‘Uncle,’ I said. ‘Uncle, stop. Nurse Clarence! Nurse!’
But he wouldn’t stop. ‘I never see Khohlwa again but Zodwa tells me that they took plastic and burned it until it was hot hot hot and then they made her spread—’ He gulped. ‘And then the next time I see Zodwa her tummy is growing and growing Black Jesus is punching her in the stomach and saying my little bitch my little whore when the cunt explodes I’m going to – he was going to kill you but your mother she loved you she makes me promise, promise to try to escape take the baby with you please look after my baby please and you were born in the night and we put you in a satchel and I took night cover and we managed to cross Zamanyone hill in the west and a headmaster there gave us a ride to the missionary hospital but I get home I find there is nobody. I am waiting and waiting for them; mama Andile Donsekhaya Ntokozo Skhubekiso Jabu Hluphekile Khathazile Qedindaba Phephelaphi. How many is that? Yes, ten. Out of ten zero come back and I am like to myself I must burn this place down and forget and go away and never come back otherwise I am going to die being here alone with all these memories it is going to kill me better to not remember. Your mama I made her a promise to look after you and I keep that promise.’
He exhaled, a long, seemingly infinite exhalation, I think with relief. Me, I couldn’t think. I couldn’t think and, for a long time, I didn’t want to understand what he had said. How could he lay on my shoulders something like that? Wtf was I to do with it? He died that night, the relief of passing on the burden of knowledge enough to allow his spirit to finally soar to the heavens.
Isn’t this the hi-story Bukhosi always wanted to know, before he went missing? For which he got a beating whenever he asked our father, ‘Baba, what happened in the ’80s, what was Gukurahundi?’ That was Gukurahundi, Bukhosi. It was the lead rain of our new country, Zimbabwe, sent to wash away us, the chaff. It was the state-sponsored murder of twenty thousand of your kin. How was our father to tell you that? How was he to tell you that within that number were the only two people he ever really loved?
I saw how it hurt the boy. I saw how it was hurting my surrogate father. It hurt me also. That’s why I took the boy to Dumo, to get answers. Dumo who never beat him or turned him away but answered all his questions earnestly, with an intoxicating passion, proclaiming, ‘We must secede! We can never be free, until we are allowed to mourn our dead, to acknowledge that they died, and how they died, and to exhume their bones in the unmarked mass graves in which they lie with strangers and perform the proper burial rites!’
I’m not ready to perform any burial rites for my inamorata! It feels as though she died only yesterday! How can she be dead? Stolen from me by Black Jesus, just like he robbed me of my mama! Will I never be free of Black Jesus? Shan’t I ever be able to cleanse my blood of him? My past of him? The beast! Destined in life to be the henchman of a President, plagiarizing, during that terrible time right after our independence from white rule, the most creative ways of torture: severe-beatings hut-burnings asphyxiation falanga abnormal-body-positions rape dry-submarine electric-shocks lack-of-sleep immobilization constant-noises screams stripping excrement-abuse sham-executions and special-contraptions-copied-from-Pol-Pot-Dacko-Amin-and-perhaps-some-unnameable-elements-of-the-CIA-with-speculated-but-unconfirmed-blessings-from-jolly-Uncle-Sam. His reputation preceded him in red carpet fashion all over the land of Mthwakazi, his shadow blotting out even the tiniest suns of children, who were deemed by his Christ-like powers to be guilty-by-association.
Proudly granted, in ’87, after this most impressive exhibition in Matabeleland of ruthless ambition, a spot at the Royal College of Defence Studies in the Land of Her Majesty.
Proudly capped, in ’91, Commander of the Air Force.
Six foot two and thin-shouldered.
Skin the colour of hematite.
Would she have been able to love my face, my mama? Would she not have looked into it and always seen … but no, she loved me, my mama, she loved me! She even had me smuggled out at birth to get me away from that Black Jesus.
