Sometimes There Is a Void (14 page)

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Authors: Zakes Mda

BOOK: Sometimes There Is a Void
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‘You horny bastard, are you doing this for sex or for your country?' I said as I pushed him behind his boulder and took cover behind mine.
Sabata yelled back at me, ‘For both. Why can't we do it for both?'
Tholoana Moshoeshoe was right. She knew exactly what time Marake Makhetha would be crossing the donga. We heard his voice from a distance singing his favourite freedom song:
Boys of Africa rise and fight, girls of Africa rise and fight, in the name of great Africa we shall fight and conquer now. There is victory for us, there is victory for us. In the name of great Africa there is victory for us
.
Damn that song!
As he got closer I drew my derringer and pointed it in his direction. I saw Sabata behind his boulder do the same. I was shaking and couldn't remember how to cock it. My bladder was burning and I wanted to pee so badly.
When Marake Makhetha was about to pass the boulders we emerged from our hiding places and walked towards him at the same time as if we had planned it that way, our guns pointing to the ground.
‘Sons of Africa,' he greeted us.
We broke down and confessed that Tholoana Moshoeshoe had sent us to assassinate him because he was a Communist spy.
He shook his head and said, ‘Go back to bed, sons of the soil.' And then he continued with his song and walked home without ever looking back.
 
 
 
