He was taken aback by her sudden anger. ‘I’m sorry,’ he tried, although he had no idea what he was sorry for.
She softened a little, and he attempted a change of subject. ‘And what’s that book for?’ he asked, pointing at a peculiar volume with a camel-skin cover on the shelf.
Here he’d done well, for her face bloomed to its usual animated radiance. ‘Ah, this.’ She got up and picked up the book. ‘Is my most prized possession, which I share only with those I consider trusted friends.’ She winked at him.
‘Eh? And what is it?’
‘It’s my special project,’ she said, resuming her seat next to him. She flipped open the cover, to show him not a printed book, but some sort of journal, with the A3 pages unlined, and curlicue script scribbled across in black ink.
‘I’m working on retracing the history of my family. Remember I told you my grandfather was a soldier in King Lobengula’s personal regiment?’
‘You? You wrote this?’
‘Yes, it’s a script I’m writing. For a play. Frankie’s helping me with it. And some drawings I’ve been doing, to help me visualize the costumes for my cast.’
‘You’re writing a play,’ he said, dumbfounded.
‘Perhaps you may feature in it …’ Again she winked at him. ‘Come, let’s act out a scene. This is in 1889, after King Lobengula has realized that that liar Rhodes tricked him into signing away half his kingdom in the Rudd Concession, and here he’s confronting that snake-in-missionary-clothing Charles Helm, who he’d thought was his friend and who’d advised him to sign the concession. Here, you read here, you can be King Lobengula and I’ll be Helm.’ She cleared her throat.
He wanted to say, I don’t know how to read, but the very thought of how this would widen and possibly make irresolvable the gap between them made his heart beat faster. He squinted at the pages, blinking rapidly, and then looked up at her.
She stared back. ‘Well? You start, read from right here.’
‘Why don’t you read out loud for me?’ he said. ‘I would love to just listen to you read.’
‘You don’t want to be in my play?’
‘No … I mean, of course I would love that, if I can act, that is, but … we can try another time. Right now, read for me, please. I just want to hear you read.’
‘All right.’ She smiled at him shyly, but it was fleeting, for the next moment she was en poise, her face taking on irony, her voice suddenly gruff, the syllables flat, filling the whole room and, he was sure, spilling out into the street.
Of course, my surrogate father barely listened to a word, and so the true content of that camel-skin prized possession is lost to posterity. But he supplied the names to me and so I’ll do the rest – any self-respecting man such as I who sets out on the redemptive task of redescription has to be familiar with the stories of the so-called great men who have deemed themselves the makers of history. I know our King Lobengula’s story well enough; I know Cecil Rhodes’s story too well. I imagine a sapient soul such as Thandi would have been familiar with these histories, too. No doubt she would have begun with that famous lamentation our King Lobengula is said to have caterwauled after discovering Rhodes et al.’s duplicity:
‘Did you ever see a chameleon catch a fly? The chameleon gets behind the fly and remains motionless for some time, then he advances very slowly and gently, first putting forward one leg and then the other. At last, when well within reach, he darts his tongue and the fly disappears. England is the chameleon and I am that fly.’
I imagine her voice becoming lyrical as she mimicked an imaginary Charles Helm, with the intonations proceeding as though from her nostrils: ‘I doubt there can be peace without your honouring your end of things, Your Kingship. As I have already said, all has been in good faith, and Her Majesty, the Queen Victoria, was very pleased to hear of the progress we have made in coming to an affable agreement.’
Gruff and flat again: ‘Away with your child’s tales, Charles! Tell me, would mineral rights of a similar expanse of land in England go for this very same sum?’
Acquiring a nasal haughtiness: ‘Well… I wouldn’t be in a position to comment on that, Your Kingship. However, your mark of approval sits on the document, and I’d say that makes it binding …’
Gravelly and angry: ‘Be done with your evil scheming, Charles! What is this piece of paper to me? I shall send an envoy to your Queen, only with whom I can speak of such adult matters as an equal. I shall tell her I’ve been overrun by greedy men from her country who harangue me every day with demands for concessions this concessions that. She must come here and see me herself, so we may settle matters as equals.’
