‘If you give me a leg up over the fence, I’ll teach you how to read,’ said that lecherous-then-treacherous brother to Abednego.
Abednego hesitated; he also didn’t want to be beaten up by the farmer! But, oh, how he yearned to learn how to read! How many times had he begged that brother to teach him?
‘All right,’ he said finally. He put the huge watermelon he had stolen to one side and laced his fingers together, letting that brother of his step into his hands and scramble over the top of the fence.
No sooner had that brother disappeared from view, not even sparing a backwards glance, than a hand grabbed him from behind; he felt his shirt tightening around his chest. When he looked up, it was into the terrifying eyes of Farmer Thornton. He yelped, even though he’d promised himself he’d be brave.
‘Now, what have we here? So, you are the other little thief.’
He had seen blue eyes before, those of the missionaries who came door to door, proselytizing and patronizing; he had even seen russet eyes, but never eyes as green as Farmer Thornton’s. He had never been so close to a white face before, so close he could feel the tobacco breath hot on his skin, and follow the strange mesh of capillaries, like tribal marks across the white skin, glowing red in the sun.
The farmer dragged him all the way to the farmhouse. There, he dropped him on the floor by the kitchen entrance, where Sonny Boy, who had just turned sixteen, was busy fiddling with wire and sticks to make a bird trap he intended to set by the banks of the Bubi River. Farmer Thornton disappeared into the house. Abednego was too scared to move.
He could hear Mrs Thornton rattling around in the kitchen. He smelled an aroma that made his stomach fart. Were they going to cook him? Was that it? Chop him up and stew him for those ferocious Mastiffs of theirs? They looked like they could eat a human whole, those dogs. A boy, especially.
Sonny Boy studiously ignored him, still fiddling with his trap. There was a time when they had been cordial to one another, even played together, but the tensions between their families, and between the farmers and the kinsfolk living on the Tribal Trust Lands, had been thick in the air ever since the state of Rhodesia had declared itself independent two years before, in ’65 – a furious response to the Mother Country’s betrayal of her promise to grant the self-governing colony independence under minority rule (and in return for which she had received the colony’s best armies during the Second World War) and not majority rule as she was now trying to do.
When my surrogate father heard the wooden floors groaning beneath the weight of the farmer’s boots, he tensed his pelvic muscles. He stared at those boots, afraid to raise his eyes. They were tan and faded and wrinkled like an old man’s cheeks. They were huge. Farmer Thornton must have had the biggest feet he had ever seen. The big boots got bigger and bigger, until they came to a halt by the kitchen entrance, right beneath his face. They made his nose crinkle; they smelled of Kiwi polish and paraffin.
Finally, he looked up. The farmer was carrying a plate in one hand, a knife in the other.
When Abednego saw the knife, he began to cry.
‘What’s wrong, little fella? Here you go.’
Farmer Thornton placed the plate next to him. There was a wedge of watermelon, which the farmer began to slice. He handed Abednego a piece. Abednego was too scared to refuse. The watermelon was cold; a sharp pain cut across his teeth.
‘Tastes good?’ Farmer Thornton asked.
Abednego nodded, wiping the juice dribbling from his lips.
‘When you want, you ask, OK? No more stealing. You’re lucky you’re not hurt; I’ve put traps all over my fields, ever since my produce started going missing.’
That was the last time he ever slinked into the Thornton fields. And although that lecherous-then-treacherous brother did not keep his promise of teaching him how to read, he became a little legend among the village boys as he told of his ordeal:
‘He lifted you up, with just one hand, high up in the air?’
‘Yes, and he had eyes like a green mamba…’
‘Yo, yo yo yo, yo!’
‘And as he lifted me his eyes turned red …’
‘Red!’
‘And then blue …’
‘And then blue!’
‘Yes, and he took out a big hunting knife, and said he would skin me alive and paste me on his wall, like the heads of the antelope hanging in his living room…’
‘Yoh, yoh yoh yoh, yoh!’
‘But I fought him, and wrestled the knife from his hands …’
‘Ah, ah ah ah, ah!’
‘Then he said I was so brave, and that I have such nice skin, and I shall marry his niece when I grow up …’
‘Wo, wo wo wo, wo! White girl, mfana! You are going to be a big man!’
