by Graham Lang
Under the trees next to the Dusi, I’m suddenly glad to be on my own in the place that had made Lydia happy. Alone with her presence.
In the evening I drive down to Durban and book into a hotel on the beachfront along the Golden Mile, as it was formerly known. The concierge warns me not to venture on foot outside the hotel after dark as the chances are I’ll get mugged. My room is on the thirteenth floor. I keep my windows wide open all night, letting in the sea breezes. I sleep restlessly, waking often. I lie there, sweating in the humid air, listening to the traffic down below and breathing in the dank, fetid smell of the sea.
There is the same dank smell as I drive north towards Zululand. The Indian Ocean’s warm amniotic breath. A ceiling of low cloud slowly burns away, leaving the air hot and humid. It’s a three-hour journey; a dual carriageway as far as Mtunzini, and good roads, I’m told, thereafter up to St Lucia and on to Hlabisa, near the Swaziland border.
The greenness everywhere is a sight for sore eyes. Vegetation seems to explode from the ground. Through patches of coastal forest and endless fields of sugar cane, I think of the multitude of chance encounters that have led me here. The almost total extent to which our lives are shaped by others has never occurred to me so profoundly before. People use the term spitting image to denote likeness. Hazel said that I’m the spitting image of my father. To me, this had always been a nonsensical term until I learned that it’s a corruption of spit and image. The notion that we can be the very substance and likeness of others presents a tantalising contradiction. We are unique because of all of those who comprise us. All of those whose lives have intersected randomly, coincidentally, with ours. We are all made of others.
A quaint thought, but will Lettah – if this person at Hlabisa is Lettah – harbour such fancies? Or will she have cut out that part of us that exists in her, like a surgeon cuts away a tumour? Perhaps the violence that eclipsed her life has been so great that it routed everything that came before.
Near St Lucia I branch off inland. Away from the coast, the land opens up into vast valleys ringed with distant blue krantzes. The vegetation thins into acacia bushveld, strewn with eerie green fever trees and aloes on the rocky ridges. The road to Hlabisa cuts through the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Park. Glimpses of game: giraffe, impala, zebra; a rhinoceros browsing alongside the road. These sights lift my spirits. Perhaps on the way back I might take a more leisurely drive through the park. Perhaps even stay a night in one of the lodges.
Beyond the park, the road rises up over a great range of hills. Long blue wreaths of smoke from Zulu kraals dotted along the slopes hang in the valleys below. I overtake buses and taxis filled to overflowing with human cargo. I zoom past herd boys waving on the side of the road, tiny against the surrounding vastness.
Hlabisa is typical of the small neglected towns of South Africa’s old Bantustans: a dusty huddle of buildings straddling the road north to Swaziland. Shops with security grates. Pep Stores, Spar, KFC. Billboards with smiling kids eating porridge or sporting shiny school shoes. Roadside vendors selling vegetables under bright umbrellas. A cell phone dealer operating from a shipping container. Lined-up minibuses with flamboyant names: Baby Cakes, Lover Boy, Tequila Sunrise. People wandering about, congregating in the shade of trees. Litter. Stray dogs foraging around overflowing bins. A heifer nibbles at tufts of grass at the base of a telephone pole.
Following Reverend Mkhondo’s directions, I drive through the town along the Nongoma Road. A few kilometres further on, Hlabisa Mission appears on the left across a small valley, against a south-facing hillside. From a distance the mission is dominated by a church steeple, a double-storey hospital complex and a reservoir on the hill above. A high security fence glinting with razor wire runs around the perimeter of the complex – South Africa’s crime epidemic affects even missions, it seems. I negotiate a winding dirt road across the valley, passing processions of people heading to or coming from the mission. I stop at a boom gate; a security guard hands me a clipboard with a form on which I enter my name, the vehicle’s registration number and time of arrival – 10.55 a.m. I ask the whereabouts of Reverend Mkhondo. The guard points towards a building fronted by a long veranda adjacent to the church. The office at the end, he says.
The gravel road crunches loudly under the tyres as I drive slowly towards the building. I park outside the office, climb a flight of steps to the veranda and knock on the door.
