Sometimes There Is a Void (36 page)

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Authors: Zakes Mda

BOOK: Sometimes There Is a Void
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The German young man – his name is Christof – is a student back in his own country. He is here as a volunteer to help the villagers in their rural development project. Perhaps it is for credit in some college class. He knows nothing about beekeeping; he majors in development studies or something along those lines. He stays at Morrison Xinindlu's house. The elder is proud that there is a white man staying at his house. This has increased his prestige in the village.
The women tell me that Christof is a hard worker. He climbs the mountain with them on foot and carries the heavy supers down to the building where the women extract the honey from the combs, heat it so it doesn't crystallise and then bottle it.
But his enthusiasm for the project has placed him at loggerheads with some of the community members. He is not aware that he is being used in local power struggles. I am told that at one stage my Uncle
Owen threatened to beat him up because he believed he was inciting the Bee People against him. But what has brought me to Xinindlu's house to talk to the young man has nothing to do with petty disputes. It has to do with the fact that his zeal has gone too far and I need to find a way of restraining it.
Apparently he has been spending his evenings writing down rules for the Bee People. As he was working with them he observed problems that in his view were constraining their progress, and he was devising ways to overcome them. He already had a list that included instructions on what time work should start in the morning, and when the women should take a break for lunch and who among them should supervise which aspect of the production process. Worse still, he had written a constitution for the organisation; from now on everything should be run according to this document. What riled the Bee People most was that now they were supposed to elect a new committee to meet the requirements of this new constitution drawn up solely by Christof in the solitude of Morrison Xinindlu's bedroom. Because he is a white man these rural folks see him as some authority figure who must be obeyed.
‘We don't do things that way,' I tell him after we have been introduced and I have taken a seat in front of Xinindlu's house.
I can sense that he is resentful. He sees me as an intruder.
I try to explain that he can't just draw up a constitution for an organisation that he knows nothing about. He can't just make his own rules either. He admits that he is not familiar with South African laws governing non-profit and community-based organisations. But, according to him, that makes no difference because a constitution is a constitution in any country.
‘Did you ever try to find out about this organisation's founding documents?' I ask.
‘They told me they have no constitution. They can't operate without a constitution.'
‘Do you know why they have no constitution?' I ask. ‘It is because they are a Trust. The Trust Deed is their constitution. They are not just a makeshift organisation; they are registered. In any case, even if they
didn't have a constitution, you can't just write a constitution by yourself and then impose it on them. That's not how things are done here.'
He becomes angry and starts yelling that he came all the way from Germany to help these rural people because they don't know anything and now I am trying to stop him from doing his job.
‘To help people is a good thing,' I tell him. ‘To help them help themselves is even better. We aim for self-reliance. But you are not helping them when you come here and start behaving like their boss and impose rules on them and even appoint people to positions and assign duties in their own business. You can table ideas for discussion, you can make suggestions, but you are not their boss. We have tried to cultivate a democratic culture here. We need to maintain it and enhance it.'
He is not listening. He is visibly angry. He obviously sees himself as a dispenser of wisdom and doesn't seem to understand that he is here to learn as well. He is a white man come to civilise the natives and now here is an equivalent of a native chief resisting the generosity of his knowledge. He angrily grabs his papers from the bench and snatches from my hand the constitution I was reading which was so naive you would have thought it was written by a high school kid.
Gosh, I lose it!
‘Who the fuck do you think you are, man?' I yell as I stand up to face the impertinent numbskull.
But the Bee People gently push him into the house to talk to him about manners.
 
 
 
