The Madonna of Excelsior

by Zakes Mda

  “Divorce,” he said. “I don’t know what is happening with young people these days. They marry today, and the next day they part. I hate handling divorce cases, especially when the custody of children is involved.”

  “I thought lawyers didn’t get their personal feelings mixed up with business,” said Viliki.

  “Lawyers are human beings too.”

  “Lawyers have no scruples, Meneer. They defend anyone who can pay.”

  “A person is innocent until proven guilty by a court of law, Viliki,” explained Adam de Vries. “When a lawyer takes your case, at that stage you are innocent. Only a court of law can determine otherwise. And it does so only after the case.”

  Viliki had no answer for this. Somehow it did not sound right. But Adam de Vries had a way of twisting things so that he did not know how to respond. He decided to be wicked. To provoke him about his professed role in the anti-apartheid struggle.

  “Hey Meneer, at your congress in Marquard so many years ago, what made you suggest that your people should negotiate with the heathens?”

  “I was merely quoting the Bible when I talked of heathens,” said Adam de Vries defensively. “You are not going to take me to the Human Rights Commission for racism, are you?”

  “Well,” said Viliki light-heartedly, “I can call them heathens too as they kicked me out of my own Movement. But what I want to know is, what created your doubts about apartheid?”

  “I think they had their genesis in the Immorality Act case of 1971,” said Adam de Vries. “I began to question some of our laws.”

  Adam de Vries had boasted about his old cases to Viliki before. Including the case of the Excelsior 19. And Viliki did not mind when this case was discussed, even though his mother had been one of the accused. He even joked that had it not been for the capers of those days, he would not have had a sister as beautiful as Popi.

  It was obvious to Viliki that Adam de Vries was a bored man. He looked back with nostalgia to the days when he handled some of the most exciting cases of Excelsior. Today most of his business involved what he called chamber work, drawing up wills and transfer deeds. A little bit of conveyancing here; a little bit of notarial work there. Once in a while, the odd divorce case, for which he normally briefed advocates in Bloemfontein. The days of courtroom drama were gone. He could only relive them in his stories to Viliki.

  “Yes, that was the greatest case of all time,” said Adam de Vries. “But I tell you, Viliki, those women were bribed to frame the white men.”

  “And I suppose their children made themselves,” said Viliki, without any enthusiasm. He had heard this version of the Excelsior 19 case so many times that he was prepared to let it pass.

  “But I tell you, we were ready for them,” continued Adam de Vries, ignoring Viliki’s comment. “We were going to win that case. It was going to be very bad for the country. That was why John Vorster instructed Percy Yutar to withdraw the case.”

  “You say as a result of this case, you began to question your laws,” said Viliki, “but you remained in the party for the next thirty years. Why?”

  “To change it from within. People like de Klerk and I changed the National Party from within. That is why today the National Party is the party that brought about the new dispensation in South Africa.”

  Viliki laughed for a long time. Until Adam de Vries got irritated.

  “So it’s really you who brought us this freedom we are enjoying today?” asked Viliki, still laughing. “All this time we thought it was the Movement and the other organisations. What were we doing fighting for freedom in the underground when you and de Klerk were here all along to free us?”

  “Listen,” said Adam de Vries, not bothering to hide his annoyance, “I am busy. I cannot sit here all day listening to your idle talk. Don’t you have any work to do at the council?”

  “You know, Meneer,” said Viliki as he made to go, “these days it is very difficult to find a white person who ever supported apartheid.”

  We watched Viliki walk out of Adam de Vries’s office. We knew that whenever he was bored, whenever he had had his fill of the Seller of Songs’ music that tingled in his veins, making his body hot to the point of explosion, he sauntered off to Adam de Vries’s office in town. We wondered what it was that had drawn these two together. At least Popi and Lizette de Vries were drawn together by their work. But Viliki and Adam de Vries?

  When the inquisitive quizzed him about it, Viliki would only say, “He is a nice guy, although a white man will always be a white man.”

