I can see him, that once-Rebel, lean and sinewy on that pseudo-stage, bristling with Rebel Rage. And here I am, bristling in my pygmy room with its low roof, my head bent onto an imaginary chest, Thandi’s chest, The Rebel’s Mother, my Mother; I can feel it heaving with urgency, I can feel her full breasts against my cheek, her arm around me, her tears falling warm and rapid on my face. And there we are, on the pseudo-stage, Mother and I:
THE REBEL: My name – an offence; my Christian name – humiliation; my status – a rebel; my age – the stone age.
THE MOTHER: My race – the human race. My religion – brotherhood.
THE REBEL: My race: that of the fallen. My religion … but it’s not you who will show it to me with your disarmament! ’Tis I, myself, with my rebellion and my poor fists clenched and my woolly head. I remember one November day; it was hardly six months ago. The master came into the cabin in a cloud of smoke like an April moon. He was flexing his muscular arms – he was a very good master – and he was rubbing his little dimpled face with his fat fingers. His blue eyes were smiling and he couldn’t get the honeyed words out of his mouth quick enough. The kid will be a decent fellow, he said, looking at me, and he said other pleasant things too, the master – that you had to start very early, twenty years was not too much to make a good Christian and a good slave, a steady, devoted boy, a good commander’s chain-gang captain, sharp-eyed and strong-armed. And all that man saw of my son’s cradle was that it was the cradle of a chain-gang captain. We crept with knife in hand …
THE MOTHER: Alas, you’ll die for it!
THE REBEL: Killed … I killed him with my own hands … Yes, ’twas a fruitful death, a copious death … It was night. We crept among the sugar canes. The knives sang to the stars, but we did not heed the stars. The sugar canes scarred our faces with streams of green blades.
THE MOTHER: And I dreamed of a son to close his mother’s eyes.
THE REBEL: But I chose to open my son’s eyes upon another sun.
THE MOTHER: O my son, son of evil and unlucky death—
THE REBEL: Mother of living and splendid death,
THE MOTHER: Because he has hated too much,
THE REBEL: Because he has too much loved.
Oh, see now, what you have done to me, Césaire; my face is wet!
My surrogate father managed to find a bit of alone time with Thandi after the play; Mvelaphi, who had something no doubt revolutionary to attend to, had to leave them, begrudgingly, I imagine. They took what my surrogate father claims was a lovers’ stroll in the city. (Lovers’ stroll? The man is making things up now. But he was hopeful, at least; that’s good.)
‘Are you a terrorist?’ he asked her.
She laughed – eish, what was it with her and all this laughing, laughing at him all the time?
‘Not a terrorist. A freedom fighter.’
‘They say you are terrorists on TV. That you are crippling the country. Bombing roads, destroying infrastructure, killing innocents while they sleep in their farms at night.’
‘But the play, was it not beautiful?’
‘Indeed, it was.’ (I imagine like me, it must have brought tears to his eyes!)
She laughed – again! – and fished out of her handbag a folded picture that she shielded from the wind with her body and beckoned him to look. He could smell her city-girl scent, something sweet that made his head spin, that reminded him of the taste of a queen-cake.
He recognized the man in the photo immediately. Who did not know Joshua Mqabuko kaNyongolo Nkomo, co-founding leader of ZAPU, the Zimbabwe African People’s Union, agitator against all that was holy and sacred to the nation of Rhodesia, hated terrorist, prisoner of the state, dangerous communist, calculating Marxist? Devout Methodist, Teacher and Husband?
He could tell, from the many creases on the photo, that she’d spent hours staring at the man; the small, laughing eyes, the measured smile, the chubby, handsome, contemplative face.
‘When you look into his eyes, what do you see?’ she asked.
This was an important-sounding question, and so he groped around for an important-sounding answer. ‘The future?’
(The past, surrogate father, the past! How can a man see the future if he can’t understand the past? Always, you must be looking back over your shoulder, to see what history is busy plotting for your future.)
My surrogate father says he remembers very little of what Thandi said to him, only that it was a long monologue and that he was dizzy from the intoxication of being so close to her. He nodded vehemently to her impassioned stories, for her fervour was infectious. He was empty and in need of filling, and she, she was overfull.
