HOUSE of STONE
HOUSE of STONE
Novuyo Rosa Tshuma
First published in hardback and trade paperback in Great Britain in 2018 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, 2018
The moral right of Novuyo Rosa Tshuma to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.
Excerpts from THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH by Frantz Fanon, English translation copyright © 1963 by Présence Africaine. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78649 316 3
Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 78649 362 0
EBook ISBN: 978 1 78649 317 0
Printed in Great Britain
Atlantic Books
An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
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CONTENTS
Prologue
BOOK ONE
Of Fathers and Grandfathers
Thandi
A Budding Romance
The Mbira
Spear-the-Blood
Fathers
‡khoā
A New Country
The Men in the Red Berets
Uncle Fani
Black Jesus
BOOK TWO
An Arranged Marriage
The Prayer Meeting
Fire on the Mountain
The Outing
The Box
April Baby
The Commission of Inquiry
Bhalagwe
The Invasion
The Reverend Pastor
BOOK THREE
Uncle Fani’s House
Help Me
Forbidden Fruits
Black Jesus
Christmas Day
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Iam a man on a mission. A vocation, call it, to remake the past, and a wish to fashion all that has been into being and becoming. It all started when my surrogate father, Abednego Mlambo, sought me out in my lodgings two days ago with a bottle of Bell’s in one hand and two crystal glasses pressed to his chest. He was dressed in a pair of his faded, beige don’t-touch-my-ankles trousers that give him the look of a civil servant, complete with a matching shirt.
He held the crystal glasses in place with his chin, one balanced atop the other, the bottom glass clasped between the thumb and forefinger of the hand clutching the Bell’s, the top glass muzzling his mouth, so that his voice reached me as though a daydream, as he said, raising his free hand and slapping my back, that he appreciated how I had taken his son Bukhosi under my wing, playing big brother, and that I was like a son to him and he would, from then on, call me his surrogate son.
It would have been perfect, and may even have made me cry, for no man ever claimed me as his son, had Abednego not beaten me to it, his sagging yellow face suddenly mugged by sadness as he began to shed tears for that Bukhosi, like he has been doing ever since the boy went missing. If only he knew how the boy once made the eerie confession that he wished it was I who was his father and not he, Abednego, never mind that I’m only twenty-four and Bukhosi had just turned seventeen.
He’s been missing for over a week, since the beginning of October. Yes, I must say it again to believe it, it’s already beginning to feel to me as though the boy never existed at all: Bukhosi is missing. BUKHOSI IS MISSING. Bukhosi is missing. Abednego sat down heavily on my little put-me-up bed, still clutching the whisky and the glasses, and snottily apologized for crying. I watched his tears drip-dripping into the crystal glass, like our taps on the days when the municipal doesn’t cut off the water supply, and tried to cluck sympathetically. He confessed that it pained him to say the boy’s name out loud, to look up as though at any moment he would hear his heavy steps thudding on Mama Agnes’s polished cement floor and see his plump, walnut face peeping around the living room door.
I wanted to reach out and hold him, but we had never shared such moments, him and I. I had seen him lean into Mama Agnes’s embraces, inhaling the scent of her perfumed bosom as she hugged him in greeting when he arrived home from those long hours at the Butnam Rubber Factory. I had also caught him and Bukhosi once, locked in an uncomfortable grip, something almost like a hug, but not quite, for their faces were held apart even as they squeezed each other’s shoulders.
‘We’ll find him,’ I said, relieving him of the glasses but not the whisky, which he clutched possessively. ‘I’m here for you.’
‘Bukhosi,’ he muttered again, wincing as he said it, speaking it out loud in the same way God bespake Adam into existence, croaking Bukhosi and therefore he was; except he wasn’t. And me, I winced because I suspected he may never be found, for I was there with him when he disappeared – we were chanting side by side at the rally held by the Mthwakazi Secessionist Movement only nine days ago, on Sunday 7 October, in Stanley Square. The flame-lilies were raging, the sunflowers sashaying and our secessionist leader Dumo spraying us with his saliva as he frothed up a call to arms, to secession, to revolution, to freedom!
‘Secede from the country Zimbabwe,’ he cried. ‘Secede!’
‘Secede!’ echoed our fevered chorus.
‘For our brothers killed in the ’80s in the Gukurahundi Genocide!’ he cried. ‘Secede!’
‘Secede!’ we echoed.
‘Secede from tyranny!’
‘Secede!’
While we were thrusting peaceful fists of revolt in the air, the riot police thrust themselves on our gathering, gathering those of us who could not run fast enough into the backs of their police vans. And that was the last time I saw Bukhosi and that’s when he went missing.
What would Dumo say to me now? Speak Truth to Death or Live a Dead Lie! I never understood half of what Dumo said, but he had an uncanny knack of somehow hitting your heart, regardless. Dumo, who tried to be my mentor and, more importantly, nursed my grief after my Uncle Fani’s death, a grief that turned me delirious for a time; Dumo who, even so, never tired of lambasting me, telling me I was useless as a revolutionary protégé, lacking the kind of recklessness necessary to resurrect insurrection.