  The likes of Tjaart Cronje and Johannes Smit said that Adam de Vries was Viliki’s puppet. It was not enough that his party had sold out the Afrikaner; Adam de Vries was now dancing to the tune of the blacks who were taking the country down the sewer. Otherwise what would an Afrikaner lawyer have in common with an unschooled township boy?

  The people of the Movement said de Vries was the puppeteer and Viliki the puppet. The Pule Siblings no longer represented the interests of the people of Mahlatswetsa Location in the council chamber, but those of the rich Afrikaners of Excelsior.

  We, on the other hand, were not bothered by these friendships. We put them down to the old love affair between black people and Afrikaners that the English found so irritating. Even at the height of apartheid, blacks preferred dealing with Afrikaners to the English-speaking South Africans. The English, common wisdom stated, were hypocrites. They laughed with you, but immediately you turned, they stabbed you in the back. The Afrikaner, on the other hand, was honest. When he hated you, he showed you at once. He did not pretend to like you. If he hated blacks, he said so publicly. So, when you dealt with him, you knew who you were dealing with. When he smiled, you knew he was genuine. One could never trust the smile of an Englishman.

  We never questioned what informed these generalisations.

  VILIKI WALKED aimlessly down the main street of Excelsior, which was really the only street of note in the town. The rest of the streets were lined with residential houses. The street was bustling with excited people. There was a carnival atmosphere as men, women and children walked from one shop to the next with plastic bags full of groceries. Other people gathered at the Greek café, which was really a Portuguese café, to treat themselves to Russian sausages and chips.

  It was payday in Excelsior. The aged who were on old-age pensions had received their monthly grants. And their children and grandchildren were out to spend the money on both necessities and luxuries. Payday always caused such excitement. Even children knew when it was payday, because most families depended on the money that the government gave to the aged for being old. The most fortunate families were those that had one or two mentally or physically disabled members. Their disability grants, paid on the same day as the old-age pensions, fed entire families.

  Viliki became part of the buzz of excitement, joining some friends from Mahlatswetsa Location who wanted to have a few beers at the off-sales liquor outlet, or bottle store, adjacent to the only hotel in town. They bought the beers and sat on the window ledge outside the bottle store, as was the custom. The owner allowed them to sit on the inside window sill in front of the counter when the weather was not conducive to imbibing outdoors.

  They watched as Afrikaner men and women walked in and out of the pub at the hotel. Viliki and his friends had never been inside that pub. The thought never even entered their heads to drink there. It was the domain of the Afrikaners of Excelsior. And everyone left it at that.

  Viliki saw Tjaart Cronje and Johannes Smit climb out of a four-wheel-drive vehicle, singing boisterously. Jacomina followed, reprimanding them for making too much noise. They only laughed at her and sang even louder, dancing clownishly around her as they walked into the pub.

  Viliki had not seen Johannes Smit for quite some time. Since the time he had burst into the council chamber to complain about the increase in rates a year ago. To cheers of derision from the Movement council members and of admiration from Tjaart Cronje, and to the bemusement of the N
ational Party members, he had stood up in the gallery, and had shouted out of turn, “I am a farmer! I feed South Africa! The very Mandelas and Mbekis cannot survive without me!”

  Viliki sipped his beer from the one-litre bottle and wondered why people like Tjaart Cronje and Johannes Smit were so angry. Were people like Viliki, Popi and Niki not the ones who should be angry? Were they not entitled even to a shred of anger? Why should the Afrikaner hoard all the anger?

  POSKAART/POSTCARD 2

  STREET SIGNS INDICATE that this is a crossroad. He pulls the two-wheeled unhooded cart across the crimson soil like a rickshaw man. His red hair has been tied into a big bun that hangs like a cap over his face. It is a small delicate face connected by a thick neck to a small delicate body clad in golden-yellow overalls. His grey boots have patches of red from the soil. His body is bent slightly forward from the weight of the cart. He pulls it among golden-yellow sunflowers. On the cart sits a brown Mother Mary with a brown Baby Jesus in her arms. She looks like a nun in a blue veil. Three giant candles burn in the cart: one in front, two at the back. A white giant star of Bethlehem spreads its white light between the puller of the cart and its riders. Sunflowers flourish on the crimson soil. Three giant sunflowers grow out of the blue and white sky.

