Little Suns

by Zakes Mda

  Another policeman waved some documents in front of him and said, ‘Actually the prisoner is no longer in Umtata. He is in Kingwilliamstown. It says here the Secretary of the Law Department in Cape Town sent an urgent telegram on November 6th to the Chief Magistrate of Umtata telling him that they decided the preliminary examination would be in Kingwilliamstown and Mhlontlo had to be transferred to the Kingwilliamstown Jail for that purpose.’

  The sergeant broke out laughing and said, ‘We are not taking you to Kingwilliamstown either. So leave before things get nasty for you, my friend.’

  The black policeman warned him that the sergeant was a very nice man and had been patient with him for far too long. He shouldn’t test the kindly white man too much. He should leave in peace because no one was interested in arresting him. No one would arrest him. Instead they would beat him up and throw him out in the street.

  Malangana stood there for a while and considered this advice. The policemen went on with their work and ignored him. He decided that perhaps it was wise to leave. As Malangana was stumbling out the white sergeant called him back.

  ‘Somebody donate the old crutches lying in the storeroom to this man,’ he said. ‘He looks like he’s going to tumble down every time he walks.’

  ‘I don’t want your crutches,’ shouted Malangana. ‘I want to be a prisoner with Mhlontlo.’

  Actually he needed those crutches. His gait was becoming strained and painful. He had not been doing much walking in Qomoqomong. He didn’t realise that his joints had deteriorated to this extent.

  He asked the herdboy to ride with him to Zastron in the Orange Free State where he took a train to Kingwilliamstown. The herdboy rode back to Qoboshane with the two geldings.

  Now he was done with Kingwilliamstown. It was going to be months before there was a trial, they told him. And only Mhlontlo would be tried. Not anyone called Malangana, son of Matiwane. They did not know him, never heard of him, did not want to know him, and did not want to lock him up either. If he kept on pestering them they were going to blow his head off.

  Government had no appreciation of his role in the War of Hope.

  He walked to the ticket office and bought a train ticket to Umtata. From there he would see how to get to Qumbu.

  Tuesday May 17, 1904

  He has taken to sitting outside his hovel on the slopes of the hill in the clearing that used to be a camp of the tree planters surveying those parts of the village within his view. He sees the puny villagers going about their business. He despises them all for their ignorance. The old residents whose blood he shares from the blue lakes of eMbo and the new residents who were placed there to lord over them as a reward for their loyalty after the War of Hope. They are all ignorant of him. And he is happy to leave them at that. And to play his drum.

  Depending on the direction of the wind, the people of the village can hear the drum from time to time throughout the day. Sometimes it goes on for hours on end. Then it stops. The drummer is tired. He is not a strong man. He is skeletal. They are surprised he wakes up breathing and drumming every morning. Sometimes in the middle of the night they hear the drum. And sometimes when the drum is silent they see him hobbling down the hill to the village on his twisted crutches, with the heavy drum hanging on his back tied with a leather rope over one shoulder. He refuses when anyone offers to help him carry the drum.

  He takes it with him when he has to go to the general dealer’s store. He dare not leave it at his hovel on the slope of the hill. What if someone comes and steals it? It is all he has left of Mthwakazi. He is no longer looking for her. All that mkhondo thing was nothing but shit. That is why ever since the day he walked to Sulenkama accompanied by stories of the past there has not been an inkling of it. It was strong all along the way but suddenly stopped when he entered Sulenkama. And yet Mthwakazi has lived here. Her traces are all over this village. Why is her mkhondo absent here then? One would easily believe some mischievous spirit was playing cruel games with him, yet everywhere there was a mkhondo there was always confirmation that indeed Mthwakazi had been there.

  The chase has been fruitless. He has given up on Mthwakazi. All he is waiting for is death. He will die a happy man, with her drum in his arms. That is another reason it must always be with him everywhere he goes. Because the day and the hour are not known.

  On other occasions the drum is silent because he is walking to the Sulenkama River for his ablutions. Sometimes when he has enough strength he walks right up to the confluence of Sulenkama and Gqukunqa and sits on the bank and dips his feet in the water and plays the drum.