‘I’m afraid it’s not up to Her Majesty, Your Kingship. It is up to our courts and Parliament …’
‘Oh, you and your folly, Charles! Why do you enjoy tormenting me with your child’s tales? First, you make me put my mark on papers that tell lies, now you tell me of a queen who has no power … what kind of foolishness is that?’
This is where she would have paused, and looked up at him, becoming bashful again. ‘Well? What do you think?’
‘More! More!’ he said, clapping rah-rah.
He visited her many times thereafter, and begged her to tell him her family hi-story. And in this way, he learned about her grandfather, the mettlesome Impikade Hadebe, cousin to Queen Lozikeyi Dlodlo, King Lobengula’s senior wife, and who had served as part of the king’s personal regiment. He had been a valiant warrior, she told him dreamily, defending the Nation of Mthwakazi at the Battle of Galade in 1893 when it was attacked by somebody called Doctor Jim and his troops under instruction from that colonizer Rhodes.
Here, Thandi flipped through the pages of her camel-skin-bound book, to show my surrogate father the drawings she’d done of her grandfather. They were, he attests, very good; pencil and watercolour sketches of a copper-hued warrior in a shimmering ostrich feather headdress and a knee-length leopard kilt, with purfles made from oxtail hide adorning his arms and calves, and also gold and beaded bracelets tinkling around his wrists and ankles. His poses were athletic; kneeling amidst the khaki-coloured veld grass in one, his slim face peeping between his oxhide shield and assegai; leaping in the air in another, wielding a stout stick, the slits in his earlobes caught by a brilliant splash of sunlight sparkling off the upper left corner of the page; and in another still, sliding his assegai into the chest of a settler, whose blue shirt was stained with blood, his arms flung backwards, as though to curb a fall, his astonished grey eyes staring into the face of Impikade.
They were sorely defeated at the Battle of Galade, Thandi told him, thoroughly walloped by men who made claims to civility and yet found pleasure in the killing of the bantu men, women and children.
‘More exhilarating than partridge hunting,’ they said.
‘Humanitarianism,’ they called it.
It seemed to my surrogate father that it was this, the narrative of war rather than war itself, which incensed Thandi.
The impis, with their assegais and their Martini-Henry rifles, hadn’t stood a chance against the English Maxim and Gatling guns, their cannon and their rifles. This counted as the darkest period in the Kingdom, for the royal town Bulawayo was burned to the ground, as was custom, and the king fled, never to be seen or heard from again, his valiant spirit kept alive only through rumours of being spotted here and there, and ephemeral promises of his imminent return. And what were a people without a king? They were a people with a queen. In the absence of King Lobengula, protocol decreed that Queen Lozikeyi take over; she had shared not only his bed but also his secrets, and was therefore as powerful as any man.
(My once-mentor Dumo was an admirer of our Queen Lozikeyi. Mother of Mthwakazi! UMpangazitha! Materfamilias … Our Virgin Mary? No, that can’t be right. I become so awestruck I forget the totems! Eish, this always made Dumo mad. I must look them up; I have them saved on my Mac somewhere.)
Here, Thandi showed my surrogate father a watercolour drawing of our Queen, who
looked stout, her small face pretty, a multicoloured cloth draped around her shoulders and covering also her loins. A beaded apron hung from her waist, and brass and iron encircled her arms and legs; from her head fluttered the azure feathers of a jaybird. She stood still and unsmiling, her hands clasped across her bosom, and behind her were visible the beginnings of a beehive dwelling.
Thandi’s grandfather was with the Queen when, in 1896, right under the unwary eyes of those haughty Europeans, who really ought to have known better, she led her people in a second battle, the War of the Red Axe. But even though this war was bloody and long, forcing Rhodes and his cohorts from imperial England into negotiations with the Queen, it, too, was ultimately lost. The State of Mthwakazi was toppled, and left to die in the dust of the very land that had been stolen from it.