Reverend Gabriel Mkhondo is a stocky man of indeterminate age. When he opens the door, I assume he’s in his mid-thirties, but soon realise he’s older – somewhere around my own age, perhaps. He greets me warmly with a handshake and a broad smile displaying widely spaced teeth. His head is shaved completely, enhancing his youthful appearance. Black-rimmed glasses. A slight nervous tic beneath his left eye. Despite the heat he wears a full-length black cassock.
I’m ushered inside and accept his offer of tea. He pulls up a chair for me next to his desk, switches on a kettle standing beside a small sink next to the window and busies himself making tea. The office is cluttered. A computer hums on the desk. The walls are painted with pale institution-green enamel, bare except for a whiteboard with what appears to be a roster scrawled untidily on it, its metal frame festooned with notices. A crucifix on the wall above the desk carries the legend: God Will Guide You. Filing cabinets line two walls. Folders are balanced in teetering piles on the desk and all over the grey-carpeted floor.
‘Excuse the state of my office,’ he says, tapping the contents of a sachet of dried milk into the steaming cups of tea. ‘As you can see, we are struggling to cope.’ He removes the tea bags from the cups. ‘This used to be a general hospital. TB, measles, kwashiorkor. Now it’s a different story. Now everything is AIDS.’
Whistling tunelessly, he hands me one cup and sits behind the desk. He pushes aside a pile of folders and puts his cup down in front of him.
‘Eh-ja,’ he says. ‘We are like a small island in a rising ocean, Mr Cole. The situation is not good. But that is another matter. You must be wondering why Sister Lettah is not here to meet you. She has been on night shift and will only be ready to see you at lunchtime.’
‘And you are certain she’s the person I am looking for?’
‘Oh, yes. There’s no doubt. Sister Lettah herself has confirmed it and has been preparing herself for this meeting.’
Preparing herself? The spectre of Chombo looms, then vanishes – another scam seems unimaginable. We sip our tea. Reverend Mkhondo loosens his priest’s collar and fans himself with one of the folders.
He goes on: ‘It’s not a straightforward situation, Mr Cole. Sister Lettah has been afflicted with a very serious disfigurement. The result of terrible brutality. Through the grace of God she has managed to live with this problem, but you should prepare yourself. She has great difficulty speaking. Your meeting will not be easy.’ He reaches for a sheaf of papers next to the computer. ‘I’ve taken the liberty of consulting her original pathology report just to put you in the picture – she agreed that I should do this . . .’
The tea scalds my lips; I sip tentatively, sweating, as he reads certain sections of the report. He describes how the injury was inflicted. The information is objective, disengaged, dispassionate. It needs to be. I recoil from putting it all together – I seem capable of only registering isolated bits. A blunt bayonet. Pliers. There are terms I’ve never heard before: labiodental fricatives, bilabial sonorants and plosives . . .
Outside, I can hear children singing.
Finally Reverend Mkhondo puts the report down. Bizarrely, he has a stab at humour: ‘So, to cut a long story short, Sister Lettah will not be whistling any tunes.’
‘Tell me, Reverend, with this . . . this impediment, how has she coped?’
‘Sister Lettah is a woman of extraordinary fibre. If I were in her shoes, I might have lost the will to live. We take so much for granted. Thanks be to God that we were able to pr
ovide a place of refuge for her. In the beginning it was very hard for her to come to terms with her injury. But she responded to our acceptance of her and found true faith in God. Fortunately, she is an Ndebele. As you know, the Ndebeles were originally Zulus, so she at least understands the language and customs of people here. She became very determined to overcome her injury. Because we are a largely autonomous mission, we allowed her to train as a nurse. She has since gone on to do a degree in theology by correspondence. She even became our CPN, our chief professional nurse, for many years. Now she is of retirement age but refuses to give up working.’ Reverend Mkhondo shakes his head. ‘Through the grace of God, she has overcome all obstacles. Truly, she is an example to us all.’
‘How long has she been here?’
‘Let me see . . . Nearly twenty years.’
