by Mda, Zakes
Even today the civilized ones condescendingly visit the clothes of the amaqaba, and wear them as curiosities during special cultural occasions. As their everyday attire the civilized ones wear German and Java prints that are embroidered in the West African tradition, but they still boast that they are in African dress. To them, African fashion means West African, and never the clothing of the amaXhosa or some other ethnic group of South Africa.
Camagu parks his car and walks into Vulindlela Trading Store. There is a long line of people who are waiting to be served. He is not sure whether he should go to the counter and make his inquiry or join the queue. He thinks everyone is looking at him with suspicion. To them he looks like the kind of person who thinks he is better than the common village folk, and who will therefore jump the queue. He decides to join it.
It is a long queue and the salesperson behind the counter takes her time. She is passing pleasantries and exchanging snippets of gossip with the customers as she serves them. Camagu amuses himself by watching a teenage boy whose hat has made him very popular with a group of children who are surrounding him. It is a miner’s helmet in the black-and-yellow colors of Kaizer Chiefs Football Club. It has many horns that fascinate the kids. He tells them that the horns grew because his grandmother told him folktales during the day. Such stories are supposed to be told only at night.
“Every time she told me a story a horn grew,” he tells his captive audience.
Finally Camagu’s turn comes and he asks for the owner of the store. He is told that the owner and his wife are not in. They are in the house behind the store. The salesperson asks Qukezwa to take the visitor to the house.
Once they are outside the store Qukezwa smiles at him and impishly says, “I am not married.”
Camagu takes a close look at her, his eyes betraying his shock. She is short and plump. She wears a skimpy blue-and-yellow floral dress. Although she is not particularly beautiful, she is quite attractive. Almost half her face is hidden by a black woolen cap which is emblazoned with the P symbol of Pierre Cardin in green and yellow.
“I am available if you want me,” she adds.
“What do you mean?”
“You can lobola me if you like.”
“What is your name?”
“Qukezwa Zim.”
They have reached the door of the house. Without another word she runs back to the store laughing. He knocks unsteadily and Missis lets him in.
He sits on the sofa, and looks at a framed picture of a nude African woman carrying a naked baby—a very common poster that he has seen sold by street vendors in every small town through which he has driven.
John Dalton enters the room.
“It is my wife’s idea of art,” he says, making light of his embarrassment. “I can assure you I am a man of discerning taste.”
They both laugh and shake hands.
“What can I do for you?” asks Dalton.
“I am looking for a woman. Her name is NomaRussia. The first person I asked when I entered this village told me that there was someone of that name who used to work at your store.”
“NomaRussia?” says Dalton, trying to think very hard. “I don’t remember her. Of course that is a common name in these parts. It has historical significance . . . from the days of Nongqawuse. What has she done? Why are you looking for her?”
Camagu concocts some story that she worked for him in Johannesburg, and she inadvertently left with his passport. He dare not tell this white man that he does not know why he is looking for NomaRussia, that he was driving to the airport to catch a plane to America when all of a sudden he took a different direction. He looked at the map and decided to take the ten-hour drive to Qolorha—NomaRussia’s name buzzing in his head.
“What is her surname?” asks Dalton. “I know all the families in this region.”
Unfortunately Camagu does not know it. Dalton says he is sorry he can’t help him. He exclaims, “City people are amazing. This woman worked for you, but you don’t know her surname!”
But Dalton is curious about the stranger and wants to find out more about him. They talk about Johannesburg and the political situation, and about America. Dalton is fascinated by an umXhosa man who has spent so many years living in America. He himself has never left South Africa and has spent most of his life in the Eastern Cape. Camagu cannot get over the fact that Dalton speaks much better isiXhosa than he’ll ever be able to.
After two hours and many cups of tea, Dalton takes Camagu to his car.
“Is there a place where I can put up for the night?” asks Camagu.
“There is the Blue Flamingo Hotel. It is not a bad place.”
“I think I’ll stay there for a few days. . . until I can sort out this NomaRussia problem.”
