Sometimes There Is a Void

by Zakes Mda

  One of the most important items in my job description was the introduction of a television service in Lesotho. I drew up the plans for the setting-up of a new station and for training staff. There were already some cameras and editing suites and two or three cameramen and editors. I occasionally sat with them to look at their footage and to make sure that they showed Chief Leabua in the most flattering angles in the documentaries of his pitsos – or public rallies – that they shot. I use the word ‘documentaries’ very loosely. They were just images of Chief Leabua making speeches and the crowd ululating and shouting slogans and singing songs in his praise. These reels would go on for hours because it was a sin to edit any speech. There were no subtleties or sound bites. Everything had to be faithfully recorded and broadcast, including the speeches of the cabinet ministers who introduced him, extolling his virtues as the great-great-grandson of King Moshoeshoe the Great, and a revolutionary of the first order who freed the Basotho people from the yoke of the British and was also going to free the black people of South Africa from the yoke of the Boers. He was going to achieve this with the help of his North Koreans. And at this women would ululate and that had to be included in the ‘documentary’.

  After working on this kind of material I felt dirty and had to take a bath as soon as I got home to the luxury flat that the government was renting for me near Victoria Hotel. It was the same block of flats that was stormed by the Boers when I was still in Ohio where they killed a number of South African refugees and innocent locals, such as ’Matumo Ralebitso.

  I wouldn’t have lasted in such a job. Much as I was in total agreement with the sentiments of liberating South Africa, and with the policies of the ANC, and therefore wary of alienating an ally like Chief Leabua Jonathan, I was never cut out to be a propagandist. Especially in such a crude manner. I resigned, losing the privileges of the use of a government vehicle with a driver who transported me eighty kilometres to my home in Mafeteng every afternoon and fetched me there every morning before I was allocated the fully furnished flat, and who took me around to places in Maseru and other districts any time I felt like it. And of course I had to vacate the flat. I went to live in the servants’ quarters of my sister-in-law Johanna, who was teaching at the National Teachers’ Training College and was staying in the staff houses there.

  All this was a world away. I was on a train to see Ruth. I would deal with my homelessness and joblessness when I returned. At that moment all that mattered was that I was going to see Ruth.

  The train stopped briefly at a small station in the Karoo and urchins came running to the windows shouting ‘Dankie Auntie! Dankie Auntie!’ Passengers threw apples, oranges, cookies and other foodstuffs to the ground. The children scrambled for the food and fought each other over scraps of steamed bread and chicken bones as the train pulled out. This was the incident that inspired my next play, Dankie Auntie, which was directed by Mavis Taylor and opened at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in July 1989.

  In De Aar, a town in the Northern Cape famous as the second most important railway junction in South Africa, I changed trains. I bought the Sunday Times at a newspaper stand before boarding the train to Kimberley. Between Cape Town and this junction I had shared the compartment with a guy who was so conscious of his dark complexion that he kept on reminding me that although he looked like me he was actually a Coloured. His accent proved his point, although a lot of Batswana and Xhosa people of the Northern Cape are Afrikaans first-language speakers and have the same accent. But now, from here to Kimberley, I was alone in the compartment and had time to think about what I was going to do with my life. The only option open to me in Lesotho was going back to teach at a high school. Once more I had come full circle, despite my two graduate degrees: an MFA in theatre and an MA in telecommunications.

  My only consolation after resigning was that Jane Fonda’s movie project would take off and I would be occupied with script editing and perhaps even get a job as a consultant of sorts on the movie set. But even that dream had been smashed when I received a letter from her telling me that she would no longer be proceeding with the project. I still had her letter in my bag where she wrote: I have abandoned my efforts to develop a feature film on South Africa for lack of a strong story that was more artful than a political docu-drama. Alas!

  She went on to say that if it was at all possible I could use the money she had advanced me to support a humanitarian endeavour of my choice in Lesotho or South Africa.

