Sometimes There Is a Void

by Zakes Mda

  The plays were directed by Benjy Francis and opened at the Diepkloof Hall in Soweto. However, I doubt very much if the people of Soweto enjoyed them because they were not the kind of theatre they were used to – with songs and dances à la Gibson Kente. Nevertheless they received extensive coverage in all the newspapers of the time. John Mitchell wrote in the Rand Daily Mail:

  Lesotho-based playwright Zakes Mda claims a special love for the work of Tennessee Williams and Joe Orton, an affinity apparent in his play ‘Dead End’. But perhaps his work is closer to Samuel Beckett – if, indeed, we can draw comparisons between Western and South African black writers.

  It is true that I was much enamoured of the work of the Absurdists, although I didn’t subscribe to any notions of the meaninglessness and hopelessness of life. My plays aimed to show that the struggle for liberation was not futile.

  Later, the plays were transferred to the Market Theatre with Nicholas Ellenbogen himself as the new director. The Space Theatre in Cape Town mounted its own production of We Shall Sing for the Fatherland on a double-bill with Dark Voices Ring directed by Nomhle Nkonyeni and Rob Amato. Amato was also the director of Matsemela Manaka’s plays.

  The success of these plays gave me a new voice. And a new political purpose. I no longer felt guilty for not taking up arms when some of my comrades had gone to join the guerrilla forces. I still strongly believed in the armed struggle – in Dark Voices Ring I actually present the armed struggle as the solution – but I was going to fight with words while others took the guns.

  That was exactly what I told some Peka High School old boys, the so-called MaPeka, when they came to my house under cover of darkness and wearing heavy Basotho blankets to recruit me for combat, as the late Masiu had done when I was teaching at Likhakeng Secondary School a few years earlier. The armed wing of the BCP, the Lesotho Liberation Army (LLA) that had been formed in 1974, was finally preparing to launch guerrilla attacks inside Lesotho to topple the illegitimate government of Chief Leabua Jonathan. Its commander was Sekamane, a fine-featured, light-complexioned and well-heeled man I never imagined as a fighter. But there he was leading blanketed Basotho men, some of whom were my high school friends, to war. I had met Sekamane a few times before but was not on first-name terms with him. The person I knew very well was his sister Limpho, who was Clemoski’s girlfriend. This was before Limpho married Chris Hani.

  Sekamane and his LLA forces had trained under the auspices of the PAC in Libya and other African countries where the PAC had military camps. The MaPeka who came to recruit me never forgot to remind me of that fact, hoping it would arouse my interest.

  ‘Even your friend Jama Mbeki is one of us,’ they told me. ‘We all trained together with the APLA forces.’

  APLA was the Azanian People’s Liberation Army, the PAC military wing that replaced the more peasant-based Poqo.

  No wonder Jama went to Botswana after completing his law studies in England. There was a big community of BCP exiles in Botswana, including the leader Ntsu Mokhehle himself, and his deputy Tseliso Makhakhe. You will remember Tseliso Makhakhe as my Peka High School principal who went with me to confront the Catholic priest, Father Hamel, when I was given the anathema. The command structures of the LLA were in Botswana.

  My enthusiasm for the PAC had waned at this point. But that was not the reason I turned MaPeka down. They should have known by now that I was not prepared to be a warrior. Perhaps they thought I had cultivated more guts since the last time Masiu approached me. But I was not in a fighting state of mind. Even more so now than ever before because I was getting all this new recognition as a writer. My work was getting good reviews and had now been published in a book.

  The Ravan Press publication of my plays was my very first book. I was so proud of it that I took it with me everywhere I went. But the Publications Control Board of the South African government had other ideas. They banned the book, which meant that anyone could go to jail for possessing it. I first learnt of the ban when I chanced upon an article in the Rand Daily Mail with the headline: Black writers lash ban on book. The African Writers’ Association was quoted as saying: We view the banning of Zakes Mda’s book as naked kragdadigheid (brutal force) against another umpteenth black man’s voice through literature. Another view into the black man’s world has been sealed. An article in The Star was headlined Ban on book ‘a show of force’. In the article the president of the writers’ association, Nape Motana, encouraged black writers to disregard the Publications Control Board when they set about writing, adding that: We are proud of Zakes, one of the most prolific breed of young playwrights to emerge in southern Africa. We say to him courage brother, a worthy soldier dies in his boots. In the same newspaper Mike Kirkwood of Ravan Press said We Shall Sing for the Fatherland and Other Plays was the first Ravan Press book to be banned. ‘The ban was completely unjustified,’ he added.

  I was encouraged by all this support and saw myself as a soldier for freedom who was now using other weapons than the AK47, bazooka and grenade.

  I began to take my writing more seriously than my painting. In any event, I was earning good money as the deputy principal and didn’t need to hawk my work to the tourists to make ends meet. I was painting less and less while spending more time at Lancer’s Inn or at ’Mamojela’s. With the recognition I was getting as a playwright I began to focus on writing more plays. I stopped drinking during the week. I sat in the staffroom and worked on play scripts after school. I wrote longhand, and then typed the manuscripts on a typewriter that was placed in the staffroom for the use of teachers. It was slow going because I never learnt to touch type; to this day I use only two fingers, even as I write this book.

