Sometimes There Is a Void

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Authors: Zakes Mda

BOOK: Sometimes There Is a Void
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Paradoxically, academic writers are often inhibited when it comes to speaking directly, possibly because they were all little goody-goodies in junior high school, and they're being massed together in university departments, and when you put all the smartest in the class together, there's a tremendous anxiety about whether one can live up to the seriousness of the enterprise.
 
– Terry Castle
THE SMELL OF LIFE
is back on the pink mountain. Human life, that is, for other forms have always thrived here even after we had left. Before our return shrubs and bushes flourished, but their fused aromas highlighted an absence. The air was too crisp. Too clean and fresh. In spring aloes bloomed – hence the pinkness – and wild bees busied themselves with the task of collecting pollen for some hive that would invariably be located in a cleft of a dangerous-looking sandstone cliff. Now we have tamed the bees, and are keeping them in supers that dot the landscape. Bees have brought us back to the mountain.
Decades ago my grandfather's estate sprawled out on this mountainside.
He, Charles Gxumekelana Zenzile Mda, was the headman of Qoboshane Village in the Lower Telle area, named for the Telle River that separated Lesotho from the Herschel District of the Cape Province in the Union of South Africa. A headman was the chief of a small village, and my grandfather was given that position by his brother-in-law, Edwin Mei, the original headman who pursued a better career as an interpreter at the magistrate's court in Sterkspruit. Edwin also gave Charles a huge chunk of Dyarhom Mountain where he planted vast orchards and built houses for his wife, Mildred Millicent Mda, who never forgot to remind everyone of her true royal breeding by repeating at the slightest provocation:
Undijonge kakuhle, ndiyintombi kaMei mna.
Don't mess with me, I am Mei's daughter.
Soon other families built their homesteads on the mountain, and my grandfather named the settlement Goodwell.
The elite of Qoboshane lived in Goodwell. Across the gravel road, just below my grandfather's estate, lived Mr Nyangintsimbi who, as the principal of Qoboshane Bantu Community School, taught me and my father before me. As a spindly boy of twelve I used to play with his son Christopher, though I was in awe of him because his father was the school principal. My own grandmother used to teach at that school. Her mantra, as she twisted your ear for not performing your tasks properly, was: ‘One thing at a time, things done by halves never done right'. She said these words in English. Grandma always spoke in English when she was mad at us, whereas on all other occasions she spoke in her native isiXhosa. We came to regard English as a language of anger.
There were other homesteads on that mountain, but because the houses and kraals blended with the rocky terrain in perfect camouflage you knew of their presence only by the smoke that spiralled from each of them every morning and evening.
That was in 1960.
Today I am walking with Gugu on the ruins. I call them ruins, though nothing is left of the buildings. The stones long since became part of the landscape. Yet I remember where each house used to be. I show Gugu where the main house,
ixande
, stood. It was built of stone and roofed
with corrugated iron. It was pure joy to sleep in that house when it rained because the sound of the raindrops created ear-shattering music on the roof. But when it thundered it got really scary; the rafters shook and we imagined all sorts of fire-breathing ogres dancing in the rain, creating all the mayhem.
As we walk the length of what used to be our yard surrounded by gigantic aloes, I point out to her where each house used to be: the grass-thatched rondavels, one used as a kitchen, another one as a pantry, the big four-walled thatched house with decorative patterns on the red mud walls. You had to climb many stone steps before you got to the mud stoep and the door. This house also served as our living room, except when there were important visitors: they would be welcomed on the sofas in the
ixande
.
We all slept in the thatched four-walled house. There weren't enough beds to go round; some of us slept on mats on the floor. In seasons of scarcity sleeping on the floor became a source of hilarity, like when we woke up one morning and discovered that Cousin Ethel's toes had been nibbled by rats and were caked in red. She had slept through it all.
The kitchen rondavel was the centre of our social life in the evenings. Not only did grandmother cook our food in a three-legged cast-iron pot in the hearth that was in the middle of the hut as fifteen or so grandchildren huddled together around the fire in a cold winter, we also told folk tales in this room. I remember that when my siblings and I were newly arrived from Johannesburg sitting here was an ordeal; we would cry streams from the pungent smoke that filled the hut. But after a few months our eyes, like those of the rest of the cousins, were inured to the smoke.
