The Heart of Redness: A Novel

by Mda, Zakes

  “But I am afraid that is exactly what those cattle-killers of the frontier plan to do . . . kill settlers and rape white women,” said the governor. “And I will deal with them in the same manner that I dealt with Te Rauparaha.”

  The sufferings of the Middle Generations are only whispered. It is because of the insistence: Forget the past. Don’t only forgive it. Forget it as well. The past did not happen. You only dreamt it. It is a figment of your rich collective imagination. It did not happen. Banish your memory. It is a sin to have a memory. There is virtue in amnesia. The past. It did not happen. It did not happen. It did not happen.

  John Dalton’s friends think that memory is being used to torment them for the sins of their fathers. Sins committed in good faith.

  Next week two of them are leaving, one for Australia and the other for New Zealand. One owns a cottage at Qolorha-by-Sea and the other lives in Port Elizabeth. Today they and a few other cottage owners gather in the garden of the emigrant, braaing meat on an open charcoal stand and drinking beer.

  Dalton is one of the guests.

  “What will happen to this nice cottage?” he asks.

  “I am selling it,” says the emigrant. “My house in East London too. And my ostrich farm in the Karoo. I am leaving everything in the hands of my estate agents.”

  Perhaps Camagu will be interested in this cottage, thinks Dalton. He seems so happy in Qolorha, and is involving himself in the life of the community. He has even established a business with some village women.

  It all started with the oysters and mussels that he ate at Zim’s. He was sold on the taste. When he moved to the sea cottage he is currently taking care of on behalf of the Butterworth doctor, he made it a habit to buy fresh oysters and mussels from the women. Two women in particular, NoGiant and MamCirha, became regulars at his cottage. Every other day they brought him oysters and mussels kept in a bucket of sea water to prevent them from going bad. They told him that sea-harvest can last for many days in a bucket of sea water. Since then he has not had any need to buy meat.

  Later on, Camagu wanted to learn to harvest the sea himself. But the women would not teach him. He was good as a customer and not as a competitor. One morning he found Qukezwa harvesting the sea. She was in a good mood and offered to teach him the art of catching mussels and oysters, or imbhaza and imbhatyisa. She told him that the best time to catch this valued seafood was in the morning between seven and nine.

  “When the moon is red,” she explained, “or is dying, with only a small piece remaining, then we know that the next morning will be good for harvesting the sea.”

  She taught him how to walk into the sea, sometimes with the water rising up to his chest, how to use his hands to feel the rocks at the bottom, and how to use an ulugxa to dislodge imbhaza and imbhatyisa from the rocks. She also taught him how to get amangquba and amaqonga, the varieties of abalone that look like big snails. He learned fast, for there was no guarantee that Qukezwa’s good mood would still be there the next morning.

  NoGiant and MamCirha were not happy that he was no longer buying their seafood now that he could harvest his own. In fact, he could not eat all his harvest, and this gave him a good idea. He had no means of earning a living in this village. Soon his money was going to run out. His Toyota was sitting idle since he hardly went anywhere in it. He made up his mind to catch oysters and mussels, keep them in sea water as he was taught by the women, take them in his car, and sell them to hotels in East London and the surrounding smaller towns. He was not going to compete with the women. Instead he would form a cooperative society with them.

  Indeed, the business was established, with NoGiant and MamCirha leading a committee of very enthusiastic women. It is not as lucrative as they might wish. It is struggling on. But Camagu, for the first time after many years, is a very fulfilled man.

  Although he has not said it in so many words, he regards Qolorha as his home now, and it is reasonable for Dalton to suspect he will not be thinking of going to America or even back to Johannesburg in the near future. He often says this is the most beautiful place in the world. Even if he leaves, there is no harm in investing in property, especially such a prime one. Dalton will certainly bring the matter to his attention.

  “This is one of the things we’ll miss,” says the second emigrant to the first. “I don’t think where we’re going we’ll get such beautiful land for a bottle of brandy.”

