What I cannot forgive him for, though, and what was most likely the cause of the irreparable fall-out with my surrogate father, are his incestuous writings about my beloved Thandi, scribbled during his Oxford University days in his leather-bound diaries which, under the euphoric urgings of the ubuvimbolaced tea, my surrogate father has retrieved from their hiding place atop his wardrobe and proceeded to show me. To covet your own brother’s woman! Who is with child! To not only covet her, but to indulge the most graphic of sexual fantasies, and to record them with maiesiophilic zeal! That, now, is the crime of crimes! The man – otherwise a genius – even plagiarized Wordsworth’s ‘Laodamia’, all in the name of Thandi. Laodamia, wife of Protesilaus, that great leader of the Phylaceans and the oracular hero of the Trojan War of Greek mythology, appeared in Uncle Zacchaeus’s dreams with the likeness of Thandi. He imbued her, the Laodamia of his dreams, with umber skin and the most sybaritic curves, falling during many an afternoon into a haze in which he heard Thandi’s voice lilting, Celestial pity, I again implore; – Restore him to my sight – great Jove, restore! While he, the intrepid Protesilaus, martyr and saviour of the idyllic kingdom Phylace, came up from the Greek underworld Hades to comfort and chide her, and at times French kiss her before laying down with her, and in one diarized fantasy even returning with her back to the underworld.
His is the type of family hi-story that deserves to be written out of the history books! In fact, the man deserves to be written out of our family hi-story altogether for his vices! I shall conclude by saying: my Uncle Zacchaeus, otherwise a very affable fellow, was a lecherous libertine who deserves to fry in the fieriest of furnaces for lusting after my Thandi.
What is it about my beloved that has us men banging our heads against each other so? If only my surrogate father would get to the part where he tells me what became of her, if only he’d tell me where she is now, I’d go and pledge my love to her this very day! I imagine she has aged well, my inamorata, that her lovely umber skin has only matured handsomely with time.
Is she as spirited now as she was back then, in January ’76, when, still brimming with passion and a penchant for theatrics, she fled with Abednego who at that moment she hated for having brought her to the cesspool of backwardness that was Lupane? What else was she to do? She was with child and, besides, she certainly hadn’t signed up for the kind of hardcore militancy Spear-the-Blood & Co. demanded. No, this bhundu living with my surrogate father’s family had sobered her proper, especially having to witness the way Smith’s army had gunned down her nutso father-in-law in broad daylight and then had had the gall to go around claiming he’d been a loopy gook trying to blast them all to kingdom come.
No, my Thandi just couldn’t handle this crude rural warfare business, this running off into the mountains and what-not, gun-toting men on every side of her. She was a city girl through and through, and her true calling, she realized, lay in disrupting the ritzy eating rooms of the likes of the Sun Hotel and also prancing about on a stage wooing tears from an audience, whether sympathetic or hostile, for at the bottom of it all the essence of all (wo)mankind was feeling – sweet poignant, heady feeling – feeling which, with her pregnancy, was now terrorizing her and making her dizzy and weepy so that Abednego could do nothing but stare at her feeling helpless while she slapped him with all the feeling she could muster.
‘It’s all your fault, all your fault, all your fault …’ was all she could say, thrice like that, although secretly she must have been grateful: his bringing her here had forced her to see first-hand what would have been in store for her had they managed to enlist with the comrades and gone to Zambia.
‘I’m sorry,’ was all my surrogate father could say, though for what, he was not entirely sure.
Off they fled from the homestead of my grand-dada, the jingoistic Ziphozonke Majahamane Mlambo, renegade for Christ and also Second Lieutenant of the Rhodesian African Rifles, who’d been presented with his colours by the Mother Queen herself, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, back in those days in ’53 when her skin was still taut and chiffon-coloured and her hair had about it the spry hue of pecan-sangria. Off they scuttled, nipped at the heels by the gun-toting Spear-the-Blood, and also the venom-spouting raconteurs of the crimes of my grand-dada, that two-timer said to have been two-ing the RARs and timing the munts.