‘I see the fate of my father in those eyes, Abed,’ he remembers her saying to him as she stared wistfully at Joshua Mqabuko’s photo. ‘My father, he died, two years ago in the mines in Tsholotsho.’
‘My father too used to work at the mines in Tsholotsho before he became a soldier,’ he said, glad to offer something useful to their intimate-bonding-over-photo.
‘And that is terrible. Have you heard of the conditions there? The government gave my father a piece of land where nothing could grow, and so he was forced to go and toil in the mines, like somebody’s mule. My grandfather, he was a soldier in King Lobengula’s personal ibutho. He was rich. Lots of land, lots of cattle, and primed to have many wives. But my father ended up dying in the mines, with neither his family nor his dignity. So. There is no other way but to fight for freedom. Me, I want to be free. Don’t you want to be free?’
For the first time, my surrogate father saw his surrogate father not as the fearsome bull of the Mlambo clan, uMlambo kaMdlongwa, whose voice boomed into the night making it shudder, whose thoughts sprinkled the land with light. Suddenly, Baba was shrivelled; a hoary carapace lolling all day beneath the mopane tree in an RAR uniform, cradling a rifle and prattling to the ghosts of a tenebrous past.
He clutched Thandi, more to prevent himself from falling than anything else, for he was assaulted by a terrifying vertigo. But now, he was as close to her as he’d ever been. Being the opportunist that he was, he kissed her. (We have these opportuntistic tendencies in common. A man with ambitions always has to be on the ready! You need an instinct for these things.) And that kiss, from the mischievous sparkle in my surrogate father’s eyes as he told me, was, no doubt, the beginning of propitious things. It was a gesture without thought, and he flinched, waiting for Thandi’s reprimand. But when he opened one eye, he saw that she was smiling.
‘I’m going to fight in the war,’ she said, her voice husky.
‘You, a woman?’
‘Why not? There are many women in the struggle, birthing the struggle, feeding the struggle, carrying the struggle, nursing and wiping the buttocks of the struggle. I can’t stand living like this any more.’
He paused. At that moment, the mist that had fogged his mind since coming to Bulawayo cleared, to reveal the rays of his destiny pricking an azure sky, the Mount Nyangani of his future ploughing through the clouds of his existence. ‘I’m going to fight in the war, too. With you. Together.’
A Budding Romance
He was afraid to go home that night, the memory of his uncle and his cousin gaping at him from behind the kitchen doors of the Sun Hotel restaurant still fresh, so he lingered about the city centre well past nine, the designated curfew for Africans, and moseyed down King’s Avenue, quite unperturbed by the prospect of being stopped by the po-pos. He cut across Makokoba Township, where the kwela music boomed even at that witching hour, and where fires could be seen flickering outside the asbestos-slat houses huddled together as though for comfort, and arrived at the Emakhandeni hostels near to midnight. His Uncle Lungile was awake still, seated on the edge of his mattress with its sagging centre, and seated next to him was Cousin Solomon, regarding him with eyes opened wide, whether from surprise or awe or perhaps just the effort of staying awake he did not know.
Did he know, demanded the old man, that what he had participated in that
afternoon amounted to criminal activity, could even be considered, in these delicate times, terrorrrrist activity – Lungile shuddered – and earn him a good fifteen to twenty years in jail? Was he trying to give his poor father all the way back in Lupane a heart attack, heh?
‘Not a terrorist,’ Abednego said, trying to look solemn. ‘A freedom fighter.’
‘A freedom what? Mfana … wena … you haven’t been here even three months, and already … instead of looking for a job you … now they’ll never hire you at my kitchen, in fact, if they ever see you there again, they will most likely call the police! You certainly made yourself memorable what with that outfit looking like a Goli guluva … do you know you could have got me fired?’
Here he stared at the floor, while his uncle raged on. He could hear Cousin Solomon’s stifled giggles, followed by some riotous throat-clearing. He wanted to look up and wink at his cousin, but he dared not risk meeting his uncle’s glare.
