Victory is a demonstrative lover, full of kisses and hugs. “My wife,” he says. You cannot persuade him to go to a party when she is around.
Lulama wears no makeup. Whenever Victory is busy, she comes to my room and sits on my bed, reading a magazine and asking me shy questions about Kenya. She has no fear of me, and I am uncertain around her; she looks me directly in the eye, not afraid to smile and stare at me without blinking. Whenever she speaks to Victory it is in their language, Xhosa. Mostly, she does not speak to him with others around. Sometimes, if there is a group of customers drinking with Victory, she creeps up to him and sits on his lap and whispers something in his ear. She never joins in the conversation if there are men talking in Victory’s room.
In this filthy drunken residence, in this homeland university, the garbage chutes are piled high with rubbish. Students regularly shut the campus down, over one or another political issue. All over South Africa is liberation talk.
I hear the first moment of a protest march while I am lying down in bed. A thin reedy sound rising. Laughter, doors slamming, a student politician mouthing slogans, laughter, some drunken jeers, and bottles breaking on tarmac. Chants.
ANC. PAC. ANC. PAC.
Sounds slide away from the weak strings of song, doors slam somewhere, and the sound bursts out: clapping, and then thumps, loose and leisurely, feet thumping randomly, but stronger; another door slams, now there are echoes as a swarm of wings flap their way through the floors of Ntinga Female Residence next door and burst out of the door, a wind of sound, flapping and rolling like sheets, like the sea; now a group thump, tenors swoop like a swarm of swallows diving to earth, ten thousand beaks of attacking altos, ten thousand wildebeest feet stomp in Xhosa.
The train is sound flying in circles. Sometimes it glides, feet thumping as the train whoops.
I peep out of the window and see no swarm—two thousand students have gathered in a messy sprawl at the door to the residence, but every foot, every voice is doing what it is supposed to do to support the strike.
…
Victory and I are drinking in his room, with Monks, his roommate, and Sis D, who came to the university in her thirties and so drinks publicly and nobody says anything about it. It is the second day of the campuswide strike.
We talk about Brenda Fassie’s new scandals. They are fast and furious now. She was seen playing soccer with young boys on the streets of Hillbrow, Johannesburg, topless. Then she shocks the conservative country by announcing she is a lesbian.
Then she is touring in the United States, dancing at a club in Washington, D.C., when one of her breasts pops out. She grabs it and says, “This is Africa!”
Brenda is where sex and struggle politics met. She is Hillbrow, in Johannesburg, where tens of thousands of illegal immigrants find themselves selling and trading and changing and dying and making money and losing money. Where black meets white, drugs meet dreams, and music soaks it all in. Hillbrow is where she always seems to end up when she is down on her luck.
Finally, we have watched TV, and we shake our heads. Brenda is finished. Drunk and incoherent, she misses concerts. Rumor has it she is on crack cocaine, which has landed in Johannesburg and is ravaging whole suburbs.
…
The strike stretches. The faculty union, the workers’ union, the students’ union join. On Friday, hungover, I make my way to Victory’s room. Reggae is thumping on the stereo. Ayibo! Victory is always laughing as he complains about the striking students. I am always worried that things will break, as he whirs around the room on unsteady-looking limbs. “Damn. Damn. Not enough stock,” he says. “No class tomorrow and I don’t have enough dope.”
Once you have spent enough time with him, you see his grace: counterintuitive, not moving the way the group moves—he always looks for the gaps between things: opportunities and ideas. If so many black students live only for the utopian future, Victory is on the ground, looking out for the things nobody noticed. Many students don’t approve.
Yu! A whole university student! Selling something? Ayibo. Why can’t he get a scholarship and apply for store credit cards?
I met a Ghanaian man a few months ago at a baptism for Kofi’s niece. He is a bitter administrator of an agricultural college in the Ciskei. His students were on strike because he had cut the maintenance staff on the farm.
“Clipboard farmers!” he shouted. “They want to become clipboard farmers!”
Victory offers me a beer. I never seem to pay for beer when I drink with him. I gave up insisting. He is excited.