Off they went over the mild hills of Lupane, across the scraggly bush, headed south on foot, walking along the Bulawayo–Victoria Falls road, hitching a ride in the Morris Minor of a compulsive smoker with a Red Cross armband and a thick Swiss accent, who was not headed, as they had hoped, to Bulawayo, which lay further to the south-east, but who took instead the road that shot off like a forefinger from the thumb that is the A8, past Bayi-Bayi and Pondo and Tsholotsho, making a final stop in Plumtree, that bland, dull border town south-west of glamorous Bulawayo, where nothing ever happens, but which they found uncharacteristically ahive with activity. For war was on its way, and Spear-the-Bloods had sprouted everywhere, intending to make martyrs out of young men. And so, from here, too, they had to flee, tumbling across rivers, fences and towns until they found themselves at Dukwe Refugee Camp, Dukwe, Botswana.
The campsite, my surrogate father says, struck a terrible dread in my inamorata. It stretched over some fifteen square kilometres of unfenced scrubland, the entrance demarcated by a cluster of buildings that housed the Aid Orgs and the church groups, and next to this a gathering of large tents where a Sister Bhictoria of the World Health Organization – nunned up in blistering and biting weather alike – administered, on behalf of all the charities, the food and clothes rationing, her wimpled face a perpetually severe glare. Separated from these by a patch of Kalahari soil, red and fine and on windy days billowy, and where the refugee children liked to play, were rows of tents, their tarpaulins fastened to the outer edges of low mud walls that had been built to prevent the rain from leaking in. Thandi took on the pastime of decorating the mud walls using a blend of soil and spit, sometimes crushing leaves into the mixture to variate the colours.
She was angry at being separated from my surrogate father and allocated a women’s tent, in which they had to squeeze up against each other in groups of up to twenty. She didn’t understand what the hell was happening, the whole of her life just turned upside down like so, in a matter of months! From script-writing revolutionary-acting Citizen against the Colour Bar to preggas refugee in the middle of nowhere in a foreign land fleeing war from her beloved home!
And war is exactly what it was. By 1976, it was raging in earnest throughout the whole country. I looked up the statistics at our National Archives. More than twenty thousand lost their lives, tens of thousands more, like my Thandi and my surrogate father, ruthlessly displaced. The ruckus between the colonists and the nationalists lit up the whole country – a fight over Anglo-Saxon values that was bitter to the end – spilling over into neighbouring Mozambique and Zambia. Meanwhile, a fratricide was going on between the nationalist parties themselves, a battle for the people’s souls.
All around Dukwe Refugee Camp was nothing but the red soils of the Kalahari, scattered with clusters of shrubs and the more resilient acacia trees and the occasional kopje; in short, a dry and unimpressive landscape graced by the hunchbacked kudu or the sprier springbok, which must have made my inamorata’s breath catch in her throat as it sautéed over three metres in the air or leapt across the plains in a nimble allegro, its tan and beige coat a rippling muscular sheen. They heard that lions roamed the area but had never seen one, but they glimpsed, occasionally, the Khoi San, who lived in the bush around the camp but who hardly ever made themselves visible, not until my Thandi joined the young women who ventured into the bush to pick mpulunyane, which they sold to the Khoi San, who then fermented it until it became a most potent brew, skittling even the most seasoned drunkard.
I imagine whenever she appraised this landscape and saw the drought-endued, cosmopolitan-deprived terrain that had become her life, my poor inamorata could not
help but weep. My surrogate father watched her, helpless, for she was inconsolable. He had to be careful to keep his distance, for she could no longer stand the sight of him, in the same way that the smell of raw eggs or the taste of peanut butter made her nauseous. Not even his building them a hut in an area separate from the tents that was designated for the married, a lie they told Sister Bhictoria so they could live together and shored up by Thandi’s oversize belly, could mollify her.