‘… hooliganism … city swallowing you … write to your father …’
He immediately sobered. ‘Uncle, please don’t tell Baba, I won’t do it again, I promise.’
Having convinced his uncle not to write to Baba on the promise he’d find work, he got a night job as a security guard at the Bulawayo Drive-In, where he patrolled the rows of cars with a sjambok in hand, dressed in starchy black fatigues and a brand-new pair of boots that made him walk stiffly, solemnly, nodding at the white movie-goers and trying not to stare too hard at the steamy goings-on inside their cars. Instead, he tried to concentrate on the movies, fascinated to observe that the white people of Rhodesia, too, lived vicariously through white people from elsewhere, their lives over there in London and New York displayed on the big screen. He longed to share these wonders with the people back home in Lupane and he attempted to relate them to an amused Thandi, whom he spent his free time during the day trying to distract at Ticki-Tai while avoiding being thrown out by her boss. He noticed how she was more indulgent of him, though when she laughed – and she still did that a lot – he was unsure whether she was laughing with him or at him, although he was nevertheless pleased to be the source of her mirth.
It’s hard to imagine quite what she saw in my surrogate father. He would, no doubt, attribute it to some sort of imagined, irresistible charm on his part, but dare I say he had nothing to offer the girl? He himself admits to having been intimidated by her rambunctious nature; the haughtiness of her Angela Davis and her feminality which demanded to be respected; the way her footsteps claimed the street; the way she always looked him straight in the eye, as though searching there for a deeper truth … deeper truth to what? He felt there was nothing mysterious or hidden in him; he was a makhaya boy as transparent as a rural boy could be, painfully aware of how gauche he was next to Mvelaphi and of course Frankie and of how little he understood the world, the city, her.
Why would Thandi – popular, beautiful and intelligent, and clearly possessing an adoring posse – end up choosing my surrogate father, a rural boy with nothing to offer her, neither in sophistication nor upward mobility? Perhaps, for a mutinous blot-out-sun such as she, who thrived, as the diners of the Sun Hotel would no doubt attest, on the shock of going against the status quo, she meant the choosing of a man who was so far below her league as a declaration of her freewill. She strikes me as one of those females who wish it were a woman’s world, and resent those men like Mvelaphi who attempt to court smart women with an aggressive intellectualism, always preaching or correcting (with a condescending haughtiness) where they would do better to listen and learn. And so, here was my surrogate father, a young man enamoured of her and who listened to her rather than preached – and never seemed to correct her, only drinking in her every word like it was uluju – a man who, by compelling her to fill in the gaps left by his sometimes-awkward silences, pushed her to express herself to the fullest.
Whereas in reality, we know that my surrogate father’s silences were not borne of any deliberate interest in listening to Thandi or delighting in her speech, which he found both intimidating and fascinating, but were because he truly did not know what to say to her, and many times had no idea what she was talking about.
It would have been a Saturday, he tells me, when the shop was quiet and her boss away, that she asked him, rather shyly, if he would like to see where she stayed. And though he was overjoyed, hopeful that this was perhaps the opportunity for real play, he nodded calmly, in an approximation of nonchalance. And so, it was on a rather nippy afternoon in May that she led him down the dusty township streets of Njube, named after one of the Ndebele King Lobengula’s sons, where she seemed, once again, to attract greetings and laughter from passers-by like inhlwa to bulb light.
