Nwelezelanga
First published by BlackBird Books, an imprint of Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd
First and second impression 2016
10 Orange Street
Sunnyside
Auckland Park 2092
South Africa
+2711 628 3200
www.jacana.co.za
© Unathi Magubeni, 2016
All rights reserved.
Cover design by Karen Wentzel
Job no. 002733
Also available as an e-book:
d-PDF 978-1-928337-25-6
ePUB 978-1-928337-26-3
mobi file 978-1-928337-27-0
See a complete list of Jacana titles at www.jacana.co.za
Nwelezelanga
The Star Child
Unathi Magubeni
Contents
PART ONE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
PART TWO
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
PART THREE
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Acknowledgements
PART ONE
One
I HAVE MANY NAMES; my mother calls me ‘Nwelezelanga’ because of my golden hair. Some call me ‘Mhlophe’ because of my fair, almost-ginger skin. One wise old woman of the tribe calls me ‘Mehlomadala’ because of my big round eyes that reflect oceans of untold stories. The village girls who like to taunt me just call me ‘that albino girl’.
I’m thirteen years old; however, that’s a distortion on its own. I’m young yet old; I’ve experienced the cycle of birth and death many more times than I care to count. I’ve donned and shredded many skin colours in my lifetime. I’ve lived the lives of many; the lives of the poor and the healers of Bantu and served the divine purpose in countless ways. I have also visited this world before as a baobab tree and stood tall for over a hundred years exuding all the wisdom in the known world. I’ve made short visits sometimes as a carefree butterfly showing off the innocence from beyond. One of my favourite incarnations was when I was a bird and would cross the oceans with my own kind, reflecting the endurance of the immortals. On occasion, I have visited this world in less glamorous roles such as in the form of a worker bee and worked all my waking life giving the world the sweet honey of my hard labour.
I spend most of my time suspended in the hills of my humble village. I watch the clouds, looking for messages from beyond. I watch them morph into countless symbols speaking the language of the gods. I struggle to decode some of the messages. I have to be patient; there are hidden secrets in the eternal knot of existence. Many think I’m crazy and find my favourite pastime an excuse for being lazy.
‘Uhlala njalo ugcakamele amalanga,’ they mock, calling me a ‘lethargic turd’.
‘She is crazy that one,’ the village women gossip with their eyes.
‘The heavens are not going to fall any time soon,’ the young girls my age tease.
They don’t know any better; I’ve tasted immortality and bathed in its deep ancient waters. I’ve swum aeons on end in the stream of eternal bliss. I have gone beyond all mortal emotions and painted the path in the unknown with colourless light. There are only stories of joy and profound peace in this foreign land; freedom is the essence of our existence in the world of the spirits.
I don’t have many friends and am an outcast of sorts; the situation is exacerbated by the fact that I do not attend school. I’m frowned upon by my peers. There is one old woman, Nomkhubulwana who is my friend. She is kind to me. She’s aged yet a dancing spirit of a child lights up her face. She tells me stories of the land; stories of growing up in the village of Dingilizwe. She comes with me up the hill sometimes, picking wild berries along the way. We have many things in common; we were both sent by the great spirit of Qamata to this land of the walking dead to satisfy earthly desires and pass messages from beyond. We have a purpose to serve; a divine responsibility to each one of us, children of the star.
Along the cycle of birth and death, I somehow got tired of the pitiful physical existence and begged the all-knowing one for a permanent residence in the world of the spirits and my wish was granted. I have spent many folds of lifetimes in the land of the holy ones before being born again in this lifetime. All the words and emotions would fall short to describe the profound serenity of the spirit world we call home. I can be silence, light or nothing in a few moments. I can be as carefree as the wind, defying all space and time with no birth in sight; we play games in multidimensional realities. The enlightened ones visit us for a while in the land of the divine before being summoned to earthly missions. We have fun knowing that the call to duty can fall at any moment.
My call came and I was ready to serve; for some strange reason I missed the confined and predictable world of the walking dead. It has its unique charms. The all-knowing one summoned me to listen to the prayers of the woman who would be my mother. She wept as she knelt on top of Mount Ntabankulu.
‘Bless me with a child, my lord, and I will be forever grateful,’ she cried. ‘What is the use of a wife if she can’t bear children?’
I felt her pain.
‘Grant me just one child, oh all-knowing Qamata, and I promise to give her all my love,’ she begged and prayed until her mouth was dry; I was born ten moons later.
The hut was dark and humid; my mother lay like a log on the reed mat, half-dazed after four hours of hard labour. The little clothing she wore was rugged and soaked with sweat. Birth is such a sharp shock even for me, the one who has been borne by women of different creeds.
‘You should get rid of this thing, Nokwakha!’
‘What?’ my mother gushed forward in astonishment.
‘Get rid of this thing this moment!’ the midwife screeched.