  The people of Sulenkama do not know that he despises them for their ignorance of him. They think they know him: he is the Madman of the Hill who used to claim to be a war hero but is now silent about it since he was exposed as a fake by itinerant tree-planting boys. Once in a while the Madman of the Hill gets fed up with people at the general dealer’s store and shouts: ‘I don’t care what you say, my spear did taste his heart even though he was already dead.’

  No one knows what he is talking about. This outburst happens when people are gathered around whoever has the news of the trial that day.

  It is the only mad thing he expresses. That, and the beating of the drum. Everything else he utters sounds quite sane and reasonable. When people greet him he responds politely and is even able to conduct a civil conversation about the weather, and its being May, the end of the amaMpondomise year which is also the time of harvest; he comments about the brightness of Canopus at night and the promise of a good harvest this year. He seems to exude compassion and wisdom. Even the beating of the drum: those who are less mean-spirited consign it to ukuthwasa rather than madness – that is, perhaps he is being summoned by the ancestors to join one of the sacred orders of diviners.

  He despises them, but they do not pay much attention to him. More exciting things are happening in Kingwilliamstown and each day has its new developments. Mhlontlo, who used to be a king, is on trial for a murder that happened more than twenty years ago. Whenever Malangana goes to the general dealer’s store he stops to listen as the men congregate on the veranda around amakhumsha who came from Umtata or from Kingwilliamstown that day with the news of the trial. Some even read from the East London Daily Dispatch.

  In the early days of the trial it seemed that the prosecutor was having difficulty getting evidence against Mhlontlo and people were saying it was because of his strong medicine. Who did not know that Mhlontlo was an ixhwele in his own right – a powerful medicine man who could work magic? Is the story not told that during the War of Hope he could make the bullets of the white man turn into water? Is he not the hero king who could fight on many war fronts at the same time on his magical horse Gcazimbane which could grow wings?

  Malangana pays no attention to all this talk. Yes, he stands, listens, shows no emotion, and then moves on with his heavy burden on his back. He sits down whenever he gets tired and beats the drum.

  Some days the trial produces new details and people ask themselves what they have to do with Hope’s murder. They hear that a witness has revealed that Mhlontlo was being paid a Government stipend of sixty pounds per annum or that Mhlontlo sent Hamilton Hope’s horse to a Mr Mqikela after the murder but he refused to keep it; he sent it back to Mhlontlo instead. When Malangana hears this last one his usually indifferent demeanour changes for a few seconds and he giggles like a child who is being tickled. To those who see him it merely confirms the communal diagnoses of the man.

  Sometimes a woman – and it is always a woman who wants to make friendly conversation – asks the Madman of the Hill what he thinks of the trial today; does he think Mhlontlo will get away with it? He smiles and politely asks, ‘Have you ever wondered why amaKroza stand on their head, dadethu?’ The woman being referred to as ‘my sister’ wonders how amaKroza, Orion’s Belt, has anything to do with her question. But Malangana continues regardless, ‘We teach our children not to point at amaKroza with their dirty fingers because on those stars t
here are three sacred dwelling places: one for the grave where the bones of our ancestors are peacefully resting; the second is where their spirits are roaming free; and the third is the dwelling place of the big man himself, uQamata.’

  Then he walks away, leaving the questioner confused. Perhaps these theological outbursts are a residue of the influence of the days he spent at Ibandla-likaNtu.

  But sometimes when he is in a hurry and the drum has taken its toll on his weak back, his answer is very brief: ‘The great rains had returned after a long drought.’

  Today is like other days. He has no special expectations. It is in the afternoon when he approaches the general dealer’s store and omathand’indaba – the lovers of news – are already gathered around an ikhumsha gentleman, who is the local primary school teacher. He is reading details in the previous day’s newspaper: Both the prosecutor, Mr Rose-Innes, and the lawyers for the defence, Messrs H.S. Smith and H.W. Gush, have made their summations before the presiding officer, the Acting Resident Magistrate of Kingwilliamstown, Mr Robert James Dick. The defence emphasised that all the witnesses pointed out that the accused was not present when Hamilton Hope was murdered; he was out conferring with Mr Alfred Davis. Not a single witness linked him to a conspiracy. The accused stated that he knew nothing about any plan to kill Mr Hope and the Crown failed to prove otherwise.

  At that moment a horseman comes galloping, waving a piece of paper.

