Sometimes There Is a Void (40 page)

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Authors: Zakes Mda

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With this kind of behaviour I wouldn't have lasted that long at the Convo. The guy didn't kick me out, but his attitude made it obvious that I was no longer a welcome guest. I moved out and shared an apartment with two white American girls whose hygiene was not of the best. They washed their hair in the kitchen sink, which was unheard of where I came from, and kept a small bucket in the kitchen where they dumped their used sanitary pads and tampons. They just left the bucket by the sink for weeks on end until the contents were black in colour and smelled like a dead rat. I have no idea why neither of them thought of dumping it in the dustbin outside. I never saw the girls' rooms but I can imagine how untidy they were, judging from the fact that some of their clothes and frilly undergarments were scattered all over the floor, even in the corridor and on kitchen floor. They had a well-fed cat that pooed all over the house even though there was a cat litter box in the kitchen. I had to be very careful when I walked in the corridor and in the kitchen. And yet these beautiful girls were talented artists who produced some of the most wonderful intaglio at Siegfried Hall where they were students.
I wanted to leave and find an apartment of my own but I couldn't afford it. The stipend from the School of Theater was too small for such a luxury. I couldn't even afford food sometimes and had to sell my blood for a few dollars to survive. On two occasions my blood was rejected. They didn't tell me why. I had become anaemic and suffered from dizziness. Maybe I was harvesting too much plasma in order to buy my favourite subs at Rax Beef Sandwiches. Or a few items of groceries and toiletries at the Super Duper Store on Stimson Avenue.
It was at this time that I remembered Jane Fonda. When we had dinner at the Lesotho Hilton she had said to me, ‘Next time you are in the United States do see me.' Normally people say such things to be nice, you know, just to make small talk. But I told myself that I didn't give a damn if she meant it or not, I was going to take her up on that. I had kept her postal address and telephone number in Santa Monica where she lived with her husband Tom Hayden.
So, I got in touch with her and told her of my predicament. She told me that in fact I had contacted her at the right time because she was planning to make a movie set in South Africa and was looking for the
right property. She immediately engaged my services as what she called a script consultant, and sent me a cheque in advance.
With her money I was able to rent myself a nice basement apartment on East Carpenter Street from Professor Gifford Doxsee. It was fully furnished with a big kitchen, a living room, a bedroom and a laundry room with a washer and a dryer. I lived like a king. I was even able to send flowers to Keneiloe occasionally through Interflora. Now I could entertain as well. Abok had long completed his studies and returned to Kenya. But I had a number of friends from Africa. There was Baratang Mpotokwane from Botswana who was doing her PhD in Education; Zanele Mfono and Simphiwe Hlatshwayo, both from South Africa and both doing African Studies; Mike Kirubi and Macharia Munene both from Kenya and doing PhDs in International Business and History respectively. Another special friend was Augustin Hatar from Rwanda. Hatar is the only one who I met later in life on African soil. He had been the head of the Rwandan broadcasting services during the period that led to the genocide. He was able to escape and found refuge in Tanzania, where he continues to live and teach at the University of Tanzania. He and his wife once visited me at my house in Johannesburg.
I remember all these people very fondly because we had such wonderful carefree times together, which were nevertheless very intellectually stimulating. I felt for the first time that I was becoming a real scholar. Here my promiscuity ceased, my excitement at discovering sex so late in life had waned, and the only vice that remained was drunkenness.
In the meantime the South African establishment got to hear that Jane Fonda was planning a movie set in South Africa and became hysterical. Alden Library at Ohio University subscribed to the
Sunday Times
, published in Johannesburg, and one day I saw the headline:
Though not fond of it, Jane wants SA's story
. A columnist by the name of Adrian Monteath wrote:
I have news of quite extraordinary gravity this morning. Jane Fonda, the famous ageing banshee, wants to write, produce and direct a film about … South Africa. Since her views on the world are only
marginally less extreme than those of the crazed Redgrave woman, I shudder at the possible result. She has been obsessed with the project since her 1981 visit to Lesotho, when she was ‘held' at Jan Smuts. There is yet no story for the film, which is still very much in the planning stages. But it is known that she wants to make it in Lesotho.
Jan Smuts was the airport in Johannesburg, now known as O R Tambo International Airport. I hadn't known that Jane Fonda had been detained there by the South African authorities when she was in transit to Lesotho.
The article went on to express the hope that since Fonda had engaged my services as a consultant I would help with the authenticity of the script.
And this paranoid diatribe was from a supposedly liberal South African English newspaper! You can only imagine what the conservative Afrikaner newspapers were saying.
There were other things that were happening in southern Africa besides the paroxysm over Jane Fonda. The African students at Ohio University, especially those from the subcontinent, were outraged when they received reports that on December 9, 1982, South African commandos crossed the Mohokare River into Lesotho just before dawn and massacred a number of South African refugees and Lesotho nationals. They called the raid Operation Blanket and claimed it was a pre-emptive strike against ANC terrorists who were preparing a raid of their own into South Africa. For a long time we were in the dark as to who had been killed. I worried about my ANC friends, especially Jobodwana. Newspapers from South Africa only reached us after two weeks, via the Alden Library. I was shocked by the
Sunday Times
headlines that extolled the raid even though twelve of the forty-two people who were killed were Basotho people who had nothing to do with the ANC. Some of these were women and children, including a woman we grew up with in Mafeteng when her father worked for the education department before he joined the diplomatic service and then became a cabinet minister in Chief Leabua Jonathan's government. The woman, 'Matumo Ralebitso, allegedly fell from the window when
South African soldiers barged into her flat near the Victoria Hotel, guns blazing, looking for Limpho Hani. The rest of the casualties were South African refugees. Apparently the agents of the apartheid government pointed out what they believed to be houses occupied by the so-called ANC insurgents all over the town and its outskirts. A lot of their information was either wrong or outdated and many innocent people died.
