by Wole Soyinka
Solomon decided, as he lay dying on the mat in Aunt Po’s hut, to impose an impossible request: ‘Bury me where my ancestors lie.’
He knew two things, Solomon:
one: to deny the request of a dying man was suicide
and
two: his was an impractical request.
Everybody knew that the land in question was located in Farmer Thornton’s sprawling fields. Aunt Po, swamped by grief, sagged beneath her son’s request. And so it was left up to Abednego – he puffed – as were most important decisions in the family, to coax out one last shaft of reason; he grabbed his cousin’s hand.
‘Please, mzala, anything else.’
‘When my body lies in the ground, I want to be able to greet my ancestors on the other side.’
‘Anything else mzala. Please.’
‘I want to wake up in the spirit world of my clan across the Dongamuzi Mountain.’
‘Cousin, don’t say that, ngiyacela, please.’
‘It’s the grief of having to drive past the stolen land of my people which has killed me.’
‘Cousin, it is Aids which has killed you . . .’
Aunt Po let out an indignant shriek.
‘When they stole the land they stole our souls. Don’t let me wander in the spirit world without my soul.’
‘Cousin . . .’
‘Bury me in the land of my ancestors. Do you hear me? I will come back and haunt you if you don’t.’
Solomon chose this moment to draw his last breath; the pact was sealed.
The crime was committed in the dead of night. It was Abednego who led the excursion. Aunt Po insisted on a patch of land right in the middle of Farmer Thornton’s pumpkins. It was the farm workers who heard the conk-conk of the hoes against rock, and, loyal little mutts that they were, the little shits1, they alerted the farmer. And so, beneath the glower of the farmer’s flashlights, his rabid mongrels, his loaded shotgun and the local constabulary – who, fearful of spirits which when unfulfilled wandered the earth in search of vengeance, refused to help the farmer – Solomon Ndimande was buried. The family and what few friends had decided to brave the spectacle congratulated themselves on a job well done and went on their way.
And that was that.
Until.
Three years later, when, under the assistance of a court order from Judge Muponde – a drunk, a womaniser and a civil servant of the overzealous, irritating kind – Farmer Thornton and his band of latifundia thugs congregated to dig up Solomon. Aunt Po threw herself on to the grave and rolled and rolled, rolled and rolled, tearing at her tangle of frizzy hair. Abednego stood with his hands hanging awkwardly at his sides. It was Farmer Thornton’s son, a finely etched shadow of the father, who telephoned the police, and it was Black Jesus, who happened to be visiting the area, who arrived with a gang of terrified constabulary in tow. Before he knew it, Abednego was doubled over, retching; how could it be that after eleven whole years, the man was still disarming in all his magnificent ugliness? He had never been sure if the man had a frightful face simply because it was ghastly or because he was Black Jesus. For years, he had obsessed over photographs of the man on television and in newspapers, safe in the illusion that his rage was a weapon biding its time. Before him, this rage whimpered and died. Oh, not only was it unforgettable, that face, the colour of the rich black clay that could be found along the Gwayi River floodplain in Tsholotsho, near Lupane, but each twitch of those lips – the shape of a flat-bellied heart – and each contraction of those cheeks – protruding from either side of the columella in the distinguished silhouettes of smoking pipes – gave those loathsome eyes a savage sophistication that was at once dreadful and beguiling.
Abednego turned away, still gagging, clamping and unclamping his hands.
Black Jesus seemed to relish the task of dragging Aunt Po off Solomon’s grave; he slapped her one two three, successive claps on each cheek, and flung her at Abednego’s feet, where she began to tear at her pastel dress, the only remembrance Solomon had brought her from Cuba. Cousin Solomon was dug up and flung at his mother’s feet, spraying her dress with maggots.
‘Nincompoops. Good-for-nothing peasants. Distracting the important work of the farmers with your silly superstitions. You want to be shitting everywhere, heh? Sniff sniff my ancestors are here my ancestors are here – you are worse than dogs,’ Black Jesus spat. Spittle dribbled down the sides of his lips.
After he left, Abednego wept. The greatest indignity of all was how the man, whose impact Abednego had never been able to forget, hadn’t even recognised him.