My mother sat upright, steaming with wild fury; a baffled look was written across her face as she stared with contempt at the old wrinkled woman.
‘This is a bad omen; you’ve given birth to an albino. This is the devil incarnate; get rid of this thing at once,’ she screamed.
‘This is my child!’ My mother snatched me from the midwife’s arms.
‘We should drown this ghost of a child in the nearest river,’ the midwife whispered the words with much tenderness this time around. ‘The ancestors have warned me countless times to look out for an albino child who would be born in the first moon of spring,’ she trembled with fear.
‘This girl, I was told, would bring confusion that would lead to the demise of our tribe; she would bring nothing but illusion and we will all jump willingly down the mighty high cliffs of Zambezi to our deaths. The ancestors said she would make false promises to the whole tribe about receiving a gift of immortality in the everlasting life,’ the wide-eyed old woman narrated.
‘But this is my unknowing child.’ My mother’s maternal instinct was having none of it.
‘The departed ones told me that I would recognise her by the mysterious round hairy black birthmark on her left shoulder blade and I should snuff the life out of her on the spot.’
In an instant, my mother flipped me around to see the birthmark; she stared at it like a lost soul and words refused to come out of her mouth. A bolt of lightning outside induced a loud screech from the base of her gut. She cried like a
woman who had just lost a child; buckets of rain fell at that moment and dark heavy clouds hovered in the sky.
‘We should get rid of this evil child,’ the midwife continued in her persuasion.
The mighty roar of the heavens induced fear in the two women and after some time my mother finally relented under the midwife’s spell and agreed to get rid of the unwanted child and so they plotted a plan of action moving forward. The midwife grabbed the little child by the right ankle and neatly wrapped my whole body with an old cloth and they left for the mighty Umfolozi River. They crawled in the thick tall grass to shy away from any prying eyes. The rain came pouring down and gallons of water quickly filled the river. The wrinkled woman didn’t think twice about throwing me down the flowing river to my death; they returned home and never looked back.
A portal to the land of spirits momentarily opened up; a radiant luminous colourless light of emptiness spoke of blissful serenity and deep peace, calling me to the land of origins. I could hear the children of the star giggling and playing the games we used to play and for a moment I wished I was among them. The access to the spirit world opened very briefly; however, my attachment to the almighty purpose made me resist the call to be completely spirit. The two women didn’t know that I was under the direct protection of the all-knowing Qamata with a calling to serve. They didn’t know that I had one foot trusted in the land of the holy ones and the other in this contemptuous life suspended between birth and death.
I was rescued by a middle-aged woman, who found me on the banks of the flowing river. She had been fasting and praying for rain for nine days near the Mpelazwe waterfall. She had only asked for rain to nourish her dying crops but got far more than that. She took me to her home and tried to resuscitate me. She fed me different concoctions to bring me back to this world of form; I remained unconscious. I kept hearing the voices of angels; sons and daughters of the supreme; friendly faces of those I spent most of my time with. I could hear them laughing and making sounds so pure they made my heart melt and almost convinced me to answer their call; they were so near yet so far. I knew I had an earthly mission to serve; a call to honour the commands of the high one.
The two women thought that death was final; they didn’t know that it was merely a figment of their imagination. There is no end for a spirit. The soul is in a state of becoming; a continuous state of learning and development. It does not need the physical body to survive. It continues to exist outside the physical actuality and even outside the apparent life; experience has served this divine truth many times and I accept. When one experiences the ‘perceived death’, only to be followed by the reality of another existence, a weird sense of divine comedy sets in; realising that the end was only the beginning.
Chos’ chosi ngabali.
Two
MY PRESENT EXISTENCE in the world of form is probably the most challenging one and I’ve lived many lifetimes to know that. It is not the bitter and unrelenting changing fixations that this world throws at regular intervals but the multidimensional possibilities in the world of origins that test my purity. There is no one spirit world existing in one dimension like there is no one planet in the universe; one has to die many times before reaching my present plane of existence. I now find it hard to strike a seamless symphony between the form and the formless. The bridge between the two existences needs to be clear of all rubble to truly serve the divine purpose and to be able to pass messages from beyond.
As a little girl growing up, I always felt I was something more than a physical being imprisoned within flesh and bone. There was always a ‘me’ more pronounced outside the corporeal image; a ‘me’ that possessed all the enchantment of the spirit. I spent a lot of time gazing lustfully at all the open spaces, admiring all things holy; I listened to the whispering silence for the peace of God. The world of form never really made sense; there were questions more than answers. I was lost in the divine game. The world around me seemed to be talking or at least trying to convey a message; however, I wasn’t ready to comprehend it. The guises of the world of form clouded the truth in the meaning. I was listening and hearing but could not deduce the language locked in symbols. I could feel a pull of vibration begging for my absolute attention. The elders noticed my eyes appeared forever absentminded.
