “I do not care for towns and cities, mother. Anyway, Centani is just a big village and Butterworth is a small town. Don’t you understand? People I have been to school with are earning a lot of money as directors of departments in the civil service. I am sitting here in this village, with all my education, earning peanuts as a schoolteacher. I am going. I must go from this stifling village. I have made applications. As soon as I get a job I am going,” says Xoliswa Ximiya with finality.

  It is an ungrateful night, and sleep refuses to come to Bhonco. His eyelids are heavy, but sleep just won’t come. Oh, why do children ever grow up? How huggable they are when they are little boys and girls, when their parents’ word is still gospel, before the poison of the world contaminates their heads. He envies NoPetticoat, who can sleep and snore in the midst of such turbulence.

  On nights like this his scars become itchy. He rubs them a bit. He cannot reach them properly, because they cover his back. And the person who usually helps him is fast asleep. Why he has to be burdened with the scars of history, he does not understand. Perhaps that’s what prompted him to bring the Cult of the Unbelievers back from the recesses of time.

  Yes, Bhonco carries the scars that were inflicted on his great-grandfather, Twin-Twin, by men who flogged him after he had been identified as a wizard by Prophet Mlanjeni, the Man of the River. Every first boy-child in subsequent generations of Twin-Twin’s tree is born with the scars. Even those of the Middle Generations, their first males carried the scars.

  You can give Twin-Twin any name. You can call him anything. But a wizard he was not. Bhonco is adamant about that. Twin-Twin was a naughty man. Even after he died he became a naughty ancestor. Often he showed himself naked to groups of women gathering wo
od on the hillside or washing clothes in a stream. He was like that in life too. He loved women. He had a generous heart for amabhinqa, the female ones. But Prophet Mlanjeni got it all wrong. Twin-Twin was not a wizard.

  The ancestor’s name was Xikixa. A patriarch and a patrician of the Great Place of King Sarhili. He was the father of the twins, Twin and Twin-Twin. Twin-Twin was the first of the twins to be born, so according to custom he was the younger. The older twin is the one who is the last to kick the doors of the womb and to breathe the air that has already been breathed by the younger brother.

  Twin and Twin-Twin were like one person. Even their voice was one. Mothers who eyed them for their daughters could not tell one from the other. And because they were close to each other, like saliva is to the tongue, they relished playing tricks on the maidens.

  The patriarch lived his life with dignity, and brought up his children to fear and respect Qamata, or Mvelingqangi, the great god of all men and women, and to pay homage to those who are in the ground—the ancestors.

  The twins were circumcised together with the son of the chief, and therefore became men of standing in their community. They became men of wealth too, for Xikixa did not want them to wait for his death before they could inherit his fields, cattle, and overflowing silos. He divided the bulk of his wealth between them.

  Twin-Twin, the first-born twin who was younger than the second-born, loved women, and was the first to marry. And then he married again. And again. Long before Twin could know the warmth of the night. Yet the brothers remained close friends.

  Then the news of Mlanjeni reached the homestead of Twin-Twin. And that of Xikixa, which was also the home of Twin. It reached the ears of every homestead in the land.

  Mlanjeni, the Man of the River. He was only eighteen. Yet his head was not full of beautiful maidens. It did not throb with stick fights and umtshotsho dances. Instead he brooded over the evil that pervaded the world, that lurked even in the house of his own father, Kala. As a result he refused to eat his mother’s cooking, for he said it was poisoned. He decided to fast because food enervated him. Women had an enfeebling power on him. So he kept himself celibate.

  In order to stay clean he eschewed the company of other human beings, and spent his time immersed to the neck in a pool on the Keiskamma River. There he lived on the eggs of ants and on water grass.

  “That son of Kala has something to him,” said Xikixa to his twins. “He is a child, but he already talks of big things.”

  “I have heard his father talking with him about his behavior,” said Twin-Twin. “Yet he will not listen.”

  “Kala is right,” said the patriarch. “What does a boy who has not even been to circumcision school know about witchcraft and disease?”

  When the time came, Mlanjeni went to the circumcision school. Both Twin and Twin-Twin were among the amakhankatha—the men who taught the initiates how to be men. Xikixa was the ingcibi—the doctor who cut the foreskin. They saw that Mlanjeni was very thin and weak. They did not think he would survive the rigors of the mountain. But he did, and went on to become the new prophet of the amaXhosa people.

  And the amaXhosa people believed in him, for it was clear that he had contact with the spirit world and was charged by the ancestors with the task of saving humankind from itself.

  As his teachings unfolded, people knew that indeed he was the next great prophet after Nxele, the man who had revealed the truths of the world thirty years before. And both of them spoke against ubuthi, the evil charms that were poisoning the nation, and against witchcraft.

  Whereas Nxele had preached about Mdalidephu, the god of the black man; Thixo, the god of the white man; and Thixo’s son, Tayi, who was killed by the white people, Mlanjeni worshipped the sun.

  Nxele used to talk of the great day that was coming, when the dead would arise and witches would be cast into damnation in the belly of the earth. But his career was stopped short by the British, who locked him up on Robben Island. Before he surrendered he promised that he would come back again. Alas, he drowned trying to escape from the island.

  “Can it be that Mlanjeni is the reincarnation of Nxele?” Twin wondered. “After all, the amaXhosa nation is still awaiting the return of Nxele.”