“I will make a lot of money this weekend. It is month end, and students have money.”
“Where is Lulama today?”
“Lulama stayed in Butterworth for the weekend,” he says. “She is studying for an exam.”
He jumps to his feet and is out of the room. He comes back an hour later with crates and crates of beer. We load his giant freezer together, and wait for the liberation songs to become partying songs so Victory can start counting money.
Nonracist, nonsexist South Africa. This is shouted everywhere, every day, on walls, on posters. Villages. Cities. Hills. Student residencies. It is scrawled on the walls of toilets.
…
A year passes.
We are at Club Dazzle. My new friends Trust, Kaya, Feh George, from Sierra Leone, and I. Kofi is in America. We notice something strange. There is a huge group of women on the dance floor. All of them have baby dreadlocks; they are wearing trousers and men’s shirts. They are all smoking on the dance floor, laughing and looking free and happy. We are not happy.
The bouncer makes his way to them, and tries to pull one of the smoking girls off the dance floor. The group attacks him, pulls their friend back in, and continues dancing.
My friend Trust goes up to them, to ask one of them for a dance. He comes back, sweating. “What is it?” I say, laughing. His eyes are wide open. “They say they are lesbians.”
Soon, they are on campus too, girls having all-girl parties, buying their own booze, and smoking in huddled groups in public. Every single one of them has dreadlocks. Liberation is coming. It is all over the radio.
Chapter Fifteen
I have a small black-and-white television in my new room off campus. It is on all day. A metal hanger thrust into the broken aerial helps me get a good picture. It is 1993. Mandela snaps and crackles onto the screen. De Klerk is whirring backward, stuttering and all kimay and defensive. Bodies pile up in Zululand. Chris Hani is the angry man of the left, popular among the youth. White South Africans are terrified of him. They like Mbeki—he speaks smoothly and smokes a pipe. Ramaphosa too is a contender—for the next generation after Mandela, which is aging.
Over the past year, as I fell away from everything and everybody, I moved out of the campus dorms and into a one-room outhouse in Southernwood, a suburb next to the university. I do not know what happened. All of a sudden, I was moving slower, attending class less, and now I am not leaving my room at all.
My mattress has sunk in the middle. Books, cigarettes, dirty cups, empty chocolate wrappers, and magazines are piled around my horizontal torso, on the floor, all within arm’s reach. If I put my mattress back on the bunk I am too close to the light that streams in from the window, so I use the chipboard bunk as a sort of scribble pad of options: butter, a knife, peanut butter and chutney, empty tins of pilchards, bread, a small television set, many books, matches and a sprawl of candles, all in various stages of undress and disintegration.
There is a secondhand shop in Umtata that is owned by the palest man I have ever seen: he has long spindly fingers, almost gray, and wears a brown sweater. He is Greek and talks to his mother a lot on the phone. He has a book exchange section. I take my batch of books out; he values them and gives me a list of my options. I will steal a few. He never watches. I walk out with books thrust into my trousers, front and back, and head for the bus station.
Back in my room, my head aches. It always aches when I lea
ve my room for too long. I have managed to avoid my landlord for two months. When he knocks on my door, I do not respond. My curtains are closed. The keyhole is blocked. I am not home. Notes are slipped under my door. Notes are thrown away.
Ciru is about to graduate. Computer science. She is teaching at a local college and working at the computer center on campus. Sometimes she comes and knocks and knocks. She slips money under my door, even brings food sometimes. Once in a while I find myself at her apartment. She opens the door, doesn’t say anything serious. We chat. She pours me a drink, she laughs, and I find myself laughing too, like we did when we were young. Twin Salvation Army marching bands on a hot dry Sunday in my hometown, Nakuru, Kenya. They bang their way up the sides of my head and meet at some crossroads in my temple, now out of rhythm with each other. I am thirsty with the effort of them, but my body is an accordion, and can’t find the resolution to stand.
I relearn finger-tatting patterns, from my childhood, unraveling my sister Ciru’s new handmade poncho and getting belted for it. There are several odd shapes, little curling braids and bracelets, on the floor next to my bed, all made from my winter sweater. I can hear my landlord, a Ugandan geography professor, moving about in his room. Three Mozambicans have been thrown off a train in Johannesburg. It is in the news. Black immigrants are being beaten daily now in Johannesburg.