I can see them, on that fateful day in April of ’76 in the bush where the baby was born. My poor inamorata must have felt the vibrations that travelled across the underbrush running through her feet and up her spine and into her pregnant belly. The ground trembled, and then somewhere, whether far away or nearby my surrogate father could not say, rumbled a rumble that swelled into a roar. And out of nowhere appeared a lion, out of that scraggly bush, a real, live, roaring lion, its mane shuddering, a delicious gold springing from the sides of its face and darkening to a handsome hickory as it travelled all the way down to its belly, its nostrils flaring as it dropped its chin and pulled back its lips to display moist, black gums and sharp, yellow canines.
My inamorata dropped her jaw and her basket of mpulunyane. The next moment, my surrogate father was in front of her, crouching with his hands spread wide, startling the beast, which roared and swiped at the air with its huge paw.
‘Run,’ he hissed at her.
But she couldn’t run, poor Thandi, she couldn’t run and instead her trembling legs gave way. It was then, as my surrogate father stared into Death’s ochre eyes, that my inamorata’s water broke and trickled down her thighs, that a Khoi San woman leapt out of the scraggly bush, out of nowhere she leapt thrusting herself between the lovers and the lion, my surrogate father tried to scream but couldn’t find his voice, my inamorata found her voice and screamed, the woman bared her teeth and barked, the beast bared its gums and snarled, the baby was coming, the Khoi San woman was hissing, Thandi was groaning, the lion was growling, she spread her legs, it licked its nose, she fisted her hands, it shook its mane, she began to cry, and off it sauntered.
This is the story of his son’s birth as told to me by my surrogate father. I admit, the ubuvimbo had done him a number, but this is what I got.
So. Baby Bukhosi was eased into the world by the hands of ‡khoā of the Khoi San, ‡khoā The Lion Whisperer. He announced himself to the world with a ferocious wail, a squirming mega-baby alarmingly oversize not only for the meagre diet on which my inamorata had subsisted for the previous months, but by any ordinary-world standards.
It was Thandi who named him Bukhosi, Princehood, for he had been born in the bush under the kingly roar of a lion and was thus a royal, lucky little neonate.
I must interject here, to clear any confusion, and state outright that this Bukhosi, this mega-baby who had his wrinkled little forehead smeared with a thumb of spit by ‡khoā of the Khoi San, this princeling who received from ‡khoā The Lion Whisperer a blessing recited in a click-click onomatopoeic tongue, whether in the language of the lions or in her own Khoekhoe dialect we shall never know, is not our Bukhosi, my poor surrogate brother who has been missing for two weeks now. I don’t know what happened to this other Bukhosi, where he is and why my surrogate father has not spoken of him until now. I worry that maybe he’s up to his fibbing again; perhaps he’s confusing things; perhaps, caught in the euphoric clutches of ubuvimbo, he’s given way to fantasy. But he seems now to be adamant about this Bukhosi, who he claims was born not on 18 April 1990, the birth date of our Bukhosi, but on 18 April 1976, a full fourteen years prior.
And so, cradling that chubby load, beholding in that tiny face the agreement of my surrogate father’s teardrop nostrils with her own sepia eyes, stroking skin so buttery and honey like the father’s but which would, in the coming months, darken handsomely to her own burnished umber, my Thandi began to cry. When she lifted her tearful gaze, my surrogate father’s eyes, too, began to moisten.
The birth of Bukhosi, according to my surrogate father, seemed to mellow my inamorata, so that all inclinations of impregnating herself with the liberation struggle went out the proverbial window, and instead motherhood colonized her.
Their baby felt to my surrogate father like a focus, so welcome in the never-ending monotony of the camp: lining up outside the USAID tent for food, lining up outside the Red Cross tent for hand-me-downs, attending the abstinence lessons outside the WHO tent, lying under the cluster of acacia trees near the camp entrance … It had begun to seem to him that waiting had become his whole life.
But, each time Thandi clasped his hand or leaned her head against his chest – he taking this moment to bury his face in her mfushwa hair, which sprung from her head like a tropical forest – he was overcome by a lightness of spirit. These memories of her give me a lightness of spirit!
This Shangri-La was destined not to last, however, for one day in May the following year, just a month after little Bukhosi turned one, a truck arrived without warning at Dukwe Camp to take the men of Rhodesia away to a separate camp at Chifombo base in Zambia, that country which is shaped like a Fattail scorpion and rests its portly abdomen atop teapot-shaped Zimbabwe, née Rhodesia.
