Sometimes There Is a Void (72 page)

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Authors: Zakes Mda

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‘This is where two former cabinet ministers of Chief Leabua Jonathan's government and their wives were murdered,' I told Debe.
I was talking about Desmond Sixishe, the Minister of Information who helped me get to America that first time in 1981, and Vincent Makhele, Minister of Foreign Affairs. They were abducted from their homes with their wives. Their bodies were found at this mountain pass riddled with bullets. This happened soon after the 1986 coup when General Metsing Lekhanya overthrew Chief Leabua Jonathan in what seemed at first to be a bloodless coup. It was not until 1990, after Lekhanya had been overthrown by fellow officers, that two senior members of the Lesotho Paramilitary Force, who were also relatives of the King, were convicted for these point-blank executions of two men who were political rivals and two women whose only crime was that they were married to the men.
Debe took photographs of the horrid place.
In Toronto, we recall the blood-soaked mountain and the rest of the journey. Debe says her strongest impression of the trip is being in awe of me and my generosity and kindness. I am rather flattered by it all. It is not every day that women tell me they are in ‘awe' of me. I know of one in Athens, Ohio, who thinks I am the worst scumbag ever to walk this earth. But I do not tell Debe about my miserable situation back home. One doesn't burden friends with one's afflictions, especially when they are self-inflicted – yes, I was not forced by anyone to be in this situation, I walked into it with my eyes open. A sane person would ask: then why don't you just walk out of it? Good question. And when people say that, you know immediately that they don't have a good answer. I don't know if you'll buy it if I tell you the children have something to do with it. You will buy it even less when I tell you I feel I have an obligation towards her. But take it or leave it, that's how I feel.
The greatest relief comes when I return to South Africa during the summer months. South Africa means the bees and the Bee People. It also means the comforting presence of Gugu in Johannesburg and of my mother in Lesotho.
I rent a townhouse in Sandton and Gugu and my daughter Thandi join me there. We travel to the Bee Place and find that the Bee People are still as determined as ever to make their project a success. Only women remain in the project now, the men having given up long since. One of those who left is Morrison Xinindlu, the elder we once upbraided for wrecking the car in his drunkenness. But others have been forced out of the project by death. One of these is my Uncle Owen. I heard of his death while I was in the United States, but I couldn't come for the funeral. My children Thandi and Neo and their mother Mpho represented me.
The only retrogressive step that I find among the Bee People is that they still haven't learnt how to drive. They tell me that they did enrol two women at a driving school in Sterkspruit but neither of them made any headway because they were so fearful of driving. Now they have to employ one of Uncle Press's sons, Sandile, to drive their truck whenever they have to deliver their honey in Sterkspruit or Lady Grey and he charges them exorbitant amounts as if they were hiring his own vehicle filled with his own petrol. I try to give them more pep-talk.
‘This is now a women's only project because you are more persistent and have more patience than men,' I say. ‘You have proved that you can be successful without men. In fact, in your case it is likely that you are successful because you do not have any men running things here. That is all the more reason why you must learn to drive your own truck. This guy you employ as a driver is robbing you blind. You should be doing your own driving.'
They promise that they will try to banish their fears and return to the driving school. But their eyes tell me that none of them have any intention of doing so.
From the Bee Place we drive to Lesotho to visit my mother. Her health has deteriorated and she is beginning to lose her memory. She is grateful to the Lord that I finally found Sonwabo and she hopes that she will see him before she dies. I admonish her for talking as if she is
at the mouth of the grave and promise that I will persuade Sonwabo to come back home, even if just to visit and see his mother, his siblings, his wife and his children who are now three grown women and one giant of a man.
Back in Johannesburg we launch
The Madonna of Excelsior
at Exclusive Books in Hyde Park. Kader Asmal, the Minister of Education, is present. I am glad that he came when he heard I was launching a book even though he was not specifically invited. He is a true lover of literature and a supporter of my novels in particular, though he has told me that he does not agree with my political position in
The Heart of Redness
. I tell him that I am particularly proud of
The Madonna of Excelsior
because I own all the rights, thanks to my beautiful agent Isobel Dixon.
An eavesdropper whose book I have just signed asks, ‘What has her beauty got to do with it?'
I laugh and say, ‘I know, I know I am being sexist and all that jazz. But I am a man of art, I love beauty.'
Gugu and I pay a long overdue visit to Nadine Gordimer in Parktown. Today she is all alone in her huge house. We relax in her tastefully furnished but subdued living room and she offers us brandy. Alas, we are wet blankets because we are teetotallers. She treats herself to a shot nonetheless. She is a very disappointed woman. One of the icons of the struggle, Mac Maharaj, has just been accused by the
Mail & Guardian
as having been involved in some financial scandal. I never really get to know what it is all about because I am really corruption-fatigued; there are too many such stories in the papers.
‘What do you think happened to our comrades?' Nadine keeps on asking.
But I don't have any answer. I can offer some cliché like ‘power corrupts', but it does not provide us with any insight into the specific problem of her comrades in her party, the ANC, who always occupied the moral high ground during the liberation struggle and who sacrificed careers and families in pursuit of justice, fairness and equality, but whose snouts are now buried deep in the troughs of corporate crony capitalism.
‘If the domination of business by government is socialism and the domination of government by business is fascism,' I offer unhelpfully, ‘in South Africa we have these opposites in an unnatural coexistence. This breeds the double-dosage of corruption and patronage we see in our country today.'
I know that my characterisation of our system and my definition of the ‘-isms' are simplistic, but they do serve my anger at the damage that our leaders are doing to my country. Nadine thinks I am making the situation sound bleaker than it really is. I think she still has faith in her ANC comrades. I lost it long ago. When I wrote to Nelson Mandela I still thought the situation could be saved. I gradually lost hope with the next administration. Now, of course, there is wholesale plunder.
Nadine wants to know what I teach in America and when I tell her that I teach creative writing she laughs and says, ‘But you know that creative writing cannot be taught. You and I were not taught.'
I don't think she is correct on either count. The craft and techniques of writing can be taught, just as those of painting or acting or singing can be taught. What cannot be taught are the flair and the artistic vision. Raw talent alone is not of much use if it is not refined, polished and channelled in the right direction. When Nadine says we were not taught, she means that we did not go to any formal class or workshop to learn how to write. We are self-taught. But self-taught writers are taught by other writers whose work they read and emulate. They are also taught by friends, family, neighbours and school teachers who read their work and give them feedback. And, by the way, that's what a workshop does, albeit in a more formal, organised and distilled environment. So, Nadine and I were taught after all.
The following week Gugu and I go to the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown to launch
The Plays of Zakes Mda
, which have been translated into isiXhosa, isiZulu, Southern Sesotho, isiNdebele, Setswana, Siswati, Xitsonga, Northern Sesotho and Tshivenda. This is where we meet a poet called Natalia Molebatsi who works for my publishers, the University of South Africa Press. We fall in love with her and establish a strong friendship. She encourages us to adopt a vegetarian lifestyle. I have always been inclined towards vegetarianism
even as I devoured huge chunks of pork. I have always felt bad for the animals I was eating but did not have the courage to do anything about it. Even after Natalia has given us encouragement we don't do anything about it and continue cannibalising other creatures unabated.
It is only on a subsequent visit to South Africa that something happens that forces us to think twice about eating meat. Gugu has moved to Twin Oaks, a townhouse complex in Randpark Ridge. I buy a plump duck that I first steam for her. I then bake it after basting it in a mixture of ginger, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, white pepper, soy sauce and honey. After I have done the job it looks really good and we are looking forward to eating it. Just as we are preparing to serve the meal we hear some quacking sounds outside. When we open the door there is a mother duck and her ducklings standing on the doorstep looking at us admonishingly. We quickly close the door.
‘There's no way I can eat this meat now,' I say.
‘Nor me,' says Gugu.
We dump that whole duck into the dustbin. From that day we stop eating meat altogether. In fact, Gugu had started earlier by giving up pork after she saw on television how pigs were slaughtered. She had kept only to ostrich, chicken and fish. But after the visit of the ducks we decide to stop eating all creatures of the sea or land or air.
We are committed vegetarians but we don't proselytise about it. Ours is a live-and-let-live attitude. I, for one, do recognise the fact that for humanity to survive the harsh environment of past eons it was necessary to bludgeon each other to death and to eat other sentient beings. That's how we evolved to be what we are. But I think now we have reached a stage where some of us have evolved to such a high level that our warrior gene has diminished and we have become squeamish about death. We can therefore survive quite healthily on the non-sentient bounty of the earth, without visiting acts of violence upon each other and on those creatures we deem to be of a lower order.
 
