The Theory of Flight

by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu

  Livingstone was a man who thought about things deeply and liked to see things through. So when the war came, after having thought deeply about the issue, he decided that the freedom fighters’ cause was just and that he would fight with them to the very end … or to his. To the war he took only the clothes he was wearing, his burning desire to fight injustice, the cravings of a half-full stomach, the beginnings of an unquenchable thirst and the His Master’s Voice sales ledger with all his drawings of aeroplanes. He chose as his nom de guerre ‘Golide Gumede’, which meant ‘fields of gold’, because that is what he envisioned for his people after the war – lives of plenty, lives of comfort, lives of value, lives of substance, lives that mattered. When he shared his vision of the future with others, they were eager to follow him.

  But before he could become the leader of men, it just so happened that one of his camp commanders saw the ledger full of aeroplane drawings and sent him to the Soviet Union to study aeronautical engineering. Golide happily endured the cold bitterness of the Soviet climate because he understood that after the war – when independence arrived – people would need to know that they were capable of flight.

  When he returned he fought with purpose and determination, and his war was good. Having been raised to be content with what he had, Golide had long felt that his life was complete. Then one day, while on a reconnaissance mission in Victoria Falls, he caught sight of a woman’s ankle through the slight opening of a beer hall door. The turn of the ankle was delicate. As he moved closer he saw that the ankle led to a foot clad in a dangerously heavy and high red platform shoe. Having seen the ankle, Golide was no longer content with just what he had. He wanted more. He wanted that ankle to be a part of his life.

  There was a puff of smoke and a throaty laugh. He could not help but open the door wider … and there she was, suddenly upon him like a surprise – the woman who would determine the course of his life from that moment on. She had deep brown skin, the longest eyelashes he had ever seen, and a plumpness that his body would welcome. Her hair was plaited and parted with a precision that somehow did not belong to her; whoever had plaited her hair had not taken the time to get to know the woman, of this Golide was sure. The woman let a cigarette dangle precariously from her invitingly full lips as she reached for spun golden hair that seemed to stand suspended in the air and placed it ever so gently on her head. The golden hair made her perfect. If there was anyone else in the room, Golide did not see them. After an eternity, the woman looked at him through the mirror she was sitting in front of, took a deep drag of her cigarette, exhaled at her leisure, took the measure of him, shrugged her shoulders nonchalantly and then stood up. As she walked past him she said: ‘Waiting. That is definitely no way to treat a lady.’ Not auspicious words to be sure, but she had gently rested her left hand on his shoulder as she said them, and that had been enough to seal Golide’s fate.

  And so it began. The woman was Elizabeth Nyoni. She was a country-and-western singer, self-styled after Dolly Parton. She drew a large audience that spilled out of the beer hall and into the beer garden. She sang happy songs. She sang sad songs. All of them were love songs – love discovered, love lost, love regained, love unrequited, love remembered, love gone bad – and that afternoon she sang them all to him, Golide Gumede, the man who, without knowing it, had kept her waiting. There was also a song about a dog, which, from the way she cut her eyes at him while she sang it, he was sure was not about a dog at all.

  As Golide watched the band pack away their instruments and Elizabeth spurn the advances of hopeful would-be lovers, he felt that they had already been on a journey together through the ins and outs and highs and lows of love – that they had always already shared a life with a past, present and future.

  Golide and Elizabeth did not ask much of each other. She told him that she needed to make her way to Nashville, Tennessee, so that she could become a bona fide country-and-western singer, and he promised that he would one day get her there. He told her that after the war he intended to make a home on the Beauford Farm and Estate, and she promised that she would go ahead and prepare one for him. In all, they spent the better part of nine hours together that day, but that was all that was needed to lay their solid foundation.

  After he met Elizabeth Nyoni, a part of Golide’s life suddenly made sense to him. All those countless hours spent drawing and building model aeroplanes and trying to determine their aerodynamics had not been about trying to bridge the distance that his father had created, but had instead been about preparing himself to be useful in Elizabeth’s life in the future.

