He gripped the handlebar of his heavy cart and began pushing it down the aisle. I stood and watched him, a hunched, laboring figure. He had spoken from the depths of his gut, from a place that does not usually find expression in words.
He had likened himself to an ox once before, outside the clinic, when he said he could not countenance the thought of the virus in his veins. Then, as now, he conjured an ox as a metaphor for a castrated man: castrated not in the sense that he cannot father children, but in the sense that he cannot father children he can claim as his own—a man without descendants and thus without permanence, a man who will leave in this world only his rotting corpse.
Today, he meant precisely the same thing when he spoke of an ox, but his words were more powerful. Back at the clinic, the oxen were young men with AIDS. Now he was speaking of his entire generation, and perhaps the last one, too. The erosion of marriage, which followed the decline of working land and jobs, had spawned lives without meaning or permanence. He and his peers risked living like animals who labor and then die. When he skipped two generations in his search for material with which to model his adulthood, he had in his mind an epoch when men were homestead patriarchs and left a lasting mark on the world.
I guess there is nothing remarkable in this. Pondoland was battered and shaken and gutted during the course of the twentieth century. It is unsurprising that among its heirs are young men of conservative bent who scour the recent past for better times: men intent on shoring up as unscathed an image of patriarchy as they can muster.
Yet for me it was a moment of revelation; it helped me make some sense of a person with whom I had spent a great deal of time, and over whom I had puzzled. Among the things I learned was that Sizwe was investing the profits of his shop in something at once material and metaphysical. Most men his age could not afford to marry, could not afford to sire children who would bear their names. Sizwe could follow the trajectory he imagined because he was lucky or smart or single-minded enough to earn a reasonable living. He had invested his profits in a proper marriage, in children who would be born Magadlas, and in a growing bundle of assets that they would inherit. He had, with his profits, begun to fashion his own permanence in these Transkei hills.
I think I understand a little better now what Sizwe was feeling that day outside the clinic when he refused the invitation to test for HIV. He was, of course, feeling many things, some of which I have yet to explore, others that I will never know. But whatever else it meant to him, being HIV-positive was a curse that one carries in one’s semen and thus that one might transmit to one’s children. He believed a diagnosis of HIV-positive would entail putting off his impending marriage, to Nwabisa or to any other woman, and sitting out a life that produced no more Magadlas. The corrosiveness of AIDS was expressed in the wasting away, not only of one’s body, but of one’s lineage, and, thus too, of the lineage of the dead ones who walked this earth in years gone by.
I wonder, then, whether at one level AIDS ought to be understood as a metaphor that describes the fate of the men of Sizwe’s generation. Their fate is to fail to procreate as patriarchs do. AIDS represents this failure as a disease. In retrospect, once the epidemic has come, it perhaps brings with it the illusion that it was destined for these people in these times.
Progeny
The maternity nurse at the clinic had told Nwabisa that she would go into labor on or around January 18, 2006. On the morning of the 12th, Nwabisa packed a small bag and walked out of Ithanga with Sizwe. They caught a taxi to town, and then another to Nwabisa’s mother’s village, where they were met by members of her family and by the traditional midwife who would deliver the baby. Sizwe stayed long enough to chat, and to receive a light meal. Then he and Nwabisa said farewell shyly, and a little stiffly, the expression of their emotions inhibited by the gathering around them. He got into a taxi, went home, and waited for news.
Among the precolonial Mpondo practices that weathered the twentieth century is the banishment of fathers from the births of their children. The mother returns to her parental home to prepare for labor. The child’s father can only begin visiting on the eighth day after the birth. Even then, he is to cover his entire body, save his head, for the duration of his visit, to speak only in hushed and deferential tones, and to stay as briefly as possible. He certainly cannot spend the night. His wife and child return to his home a month or two later.