I DON'T THINK I
ever told Gugu about this incident. But as we drive past Mohale's Hoek I remember how it shook me back to my senses. Had we accomplished our mission we surely would have been arrested and spent the better part of our lives first at the Juvenile Detention Centre in Maseru and when we got older at the Mohale's Hoek prison. I would never have known Gugu. My arrest for murder would have come as a shock to my father because he did not know of my political activities, not even of my going to Quthing with Potlako Leballo and Ntsu Mokhehle addressing meetings or my officially joining the PAC. He wouldn't have approved. He wanted me to focus on my education, and indeed this narrow escape made me think twice about my priorities.
I never went back to Dlamini's house again. I heard from Willie that
Tholoana Moshoeshoe disappeared the next morning and no one could trace her. The BCP head office in Maseru had never heard of her. The story went round that she was an agent provocateur working for the Communist Party or the British or the Boers or all of the above. Those heady days one never knew who was in cahoots with whom and to what end.
I often meet Marake Makhetha when I visit Maseru. He is an old man now with grey hair. ‘I nearly killed you, son of Africa,' I tease him, and we laugh about it.
In Mafeteng we go to my brother's house to see my mother before we proceed to the border post in Wepener and then drive through the vast flat expanse of the Free State province to Johannesburg. These days she spends all her life sitting in the bedroom, either on the bed or in her wheelchair. She watches endless television programmes and talks of the characters she sees there as if they are real people she actually interacts with in her room. Early in the afternoon she is glued to American soap operas,
The Bold and the Beautiful
and
Days of Our Lives
. In the evenings it is time for the South African soapies,
Isidingo
,
Backstage
and
Generations
. It irks her no end that
Backstage
and
Isidingo
run at the same time at 6:30. Fortunately, both soaps are repeated on weekday mornings and on Saturdays there is an omnibus where episodes for the whole week are played one after the other.
I give my mother some of the honey we purchased from the Bee People and she is happy to hear that the project is progressing well and the women now run it themselves without help from us. In the beginning we had to employ a white farmer from Lady Grey, Aubrey Fincham, to manage it for them while they were learning the ropes.
As we sit with her telling her about the people at Qoboshane and laughing at Cousin Bernard's antics, people from the neighbourhood come to greet her. They sit on the chairs, the bed and even on the floor and gossip about what is happening in the town. They range in age from old men and women of her generation to teenagers. That is how popular she is in the neighbourhood. And they pay these visits every day.
That is proof enough that exile long became home for her. Not just exile. The community of Mafeteng in particular.
We first settled in Mafeteng in 1966 when my father moved his headquarters from Quthing and rented a house from the Thatho family. A few months earlier my mother and my siblings had come to join us in exile and were staying at Mme Mmatladi Maphathe's house, a friend of my mother's who was divorced from the local medical doctor. At the time I was already a student at Peka High School in the northern Lesotho district of Leribe. For a year or so I had continued to spend my holidays at the Mafoso household in Mohale's Hoek, but later we all moved to the green-roofed stone house on the Thatho estate. My siblings were enrolled at local primary schools and once more we lived as a family.
I missed my Mohale's Hoek freedom where I could come and go as I pleased. But the compensation was that I was now with my mother and of course with my brothers and sister. I had to relearn to live with my father's discipline and stand to attention when he spoke and respond
ewe tata
at regular intervals to show that I was paying attention to his elaborate lectures. He now had offices in Quthing, Mohale's Hoek and Mafeteng, and also appeared before the High Court in Maseru. Since he didn't have a car he travelled by bus and spent some nights away in these towns. Those were the days that we really enjoyed Mafeteng. Whenever we came back home from hanging out with friends and found that he had returned from a long trip our hearts sank.
One thing I loved about Mafeteng was that there was a big South African refugee community there and we all lived together as a family, irrespective of political affiliation. Ours was a PAC-aligned family, yet our closest friends were the Mafikeng and Hani families who were staunch ANC members. In fact when my father wanted to escape from clients who bothered him at home he went to work at a café owned by the partnership of Elizabeth Mafikeng, a trade unionist from Cape Town, and
Ntate
Hani, Chris Hani's father. Chris Hani himself, known to us only as Bhut' Thembi, was a leader of the South African Communist Party and a guerrilla commander of
Umkhonto weSizwe
– the Spear of the Nation – the military wing of the ANC. Yet we all exchanged visits, dined and celebrated family occasions together.
All these families returned to South Africa after our liberation in 1994. Only Zwelakhe, the youngest of my brothers, and my
mother remained. But there are other Mdas who live in Lesotho and sometimes visit my brother's house to remind us of our origins. They first came here in 1880 as refugees after our revered ancestor killed the British magistrate Hamilton Hope. They were first given succour by King Moorosi of the Baphuthi clan in Quthing, but soon spread to Mantsonyane, a village high up in the Maluti mountain range of Lesotho where they keep goats and sheep. But others live at Taung only a few miles from Mafeteng. Their leader is Bles Mda who once came to pay homage to my father with a large group of his Bathepu people in red ochre skirts and blankets and gigantic turbans soon after we had settled in Mafeteng in 1966. They sat on our green stoep puffing on their long pipes. I remember how we kids were embarrassed by them because we viewed them as uncivilised. Also, they exposed our foreignness to our Basotho friends. I had worked so hard to try to blend into the Basotho culture, to the extent that I had taken the Sesotho name of Motlalepula and had given my twin brothers, Sonwabo and Monwabisi, the Sesotho names of Thabo and Thabiso. And now here were the red-blanketed Mdas sprawled on my stoep with all the passers-by gawking at them.