‘Yes, and he said he will take me to go and see his great big god who lives in the sky, who gives them green eyes and red eyes and blue eyes, and his god will give me green eyes like he has, and pale glowing skin …’
I glance at my surrogate father’s eyes to check their colour, and am disappointed to see that they are still brown, and furthermore, that they are getting moist once again. ‘Dukwe was a terrible time for my chicken-pie and my boy, and they didn’t have me there to protect them!’ He fumbles about for a tissue – ah, but where will he find some Alibaba Facial Wipes these days? He lands, instead, on yesterday’s Chronicle, crumples the face of His Most Excellent Excellency, looking solemn at some inauguration or other, brings it to his nose, and blows. ‘We’d left home without really thinking it through, you see, had had no choice, uprooted from our home and all we knew just like that. Oh, the trauma of it!’
Oh, the trauma of it! For little Bukhosi, the camp at Dukwe was all he knew, it was his home. The other refugees – people I’m sure my Thandi wouldn’t have otherwise associated with had it not been for their being cooped up together in that camp under the grind of time, day after day, month after month, year after year, until one year became two became three, all feeling the same as the one before – had become their family.
Thandi remembered the refugees well, and would often tell my surrogate father about them, when they reunited after the war. There was Ndali, whom she described as a grown man who was skinny like a boy, always lying beneath the acacia tree outside one of the men’s tents, sniffling and dipping his head every now and then to smear his tears against his SWAPO tee-shirt, declaring loudly that the world was a motherfucking Gehenna. There were the Mbilu twin sisters, who could be found entangled in one another in the sand outside their tent, busy disentangling each other’s hair, which sprang from their heads with a delicious lushness, squishing lice eggs between thumb and forefinger, making little Bukhosi squeal as they made a ‘cc cc’ sound. There was Sister Bhictoria and her Bread of Life, given to Bukhosi by the Sister’s wrinkly hands, made from her great-great-Nanna’s special recipe, as she always told the plump little boy and his mother, stuffing the oily bread into his mouth, pausing every now and then to appraise him, to lift his legs and arms, press her hand against his belly, and peer into his mouth, admonishing him not to go out and play with the savages, they’d give him ringworms, that’s what.
Little Bukhosi would nod but, after receiving the Bread of Life, one morsel at a time, he’d slip away and scamper off to the edge of the camp, where ‡khoā of the Khoi San, ‡khoā The Lion Whisperer squatted, just outside the camp demarcation, but within viewing distance. ‡khoā in whom Thandi had entrusted her son’s well-being, much to Sister Bhictoria’s chagrin, Sister Bhictoria who never tired of the opportunity to wave her King James bible in the direction of the wilding woman.
Bukhosi would sit on ‡khoā’s lap and bring his little umber forehead to her big peanut butter one; he’d stare into her slanting, laughing eyes, dazzled by the glimmer there, the glimmer of the sun, she called it; he’d tap-tap a chubby little finger against ‡khoā’s petite, triangulated nose and watch with glee as it crinkled, the nostrils flaring in playful annoyance; and then, he’d break into
giggles, quenched by the knockabout laughter that gurgled deep and full from ‡khoā’s small, fleshy lips.
And just like I used to bellow to Uncle Fani as a child, ‘Tell me again, Fani, the story of how the world began!’, I can hear little Bukhosi screeching, ‘Tell me again, ‡khoā, the story of how the world began!’
‘All right …’ ‡khoā ever patient, unlike my Uncle Fani, never tiring of telling the boy his favourite story, never yelling at him to go away, but taking instead his hand and leading him into the bush, where she proceeded to frown thoughtfully at the shrubs. ‘One day Kaang, the San god, created the world. But he was lonely, and so he decided to change into an eland, so he could run across the plains. But, again, he got tired, so he decided to make himself into a praying mantis, so he could jump from tree leaf to tree leaf. In this way, he created every animal living in our world. But then, one day …’
‘What happened one day, ‡khoā?’
And she, plucking the roots of a shrub and slipping it into her leather bag: ‘One day, the animals that Kaang had created turned against him, and so, heartbroken, he decided to go and live up in the sky, away from all that he had created …’
‘And what did he do to the moon!’
