Sometimes There Is a Void (54 page)

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Authors: Zakes Mda

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‘It doesn't matter,' I said to Adele. ‘We can have our marriage solemnised by civil authorities. The District Administrator will gladly do it for us.'
But Adele didn't want a civil ceremony. She wanted to be married by a priest of the Roman Catholic Church. She was an ardent Catholic who had converted to that denomination for the purposes of schooling but became a true and firm believer in their doctrine in the process.
Fortunately Father Khasoane discovered a loophole in my first marriage. It had not been solemnised in the Catholic Church but by civil authorities. Mpho had not been a Catholic either but belonged to some Protestant church. Therefore the Catholic Church did not recognise it as a marriage at all. Presto, I had never been married before!
Father Khasoane looked beautiful in his white and gold Roman Catholic regalia when, on February 22, 1991, he solemnised the marriage of a happy couple in red traditional isiXhosa costumes under a marquee in a homestead in a remote Lesotho village.
Soon after the wedding I took Adele to Qoboshane village in the Eastern Cape to introduce her to my relatives. They knew her quite well because she had been there before. But now of course she was officially my wife so it was necessary that Uncle Press and his wife and my grandmother's people, the Mei family, meet her in her new status.
Adele, as a family-values person, was happy that I had taken this step. She was particularly pleased when they called her MaMiya. That was her clan name where she came from. It's always been like that with my people, and in fact with all the Nguni people of southern Africa. A woman was called by the clan name of her own father; she didn't adopt the clan name of the family into which she was marrying. The practice of women taking the surnames of their husbands was introduced to my people by the British with their patriarchal colonialism. Remember, we did not have surnames in the Western sense before we were colonised. Men were identified by both their fathers' names and their clan names. For instance, my great-great-grandfather was Mda son of Gatyeni, my great-grandfather was Feyiya son of Mda, my grandfather should have been Gxumekelana son of Feyiya, my father should have been Solomzi son of Gxumekelana, and I should have been Zanemvula son of Solomzi. The over-arching familial identity of all these generations would have been the clan name, the Cesane branch of the Majola House – uMajola kaCesane. But as you can see, we got stuck with the
Mda surname – and some of our relatives got stuck with the Gatyeni surname – when the British forced us to have the kind of surnames that they could understand, that were passed from generation to generation.
Similarly, the wives had to come from different clans, and they kept their clan names in marriage. After colonisation the British made laws that forced women to adopt their husband's surnames. But my people retained the practice of calling the women by their clan names and it continues to this day. That was why my relatives in the villages called Adele by her clan name, MaMiya. This was an indication to Adele that they gave her full recognition and honoured her as a daughter-in-law of the Majola kaCesane clan.
Back in Maseru, a pregnant Adele was the sweetest person ever. We became inseparable and walked in town hand in hand. I had found happiness at last and the void had been filled. I was never ever going to be unfaithful to her, and I was happy that she was always around.
Even when I went to rehearsals of a one-man play I had written and was directing,
In Celebration of our National Arrogance
, she was with me.
The play looked at the corruption in the public sector in Lesotho and the culture of impunity that resulted in the second highest per capita number of road accidents in Africa. I had written it especially for Lesotho's premier actor of the time, Gonzalez Scout, who performed it to music provided by guitarist Mafata Lemphane – who has since emigrated to Canada – or sometimes to Sam Moeletsi's piano. Sam Moeletsi was a well-known piano teacher in Maseru. In my work as director of this play I was assisted by my old friend 'Maseabata Ramoeletsi, who stage-managed it and also acted more in a producer capacity. I had been close to 'Maseabata from the time she was with Meso Players, Teresa Devant's group that specialised in my plays. Another person who became quite close to me was Deborah Mpepuoa Mokitimi. She had assisted me in my office at the Screenwriters Institute. I used to hang out with her a lot, and enjoyed her company. She had a lot of stories to tell about her neighbours and friends, some of which found their way in the early novels that I was to write. I later learnt that Deborah was the daughter of Kittyman, my protector from savage
ill-treatment at Peka High School. That brought me even closer to her.
I never noticed any jealousy from Adele about my association with these women. I took it that she understood that I had a history with them, and what brought us together was nothing more than theatre.
She was still teaching at Thelejane Middle School in Thaba Nchu, but we spent every weekend with each other, alternating between Maseru and Thaba Nchu.
 