  Everyone laughs. Except Dalton.

  “You are the only one who will remain in this mess, John,” says a cottage owner who sees himself as a prospective emigrant down the line. “Everyone is leaving.”

  “Not everyone,” says Dalton, not bothering to hide his irritation. “The Afrikaners are not leaving.”

  “Do you fancy yourself an Afrikaner, just because you married one?”

  “I am staying here,” says Dalton. “I am not joining your chicken run. This is my land. I belong here. It is the land of my forefathers.”

  “That is self-delusion, John,” warns the first emigrant.

  Dalton is now getting angry. Against his better judgment he raises his voice and says, “The Afrikaner is more reliable than you chaps. He belongs to the soil. He is of Africa. Even if he is not happy about the present situation he will not go anywhere. He cannot go anywhere.”

  Everyone is taken aback by his outburst. No one understands why he takes their ribbing so seriously. So personally. They all look at him in astonishment.

  “He can go to Orania,” says another prospective emigrant, trying to recapture the jolly mood.

  “That is the problem. You call the Afrikaner racist when he wants a homeland for his own people. You laugh at his pie-in-the-sky Orania homeland as a joke—which it is—but you are not aware that you your-selves have a homeland mentality. Your homelands are in Australia and New Zealand. That is why you emigrate in droves to those countries where you can spend a blissful life without blacks. . . with people of your culture and your language . . . just like the Orania Afrikaners. Whenever there is any problem in this country you threaten to leave. You are only here for what you can get out of this country. You think you can hold us all to ransom.”

  “Us? You are not a native, John. You may think you are, but you are not,” says the second emigrant, jokingly using the “native” tag of a bygone era.

  “At least in Australia they killed almost all their natives,” titters the first emigrant.

  But the other cottage owners are not prepared to take Dalton’s accusations lying down. How dare he call them racists when they are well-known liberals who fought against apartheid? Dalton himself knows very well how they used to demonstrate against the injustices of the system even in their early university days, how they were activists in liberal student organizations, how they always voted for the sole progressive party of the day. How dare he compare them to people with a laager mentality? Does he mean they must stay and watch while the country is being sucked into a whirlpool of crime, violence, affirmative action, and corruption? Is he blaming them for thinking of the future of their children?

  “Yes, you prided yourselves as liberals,” admits Dalton. “But now you can’t face the reality of a black-dominated government. It is clear that while you were shouting against the injustices of the system, secretly you thanked God for the National Party which introduced and preserved that very system for forty-six years.”

  He is walking away as he utters these words. His friends remain wondering whatever went wrong with a man who used to be so upstanding.

  The first emigrant says sadly, “It’s very much unlike him. He must be under a lot of stress.”

  “Stress my foot!” exclaims the second emigrant. “The man has mastered the art of licking the backsides of the blacks. He has even joined the ruling party.”

  John Dalton gets into his four-wheel-drive bakkie and drives away. He has had it with these clowns and their attitude. They can all leave for all he cares. Yes, let them go. He does not need them. He has his community of Qol
orha-by-Sea. And his wife’s people.

  Somebody is flagging down the bakkie. It is Bhonco, son of Ximiya.

  “Where does that road lead to, son of my dead friend?” he asks.

  “To my store, of course. Where does yours lead to?”

  “To the Blue Flamingo Hotel,” says the elder.

  “Jump in.”

  The old man struggles to climb into the back of the bakkie. Even though Dalton is alone in the front seat, customs do not die easily. Dalton can see a hint of anger on the elder’s face. But he dismisses it as the natural anger of the Unbelievers.

  On the road that branches off to the Blue Flamingo Dalton stops, and Bhonco jumps down. He stumbles a bit. Dalton is about to drive away when Bhonco shouts that he has left his stick and knobkerrie where he was sitting on the bakkie. He reaches for his weapons.

  “Hawu! What now with the weapons?” asks Dalton.

  “Because I am going to fight!” answers the angry elder.