  In that future he saw himself building a giant pair of silver wings; he saw people come from all over – some fascinated, some disbelieving, some ready for him to fail – to witness him build them. Among the non-believers he saw a few believers who looked at him with such admiration, adoration and assurance that he knew, without a doubt, that he was a man capable of impossible things.

  Golide knew that building aeroplanes was a costly business – that being capable of flight would come at a price. Parts either had to be bought or manufactured, people had to be educated and trained and the state’s monopoly on manufacturing had to be destroyed and decentralised. These obstacles made Golide spend most of his time thinking of ways to make the people understand that they were still capable of flight, and at no cost to themselves.

  The solution came to Golide one day when he looked up at the clear blue sky, saw a Vickers Viscount and suddenly understood what was possible. This Vickers Viscount was a passenger aeroplane that flew over the Zambezi River every day. Golide decided that he would strategically shoot down the passenger aeroplane so that it would land virtually undamaged in the guerrilla camp. This way he could teach people about how aeroplanes work before the war was over – before independence – at no cost. His commanders liked the idea because they could use the civilians on board as prisoners of war and hopefully broker an end to hostilities and finally realise the country that they had long been fighting for.

  On September 3, 1978, as Golide sat looking at the magnificence of the Victoria Falls, as he waited for the aeroplane to fly overhead, he thought of how Frederick Douglass had, exactly 140 years earlier, escaped from slavery. He did not think this thought in order to justify his actions, he thought it because it was a thought one could think as one waited to shoot down an aeroplane.

  As the Vickers Viscount flew overhead, Golide took aim with his anti-aircraft missile … and that was when they appeared with their formidable grace. Majestic. A herd of elephants raising dust beautifully in the savannah sunlight. The bull at the head of the herd raised his trunk and trumpeted terrifically and all the elephants came to a gradual standstill on one side of the Victoria Falls. The bull dived in close to where the waters plunge over the edge and swam across the Zambezi River. The ancient river and the mighty animal were in perfect harmony. This was a rite of passage made sacred by its sheer audacity. There was a wonder to it all … The possibility of the seemingly impossible. There was this feeling that Golide got … a knowing … He became aware of his place in the world. He understood that in the grander scheme of things he was but a speck … a tiny speck … and that that was enough. There was freedom, beauty even, in that kind of knowledge. It was the kind of knowledge that finally quieted you. It was the kind of knowledge that allowed you to fly.

  Golide launched his anti-aircraft missile. The missile was followed by a vision: he saw Elizabeth going to Beauford Farm and Estate carrying a golden egg. The golden egg became too heavy for her and she dropped it. It cracked open and a girl emerged. The girl had a gap between her two front teeth, and that is how Golide knew, with edifying certainty, that he and Elizabeth had created a life together – a daughter, Imogen Zula … Genie.

  The Vickers Viscount burst into glorious golden light.

  PART II

  HISTORY

  BEAUFORD

  As Golide Gumede watched the Vickers Viscount travel to the earth as a great ball of fire, he c
ould not have known that retribution would be sought for this one act. This one act that made him a hero in the eyes of many and a villain in the eyes of many others. He understood the madness of war – that there was no rhyme or reason to its casualties, no clear lines between cause and effect. He could not have known that certain men with a jaundiced sense of justice would draw an undeviating line from the shooting down of the Vickers Viscount and follow it, like a river, to Beauford Farm and Estate, where their vengeance would flow like an everlasting stream.

  But, truth be told, the line reached further still – through Golide Gumede and beyond him to connect him, in the inexplicable and inextricable ways that only geography can, to Beatrice Beit-Beauford, the heiress of the Beauford Farm and Estate and one of the survivors of the downed Vickers Viscount. Two separate lives lived on the same patch of land, brought to such proximity by an idea that had germinated, long before Golide and Beatrice came into being, in the mind of one Bennington Beauford as he sat in his armchair and smoked his pipe, watching the embers of a long-unstoked fire slowly die, trying to quiet the disquiet that resided deep in his heart.

