by Gaile Parkin
Today they had dropped Titi at the supermarket, and Mama and Henry would be collecting her from there. Mama was having a driving lesson in the Saturday morning traffic of the capital city for the first time ever, and she had been too nervous to eat her breakfast.
‘What are you expecting?’ Baba had asked her. ‘New York rush hour?’
‘Of course not, Pius, we’re in Africa. You’ve seen how bad the traffic gets in Dar.’
‘Dar es Salaam is the biggest city in East Africa, Angel. There are somewhere round two million people living there – twice as many as live in the whole of Swaziland. And not everybody in Swaziland drives a vehicle. Eh, here people are lucky if they have a wheelbarrow to push!’
‘Please eat, Mama,’ Benedict had said. He knew from Baba that they were lucky to get breakfast and that most of the people they shared the continent with didn’t. Most were lucky to get just one meal a day.
‘Please, Auntie,’ Titi had tried. ‘At least have more tea.’
‘I can’t.’ Mama had pushed her empty mug away and put a hand to her stomach.
‘Eh, Mama!’ Grace had said. ‘Being nervous could help you to reduce.’
Mama had given Grace one of her looks that said she must be very careful what she said next. Then Daniel and Moses had asked if they could share Mama’s bread and she had let them, and Baba had thrown his hands in the air and muttered something about Mama not blaming anybody but herself if she fainted behind the wheel and killed somebody.
At the library, Benedict volunteered to stand in line at the counter with all the books they were returning, because he wanted to ask the librarian for some information on King Solomon. There hadn’t been much in the encyclopaedias at home, little more than the story that Benedict already knew from the Bible. Two ladies had said that a baby was theirs, and they had gone to King Solomon so that he could say who the real mother was, but he had said he would cut the baby in two so that they could share. The lady who had said no, he mustn’t cut the baby in two, he must rather let the other lady have the whole baby, that lady was really the baby’s mother. The story showed that King Solomon was wise.
The librarian recommended a storybook called King Solomon’s Mines. It hadn’t been taken out and it hadn’t been stolen, so that was what he chose. He showed it to Baba, even though he knew that Baba wasn’t interested in storybooks; Baba was busy looking at the books that people had written about their own lives.
A voice close behind them said, ‘Sanbonani! Hello,’ and they both swung round.
‘Dr Mazibuko!’
‘Uncle Enock!’
‘And how are my tenants this morning?’
‘Fine,’ said Baba. ‘And how are you?’
‘Tip top.’
‘We don’t normally see you here.’
‘It’s not my natural habitat!’ He winked Benedict, who smiled back at him. ‘I’m just from the bank. I saw the Microbus outside and I came in to check if you were here.’
‘Shh!’ A Mzungu woman sitting with a newspaper looked at them angrily over her shoulder.
Uncle Enock said eish! very quietly and the three of them moved closer to the open door. His voice was a whisper when he continued.
‘Benedict’s duck may be well enough to come home today. I’m on my way to check on her. Do you want to come with me, Benedict?’
It was the most wonderful news! Benedict had rescued the duck from the dam some time back, sure that she was on her way to being late. Uncle Enock had said he would try to save her, though he had warned him that there wasn’t very much hope.
‘Please, Baba!’
‘Shh!’
‘Of course. Here, give me your book, I’ll take it home for you.’
Uncle Enock’s bakkie was big and powerful, just like Uncle Enock himself. Benedict strapped himself in, and as they set off together he checked how much traffic there was in Mbabane for Mama to be coping with. It was nothing like it could get back in Dar, though it was a little crowded and confused at the circle near the market where the United Nations had sponsored a wall with a picture painted on it. It was a picture about a bad disease, and it showed the planet Earth with Africa on it, and the flag of Swaziland and a person and a mask both crying. There was a skinny, skinny person wearing a white robe, with black letters on it saying hospital bed, diarrhea, weight loss, TB, sores, death, and behind the skinny person there was a casket and a gravestone that said RIP. It was a scary picture, and Benedict didn’t like to look at it.
