Sometimes There Is a Void (50 page)

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Authors: Zakes Mda

BOOK: Sometimes There Is a Void
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All the time I was in Harare stuffing myself at Robert Mugabe's State House banquets on behalf of the hungry children of Africa, I caught myself thinking more and more of Gugu and how I would have had an even greater time had she been with me. It was the laughter that we shared that I missed. I resolved that as soon as I got back to Roma I would take her out to spend quality time alone with her away from the rest of the world.
My first outing with her, without her girlfriends, was a long drive up steep and winding roads to the Oxbow Skiing Lodge in the Maluti Mountains of Lesotho. I rented a comfortable chalet for us. Although there were all types of skis for rental we did not venture on to the snowy slopes. We spent a couple of days there, sitting by log fires or out on the rocks admiring the imposing mountains and the gorges and rivers that we could see in the distance. And of course we made love for the first time.
After this trip we had a few dates, mostly to my hometown of Mafeteng, because I had to see my mother and my kids quite often. We
stayed at Hotel Mafeteng. My mother liked her very much and would ask after her on those occasions when I visited by myself.
I took her out to the Lesotho Sun, a luxury hotel on a hilltop in Maseru, for her twenty-first birthday. We had dinner from their wide-ranging buffet. I gave her a present of African-themed jewellery and a West African style dress specially designed by
Ntate
Jabbie, a West African man who lived in Maseru.
Ntate
Jabbie designed and made all my Afro-shirts and was Bintu Jabbie's father, another beautiful woman who became my friend when we both worked for the Department of Information and Broadcasting. Bintu was the one who introduced me to her father in the first place, which resulted in my unique style. The brown dress he made for Gugu's birthday was especially elegant with its ornate embroidery.
Adele got to hear of the birthday present from some of the gossips at Roma and she drove from Maseru to the university to confront Gugu. She threatened Gugu with violence if she did not hand over the dress and jewellery. Gugu, of course, had no intention of risking life or limb for material objects, however sentimentally valuable they might have been. She meekly handed the gifts over to the bigger and more aggressive woman. I was very embarrassed when Adele returned from Roma and showed me the items she had confiscated from Gugu.
That evening Adele phoned Josephine, Gugu's mother in Soweto, and told her that her daughter had stolen her husband. I don't know how she got Josephine's number. But she had her mysterious ways of investigating things and finding information. I could not vouch for this, but I suspected that her strong Youth League and ruling party connections had something to do with it.
Next time Gugu went home for a short holiday she was in big trouble with her mother. She was only twenty-one but was already stealing other women's husbands. As if that was not bad enough, the woman whose husband she had stolen was related to her; Adele's mother was from the Nhlapho family, which was also Josephine's family. This meant that, according to Josephine, Gugu was practically Adele's sister. It became obvious to Gugu that Adele must have had a long conversation with her mother. Josephine yelled at her so much that she didn't
even have the chance to explain that Adele had lied about my being her husband.
When Gugu returned to Lesotho things cooled a bit between us. I think Josephine's voice was still ringing in her ears. But as soon as the sound began to fade the old attraction returned and we began to see each other again. But this time we had to be careful lest Adele's spies saw us. The best times to see her were during the rehearsals of my theatre group which took place at the Netherlands Hall at the university. As the group went through their paces Gugu and I got into my new white Toyota Cressida and drove about twenty kilometres from campus in the direction of Maseru. When we got to Masianokeng, instead of turning right towards Maseru we took a left turn and drove on past Mazenod in the Mafeteng direction until we got to the church which we named Jerusalema. We parked outside the yard under the tree and just sat in the car and talked the kind of nonsense that lovers talk and sang to Queen's ‘Radio Gaga'. The members of the congregation walked in and out of Jerusalema in their blue and white uniforms wondering what Sodom and Gomorrah was happening under their sacred tree.
 