  The lush and verdant village of Guqhuka became the Beauford Farm and Estate in much the same way that most villages became settler farms in the colonies. Bennington Beauford, having had the misfortune of inheriting only the family name and none of its centuries’ worth of fortune, dignity or honour – due to his father’s wild speculations – and having had the fortune of, absolutely by chance, distinguishing himself during the Great War, had decided that perhaps a life in the colonies would be just the thing for him. He had always fancied that if he made a go at being a gentleman farmer, he would be a great success at it. He had then set about looking for some land he could acquire through very little effort and at no great expense to himself. There were many colonies to choose from and so it took quite a few years for him to find the right place. At one hundred hectares, the place he settled on – Guqhuka – was adequate for his needs.

  Bennington was a fair-minded man and asked that the Africans who had lived on the land for centuries not be resettled. He had grand schemes for the Beauford Farm and Estate, schemes that would require a labour force. It was not lost on him that a readily available labour force would be less expensive than a labour force that came from afar. Bennington was a very enterprising man and he put the land and the people on it to good use. In just one decade he had made his farm one of the lifelines of the colony. He grew maize, sugar cane and cotton, reared cattle, sheep, pigs and chickens. He built refineries, butcheries and mills on his property. He turned the village into a modern compound, replaced the thatched mud rondavels with square concrete rooms under corrugated asbestos sheets. Everyone who lived on the compound worked in some capacity on the farm and estate. And because he was a generous man, he also built a school for the natives on his property.

  Having thus established himself, Bennington married Rosemary Beit, a woman from the purest pioneer stock who had never quite recovered from the ‘tumble’ from a horse she had taken when she was a child. Rosemary was considerate enough to die soon after giving birth to a baby girl, Beatrice, thus providing Bennington with an heir, perhaps not of the right gender, but an heir nonetheless. During a trip to the Netherlands with her father, his young daughter had shown a liking for sunflowers and so Bennington had dedicated a few acres of his land to growing them.

  When the Second World War broke out, Bennington proved to be indispensable to the war effort – his cotton made the soldiers’ uniforms, his canned goods fed the troops, and his leather made it possible to have boots on the ground. He became the wealthiest man in the colony. When he died in an unfortunate car accident in 1948, his only child and heir, Beatrice Beit-Beauford, then became, at eleven, the wealthiest person in the colony.

  At thirteen, Beatrice went to Eveline High School with the distinction of being the daughter of the man most people thought instrumental to the colony’s economic growth during and after the war. This guaranteed Beatrice respect and easy passage. However, Beatrice did not make it easy for those willing to grant her any privileges. She was a liberal-minded young woman whose ideas, especially on the rights and treatment of the African, terrified those around her – including Kuki Sedgwick, the girl who was to be her lifelong friend.

  Beatrice questioned and challenged everything and everyone, whereas Kuki never had an independent thought. Kuki had accepted wholesale the opinions and beliefs of her family, community and country. She loved her family, she loved her community, she loved her country and she never once thought they could be wrong – that they could all have contributed to the establishment and preservation of a system and order that was at its very heart unfair and unjust. Kuki did not quite agree with Beatrice’s notions, even thought them foolhardy, but she could not help finding Beatrice’s irreverence for all the things that Kuki herself held dear seductive. Not quite brave enough to be as defiant as Beatrice, Kuki was happy just to live vicariously through her and know that an alternative way of thinking and being was possible. For her part, Beatrice never tried to make Kuki share her views. Beatrice was too self-assured, too convinced that her way of thinking was just, correct and right, to look for converts. And because they never tried to change each other and simply accepted one another, Beatrice and Kuki became the best of friends.

  The only thing that threatened their bond was Emil Coetzee – a man whom Beatrice could never respect; a man whom Kuki loved and later married.

  After Eveline, Beatrice left for Oxford University and returned five years later, perhaps predictably, as a hippie. It was the dawn of the Sixties – the age for the Beatrices of the world to finally come into happy being. Never quite comfortable with the grandness of her inheritance, Beatrice turned the Beauford Estate into a multiracial commune and artists’ colony. She left the running of the Beauford Farm to the foreman and did not seem to care either way whether he did a good job or not.