As he drives away he sees Qukezwa sweeping the stoop of the store, her yellow thighs glistening in the late afternoon sun.
“What a forward girl!” he says to himself. He is renowned as a man of great venereal appetite. But she is still a child. Young enough to be his daughter if he had bothered to marry and procreate.
4
It is a beautifully undisciplined dance that the amagqiyazana—the young girls who have not yet reached puberty—are performing. They shake their little waists and lift their legs in innocent abandon. Their song rises and falls with the wind. It is the same wind that carries the sonorous sounds of the sea and scatters them in the valleys. The audience claps hands, responding to the rhythms. Everyone finds it charming that some of the girls are consistently out of step.
Camagu is filled with a searing longing for an imagined blissfulness of his youth. He has vague memories of his home village, up in the mountains in the distant inland parts of the country. He remembers the fruit trees and the graves of long-departed relatives. He can see dimly through the mist of decades all the lush plants that grew in his grandfather’s garden, including aloes of different types. There are the beautiful houses too: the four-walled tin-roofed ixande, the rondavels, the cattle kraal, the fowl run, the toolshed. Then the government came and moved the people down to the flatlands, giving them only small plots and no compensation.
He was only a toddler when he left with his parents to settle in the township of Orlando East, in the city of Johannesburg. There it was a different life, devoid of the song of the amagqiyazana. And there he grew up until the political upheavals of the 1960s sent him into exile in his late teens. So many things in Qolorha bring back long-forgotten images. He is glad to find himself in the middle of these festivities.
The cacophony of birds, monkeys, and waves had woken him up very early in the morning. To some people this racket from the surrounding woods and from the nearby Indian Ocean may be music, but he would have preferred to enjoy the austere wooden bed of the Blue Flamingo Hotel without further disturbance. His night had not been a restful one because of a recurring dream.
In his dream he was the river, and NomaRussia was its water. Crystal clear. Flowing on him. Sliding smoothly on his body. Until she flowed into the ocean. He ran after her, shouting that she should flow back. Flow back up the river. Upstream. Up his eager body. Climb its lusty mountains, even. When he failed to catch her, he tried to catch the dream itself, to arrest it, so that it could be with him forever. It slipped through his fingers and escaped. He chased it, but it outran him. He woke up, all sweaty and breathless, drifted into slumber, and dreamt the same dream again. Over and over again. For the whole night.
Although he was exhausted from all that running he had to do in the dream, he had jumped out of bed, taken a quick shower, and stepped out of his chalet to face an uncertain day in a strange village.
He had decided to take a walk through the village. Women and children stared at him at every homestead he passed. He was obviously a stranger. All the while he looked very closely at every young woman he met, in case he saw someone who remotely resembled NomaRussia.
He had been called to this gathering by the joyous celebration.
“Are you just go
ing to stand here watching children dance, or are you going to join other men and eat meat and drink beer?”
The furrowed face looks friendly. He cuts a handsome figure in his dark suit and white shirt. His wrinkled necktie has a huge knot. Camagu extends his hand and warmly shakes the old man’s.
“I am a tourist from Johannesburg. My name is Camagu, son of Cesane.”
“A black tourist!” exclaims the aged one. “We only see white tourists here. Mostly stupid ones who come to Qolorha because a foolish girl once lied that she saw miracles here.”
“Ah, Nongqawuse. I learned about her at primary school. We even sang songs about her.”
“It is you learned ones who have turned her into a goddess who must be worshipped. Yet she killed the nation of the amaXhosa. Anyway, why do I bother a stranger with the problems of this community? I am Bhonco, son of Ximiya.”
This is his homestead, he says. He is the owner of this feast. His daughter has been made principal of the secondary school, so he decided to make a feast to thank those who are in the ground, the ancestors. The stranger from Johannesburg is welcome to share with them the little that has been prepared. He calls a prancing boy to lead the esteemed visitor to the place where he will be served.
The boy leads Camagu towards an umsintsi tree under which some village men are eating meat from a big dish and drinking beer in a tin container that is passed from one man to the next.