  As Mlanjeni was praying to the sun, it scorched the earth. There was famine in the land. Cattle were dying. And those that still lived, you could count their ribs. As the Man of the River was waning away from his fasting, men and women of the land were waning away from starvation. And he told them that it was because of ubuthi.

  “Leave ubuthi alone,” he preached. “As long as there is witchcraft among you, there will be disease. People and animals will die. Cast away ubuthi! You do not need ubuthi to invite good fortune or to protect yourselves! Cast it away, and all come to me to be cleansed!”

  “This sickly boy is Nxele himself. Nxele has returned as he promised he would,” said Twin.

  “No, he is not Nxele,” responded Twin-Twin. “Mlanjeni is a prophet in his own right.”

  This difference of opinion developed into a serious disagreement between the twins, to the extent that they took up sticks to fight each other. Women screamed and called the patriarch. When Xikixa arrived, he was happy. His sons had never disagreed on anything before, let alone fought each other. Now, for the very first time, they were not seeing things with the same eye. A spat over prophets.

  “I was becoming worried about you two,” he said, taking the sticks away from them. “Now you are becoming human beings.”

  People came to the homestead of Mlanjeni’s father to be cleansed by the wonder child. They came from all over kwaXhosa, even from beyond the borders of the lands that had been conquered by the British. Those who had poisonous roots and evil charms disposed of them and were cleansed. But still, some people held tight to their ubuthi, and lied that they had got rid of it.

  Mlanjeni set up two antiwitchcraft poles outside his father’s house. Those suspected of witchcraft were required to walk between them. The innocent walked through. Terrible things happened to those who had ubuthi even as they approached the sacred poles.

  From early dawn, hundreds of people gathered outside the house. Among them were Xikixa, his wives, his other children from the junior houses, Twin-Twin and his wives and children, and Twin. People had come because word had spread up to the foothills of the Maluti Mountains that Mlanjeni cured the sick, and made the lame to walk, the dumb to speak, and the blind to see.

  He was a man of great power. He lit his pipe on the sun, and when he danced drops of sweat from his body caused the rain to fall.

  The Man of the River appeared at the door of his hut, and after one word from him people saw the star of the morning coming down from the sky and placing itself on his forehead. Another word from him and the earth shook and the mountains trembled. He disappeared into the hut again. And people began to sing a thunderous song that echoed in the faraway hills. They sang until the sun rose from behind the mountains and moved to the center of the sky.

  Mlanjeni emerged again, raised his spear to the heavens, and touched the sun. The sun came down to touch his head, and went through his body until it was bright like the sun itself. People prostrated themselves, shouting, “Mlanjeni! Mlanjeni is our true Lord! The Man of the River is the conqueror of death!”

  One by one they began to walk between the poles. The clean were unscathed. The unclean were struck by weakness and fear as they approached the poles. Then they writhed on the spot, unable to move. The people shouted, “Out! Get out, witchcraft!” until the victims staggered through the poles to Mlanjeni, who gave them some twigs that would protect them from further evil and keep them pure.

  Twin-Twin’s wife from the senior house stood up and slowly walked towards the poles. It was as though she was in a trance. As she moved between the poles she froze. She was paralyzed. Mlanjeni began to dance a frenzied dance around the poles, and the crowd chanted, “She is fixed! She is fixed! She is a witch!”

  Twin-Twin rushed to his wife,
who was writhing on the ground in agony. He was shouting, “No! No! My wife is not a witch! There must be a mistake!”

  A group of zealots grabbed him and dragged him to the donga below Kala’s homestead. There they flogged him with whips. They beat him until he was almost unconscious. Then they went back to the Man of the River expecting his praise.

  “Twin-Twin is a wizard. That is why he was defending his wife who was clearly identified as a witch by the poles,” said Mlanjeni feebly. “But you had no right to beat him up. I have said it before, no person should ever be harmed for being a witch. Witchcraft is not in the nature of men and women. They are not born with it. It is an affliction that I can cure.”

  Twin-Twin’s weals opened up and became wounds. After many months the wounds healed and became scars. But occasionally they itched and reminded him of his flagellation. At the time he did not know that his progeny was destined to carry the burden of the scars.

  For a long time he was angry at the injustice of it all. He was not a wizard, and was sure that his wife was not a witch. Yet his own father and twin brother were blaming him for stupidly defending the honor of a woman who had been declared a witch by none other than the great prophet himself. And now both Xikixa and Twin were ostracizing his senior wife.

  It did not escape Twin-Twin that this was the second time he had quarreled with his twin brother, and on both occasions the prophet was the cause.

  But he continued to defend Mlanjeni. When the British decided to hunt the prophet down—claiming they did not approve of his witch-hunting and witch-curing activities—he was just as furious as the rest of the men of kwaXhosa.

  Twin-Twin suppressed the bitterness in his heart and went with Twin, his father, and a group of mounted men to meet the white man who called himself the Great White Chief of the Xhosas, Sir Harry Smith. He watched in humiliation as the Great White Chief commanded the elders and even the chiefs to kiss his staff and his boots. And they did. And so did he.

  The Great White Chief was running wild all over the lands of the amaXhosa, doing whatever he liked in the name of Queen Victoria of England. He even deposed Sandile, the king of the amaXhosa-ka-Ngqika. This caused all the chiefs, even those who were Sandile’s rivals, to rally around the deposed king.