And so, Thandi concluded, Rhodes and his settlers had driven the bantu peoples out of their fertile land, upsetting the whole of the culture and its way of life, making out of young men farm labourers and mine workers. Impikade, who by then had two wives and five children, four of them sons, refused to do menial work – as far as he was concerned, he was a warrior and a servant of the Ndebele royal family. As a result, his home was burned down, his daughter raped and killed and his sons taken to work in the mines. One of these sons, Mzilethi, was Thandi’s father, whom she saw only occasionally growing up, for he spent most of his life shambling about in the darkness of the Tsholotsho mines, searching for and yet unable to find the light.
‘And now, the valour of our people and the glory of the Mthwakazi Nation lives not in any history book, or in any official account, where we are nothing but savages without culture, without history or glory or anything worth mentioning and passing on, but in here,’ she said, pressing her hand to her chest. ‘I heard the stories from my father, passed down to him by his father, my grandfather, and which I shall one day pass down to my children.’
‘My father never told me any stories,’ my surrogate father said. ‘By the time I was born, he’d come back from the Second World War, and all he could remember was fighting for England, not against it. Nothing before it. I used to think it was funny.’
‘So, you see, Abed, why we must fight in the war, and prepare for the time when our leader Joshua Nkomo assumes power, and we can restore the dignity of our people.’
‘Prepare for this time how?’
‘You know, we shall burn all of this to the ground when we win the war, like all conquerors of any land. They shall all go up in flames, the Royal Cinema, Asbestos House, that City Hall, everything, that maniac Rhodes’s statue and the Gatling Gun relic, nothing shall be left standing. We shall burn down the lie that the English have made of us!’
‘You want to destroy these sturdy buildings? And then what shall replace them, huts?’
‘Don’t be silly. We’ll buy materials from the Chinese and the Soviets, state of the art stuff, and build a royal city fashioned after Ndebele architecture, worthy of King Lobengula himself.’
This kind of thinking would be very appealing to Dumo. A modern city that narrates Mthwakazi history through its architecture! A reinterpretation of the Expressionist era; domes upon domes, semi-circular structures out of whose radii flourish other semi-circular structures, creating secret rooms and semi-rooms and rooms on top of rooms; rooms of flight, of fancy.
Of (im)possibility.
*
Usually, after telling him these hi-stories, she had the urge to go out dancing. It was as though reimagining the past had welled up in her excess energy that demanded to be expended, for she would dance for hours on end, oblivious to the June cold or the late hour, at the Njube Community Hall where many of the dhind-indis were held, disco and soul music blaring from a gramophone placed at one end of the hall. She would sway down to the floor and undulate her hips as she slowly rose back up, flitting her eyes at him, running her hands down his back while he stood there looking stiff. At times, the community hall projected films from a bioscope, and charged an entry fee, but during these she was always too restless, the excess energy making her shuffle in her seat, and clasp and unclasp her hands. He preferred these to the plays she attended in the room on Customs Avenue, however, and which she liked to drag him to, the possible penalty of whose terrorist activity terrified him. But she brushed this concern aside, saying there were more important things at stake than jail; for she and Mvelaphi had been precociously developing the Césaire play Et les chiens, and were making plans to tour the whole country to showcase the two-person production.
It was after one of these bioscopes at the community hall that she let him into her mother’s house – she never let him in after the dancing or the films, although he walked her home every single time, ever hopeful – where she pressed him onto his back across the peacock-print sofa, and lay atop him. Her mouth was hungry, searching his lips, his face, her tongue flickering in and out, making him hungry too; before he knew what was happening, she’d unclothed him and was astride him and he was inside her. He clung to her, she flinging back her head and pumping her hips and hurling throaty moans at the roof, her full breasts beaded with sweat from the exertion of it, he stunned and delighted and warm inside her, taking all of this in, how it was she who was doing the doing and he the one who was being done when, before he knew it, she was shuddering and he was shuddering with her, deep inside her, and then she was rising, and he felt himself slipping out of her luscious warmth, the heat of her flesh leaving him, exposing him to a cold draught.