Black Jesus
Every day for the past week, my surrogate father has left the house in the evening – to search for Bukhosi, he says, although nobody knows where he goes – only coming back at dawn. I’ve begged him to let me come with him, but always he glares at me, as though he blames me for the boy’s disappearance – it’s not my fault! – before huffing off. He has also made it a point to leave the room whenever I enter, and to be never home when I come knocking, or when he is, to pretend not to be there, even though I can sometimes glimpse him through the lace curtain staggering about drunk in the living room, even though I sometimes shout, ‘Father, I see you!’, to which he sometimes ducks behind a sofa. The other day he said the most hurtful thing; he yelled, ‘I’m not your father! Leave me alone!’
I don’t understand it. Didn’t we just share a moment last week in Mama Agnes’s sitting room? Didn’t we share our grief? I thought it would bond us. He let me cup his face. He even let me kiss him, on the lips.
Eh. What more does he want?
Perhaps I’ve been wooing the wrong parent. It’s a mother’s loving touch that I need, not this drunkard of a man who keeps rejecting me, despite my best efforts.
Mama Agnes appreciates me – didn’t she invite me to join them for the prayer meeting last week? He’s like family.
I wish I had Dumo’s gift of the gab, so as to find the words with which to charm her, relate to her, coax out of her her own history. Dumo, that cold and calculating revolutionary, that manipulator of searing and super-sharp, Corning Gorilla Glass-coated, iOS upgradable, pixelated vision, who managed to innovate his Gukurahundi trauma into software for his fantastical ambitions.
But I’m no Dumo! My words seem to fall flat in Mama Agnes’s ears; though I have tried, these past few days, to sprinkle in her cochlea questions about her past, her lips have remained sealed. It’s her daily prayer sessions at Blessed Anointings with the Reverend Pastor, and also the sleepless nights worrying about Bukhosi, that preoccupy her.
Without my surrogate father’s accounts, with Mama Agnes all clammed up, and with nothing to do but skulk around my pygmy room, Black Jesus is beginning to take over my life again. For a long time after my Uncle Fani’s deathbed confessions, he haunted me. I thought of him day and night. I could not sleep. Even when I did manage to get some shut eye, he came to me, though I could not tell in my dreams whether he was beckoning me or mocking me. Whereas before, I had been perfectly content with Uncle Fani being my only family, a gaping hole now opened in my heart, a need for … love! A mother’s love, a father’s love, my mother’s love, my father’s love. I became obsessed with the idea of knowing Black Jesus.
What’s it like, to be loved?
I bought the Red Album, and began hunting for him everywhere. It started in the newspapers; and then I began to loiter at the Bulawayo Public Library, where I razored him out of the history books. I even visited our National Archives in search of flyers bearing his likeness from our liberation war, photos, sketches, anything …
And now, I am back to that album again, studying every contour and shade of that face, his expressions, his physique. Here he is, on the first page of my album, hand on hip, a beret slanting fashionably over his left ear. His full figure has been shrunk into an envelope-sized photo. The corners of his mouth are caught in an upturn, hinting at a smile. His eyes, with the whites super-white and the pupils mahogany dark, hold the lens with a quizzical friendliness. He looks so small in that photo, so minuscule, so insignificant. I could fit him in the palm of my hand and squish him and he would cease to exist.
Soon, though, the album was no longer enough; I felt I had to see him in action. I wanted to study him, the way that Nabokov studied his butterflies. I wanted to examine the way he walked, talked, laughed; I wanted to pin him to a corkboard, the prize specimen of my collection. I Googled him, and began to watch all the propaganda the state bombards us with on TV, to catch whatever glimpses of him I could. I wou
ld see flashes of him, and play them over and over in my mind, appraising him and comparing myself to him. I even began to try to walk and talk like him. Slowly, I sloughed off Uncle Fani’s grief-stricken modesty, a burden that had hunched my shoulders, as it had his. I began to prance about with my back straight, lengthening my height, my shoulders thrown back in the casual way of a man who is used to authority. When I laughed, I tried to do it nonchalantly, beginning with a spreading of my lips and a shaking of my shoulders, and then followed by a low bellow. It didn’t come naturally to me, so used was I to Uncle Fani’s lugubrious laughter.