I stretch in bed. New books by my side. Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer. A matchbox sits in a saucer, Lion matches, its belly sunken and crusty with crumbs of cigarette coal. It is stuck in a hardened wallow of wax. It leaves a clean wedge as it rises, swelling ominously and blurring as I swing it away from the full glare of the bedside lamp. The candle roars to light, spluttering like late-night cats fucking near the garage outside.
…
We are children of the cold war. We came of age when it ended; we watched our countries crumple like paper. It is as if the Great Lakes are standing and rising above the map and tilting downward, and streams of Rwandese, Kenyans, and others are pouring into Congo, Tanzania, Kenya. Then Kenya shook and those stood and poured into South Africa.
Spring is coming, and I am agitated. My hair is no longer chemically treated. It has grown kinky. My fingers watch themselves on the candlelit wall as they play with an Afro comb splitting my scalp into clean squares, section by section, pinky swung away, thumb, fore-, and middle fingers set to work, bumping each other first, soon remembering Mary’s clicking fingers in Mum’s salon.
On the news here, a fourteen-year-old Rwandese boy crossed the border into South Africa. On foot. Build your little tower of hair, watch it droop sideways, run your forefinger and feel the hidden orders of all that mass of kink, split and squared and built into a field of short stumps of lace. Do not look at your fingers; they will immediately seize and get confused.
Auntie Rosaria lives in Rwanda. With her three sons and husband. We haven’t heard from her since the killing began. Mum is beside herself. I should call her.
I don’t call her.
Doctors from Kenya, old Mangu boys, are flooding South African hospitals to work. Let time be each open-ended knot; time is your fingers reaching into the back of the head and grabbing the wild bunch of unsorted hair—squeaky from just being washed and brittle from drying. Pull the bunch together, so it does not curl back into itself, and hold it like a posy of flowers; rub your fingers off the sides of your posy to keep them from becoming too slippery. In minutes you, the uninitiated, are moving across the growing chessboard of plaits, finger pads kissing each other rapidly, like Mary’s—eyes glazed, and talking softly to the back of Mum’s ears, nothing at all you will ever remember.
This year, Kenyans start to arrive in South Africa in significant numbers. Sometimes I leave my room, always at night, and find myself in parties with small groups of young people. They carry stories that flow down the continent: Oh, the roads in southern Tanzania? What roads? And they laugh. Some people came regularly, to buy old Peugeots in South Africa from old white women and drive them back to Kenya for sale. After a few trips, knowing how to bribe; where to hide in plain sight; how to build a bulletproof refugee story; how to pay college fees; what to say in job interviews. (I am not political. Your roads are soo good. They will kill me. The politicians. I am from Rwanda. Somalia. Liberia. I lose my papers. I am orphan. No no am not doctor, I am refugee baby of Geldof. Look, look my face looks like pity baby of Geldof. No spik English.)
You collect information about traffic police in Botswana, who cannot be bribed; about college life in Harare. It is soo clean; education is cheap and good.
Moi rigged the elections, and the economy is sinking. There have been ethnic clashes in the Rift Valley, not far from where my parents live, where I was brought up.
In 1992, thousands were displaced from Rift Valley Province in Kenya. The principal aggressors were Moi’s militias. There are retaliations—and soon it is not clear who started what, where or when—and soon the violence spreads out of the Rift Valley, into Nyanza and Western. It seems clear that Moi’s rule is soon coming to an end, and this serves as a sort of final solution, to rid the Rift Valley of “foreigners.”
I am desperate to go home. But I do not know what I will do there without a degree, with no money. My father begs me, on the phone, to stay and find a way for myself.
I do not tell him explicitly that I am now an illegal immigrant. I do not say I haven’t attended class in a year, I have failed to let myelf disappear into the patterns of a school where there is no punishment, no bell, no clear timetable, no real shame, for I am not at home, and don’t much care for the approval of people here.