Sizwe waited longer than he had expected. On the 21st, a hand-delivered note brought him news that he had a son, and that mother and child were both healthy. During the days that followed, a succession of windswept and hungry children arrived at his door, each clutching a note that bore more news. The second letter informed him that while the infant was not gravely ill, he was not quite well, either. He had a fierce rash on his skin, and it was making him miserable; he spent much of his waking time crying.
Nwabisa’s family was poor. They would gratefully receive advice and herbs from their traditional nurse, but no more. Sizwe shoved a wad of banknotes into an envelope, wrote a letter asking Nwabisa to take the boy to a general practitioner in town, and handed his package to the child messenger who was gulping down a plate of food at Sizwe’s table. He watched the child leave, then closed his door and paced his bedroom.
Beside himself with worry and impatience, he decided on waking the following morning to break ranks with custom and to see his child. He went into town, made his way to the doctor’s rooms, and found Nwabisa in the waiting room, clutching a bundle. He would discover, during the course of the morning, that it weighed about seven pounds.
ON THE EIGHTH morning after she had given birth, I drove Sizwe to Nwabisa and his son, Mfanawetu—“Our Boy.” It was a long drive. As the crow flies, Nwabisa’s family’s village was eleven miles from Ithanga. By car it was nearly four times that.
The gravel road ended about a hundred feet from the entrance to the Mabaso homestead. I turned off the ignition and we sat and watched. When his child is but eight days old, a father does not casually wander into his wife’s parents’ homestead. He waits to be invited.
It was an unforgivingly hot late January day. The radio weather report had put the temperature at equal to ninety degrees Fahrenheit. In the car, with the sun pummeling our roof and no trace of a shadow, it was much hotter than that. The homestead was still; not a soul was to be seen. To pass the time, we spoke of Ithanga’s dogs. Sizwe said they were all devoted to him, even the dogs of his enemies. His grandfather had taught him a secret. Wipe your face with a towel, squeeze the sweat in the towel onto a dog’s bowl of food, and then feed him. He will be yours forever.
The better part of an hour passed before a young girl, seven or eight years old, appeared from one of the Mabaso huts. She spotted our car and came over. Sizwe began speaking with her, and as I listened, I was struck by his tone. He addressed her with the deference he usually reserves for an elder, his chin bowed, his eyes lowered, his voice a cautious murmur. Watching him perform thus for a young child, I began to appreciate for the first time the full weight of the journey we had just made.
The girl went inside, reappeared a moment later, and signaled for us to come. As we got out of the car, Sizwe donned a heavy, thigh-length winter’s coat, an ostentatious observance, I thought, of the stricture that a father cover his body at his infant’s birthplace.
I walked several paces behind him. Watching him make his way to Nwabisa’s hut I was struck by an odd thought. Just a few years ago Sizwe strolled through young women’s homesteads with the confidence of a youthful hunter, his primary thought the prospect of seducing his target from her parents’ home. Now he made his way furtively to Nwabisa’s hut, his body concealed in a greatcoat and stewing in the heat, his countenance one of splaying humility in the face of a timeless tradition. I was struck by the immense disciplining power of the respectable patriarchy to which Sizwe had attached his worth. It had the power to tame libido, to dampen exuberance, to get a man to sublimate the substance of his being into the pursuit of
a distant horizon.
YET IF SIZWE was emulating his grandparents inasmuch as he needed to marry, to command a patriarchal homestead, and to have descendants, his identification with them was by no means whole. In some respects, the marriage he was erecting with Nwabisa scorned the men who came before him.
Walking through the river basin at the bottom of Ithanga early that morning, Sizwe began talking of Vuyani, the grandfather whose corpse he believed to have been brained in the morgue.
“That man was crazy for his love potions,” he said. “He was always spending a lot of his money on the medicines that make the women want to have sex with you. And then with his medicines in his bag he would go traveling. Even in my time, when he was already old, he would go traveling very far.