  Sometimes Sister Cathy brought me cookies and missal wine and laughed at me, saying that I typed like a hungry hen pecking at scattered grains of corn. She could only pop by in the afternoons because Mother Superior expected her to be at the convent after school for her chores or prayers or whatever nuns did in their cloister.

  One person who spent a lot of time with me was Tholane. You remember the science teacher who was making tea in the principal’s office when Sister Yvonne first arrived?

  Tholane was different from any woman I had known. She spoke her mind, laughed freely without any of the decorum expected in the staffroom of a nun-run Catholic school. She was indeed a free spirit with an impish sense of humour. There was some tomboyishness about her which made her very sexy. I called her Fana, which means ‘boy’; she called me Fana too.

  A passionate and tempestuous relationship developed between us. Unlike my relationship with Sister Cathy, this one was very sexual. I started spending my evenings at her house. Then the nights. This was a very dumb and cruel thing to do because she lived only two houses from the house I shared with Mpho and our three kids. I was blinded by lust for this woman who was so sure of herself, who knew what she wanted and how she wanted it. Through her patience and guidance my ‘little problem’ was cured without much effort and I found myself going all night long with her. And all day long. And all weekend long. Without venturing out. We just couldn’t have enough of each other. It was like I was making up for all the years I had been celibate or had short-changed my partners.

  I was healed! Thanks to Tholane I was healed! I would have turned cartwheels if I could. I would have danced in the clouds. In my mind I did. So this was what I had been missing all along?

  I wrote a poem about the sweet stenches of sex.

  I had never gone for professional counselling when I consistently ejaculated prematurely. But years later, long after I had been healed, I got an opportunity to analyse myself and the roots of my dysfunction. I traced it back to the sexual abuse I suffered as a six-year-old child at the hands of our housemaid Nontonje. I told you that when she grabbed my penis and forced it into her vagina I felt a burning sensation, and after that I couldn’t pee for hours. For days I would pee with difficulty. On looking back, it became clear that my penis had a memory of that pain and every time it had to
face a vagina it associated it with the agony and defended itself by ejaculating immediately and then dying. That was how it saved itself from any prolonged stay inside the inferno. Somehow Tholane had managed to make it trust the darkness inside and to coax it into staying longer and longer until it realised that it was safe and warm and comfortable and very pleasurable. When it was convinced that not all vaginas were as deadly as Nontonje’s it wanted to frolic in there forever.

  There you have it: I was damaged by a woman; I was made whole again by a woman.

  Mpho was bound to find out about my scandalous affair. She yelled and pleaded and threatened and cajoled and cried, and I promised it would stop forthwith. To assure her of the security of our relationship I decided to marry her officially in a civil ceremony after many years of a common law union. On December 22, 1978, we appeared before the District Administrator in Maseru and took our vows. Her twin sister, Mphonyane, and my brother Sonwabo were the witnesses.

  You would have thought after this I would settle down and be a good husband and father, but no, I could not resist sneaking into Tholane’s house after pretending I was going for a drink with my friends. But of course Mpho was not a fool. She could see what was happening and went to Tholane’s house one night and set her bed alight through an open window. Fortunately when this happened neither of us miscreant lovers was there. We were at Clemoski’s house at Lesotho High School making love in one of his three bedrooms. We had taken to camping there for freer romps.

  The nuns didn’t take kindly to their burnt bed. What if the whole house had burnt down? Sister Cathy, especially, looked very disappointed in me. She didn’t say anything. But she no longer gave me cookies and missal wine, and she avoided me. We no longer played innocent ditties together. Sister Yvonne Maes didn’t say anything either, but looked at me as if I stank. The whole atmosphere at Mabathoana High was fetid. And I was responsible for all that. I resigned after serving a month’s notice because I had been promised a job teaching art at the National Teacher Training College. But on the day I was supposed to report for duty I was told the job was no longer available. Apparently the nuns of Mabathoana had given a very bad report about me to the principal of the Teacher Training College. I rented two rooms at Qoaling on the outskirts of Maseru where I moved with my battered family. I went back to being a hustler with my paintings, hoping to get a new job with the Protestants since I had dirtied my name with the Catholics.

  Tholane also resigned from Mabathoana and set off to improve her qualifications. She only had a Secondary Teachers’ Certificate so she went to study for a BSc degree at the National University of Lesotho where she met a law student, fell in love with him, and forgot about me.

  Mpho and Mphonyane took a job with a Danish non-governmental organisation that established kindergartens in Maseru. They worked at a kindergarten that was just over the fence from the rooms we were renting.