 
 
WE LOOK AT THE
ruins of Jerusalema and we giggle. Thandi wants to know what is so funny about a withered tree and a heap of bricks and mud. If only that tree could talk. If only she could see what I see – ghosts in white and faded blue walking in and out of the building, stopping from time to time to stare at the car under the tree, faces scowling. Our Jerusalema.
 
 
 
THE SECRET OF JERUSALEMA
could not last forever, but Gugu was an opiate I could not give up. I did not know where this would lead, but Adele was still very much in my life. She had graduated from the university and was a civil servant in Maseru. She lived with me at my university house in Florida. At this time my daughter Thandi, who was
a student at St Mary's High School at Roma, was staying with me. She commuted in a minibus taxi that transported students to and fro between Maseru and Roma, a distance of about eighty kilometres.
The two women did not get along at all. Every day I would be fielding complaints from Adele about Thandi: one day it would be about Adele's perfume which Thandi allegedly used even though Thandi denied it; the next day it would be about Thandi who had allegedly gossiped about her to her friends … and so it would go on and on like that.
I decided to take Adele with me to Cape Town when I went to consult with Mavis Taylor about my PhD thesis so that I could buy her a graduation dress at one of the exclusive boutiques in the city.
The day I took her to the underground Golden Acre Mall she quarrelled with me because as we were walking I would stop to look at something attractive in a window display. I would point it out to her, only to find that she had walked on. On realising that I was no longer by her side, she would stop and look back at me quite furiously, arms akimbo. I would have to gather speed towards her to save myself from the embarrassment of being yelled at. After buying the dress she liked we returned to our accommodation at Serengeti self-catering apartments in Mowbray.
I don't know what was on Adele's mind, but as soon as we entered the living room she put the shopping bag on the carpet and sat down on the glass coffee table. Maybe she was tired or just too furious to realise what she was doing. The glass cracked. I was horrified, but she looked unperturbed.
‘We'll tell them we found it like this,' she said.
‘They know we didn't find it like this. They were here just this morning to clean,' I said.
‘Precisely. The cleaners must have done it. They have no evidence that it's us.'
I didn't want to argue, though I knew that I could not go along with her plan. The cleaning woman might be fired for something she had not done.
‘They can't prove it's us. We'll deny it,' she repeated to make it clear that she would tolerate no dissent. I said nothing. I didn't want her to think I was a traitor or to start another quarrel.
While she was freshening up I went to the manager's office and told her that I had inadvertently broken the coffee table and would like to pay for it. She added the cost to my accommodation bill and Adele never got to know that I squealed. To this day she thinks she got away with breaking the Serengeti coffee table. This episode worried me. I was seeing a side of her that I had not known before. And it scared me.
But I didn't have time to dwell on this. I had come to Cape Town primarily to attend to my thesis. At the university my supervisor was having problems finding someone with the right credentials to co-supervise my doctorate with her. My research was on how theatre could be used effectively as a medium for development communication. Mavis was a professor of theatre who specialised in training students in voice, movement and directing. She had no knowledge of theatre-for-development, which was my specialisation. But that could easily be remedied because she was well read in theatre-in-education and with all the books I had brought with me from the United States she could read up on theatre-for-development. The problem was the communication side of things. The University of Cape Town did not offer any field of communication studies and therefore there was no one appropriate who could supervise my work which was interdisciplinary, encompassing theatre, interpersonal communication and what was known in those days as mass communication. There was, however, what was referred to as the Professional Communications Unit that was headed by Mr M L Fielding. I didn't know what exactly the Professional Communications Unit did, but it did not offer any courses. Although Mr Fielding only had an MA degree he was appointed as one of my supervisors. I later discovered that he was studying for his own PhD at Rhodes University at the very time he was supervising my PhD. He enriched my thesis by advising me to ground it on mass communications and interpersonal theories, beyond just my Marxist approach to communication-for-development. However, it seemed to me that every time he learned something new from his professors at Rhodes he wanted to impose it on my thesis. In most cases these would be outdated communication theories that had no relevance to my work. We argued a lot about this and on many occasions Mavis Taylor had to intervene. Mavis, on the other hand, was fine because she was willing to learn and I spent