But what does it matter what he would say to me now? I’m the one who’s survived and he’s the one who’s disappeared, thanks to those mad man antics of his. Poof! Like a spoko. He too was gobbled up by one of those police vans the day of the Mthwakazi rally, and has not been regurgitated since.
Like Bukhosi, I doubt I’ll ever see Dumo again. It was he who taught me that a man could remake himself by remaking his past. So, when Abednego said I was like a son to him and that he would, from then on, call me his surrogate son, I felt a swell of pride and the prick of opportunity. Perhaps, as my surrogate father’s son, I can be blessed with some familial affection and, in this way, finally powder away the horrors of my own murky hi-story bequeathed to me by parents I never knew.
I have begun calling him, jokingly but in all seriousness, surrogate father. And
let this surrogacy business fool no one, I intend to be as close to the Mlambos as any real son would be, bound, happily, by the Bantu philosophy of ubuntu, that communal pedigree. And even though I’m just a lodger in the pygmy room they have squeezed into their backyard so as to rent out in these trying times, only the narrow corridor of a dirt path separates me from their back door; even though I’m just their lodger, we already have a shared history, the Mlambos and I, for though they don’t know it, I grew up in this house, it belonged to my dearly departed Uncle Fani.
Perhaps, despite his incessant worrying over Bukhosi, Abednego really is beginning to think of me, too, as his son. Why else did he then wipe his eyes, set his shoulders and proceed to pour us both generous portions of Bell’s in the crystal glasses? And why, in spite of the fact that I knew that he’s a recovering alcoholic who’s been sober for five years straight, since 2002, and even has a five year AA Bronze Medallion to prove it, did I indulge him and drink the Bell’s? Perhaps it was because of my eagerness to consolidate this new claim to sonhood. He quaffed his Bell’s much faster than I mine, topping himself up often and liberally, until he was drunk blind and chatty proper, and then began chittering at length about his past. I did, then, what I understood he was asking me to do; I began to chronicle the family hi-story he was entrusting me with, like any good son would.
Our conversations, which started two days ago, are more in the way of one-sided confessions and always in the pleasant company of whisky – which I’ve started supplying since, without it, my surrogate father is rendered a grumpy mute – and take place in between our community searches for Bukhosi. We sit more often than not in Mama Agnes’s living room, just he and I, he slumped in his sofa, I administering the Bell’s. It takes him a while to get to the meat of the matter – he does have a tendency to go on and on about the boy. Mama Agnes, thankfully, is always away during the day and, sadly, late into the night, these days, either at work on the other side of town in the leafy Suburbs at Grahams Girls’ High where she teaches English, or at her church Blessed Anointings where she goes every day to beg, bully and bootlick the Holy Ghost into revealing the whereabouts of her Bukhosi, so far to no avail. My surrogate father has given himself indefinite leave from his work at the Butnam Rubber Factory, until his son is found, he says.
These intimacies that my surrogate father has begun sharing with me are what Bukhosi always wanted from him. The boy badgered our father about the family hi-story. ‘Baba,’ he would ask, at first timidly, for he anticipated the rage such questions caused Abednego, who was never stingy with the belt. ‘Baba,’ although not even the prospect of the belt deterred him. ‘I want to know, Baba,’ so strong was this desire, so brilliantly did it flicker in his emerald eyes. ‘How did you grow up … ?’ Shimmering like a thing hungry and searing and lost. ‘Where were you during … what was …’ Growing ever more defiant after I introduced him to Dumo, who took him under his wing, like he had tried to do for me, feeding the boy’s hunger to know the past. ‘I need to know, you have to tell me …’ His seventeen-year-old voice booming with a dangerous bass, suddenly mature in its insolence, different from his usual brattishness. ‘I demand to know what happened during Gukurahundi!’
What anguish this caused our father! I noticed how his hands trembled, how it wasn’t anger that made his mouth froth and sputter but something more substantial, making the sweat break out across his forehead. And though he beat the boy, it wasn’t really the boy he wanted to beat, but, it seemed to me, himself…
The boy didn’t know when and how to push, didn’t know how to cultivate the kind of rapport a son needs to have with his father. But I’ve been watching, I’ve been paying attention, and I know how to be around a man when he’s down. There’s a certain silence that’s soothing, and the way to do it, I’ve discovered, is to act as though what has just happened, the flimsy beating and ineffectual yelling and the tremors, is nothing. To change neither tone nor body language. And I did this well; if I was reading the paper when a beating happened, I would continue to read the paper. I only sort of interfered when Mama Agnes was home, for she would rush to the scene, yelling for Abednego to stoppit as she tried to leap between him and the boy. Here, I would jump up and dither behind them, as though I were doing something useful. And afterwards, I would make Mama Agnes a cup of Tanganda tea, steeped for five minutes in boiling water, with a dash of lemon, just the way she likes it.
