The Heart of Redness: A Novel

by Mda, Zakes

  “No one ever elected you in any of these quarrels between the Believers and Unbelievers. Yet you have chosen a side,” says Bhonco.

  “Hey, John, come out here,” Camagu calls into the house. “I am not going to be a martyr for your sins.”

  John Dalton walks out. He seems relieved to be rescued from the harangue of the intellectuals in the house. But his face soon changes when he realizes that he is in for interrogation out here. The people want to know why the water taps have been closed.

  “You know very well why they are closed, my mothers and fathers,” says Dalton. “For many months now you have not paid for the water. You know that those water pumps have to be maintained, and it takes money to maintain them. It takes money to buy diesel too.”

  “But some of us have been paying regularly ever since the communal taps were constructed,” pleads a woman.

  “It is true, some of you have been paying,” admits Dalton. “But most of you have not been paying. The taps shall remain closed until all of you have paid.”

  “It is unfair. We suffer for the sins of those who have not paid.”

  “We open the water just for you, even those who have not paid will get it. It is up to you to see to it that your neighbors pay so that everyone can get water.”

  “What about you and Camagu? You have water.”

  “Because we have paid and ours are not communal taps. Those who can afford to have taps that go straight to their homesteads and have paid for them continue to get water.”

  “It is a plot of the Believers!” shouts Bhonco. “I want everyone to know that I disagreed with this closing of the taps at the committee meetings. I disagreed completely. But I was outvoted by the Believers!”

  “It is like this election thing,” says NoPetticoat. “We thought things were going to be better. But look who they put in to run our affairs: people we don’t know. People from Butterworth who know nothing about our life here.”

  This is a sore point for the villagers. When local elections came a few years back, people thought that at last they were going to run their own affairs. But the ruling party had different ideas. It imposed its own people nominated by party bosses from some regional headquarters far away from Qolorha. And the villagers did not know these candidates. As a result many people refused to vote, even though they were supporters of the party. The same thing happened at the last general election, and it will happen again at the next local election unless people learn to fight for their rights.

  “It is the same at the provincial and national level too. Leadership is imposed from above,” says Dalton. “But I do not see what that has to do with the water taps. The water committee was not imposed on anyone. It was elected by the villagers.”

  “Don’t even talk, Dalton,” says Bhonco. “You have messed up our lives. You and your Believers. Now we can’t even cut our own trees.”

  “That is unfair,” says Camagu. “You all know it is not John’s law. It is the law of the land. And it is for your benefit.”

  “What benefit?” Bhonco fumes. “Our forefathers lived to be gray-beards without imposing such stupid laws on themselves.”

  “Perhaps you need to learn more about your forefathers,” says Dalton. “King Sarhili himself was a very strong conservationist. He created Manyube, a conservation area where people were not allowed to hunt or chop trees. He wanted to preserve these things for future generations.”

  “Don’t tell us about Sarhili,” cries Bhonco. “He was a foolish king. A king of darkness. That is why he instructed his people to follow Nongqawuse!”

  The argument is broken by the arrival of Zim. Everyone bursts out laughing. Zim looks very strange. It is as if he does not belong to this world. He has shaved off his eyebrows. And he has cocooned himself inside a red blanket, without any of the beautiful ornaments for which he is known far and wide. There is not even a single strand of beads. His feet are bare. No shoes. No anklets.

  “I greet you, children of the amaGcaleka clan, even though you welcome me with the rudeness of your laughter,” says Zim, sitting down among his peers.

  “What have you done to yourself, Tat’uZim?” asks Camagu. “You were not like this yesterday when I saw you.”

  “It is the new look of the Believers, in accordance with the teachings of Nonkosi, the prophetess of the Mpongo Valley,” explains Zim.

  “What happened to Nongqawuse now?” asks NoPetticoat laughing.

  “Oh, she is still there all right. But she is not the only prophet, you know. We Believers have a number of prophets. Nonkosi taught her followers to shave their eyebrows so as to distinguish themselves from the Unbelievers.”