Sinking her teeth into a bulbous root, which at once began to sputter with an onion-coloured juice, which she squeezed out into a calabash: ‘Well, it was dark and lonely up there, and his wife Coti had stayed behind here on earth, so Kaang made himself a light, a great big round light, which he called the moon …’
‘And he made the moon cry!’
‘Here, drink this, it will protect you from the diseases of the white man – so whenever the people of the earth need water, they do a rain dance and plead with Kaang, who is still angry at them for attacking him, so angry that their rain dances make him cry, and thus his tears fall from the sky and rejuvenate the earth.’
And he, little Bukhosi, trying to make a brave face as he gulped the bitter juice, just like the brave face I tried to make at Uncle Fani’s rebuffals: ‘Tell me the story of the beast Ga-Gorib!’
‘All right. One day there was a beast called Ga-Gorib…’
I can imagine Thandi watching them from a distance, her Bukhosi and his ‡khoā, fascinated by the ease with which the boy had picked up the Khoi San woman’s click-click language, with how he laughed so easily in her presence. I imagine this intimacy between ‡khoā and little Bukhosi sometimes made my inamorata envious, as it would any mother upon seeing her son mothered by another woman, much like how Abednego’s continued snubs of my affection while he pines after the boy, who didn’t even appreciate him like I do, hurt me.
It was thanks to ‡khoā and her strange herbs and roots, Thandi told my surrogate father, that she and little Bukhosi never suffered, in that refugee camp, from any disease, despite the poor diet and, during one month, a vicious cholera epidemic. ‡khoā who – at once impenetrable and penetrating, distant and contemplative as she watched the goings-on of the camp with curiosity and yet without the slightest envy, cackling in response to Sister Bhictoria’s ape-like gestures beckoning her with the King James bible towards the light of the Lord – had made Thandi see just how big the world was, how it existed on many plains at once.
It would crumble, this world in which Bukhosi spent his formative years, on that historic day in March 1980, when they heard a terrifying drone coming from somewhere up above. Three aeroplanes descended upon the camp, whipping up a terrific dust storm. The camp unravelled as everyone flung themselves to the ground – they looked like fighter jets for sure. But it wasn’t bullets that sprayed the cowering refugees, just flyers; sheaves upon sheaves rained down upon the camp and its surrounding areas like the dead quail and frosty manna for the Israelites in the Desert of Sin. Thandi stood up from where she had flung herself beneath a scraggly bush, her eyes moving wildly, her chest fluttering, until she caught sight of her son in ‡khoā’s grip by the entrance of the camp. She sighed, grinned and began to make her way towards them, the flyers crinkling under her bare feet. She bent and picked up a leaflet.
‘RHODESIANS COME HOME,’ she read. ‘WE ARE ZIMBABWE NOW. MUGABE HAS WON! COME HOME. ZIMBABWE WELCOMES YOU.’
A New Country
He never got the honour of experiencing combat up close, my surrogate father. He was never deployed to the front, but stayed cooped up in his damp bunker thinking of that Farmer Thornton and talking to the apparitions of Thandi and his boy, right up until the end when, on that fateful day of 28 December 1979, just several days after that Lancaster House Agreement – where a young, polished Zacchaeus had launched his career – word reached the Chifombo base that they’d done it, the guerillas had walloped Prime Minister Smith’s army so bad the wretches had finally begged for surrender. The war was won! He had been handed his discharge papers; and just like that, history found him anew and declared him a war hero, redeeming, if only briefly, my grand-dada’s traitorous legacy, and like all war heroes, my surrogate father was eligible for a lifelong pension plus benefits plus eternal thanks.
On an unruffled March morn in 1980, he finally beheld his Thandi again, stepping off the train from Francistown, no longer fleshy but dainty as she placed carefully first one sandalled foot and then the other onto the platform, her floral dress whipped about her thin legs by a gust of wind blowing from the tracks. She had a doek wrapped around her head, covering that mfushwa hair he loved so much, bringing attention to the steep curve of her jaw and also elongating her striking neck, all the more defined now that she was thinner. A fresh mint, she was! She hadn’t yet seen him, for she still had her head angled inside the train; she tensed her muscles, pursed her lips and lifted something; and then there he was, his boy, being placed heftily onto the platform, beautifully burnished and impressively plump. And there, his mother’s eyes, light-hued on his tiny face, and my surrogate father’s own replica nose so wonderfully proportioned!