They didn’t talk much to each other on the way out of Mbabane, on account of Uncle Enock talking to the other vehicles and shouting at many of them.
‘Now what are you trying to do?’ he asked a dark blue Mazda. ‘Oh, I see.’ His voice rose to a shout. ‘Why don’t you bloody indicate?’
‘No, no, no,’ he said to a minibus taxi. ‘This is my lane, don’t you dare! Hey! Hey! Hey!’ He slammed his hand down on the hooter as the taxi squeezed in front of them anyway.
‘Come on, try a little harder,’ he said kindly to the old bakkie in front of them that was struggling to get up to the crest of the Malagwane Hill on the outskirts of the city. ‘You’re way too old to be carrying so many people on your back.’
Benedict asked him if he always spoke to vehicles in English, and Uncle Enock laughed and said he was sure that vehicles wouldn’t understand siSwati, and since he himself spoke no Japanese or German, English was probably best.
Over the crest of the hill they went, and the road sloped down steeply, twisting and turning. Just near the turn-off to the Baha’i centre they stopped to buy some new chicken-houses from a boy who was selling them at the roadside. Quite a few chickens lived down near the dairy, sleeping in round houses woven from dried grass just like the ones Uncle Enock was buying. They laid their eggs in there, too. Auntie Rachel ate a lot of eggs on account of not eating any meat.
Mama had been afraid that Benedict might want to become a vegetarian, especially after meeting Auntie Rachel, who had seen too many animals killed for food on her parents’ farm. But Benedict had told her no, if he did that, when his time came to get confirmed in the church, he wouldn’t be able to join Mama, Baba and his sisters in having parts of Jesus. And yes, there were animals that didn’t eat meat, animals like cows and giraffes, but there were also plenty of animals like lions that ate meat, and birds that ate fish.
‘People are animals, too, Mama,’ he had assured her, ‘and people are supposed to be omnibus.’ She had given him one of her looks that said she wasn’t quite sure if what he had said was a good thing or a bad thing, but she had said she was happy.
Uncle Enock wasn’t a vegetarian. Being a vegetarian was un-Swazi, and something un-Swazi was a very bad thing for a Swazi to do.
When they turned off the busy new highway onto the old road through the Ezulwini Valley, the Valley of Heaven, there were fewer cars to shout at and Benedict felt that it was okay to talk.
‘Uncle Enock, you know King Martin Luther Junior?’
‘Er... you mean Martin Luther King Junior?’
‘Mm. I found him in the encyclopaedias when I was looking for King Solomon.’
Uncle Enock shouted at a bus to stay on its own bloody side of the road. It was coming towards them at an angle: the wheels were heading in the right direction, but the body seemed to be trying to cross over to the far side of Uncle Enock’s lane. When they had passed it safely, Benedict continued.
‘It said he tried to get respect for black people in America.’
‘Respect and rights, nè?’
‘Mm. That law in South Africa, that law that said you and Auntie Rachel weren’t allowed to fall in love. Did they have it in America too?’
‘It wasn’t quite the same law, but the effect was the same. I’m not sure you went to jail for loving somebody different, but a mob might have killed you.’
‘Eh!’
‘If your indicator doesn’t work, stick your bloody arm out of the window!’ The Toyota in front of them was dead still;
it was waiting to turn right onto the road to the Calabash Restaurant, where rich people ate. Baba had eaten there once with the minister, but their cakes weren’t as nice as Mama’s.
‘Did they have a law like that anywhere else?’
‘Eish, ask Rachel and her mom what happened to their Jewish ancestors in Germany!’
Auntie Rachel’s mother, Mrs Levine, had been with her in the yellow Hi-Ace after school on Friday with her suitcase in the back, straight from the airport in Matsapha. The Mazibuko children had been happy – though surprised – to see their Gogo Levine. She was friendly enough, though the tight, straight line of her mouth told Benedict that something was making her angry. He really didn’t feel like asking her about her ancestors.
Uncle Enock went on. ‘But you know, I doubt you should be using past tense about these things. You’ve done past tense at school, nè?’
‘Mm.’