  Zim is clearly taking the war to new heights. He says it came to him through the birds that he had neglected some practices of the Believers of old. Maybe that’s why his son left and never came back. From now on he is going to shave his eyebrows.

  His discovery of Nonkosi, the eleven-year-old prophetess of the Mpongo Valley, has injected new life into his belief. He has now adopted a new set of rituals that combine the best from the two denominations. For instance, he takes regular enemas and emetics to cleanse himself, as he comes into contact with Unbelievers like Bhonco on a regular basis. This ukurhuda ritual is a basic tenet of the teachings of the daughter of Kulwana.

  All the while Bhonco is shaking his head pityingly.

  “A person who does not get any pension from the government can shake his head until it flies off his neck,” says Zim, not looking at Bhonco.

  “How foolish can people be!” rejoins Bhonco.

  “How foolish can people be!” echoes NoPetticoat.

  “If Unbelievers have their rituals, there is no reason why we cannot have our own too,” says Zim. “If they can induce sadness in their lives, there is no reason why we should not purify our bodies and our souls by purging and vomiting.”

  “Our rituals don’t leave a stink!” shouts Bhonco.

  “Your rituals are not even your own,” Zim shouts back. “You stole them from the abaThwa!”

  “The abaThwa people don’t dance around to invoke grief! Grief is our thing, and no one else’s.”

  “The abaThwa dance around to induce a trance that takes them to the land of the ancestors. You stole that from them!”

  “We didn’t steal it! They gave it to us!’

  “Thieves! Thieves!”

  “You call me that again, Zim, and see if Nongqawuse and Nonkosi will protect your head from the damage that my stick will cause on it.”

  “You and whose army, Bhonco?”

  “Stop!” cries Camagu. “You are the elders of the village. You are here to bless my new house, not to desecrate it with your bad blood!”

  “How can your house be blessed when you have run out of beer?” asks NoPetticoat, standing up and shaking her upper body in the tyityimba dance. Everyone cheers and claps hands and sings for her.

  It is true that Camagu underestimated the number of people who would come to his housewarming party. He had thought that only those he had invited would come. He had forgotten that in the village a feast belongs to everyone. But he has only himself to blame, because MamCirha and NoGiant, his business partners who brewed the beer for him, did warn him that the malted sorghum he bought was too little to satisfy the thirsty throats of the guests. Camagu thought they were referring to the guests he had invited, and not to the whole village. So he dismissed their concerns. Now everyone is complaining that he is tightfisted and stingy like all learned people.

  He goes into the house and comes out with a bottle of brandy. It is only for the elders, he tells them, and not for everyone. He pours some brandy in the bottle cap, in the manner that brandy is normally served, and gives it to the shriveled old woman nearest him. She swallows it in one gulp and grimaces with burning pleasure. He does the same for every older guest, each one swallowing and grimacing. This continues for several rounds, until the brandy in the bottle is finished.

  “You gave him five capfuls of brandy,” comp
lains Zim, wagging his finger at Bhonco. “Why do you only give me four?”

  “I was not counting,” says Camagu. “I just passed the bottle cap around.”

  “It is the greed of the Believers!” shouts Bhonco. “He got five like everyone else!”

  Another battle is about to erupt, but Camagu and Dalton put a lid on it. Dalton makes the mistake of saying that their ancestors must be ashamed of them for the way they behave. Both elders give him a stern look.

  “Leave our ancestors out of this,” says Zim. “What do you know of them?”

  “He knows them all right,” says another elder. “His forebears cooked them in their cauldrons.”

  “Yes,” rejoins Bhonco. “This Dalton here . . . he is a descendant of headhunters. Yet no one holds that against him.”

  “It is not true! It is not true!” shouts Dalton, flushed with shame.

  On this matter Camagu is on the side of the elders. He says it is true. In one of his travels abroad he went to the Natural History Museum—part of the British Museum—in London to see the reconstructed skeletons of dinosaurs. He chanced upon some scientists from his university in the United States who had been given access to examine some items that were not on display. He was shocked to discover that there were five dried-out heads of the so-called Bushmen stored in boxes in some back room of the museum.