  “Oh, no! Not the war of the Believers and Unbelievers again. Will you people ever stop your silly wars of the past?”

  “It is not the Believers I am going to fight, although after what you and they have done to stop the development of Qolorha, I would be happy to give all of you one or two bumps on your stupid heads.”

  Bhonco explains that he is going to fight the white tourists at the Blue Flamingo Hotel. They insulted his wife. NoPetticoat came home from babysitting fuming that white people from England—a middle-aged couple and their three teenage children—made a monkey of her. They had what Dalton understood to be a camcorder, and took photographs of her. They all posed with her. She did not mind that. Tourists do that all the time. But that was not enough for these characters from the queen’s own country. They asked her to talk into the machine in her language. And say what? Anything. Any old thing as long as it is in the clicky language. She uttered some words which meant absolutely nothing. Then they asked her to sing. She sang a few notes into the machine, even though by this time she was feeling foolish. Fellow workers were looking at her, laughing. Then the tourists asked her to dance. Her dignity was hurt, but she had to do it since she didn’t want the hotel manager to accuse her of being rude to his guests.

  “Can you believe it, son of Dalton . . . making my wife look foolish like that?” asks Bhonco. “Do you think they would do that kind of thing to their own mothers?”

  Although Dalton does not really understand what the fuss is about, he tries to calm the elder. It would not be a nice thing for the future of Qolorha if he went to fight tourists at the hotel. Is he not one of the people who want to attract more tourists to the region by building a gambling resort? How will tourists come when they hear that villagers go to hotels to attack them for no apparent reason?

  “For no apparent reason?” bristles Bhonco. “Would you be happy if they did that to your wife?”

  “Tat’uBhonco, your wife works at that hotel. In the evenings she sings izitibiri for the tourists. Why is she offended now?”

  Dalton is referring to the concerts that are held in the bar of the Blue Flamingo. Saturdays are seafood nights at the hotel. Huge bedecked billiard tables heave with raw oysters and grilled prawns, langoustines, abalone, mussels, and line fish. These are served with garlic butter and chili sauce, and fried rice. When the tourists have stuffed themselves, they relax with wine and beer. The women who work as cleaners, babysitters, waitresses, and chefs’ assistants form themselves into a choir and sing izitibiri, the songs that are popular at school concerts and are also known as “sounds.” The workers clown around, entertaining tourists, who donate money in a plate that is passed around. At the end of the concert the workers share the proceeds of their weekly ventures into the world of showbiz.

  “That is different!” protests Bhonco. “That is a concert where everyone sings and dances. It is not an attempt to ridicule my wife.”

  To placate the elder, Dalton invites him over to his store. He promises him that they will sit down and explore other ways of solving the matter. After expressing his doubts about Dalton’s ability to solve anything, especially now that he is in cahoots with the enemies of progress, Bhonco jumps back into the back of the van. Dalton drives on to Vulindlela Trading Store.

  He regrets this indiscretion as soon as they arrive at the store. Zim and Camagu are sitting on the wooden yokes bundled together on the verandah, waiting for him. A noisy group of herdboys is watching an ancient black-and-white movie on the television screen against the wall. Camagu wonders how they are able to follow the dialogue, which is all in English. And they laugh at the right places too. They egg the hero on and condemn the villain. They follow and understand every detail of the story. Then he remembers that he should not be surprised. As an urchin in the townships of Johannesburg, he used to be a regular in the dingy movie houses. He and his friends followed the exploits of Roy Rogers and Tex Ritter in all their intricacies, although none of them knew any English.

  Zim’s face turns sour as soon as he sees Bhonco. Camagu smiles, stands up, and extends his hand to the elder. Bhonco ignores it.

  “So it is true what they say,” says Bhonco sadly. “You have now joined the Believers.”

  “It is not true, Tat’uBhonco. I do not belong to the Believers, in the same way that I do not belong to the Unbelievers. I am just a person. My ancestors were not here when these quarrels began with Prophetess Nongqawuse.”