many evenings at her house discussing the work of Augusto Boal on the theatre of the oppressed, Keir Elam on the semiotics of theatre, Penina Mlama, Chris Kamlongera and David Kerr on theatre-for-development in Africa. Even though I would have liked to discuss communications theorists – especially development communications theorists – with Mr Fielding, he didn't think it was necessary and never availed himself of the opportunity. I was fighting these battles at the university and would then return to fight other battles with a morose Adele.
My stay with Adele in Cape Town, however, was not only confined to the petty battles in my life. There were other bigger battles of national proportions. It was 1989 and the struggle was at a turning point in South Africa. We attended some of the rallies that were organised by the United Democratic Front in Cape Town. At one of these demonstrations we managed to march up to Greenmarket Square but the police sprayed the protesters with purple dye, giving birth to the slogan
The Purple Shall Govern
, a play on the words of the better known slogan
The People Shall Govern
. The intention of the police, of course, was to identify all the people who were stained purple as the culprits marching against the state and demanding the release of Nelson Mandela and other political leaders.
We were part of the thirty thousand plus who marched into Cape Town – the very first successful march into a major city by demonstrators. I could see the glint of pleasure in Adele's eyes as we sang and danced and marched in Adderley Street – the main street in Cape Town – as Desmond Tutu, Allan Boesak and Gordon Oliver led us to St George's Cathedral. Gordon Oliver was the liberal white mayor of Cape Town who had convinced the police to allow the march, hence our continuing right up to the Cathedral without being sprayed with purple rain.
We went back to Lesotho for Adele to attend her graduation ceremony and take up a new teaching job at a middle school in Thaba Nchu in the ‘homeland' of Bophuthatswana – one of the reservations designated by the apartheid government as the natural home of black people where they could exercise their political rights. I had to return to Cape Town for an extended stay to complete the thesis, bind it and then submit it. Because I was going to be there for a few months it would
have been too expensive for me to stay at the Serengeti apartments. My Afrikaner friend Ali Semmelink, who I had first met in Leribe, Lesotho, and had continued my friendship with him when he moved to Roma to teach at Christ the King High School, had now returned to Cape Town which was where he originally came from. He told me that his sister-in-law, Elsa Semmelink, who happened to be the daughter of arch-conservative white supremacist leader Andries Treurnicht, would help me find accommodation. Elsa, obviously a rebel who didn't share her father's political views, knew which hotels in the city would give accommodation to a black person. She located a nice hotel within walking distance of the Hiddingh Campus, the site of the Drama Department. This was rather expensive accommodation for me, as you can imagine, but fortunately Mavis Taylor came up with some money to assist me. She said it was from an anonymous donor who liked my work, but I suspected that it was really from her. I played along and asked her to thank the donor for me. Actually, I kissed the dear heart and asked her to transfer that kiss to the donor.
I completed the PhD at the end of that year. I was used to the American system where candidates had to defend their dissertations and was surprised to discover that there was no defence at all. I heard that Mr Fielding had not been happy with my final work because I had not used some of the theories he had suggested. But if the defence system had been applied I felt that I would have been able to argue my case quite effectively. However other committee members, those from the Drama Department, prevailed and on June 29, 1990, I walked on to the stage at Jameson Hall to be capped by Chancellor Oppenheimer. My mother was in the audience. So were my brother Zwelakhe, my sister Thami and my girlfriend Adele. Even from the stage I could see my mother's eyes gleaming with tears of pride. When the choir broke into
Gaudeamus Igitur
and the whole hall thundered into the commercium hymn that celebrates the bacchanalian mayhem of academic life, I knew I had arrived. Everyone in my party was visibly moved.

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