They gathered at the school, Thandi jibber-jabbering about how jealous Mvelaphi and Frankie would be when she told them that she was fighting side by side with the rebels. My surrogate father, on the other hand, was fearful for both his life and Thandi’s. He was alarmed to have plopped himself in the middle of this dangerous struggle when he’d mostly been faking his interest in the rebellion in the city so as to impress Thandi.
Spear-the-Blood began by hauling a teacher and a well-known elder to the front of the ragtag gathering of subdued villagers, where he proceeded to pummel them with the butt of a rifle, repeatedly on their heads and backs and any exposed body parts.
‘Nobody is above the struggle!’ he declared. ‘Nobody! Nobody is too big for the struggle! When we are coming here needing your help, nobody is too big to be busy complaining behind our backs. You are thinking you are having too much education, heh? You are thinking you are having too many years, that you are better than everybody, heh? Nobody is above anyone else in the struggle!’
My poor Thandi! I can see her mouth dropping.
‘The struggle is for freedom for all of us! Are you understanding what I’m saying?’
‘My father, he was a chief before the whites came and scrambled up everything,’ came a timid murmur from among the subdued villagers. ‘He was a chief above Dingwayo here, who is busy lying to everyone claiming a chiefly lineage. Will you restore me to my rightful position of chief after the war?’
The most vulgar words were mortared from the relations of Chief Dingwayo, shelling the speaker into silence.
‘And me, just last month the District Administrator came and took a third of my fields and relocated them to a new family which is moving into the Tribal Trust Lands,’ came another complaint. ‘Now, my plot was already smaller than everybody else’s, and to be having even more land taken away from me is just not right. I know the District Administrator has it in for me because I refused to marry that ugly niece of his—’
‘You are the ugly bastard, you Jepheth, with a face like your mother’s pussy!’
There rose a cacophony of other requests, complaints and demands, which it took several minutes for Spear-the-Blood to quell. ‘All of these matters are of no consequence,’ he said, provoking another racket. ‘We are needing to, we are needing to band together and and and to be freeing ourselves, the whites, they are our enemy—’
‘But it is you who comes and takes food we don’t have from us. Our children are starving because we give all we have to you. First the whites spat on our being and made us live like slaves in our own lands, now you have taken our sons and made us seedless. You are busying scaring the Faaders at the church also, turning the House of God into heathen business. And just last week, you bombed the local clinic, now we must travel how many kilometres for treatment—’
‘Be stopping that traitorous talk!’ yelled Spear-the-Blood, pinching the space between his eyes. ‘The clinic was an institute of the white man. We are having our own local healers here. What is there to be missing? Do you want me to be going and reporting back to our leaders of the nationalist movement what type of spineless swines are roaming this part of the land?! We have been working so hard trying to free all of you cockroaches from white bondage; our leaders have been jailed too many times, and now, they’ve had to be going into hiding, over there in the USSR and over here in Zambia. And now it’s the eleventh hour and you want to be backing out of the struggle? Do you know what they shall be doing to traitors when we win the war, heh? To those who refuse to be lending a hand to the struggle …?’
It was here that my Thandi learned just how bourgeois her form of idealism really was! No one in the village was exempt from the demands of food and clothing from the guerillas, not even the Mlambo family and the urgent needs of their pregnant new makoti. Abednego watched, dismayed, as the fat shed itself from beneath Thandi’s skin, making her reel from the weight of her baby load. Even she, what with her visions of dragging home the carcass of the liberation struggle, was frightened by this brand of Spear-the-Blood & Co.’s justice. Every day she cried, every day she pined after big-city living and cursed the day she met my surrogate father, and not even his romantic, manly gesture of building them a hut all by himself could kindle her. She became a pariah, what with her haughty-city-girl airs and her refusal to help with the cooking or any other womanly chores, screaming to anyone who cared to listen how she was an Angela Davis who demanded that her feminality be respected. And hadn’t Abednego promised that she’d live like a queen? Not even my surrogate grandma, with her inclination towards agreeability, could put up with such eccentricities. It was, to my surrogate father’s dismay, my Uncle Zacchaeus with whom she became close friends, Zacchaeus with whom she seemed to have in common that haughty-roving-eye, with whom she could dress up Marxian rhetoric in fancy English words.