I switch on the television, switch off the television and watch the swollen glowing belly of the screen for a moment. The night is quiet; I sit up on my bed and light a cigarette. The matchstick belly dances, a giant trembling feather of flame tiptoes across the wall. I reach out to kill the candle. Giant baby finger shadow and thumb shadow meet awkwardly on the wall. Thumb has learned not to think as it moves across hand to make a pincer with pointing finger, but pointing finger is busy carrying Olympic torch with the Big Man, middle finger, who does nothing at all, just stands there all up yours and presidential, but claims some kind of dubious authority based on height. Finger pincer meets flame, which screams for a moment before going dark. I wriggle back into my own pillow, and my tears start falling, and they don’t stop.
Brenda Fassie is back on the radio. A softer, surprising Brenda, singing the gospel song “Soon and Very Soon.” We are disarmed. And sigh. We don’t know if the song is so powerful because of her backstory, or because of the unusual sincerity of her delivery. She should have been called Grace, a lyrical tongue of silver light, built from shacks and gold dumps, of dust and cramps and dreams. Look, she says, what you can make of this.
There she is, an open target, taking bullets, and standing, each time more battered, but still coated in light. Why, why, Brenda, we ask, do you keep on loving and burning? Close yourself, Sis Brr. Close yourself, girl.
…
Chris Hani is dead in his driveway, he has been shot dead, and blood drips from his head and rolls down South Africa’s smooth tarmac, and you stand, dizzy. You make your way to the campus for the first time in over a month.
You buy several quarts of Lion beer. Victory drinks a lot now. He has a potbelly. He is dating a forty-year-old woman, with light glowing skin, a bank job, and a sixteen-valve car. For sex, he says. I am going to make money, he says. I am going to be rich. Lulama broke up with him. She is a lesbian, he says; she drinks with her gang of friends.
I bark and bellow with my friend Trust, in Victory’s little shebeen. You can hear yourself grunt, and everything you say for the first few minutes is a sort of echo, as you watch his Adam’s apple bobbing.
You can hear the swarms of roars all over the campus.
The country will explode. Chris Hani, the last big barrier of the ANC’s left, is dead. Umtata is burning with anger. Students, even the cheese and wi
ne club fashionistas, are turning over bins and chanting. Chris Hani is dead. We all saw the body on the tarmac on television, blood oozing from a broken head. Mandela, on television, begs people to be calm.
Trust’s cousin has a car. We drive around town. The whole of Umtata is on the street, crying and singing, feet pounding. We park at a giant open-air shebeen called Miles, after its millionaire owner. He has recently converted it from an old warehouse. It is at once a giant wholesale outlet for the thousands of Victorys of Umtata, and also a place where all the slinky car people can show off their music systems, and girls of the St. John’s Colleges of the world can choose the most compelling thumps and valves and bass and mags. An open-air, summer-party place. You can buy meat and sausage and barbecue.
Our car is parked next to Tsietsi and his friends. Tsietsi used to stay across the corridor from me when I lived on campus. He has a gun and is a bad drunk. He claims to be a well-known gangster in Johannesburg. His friends are covered in gold and cologne, the new language of these post–Berlin Wall times.
He likes to hang with some Zulu boys from Durban. One of them is Brenda Fassie’s ex-husband’s brother. He looks just like his celebrity brother, Ntlantla Mbambo, but he has a clubfoot. A year or so ago, Brenda Fassie and Nhlanhla were having problems, only a few months after their wedding, which was in every magazine, every newspaper, every television program.
Tsietsi and his gangsters have a huge stereo in their room on campus. They leave the door open—this way any woman passing by may peep in and be invited for some Fish Eagle brandy. Victory has banned Tsietsi from his shebeen. He likes to pull his gun whenever he is upset. A young woman—she can’t be older than sixteen—walks past his car. He grabs her arm. She resists. He is pulling her close. She is screaming.
I am hot with life and it feels good. I let the vodka jump down my throat. I can feel it running down the pipes, can feel the fumes out of my mouth, and I am so hot, I wait for them to catch fire.
One Day I Will Write About This Place Page 11