This request to separate the sexes had been put forward by Sister Bhictoria. She had tired, she wrote in a redacted report to the WHO, which I found gathering dust in our National Archives, of waging a losing war against the STD epidemic ravaging the camp, and having to deal with the refugee babies who popped out almost on a daily basis, and was fast losing faith altogether in the possibility of un-lusting these fugitive infidels of Aafricah.
As they dragged him on that fateful day in May to the idling truck, my surrogate father grabbed hold of Thandi’s hand and tried to hug his son for what could be the last time. Sister Bhictoria stood pursing her lips and waving her rosary, murmuring how everything was going to be all right, no need for all this crying now, abstinence for Jesus, blessed be the celibates.
My surrogate father thought of Thandi and his son every single day in Chifombo, which turned out not to be another refugee camp, as had been promised, but a clustering of a different kind; he found himself in a training base for the guerillas, where every day he ran combat drills, during which they learned the Art of War as strategized by the great Master Sun Tzu, and where every day my surrogate father saw young men being loaded into vans and driven back into the charnel house from where they had just fled.
There were whiffs in that base of rebellions-within-the-rebellion, fantastical rumours of coups and assassinations, and the most ferocious power struggles going on at the very heart of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU (PF)), which had broken away from my Thandi’s hero, Joshua Mqabuko kaNyongolo Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union ((PF) ZAPU). Something about some eager beaver with a serious face and oversize glasses named Robert or Gabriel or some such said to be playing some sick chess moves in this breakaway party and managing to manoeuvre to the top seat of the High Command. But more matter-of-fact and thus maddening was the buzz about the High Command having already betrayed the lunchpail principles as expressed by Chairman Mao, for they could be seen busy gorging themselves on hotel food and first class flying to that Britain and that America, and preferring to secure spots for their offspring brats in that Harvard and that Oxford, instead of maybe Shanghai Jiao Tong University or People’s Friendship University.
Meanwhile, as the leaders of the revolution pigged out on first class living, the guerillas languished on weevil-infested rice in bases such as Chifombo. My surrogate father did not care much for this power grabbing business by this Robert nerd-boy or angel Gabriel whatever and his breakaway ZANU what-what party; he cared neither who was gorging on what in which hotel nor whose beloved among the guerillas was sleeping wherever without whatever; he concentrated instead on trying to remember the smell of Thandi’s hair, on rendering her smile, on recalling Bukhosi’s face, day after day, polishing their memories in his mind until they began to fog, to his horror, f
rom all that rubbing, a day becoming a month becoming a year becoming three, and he spit-shining the same memories still as though to shield himself from this useless progression of time that seemed to be hustling him further and further from his beloveds.
During the day, he often imagined what kind of father he would be to the boy, while at night, in that damp room in the guerilla base, he would think of his own childhood. More often than not, his mind would turn to Farmer Thornton, who had once tried to claim him as his own, and who had always shown him a disturbing amount of kindness while treating Zacchaeus – that libertine who is now dead to me and shall henceforth be referred to only as that brother, for I intend to deny the letch the honour of recognition in my chronicles – with the contempt he deserved.
When my surrogate father was thirteen, he cut holes in the fence of the Thornton Farm with that brother, who was ten at the time. They slithered across Farmer Thornton’s fields, stealing sugar-cane and green-squash and maize-cobs that were not quite ripe, which they’d roast over the glowering embers of the evening fire, in the camouflage of night so their mama wouldn’t see. He’d never been caught, Abednego, but Farmer Thornton had happened upon that brother many-a-time, and proceeded to swat him with the cord of a telephone plug; Baba on the other hand had never walloped him, but thrashed Abednego constantly, sometimes without reason.
They were squatting in Farmer Thornton’s fields, that brother cradling their loot, when they heard, coming from the direction of the farmhouse, the barking and howling of the farmer’s Tibetan Mastiffs. They fled back to the high fence, but couldn’t locate the holes. They were trapped.
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