‘And how did she get here? It seems incredible that she managed to find her way to this place.’
‘In 1988 my predecessor, Reverend Arthur Jones, who has since passed away, travelled up to Zimbabwe and witnessed first-hand the aftermath of the Gukurahundi atrocities in Matabeleland. He came across Lettah who had found temporary refuge in a mission in the small town of Gwanda. When he was told her story, he took pity on her. It was he who persuaded her to come to Hlabisa. He organised her passport and brought her with him when he returned. Reverend Jones was blessed with an abundant heart. When he died seven years ago, Lettah was inconsolable. He was her saviour.’
‘It’s hard for me to imagine what she has been through.’
‘There are reasons why God places limits on our imagination.’
‘I’m very anxious to see her.’
‘I’m sure you are, Mr Cole. All in good time. Meanwhile, let’s finish our tea and I’ll show you around the mission. Have you ever been to a mission before?’
I shake my head.
He laughs. ‘The blind come to us in many forms. I think you will find it instructive.’
I’m relieved to escape the stifling office, although marching out into the blazing midday sun offers no sound alternative. I sweat profusely; the back of my shirt clings to my skin as we tour the mission. First, I’m shown the small church, with its thatched roof and whitewashed stone walls, built a century ago – now a national monument. Reverend Mkhondo gestures proudly at a blaze of brightly coloured friezes covering the walls. Biblical scenes culminating in the Crucifixion and Resurrection in the apse. All the central characters, including Christ, are black. Reverend Mkhondo tells me these friezes were painted by a patient with tuberculosis back in the sixties. I’m transfixed. While the characters, with their awkward postures and big staring eyes, appear naive, the sophisticated layout and idiomatic leaps of the imagination (the Nativity scene in a traditional beehive hut) are extraordinary. Apparently, attempts were made to force the mission to remove them during the apartheid era – Black Christs have an unfortunate tendency to upset ideological apple carts, Reverend Mkhondo remarks dryly.
Emerging again into the sun, we walk up to a vantage point on the hillside above the mission where Reverend Mkhondo points out the U-shaped hospital, the antenatal clinic, the nurses’ hostel, the kitchen and laundry, the maintenance workshops, vegetable gardens, an orchard of avocado trees – all of it, he explains, running on an increasingly limited budget. He stands there for a while, cowed, it seems, by the scope of his responsibilities. Then he leads me down a path towards the hospital. Again, the sound of children singing wafts across. Reverend Mkhondo cups a hand to his ear. ‘Ah, the voices of angels,’ he says, pointing towards a small modern building abutted by half a dozen prefabs against the security fence. ‘That is our orphanage. Sister Lettah will want to show you the children.’
An incongruous sign forbidding firearms catches my eye as we enter the main entrance of the hospital. On the ground floor there are waiting rooms filled with silent people, mostly women, mesmerised by a game show blaring from television sets mounted on the walls. All waiting to receive antiretroviral drugs, Reverend Mkhondo explains. We walk along corridors past long queues outside the counselling and testing units. Safe-sex posters on the walls. Schematic diagrams depicting the causal stages from initial HIV infection to the onset of AIDS. Other posters, ranging from bilharzia symptoms to skin and eye diseases, seem an ironic reminder that this hospital once contended with less fearsome maladies.
Upstairs we pass through wards filled to overflowing. The windows are wide open, letting in a harsh white light. Electric fans spin overhead. A smell of antiseptic soap, soiled sheets, wasting bodies. Gaunt men and women stare at us with haunted eyes as we pass by. Reverend Mkhondo unleashes a barrage of statistics that elsewhere might have been meaningless to me. Of every hundred people they test, seventy-five to eighty will be HIV positive – the tip of the iceberg, he says, since so many avoid being tested in fear of being stigmatised. The HIV prevalence among women attending the antenatal clinic is forty percent. There are at least five million people currently living with HIV in South Africa. Over one thousand AIDS deaths each day. Parts of rural Zululand have been devastated by the epidemic. Families and communities decimated. A situation not helped by an obdurate president who refuses to accept any link between HIV and AIDS, and a health minister who insists a good dose of beetroot, not antiretroviral drugs, is the way to treat HIV. Reverend Mkhondo shakes his head angrily; he suspects the cost of supplying antiretroviral drugs lies behind much of this sort of hocus-pocus. And now the horse has bolted. Too late have they agreed to make drugs available. Too late have they made the drug Nevirapine available to pregnant women to stop mother-to-child transmission of HIV.