But I gained great satisfaction from those rare moments of minor success at mimicry. Although the more I mimicked and the more successful I became, the crueller I felt! I bought a French beret and wore it over one eye. I would swagger about our Luveve streets feeling almost like a new man, for even osisi regarded me with a surprised, wary interest, they who had never considered me with any romantic notions but only a patronizing kindness, sometimes taking pity on me and feeding me, right through my teens when Uncle Fani squandered all his government pension on booze – so poorly, I think now, was my apologetic stature then.
Their new interest pleased me no end, yet, feeling myself a better man and thus above them, they who had never had any womanly time for me, I made sure to have no time for them now. Perhaps this is only what I told myself. Deep down, I was properly afraid of them, not knowing how to woo them, unclear as to what I would have done had they accepted my advances, as they seemed now ready to do, not schooled, as were many young men my age, in the art of fondling a breast or licking a nipple or tickling those mysterious lady-parts, which were said to be moist and excitable, and the proper teasing of which, with skilled finger or artistic tongue, was guaranteed to get a lady to let you into her Eden. What is worse, I was now assaulted by visions of my mama, she who I had never laid eyes on but whose face I now saw conjured in every female countenance.
Oh, but how intoxicating was the girls’ interest in my bad-boy persona! I thoroughly enjoyed it, this sense of having influence over another person. I went back again and again to Black Jesus, trying on more of his mannerisms, talking to my Red Album, studying it, exhilarated by the sense of power it gave me. But then a viciousness began to grow in me, and this frightened me, and confused me, as I also was overcome by an insane joy. It was the joy of recognition! To see yourself in another human being; the parent root, ubaba, dada, the father who sprinkles his seed and produces spawns in his likeness. In this joy was disgust, and fear, and grief, disgust at myself for my happiness, fear of the man and the things he had done, grief for my dear mama! The malice grew and threatened to overwhelm me, I could feel it as a menacing, almost physical presence; I resolved to stop what I was doing, to forget the man and everything Uncle Fani had told me, and move on as though the past had never been.
But then, one day, I saw Black Jesus at a presidential event at Rufaro Stadium that was broadcast live on TV, squashed between His Most Excellent Excellency, whose chin was slumped on his chest, and The Crocodile, who kept flashing a crocodile smile at the cameras. It was the longest viewing of him I had seen, and I took him in hungrily. He had one leg slung over the other knee, his leather Ferragamo shoes shining for the cameras. He was dressed in a blue Air Marshal uniform. The navy blue jacket tapered from his epauletted shoulders. It clung to his taut body. It ruffled across his abdomen. Then it flared out on either side of his slim hips. From the epaulette on his right shoulder dangled a plait of gold braids, like curtain shades. They curved and fastened just below the top button of his jacket. He had on a sash across his jacket, in the colours of the country flag. Or the ruling party flag – the colours are the same. It is the same colours or it is the same flag. Po-tae-to Po-tah-to. His shoulders began to shake. He leaned towards The Crocodile and whispered something in his ear. The Crocodile’s shoulders too began to shake. What were they saying? Why were they laughing? The peaked cap sitting low on his head shaded his face. I wanted to see his eyes. I wanted to look into them and see what was there. But instead, it was the Zimbabwe Air Force emblem on his cap that kept winking at me. The African Fish Eagle emblem resting serene atop the soapstone kept winking at me. But Black Jesus, I couldn’t see his eyes. I wanted to see his eyes. I wanted so badly for him to wink at me.
I began to dream of meeting him in the flesh. Where before I had desired to know him, I now felt that he had to know me. More than imitating him, I yearned to find out what parts of himself he saw in me. This tormented me. Were there parts of him in me? The ferocity I had felt electrocuting me ever since I had begun my Black Jesus mimes, was it an awakening of the seeds of the father in the son? How could I wish to be like him, after all the things he had done, to our people in Matabeleland, to my mama! And yet, if he were my father … I could imagine his contempt at my torment, he who had no regard for the human in ‘human being’. Contempt! I wouldn’t be able to bear it from him. I yearned for his respect, even if I could only get him to give it grudgingly. It would not be enough to tell him that I was his, even though one look at my features and there’d be no denying it. No, I would have to show him that I was his son. But how? I had no intention of murdering some poor innocent just to prove a point to the brute, I’m no monster! But if it was him I killed … That would be my experiment. That would be my proof. There would be no monstrosity there, only an Oedipus style justice.