Occasionally Bles Mda came to visit on his brown and white stallion. He felt very sorry that I, his cousin's son, could not ride a horse and tried to teach me. I was dead scared of the horse and almost peed in my pants when it galloped away with me on its back.
All these are things we talk about when we visit my mother. She thrives on nostalgia ever since sickness confined her to the bedroom.
We also thrive on laughter at the folly of our youth.
WHAT I DREAD MOST
about driving through Lesotho on my way from the Bee People to Johannesburg are police roadblocks. You are likely to come across one at least three times before you reach the next border post. This would be a good thing if their objective was to catch wrongdoers. The constant police presence would also make you feel safe and protected. But no, they are not there for that. Their main business is to extort bribes from motorists.
Their modus operandi is a simple one: they place a stop sign on the line in the centre of the road and small groups of police officers stand about fifty yards on either side of the sign. They let all Lesotho cars whiz by and stop all those with South African number plates. They ask
the motorist to produce a driver's licence and then proceed to inspect the discs on the windscreen, indicators, hooter, and brake lights. If they don't find anything wrong they are bound to manufacture something, as they did once in my case. They inspected the windscreen disc and claimed that it did not state that there could be passengers in the car. It was therefore illegal for me to be with my wife and two minor children in her Toyota Tazz sedan. This, of course, was a cockamamie charge concocted merely to shake down people they deemed to be strangers in the country. When I stubbornly stood my ground and insisted that we had committed no offence and would not pay any fine, they took us to the police station and left us there for the whole day. It was only when another shift came in the evening that we were released. No explanation, no apology. I was proud that I had steadfastly refused to pay a bribe, albeit at great inconvenience to my family. And I was angry that a whole day was wasted and I had missed my appointment with women in the Mjanyane village of Quthing who were interested in starting a beekeeping project similar to the one across the river, the Lower Telle Beekeepers Collective. A whole rural development project which already had prospective donors was destroyed by police corruption. I certainly was not going to subject myself to such treatment every time I had to visit the project, so I called it quits.
I am thinking of this experience when I approach another roadblock of this kind near a village called Peka in the Leribe district. I am still high on my banter with my mother on the high jinks of the various members of the Mda family and am determined that the cops will not spoil my day. But they do. As soon as I get to the first group of officers I stop, but an officer from the second group beckons me. I slow down as I approach the stop sign in readiness to stop, but the officer continues to beckon me. I pass the stop sign and stop next to him.
‘You didn't stop at that stop sign,' he says.
‘Yeah, because you kept on beckoning me to you,' I say.
‘You're supposed to stop at the stop sign,' he says.
‘I was following your orders,' I say.
He denies that he gave me any orders. He is going to give me a ticket, he threatens.
‘Yes. Go ahead and give me a ticket,' I say.
He asks for my licence, and then checks the discs on the windscreen. Everything is in order. This infuriates him. Also the fact that I don't seem to be prepared to negotiate but instead I demand to be given a ticket that I will defend in court.
‘I cannot give you a ticket,' he says. ‘You're from South Africa. How do I know you'll pay it?'
‘Of course I won't pay it. I'll go to court.'
‘How do I know you'll come for the case? I have no way of getting you when you leave this country.'
He looks at me expectantly. He obviously thinks he has a trump card and I am bound to negotiate.
‘I don't know.'
‘I am impounding your car unless you pay.'
He gives me directions to the charge office and asks me to drive there and wait for him. As soon as I enter the police station I announce quite loudly to the sergeant at the desk, ‘A police officer at the roadblock asked me to come here because I refused to pay
tjotjo
.'
The policemen are embarrassed at my blatant use of the Sesotho word for bribery. I tell the sergeant what happened and demand that I be charged even if it means impounding my car. I guess they have never met such a customer before, and the sergeant says he will let me go with a warning.
‘I don't want you to let me go with a warning,' I say. ‘You can't warn me for doing nothing wrong.'
‘Just go, man,' says the sergeant.
‘This country depends on tourism,' I say just before I walk out. ‘It spends millions advertising in the South African media for tourists to come and enjoy your friendly country. And when they come you treat them like this?'
Back on the road I see the police officer who gave me problems walking back to the police station with two fellow officers. I blow my horn very hard and wave at him. I am fuming inside. I vow never to come back to this country after my mother departs this world. She is the only reason I return here. When she is gone the only thing that
will bring me back are weddings, graduations and funerals of my many relatives who still live here. Not just to visit, as I do now. Not just to use the route through Lesotho as a short cut between Johannesburg and the Bee People in the Eastern Cape.
I am sorry that I have to come to this decision because I love this country. I regard it as my home. Which is what I once told King Letsie III, the monarch of Lesotho. He was having dinner with two of his cousins at the Maseru Sun Cabanas one evening when a waitress ushered Gugu and me to a table next to his. The King and I had not seen each other for many years, since I left exile to return to South Africa, and so he was quite happy to see me. What impressed Gugu, on the other hand, was that the King in Lesotho is just like any other guy. There he was having dinner with us commoners in a hotel restaurant without an entourage or even a single bodyguard.
‘So, you do visit us sometimes?' he said as we shook hands.
‘Of course,' I said. ‘This is my country.'
‘I am glad that now you feel it is your country.'
‘What do you mean “now”?' I asked, rather irritated. ‘I have lived in this country almost as long as you have. Why should it be yours and not mine?'
It is true. I came here a few months after Prince Mohato, as he was then called, was born. I grew up here. I had my high school education in this very village of Peka.
 