THAT HAS ALWAYS BEEN
a problem with me, the short fuse. It used to happen in the classroom too in my early days as a teacher. But, thankfully, in the long run I was able to overcome it, although occasionally my irritation does show. What can I say? I am my father's son.
But my father could be very diplomatic too. And wily. I saw this when my kid brother was arrested by the Boers and was sent to Grootvlei Prison in Bloemfontein.
It all started when Limpho, Chris Hani's wife, tried to smuggle a
group of young men out of Lesotho for military training in the ANC camps in other African countries and abroad. The group was composed of my former Mabathoana High School students – Buti Moleko, Nelson Mogudi and my sister's boyfriend Steve Tau. The fourth young man was my brother Zwelakhe. I was quite surprised to hear that he was in this group because his sentiments were strongly PAC. It was the case with the other young men in the group as well. But then those days things tended to get blurred sometimes and ideology and party loyalties became secondary to the goal of liberating South Africa. I have told you, for instance, that Limpho's brother Sekamane was a commander in the Lesotho Liberation Army which trained under the auspices of the Azanian People's Liberation Army – the PAC military wing – in Libya. Actually, Limpho herself used to be strongly pro-BCP, an ally of the PAC, when she was still Clemoski's girlfriend before she married Chris. Well, don't even try to sort that out.
My brother told me later that what was uppermost in these young men's minds was to get higher education abroad. It didn't matter under the auspices of which one of our liberation movements.
But they had not reckoned with the Boers. When they were crossing the Maseru border post with Limpho and the driver in the guise of a family going shopping in Ladybrand, they were arrested. Someone had snitched on them. Limpho and the driver were released after questioning because they were Lesotho citizens and there was no evidence at the time that they were not who they claimed to be. Their Lesotho passports were genuine. But the young men were clearly South Africans who carried false Lesotho passports. There was evidence that they had crossed the border illegally when they took refuge in Lesotho. They were taken to Bloemfontein where they were fortunate enough to be sentenced to only one year in prison.
It worried my father no end that his last-born was in the hands of the Boers. The Boers, on the other hand, had their own ideas about Zwelakhe. They wanted to use him as bait to get my father to cross the Caledon River so that they could arrest him. They sent emissaries to Mafeteng with the message that they were willing to negotiate for Zwelakhe's release if my father would meet them on the South African
side of the border post. My father insisted that they meet by the river on the Lesotho side. He was accompanied to the meeting by Sechaba Kalake, a Mafeteng youth whose father was serving a long term on Robben Island, and by my brother Sonwabo. He instructed them to stand a few yards behind him as he negotiated with an Afrikaner police captain. The two young men pretended that they were armed in case the captain grabbed my father by force with the view of dragging him across the border.
‘You know, Mr Mda, we have nothing against you,' my father later told us the captain had said. ‘We know that you've not been doing anything subversive since coming to Lesotho. Come back to South Africa. No one will do anything to you.'
The captain promised that they would release Zwelakhe if my father undertook to return for further negotiations about his safe passage back to South Africa. My father promised he would return for further negotiations if they released Zwelakhe first.
A few weeks later Zwelakhe was released from Grootvlei Prison, but my father never kept his word to the Boers, despite their gesture of ‘goodwill'.
The next time I met Chris Hani I confronted him about this.
‘Bhut' Thembi, how can you guys take my kid brother across the border without our knowledge?'
‘AP knew,' he said.
I was quite surprised. Was Chris just trying to shut me up?
I still don't believe that my father would allow his son to be taken out of the country for military training by the ANC. But then you never know. My father, though a Pan Africanist and a champion of African nationalism, had a very open mind and even affection for his old organisation.
After his release from prison Zwelakhe gave up all ideas of going for military training and went to study for an LLB degree at the National University of Lesotho.
At about this time John Nyathi Pokela was released from Robben Island after serving thirteen years. He was my father's protégé from the village of Qoboshane – the Bee Place. While he was in transit to
Tanzania to take over the chairmanship of the PAC he stayed at Bra Saul Manganye's house at Lesotho High School. Bra Saul was another friend of mine who taught commercial subjects at the high school and had come to Lesotho some years back as a refugee from Lady Selbourne in Pretoria. Lady Selbourne – and the neighbouring Pretoria townships – was the headquarters of jazz in South Africa, so one of the pleasures of hanging out with Bra Saul, besides his nostalgic reminiscences about launching the PAC in Pretoria, was listening to jazz. Also, he was the only person I knew who had a TV in those early days of South African television.
I went to Bra Saul's home to pay my respects to Pokela. He looked fine despite the years he had spent working in the lime quarries on Robben Island. I remembered him from his youthful days at eHohobeng, which was the name of his sub-village at Qoboshane, and then when as a refugee he taught at Maseru Community School. He was present when Potlako Leballo swore me into the PAC. He was very happy to see me and remarked that I had not changed one bit. He was being nice, of course; I had gained quite a few kilograms since the last time we met. I paid him the same compliment. He told me that my plays were smuggled into Robben Island and he and his comrades from all the political parties had staged readings of them.
Dark Voices Ring
resonated particularly with them. I was quite moved to hear that my work was giving hope and solace to those who had been condemned to spend their precious lives behind bars for our freedom.
‘We of the PAC boasted to the rest of the prisoners that these plays were written by one of our cadres,' he said.
I didn't have the heart to tell him that I no longer saw myself as a PAC cadre, despite the fact that I never officially resigned from the party. I was more inclined towards the ANC line of thinking. When I had mentioned this to Bra Saul he thought it was because of the influence of the ANC guys who had become my drinking buddies. Top among them was Zingisile Ntozintle Jobodwana, or Jobs as we called him, who had his law practice in Maseru. Even though these ANC guys were his friends too, Bra Saul dismissively called them Charterists because they subscribed to the Freedom Charter, a document that was adopted by
the Congress of the People at Kliptown, Johannesburg, in 1955. This document had played an important role in bringing about the final split that resulted in the formation of the PAC.
I was disillusioned with the PAC, though I still believed in two of its three guiding principles, namely continental unity and socialism. It was with the leadership's interpretation of the third principle, African nationalism, that I had a problem. It was quite different from the way my father used to outline it for us at one of his family meetings. His was not a narrow nationalism. It was all-inclusive of all South Africans who identified themselves as Africans and paid their allegiance first and foremost to Africa. But the way my PAC comrades understood the concept it became clear to me that that the rights of citizenship of a future Azania, as they called South Africa, would be limited only to black people of African descent. In the meetings that we attended, especially when I was staying at the Poqo camp, the leaders did not make any bones about that. I, on the other hand, did not think any modern race-based state was viable or even desirable. I saw this position as a misrepresentation of the tenets of African nationalism as propounded by my father.
The PAC wrote extensively against tribalism; African nationalism was essentially about embracing Africans regardless of which cultural, linguistic or ethnic group they belonged to. But our PAC and Poqo cadres in Lesotho, who were predominantly amaXhosa, had a negative attitude towards their Basotho hosts. They viewed themselves as naturally superior to other ethnicities. I used to get very embarrassed when I met one of these cadres late in the afternoon and he would greet me by saying:
molo, mAfrika, yazi oko kusile ndiqal' ukubon'umntu ngawe
. Greetings to you, African, you are the first person I have seen this whole day. Obviously, according to him, the rest of the people he had been interacting with throughout that day were not really people because they were Basotho.

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