  Between counting the telephone poles that were passing the window at a tremendous speed and being awestruck by the barren yet breathlessly beautiful landscape, I browsed through the pages of the Sunday Times. I was suddenly struck by the headline: Fonda, thankfully, cans movie on SA.

  I quickly went through the short article. It was the same old South African ‘liberal’ hysterics about Fonda being some loony leftie who wanted to besmirch their country.

  From Kimberley the wheels of the train ground their way to Mafikeng, from where I took a taxi to Ramatlabama border post in Botswana. This was my first visit to Botswana and I was amazed at how the ambience and the people were very much reminiscent of the Lesotho towns. In the bus to the town of Lobatse it was as if I was in a bus from Mohale’s Hoek to Mafeteng. The only difference was that here the land was flat, and among the vendors who were selling fat cakes, fish and other home-cooked foods at the bus stop in Lobatse some women were selling Botswana currency. I had South African rands in my pocket so I bought a few Botswana pula notes. I had never seen money being sold this way before. In Lesotho all such transactions were done at the bank.

  In Gaborone I booked in at the President Hotel and phoned Ruth. I was sitting in the bar having a beer when she came in the evening wearing a big black floppy hat and a broad smile. As we kissed there were tears in my eyes. I had missed her so much all those months. She didn’t go home that night. It was as though we were back in our basement apartment in Athens, Ohio, again.

  During the next few days she was due to travel to northern Botswana, right up to Francistown, with three of her university colleagues, to visit schools where some of her students were doing practical teaching or some kind of internship. So she took me along in their Land Rover and I got to see much of the country. She even took me to her home village, Mochudi, and introduced me to her parents and to her two kids. From there she took me to Serowe to meet Bessie Head, a South African writer who had made her home in that village after being exiled in Botswana some years back. Alas, after greeting her we couldn’t get anything coherent out of Miss Head! She was very drunk and was more occupied with shouting invective across the fence at the woman from next door. A pity, because I would have loved to discuss a few things with her. Although I was now an ANC supporter, I still had a strong kinship to PAC people, and from what I had read she was a member, or a strong supporter, of that organisation. My affinity with PAC folks – which continues to this day – was understandable because I was from a PAC family.

  Once again, I raised the issue of marriage with Ruth. And once again she said there was nothing she wanted more in the world than to marry me, but she still insisted that this would only be possible if my parents went to Mochudi, her village, to ask for her hand in marriage in the traditional manner.

  I spent a few blissful days with Ruth, and went back to Lesotho with a heavy heart knowing that she would never be my wife.

  Back in Lesotho I buried myself in writing plays while scouring newspapers for teaching jobs, which was the only thing I could do, or perhaps the only kind of job available to me other than the civil service. And I had already had my chance and had blown it there.

  The German Embassy came to my rescue by commissioning me to adapt Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle for six characters. The play – directed by Wonga Matanda, a Trotskyite who was a refugee from Port Elizabeth and a student at the National University of Lesotho – was performed at the Victoria Hotel to great acclaim. One of the actors was ’Maseipei Tlale, an old crush of
mine from when we were kids in Mafeteng. Her father had been our local doctor in the town and she and her sister Nonkosi were popular girls who were the fantasy of every boy. Their father brought them up reading scientific journals, and they both followed scientific careers when they grew up. Their brother, Moabi, became an engineer, Nonkosi became a medical doctor, and ’Maseipei studied in Ireland and became a medical laboratory technologist at the Queen Elizabeth II Hospital where her sister Nonkosi was practising as a doctor.