  He has never understood this barbaric habit of the British of shrinking heads of the vanquished people and displaying them in these impressive buildings where ladies and gentlemen go to gloat and celebrate their superior civilization.

  “Maybe that is where the head of our great-great-grandfather ended up,” says Zim.

  “Yes, the head of the great Xikixa must be in that building,” agrees Bhonco.

  There is sudden silence. Everyone is taking in what has just happened. Some stare in disbelief. Believers and Unbelievers have just agreed on something!

  “The heads of our ancestors are all over Europe . . . trophies collected in military action and in executions,” continues Camagu. “Not only heads. In Paris the private parts of a Khoikhoi woman called Saartjie Baartman are kept in a bottle!”

  Bhonco bursts out laughing.

  “The Khoikhoi are Zim’s people,” he says, still laughing. “He descends from a Khoikhoi woman called Quxu. They changed her name to Qukezwa so that people would think she was an umXhosa. Zim himself married a woman of the amaGqunukhwebe. And we all know who the amaGqunukhwebe are.”

  “The way I see it, it is no laughing matter,” says Camagu.

  “It is a laughing matter from where I am sitting,” says Bhonco. “I have an unobstructed view of Zim’s face. I wonder what he plans to do about the femaleness of his great-grandmother that is kept in a bottle in the land of the white man.”

  Zim stands up, casts an evil eye on both Camagu and Bhonco, and walks away from the feast.

  “Please, Tat’uZim, come back! Do not leave like this!” Camagu shouts after the old man. But he walks on, and does not look back for one moment.

  “You see now?” says Dalton to Camagu. “That’s what you get when you dig out the past that is best forgotten.”

  “It is not the past,” says Camagu emphatically. “It is the present. Those trophies are still there . . . today . . . as we speak.”

  “Let him go! Who needs him here?” shouts NoPetticoat drunkenly.

  “You cannot say that about my guests,” says Camagu sternly. “This is not your feast. You wouldn’t like it if somebody did this at your feast.”

  “This child of Cesane, now he is boasting about his feast,” says Bhonco, standing up and uxoriously holding NoPetticoat’s hand. “Why doesn’t someone tell him that it is not the first time we have seen a feast? He can stay with his feast for all we care.”

  He helps NoPetticoat up, and leads her away. All the while she is singing an umtshotsho song, and shaking her upper body in the style of the tyityimba dance. Bhonco joins in the song as they stagger away together.

  Although the elite stays until late at night, dancing to compact discs that have been brought by Vathiswa, Camagu has lost interest in his own housewarming party. Right up to the end, Xoliswa Ximiya does not stop nagging him about his encouragement of redness in the village. Even when he accompanies her to her house, the harangue continues. Normally he cannot drink enough of her chilled beauty. But at this moment he wishes she would just disappear.

  Qukezwa is the best antidote to Xoliswa Ximiya.

  Qukezwa. He has not seen her since the silvery night, months ago. He thought he had freed himself from her inebriating power, until she started invading his dreams, as NomaRussia used to do. Orgastic dreams. Dreams in slow motion. Dreams that sweep the NomaRussia water from the river. The riverbed lies naked. Dreams in slow motion. Very messy dreams.

  The following day he goes to Zim’s compound under the pretext of making peace with the elder. But Zim is not under his tree. He has gone to the dongas to purge himself of the contamination he got from mixing with Unbelievers yesterday, Qukezwa tells him.

  “You are lucky he is not here,” she adds. “He does not even want to hear your name mentioned.”

  “I came to make peace with him, even though I do not know what I have done,” says Camagu.

  “You do not know? After spreading lies throughout the village that my grandmother’s femaleness lives in a bottle in the land of the white man?”

  “I never said such things!”

  “Is my father lying then? Is he lying when he says he became the laughingstock of your feast after you made such ludicrous claims about our relative?”