Bhonco shouts at the boy, “Hey, kwedini! Stupid boy! Why are you taking the visitor to those village bumpkins? Don’t you see he’s a teacher? Take him to the house where the teachers are!”
The “bumpkins” laugh. An elder among them shouts back at Bhonco that he must not be so high and mighty now that his daughter is the principal of Qolorha-by-Sea Secondary School. He must remember that fortune is like mist. It can disappear anytime.
Camagu joins the elite of Qolorha-by-Sea at table. He discovers that “the little that has been prepared” is a mountain of beef, mutton, chicken, samp, rice, potatoes, tomato, and onion gravy, beetroot, and green salads. And bottles of beer, brandy, and wine. Later he learns that the patriarch spared no expense to celebrate his daughter’s elevation. He slaughtered an ox, two sheep, and a number of chickens. Women brewed barrels and barrels of sorghum beer. Xoliswa Ximiya was against the very idea of holding an ostentatious feast in her honor. But the patriarch would not miss the opportunity to show the Believers that it is the Unbelievers who rule the roost in Qolorha-by-Sea.
No one is ever invited to a village feast. When people hear there is a feast at someone’s homestead, they go there to enjoy themselves. Others, especially the neighbors and close friends, go beforehand to help with the preparations and to contribute whatever food they can afford. Everyone is welcome at a village feast. Indeed, it is considered sacrilege to stay away from your fellow man’s feast.
But none of the Believers have come. The war of the Believers and Unbelievers has gone to that extent. They don’t attend each other’s feasts. They do attend each other’s funerals, though, because death is, as the elders say, the daughter-in-law of all homesteads.
Cynics will say that they attend each other’s funerals to make sure that the deceased is really dead. One less person to be irritated about.
But this boycott does not worry Bhonco and NoPetticoat. There are more people at this feast than Zim, the elder of the Believers, would ever be able to muster at a feast of his own. After all, there are more descendants of Twin-Twin’s in the Qolorha area than there are of Twin’s. This is because Twin-Twin had five wives, who gave birth to many more children than Twin’s sole wife was able to do. Another reason is that Twin-Twin was the original Unbeliever. He refused to slaughter his cattle when Nongqawuse gave the orders that the amaXhosa should destroy all their herds. He said the prophetess was a liar who had been bought by white people to destroy the black race. Today the village is full of Twin-Twin’s progeny, because not many of his children died when famine attacked the land after Nongqawuse’s prophecies failed. At the Blue Flamingo Hotel alone, every other charwoman, gardener, waiter, and bartender comes from the loins of those who came from Twin-Twin’s loins. Three generations of chefs, trained by Zimbabweans, are from Twin-Twin’s line. And everyone is always at pains to stress that Twin’s and Twin-Twin’s lines are distinct, even though they are joined at the top by the headless ancestor.
The members of Qolorha society who are sitting at the table are discussing precisely these issues, as they stuff themselves with meat and beer. They are laughing about it all. One teacher asks, “How far can you stretch pettiness?” And the rest of the table laughs once more. Camagu notices that Xoliswa Ximiya does not laugh. She merely grins. She seems embarrassed.
The attention turns to the stranger in their midst. After he has introduced himself, Xoliswa Ximiya wants to know, “What puts you in this godforsaken place?”
“Godforsaken? I think it is the most beautiful place on earth,” replies Camagu, meaning what he says.
“Perhaps if you are only a tourist. If you were forced to live here forever you’d think twice about it.”
“Maybe you are right. I’ve never lived in a village before.”
“It must be something important that has brought you here.”
Camagu repeats the concocted story of a young woman called NomaRussia from these parts who worked for him in Johannesburg. He released her from work because he was going to the United States to live there. Only when he was on his way to the airport did he discover that NomaRussia had inadvertently taken his passport with her.
“I am looking for her, and I hope that some of you may know her,” he tells them.
