The first day, there’s not a lot of conversation. We go around the room and introduce ourselves, giving our clan name, and where we’re from. When it’s my turn, I say, “Madiba. Yem-Yem uSpicho, Vele-bam-bestele. Igama lam lesfana ngu-Ndaba.” (My name is Ndaba.) “Ndisuka eQunu.” (I’m from Qunu.) “Inkosiyam ngu-Nokwanele.” (My chief is Nokwanele.)
I listen carefully, trying to memorize the names of everyone in the circle. For seven days, I’ll remain with my fellow initiates in the iboma. For obvious reasons, we’re not given water or anything else to drink. We eat only a stiff mash of boiled maize. We sleep on the ground with only the blanket, and you can’t sleep laid out straight or on your side; you sleep on your back with your knees elevated. I dream strange dreams and wake up frequently, because every time I move the slightest bit, a bolt of agony shoots through my midsection. I lie on the ground thinking, This is hell. My father must hate me to put me through this torture. How dare they do this to me? This is madness.
The second day, someone comes to show us how to dress the wound with fresh leaves called isicwe. It has tiny hairs on it that stick to the wound, so you can imagine when it’s time to change it, removing it is no simple task. Every inch is agony, and then a few minutes later, you have to put on another one. Yeesh. They tell us we must do this several times a day, no matter how painful it is, and it is incredibly painful. This will continue for weeks until the wound is fully healed.
The next day, we cover our faces and bodies with white clay and sit like ghosts in the iboma. My stomach aches with hunger. I’m grateful to see that some amasi has been added to the maize, but I’m so thirsty, the inside of my mouth feels like an old shoe. The thirst is crazy-making. I tell myself, Don’t think about water. Don’t think about water. Don’t think about Beyoncé. Don’t think about Holyfield’s scabby ear or P. Diddy’s dance moves or that fine-ass Ms. Dynamite from London town.
The seventh day, I’m so weak with hunger and thirst, I can hardly find strength to slather myself with the white clay that will protect my skin when I go outside, and I am so freaking ready to go outside. I smell goat roasting out there. More than anything, I just want to get my hands on some of that. And water. That first swig of cold water is everything—grace, life, courage, God—but they tell us, “Don’t drink too much! Remember, it has to come out somewhere, and you know what that means. Pain!”
The second week, we’re allowed to drink alcohol and smoke some weed, which is a tremendous relief. You have to pay for it, so the khanki, the elders looking after you, bring money.
Over the following weeks, we smear ourselves with white clay every morning before leaving the iboma. It feels good to walk out into the bush, breathing fresh air, using a machete to gather firewood. We also gather the leaves for the dressing, which we must continue to apply diligently, but not as often, because the wounds are healing remarkably fast. We spend time hanging out, talking about home and school and women. At some point, we must be “hit by the wind,” which means you get naked and let the wind—okay, too much information. It’s therapeutic. Let’s leave it at that.
One might think that a crew of guys who’d grown up with video games and computers would get bored sitting there day after day, but for me at least, that’s not the case. As the weeks go by, we learn songs about manhood, about life, about women. There’s one about writing a letter to a lover and one called “Isipringi Sebhedi” (“Springs of the Bed”) that tells a story about women and girls and this woman is gonna kill me, I love her, she’s amazing and so forth. We learn a sort of secret language—different words for chair, food, water, whatever—and we hear stories about our ancestors. Days pass, and the smell is indescribable because we are twenty animals in the iboma and we’re not able to bathe or shower.
After three weeks, we go to the river to wash ourselves, walking as a group, wrapped in our blankets, carrying sticks, soap, and limestone. We grind the limestone on the river rocks until it becomes a viscous white paste, and we smear it on our bodies from head to toe, covering the brown skin that makes us human. We stay that way until the last three days, when the ritual is taken to yet another level. We return to our village—I and the two others of my clan—and the next night, we dance with our sisters. You’re naked except for the blanket tied around your middle, and you have to dance, holding a stick above your head. The sisters and brothers and cousins come with needles, and they prick you with the needle every now and then. I can only guess at the purpose of this. If you think about it, some symbology is bound to emerge, but in the moment, you’re just trying to avoid getting jabbed. You dance until you’re exhausted and sweating, and when the girls get tired of it, they leave.
The final night is a huge celebration with food and brandy and a traditional beer we make ourselves and drink out of clay pot or tin jug. You drink and pass it around. All the guys in the village have heard and are like, “Hey, those guys are back, and one of them is a Mandela!” So they want to inspect the situation and make sure that the deed has been properly done. They want to see that wound and verify that it’s the real deal. There are different styles of cut—small, middle, handbag (loosely translated from the traditional names)—so they want to see which one you got. What can we do? We show them, and they’re duly impressed. One guy is so enthusiastic, he shows me his.
“Yes, you have a very good cut,” he says. “See, mine was done seven years ago, and you can see that it didn’t heal properly.”