We each took turns telling stories that had been passed on to us by older relatives, who had in turn learnt them from those who came before them, from one generation to the next, beginning when time began.
We noted whenever Cousin Nobantu came to visit from Johannesburg that her stories would not be quite the same as ours. By that time I had already spent a year or so in this village and thought of myself as one of the villagers as Johannesburg became a receding memory, whereas
Cousin Nobantu only came to visit during school holidays. Although her stories would have the familiar characters that we had grown to love so much and the plots were no different from the plots we knew so well, her characters acquired Johannesburg slickness. Also, they spoke in isiZulu and in a lot of township slang, whereas our characters spoke in isiXhosa as spoken by the village people. Her characters were therefore more endearing than ours. isiZulu gave them the sophistication that villagers envied in Johannesburgers.
And then there was Cousin Nondyebo whose manner of narration transformed even those characters we knew as kind and gentle into bullies, quite reminiscent of her own bullying tendencies. She was older than the rest of us, and had even been to Lady Grey, a town that lay beyond our district headquarters of Sterkspruit. She was therefore the fountain of all wisdom.
But the stories that left us in stitches were Cousin Ethel's. Whereas we all told stories as they were passed down to us, Cousin Ethel invented new events and characters in the tried and tested folk tales. She even incorporated the rats that ate her toes in a story about Mamlambo, the water goddess who lives in the Mzintlava River but travels in lightning to visit other rivers, including the river that runs in a narrow valley between our own Dyarhom Mountain and the eSiqikini Mountain. The true Mamlambo is a beautiful goddess with the torso of a horse, the neck of a snake and the lower body of a fish. But Cousin Ethel added other features to this wonderful water creature, such as hair that was flaming red and spellbinding eyes that hypnotised toe-chomping culprits until she swallowed them. Oh, yes, Cousin Ethel's rats got their comeuppance from Mamlambo!
Stories continued even as we ate
umgqusho
– samp cooked with beans – and
umfino
– wild spinach – from a single basin. As our hands raced to the food and as we stuffed it in our mouths and swallowed without chewing properly so as to fill our stomachs before the basin was empty, storytellers continued unabated. Occasionally grandmother snapped at them, ‘Don't talk with your mouth full' or ‘If you don't chew your food you will be constipated and I'll have to unblock you with castor oil or an enema'.
Outside the kitchen rondavel was the smooth granite stone that was used for grinding maize, wheat and sorghum into flour, and another granite rock with a hole and a pestle for stamping maize into samp. On the clearing below the
ixande
was the space where the bus that travelled between Qoboshane and Sterkspruit, Dumakude Bus Service, was parked every night. My grandparents rented out the parking space, and a rondavel up the mountain where the driver slept, to the coloured family who owned the bus. The fact that Dumakude slept at our home was a source of pride to the hordes of grandchildren who lived at the estate.
And then there were the orchards; my grandfather's own source of pride. People wondered how he had turned the rocky mountain into a Garden of Eden. There were rows and rows of peach, apricot, quince, pear, apple, orange and pomegranate trees. There were also vines that bore both green and purple grapes, and cacti that bore red and green prickly pears. Figs had great prominence in the orchard, and my grandmother said it was in honour of our grandfather's father whose name was Feyiya, which means fig. In summer yellow cling peaches became our bane because we had to eat them as relish for hard porridge during hard times. Sometimes my grandfather's relatives from Lesotho would wade across the Telle River and bring us wild honey, which also helped in our battle with hard porridge.
It is hard to believe that I lived here for only two years – from 1960 to 1962 – when at the age of twelve I was banished from Johannesburg by my own parents for engaging in gang activities. My father had moved to Engcobo in the Transkei to serve articles under George Matanzima in order to be admitted as an attorney, while my mother remained in Johannesburg working as a registered nurse and midwife at the Dobsonville Clinic.