“He would leave Ithanga one morning and head south. Days later he would come back from the north. He had slept with so many women. That is why he had five wives. He liked sex too much. And maybe that is why we are poor, why he could not leave us more money—life was too expensive with all of his women.”
It is an accusation Sizwe has also made against his father. When the family was slipping into penury, Buyisile’s interminable training as a diviner was one reason. Another, according to Sizwe, was his many lovers, and the cost of maintaining them.
“If AIDS had come during your grandparents’ generation,” I asked, “would it have been worse than now?”
“Yo! So much worse. They all would have been dead. You sit down with an old man, any old man, when he is drunk, and he will tell you that the young generation are isishumane, we are scared of girls compared to them.”
“You are consciously living your life in the opposite way to your dad and granddad,” I said.
“Yes. They needed many women. I need one woman.”
“What makes you different to them?”
“Two things,” he replied crisply. “The first is AIDS. It has terrified us. My grandparents were lucky to live in those times. They got sick from the sexually transmitted infections, but they were not killed by them. Us, we die.
“The second is education. An educated person does not sleep with everybody and lose his money. He learns to save, to think of the future, to invest in his family. Look at me. If my father and grandfather had thought of the future, maybe I would have had a proper education. Maybe I would be a schoolteacher now.”
It was a damning indictment of Vuyani and his generation. On the one hand, they were the real patriarchs, fathers of true descendants, investing their living years in their futures beyond the grave. And yet they squandered their assets and left their progeny destitute because they could not keep their pants zipped. It is the sort of paradox that makes for satire.
By the time we reached the edge of Ithanga it was about 7:30 A.M., and the sun had scaled the tallest of the hills on the village’s eastern flank. We passed Simlindile’s new spaza shop. It was boarded up and deserted. Sizwe nodded his head at it.
“That one,” he said, “he is like the men from my grandfather’s time. He will never be successful because he is spending at least half of his time making new children for this village. Look at his place. The sun is up, the people are walking past his shop to get the transport, and he is too tired from all his activities to wake up and open his shop.”
YET IN OTHER respects, Sizwe’s idea of a marriage was one his forebears would have recognized and approved of. About six weeks before the day we went to visit Nwabisa and her new son, as she entered the eighth month of her pregnancy, the question of maternity leave from her job at the forestry station arose. She had told her employer that she wanted a month’s paid leave. He demurred. He said that if she left work for a month, she would not be paid. If she stayed away for more than a month, she would lose her job.
“It does not really matter,” Sizwe told me when I asked whether the impasse had been resolved. “We will be married soon, and after we are married she will not work.”
He said it so matter-of-factly that I simply took it for granted, and when I saw Nwabisa the following day I asked her casually whether she was looking forward to putting the forestry station behind her.
She looked up in surprise. Momentarily, her brow creased in anger.
“It has not been decided that I am leaving,” she said evenly. “It is a difficult decision.”
Uncomfortable with the rising tension, I began to talk to her of other things.
When I saw Sizwe the following day he told me that he and Nwabisa had quarreled after I left. We were driving to Nomvalo to see Kate Marrandi. A forty-five-minute car journey lay before us.
“She did not like that I told you it had already been decided she was leaving her job,” he said.
“I guess she is worried,” I replied. “She has a mother to support, and an eight-year-old son. What if you turn around one day and tell her you will not pay for her child? What will she do if this time next year you are divorced?”
He nodded slowly. “I know. I know that is what she is scared of. But she cannot work after we are married. It is not right.”
“Why?”
“There are several reasons.” He shifted his weight in the passenger seat and leaned forward uncomfortably. “First, if we are to be married successfully, she needs to spend a lot of time with my parents. They must get to know her very well. And the child must spend a lot of his time in the home of his grandparents, where he is close to his ancestors, where they will come to know him well. If Nwabisa is working, she and the child cannot spend much time there.
“Second, I am earning money, not just for myself, but for the whole family, and for the people she supports. It is for all of us. If she was earning a lot of money it would be one thing, but she is earning very little.