One day, in September, during one of his visits, some two months after the beginning of their sexual encounters, about which they never spoke but which continued in that fashion, she sat down next to him with a paper and a pencil, and a slim, yellow book with the five vowels, a e i o u, dancing across the cover. She took his big, tough hand in her dainty one, moulded it around the pencil, opened the yellow book and pointed at the letters.
‘We’ll start with teaching you how to write,’ she said. ‘Then learning how to read should be easier.’
He stared at her. ‘How did you …?’
‘This is how you write your name,’ she continued, moving his hand with hers, slowly, painstakingly, until letters began taking form across the page.
‘See? You’ve just written your name.’
He stared at the crooked letters, saw that indeed he had, and tried not to cry.
The Mbira
Even in his absence, Bukhosi is here, tucked in every worry line etched on our father’s face, in the hunched posture of Mama Agnes’s back each morning as she heads out to Blessed Anointings. Some days I don’t even see her; she arrives home late from her prayer sessions with her Reverend Pastor, and leaves for work in the morning before I’m awake. I miss spending time with my surrogate mama!
I decided to stay up last night so I could see her. I waited with my surrogate father in the gloom of the sitting room; the electricity had gone again. My surrogate father has been sullen since running off the other day to pick up Mama Agnes’s cooking oil, clamping up whenever I ask about Thandi, and refusing, despite my best efforts, even one drop of Bell’s. We spent the whole of yesterday seated in the sitting room, in a battle of wills, me trying to get him to take just one sip of the whisky, he pursing his lips, glaring at the wall, willing Bukhosi to reappear, declaring himself mute unless the boy popped up abracadabra before his eyes, and snapping at me to shurrup when I pleaded with him to continue with his story.
I have been trying to figure out how to get him to open up; I think I may need stronger medicine for that obstinate heart of his. I understand that he’s worried about the boy. I miss him too, sometimes. But I’m here for our father, aren’t I? I’m here, I can be the son who will never leave, who won’t disappoint, who is eager to learn from him and who will always show him affection. Why can’t he see that?
When Mama Agnes finally walked through the front door, I quickly slipped the bottle of Bell’s I had been trying to feed Abednego beneath my shirt, but she must have caught the
glint of the bottle in the moonlight spilling through the window, or heard the swirl of the liquor as I hid the bottle, for her head snapped in my direction.
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s nothing,’ I said.
‘You’ve been drinking? Zamani? You’re letting him drink when you know—’
‘Leave us alone, mani,’ snapped Abednego. ‘We do what we like. This is my house, mani. You hear? My house!’
‘You know how you get when you drink—’
‘Hayi shuttup, mani, you are not the boss of me.’
She sighed, then, my surrogate mama, a long sigh that made me slump my shoulders. And then, the next moment, she clapped her hands; I jumped. They had had a breakthrough with the Holy Ghost! Thanks to the Reverend Pastor’s ceaseless prayers, she had finally seen a vision of her Bukhosi walking down a street somewhere. Bless the Reverend Pastor! He had done so much for them, shuwa. If it hadn’t been for him and his faith … From the noise of the street in her vision, and the hooting khombis, it looked like somewhere in Johannesburg … Maybe the boy had run off there! The Reverend Pastor certainly thought so. But most important was that her nanaza was all right. Their prayers were paying off. They just had to keep praying, and all would be revealed soon. How faithful was the Holy Spirit!
I congratulated her, saying this was, indeed, something to rejoice in, although my heart beat wildly as I stood up to hug her. The boy can’t be in Johannesburg, can he? I saw him with my own eyes, being thrown into that police van at the Mthwakazi rally. Could he have escaped? But then why would he go to South Africa instead of coming home? How powerful, exactly, is this Holy Ghost? Does it really have the powers to reveal all, and if so, what, exactly, does it intend to reveal, how does it intend to reveal it and when?
Mama Agnes met my embrace with open arms. I inhaled her soothing, fruity fragrance. I never got to hug my own mama and smell her; I imagine this is what she would smell like.
House of Stone Page 5