‘People are not everywhere respected. People are not everywhere free. What? What? You’re a luxury tourist bus and you can’t afford brake-lights?’
The bus in front of them was pulling off the road near the big hotels so that tourists could look at the things for sale at the long line of wooden roadside stalls. Sellers hurried towards the bus, hoping to lead the tourists to their own stall and persuade them to buy their own hand-made baskets, clay pots and carvings of wood or stone, or their own selection of brightly coloured cloths. Mama had bought some of the cloths to wear as kangas tied around her waist, which she said was a much more comfortable and sensible way to dress at home than a smart, tight skirt.
‘Do you mean like a shangaan or a kwerekwere not being respected here?’ Benedict asked.
‘Eish, thanks God you’re here and not South Africa! That side a mob can kill a kwerekwere!’
‘Eh!’
‘Here we’ll just be rude to you or send you home.’ He slammed his foot on the brake. ‘Are you bloody blind? How can you just turn in front of me like that?’ He swerved to overtake the tractor that had joined their road from a side road and was now barely moving on account of the driver being busy with his cell-phone. ‘No, as Swazis we’re too peaceful. Our last king, this king’s daddy, on his memorial it’s written I have no enemy. But there’s ever a problem for outsiders, nè? Everywhere. What would you call me if I came as a Swazi to live in Tanzania?’
‘Welcome,’ said Benedict, and Uncle Enock laughed, even though Benedict hadn’t said anything funny.
‘But it’s been okay for you at school, nè?’
‘Mm, except when they thought Baba was the Pipi Doctor.’
Uncle Enock looked at him and began to laugh again.
Benedict had read about the Pipi Doctor in the Times of Swaziland that Baba brought home from work for Mama every day. That doctor had come from Tanzania to Manzini, the big commercial town down at the end of the highway, and everybody called him the Pipi Doctor because he was doing special operations on men to make their pipi bigger. Some days the newspaper said that men wanted him to go home and ladies wanted him to stay, but other days it said that ladies wanted him to go home and men wanted him to stay. Now ministers in parliament were going to decide for everybody if he should stay or go.
At school all the children knew that the Tungarazas were from Tanzania, but only some of them knew that Baba was Dr Tungaraza. Those children had done what Baba called adding two to two and getting six instead of four, which is a way of saying they had looked at the evidence and then guessed wrong.
Eventually Mrs Dlamini had spoken to the whole school and explained to everybody that you could be called Dr Somebody if you had read a lot of books and been to school for a long time, or you could be called Dr Somebody if you knew how to help sick people and to do operations, so Dr Tungaraza wasn’t even the same kind of doctor as the Tanzanian doctor in Manzini. She never said Pipi Doctor, but everybody had known and some of the older ones had giggled. But after that they had stopped asking Benedict about his pipi.
Uncle Enock was finding it difficult to stop laughing. He would say he was sorry and try to keep quiet, but then he would start up again. His laughter was like a cold that somebody else could catch, and soon Benedict began to laugh with him.
He managed not to laugh when he saw Execution Rock, the high, rocky mountaintop that long-ago criminals got pushed off. It was also called Nyonyane, meaning little bird, on account of the criminals looking like little birds on their way down from the top. But when Uncle Enock was too busy laughing to shout at the minibus taxi that overtook them at high speed when another was coming towards them, Benedict began to laugh again.
Crossing the bridge over the Lusushwana River, they both took in great gulps of air, filling their lungs to calm themselves, and Uncle Enock asked for one of the tissues from the cubbyhole to wipe his eyes. Benedict handed him one then used the end of his T-shirt himself.
He was calm enough to be respectful when they passed the Royal Kraal of the late King Sobhuza II, who was the father of Mswati III, the current king. Some of the late king’s wives had lived there, but only twenty-six of them; the other forty-four had lived in other places. King Sobhuza II had been a bit like King Solomon, who the encyclopaedia said had had seven hundred wives.