When I read in the
New York Times
that a Lesotho government spokesman said, ‘The only reason why South Africa invaded Lesotho was Lesotho's rejection of apartheid', I knew that the romance between Pretoria and Maseru had come to an end. This was apparent even before the invasion when Chief Leabua Jonathan established diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China, the Soviet Union and North Korea. He even invited North Korea to train his paramilitary force. As a bonsella they built him a brand new stadium.
This was a one hundred and eighty degree turnabout for Leabua and Lesotho, and some of my comrades and I applauded it. In our view he was now taking a progressive direction and needed our support. We were prepared even to forgive him his brutal coup of 1970 when he refused to hand over power to Ntsu Mokhehle who had clearly won the elections. Lesotho was now plainly on the side of the ANC. BNP members, including the much-feared BNP Young Pioneers, saw themselves as revolutionaries. They accused the BCP and its armed wing, the Lesotho Liberation Army, of being reactionaries who were secretly supported by South Africa and the American CIA.
But there were some of my old MaPeka comrades who were adamant that Leabua Jonathan's government was illegitimate; they were determined to overthrow it at all costs. My brothers, the twins, who were regarded as MaPeka themselves although they did not matriculate at Peka High School, wrote me letters updating me on the events in Lesotho. They told me that the LLA was launching more attacks into the country from bases at Qwa Qwa, the Bantustan in South Africa designated for South African Basotho people. This gave credence to the claim that there was some South African collusion in the incursions, which surprised me no end because the BCP I used to campaign for was
vehemently anti-apartheid; its
raison d'être
was the return to Lesotho of the land conquered by the Boers more than a century before. Leabua Jonathan had been the South African stooge, now all of a sudden he was on the side of the angels and Ntsu Mokhehle was the alleged South African lackey!
I was shocked to hear that Jama Mbeki, my friend from the Peka days, had been killed by the Police Mobile Unit. I had no idea what Jama had been doing in Lesotho at that time. The last time I had heard of him he was practising as a lawyer in Botswana where a number of his BCP comrades were in exile. Of course, I had known that he was a member of the LLA from the MaPeka LLA members who had tried to recruit me into the guerrilla force in earlier years. I was greatly saddened by Jama's death and recalled all our high jinks at Peka High School. It had been an age of innocence where there was a clear line of demarcation between politics and death.
Although I was thousands of kilometres away in Athens, Ohio, and therefore physically cut off by distance from these events, I couldn't insulate myself emotionally. It was obvious to me and my fellow African students at Ohio University that South Africa's arrogance knew no bounds and that something had to be done about it.
We therefore immersed ourselves in anti-apartheid campaigns. I worked closely with my fellow South African Simphiwe Hlatshwayo, who was an ANC member. I myself, as I have already indicated, was not a member of that organisation although I totally agreed with its philosophy. I could work with its cadres, but it was important for me to jealously guard my freedom to speak my mind without being constrained by party discipline. Another student who joined our activism and became the president of the African Students Union was the Rwandan Augustin Hatar.
Our campaign focused on disinvestment and divestment. With the latter we aimed to force universities, including our own, which had shares in companies that operated in South Africa to dispose of those shares. Disinvestment was targeted at the companies themselves to withdraw all operations from South Africa. We campaigned against Ronald Reagan's policy of ‘constructive engagement' which was devised
and strenuously defended by his undersecretary of state for Africa, Chester Crocker.
We invited people like Congress Mbatha, who had been an activist of the ANC Youth League from its formation in the late 1940s, to address us. Mbatha, a member of ANC president Oliver Tambo's three-man Syndicate of old, was Simphiwe's professor when he was doing his undergraduate degree at Syracuse University.
We also worked closely with Dennis Brutus, the poet and former Robben Island prisoner who had founded the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SANROC) which was achieving great success in getting South Africa kicked out of international sport. He was a master campaigner and he came to Athens to rally us to put pressure on our university to divest. I went on the road with Dennis Brutus to a number of campuses in the United States. My play,
The Road
, became the rallying tool. Extracts from it were performed at campus rallies to give the spectators an idea of what apartheid was all about since the American media had its own prevarications when it reported on Africa. A full production of the play was mounted at the Loeb Theater, Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, directed by Gerard Fox who has since become a film maker in the United Kingdom.
When I arrived at the Loeb I was told that Dennis Brutus, who had been there two days before, had left me a message. ‘We must now wage a campaign against Athol Fugard,' the note stated. The reason he wanted Fugard to be boycotted was that Fugard had been making statements against our campaign, especially the cultural boycott aspects of it. He claimed that sanctions, be they economic or cultural, would bring about a lot of suffering, not to the white ruling elite but to the black masses. Our position, of course, was that the black masses were already suffering. They were prepared to suffer a little bit more if it led to the overthrow of the apartheid system.
The cultural sanctions were my focus even more than the sports boycott and divestment and disinvestment work. It was my domain because I was a cultural worker myself – as artists were known those days. I therefore felt I would be more effective in that area.
I could understand why Fugard's advocacy for cultural engagement
with South Africa infuriated Brutus. It infuriated me too. He was at the time regarded as one of the most important playwrights in the English language and his word would carry weight against what we were trying to achieve.
But I disagreed with the boycott of Athol Fugard. I thought it would be counter-productive, and I told Brutus so when I phoned him that evening after a successful performance of my play.
‘Old Warrior,' I said, ‘we'll be fighting against our cause if we do that. We'll be alienating a lot of our liberal supporters who think highly of Fugard and see him as an anti-apartheid playwright. Our campaign in the West – and we know that Western governments are the mainstay of the apartheid system – depends on the liberals, whether we like it or not.'

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