The baby was born at Pelonomi Hospital in Bloemfontein. We named him Zukile, an isiXhosa name whose meaning combined ‘serenity', ‘tranquillity' and ‘grace'. I was pleasantly surprised at the kindness of the nurses at this public government hospital. I was used to the nurses in Lesotho who were always rude and talked to patients, especially to birthing mothers, in a rough and inconsiderate manner. If a woman as much as moaned during the process of giving birth they yelled at her, ‘You shut up; we were not there when you were enjoying it. Didn't you know that the child comes out where it got in?' But in South Africa things were different. The nurses were very kind, and everyone went out of their way to be helpful. And they didn't even know who we were. It was just their regular kindness and compassion.
A few days later, after transporting my books and some household effects to Adele's home in Leribe where her father had offered to store them for us, I flew to the United States to join the Southern African Research Program at Yale University. I was not alone. I was with Dini, the youngest of my three kids with Mpho.
 
 
 
I MISSED ADELE TERRIBLY
when I was at Yale. In my basement apartment in New Haven, Connecticut, I wrote her anguished letters professing my love for her and how life was impossible without her. She responded with her own letters, also professing her love for me and how she and the baby missed me. All this was snail mail correspondence because it was before the prevalence of email. I looked forward to the day she was going to join me in a few months' time. She had a few
things to do first in Lesotho, such as selling my truck which I had bought for my business at the Screenwriters Institute and raising money for her ticket and Zukile's. I felt guilty that I could not help her with all these tasks, but she was a strong and resourceful woman and I knew she would cope.
My anxieties were relieved by the demands of the Program. There were a number of scholars in various fields attached to it, and every Wednesday we gathered under the chairmanship of Leonard Thompson and critiqued that week's presentations. These were papers that were assigned to us the previous Wednesday. I enjoyed discussing papers by such organic scholars as Achmat Davids who wrote extensively on the origins of the Afrikaans language. I marvelled at the copies of old documents with the first ever Afrikaans text – written in Arabic script. It was, of course, written by the early Cape Malay scholars who were Muslims.
One thing that made Achmat Davids even more attractive was that he had a wife who simply loved to entertain. She cooked some of the most wonderful Cape Malay dishes that titillated our taste buds and sent our collective imagination wafting to the Cape Town suburb of Bo-Kaap where they had their home. Scholars of the Program looked forward to Mrs Davids's invitations. So did Dini, who became their regular visitor.
One thing that Leonard Thompson's Program taught me was robust and rigorous multidisciplinary scholarship. I am normally not forthcoming in a big group of people where I am called upon to criticise others; I simply hate to hurt people's feelings in public. I have always lived in my own namby-pamby-land and am comfortable there, thank you. But at Yale the environment encouraged brutal frankness and I relished the challenge. After all, I was my father's son and he was known not to suffer fools gladly. I hated it when this characterisation was used with regard to me and therefore chose to withdraw into my cocoon. Until the Program forced me to come out.
I remember on one occasion when I was the main discussant for Colin Bundy's submission – a number of chapters which were part of the biography he was writing of Govan Mbeki. You may know Colin as
the eminent historian and Rhodes Scholar who is currently the Principal of Green Templeton College at the University of Oxford. At the time he was based at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
I went to town on his paper because just as we were about to sit down for the seminar he whispered to me: ‘I hope you didn't find my paper onerous.' I thought that was rather patronising and I said to myself:
Onerous? I'll show him onerous
.