As we move from bed to bed, I feel increasingly sapped of strength. Witnessing these withered, haunted souls is torrid, overwhelming. Their looks of hopeless resignation . . . and these are the lucky ones, Reverend Mkhondo reiterates. At least they have someone to care for them and a Christian burial when they die. In other places they are just thrown into mass graves. Forgotten people. He stops at the bed of a young woman who looks wizened, ancient. She lies on her back staring at us, her hands folded limply on her chest.
‘Kunjani, tombi?’ Reverend Mkhondo asks.
The woman stares back emptily; just her mouth moves as she voices a silent reply.
Reverend Mkhondo turns to me and whispers: ‘She has not got long to go. Just one of thousands infected by their husbands returning from the mines. They get drunk and consort with prostitutes, then come home to Zululand and infect their wives and mistresses – that’s why there’re more women infected than men. This woman’s whole family has been wiped out. Her husband is already dead. No brothers, no sisters. Two of her children infected, the others cared for by distant relatives. I tell you, this disease will make this whole country an orphanage.’ He turns back to the woman. ‘God be with you, tombi.’
We come to the children’s wards. What confronts me here is almost too heavy to bear. All I can do is traipse wordlessly beside Reverend Mkhondo. One after another, the shrivelled bodies, the veined skulls, the same gaunt stares. To those who are awake, Reverend Mkhondo delivers a gentle, cheerful greeting. Sakubona, Gibson – did you finish your breakfast this morning? Kunjani, Selina – how are you, sweetie? When these kids look at me something flickers in their eyes. Hope? The fleeting thought that this stranger might possess a miracle cure? I find it hard to breathe. I wasn’t expecting to have my heart torn in this way.
‘Just the tip of the iceberg, Mr Cole,’ Reverend Mkhondo says. ‘These are the ones who could have been saved by Nevirapine. Between the bastardry of the government and the hideous superstitions of the people we face an uphill battle.’
‘Superstitions?’
‘There is a belief among African men that having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS. This has led to young girls – even babies – being raped. Some of the girls in these wards are here because of this obscene practice. That is just one example.’
I suppre
ss the urge to gasp with relief as we emerge from the hospital. But there’s more. Reverend Mkhondo points to a large prefab building adjoining the hospital. In it are approximately a dozen beds. A glimpse of a skeletal patient staring into space with glazed eyes, mouth open, just the flicker of a hand denoting life.
‘That,’ he says, ‘is where the conveyor belt ends. That is what we call Ifelekhaya – the house for dying. This is where we put those who are in the very last stage of their sickness.’
‘My God,’ I say.
He puts a hand on my shoulder. ‘I’m sorry to put you through this, Mr Cole. I can see you are shaken by the experience. But it’s important for outsiders to know the facts. If only our government ministers would visit more often.’ He glances at his watch. ‘Ah, it’s lunchtime. Can I interest you in a quick bite to eat before we see Sister Lettah?’
‘No thanks.’
He laughs. ‘Not hungry? Not to worry, I’m sure Sister Lettah will at least have some tea to offer you.’
We cross to the nurses’ hostel, a long sandstone Victorian building with a green corrugated iron roof, partially obscured behind a row of plane trees. The building is cool inside; we tramp down an echoing passageway past the dormitories, offering glimpses of two or four tidy beds per room, metal lockers with photographs stuck to the doors. Our footsteps echo in the silence; light from clerestory windows above the passage flecks the walls and red polished floor. Reverend Mkhondo explains that because of her long time at the mission Lettah has been allocated single quarters. At the end of the passageway we reach a closed door. Reverend Mkhondo pauses, then knocks. ‘Uvukile, Sister?’ he calls. ‘Good morning. Are you awake?’