‘Stay away from her, brother. She’s mine.’
‘Whatever did she see in you, brother? I could never see you landing such a girl.’
‘Well, I did. And you didn’t. I’ve been to the city. And you haven’t. So, I’m warning you.’
‘Yes, you’ve been to the city, and yet you have come back more or less the same buffoon that left. I can see through you, and your fancy city clothes with their ridiculous feminine colours—’
‘It’s the fashion of the day! Something you wouldn’t know anything about.’
‘Yes, but I’ve been to school, I know things you will never know. I shall forage towns and cities, and even whole countries, for worldly wisdom, I shall fashion myself into a Great Colonizer—’
‘Oh, shurrup, you’ve been singing that song for as long as anyone can remember, and yet here you are still, stuck in the bhundu.’
In spite of what my surrogate father says now, I imagine he got a little satisfaction from witnessing his brother wince, and walk away, for once with nothing to say.
That inevitable day when Spear-the-Blood came on behalf of the liberation struggle to collect a son from the Mlambo family – his eye cast upon Zacchaeus, having mistaken his passionate intellectual posturing on behalf of the war for eager brawn – was also the tragic day of Baba’s death.
And this, the story of how my surrogate-surrogate grandfather died, is the type of tale you’ll never read verbatim in any official history book, for, as Dumo would say, those who know it are the kind of inerudite folk who, aside from being asked to pose for Red Cross and WHO newsletter photos, aren’t thought to possess that much-needed epistemological savoir faire. It’s also the kind of scandalous scuttlebutt that any self-respecting son would be loath to remember, let alone share, and which not even Bell’s has been strong enough to coax free. Believe me, I have tried. But it turns out that stronger medicines of more stellar quality have been required. Such as a 750ml bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue. And so, putting my faith in the distillation prowess of the Scots, I have paid Johnnie a tithe, and Hallelujah! Plied with the tongue-loosening flavours of cocoa and cedar, entranced by the potent whiff of leather and spice, palating the meditative notes of moss and peat, my surrogate father has begun to avow. He has declared, he’s confessed, he’s proclaimed! And thus, the story of how my surrogate-surrogate grandfather met with Death, that intimate companion he’d first encountered in ’44 on the battlefield at Scraggy Hill, Shenam, Burma, and whose ballsy exploits had since overawed his mind, goes like so:
When the old man saw that terrorist picaroon Spear-the-Blood swaggering into his homestead as though into the backyard of some pagan commoner, having added as part of his renegade attire a candy-coloured bandana which he’d wrapped around his kooky-shaped head – covering, fashionably, one eye – and flaunting also some rusty-looking firearm which the fool was holding the wrong way round, he, Ziphozonke Majahamane Mlambo, recently born again and faithful to the causes of both Christ and Country, hastened to his hut to don the patriotic raiment of the Rhodesian African Rifles, more commonly known under the acronym RAR, which, when pronounced properly, sounds like a ferocious roar
, RRRAARRR!
He intended to shoot the picaroon dead. He especially intended to shoot him dead when he heard him bullying first my surrogate father and then more forcefully my Uncle Zacchaeus into partaking in his traitorous activities no doubt decreed and blessed by the odious hand of Lucifer. But as he stood checking and then cocking his FAL – polished, clean, not a spot of rust anywhere – he heard the terr conferring on his boys the details of an imminent ambush upon the House of Thornton, the abode of that bigoted noncombatant he cared nothing for but in whose residence a division of the nation’s army currently resided.
He stepped out of his hut and faced the boy fair and square, raining upon him all of the curses of the bible which he’d thus far learned by heart and then demanding that he come with him to hand himself in. Naturally, the bhantinti declined. There was a moment of confusion, and panic even, as the scoundrel raised his firearm – the right way round – and pulled the trigger. Luckily, thanks to the candy-coloured bandana, the scoundrel had forsaken vision for fashion, and the shot whizzed past my surrogate-surrogate grandfather to lodge itself in his darling mopane tree.