My role at the seminar was to provide an assessment of the paper, raising questions that would stimulate debate. First, I noted that Colin's was a very interesting study and I enjoyed reading it tremendously. It certainly would be a valuable contribution not only to our understanding of some aspects of the South African situation, but also to the body of work of the ‘life-history' genre, which in South Africa was dominated by autobiography rather than biography. But I went on to point out that throughout the paper, which was supposed to be on the childhood and education of Govan Mbeki, I looked very hard for Govan Mbeki but did not find him. For most part, the paper presented a sketch rather than a portrait of Mbeki. Colin told us of African education in the Cape in the early twentieth century, and gave us a well-researched picture of various institutions, but there was very little about the man and his interaction with those institutions. Mbeki was not foregrounded in relation to the institutions, even though this was supposed to be about his life, and not that of Healdtown or Fort Hare.
Most of the weaknesses of this paper, I asserted, were due to the fact that Colin was dealing with a period of childhood which would present any biographer with problems in selection and interpretation. He depended solely on literature and archival material for his sources, and as could be expected there was very little on Mbeki's childhood from such sources. Oral reminiscences could be effective, I pointed out, if one was able to sift mythology from fact. I advised him to use the techniques of participant-observer in addition to historical record. After all, some of Mbeki's peers and contemporaries were still alive at the time.
I felt that the paper was an over-impersonal treatment of Mbeki since Colin did not recreate his private life. The biography was therefore more
of a study of the period than of the man. Critical debates as to whether formal biography should include little homely details were settled in the seventeenth century, and since then it had become the practice even in political biographies to present the subject as a rounded character. Mbeki was a public man, but he still had aspects of a private life that impacted on the public life. He was a political animal, but he was not the one-dimensional figure that was being portrayed by Colin. He too was once a child with a childhood and a mother who played a role in his life. He fell in and out of love, and suffered all the petty pleasures and pains of daily life.
Colin was visibly shaken. I think I had savaged him too much and I felt very bad about that. After my presentation no one else had anything to say. Even the most argumentative scholars were silent. When we were walking out of the building Leonard Thompson congratulated me and said mine was the best critique of biography they had ever heard at the Southern African Research Program. I didn't thank him for the compliment because I didn't understand why he was telling me this privately and hadn't said it at the seminar. But as I walked home I cursed myself: I had acquired the pettiness of scholars. I was one of them now and was just as obnoxious and vindictive as the best of them. I would rather be an artist than an academic. I would rather create than destroy others as scholars are wont to do.
A few days later Colin asked for my notes and I made copies for him of all twenty handwritten pages.
Scholars from elsewhere sometimes attended our seminars. Among them were Simphiwe Hlatshwayo, with whom I was a student at Ohio University, and Mbulelo Mzamane of my old Maseru days. Simphiwe was a professor at some university in Pennsylvania – I just forget which one now – and Mbulelo was a professor at the University of Vermont. Steve Kalamazoo Mokone also came to visit. He was a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, but was better known as the first black South African to play professional soccer in Europe in the 1950s. He played variously for teams in Barcelona, Italy, England and Holland. A street is named after him in Amsterdam. He was quite a sensation with many hat-tricks to his name. Towards the end of his
career he played for teams in Australia and Canada and then moved to the United States where he was arrested at his Rutgers University office and served nine years in jail for domestic violence. He was keen that I write a movie script about his life.
One of the regulars at our seminars was Bethany Yarrow. She had the most beautiful eyes I had ever seen on any human being and was dazzling overall. A friendship developed between us and I spent many a magical evening at her apartment. It was a platonic yet intoxicating relationship, at least for me. My days as a philanderer were over; I loved Adele and wanted my marriage with her to work. So, I sat in Bethany's bedroom and admired her collection of paintings that she brought with her from Cape Town. She herself was a painter and a film-maker. She inspired me to paint again after many years and I created many pastel works with her.

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