  “You see, he is a Believer!” exclaims Bhonco triumphantly. “He even calls her a prophetess. She was no prophetess. She was a fake. She was used by white people to colonize us.”

  “I want you to understand this, both of you,” says Camagu firmly. “To me you are both respected elders. I do not care about your being Believers or Unbelievers. I respect you both in the same way. Please don’t drag me into your quarrels. Neither of you must expect me not to be friends with the other.”

  Bhonco looks at Dalton, and whispers to him in exasperation, “And they say this is the boy who wants to marry my daughter. He can’t even stand like a man in support of the side of his future in-laws. He comes with all this learning from America. Yet he does not see the value of having more tourists come here.”

  “Don’t you realize, Tat’uBhonco,” says Dalton patiently, “that the tourists who come to spend their money here . . . they come precisely because the place is unspoiled?”

  “Spend money on whom?” asks Bhonco. “On you, of course, because they buy food from your shop. You take them around in your van to see the places of our shame. You stand to benefit the most if things stay the way they are. And so do your friends who own the hotel.”

  “We employ people from the village.”

  “Exactly. Now these developments you are trying to stop will employ even more people. Everyone will benefit.”

  Zim is looking up in the sky, humming a song, as if none of these matters concern him.

  Then softly, as if to himself, he says, “I hear that some people depend on their daughters to build houses for them. Where were they when men were working for themselves?”

  “If you are talking about me, why don’t you address me directly? What are you afraid of?” asks Bhonco. “Or are you jealous that my daughter can afford to build her father a house because she is the principal of a secondary school instead of cleaning after white people?”

  Those, like Camagu, who do not follow village gossip closely learn for the first time that Xoliswa Ximiya has built her father a second house—a four-walled tin-roofed ixande—saving him from the ridicule of having only one pink rondavel at his compound. The Unbelievers see this as a wonderful gesture from a daughter who has obviously been brought up well. The Believers, on the other hand, think it is a shame that a man who should have worked for himself to fill his compound with many rondavels, hexagons, and at least one ixande has to depend on a girl to build him a house. The fact that the man is an Unbeliever, and Unbelievers are expected to be well off since they did not kill their cattle during the days of Nongqawuse, ma
kes his relative penury even more remarkable. He must have led a careless life. Or his fathers before him were merciless in their feasting on Twin-Twin’s wealth during the Middle Generations. They devoured cattle that had escaped the cattle-killing frenzy without thinking of future generations.

  But there are those who look at him with compassion and mutter that the poor man’s cattle got finished when he educated his daughter right up to university level. This education swallowed even the money he had accumulated in his younger days when he worked in East London and Cape Town. And now the government is not even giving him any old-age pension, any nkamnkam.

  “I think it is a wonderful thing that your daughter has built you a house, Tat’uBhonco,” says Dalton. “Don’t you think so, Camagu?”

  “I agree,” rejoins Camagu. “You are truly blessed to have a daughter like Xoliswa Ximiya.”

  Zim pierces them with his wounded eyes.

  “Didn’t I hear of some man who was bought with the thighs of someone’s daughter?” he asks in a contemptuous voice.

  “Are you insulting my daughter, Zim?” fumes Bhonco. “Are you insulting the principal of this village? Is it my fault that no decent man will look at your floor-scrubbing daughter?”

  Dalton steps between the elders, and tells them that if they want to start their nonsense again they should do it elsewhere. Camagu suggests that now that they are all together it would be better to try to close the chasm that exists between Bhonco and Zim through dialogue. For the sake of the village it is better if the elders lead their followers into working together rather than pulling in different directions. He offers to mediate.

  “You cannot be a mediator,” says Zim. “We all know about you and Bhonco’s daughter. We have heard already that you are going to be his son-in-law.”

  “How can you say that when Dalton and I have eaten in your house, and have made it clear where we stand on these issues?” rebuts Camagu.