While she was at work at the clinic, which was just across the street from our four-roomed home, or cycling in the township delivering babies, I was playing truant from school and hanging out on shop verandas where I played the pennywhistle with other delinquent youths. Or I would be fighting in street gangs where I had become famous among my peers as a ducking champion, though my throwing of the
stones that we used as weapons of war was reputed to be weak. On the occasions when I did go to school I spent most of the time in class drawing pictures. My talent was recognised when the teacher asked us to illustrate the poetry we were studying with appropriate pictures and I drew the Zulu warrior uPhoshozwayo as an illustration for a poem in his praise. With crayons, I brought his traditional dress of leopard skins and a shield and a spear to life. Then I signed the picture at the bottom right: ‘by Zakes the Artist'.
That was the beginning of the name Zakes. I was given the name by a friend, Percy Bafana Mahlukwana, an artist in his own right, who later died in one of those gang wars. At the time there was a famous jazz saxophonist by the name of Zakes Nkosi in Alexandra Township. With my initials ZK, it seemed the logical thing to name me after this great man.
Sometimes I played truant from gang warfare and spent my time praying. I imagined that one day I would be a Catholic priest and go to heaven. I built an altar behind the house and on Saturdays and Sundays I lit candles and conducted a holy mass for myself. Sometimes the girl next door joined me and marvelled at my Latin chants:
Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritu Sancto … Dominus vobiscum … et cum spiritu tuo … oremus
.
Because I thought she was my girlfriend, one day I asked her for
isinjonjo
– township slang for sex. She burst out in anger, threatening never to visit my altar again if I asked her to do ‘silly things'. That was a relief! I wouldn't have known what to do if she had said yes. I immediately apologised and vowed on my life never to ask for
isinjonjo
ever again.
The last straw for my mother was when I was frogmarched home by a man who claimed I had robbed his daughter. That afternoon I had been loitering on the shop veranda as usual when a man and his weeping daughter, who was slightly younger than me, arrived. The daughter pointed at me as the boy who had robbed her of the money with which she had been sent to the store to buy a loaf of bread. I swear I had nothing to do with it, but when he searched me and found a big knife in my pocket the crime fitted me very well.
Not only had I disgraced my mother by engaging in criminal activities, I had also stolen a knife from her special set of
braai
knives and forks with carved ivory handles. My protestations that I had only carried the knife to impress my friends did not convince her. She had had enough of me, and she wrote to my father to fetch me and take me to his own parents at Qoboshane.
Under normal circumstances I loved visiting my grandparents in the village, particularly because I enjoyed travelling by train. It was always exciting to board at Park Station and then change trains in Bloemfontein after spending the whole night being lulled to sleep by the grinding rhythm of the wheels on iron, or to stand in the corridor looking out at the telephone poles passing very fast. If we were lucky we – my mother, my twin brothers Sonwabo and Monwabisi, my sister Thami, and my baby brother Zwelakhe – would have our own compartment with four berths, like bunk-beds. The greatest joy came from eating
umphako
– provisions for the road – of chicken and steamed bread carried in a cane and wicker basket. Sometimes we shared the compartment with another family, in which case we would share our respective
umphako
. Invariably they would also be carrying chicken and steamed bread in a similar basket. From Bloemfontein the train took us to Zastron, where we would catch a bus to Sterkspruit, and then take our trusty Dumakude Bus Service right to the doorstep of my grandparents'
ixande
.
But on this occasion of banishment the two-day train journey was a very unhappy one. I was leaving my friends in Johannesburg, and I wondered how I would cope in a village. My father didn't make things any better when he snapped at me in a café in Sterkspruit. He was at the counter buying fish and chips for our lunch and I was standing next to him. A mad woman in dirty tattered clothes approached me, smiling. She really scared me, so I moved to the other side of my father. But he thought I was afraid of a white boy, about my age, who had also approached the counter at the same time. He reprimanded me right there in public for giving way to the boy just because he was white and lectured me on how I was just as good as the boy and had no business to be afraid of white people. I just stood there feeling small; I dared not defend myself by saying that I was escaping the mad black woman and not the white boy.

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