  “Saartjie Baartman is not your relative. She was a Khoikhoi woman, but you don’t know if she was your relative! I was merely stating a fact about what white people did to her. What happened to her was not your fault either. I do not know why you should bear that shame.”

  Qukezwa is not convinced. “All the Khoikhoi are one person,” she says. “You cannot say the private parts of that woman have nothing to do with me.”

  Camagu begs her to come down to the lagoon so that they can talk about this.

  She glares at him. She is angry, not only because of the femaleness that lives in a bottle. Of late he has been featuring in her dreams. And she tells him so. She does not like that. He has no business imposing himself on her dreams, performing unsavory acts. Everyone in the village knows he belongs to Xoliswa Ximiya. He must do those dirty things in the headmistress’s dreams.

  “I should be angry with you too, because you feature in my dreams,” says Camagu. “It is not for anyone in this village to decide to whom I belong!”

  “If I feature in your dreams it is your own fault. Just don’t mess up my dreams.”

  “Please,” pleads Camagu, “let’s talk about this. Let’s go down to the sea.”

  Mutual dreams. Messy dreams.

  She offers him food: fried amaqongwe, or cockles, with maize porridge. Then she says he should go and wait for her at the lagoon.

  On the way he meets members of his cooperative society coming up with the day’s harvest. NoGiant and MamCirha tease him that it is too late in the day if he thinks he can catch any mussels and oysters.

  “You must learn to wake up early, teacher,” says MamCirha.

  “He needs a wife, don’t you think?” asks NoGiant. “I tell him every day that a man of his age needs a good woman who will look after him.”

  “Well, he cannot say we did not advise him,” says MamCirha, to the laughter of the other women. “He can’t say there are no eligible young women in this village. There is Xoliswa Ximiya for instance.”

  “What is happening to their thing? Is it getting cold?”

  “Men are afraid of Xoliswa Ximiya. There is Vathiswa. Vathiswa is a good woman, even though she had a fall.”

  He just smiles and waves them away. They have a way of discussing him as if he is just a piece of meat, these business partners. That is how they communicate with him: by completely ignoring him and addressing each other a
bout him, and supplying the answers on his behalf.

  He has grown to love them, though. And they love him too. To the extent that their husbands were beginning to get jealous. Until they saw the money their wives were bringing home.

  Black economic empowerment is a buzzword at places like Giggles in Johannesburg, where the habitués are always on the lookout for crumbs that fall from the tables of the Aristocrats of the Revolution. But the black empowerment boom is merely enriching the chosen few—the elite clique of black businessmen who have become overnight multimillionaires. Or trade union leaders who use the workers as stepping-stones to untold riches for themselves. And politicians who effectively use their struggle credentials for self-enrichment. They all have their snouts buried deep in the trough, lapping noisily in the name of the poor, trying to outdo one another in piggishness.

  Disillusioned with the corruption and nepotism of the city, Camagu had come to Qolorha in search of a dream. And here people are now doing things for themselves, without any handouts from the government.

  But why is there still a void in his life?

  Finally Qukezwa comes riding Gxagxa. After a long wait. Yet she is unhurried.

  “You kept me waiting,” complains Camagu.

  She does not dismount.

  “Why do you want to see me?” she asks.

  “It is polite to apologize when you have kept someone waiting.”

  “I didn’t ask you to wait. It was your choice. And it is not for you to teach me manners. Go and teach that girlfriend of yours to stop being a bat.”

  “Girlfriend? A bat?”

  “Are you going to pretend that Xoliswa Ximiya is not your girlfriend? In that case you are the only one in the village who doesn’t know that you two are lovers. Yes, she is a bat, because she does not know whether she is a bird or a mouse.”

  He does not know how to answer that.

  “If you don’t know why you wanted to see me I’ll be on my way,” she says.

  “Please give me a ride on Gxagxa . . . like the other night,” he pleads.

  She laughs, and says, “Only if we ride naked. Do you think you can do that, learned man? Strip naked? Gxagxa loves to be ridden naked.”