That was when the nightmares started; first, of Farmer Thornton’s wife, who Abednego hadn’t thought of in a long time, and then of Black Jesus, who he could not stop thinking about. The nightmares stopped only after he made the trip to see the Commission of Enquiry people in Lupane in ’96. Two years of night-sweats, sleeplessness and a sensation of drowning which left him haggard. Two years and then he had managed to retrieve his sanity, thanks to the Commission of Enquiry people, who had, ironically, brought on a different, flaccid kind of anguish.
Afterwards, as he made the trip back to Bulawayo, Abednego hadn’t been able to get rid of the smell of singed flesh, and the feeling that he was back in the Liberation War.
Because it had wafted in the smog like braaied carabeef, the stench of the charred soldiers. He had cradled in his arms men he had played with as boys, slipping on outcroppings of Precambrian rock, struggling with firearms they didn’t quite know how to use. Lost inside themselves, deep in the Matobo Hills.
Slushy rain and slippery hearts.
Skinny Zacchaeus, his brother, in an oversize helmet and glasses that looked like a handyman’s goggles, wailing like a woman at a funeral:
‘We are going to die, going to die, oh fuck, are we going to die, Abed?’
‘Will you shoosh, are you trying to get us killed?’
‘Best we surrender and negotiate, yes? You know I was the first president of the debating team at school, I can lobby on our behalf—’
‘Just shuttup, please!’
‘Why didn’t we just take Muzorewa’s deal, why didn’t we just deal with this like civilised human beings, heh? I don’t blame them for thinking us savages. What is this, heh? This gorilla warfare deliberate play on the similar sound of “guerrilla” and “gorilla”, and the idea of blacks being “savages” warfare. Like we’re still wearing animal skins in the bhundu? Heh? We’d better give ourselves up. Me, I can’t die here, I’ve a degree from Oxford, destined for great things, I’m not a violent man, me. I—’
‘I swear if you don’t shut that trap I’m going to put a bullet in that dwala head of yours!’
He had receded, skinny Zacchaeus, into a shuffling, rather loud type of silence. Sniffling while Abednego held the men as they died, gagging in an atmosphere polluted by sickly fumes of bauxite. He had been a soldier in the ZIPRA military, had fought in the liberation war from ’76.2
He had smelled death then, every waking moment, had smelled of death. It had hung in the air, taunting, hiding in landmines beneath the underbrush. Popping out of the ground like phantoms out of Pandora’s pithos, springing a cruel ‘Surprise!’ The first time it happened, he was crawling in the bush in enemy territory, about to invade the camp at Fort Hare. He clung to his Kalashnikov, his mind trying to sieve through the haphazard training that had been brow-beaten into the Zimbabwean recruits at Camp Pyonyang:
What is it that we always strive at?
Dialectics – the art of arriving at the truth through the logical deduction of logical arguments.
And what is it that capitalism aims to do?
Provide an antithesis – to rule through the logical deduction of illogical arguments.
What is it that we fight against?
The forcing of the peasant off his land, his only real power, into slavery so he may sell his labour.
His father, forced off the patch of land he had adopted and worked quite successfully at the Thornton Farm, into t
he Tribal Trust Lands where not even the thorn tree dared flourish, so that he found himself – a father and husband, strong and proud with the gait of an ox, and whom men from the surrounding homesteads came to consult – slaving away in the Tsholotsho mines. He would never forget what the old man told him, pried from unravelling strands of senility, the last thing of substance Abednego ever heard from his father: ‘It was as though, Zacchaeus my son, my manhood had been chopped off.’ And he had wept. Abednego had wept too, for himself.
What is it that we are aiming to do?
Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy!
Mao fluttering on the wall above, wearing a seraphic grin.
What is our ultimate goal?
The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history!
Was that fluttering Mao winking?
The Chinese soldiers had spat as they walked past, refused to share the same plates as the Zimbabwean recruits. Welcome to slit-eye Rhodesia, Abednego had thought with a wry smile.