She appraised the boy’s face, frowned, smeared a lick of spit on her thumb and rubbed his cheek. He squirmed and yanked his face away. That was when she looked up and saw Abednego. He smiled, but her gaze remained pensive. He began to make his way towards them, threading through the passengers who had alighted from the Francistown train, walking briskly across that wide platform that was so nippy in that early morning air, taking steady strides that belied his pitter-patter-pittering heart. She waited for him, not moving, just watching. And then he was standing before her and drowning in the smell of her and it was as though he were back in that store Ticki-Tai all those years ago watching her jiggling breasts and giddied by her scent. He flung his arms around her waist. She clung to him and began to cry. She smelled of sweaty mustiness and something altogether more vast: the Kalahari. It was a long time before they separated. He looked down to find his boy studying him with open curiosity. He pulled the boy towards him, bent down and clutched him like that day three years ago when the truck had come for him at Dukwe.
‘Say hello to your father,’ said Thandi.
The boy mumbled a greeting and smiled shyly.
Thandi, though dainty, was formidable. They strode down Customs Avenue and turned into Abercorn and then Prospect, in that country now named in the interim Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, in which they could now walk into the Sun Hotel cool as they pleased without having to be accosted by the ‘whites only’ sign or the watchdog staff, this Bulawayo in which things had changed but which still retained about it a 1950s English aura. My Thandi expressed bewilderment in this their new leader Robert Gabriel Somebody, wondering out loud how it was that her own charismatic Joshua Nkomo had failed to hold the sway of the masses, but glad nevertheless that they were free, they were free, unbelievable. My surrogate father tried to grunt helpfully, looping his twinkie finger around hers. He felt, suddenly, brittle. It was as though he would break or could break and her delicate formidability was the thing that now kept him intact, that had always kept him and would always keep him.
Those first months back together in that new country, a
country they could now claim freely as theirs, during which they lodged in the sitting room of a one-bedroomed semi-detached in Makokoba Township belonging to Uncle Lungile – who lamented every day the loss of Cousin Solomon, who had left in ’76 with a training battalion for Cuba but was said to have walked out of the barracks one day and disappeared into the bustling streets of Old Havana, never to be seen or heard from again – were a strange and strained performance in which he was trying to find his way back to her and hoped that she was learning to love him proper. For, he had no illusions about the fact that during their time in the city he’d been to her just a rural boy whose affections had amused, if not flattered her, and it was the pregnancy that had brought them together and their Bukhosi who now bound them. But he loved her. I love her!
She preferred to spend her time in sombre silence, her eyes flitting about, interested no longer in her camel sketchbook nor in locating her old buddies Frankie and Mvelaphi, and although he yearned to know what had happened in that camp in his absence, he also feared to know, and so he took gratefully only the morsels she fed him, moistened and bite-sized and thus sliding easily down his throat, of Sister Bhictoria and her increasingly feverish sermons and the magnificent ‡khoā and her healing herbs and the Mbilu twin sisters and skinny Ndali. It was his boy who worried him especially, for he seemed perpetually disoriented, and often slipped into an incomprehensible click-click tongue. When my surrogate father tried to hold him, he would kick and punch and cower in the sitting room corner, refusing to be consoled.
‘I think it’s best I take him to your village, so he can be with his people,’ said Thandi. ‘Ease him into the rhythm of things slowly.’
He was surprised to hear this, as was I when he told me: Thandi wanting to go to the cesspool of backwardness! He acquiesced, wishing he could accompany her but having to stay behind and await army demobilization. I was even more surprised to learn that while in Lupane, my inamorata pioneered a groundbreaking school named ‘The Angela Davis ‡khoā Learning Centre’ that insisted on an avant-garde, holistic approach to learning, incorporating both the knowledge of the missionaries and that of the nosy villagers, who gawked at this bizarre city woman who once scorned them but was now telling them that they possessed as much knowledge, if not more, than the Faaders – possessing more knowledge than the Faaders! – and that they could harness it to do groundbreaking things.
House of Stone Page 11