  ’Maseipei loved the theatre and did a lot of amateur acting. But while we were rehearsing the play she revealed to me that she was in the process of training to be a diviner and traditional healer – what in Lesotho is known as ngaka-ea-Sesotho or a sangoma in the more common parlance of South Africa. She had been called by the ancestors and had responded by going for training in the Leribe district under the mentorship of a woman she had been shown by the ancestors in a dream or vision. She had walked on foot all the way from Maseru to Leribe, a distance of more than a hundred kilometres, beating a cowhide drum, until she arrived at her mentor’s house. She had never been there before, but had been led by the ancestral spirits. She stayed there for training for a number of weeks, and was now an acolyte who would soon be a fully fledged ngaka.

  I was fascinated by her story. Somehow I had this affinity for traditional healers and shamans. If they were not my relatives they were my friends and even my crushes. I also marvelled at the cheek of the ancestors. They didn’t give a hoot that you were brought up in a superstition-free home where science reigned supreme and that you had followed a career in the sciences; when they called you, you had to respond.

  It was from ’Maseipei’s experience that I was to create my character Misti in my second novel, She Plays with the Darkness, years later.

  Another commission came from the National University of Lesotho. Dr John Gay who taught African Development asked me to write a play for his class to perform. There were no particular guidelines as to what the play should be about. I wrote a play in verse titled Moroesi, which was performed to a full house at the Netherlands Hall at Roma. It was directed by a former Peka High School colleague, Mare Tsiki. I don’t really remember the details of this play since I no longer have the script, but I know vaguely that the protagonist was a young woman called Moroesi – I had always liked that name – who led her people to victory against foreign conquerors and oppressors.

  From these commissions it became clear to me that writing was taking over from painting as my main occupation, or perhaps as the final resort to put food on the table whenever unemployment struck.

  After seeing an advertisement for a teaching post at Sehonghong Secondary School, I applied. I got the job and discovered that Sehonghong was a village high up in the Maluti Mountains. There were no roads in the village and people who grew up there had never seen a car except in pictures. Transportation from one village to another was on horseback, donkey cart or sleigh pulled by a span of oxen. Travelling between Sehonghong and the lowland districts was only by a single-engine aircraft from and to an aerodrome in Maseru. Villagers looked forward to the arrival of the plane because it also brought mail, mostly from husbands and fathers who worked in the mines of South Africa.

  I rented a one-roomed, grass-thatched house from a young widow who lived next door, where she engaged in nightly sessions of noisy sex with miners who landed at the airstrip. Besides these nocturnal disturbances of a poor celibate man trying to get a good night’s sleep, she was a nice landlady who didn’t bother me. I would have had a pleasant stay in her house even though I didn’t have a bed but slept on a mattress on the floor, if it were not for the little fact that there was no toilet anywhere in the house or outside in the yard. To relieve myself I had to walk to a donga about a hundred yards behind the house. I could only do it under the cover of darkness, although this also meant there was the likelihood of stepping on someone else’s fresh pile. This was the worst part about my stay in this village, the lack of sanitation facilities. Even the school did not have toilets for the students. They had to walk down the hill to the dongas in the valley.

  But somehow I had to make myself at home here. I had brought some of my books and journal articles on mass communication, especially those that focused on development communication, which I had shipped from Ohio because I knew I would not readily get such materials in Lesotho. I had already determined that my thesis, as the final doctoral document is called in South Africa, was going to examine the use of theatre as a medium for development communication. Since I had already enrolled at the University of Cape Town, I thought my stay in this godforsaken village would avail me the opportunity to study and even write part of the thesis.

  In my thesis I wanted to pay special attention to what development communication scholars of those days called folk media, by which they meant traditional performance modes that could be used as channels for developmental messages. I had always been interested in Sesotho traditional theatre, by which I mean any performance mode that encoded messages (and these may or may not be in the form of narrative) that could be decoded by those who were privy to the code.

  I had heard of a ceremony called pitiki that was done a few weeks after the birth of a child. A sheep or a goat was slaughtered, beer brewed and a small feast was made to thank the ancestors for the gift that was the child. While relatives and friends gathered to enjoy the meat, the women locked themselves in a house and performed a theatrical ritual which they refer to as the real pitiki. The word itself means ‘to roll’. I very much wanted to see this ritual, but men are not allowed where it is performed. It is the kind of theatre that is performed by women for women – but only those women who have experienced the joys and the pain of birthing.

