The Heart of Redness: A Novel (36 page)

“Yes,” adds an aunt, “and who will give the bride the leg of a goat?”

“We’ll improvise,” says Camagu. “MamCirha and NoGiant will do all the things that are supposed to be done by my female relatives. They are like my relatives now.”

“Look after our daughter well,” warns Zim.

The women bring food from the house. There is plenty of mutton, samp, potatoes, and spinach. The meat is served in a big dish and the men use their own knives to cut it. The other food is served on individual enamel plates. There is no sorghum beer, though. Instead they serve the brandy brought by Dalton.

“I had hoped our daughter-in-law would cook us her usual specialty of abalone, mussels, and oysters fried with onion and served with samp,” says Dalton as he munches away.

“This child of Dalton!” exclaims the uncle. “Where do you come from? Don’t you know that our custom demands that on occasions like this, proper meat should be served and not your snakes from the sea?”

They all laugh and say that young people like to change tradition. They roar even more when one of them makes the observation that both their new son-in-law and Dalton are not so young, but are middle-aged, and should in fact be preserving customs instead of trying to change them.

“Don’t allow our daughter to cut any more trees,” an aunt advises Camagu, “otherwise you will run around in court all your life.”

“By the way, what happened to her case?” asks the uncle.

“It just fizzled out. No one talks of it anymore,” says Zim proudly. “That Unbeliever Bhonco tried very hard to resuscitate it. But the elders of the village have more important things to deal with.”

The talk turns to that evil Bhonco and his Cult of the Unbelievers. The gathering mocks the folly of unbelief. They ridicule their rituals and praise the abaThwa for taking back their dance. They curse Bhonco’s forebears for refusing to kill their cattle, thus destroying the
amaXhosa nation. The Unbeliever’s foolish forebears must take the responsibility for the failure of the prophecies.

“I for one think that on this matter of Nongqawuse, Bhonco has a point,” says Dalton quite unwisely. “It is your forebears who were foolish for killing their cattle.”

They look at him as if he has uttered the worst of blasphemies. Camagu suspects that the brandy has run to his head. No sober man, no sane man, can risk saying anything nice about Bhonco in the midst of such hard-core Believers. He is fortunate that they are in such a good mood after the successful negotiations that went completely in their favor. Otherwise they would be eating him alive. Instead of making a meal of him, they are dumbfounded.

“Has this child of Dalton been bought by the Unbelievers? Didn’t you tell me that he is on the side of the Believers, Zim?” asks the uncle.

“He is a fickle man,” says Zim.

Dalton doesn’t seem to notice the stir he has caused. He just goes on gulping his brandy and talking in a very careless manner.

“No, I am not fickle. And I am not on the side of the Believers. Neither is Camagu. We just happen to agree with you, or you with us, on this matter of development, of preserving the indigenous trees, plants, animals, and birds. That is all. We are not Nongqawuse’s people.”

“Well, John, this is not the time and the place to argue about such things,” Camagu pleads.

“The truth must be told, Camagu,” says Dalton. “Otherwise they will be expecting you to participate in their quarrels and their rituals.”

“This child of Dalton says our forebears were foolish,” says Zim sadly. “Is that why his forebears cooked them?”

“Will you ever forget about that?” appeals Dalton. “You people are just like Bhonco. Whenever we don’t see eye to eye on the smallest of things, you bring up this cooking business!”

“Foolish?” ponders the uncle. “Our belief is foolish? This child of Dalton has been bought by the Unbelievers.”

“No, he did not mean it that way, my fathers,” says Camagu. “There is nothing foolish about belief.”

“Nothing foolish about belief!” exclaims Dalton incredulously.
“Dead people and cattle rising from the sea! And you say there is nothing foolish about that?”