  Kersfees in die Karretjie. Xmas in the Small Cart. By: Father Frans Claer-houut. Popi read the bottom of the postcard and laughed. She had never noticed before that they had misspelt the trinity’s name. They had added an extra u, which served him right, as he had mastered the art of distorting everything. Houses. People. Donkeys. Rickshaws. Sunflowers and cosmos. Even holy personages like Jesus and Mary. It was poetic justice that the printer had distorted his name too. A man who could be possessed by such beautiful madness that he placed road signs in the middle of a sunflower field deserved to have his name distorted.

  It was Christmas in Excelsior, too. Popi had taken out her exercise book to look at the postcards. She wondered if the trinity would be painting on Christmas Day. Maybe the picture on the postcard was created on Christmas Day. She remembered her last visit to the trinity’s studio many years ago. As a fourteen-year-old freckled girl. Before she became a woman of thirty whose tall slender frame was burdened with anger. She felt an urge to go to the mission house in Tweespruit to see him again. To bathe her troubled soul in the colourful canvases that surrounded him.

  Christmas had lost the festive aura it used to have when she was a little girl. Those days, girls wore their new taffeta dresses and went to show off at church in the morning. Boys also dressed up in colourful new shirts, even when the pants of those whose parents could not afford new outfits were the old Sunday pants. Christ-mases were feasting days. Families used to cook special meals. After a big lunch of rice, chicken, cabbage, beetroot, tomato and onion gravy, jelly and custard, and home-baked hard cakes with ginger beer, the children would take a songful stroll to the houses of white people in town. There they would stand at the gate of each house and ask for a “Christmas Box.” The white folk would send their children or maids to the gate with sweets and cookies. Late in the afternoon the children would sing their way back to Mahlatswetsa Location, where they would divide the spoils amongst themselves.

  But these days, Christmas had lost its lustre. Children did not seem to care any more. They spent the whole day in their old clothes. Parents still maintained the tradition of buying new clothes. But the children refused to wear them on Christmas Day. They kept them in their boxes to wear during the year when no one would know they had been bought for Christmas.

  Christmas had now become like an ordinary Sunday, except for the fact that the service was a Christmas service; the reading from the Bible was about the birth of Christ, and the preaching was about what that birth meant to the world. After the service, people went home to eat their ordinary Sunday lunches, which looked like the Christmas lunches of old except for the absence of jelly and custard, and cakes and ginger beer. Adults went to get drunk, as they did every weekend, while children just loitered around street corners in small groups.

  This Christmas, unlike others, Popi had not cooked any special lunch. Neither had Niki. Popi sat on the bed and stared at the Christmas cart. She wondered why a man instead of the customary donkey was pulling it. She could never figure out the trinity. How his mind worked. Still, she enjoyed his madness, and found it moving.

  Niki sat under one of the bluegum trees that lined the road leading into Excelsior. The evergreen melliodora and the black ironbark well beloved by honeybees. She sat on a white plastic garden chair, and watched the worker bees as they flew from the trees laden with pollen and nectar to the hives that she had placed on the ground. Her eyes followed the bees from the hives back to the flowers on the trees and into the hives again. The wooden hives could be seen among the long blades of grass, sometimes peeping above them, along the three-kilometre stretch of road. She had placed them randomly, facing in different directions to make it easier for the bees to find their particular hives. If the hives had been placed in a straight line facing the same direction, this would have confused the bees, as they would not have known to which hive they belonged. She had learnt, at the one-day bee-keeping course on a farm at Ficksburg Viliki had sent her to, that unlike American bees, South African bees did not know how to count.