When, in ’77, the landmines at Fort Hare exploded, Abednego did not assume the foetal position and cover his head, as did his comrades. Instead, he stumbled through the smoke, yelling for his brother Zacchaeus. He found him scrunched up beneath the flimsy limbs of a mkhemeswane brush, bruised but unharmed.
Zacchaeus had been one of the blacks to slip through Britain’s sanctions following Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence, and had been awarded a scholarship to study in England. He’d left with the avowed intention of acquiring a law degree, had instead returned with a wispy BA in English Literature – from Oxford, he always made sure to emphasise – and a new way of speaking in roundabout sentences that were too foggy for a career in politics. Zacchaeus, who, in ’79, almost became a traitor, having allowed his reverence for all things British to cloud his judgement of a six-course English meal hosted by Bishop Abel Muzorewa; ‘Smith’s tea-boy,’ Abednego quipped, his comrades demolished by laughter. Out of the corner of his eye, a glimpse of Zacchaeus, who was too much like a shadow nowadays, fading deeper into himself.
Zacchaeus playing spittle-spattle on the fine soil of his father’s homestead: arch back, neck distended like an ostrich’s and in one lazy lunge, aim a nice, frothy globule of spit at the base of the pawpaw tree. His brother metamorphosing into a distant being Abednego could no longer recognise.
‘You have become a, a thing which . . .’ Abednego began.
‘A thing which what, brother?’
‘Which is not real, brother. A thing which lives in books.’
‘But, brother, you don’t understand. A society’s greatest asset is its poet, for only he is capable of submerging himself thoroughly in its irony, thereby holding up the mirror of many truths—’
‘We don’t need more ideas here, brother. We need more fighters.’
‘Among all fighters, is there a fighter?’
‘I don’t understand what England did to you. Who recruited you? Was it the Thatcherics, heh? This is war, and you won’t side with the capitalist cockroaches!’
And so Zacchaeus, head hung, had grabbed a pair of Abednego’s boots and marched to the guerrilla camp at Mbulilingwane.
‘Look after him,’ Abednego’s father begged him.
‘What about me, Father?’ Abednego said, though he knew he shouldn’t have bothered, really.
‘The missionaries were right; he’s Jacob, and you, my son, have become Esau. Protect him now, for in the end, it’s he who shall protect you.’
Abednego smarted. ‘I’m your eldest son! That wimpy little nincompoop can’t even hold a gun properly, who is he going to protect? All he does is read his books and write that nonsense nobody understands. I am the fighter. And yet . . . forgotten, unappreciated . . . unloved . . .’
They made it through the war. 18 April 1980 was a Friday giddy with swaying crowds and freedom curdled like sweetened amasi and flowers mingling their heady scents in the heat. As Prince Charles lowered the Union Flag, Abednego3 raised a fist, yelled, ‘let a hundred flowers bloom!’
In his fist, a little red book.4
The Rufaro Stadium was so packed that the crowd burst through the gates and out on to the parking lot. When Bob Marley and the Wailers climbed the stage and began wailing ‘Zimbabwe’, the stadium went mad with applause. Guitars tickling air, air reverberating, seducing drunken crowd. Fireworks bombing night, cheerful flag aflutter, prancing in light, a pause for applause, a blow kiss, like soft air on cheek, prance again. Oh! The sweetness of it! Like a tub of Dairy Moon strawberry ice-cream . . .
On hearing Bob Marley, the crowds outside, high on the opium of independence, began to press against the gates, trying to get in. Those inside, propelled by this force, moved towards the stage. The police, overcome by fear, sprang into action, their bodies falling into animated violence like a second skin; they began thwacking the people with their batons, and the people wailed, so that their independence brimmed over into the night, and made a horrible sound. The police flung cans of tear gas into the crowd; at first, uncomprehending, the people cupped their hands, welcoming yet another gift of their independence – were there free Coca-Cola cans? – and then, when this independence stung their eyes and threatened to make them blind, they began to cry.
The VIPs, penned in their elevated stand, were caught by the cameras in what was later proclaimed as joyous weeping, overwhelming emotions at this momentous day, this emancipation of the black-and-brown peoples of the House of Stone . . . but, in fact, the overzealous policemen, in a state of frenzy, had flung tear gas whichever way, including at the cordoned-off stand, much to the Very Important People’s pompous chagrin.