“If your Christ can walk on the sea and turn water into wine, so can Nongqawuse’s cattle rise from the sea,” declares Zim. “And they did rise. People saw them, didn’t they? Even kings like Sarhili saw them. There were witnesses to these miracles, in the same way that your Christ had witnesses to his. Of course, the cattle rose only to prove the truth of the prophecies. They rose only to be seen among the waves, then went back to the world of the ancestors. They would not have gone back if the Unbelievers had not continued to unbelieve.”

“The old man is putting it well,” says Camagu. “Believers are sincere in their belief. In this whole matter of Nongqawuse I see the sincerity of belief, John. It is the same sincerity of belief that has been seen throughout history and continues to be seen today where those who believe actually see miracles. The same sincerity of belief that causes thousands to commit mass suicide by drinking poison in Jonestown, Guyana, because the world is coming to an end . . . or that leads men, women, and children to die willingly in flames with their prophet, David Koresh, in Waco, Texas.”

“I do not know if you can compare our prophets with prophets who come from white people’s books,” says the uncle.

“What I am saying is that it is wrong to dismiss those who believed in Nongqawuse as foolish,” says Camagu. “Her prophecies arose out of the spiritual and material anguish of the amaXhosa nation.”

Dalton feels betrayed. It is fine to humor these people sometimes, to go along with their foibles before putting them on the correct path. But this Camagu seems to believe what he is saying. He is not merely ingratiating himself with his in-laws. He speaks with conviction. The Believers, on the other hand, hear his words. But they don’t mean anything to them. Educated people, they say, like to mystify the most straightforward of things. To cloud them with meaningless words.

“You know very well, Camagu, that Nongqawuse was a little girl who craved attention,” Dalton says. “She had vaguely heard of the teachings of Nxele about the resurrection . . . and the Christian version of it, as her uncle had been a Christian at some stage. She therefore
decided to concoct her own theology . . . which gathered momentum as she gained more prestige as a great prophetess. These were the delusions of a young girl!”

This Dalton does not give up. His tongue becomes more careless as the bottles get emptier and as the sun creeps towards its resting place.

“Miracles are miracles, John. She was a young girl, yes, and young girls are prone to seeing visions,” says Camagu.

“If somebody I know who is a principal at the secondary school were here, she would tell you that the statement you have just made is highly sexist,” laughs Dalton.

“It is true, you know? Who’s always seeing visions of the Virgin Mary? Young girls. Our Lady of Fatima . . . our lady of this and that. . . all places where young virgins saw visions of the Virgin!”

The following day Camagu is shamefaced. He sits on the stoop while the rays of the morning sun warm his naked torso. He regrets that he argued with Dalton at Zim’s place. They made fools of themselves in the presence of his in-laws. They must have sounded arrogant and vain, arguing about people’s beliefs as if they were the fountains of all wisdom. Blabbering in loud voices while the elders watched in undisguised disgust. No wonder they have no respect for so-called educated people. It was all Dalton’s fault. He was drunk. Camagu himself did not touch the brandy at all, although he got louder with those who did. Dalton was gulping it like water. By the time they left he was staggering and singing boisterously.

He is thinking of how he will redeem himself to his in-laws when Dalton arrives in his four-wheel-drive bakkie. The trader is in a jolly mood. He greets Camagu and carries on about the great success of their mission yesterday. He stops when he sees that Camagu is sullen.

“What is wrong, man? What have they done to you now?”

“You embarrassed me yesterday.”

“Is that how you thank me for getting you a bride?”

“You got too drunk. What will those people think of us?”

“Those people are my people, man. I know them. They know me. I grew up with them. I am one of them. I do not know why you should
be concerned how I behave when I am with them. Anyway, I came to talk about the plans you outlined at the meeting the other day.”

“Ja. What about them?”