  Some of Niki’s hives were placed in clusters. Four hives to each cluster. Back to back and facing in different directions. Four different colours in each cluster. Red, blue, yellow and green. In the three-kilometre stretch, there were thirty hives.

  At the farm, without the knowledge of the farmer, Niki had learnt from the labourers how to construct beehives. Each hive had a honey chamber and a brood chamber. Each chamber had ten frames on which honeycombs hung. In the brood chamber of each hive were the queen and the drones and the eggs and the brood.

  Every morning Niki took her white garden chair and a piece of bread wrapped in plastic, and walked the six kilometres from Mahlatswetsa Location through the town to the bluegum trees. There she sat among the hives for the whole day. Listening to the buzzing of the bees. Watching the worker bees doing their work. Sitting still even as some of the bees danced around her, communicating calming messages to her through their airborne hormones. It was as if she shared the same pheromones with the bees.

  Whenever she harvested some of the hives, Niki gave the honey away.

  The message would be relayed from one mouth to the next: The Bee Woman has honey. We would then walk along the road as if we were on a particular journey. We would see her sitting on the chair among the hives, and would greet her in the sweetest of voices. She would call us to come and get some honey. She would give us honeycombs from the pile in a white plastic bucket in front of her. She did not wonder why we happened to have containers—empty billycans and pots—on our journey. Or why our journey suddenly came to an end and we turned back to the township as soon as she had given us the honey.

  Her misguided generosity did not sit well with Viliki, who had helped her with the material to construct the hives in the first place. He had also assisted her with the construction of the catch-boxes that were used to trap swarming bees. Right from the beginning, as the councillor in charge of the parks, he had allowed her to place the hives in the veld near the trees that lined the road. He had even sent her to the farm at Ficksburg to learn more scientific ways of bee-keeping, while Popi was insisting that her mother be left alone to keep bees in her own way, using the wisdom that her ancestors had given her. Clearly her ancestors were talking to her through the bees, and it would be interfering with this communication if she were taught European ways of keeping bees, Popi had reasoned. Viliki had gone to all this trouble because he hoped that Niki would be able to make a living from the bees. Not just give honey away to passers-by.

  Viliki once discussed his concerns with Adam de Vries, who went to offer his assistance to Niki.

  “I can help you to expand your bee-keeping enterprise and make it financially viable,” he had said.

&n
bsp; Niki had thanked him for the offer, but had made it clear that she did not need anyone’s assistance.

  Even on Christmas Day Niki sat among the bees. And Popi sat on the bed in her mother’s shack. She was getting bored with the postcards. She could not go to the library on Christmas Day. It was closed. Nor could she go to collect cow-dung. In any event, cow-dung gathering expeditions were only enjoyable when Niki was there. Popi decided to get into the Christmas rickshaw, to sit behind Baby Jesus and Mother Mary, and ride along the dusty road of Mahlatswetsa Location, until it joined the broad tarred road that led to the town, past the closed shops and banks, right up to the stretch of road that was lined with bluegum trees. There she found Niki sitting on her garden chair among the hives.

  Niki was pleased to see her daughter. She was always happy when Popi came to visit her. To pay homage to her, as Popi put it. We observed that the motlopotlo that existed between them was very strong. The motiopotlo was the invisible cord that tied the child to the mother. It was the umbilical cord that remained strong even after it had been cut and buried in the ash-heap after the birth of the child. Some mothers were fortunate in that the motlopotlo between them and their children remained strong throughout their lives. The less fortunate mothers had a weak motlopotlo. Their children forgot all about them and disappeared from their lives.

  Popi sat on the grass at Niki’s feet. There was silence between them for some time. Then suddenly Niki said, “I did many wrong things in my life.”

  “I don’t care what you did in your life, Niki,” said Popi quietly. “I don’t want to know.”

  “Yet some of them have had a sweet harvest,” continued Niki, as if she had not heard her. “If I had not done what I did, you would not be here.”

  Popi did not try to make sense of what Niki was saying.

  “Are you still angry with Tjaart?” Niki asked.