After completing my one year contract as Visiting Professor I decide to stay, this time not reluctantly but because this is the place for me. I have nothing to go back to in South Africa because all doors are closed
for me there. I was surviving by my writing before I came to America, but I don't need to be physically there to write. And I can continue to contribute to the development of my people through the beekeeping project, the workshops I hold for writers at the Market Theatre and my work with the HIV-positive people, while living in the quiet and peaceful environment of Athens, Ohio. I handle a lot of the work while I am here, thanks to the Internet, and spend a few months each year working directly with the people in South Africa. I have discovered that here I am able to write undisturbed by the demands on my time in South Africa where people seem misguidedly to think that I am some kind of a celebrity. Here, in rural Ohio, I am a nobody and am able to lead a quiet life. Even those people who may know that there is an international writer of sorts in their midst don't associate that writer with me.
The most important reason I decide to stay is that my children have fallen in love with their school and I am going to feel very bad if I uproot them once again and take them back to South Africa. Zenzi actually does ask me not to take them back to South Africa.
The third reason is that I begin to smell a story after attending a party at Steve Howard's house. He is the head of African Studies. At his party I find myself being an audience to an argument about the distinction between the Mulengeons and the WIN people. I learn that the Mulengeons are descendants of the Roma people, the so-called Gypsies, whereas the WIN people are tri-racial, descending from Whites, Indians and Negroes. A film professor called Charles Fox tells us stories about his own family which is WIN. I decide there and then that I want to pursue the WIN people. There may be a story there somewhere.
I apply for a vacant position in African Literature and go through the motions of interviews and job talks. But before I can take up this post, a creative writing professor called Jack Matthews retires and I am offered his position. This, for me, is a much better job than the African Literature one and I take it without hesitation. In South Africa I had thought I was done with academia for the rest of my life, but thanks to Adele I am in Athens, Ohio, as a Full Professor in the English Department.
But life is not getting any better with her. There is too much strain on us because the divorce is not through yet. There is very little communication between us even though we live under the same roof. I moved out of the main bedroom long since and have confiscated Zenzi's room. She now sleeps in her mother's bedroom. Adele and I rarely talk but communicate our frustrations with each other through email. As a result I have a box full of hundreds of emails that will be fodder for researchers one day. I'll only quote a few lines from some real mild ones in this book, otherwise you'll think I'm being vindictive or tasteless or both if I blurt out those with X-rated language directed at me and my body parts.

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