They have to show respect now. You’ve earned all the privileges of being a man. You feel like a man. Iron Man! Untouchable. A god. You have done your family proud. Pass the beer pot! You experience this intense rush of power, so sometimes guys take it into their heads to disrespect their parents. They become problems at home. This is why it’s important to end the ritual with long conversational sessions. Our elders come to visit us—patriarchs, uncles, older brothers, and cousins—to share their wisdom and teach us the customs and traditions, reminding us that it will be our responsibility to pass all this on to our children. They remind us to respect our mothers and aunties, because a real man respects his mama. A real man helps out at home and contributes to the family’s happiness. A real man is not useless in his home or community. He has power and he uses it to add value to his surroundings.
“You’re a man now,” says Madiba. He sits in his chair, super chill and glad to be here. “You must understand that you will be one of the men in our home. It’s up to you to take care of the home and look after the women and children. Make us proud. We are from the royal house of the Thembus. We are the fourth house. Our role is to be mediators.” He talks to me for a long time about getting in touch with my ancestors and knowing my roots. Respecting where I come from. Recognizing what I am. He tells me stories about his own going to the mountain, and we compare notes on our experiences.
“In that time,” says the Old Man, “part of the ritual was that we must steal a pig, slaughter it, and eat the whole thing the night before we went in. This was someone’s pig in the community, but we did as we were told—as we were guided by ritual. I tempted the pig out of the kraal with the sap left over in the bottom of a beer tin. He came out to eat, and we all descended on him. We dug a pit near the iboma and roasted it. We ate that pig, and then we were prepared to go hungry for a week.”
The final step of Ukwaluka is “crossing the river.” You get in the water and scrub all that white stuff off your body, so when you go to meet up with your family, you are clean and wrapped in a blanket called an i-ruggy. You don’t wear your own clothes again until it’s all over and you’re ready to begin your life as a man among them.
The celebration was a proud moment for our family and lasted the whole weekend. Parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles offered words of encouragement and wisdom to me and my cousins. When we all sat down at the big table to eat dinner, my granddad said, “Are you good, Ndaba? Are you healthy?” I was surprised to hear him speaking isiXhosa. He hardly ever spoke to me in isiXhosa. It was always English.
But he spoke to me in isiXhosa now, acknowledging my manhood.
“Yes, Granddad, I’m fine.”
“Good. Good. You’re a man now, Ndaba. You’ve done well.”
“Thank you, Granddad.”
“Ndaba, what do you think about the cows?” he asked. “Do you know how many there are? You’re an adult now. You’ll have to stay current on the business of the farm.”
“I will, Granddad. Absolutely.”
It made me feel older, wiser, and maybe even a bit taller. We danced and drank and danced and ate and drank more and then went back to dancing. Later, we went into the village to hang out with the other men, young and old, who always gather at someone’s house to drink. Everyone was happy to see us. Madiba was glad to come out into the community to spend time with them.
The next morning, the Old Man asked me to fetch his newspapers. Again I was surprised, because one of the security people usually brought the papers to him, and if I passed by, he’d motion me to sit down. This was new. We were doing this together. I brought the papers, and we read them all, front to back, conversing about events and issues. Instead of feeding me bits of news like a mama bird feeds a hatchling, he allowed me to digest it for myself, and then asked my opinion about it. He expected critical thinking and welcomed civilized disagreements rather than rote learning and head nodding. I can look back now and see that this is where we turned a page in our relationship. From the time I was a kid, I knew I could depend on him. This is when he knew he could depend on me.
It’s hard to encompass—and it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to describe it all here—the depth and breadth of tradition conveyed throughout the ritual weeks. You connect with your spirituality and heritage. Who are you? What family do you represent? Which village do you come from? You have an obligation to abide by the code of your people and endure the pain like a man. You come to understand who you are, from a cultural point of view, and it makes you feel stronger, more confident.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French paleontologist and Jesuit priest, said, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” As I crossed the river, I experienced a convergence of the two. I was essentially animal, essentially spirit, uniquely myself. I was firmly tethered to my ancestors, and in turn, I tethered them to the future.
My birth name was Thembekile: “the trusted one.”
My manhood name is Zwelijika: “the world is changing.”
10
Indlu enkulu ifuna.
“A great house needs a strong broom.”
One of the strangest stories I heard when I was growing up is The Story of Nongqawuse’s Prophesy. This young girl returns from the river one day and tells the people of her village, “Two ancestors visited me and told me that all the dead will rise again.” Folks were like, “Awesome!” They would get to see their loved ones again, and this was very cool. But in order for the Big Day to happen, she said, the people must slaughter all their cattle, dig up their grain, and basically destroy and rebuild everything—huts, kraals, whatever—all gone. Now a lot of folks were like, “Homey don’t play dat,” but a lot of others bought into it and started putting on the pressure to participate. Even the king and most of the chiefs got all caught up in this idea that the dead Xhosa nations would come up out of the sea, bringing new cattle, sheep, and chickens, and—key point here—drive out the white invaders. They believed in a golden age when there would be no more disease or sorrow. They slaughtered their cattle, and when the Big Day came and went without an army of ancestors rising from the sea, rather than saying, “Hmm, perhaps this was not a good idea,” they blamed unbelievers who had refused to slaughter their cattle. Not surprisingly, many of the unbelievers and their cattle were slaughtered forthwith, and the farms they had protected were plundered. A famine ensued. Hunger and desperation swept across the cape. An estimated forty thousand Xhosa people died.