A hush finally descended on the crowd when Zacchaeus lumbered on to the stage, after Bob Marley. He adjusted his glasses, cleared his throat:
‘Oh, but what is a flower?
That decay of sunken spirits?
Soft-petalled.
Flame-Lily sandals at my feet.’
He bowed solemnly as his voice boomed:
‘Out of all lovers, is there a lover?’
Straightened up, hushed:
‘A heart’s private desire,
Smouldering in hatred cauldron
Oh, but listen!’
He cocked his ear.
‘Oh, what is that?’
Capped his head with his hand, squinted into the distance.
‘It’s the cockerel – cock-a-doodle-doo!
On the blistering horizon.’
‘That’s my brother!’ Abednego yelled above the buoyancy as Zacchaeus clambered down the stage. ‘Hey, hey, that poet is my brother! He even performed in front of Lord Carrington and Prime Minister Mugabe at the Lancaster House Conference! Yes, I know him very personally, he’s my brother!’
It was the last time he remembered them so happy together, intoxicated by the future, falling into each other’s arms like true brothers of the revolution. For once, their father’s bias forgotten.
They were among the first to jump and shout as Tuku ran on to the stage, his dancing queens in close pursuit, chunks of thigh wonderfully displayed beneath skimpy Traditional Attire. Abednego clutched Thandi’s hand as his eyes ran over those wiggling buttocks. He smacked his lips. She pouted. He laughed, tilted her chin and gave her a good long kiss.
‘Your kiss is so delicious, better even than my Mama’s Chakalaka Sunday Special. What a beautiful feeling it is, to be able to kiss as much as we like, wherever and whenever.’
Her pout bloomed into laughter. The light carried particles which danced around her yellow skin like misty translucence.
He stepped back and put his hands on his slim hips, throwing his Michael Jackson ’fro this way and that as he raised an imaginary whip in the air and said, in precise English tones:
‘Two licks for insulting my eyes with your black nonsense, sah. You blacks, don’t even know how to kiss! You look like two baboons trying to bite the lips off each other. Now, bend over!’
T
handi was doubled over before he was through with his act. ‘That’s not how they used to do it, man, thank goodness you never considered a career on the screen!’
He laughed, pinched her cheek. Her skin reminded him of pawpaw. Full lips the texture of the fleshy inside. Complete with dark spots around her nose, like the seeds. She was his own pretty, ripe pawpaw.
They were caught in the throes of song and dance, melting amongst the other revellers, when he whispered in her ear, ‘If it’s OK with you, I’d like you to be my wife.’
She looked up into his face with a mischievous twinkle in her eye, but when she saw that he was serious, she frowned. ‘I wish you’d be a little more romantic about it, you know.’
He got down on one knee and took her hand, made a mock gesture of searching for a ring in his pockets. ‘Oh, my goodness! Where is that ring? Now where did I put that ring? Will she ever accept me without that ring . . .’
Those within earshot began to clap and cheer.
‘Say yes!’
‘Make him a happy man tonight!’
‘Let the cows come home!’
Thandi laughed, attempted to pull him to his feet.
‘That’s the most melodious laugh I’ve ever heard. To wake up to that laugh every morning would make me the happiest man.’
‘Oright oright, now get up! People are staring.’
‘Let them stare. Dipping into your beauty feels like tasting freedom for the first time.’
She giggled.
Freedom, like a whiff of fresh air.5
Bauxite, like a waft of bad breath that refuses to go away.
So happy. To think that he had thought . . . it would be for ever . . . and then Black Jesus happened . . .
1 The most disenfranchised of the affranchised slave-class.
2 It had been a glowing moment for the peasantry: tongues frothy with nationalist rhetoric, mud feet marching to the promise of a Maoan revolution, rural hearts pitter-pattering to the vision of dozens of little Dazhai villages culled from the white agricultural scape. A nation of workers chugging along in solidarity to reach Marx’s great ideal of the triumph of labour over capitalist exploitation. These men and women who, having nothing already, and therefore with nothing to lose, clung to the utopic postulations of their intellectual leaders.