The only thing I ever ventured to say to Abednego, just once after one of his altercations with the boy, was, ‘Were I your son, I would never speak to you like that.’ I made sure not to look at him as I said this, to keep my eyes glued to the TV, which I had been watching when the whole thing happened, so that it was as if what I was saying was really nothing. And right afterwards, I turned up the volume and laughed along to whatever show was on, though I don’t remember much about it now, I wasn’t paying attention. I could feel Abednego’s eyes on me, and my heart was loud in my chest. I feared I had pushed too hard, that I shouldn’t have said anything, and that by speaking about it, I had angered him where I meant to soothe. But he didn’t rebuke me; he didn’t say a thing. Instead, that evening, after the electricity had abruptly cut out, as it usually does nowadays, he invited me to sit with him around the fire in the backyard, where Mama Agnes was making supper, and play a game of draughts.
To hear him call me ‘son’, even if ‘surrogate son’, when he sought me out two days ago in my lodgings, was the sweet fruit of a long labour. But never would I have thought my surrogate father would not only call me ‘son’, but bring me into the intimacies a father shares with his son – the family hi-story. Perhaps, had my surrogate brother Bukhosi understood our father and known how to talk to him, he, too, would have been brought into the intimacies of our family hi-story, and gained the solid footing he so desperately needed, but because of the lack of which he became lost, and because of the possession of which I am now found. Lost and found! Lost and found.
BOOK ONE
Of Fathers and Grandfathers
A man of consciousness, gifted with a mind and a blank screen and a keyboard such as I have, makes his own hi-story proper. There is no better way of gaining possession of yourself than chewing the bones of the mind over the question, Who am I? And who you are starts with a robust family lineage in which to cultivate your roots. A man has to be able to trace the details of his family hi-story at least two lineages down, to his grandfather. Otherwise, he can’t really claim to be standing on solid ground. You have to be able to point to a man and say, ‘That’s my grandfather.’ Or make do with a sepia-tinted photo, at least, chewed at the edges by the affectionate teeth of time.
As my surrogate father has neither glossy photo nor the confidence to point and say, ‘That’s my grandfather,’ I have been left with the task of resolving the matter of our family lineage. And it hasn’t been easy, this. For, one moment, while ensconced in the toasty Bell’s, Abednego claims that his father was the man he grew up calling ‘Baba’, husband to my surrogate grandma, that treacherously demure woman who was in her heyday such a blot-out-sun, so blinding was her beauty. And then, the next moment, having become much too heated from the Scotch whisky, he makes rather dubious assertions that his real father is a certain James Thornton, once-upon-a-time owner of that Thornton Farm whose lush harvests salivated many a tongue in the adjoining Tribal Trust Lands where young Abednego grew up, relegated to live there by the state during the time of racial segregation, back when Zimbabwe was still Rhodesia.
When he blubbered this in my lodgings two days ago, I wrinkled my nose and raised an eyebrow. Frowning, he pulled up his shirt sleeve and thrust his arm in my face, prodding the flesh. His inner forearm, which doesn’t get much sun, is closer to cream than yellow, and the hairs are a pale gold rather than a deep brown.
As though sensing still my scepticism, he launched into a dramatic monologue of the day the farmer attempted to lay claim to what, by blood and sperm, was allegedly his. Baba was sitting outside h
is hut in the shade of the mopane tree on the morning in question, cleaning his FAL rifle and decked in his full Rhodesian African Rifles army apparel – a bush-green shirt tucked into pleated shorts, woollen hose tops, black stick boots and a slouch hat – busy bobbing his head solemnly to my (surrogate) Uncle Zacchaeus as he read verses from the bible, in an English that the old man understood and extolled but did not himself know how to read, when Farmer Thornton came wheezing over the hill of the north-east, from the direction of his farm, telephone cord in trembling hand, dust simmering about his sandalled feet. My surrogate father Abednego, who had been crouching behind the kraals some hundred paces from the mopane tree, listening to Zacchaeus read and trying rather unsuccessfully to mimic his brother’s fanciful pronunciations, straightened up and gawked at the farmer.
‘Give me the boy!’ cried Farmer Thornton, gesticulating towards Abednego and lambasting Baba for not looking after him right, for sending the little munt Zacchaeus to school and not my surrogate father.
My surrogate father began to squirm, his yellow face ripening at the farmer’s outburst. He’d never thought, in all his nineteen years, that he could go to school. Zacchaeus was the special one, the younger son and yet the cimbi of Baba’s heart, and although something bilic used to brew inside him during those first days when he would watch his younger brother being shaken awake every morning to go to the sole school for Africans in the district some thirteen kilometres away, this bile had since settled in its rightful place in his gallbladder.
The farmer’s outburst made him feel all funny inside. He knew and had always taken secret delight in the fact that the farmer had always had a thing for him. Everybody knew, Baba, mama and even Zacchaeus whose buttocks the farmer always thrashed with a telephone cord whenever he caught them stealing crops in his fields. But this impassioned outburst, now, that was another thing altogether, bound to find the ears of the wind and be carried for an entire jealous village to hear. And so he squirmed, my surrogate father, and scowled and made all sorts of ugly faces, all the while secretly savouring the farmer’s words.
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