Benedict couldn’t imagine having more than one mama. Okay, he had had a first mama, and then he had got a new mama, but they hadn’t both been his mamas at the same time and in the same house. Say you lived in the Royal Kraal with twenty-six mamas. How would you ever be able to read a book without a mama calling you to do something? And say each mama had children. How many brothers and sisters would you have? How would you ever get time to be alone with butterflies and birds and all the other creatures God had made? Imagine!
Before they got as far as the big fruit and vegetable market at Mahlanya, they had to slow right down, on account of cattle being in the road. Bearing long, curved horns as far apart at the tips as Uncle Enock’s shoulders, some black, some chocolate, some the colour of peanut sauce, they ambled slowly, not seeming to be going anywhere in particular. One or two cars hooted at them impatiently, but Uncle Enock let them be.
Then they saw a tiny boy, smaller than Moses or Daniel, running barefoot down towards them from round the slight bend in the road just before the market. Though winter had already begun, the boy was naked except for a tattered old pair of brown shorts. He carried in one hand as he ran a long branch from a willow tree, all its leaves pulled off, while in the other hand he clutched a mealie with blackened seeds that had been roasted over a fire.
Before he reached the cattle, the boy began shouting and waving his willow-branch in the air, and the huge creatures listened to him and began to move slowly off the road. As the cars began to move again, the boy bit into his mealie.
‘Eish, the cops aren’t going to be happy,’ Uncle Enock said.
And they weren’t. Vehicles were only just beginning to get going again as they rounded the bend, so the police waiting there with their radar machine weren’t going to get any money out of any of them. Baba said the radar machine didn’t work properly: everybody Baba knew who had got caught had exactly the same speed written on their ticket, which couldn’t be possible on account of statistics. Anyway, somebody at Baba’s work had a cousin in the police who could make a ticket go away for a lot less than half of what the ticket cost.
Two of the police at the side of the road were buying mealies from a man who was roasting them at the edge of the market. Benedict hoped that the man had given the mealie to the small boy herding the cattle rather than making him buy it. It wasn’t right for a man with a mealie-roasting business to take money for food from a child who didn’t have shoes.
They turned off the old road, Uncle Enock shouting at a pineapple-laden bakkie that was supposed to stop for them but didn’t, and a short distance further, just before the small settlement called Malkerns where pineapples were put into cans, they pulled up outside Uncle Enock’s work.
Inside, an old woman waited with a nervous, skinny dog, while a
man sat with a lamb lying across his lap like a rag. The receptionist told Uncle Enock that Dr Mamba was at the back. Benedict wasn’t sure that Dr Mamba was a good name for a vet. A mamba was a kind of snake: there was a green mamba and a black mamba. Both had a head the shape of a casket, and both could kill a person or any other animal very quickly.
At the back, Dr Mamba was giving an injection to a goat that lay shivering in a wheelbarrow, while a young man watched anxiously. Benedict left the two doctors to talk and ran to the holiday home for pets at the end of the property.
The long building making a T with the rear wall had dogs on one side and cats on the other. Lining the side wall that faced the section for dogs was another row of dog accommodation, while lining the side wall facing the cats was accommodation for the manager of the holiday home and space for him to prepare the animals’ food.
Benedict began in the dog section, where each animal had its own little house to sleep in at the back in a covered area protected from the rain, and a patch of grass to play on at the front. Most of them had brought their favourite blanket from home and one or two of their toys to play with. Benedict knew without having to think about it that he would bring his cushion and the bookshelf full of books.
The first dog, an old black Labrador, came to the chicken-wire at the front of its cage wagging its tail, and licked his hand. The two small brown-and-white dogs next door jumped high in the air like Maasai men, straight up and down, barking at him like he was a robber and everybody must wake up and call the police. All the other dogs joined in, even the tiny one that was a ball of fluffy white curls with a purple bow on its head.
In the section opposite, a huge brown and black creature barked with a very deep voice, curling back its lips and showing Benedict its enormous teeth. He moved round to where the cats were.
Dogs and cats didn’t like each other much; he knew that. Not unless they had been raised together and they had grown up understanding and respecting each other. Then they could be good friends; they could lie down together like the lion and the lamb in the Bible. But while they didn’t trust each other, it was best for them to holiday separately.