I can picture that house better than my surrogate father described it, a semi-detached in a row of small semi-detacheds, hedged in by a dense shrub – something basil-coloured, like a Pittosporum – cut low to about waist-height, with two huge boulders placed like goal posts at each corner of an ungated entrance, most likely painted white to make them look pretty – for Thandi strikes me as the kind of young woman who would have taken pride in appearances. The house seemed to my surrogate father incredibly small for a belle as dazzling and zesty as she. He was secretly pleased, though, to see how humble her accommodation was, as this boosted his confidence; why, his father’s homestead in Lupane was much, much bigger than this, sprawling over almost half an acre, with five huts and a kraal and grazing lands nearby! He stood in the front entrance, taking in the sitting room; the window to his right as I see it now, facing out onto the street, shaded from prying eyes by a curtain – something pretty like one of Mama Agnes’s window hangings – white lace crocheted in diamond shapes, undulating with the late afternoon breeze, little diamond-patterned suns speckling a peacock-print sofa below; to the left, placed midway along the width of the room, a television set looking like a radio (I remember how Uncle Fani refused to do away with our old-fashioned TV and its tiny screen, and I couldn’t see a damn thing, but he held on to it, Uncle Fani, he would hug it when he cried, and he began saying, after watching Back to the Future, that it was a time-machine to the past, where all the people he loved were trapped). Beneath the TV, serving as a stand, a wide, bruised, solid shelf of alternating light-wenge and grey-beech with a compartment below for a turntable and a box of dials, and beneath this, pleated layers hemming in a cupboard – and though he never owned this, Uncle Fani, he dreamed of it plenty, his eyes foggy as he showed me the pictures in the TV Sales & Home newsletter. I imagine this would have been the kind of appliance in Thandi’s home, it would have been so befitting for her, its grandeur making my surrogate father catch his breath as he pointed and asked, ‘What’s that?’
‘Oh, that’s a gramophone,’ Thandi said, and she fluttered over and began to fiddle with the dials. ‘A Blue Spot, we, mama – mama got it from her baas as a Christmas gift last year.’
‘What does it do?’
She laughed, but softly this time, and he realized that she was, in fact, self-conscious. ‘It plays records. Shall I play something? What would you like?’
She placed a record on the turntable, and a peculiar strumming of guitars filled the room. She began to twirl and sway her hips, in a manner that he thought was suggestive but could not be sure, and so he just stood there, by the front door, and watched her. When she spun around and found him standing stiff and solemn, she ended her movements abruptly, switching off the gramophone, and the silence, or lack of harmonious sound, seemed to make her unusually shy.
‘Would you like to sit down?’ she asked, motioning to the sofa.
He nodded, and made his way stiffly to the sofa, where he lowered himself slowly, his hands stretched out below him to feel for the seat, finally settling his buttocks on the very edge, refusing to succumb to the sofa’s cosy incline. She sat down next to him, nervous as he appraised the room. Opposite the sofa was a shelf proper, with a slew of books, and above this, black and white photos stuck to the wall, one of a y
ounger Thandi, baring a gap-toothed smile at the camera, with her cheeks plump and her long neck scrawny – he smiled – and next to this were pictures of other people he didn’t know, but one who he guessed was her mama, so strong was the resemblance of the striking neck, the penetrating gaze, the defined angles of the face, the nose small and wide, the cupid’s bow defined. And above these were wall hangings, the first one copper-plated, with what he recognized as Psalm 23 engraved, then another bible verse he couldn’t recognize in a clay plate, and next to this a green and white crochet of Mary holding a haloed, blond baby Jesus.
‘Oh, I didn’t know you were a Christian,’ he said to her, although what he no doubt meant to say was, You don’t strike me as a Christianly woman.
‘Oh, that, that’s my mama’s. I mean, I am a Christian yes but, those hangings belong to my mama.’
It dawned on him then that this was in fact not her house but her mother’s, and how absurd it had been to assume she would own a house; she was, what, eighteen, nineteen like him? Where would she have got a house from? And although this realization placed her more firmly in the realm of ordinary beings, the thought that her mother might walk in at any moment made him jump up.
‘Oh no, she’s away,’ Thandi said, as though reading his mind. She squeezed his hand. ‘You can relax. She works in Bradfield and only comes home at the end of each month.’
‘Ah, phew. Well, not that I … What does she do, your mother?’
Her hand dropped his. ‘She’s a maid. She works in the suburbs. For Sir Bartholomew Pearce.’
‘Pearce? Isn’t that Frankie’s surname?’
‘Yes. Sir Bartholomew is Frankie’s father.’
‘And is Frankie your boyfriend?’
‘And what if he is?’ she snapped, face flushing. ‘What business of yours is it? You think I couldn’t date him?’
House of Stone Page 4