 
 
I DON'T REMEMBER EVER
taking Gugu to see my alma mater even though it is only six miles from the highway we sometimes take when we have decided to enter South Africa from the northern districts of Lesotho. Peka High School looks quite dilapidated now, with broken windows and grounds that are overgrown with grass and weeds. The walls that used to be rough-cast in grey are cracked and the once-green paint has long peeled off the corrugated iron roofs on all the buildings. It was not like this when I was a student here from 1965 to 1969. This boys' high school was the most prestigious in the country, with
a one hundred per cent pass rate in the Cambridge Overseas School Certificate every year.
I was very lucky to be admitted here since I had only a second-class pass in Standard Six, even though I was repeating the grade after obtaining a first-class pass in Sterkspruit under Bantu Education. Everyone had expected a first-class pass from me once more, but I knew otherwise. I had spent most of my time in Mohale's Hoek gallivanting with politicians and dabbling in assassinations – albeit attempted ones. I had gone to class only because I had to, and when I was there I didn't pay much attention. I drew pictures while either Mr Mohapi or Mr Mofelehetsi taught and never studied outside class. Most students who were admitted to Peka had a first-class pass or at least a superior second-class with good symbols. My only decent symbols were in English Language and English Literature and I had Fs in Science and Mathematics. But then I was also my father's son, and I am sure that counted for something with the admission authorities at Peka High School. The principal, after all, was Mr Tseliso Makhakhe from Mafeteng – a political activist of the Basutoland Congress Party.
My high school years were generally wonderful, although I cannot say as much for the first few weeks. The first day, in fact, was traumatic, from the time the bus from Mohale's Hoek dropped me at the Maseru bus stop to catch the bus hired by the school. Here the old-comers had a field day ill-treating new-comers. Even as we sat in the bus waiting for more students from various directions to arrive, the old-comers forced us to sing:
Makamara mesemeng'ting, le tla cha mohlang le shoang
. You motherfucking new-comers, you'll burn in hell when you die.
Those who refused to sing or showed the slightest sign of resistance were slapped and verbally abused. I had heard of hazing, but I didn't know it could be this mortifying. It became even more so when the old-comers paid particular attention to me because I was not a Mosotho. They were alerted to this fact by my accent. ‘You are not a Mosotho, or if you are then you are one of those fence-jumping Basotho from South Africa.' Then he pressed my nose as if playing the keyboard and demanded that I sing nasally:
Ke lla joalo ka piano. Ke lla joalo ka piano
. I sound like a piano. I cry like a piano.
‘Hey, we have a Mothepu in the bus,' he yelled to the rest, and they all laughed, howled and yelped like dogs. To them a Mothepu was a dog.
My mortification became worse when thugs and sundry ragamuffins from the streets of Maseru boarded the bus and were allowed by the old-comers to beat us up and call us demeaning names.
A wiry thug in dirty jeans and a greasy Eyre's cap got on the bus and demanded to be shown who the new-comers were. He was obviously the boss because all the other thugs deferred to him. The old-comers greeted him like an old friend, still showing some diffidence, and eagerly pointed out the new-comers.
‘This particular one is very stubborn,' said an old-comer pointing at a cowering new-comer.
The wiry thug gave him a few whacks on the face with the back of his hand. His nose began to bleed. The thug instructed another newcomer to clean the blood with his tongue. When he hesitated the thug dragged him by both ears and shoved his head on the blood that was on the boy's chest. I had never seen such savagery in my life. If this was high school then I wanted nothing to do with it. But there was no escape from the bus. The thugs were blocking the aisle and the wiry one was moving towards me, his eyes rolling like those of a snake about to swallow a rat. He stopped in front of me and stared at me for some time. I fidgeted, expecting a whack.
‘What is your name,
lekamara
?' he asked, using the Sesotho corruption of ‘new-comer'.
‘I am Motlalepula,' I said, already shaking. I was hoping that the Sesotho version of my name would mitigate my crime of being a newcomer and a Mothepu to boot.
‘Hey, you motherfuckers,' yelled the thug to the rest of the people in the bus. ‘This is my
bitso
.' This meant that we shared the same name. He too was Motlalepula. ‘If any of you touch this boy you will have to answer to me. Anyone who as much as makes this boy sing your silly songs will never set foot in Maseru ever again.'
‘Why didn't you say so?' asked one old-comer. ‘Why didn't you tell us you're Bra Motlalepula's
laaitie
?'
The thug assigned two of the bigger old-comers, Mokitimi – Kittyman to his friends – and Zwanya to look after me.
I was grateful to the thug. Throughout the two-hour journey to Peka High School I was ensconced between Zwanya and Kittyman while my fellow new-comers were singing demeaning songs about themselves and having their tin trunks confiscated and their provisions of chicken and steamed bread devoured in front of their weeping eyes. The two gentlemen, much older than the rest of the old-comers and not participating in the hazing, kept on reminding the rest that I was Bra Motlalepula's
laaitie
– little boy – and therefore no one must even imagine lifting his hand in my direction or utter any profanity while looking at me.
Even after we had arrived at the high school and had been allocated our dormitories the story that I was a
fuzie
– or sidekick – of some bad-ass Maseru gangsters spread even among those boys who were not in our bus but had arrived in other buses from the northern districts or had been brought by parents in their cars. I didn't correct them. I didn't tell them that in fact I had never met the thug before; he merely took a shine to me because of the similarities of our names. I felt like a charlatan. I was benefiting from a name that was not really mine – a Sesotho translation of my real name. You will remember that I named myself Motlalepula in Mohale's Hoek in quest of assimilation and acceptance. But who cared? As long as it gave me protection from barbaric hazing. Why would I correct the boys when this whole misunderstanding enhanced my credentials as this guy who had a personal relationship with the likes of Bra Motlalepula, the godfather of Maseru outlaws and sundry ruffians?
Hazing – euphemistically called ‘giving the new-comers treatment' – was relentless for the first few weeks of high school. But thanks to Bra Motlalepula I escaped it all as Zwanya and Kittyman took their assignment seriously. Once in a while there would be some renegade who would be resentful that I was getting off scot-free while other new-comers were being given the treatment. One such renegade was Jama Mbeki, whose uncle, Michael Mosoeu Moerane, was our Latin and Music master. Like me, he was a Mothepu and a refugee from South
Africa. Only the previous year his father, Govan, had been sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island together with his comrades Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu. Despite this, Jama was a jovial fellow who showed no sign of distress at his father's plight. I admired him for this; I would have been a wreck if my father had been sentenced to life imprisonment.

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