  If I thought this was the time to rebuild our lives I was dead wrong. Mpho decided that it was time to avenge herself for all the hurt I had inflicted on her. She and Mphonyane started partying really hard with the Danes. She did not come back home for days on end. But I would see her at the kindergarten during the day. I would wave at her, hoping she would come back home. When she finally did come we had an altercation that almost became physical. She packed all her clothes and the children’s in suitcases and left. She set herself up at the kindergarten next door and sent the kids to live with her mother in that wonderful ‘village of the twins’ that I told you about. I later obtained a court order, thanks to my pseudo-lawyer friend Thabo Sithathi, and got all three kids back and sent them to live with my mother at Holy Cross Mission in southern Lesotho. We were both so irresponsible that we simply dumped our kids with our parents rather than dutifully raising them ourselves.

  Thus I separated from Mpho, without officially divorcing. We had been in a common law union for slightly more than six years and our civil marriage had lasted less than a year. Later I heard she had gone to Haifa University in Israel to study for a certificate in early childhood education.

  I DIDN’T KNOW ANYTHING about this German boy. No one told me he would be coming. But of course the Bee People don’t have to tell me everything they do at their apiary, even though when there are problems they expect me to solve them. I don’t mind pitching in with advice occasionally as long as they realise that they are the final decision makers. It took them a long time to reach this stage where they see themselves as the owners of the project rather than employees. Because I initiated the project, for a long time they couldn’t get used to the idea that I was not their boss. I am not even a shareholder in their business, and all the hives, the buildings, the equipment in them and the truck belong to them and them only.

  The German young man – his name is Christof – is a student back in his own country. He is here as a volunteer to help the villagers in their rural development project. Perhaps it is for credit in some college class. He knows nothing about beekeeping; he majors in development studies or something along those lines. He stays at Morrison Xinindlu’s house. The elder is proud that there is a white man staying at his house. This has increased his prestige in the village.

  The women tell me that Christof is a hard worker. He climbs the mountain with them on foot and carries the heavy supers down to the building where the women extract the honey from the combs, heat it so it doesn’t crystallise and then bottle it.

  But his enthusiasm for the project has placed him at loggerheads with some of the community members. He is not aware that he is being used in local power struggles. I am told that at one stage my Uncle Owen threatened to beat him up because he believed he was inciting the Bee People against him. But what has brought me to Xinindlu’s house to talk to the young man has nothing to do with petty disputes. It has to do with the fact that his zeal has gone too far and I need to find a way of restraining it.

  Apparently he has been spending his evenings writing down rules for the Bee People. As he was working with them he observed problems that in his view were constraining their progress, and he was devising ways to overcome them. He already had a list that included instructions on what time work should start in the morning, and when the women should take a break for lunch and who among them should supervise which aspect of the production process. Worse still, he had written a constitution for the organisation; from now on everything should be run according to this document. What riled the Bee People most was that now they were supposed to elect a new committee to meet the requirements of this new constitution drawn up solely by Christof in the solitude of Morrison Xinindlu’s bedroom. Because he is a white man these rural folks see him as some authority figure who must be obeyed.

  ‘We don’t do things that way,’ I tell him after we have been introduced and I have taken a seat in front of Xinindlu’s house.

  I can sense that he is resentful. He sees me as an intruder.

  I try to explain that he can’t just draw up a constitution for an organisation that he knows nothing about. He can’t just make his own rules either. He admits that he is not familiar with South African laws governing non-profit and community-based organisations. But, according to him, that makes no difference because a constitution is a constitution in any country.

  ‘Did you ever try to find out about this organisation’s founding documents?’ I ask.

  ‘They told me they have no constitution. They can’t operate without a constitution.’

  ‘Do you know why they have no constitution?’ I ask. ‘It is because they are a Trust. The Trust Deed is their constitution. They are not just a makeshift organisation; they are registered. In any case, even if they didn’t have a constitution, you can’t just write a constitution by yourself and then impose it on them. That’s not how things are done here.’

  He becomes angry and starts yelling that he came all the way from Germany to help these rural people because they don’t know anything and now I am trying to stop him from doing his job.

  ‘
To help people is a good thing,’ I tell him. ‘To help them help themselves is even better. We aim for self-reliance. But you are not helping them when you come here and start behaving like their boss and impose rules on them and even appoint people to positions and assign duties in their own business. You can table ideas for discussion, you can make suggestions, but you are not their boss. We have tried to cultivate a democratic culture here. We need to maintain it and enhance it.’

  He is not listening. He is visibly angry. He obviously sees himself as a dispenser of wisdom and doesn’t seem to understand that he is here to learn as well. He is a white man come to civilise the natives and now here is an equivalent of a native chief resisting the generosity of his knowledge. He angrily grabs his papers from the bench and snatches from my hand the constitution I was reading which was so naive you would have thought it was written by a high school kid.

  Gosh, I lose it!

  ‘Who the fuck do you think you are, man?’ I yell as I stand up to face the impertinent numbskull.

  But the Bee People gently push him into the house to talk to him about manners.

  THAT HAS ALWAYS BEEN a problem with me, the short fuse. It used to happen in the classroom too in my early days as a teacher. But, thankfully, in the long run I was able to overcome it, although occasionally my irritation does show. What can I say? I am my father’s son.