  ‘I hear there is going to be a pitiki in the village this weekend,’ I told my landlady one day when I found her sitting on her stoep on my return from school. ‘I want to attend.’

  ‘I’m sure you may attend,’ she said. ‘You know that everyone is welcome at a feast.’

  ‘No, I want to go into the room of women, where they do the real pitiki.’

  She laughed; she thought I was joking. Why would any man want to see an all-female secret ritual? Unless, of course, he was a pervert.

  I told her about my doctoral research and how it was essential to see things before I wrote about them.

  ‘You’ll see big things if you go into a pitiki,’ she said. ‘You’ll go blind.’

  ‘I’m willing to take that risk.’

  She just laughed and went into her house.

  The next day I knocked at her door so that she could see that I was serious. When she came out I begged her once more to take me to the pitiki. She would be doing this for the good of thuto – education – I told her. I desperately wanted to see that performance so that people in Lesotho and in other countries could see how wonderful Sesotho culture was.

  ‘It is not my pitiki,’ she said. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Smuggle me in. I’ll disguise myself as an old woman.’

  She broke into laughter. She still did not take me seriously and I was getting desperate because there might not be another pitiki again for a long time, maybe not until after I left the village. I even thought of offering her some money but I knew I wouldn’t feel too good about myself after that. It would be like I had cheapened her with a bribe.

  The next day she told me she would help me attend the pitiki, as long as I didn’t ever mention her name in whatever I would be writing, since the women of Lesotho who still valued such secret rituals would regard her as a traitor.

  On Saturday, the day of the pitiki, she gave me an old blue seshoeshoe dress to wear, a red doek – head scarf – with blue and yellow paisley patterns on it, old tennis shoes worn with pantyhose that had a few runs, and a plaid shawl over my shoulders. All of a sudden she was more enthusiastic than me about this whole adventure. I, on the other hand, was beginning to doubt its wisdom. I knew right from the beginning that there was n
othing ethical about it, but I was going to do it all the same, if only to satisfy my curiosity. But then again, doubt was beginning to gnaw at me.

  ‘I don’t think I want to do this,’ I said.

  ‘You said you wanted to do it,’ said my landlady. ‘You cannot change now. Not after I have gone to all this trouble.’

  She was getting more fun from this charade than I was, and giggled at my ridiculous appearance. I was worried that she wouldn’t be able to contain herself at the pitiki and that she would burst out laughing. I didn’t want to think what would happen to me if the women found me out. Not only would they beat the hell out of me before throwing me out, but the men enjoying beer and meat outside would certainly hit me with sticks and stones for seeing their wives in a way that they themselves had never seen. On top of that, they would frogmarch me to the chief who would levy a heavy fine for my perversion.

  I used a walking stick as we trudged along the footpath to the pitiki on the other side of the village. I was a highly arthritic and osteoporotic old lady. As we met groups of villagers they greeted us as was the custom, but I did not respond lest my voice betrayed me. My landlady explained to them that I was her grandmother who was deaf and dumb from old age. This was the excuse we would give at the ceremony for my silence.

  Our destination was less than fifteen minutes away. As we approached the homestead – a cluster of three rondavels and a four-walled grass-thatched house – I saw young girls whose ages ranged from anything between four and twelve shaking their little waists in a vigorous dance. Older women were singing and clapping their hands to provide the rhythm. The young girls were doing the famous ditolobonya dance that I had seen performed for the entertainment of guests on state occasions and at political rallies in Maseru. I stopped to watch but my landlady didn’t want me to spend any time outside lest I was found out. She led me among men and women who were sitting outside near one of the rondavels eating meat and samp from big basins into one of the bigger rondavels.