  But Emil Coetzee, Kuki’s husband, did care about the Beauford Farm and Estate and how it was run. As head of the National Organisation of Domestic Affairs, he found enough incriminating evidence of interracial commingling to bring a charge of unlawful conduct against all those who lived on the Estate. Although equally appalled by the goings-on, the state was, however, hesitant to make them public and extremely reluctant to get on the wrong side of Beatrice Beit-Beauford, who was still the wealthiest person in the country and whose farm was still vital to the nation – especially now that it seemed to be gearing up for a civil war. In 1965, however, when Beatrice Beit-Beauford proudly gave birth to two Coloured twin boys, thereby flouting the state’s anti-miscegenation laws, the state decided that she was not to be trusted. Beatrice and her guests were evicted for ‘unlawful behaviour’ and for being ‘unfit’ residents.

  When the war ceased to be a few skirmishes here and there and broke out in earnest, becoming a full-blown guerrilla war, Beatrice BeitBeauford enthusiastically, vocally and publicly supported the terrorists (‘African nationalists’, as she called them) and believed, as they did, that the majority should rule.

  When Emil Coetzee found out that Beatrice was financially supporting the nationalists whose military wing was conducting terrorist attacks across the country, he zealously and triumphantly brought charges of treason against her. Beatrice had been vacationing at Victoria Falls with her two sons when she received the summons to appear before court. On her way back, tragedy struck. The aeroplane she was travelling in – the Vickers Viscount – was shot down by Golide Gumede. Many died. Beatrice’s twin sons died. The policemen escorting Beatrice died. The air hostess, who had at that very moment been serving Beatrice a Malawi shandy, died. But Beatrice survived. Her belief in an equal society also survived.

  There was such an outpouring of public sympathy for Beatrice Beit-Beauford that the treason charges were dropped and the trial dismissed. Emil Coetzee accepted this turn of events. This was not because he had forgiven Beatrice her past transgressions; it was because he had found
another use for her – he used her tragedy to call for the imprisonment and execution of Golide Gumede. Daily images of the smouldering remains of the Vickers Viscount quickly turned public sympathy into public outrage and anger against Golide Gumede. The public soon joined Emil Coetzee in thirsting for Golide Gumede’s blood, and Emil Coetzee promised to have his head on a platter within three days.

  However, finding Golide Gumede did not prove to be easy. Although there were many reports of people having seen him, everyone had a different description of him: he was tall, he was short, he was heavyset, he was thin, he was handsome, he had the type of face only a mother could love, he was an African, he was white … And no one knew what his name had been before the war. When Golide Gumede proved elusive and, thus, impossible to capture, Emil turned to his most trusted man – Mordechai.

  Mordechai Gatiro had grown up in Makokoba Township not knowing who his parents were or had been. The township was rough and, because he was a part of it, he was rough as well. He lived in an orphanage where he was bullied by the older children and where he looked forward to bullying the younger children when he was older. He was an angry child and, really, there was no alternative emotion for him to feel. He ended up, unsurprisingly, in a reform school that was one of even more ‘hard knocks’ than the orphanage. Along the way, he adamantly refused to acquire a skill or get an education. He and everyone who knew him knew that he would die young because his was a life born of fire. He was always getting into fights – dangerous fights, with fists, knives and guns involved – but he did not die. Frustrated with living, he joined the war. He was a freedom fighter or a terrorist – you could think of him which-ever way you wanted – he did not care. He was captured and this made him happy because he thought for sure he would hang for treason. Emil Coetzee, however, had other plans for him: he turned Mordechai into a spy, which was easy enough since Mordechai had never learned to have allegiances. He hoped he would get caught and killed, but that did not happen either. Instead, Emil Coetzee noticed a rare quality in Mordechai that made him officially employ him as a member of The Organisation. For not only did Mordechai not care much for his own life, he did not care much for the lives of others either. Because of this, Mordechai became The Organisation’s best interrogator. He was so valuable to Emil Coetzee that his name was never recorded even within The Organisation’s files: Mordechai was simply known as C10.