My aunt, Nontsebenzo calls me Thonqo, ‘the stupid one’. She sometimes snaps her fingers at the fall of my face to bring me back to the apparent reality.
‘Wathwetyulwa lo mntana kodwa, sisi,’ she told my mother. ‘This is really a ghost of a child that you have brought into our home, my loving sister,’ shaking her head in bewilderment.
My adopted mother is a sangoma, a healer of Bantu; she loves me more than life itself. She calls me by many names, her favourite being Nkwenkwezi; a star of the heavens. As a small child I noticed I was treated differently; I saw it in the eyes of the grown-ups. Their eyes mirrored the most puzzling of emotions and something told me that my mother was overcompensating with her great kindness; strange and fantastic is the stigma a child with albinism experiences. I grew up with song, love and dance and our homestead was and still is forever full with seekers.
My mother is overprotective. She wouldn’t let me out of her sight until recently, while girls my age have been playing games in all corners of our village for as long as I can remember. I never understood the height of her panic the moment I drifted out of her sight to play with the other kids.
‘Nwelezelanga … Nwelezelanga!’ she would shout at the top of her voice with deep anxiety.
‘What do I say to you all the time, huh?’ A condescending expression would accompany the spirited force of her words.
‘You must play in the homestead and not wander about this whole village,’ she would reprimand.
It is only now that I understand her over-protectiveness; there is a belief across the breadth and plains of the land that children with albinism have special powers and our body parts are believed to possess powerful omens by the witches of dark magic. Most of us are hunted down for sacrifices because of the suppositious belief that immortality will be gained in the everlasting life.
It is true that I am addressed by the unseen. Most of my spiritual companions ‘visit’ every now and then and share holy privileges that I cannot easily access in my present plane of existence. Sometimes we communicate telepathically. We don’t use words as such but rather images and symbols that are capable of supporting more expansive meaning and sense. We don’t take life too seriously; creative play is very much part of conscious creation. My mother has caught me countless times while addressing these personalities without physical body and initially dismissed them as imaginary friends I’ve created.
‘Uyawathetha nothikoloshe, Nwelezelanga!’ She would scoff at me about talking to these invisible beings.
She initially thought I had a curious over-imagination and regarded my engagements with these shades of nothing as harmless and childish but had a change of heart as time progressed. I guess it also helps that she is connected with the world of the spirits through her ancestors; talking with formless beings isn’t really taboo to her.
I watch the story of life unfold in the clouds while herding cattle; it is a story of my existence. The purpose of any given lifetime is available but only beneath the surface. One has to scratch and search consciously for the absolute truth to be revealed. I ‘travel’ to many other levels of existence in search of the evasive truth; it is a crazy existence indeed.
The herdboys poke fun at me every moment they succumb to boredom; it doesn’t help that I’m the only shepherd among the boys. They call me names; their favourite is Nongayindoda, the one who resembles a man, because of my chosen chore. I suppose it doesn’t help that I don’t play with girls my age in the village. I choose to be with the boys because they don’t provoke me all the time. The boys are more preoccupied with making life forms out of clay, hunting rabbits, catching insects and stick-fighting; some of the many fascinations they busy themselves with while determining t
he alpha male ranking order. I’m the least of their worries most of the time. I’ve had to fight to earn respect though. Stick-fighting is the only respectable way the boys know to separate the machos from the weaklings. It is a wonder to some of the boys that I’m not swollen with pride because of my clean sweep in the art of stick-fighting. I’ve fallen and humiliated many boys and sent them packing to obscurity. They don’t know that I’ve lived a series of male lives in my past reincarnations and as a result there is a hidden male in my psychical memory and inner self that helps me to not over-identify with my present sex. Most girls my age amplify their female characteristics. My femininity acts as a mellowing feature to the past strong aggressive tendencies that are genetically coded and imbedded in the deeper inner self.
My last victim was a boy called Dambuza. He wasn’t full of glory at my past victories. He continuously mocked the shameful lads that succumbed to my whipping.
‘I’ll never be beaten by a girl, even in my sleep,’ he teased their wounded egos. ‘I’ll beat the golden-haired Nongayindoda with one arm behind my back.’
It was no secret that the fat Dambuza wanted to fight and was rather troubled by how skilfully I managed to stay out of the battle. I wasn’t really particular in proving a point. I was more interested with the peculiar world of wonder afforded by the wilderness. I was fascinated by anthills; as the cattle grazed, I would busy myself with watching the ants live their lives. Something within me resonated with the deep and profound world they created. I couldn’t help feeling that they were the lost royal rulers of the ancient world. Dambuza thought otherwise. He took a sharp rock and destroyed the royal palace of the ants with the intention of provoking me. He succeeded.
Nwelezelanga: The Star Child Page 1