Dalton says he has thought long and hard about them. He feels that they are good. But they can still be improved. Instead of building a backpackers’ hostel with self-catering chalets for nature-loving tourists, they should construct a cultural village owned and operated by the villagers. He already has two formidable women in NoManage and NoVangeli who are experienced in entertaining tourists by displaying cultural performances and practices of the amaXhosa. This is a proven kind of business. Tourists like visiting such cultural villages to see how the people live. The village will have proper isiXhosa huts rather than the newfangled hexagons that are found all over Qolorha. Women will wear traditional isiXhosa costumes as their forebears used to wear. They will grind millet and polish the floors with cow dung. They will draw patterns on the walls with ochre of different colors. There will be displays of clay pots and other earthenware items. Tourists will flock to watch young maidens dance and young men engage in stick fights. They will see the abakhwetha initiates whose bodies are covered in white ochre. They will learn how the amaXhosa of the wild coast live.

“The abakhwetha initiates? Right there in the middle of the cultural village? What will the initiates be doing in the village?” wonders Camagu.

“These will be actors, man, not the real abakhwetha.”

“Then we won’t be showing the tourists the true picture of how the amaXhosa live. In the real-life situation you don’t find abakhwetha hanging around the village, women in their best amahomba costumes grinding millet and decorating walls, while maidens are dancing, and right there in front of the house young men are fighting with sticks. It’s too contrived.”

“That’s the purpose of a cultural village: to show various aspects of the people’s culture in one place.”

“That’s dishonest. It is just a museum that pretends that is how people live. Real people in today’s South Africa don’t lead the life that is seen in cultural villages. Some aspects of that life perhaps are true. But the bulk of what tourists see is the past. . . a lot of it an imaginary
past. They must be honest and say that they are attempting to show how people used to live. They must not pretend that’s how people live now.”

“It seems you intend to oppose everything that I come up with,” says Dalton bitterly. “First it was my water project, now you knock down things I have been doing successfully here with NoManage and NoVangeli long before you came to this village.”

“I am just saying I have a problem with your plans. It is an attempt to preserve folk ways. . . to reinvent culture. When you excavate a buried precolonial identity of these people . . . a precolonial authenticity that is lost. . . are you suggesting that they currently have no culture . . . that they live in a cultural vacuum?”

“Now you sound like Xoliswa Ximiya!”

“Xoliswa Ximiya is not capable of saying what I have just said. She talks of civilization, by which she means what she imagines to be western civilization. I am interested in the culture of the amaXhosa as they live it today, not yesterday. The amaXhosa people are not a museum piece. Like all cultures, their culture is dynamic.”

“I know what you are trying to do, Camagu. You are shooting down my ideas because you want to promote your own cooperative society. You want to benefit alone with your women. I heard that your lackeys, MamCirha and NoGiant, were trying to recruit NoVangeli and NoManage.”

“I don’t know what you are on about. What would we want with NoManage and NoVangeli? We are in the business of harvesting the sea and manufacturing isiXhosa attire and jewelry, not of milking gullible tourists.”

“You want everything for yourself. You don’t want me to have a piece of the action. You are greedy! My people will not allow you to get away with this. My people love me.”

“Your people love you because you do things for them. I am talking of self-reliance where people do things for themselves. You are thinking like the businessman you are . . . you want a piece of the action. I do not want a piece of any action. This project will be fully owned by the villagers themselves and will be run by a committee elected by them in the true manner of cooperative societies.”

In no time the village is talking of the fallout between Camagu and Dalton. It is interpreted by the villagers as a power struggle. The Unbelievers are happy that at last they will be able to break the Believers. As long as those who oppose the gambling paradise fight among themselves and are divided into two camps, the plans to develop the village towards the path of civilization will proceed smoothly. Soon the surveyors will be coming.

Tongues wag in all directions. Some say Dalton is jealous of Camagu’s success with the women’s cooperative society. Dalton is not satisfied with owning Vulindlela Trading Store. He wants to own everything else in the village. Dalton’s supporters, on the other hand, claim that Camagu is trying to take over all aspects of the tourist trade, including the cultural tourism of NoManage and NoVangeli. Camagu came all the way from Johannesburg to plant the seed of division in the clan of the amaGcaleka. He is so ungrateful, after Dalton set him up in Qolorha, bought him a cottage, and even got him a bride.