For this alone, he would have shot the little satan.
Instead, he decided to rally the troops, so he turned and ran – yes, ran, to the hasty jeers of Spear-the-Blood – out his gate and across the hill of the north-east, headed for my surrogate grandpa’s farm. His teeth rattled in his mouth, his flesh undulated in the wind, and in his heart he felt a thrill such as he hadn’t felt in a long time.
There was a young private holding sentry at the bottom of the brae where the soldier trucks were stationed and several tents had been pitched. When my surrogate-surrogate grandfather saw the private, he raised the hand holding the FAL and waved frantically.
‘The Major General!’ he wheezed. ‘Get me your Major General!’
The young private gaped in astonishment at the munt bearing down upon him shouting some incoherent native war cry clad in combat gear and brandishing a firing weapon.
A skinny lad fresh out of teenhood, having just turned twenty, this was his first conscription. He was still wet behind the ears and a little jittery and missed very much his mama’s peanut butter and jam sandwiches and the Snake Park and the Bulawayo fast life riding shotgun with his brother who was part of the Grey Street Cowboys, but he missed especially the boobs of the girl of his dreams, Miriam Hibbert, which he described three hundred and twenty-one times in the long, explicit letters he wrote her but never sent – which were found among his things after his death in a terr ambush and were published years later as part of his farmer father Matthew Robert Borris’s best-selling memoirs, during that millennial year 2000 when the white farmers of Zimbabwe were kicked off the land and settler literature became en vogue – detailing how he wished to give it to her long and hard. He, like me, was yet to copulate with any woman. He was yet to have even his first kiss.
Upon seeing the enemy bearing down upon him, primed for assault, the young private raised his FN FAL rifle, aimed and fired. He was shaking and this was his first combat and he couldn’t keep his hands steady and the target wouldn’t stop moving and so he just kept on firing and firing and firing and firing …
The first bullet struck my surrogate-surrogate grandfather in the belly, lifting his feet a little off the ground, as though propelled into weightlessness by some supernatural force. He felt nothing at first, only euphoria, and then a keen burning sensation in his gut such as he had never known. He screamed. He screamed to Christ and Country, he screamed, The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want, Rise O voices of Rhodesia, He maketh me lie down in green pastures, Bringing her your proud acclaim, He leadeth me beside the still waters, Grandly echoing through the mountains, He restoreth my soul, Rolling o’er the far flung plain, He leadeth me in the path of righteousness, Joining in one grand refrain, Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, Ascending to the sunlit heavens, I fear no evil, Telling of her honoured name, For thou art with me, Rise O voices of Rhodesia!
His scream carried across the brae, across the valley, and through the Mlambo stead; those who heard it said it was like a barn owl screeching, those who saw him claimed he seemed to flutter like a bundle of green clothing flapping in the wind. All who were present, guerillas and army alike, branded him in their unofficial hi-stories as a traitor. For, he had been to one side a fucking RAR and to the other a batshit munt and thus he had worked for the enemy.
It was here, as he lay on the ground trying to plug the hole in his belly, as the world around him gradually dimmed, that my surrogate-surrogate grandfather finally understood, sparkling clear, the gift that military life had unwittingly given him; the gift of seeing not black men die – for he’d witnessed this plenty of times throughout his life and had always known just how cheap in this world a black man’s life was – rather, he’d been granted the gift of seeing white men die, die like flies, die in the most wretched ways, ways unmentionable which kept him up at night and which were unfit for men to die; he’d witnessed this and come into an awakening, finally, which neither his life of toil in the Tsholotsho mines nor that of patriarch in his home could have proffered him. He had come into the knowing, from the time he saw his Colonel J. F. Clayton blasted to fokol at Scraggy Hill, Shenam, Burma, that the white man was no god; the white man was no god, Holy Hallelujah, the white man was no god, and although God was a white man, the white man was no god! He’d gripped this knowing and clung to it and trembled with elation and come out of it feeling fully like a man standing not beneath any other man and thus relieved of the yoke of humiliation that had burdened him all his life, first as a nigglet beneath the boot of the settler in the Tribal Trust Lands, and later as a kaffir beneath his whip in the mines.