I admit! My mind was racing; my thoughts tumbling together as if they were in a washing machine; I was unwell! But all I could think of was … how would I do it? How would I kill him? I could attend a political event where he was present, and get close enough to pull out his gun and shoot him. I would catch him as he fell, one arm around his shoulders to support his neck, the other cupping his cheek, cradling him in my arms as he died; an act of love between father and son; for I yearned to cup that face and bring it close to mine; I yearned for the glint of recognition. Would I be able to do that? How could I do that? Could I stare into that face and be faced with the truth of my own face? To have to stare into those mahogany pupils swimming in their super-white whites; to place my hands on those finely hued cheeks and trace with my thumb the wonder of their smoking-pipe silhouettes; to impress my flat-belly heart lips on those lips the shape of a flat-bellied heart; to feel the kiss of death hot and moist on my skin; it’s more than I could bear!
When His Most Excellent Excellency came down to Bulawayo for a rally a few months later, I saw my chance to meet Black Jesus. I made sure to attend the rally at the Barbourfields Stadium, dressed in the requisite ruling party regalia with His Most Excellent Excellency’s face emblazoned all over my shirt. It was a torrid day in September, nine months after my Uncle Fani’s death. I was sweating profusely. My throat was parched. I was feeling nauseous; my head was throbbing, making my eyes sore, and there was a constant hum in the back of my mind, like a muttering voice. I had been telling it to shuttup all morning, but it wouldn’t let me alone. But I was determined. I bullied my way through the crowds, until I was near the front by the cordoned-off red carpet down which the big-wigs marched solemnly from their vehicles to the VIP tent.
I peered impatiently over the bopping heads; the arrival of the big-wigs took a long time, almost a whole two hours. They dribbled in, all of them with His Most Excellent Excellency blazoned on their ruling party attire, busy waving and smiling regally at the screaming crowds as they marched down to their tent, where we could see them sipping from misted glasses. I stared at those glasses, at the cold beads running down their sides, their foggy interiors thick with ice cubes. I forced dry air down my throat with each gulp from those glasses.
Finally, he arrived! I saw him first by his shoe; a shiny, pointed leather Ferragamo stepping out of the limo that had come to a halt by the red carpet. And then, that Air Marshal cap emerged, and his face … I couldn’t see it clearly beneath his cap, but I felt he was looking at me. My breath caught in my throat. And then His Most Excellent Excellency emerged from the limo, too,
and Black Jesus turned to say something to him, and our moment was gone. But I kept my eyes on him; I strained my neck to see him, watch him, appraise him, my heart pummelling my chest now. Then, he removed his cap and tucked it beneath his arm, revealing a head of closely cropped hair. He was shorter than I had imagined; in my dreams he had taken on colossal proportions.
I hadn’t realized I was clenching my fists until my palms began to throb from the force of my nails digging into my skin. I took a deep breath, exhaled. Relaxed my hands. My plan was to leap over the rope cordoning us povo from the VIPs, sprint across the red carpet, ducking the bodyguards who would no doubt try to stop me, and grab Black Jesus’s gun from its holster. There would be no time for hesitation; I would point it between his eyes, yell ‘Father!’ and as the recognition, compounded by confusion, spread across his face, I would shoot him right between the eyes. I would live out the rest of my days with a clean conscience, for I would have cleansed myself and vindicated my mama, and would be happy in the knowledge that mine was the last face the bastard had seen before he died.
I elbowed my way through the people standing between me and the cordon. Black Jesus and His Most Excellent Excellency were walking slowly, as though taking a leisurely afternoon stroll, paying their screaming fans no mind. I gripped the rope and leaned forward, ready to jump over it; they were almost parallel to me.
House of Stone Page 15