The strangest thing about this story is that it happened. Google Nongqawuse, and you’ll see a haunting photograph of this strange girl who led the Xhosa people into a hell of their own making in 1856. Questions still swirl around this catastrophic incident, and the most compelling one is, “Why?” But isn’t that always the most compelling question?
Through the lens of political history, you see many such incidents throughout the world, going back centuries. Certain elements stand in common: A society-wide state of purposeful blindness is disguised as religious fervor. Hate that already existed on some level is weaponized. And then there’s the real motor on it: Someone stands ready to take advantage of the situation to gain power, money, or both. In the case of the cattle killings prompted by Nongqawuse’s prophesy, the colonial government responded to widespread famine with a “recruitment program” that offered starving people the opportunity to sell themselves into slavery. In the case of America’s Salem Witch Trials, wealthy neighbors took the land of elderly women being tortured and put to death. In the case of the AIDS pandemic, power struggles, pharmaceutical trademarks, conservative religion, racism, homophobia, ignorance, and willful indifference have all played their parts. If you want to read a dense but riveting book about how the AIDS epidemic started, read And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts. The title refers to the orchestra that played on the deck of the Titanic as the ship sank and most of her passengers drowned.
I can’t condemn the people who chose for so long to live in denial about the hard realities of AIDS in South Africa and the rest of the world. I was one of them. While my mother was dying, I couldn’t make room in my mind for the idea that she had HIV until someone basically punched me in the face with the flatly stated truth. And even after that experience, I was unwilling to make the obvious connections when my dad started to get sick. I knew that he had been in and out of hospital—I had driven him there myself on more than one occasion—but I kept telling myself, “People get sick. It’s no big deal.” He’d come out of the hospital and get back to work. I was busy with school and focused on my studies.
The year after I went to the mountain, I got an apartment near the university in Pretoria. I spent every weekend at home with my grandfather and popped in as often as I could during the week for lunch or dinner or just to say, “Hey, Granddad, how are you doing?” I was finally allowed to invite a girl to dinner. As we sat down to eat, the Old Man said, “So, young lady, did you propose to my grandson?” This was his line, it turns out. He used it on a number of occasions. I guess he enjoyed seeing the looks on their faces.
I liked this easier dynamic between my granddad and me, but his age was beginning to show. He maintained his inflexible daily routine: Wake up early in the morning. Walk and exercise. Breakfast. Newspapers. But now instead of going off to the office, he relaxed in the lounge and often took a nap. He liked it when people came for lunch, and after lunch most days, he watched National Geographic or sports until it was time for afternoon tea, which often included visitors. He traveled sometimes for public appearances, but it seemed to take a lot out of him in a way I wasn’t quite ready for. Honestly, I worried more about him than I worried about my dad. He and my father saw each other now and then, and the Old Man certainly never voiced any concerns to me, but I do recall one day when we were sitting together at the table and he told me about how his own father died.
“I was nine years old,” he said. “My father spent one week with each of his wives—four wives, four weeks—so once a month, he came to us. Only this particular day, he came to my mother’s hut when he was not scheduled. I came home and found him in a terrible state, coughing, coughing, coughing. He stayed with us for several days. His younger wife came to help my mother care for him. One night, he called for his pipe, and my mother didn’t want to give it to him. She said, ‘No. Clearly, he has some disease of the lungs. He shouldn’t smoke.’ I’m certain she was correct, but my father didn’t go to any doctor. He had no use for that. He wanted his pipe. He was quite insistent. Kept yelling, ‘Bring me my pipe!’ No one in the hous
e was sleeping, because he was getting quite aggravated. So the young wife filled his pipe with tobacco and brought it to him. Smoking calmed him down. He smoked for a while, and then he died, the pipe was in his hand, still lit. I could smell the tobacco in the air.”
I listened to the story, though I wasn’t sure why he felt the need to tell it to me at that moment. I didn’t give it a lot of thought. The Old Man was full of stories.
“When my father died,” he said, “I was not prepared for that level of grief.”
“But how could you be, Granddad? You were just a little boy.”
“Even after I became a man, I looked for him inside myself.”
I glanced at my watch. “Granddad, I need to get back to school.”
“Yes. Good. Very good.” He stood up to walk me to the door. “I’m very proud of you, Ndaba. Your father is very proud of you as well.”
I was already halfway out to my car, calling “goodbye” over my shoulder, because I had things to do, people to see, exams to write, holidays to enjoy. I was living the busy life of a student who’s finally found his direction and is flying through every day, full speed ahead. As the year went by, I noticed that my dad was losing weight. He became painfully thin, and I still kept telling myself it was just normal stuff. He still kept telling me, “Oh, I’m fine. Don’t sweat it. It’ll be fine.”
In December 2004, my dad went into the hospital, and it was very clearly not going to be fine. Mandla finally got frustrated with my unwillingness to face the truth.
“Our father has HIV/AIDS,” he said bluntly. “He gave it to your mom. How do you think she got it?”
Going to the Mountain Page 14