Too late, too late, this knowing … it crept upon him and gave his muddled mind clarity and he proclaimed one last fervent cry of thanks to Christ and Country – Rise O voices of Rhodesia, Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me – before he choked on his last breath and died.
Fathers
The recounting of my surrogate-surrogate grandfather’s death has deteriorated my poor surrogate father to a stuttering mess. Oh, Johnnie! Johnnie, what have you done! His nostrils, wet and drippy, and now the colour of strawberries, keep inflating to alarming proportions and then deflating back again to their already generous size. He looks too much like my Uncle Fani now, like he may drag me onto his lap and cling to me and cry into my chest like I’m his mama.
I, too, am not without grief for my surrogate-surrogate grandfather’s passing. But I can’t afford to break down while my surrogate dada is in this state. It’s as though you passed only yesterday, grand-dada! May you be resting in peace, wherever you are, whether it’s with the fucking RARs or the batshit munts.
(As I channelled you last night in my pygmy room, rendering your last moments on this earth as imaginatively as my gifts of redescription allow, I almost felt your hand on my shoulder and your voice in my ear. We were as one!)
I feel as though I’ve always known you! That man you raised as your own even as the sting of adultery made you cruel, he weeps for you, grand-dada. He loved you! It is not for a son to collapse before his collapsing father. The best I can do is to clasp my surrogate dada’s clammy hand, that’s the best I can do, and clear my throat as I grasp for something meaningful to say. Ahem…
‘… Father—’
‘Bukhosi?’ he says. ‘Bukhosi, is that you?’
I sigh loudly, and side-eye him. He’s staring at me intently, and I see hope inflaming those puffy eyes. ‘It’s Zamani.’
‘Come here, Bukhosi!’
He dives, yes, like he’s our very own Glen Walshaw at the Swimming Olympics plunging into the deep end, stretching out his arms towards me as he springs from his sofa. I happily catch him, for it’s into my arms and not Bukhosi’s that he’s diving, dammit, whether he knows it or not. I grip him by the armpits and drag him back onto his sofa and perch my little tush on his armrest. I begin to rub his back.
‘There’s nothing to be ashamed of,’ I say.
‘He was a traitor!’
‘Hush, now, Father, ssshh …’
‘And b-b-because of him we were called traitors, the people of our village remember him as a tr-tr-traitor, history—’
‘Sshh … What is this hi-story business?’ I put on my best Wittgenstein impression. ‘Our real selves lie buried deep in the stupor of a murky present, in which the act of living is ahistorical, and all that matters is breathing, waking now, now eating, now shitting, now bathing, now walking. And above all, feeling. What the hell is hi-story? Things that didn’t belong to anyone and belonged to everyone being claimed by someone, demarcations, lineages and hi-stories being created abracadabra and made real in the mind, and then consolidated through tales told and then revised to suit not only the mood of the day but also the vision for the future, memory aided and abated, yes, by delusion, constantly recreating and justifying, and thus no truth ever mattered except that which was believed to be true.’ I pause emphatically, as I’m sure Herr Wittgenstein would. ‘So, your Baba, Father, my beloved surrogate-surrogate grandfather, carried no shame except that which is common to all of man. How is the value of a life to be measured? So he fought on behalf of Rhodesia in the Second World War. So he was part of the Rhodesian African Rifles. So he pledged himself to serve country, to the honour and duty demanded by soldierhood. What are honour and duty and country except the trinity of a live, moving hearse into which we throw conquest’s history-riddled bodies? What do you suppose those soldiers of the Schutzstaffel told themselves as they flung in the name of honour and duty and country Jewish bodies, warm and breathing still, into the furnaces at Treblinka? What do you suppose the founders of the US of A were thinking as they wiped out whole Native American populations? And those soldiers of our own Mugabe’s 5 Brigade, what do you suppose ran through their minds as they hacked and hacked our people to death in Matabeleland during Gukurahundi? I imagine they all saw themselves as ordinary men, just men and even boys who had mothers and lovers waiting somewhere with rose-scented memories bosomed in their chests.’
House of Stone Page 8