NomaRussia is a very common name, one of the teachers explains. The people of this region began giving their valued daughters this name—which means Mother of the Russians—when the Russians killed Sir George Cathcart during the Crimean War in 1854. Cathcart, the teacher further explains, was the much-hated colonial governor who finally defeated the amaXhosa in the War of Mlanjeni, a war that had initially been provoked and launched by Sir Harry Smith, the pompous moron who had styled himself the “Great White Chief of the Xhosas.” The colonists called the amaXhosa Xhosas, or even Kosas!
He must be the history teacher of Qolorha-by-Sea Secondary School, judging by the way he coughs out these facts with aplomb, as if he is in the classroom.
“Since then the amaXhosa have been great admirers of the Russians,” he adds.
Unfortunately no one seems to know the particular NomaRussia Camagu is looking for. Perhaps if he knew her surname they would be able to help. They cannot fit the description of her that he has given them with any NomaRussia who worked as a maid in Johannesburg.
It is too late for Camagu to amend his story. He must remember next time that NomaRussia did not work for him as a maid. She was merely visiting Johannesburg to attend a funeral. That will narrow the search. Surely not many NomaRussias from Qolorha-by-Sea have visited Johannesburg for a funeral recently. But then how did his passport fall into her hands?
Camagu’s eyes are glued on Xoliswa Ximiya. He does not remember seeing anyone quite so beautiful before. Her beauty exceeds that of the hungry women who are referred to as supermodels in fashion magazines. It is the kind of beauty that is cold and distant, though. Not the kind that makes your whole body hot and charges it with electric currents, like NomaRussia’s. If only she could bring herself to smile a bit. Her colleagues are now full of boisterous cheer, most of which is obviously induced by the spirits. Yet she remains collected, and throughout maintains her no-nonsense demeanor. Her uncompromising eyes penetrate you when she is addressing you. Deep inside them lurks a sorrow that cannot be remitted.
NoPetticoat enters to find out if the guests need anything. She is introduced to the visitor from Johannesburg. He can see the source of Xoliswa Ximiya’s good looks. When he met Bhonco outside, Camagu’s eyes could salvage beauty from his aging face. Now here is the mother of the homestead, coming with her own loveliness and
grace. She is a sonsy woman, though, not willowy and grave like her daughter.
“You are a family of beautiful people,” says Camagu when NoPetticoat has left the room. “Your father, your mother, and you.”
She does not thank him for the compliment. Perhaps, thinks Camagu, she has no time for such pettiness as acknowledging compliments or admiring beauty. But then why has she taken the trouble to enhance her own beauty by braiding her hair in such trendy extensions? Her whole mode of dress is elegant. Severe but elegant.
Xoliswa Ximiya is more fascinated by the fact that the stranger was on his way to the United States of America. She informs him that he will be happy in that wonderful country. She herself has lived there, empowering herself with the skill of teaching English as a second language. It is a fairy-tale country, with beautiful people. People like Dolly Parton and Eddie Murphy. It is a vast country that is highly technological. Even though Camagu comes from Johannesburg, he will be fascinated by America. A city like New York is ten times the size of Johannesburg. She remembers when she went to Washington, D.C., and saw the White House, and the Capitol, and the memorial of one historical figure or another. She also remembers when she traveled in a subway in New York. Then she goes on to explain that a subway is a train that moves underground. Very much unlike the Johannesburg–East London train which crudely moves above the ground where every moron can see it.
Before Camagu leaves he must remind her to give him a few pointers on how to survive in America, she adds with a flourish.
America, wonderful America!
Her colleagues are beginning to fidget. Obviously they have been subjected to this harangue before. Camagu is embarrassed on her behalf.
“For how long were you in America?” he asks.
“Six months! I was at a college in Athens, Ohio.”
“Athens, like in Greece!” adds a woman who was earlier introduced as Vathiswa. She is sitting next to Xoliswa Ximiya, and is obviously her great fan. She nods vigorously at everything the principal says. Camagu has no heart to tell her that Athens is a college town that is even smaller than the nearby town of Butterworth.