“Third, my parents are not educated people. They do not understand a woman going to work. They understand that a woman stays at home and looks after the home. A man goes out to work. That is what they know.
“She must understand that I am serious about marriage. I am very serious. She has seen too many people get married young and then get divorced. It happens with almost everyone who gets married these days. She must understand that this is different. I am not fooling around. I am now of an age where it is a problem if I am not getting married. I cannot be around my parents’ place living with a woman indefinitely. They cannot keep seeing me have one child after another with her when none of these children are their children. I am becoming a respected person. I must get married. The one in Nwabisa’s womb will not be my child because we are not yet married. It is the next child, the one who is born first after we are married who will inherit my homestead and my cattle if I have any cattle.”
I left Lusikisiki the following day and did not return for about two weeks. Sizwe and I spoke several times on the phone. He told me, among other things, that Nwabisa would not be returning to work after the birth of her child. He said it was a joint decision, and that they were both at peace with it.
I returned to Ithanga on a Sunday. Sizwe’s parents had come for lunch. I had brought steaks and boerewors, and Nwabisa fried them in a pan over a gas burner. She did not cook for herself, but saved a piece for later. Nor did she sit with us. She settled in a corner on her own, and took no part in the conversation.
It began to rain heavily while we were eating. We closed the door and spent the afternoon talking and laughing in Sizwe’s small room; our voices mingled with the chatter of the rain on the corrugated iron roof. Buyisile, whose mood always set the tone of any occasion, was full of levity and play. The afternoon passed warmly and intimately.
When the rain stopped, Sizwe saw his parents out, leaving Nwabisa and me alone. She was washing dishes in a large, plastic tub. I was sitting at the opposite end of the room.
“Are you relieved that you are not going back to that job?” I asked lightly.
She continued with her washing, her back turned to me.
“Did Sizwe not tell you our agreement?” she asked.
I said nothing.
<
br /> “He is paying me.” She paused, took a dishcloth off her shoulder, began to wipe a plate, and turned to look at me. “The salary I was earning, plus 15 percent. Did he not tell you that?”
I nodded and gave her a colluding smile, one that signaled that I understood the significance of her victory.
She did not return my smile. She turned her back to me and plunged her hands into the dishwater.
THE YOUNG GIRL who had spotted our car outside the Mabaso homestead left us at the front gate. Like thieves, we stole gingerly toward the hut in which Nwabisa had given birth eight days earlier. Sizwe knocked cautiously on the door.
“Ngena,” we heard. “Come in.”
It was a small, bare room, its only furniture a single bed. Nwabisa was sitting on it, her son cradled in her arms. She looked very tired, but at the sight of Sizwe the weariness in her face quickly gave way to pleasure. She held Sizwe’s gaze for a long time, without blinking, and handed him his child. He drew very close to her, scooped his hands under the bundle, and lifted it up to his chest with exaggerated care, as if it were made of fine crystal, as if he did not trust his hands with this burden, his eyes moving quickly between Nwabisa and his son. I excused myself and left them alone.
Some ten minutes later, Nwabisa emerged and told me to join Sizwe inside. I went in to find him sitting on the bed, holding Mfanawetu in his arms, his face both proud and frightened.
Even in here it was hot, and Sizwe had unswaddled his son’s blankets, leaving him naked. His body was covered in daubs of clay, which the doctor had said would soothe his rash. The rash itself was dying: it had left red-brown flakes and scabs all over his body.
Sizwe ran a finger uncertainly over a flake on his son’s forehead. Then he began picking at it, gently, experimentally. It offered little resistance, peeling off at the lightest touch. Mfanawetu dozed peacefully. Sizwe turned his attention to another scab, then another still. Once he had started, it seemed that he could not stop. He moved from his son’s forehead, to his chest, to his arms, working intently, never looking up.
Sizwe's Test: A Young Man's Journey Through Africa's AIDS Epidemic Page 28