  ‘It is from the telegraph office in Qumbu. In the case Rex v. Mhlontlo, the accused was found not guilty!’ the horseman shouts, still waving the telegram, with the horse jogging around the crowd.

  There is an instant outburst of applause and yells and screams and ululations.

  The only thought that comes to Malangana is: that telegraph office, we set it on fire, didn’t we? I personally lit the fire; but none of these despicable people will believe me. So, they built it up again?

  He walks away. Along the path people have heard the news. Obviously news travels faster than Malangana can walk. One can conclude who among them are amaMpondomise from their mood. Other nations may not necessarily have any ill-feeling towards Mhlontlo but may not be overly excited. Yet more and more people these days are becoming increasingly united and would like to see themselves as one black nation, as the ikhumsha teacher who was reading Izwi Labantu was telling the people the other day. They have seen what the white man can do to them when they are many separate kingdoms.

  He meets a group of young men and women singing: ‘At last our king is coming back. We’ll get our land back.’

  Malangana tries to summon the memory of the king that is coming. The image is blurry; the king sees nothing and hears nothing for he is preoccupied with counting beads on a rosary. The singers try to encourage Malangana to join them in song even if he can’t dance because of his crutches and the load on his back. He ignores them and stumbles away.

  One of the singers stops and looks at him, and then asks, ‘Why are you so sad, old man? Are you one of those who fought against him?’

  He does not stop to respond.

  The river is the place to go, even though he was there early in the morning for his ablutions. This time he will walk as far as the confluence of Sulenkama and Gqukunqa. As he shambles along the bank he is struck by a new observation: this river he has been calling a river even in his dreams is not a river at all. It is just a stream. How did it manage to pass itself off as more imposing than it really is for all these years? And what film has been removed from his eyes so that now he can see it for what it is, in all its emaciated nakedness?

  The water still sounds the same. But now the familiar sound is intermingled with a cacophony of hooting and screeching. And then he sees the source. Strange birds grazing on the grass like sheep. Quite big too. Among them he sees their shepherd. Very close to the confluence of the two rivers. The two streams, for that’s what they have become, after their lie has been exposed today. As he walks closer to the shepherd, he notices that the shepherd is not a shepherd at all. She is a woman.

  She walks towards him, smiling.

  ‘What took you so long?’ she asks, her eyes squinting and her grin toothless.

  He recognises her immediately.

  Mthwakazi!

  She’s grown old and her face is wrinkled and her eyes surrounded by crow’s feet, but she’s undoubtedly his Mthwakazi. Her ears are adorned with earrings of gold. He does not notice them though they are quite conspicuous. She is not wearing the tanned-hide skirt or front-and-back apron of the abaThwa people that she used to wear in the olden days. She is in a brown European skirt and yellow blouse but she is barefoot. The clothes are not ill-fitting like the last European attire he saw her in, the red-and-white floral silk dress the bulk of which she had to carry over her shoulders.

  He looks at the geese. It is not a friendly stare.

  ‘What are these strange birds?’

  ‘They’re Rhudulu’s geese.’

  ‘You’re herding his geese?’

  She nods.

  ‘They’re noisy.’ That is all he can think of saying.

  She only sniggers.

  ‘And they’re ugly,’ he adds. ‘I don’t think they taste so wonderful either.’

  She looks at him curiously, and then at the geese. She turns back to him.

  ‘I waited for you,’ she says again. ‘What kept you so long?’

  ‘A war happened.’

  ‘I can see it took its toll on you. And the load you carry is too heavy for you.’

  ‘It’s your drum,’ he says, and he unloads it and places it between them.

  She looks at it for a long time as if trying very hard to remember it.

  ‘It’s the drum you stole. You are only returning it now? You can keep it; I am no longer a diviner.’

  ‘We’ll keep it still,’ he says.

  She smiles and shakes her head, displaying the golden earrings. Nothing registers in him. They are standing to attention, facing each other with the drum on the ground between them. The twisted umsintsi crutches support his frail body. She shakes her head again; she wants him to notice the earrings and say something. He is looking at her face, mesmerised.

  ‘Don’t you remember them?’

  ‘Remember what?’

  ‘These earrings? You’re so stupid! I wore them all these years so that you could remember them.’

  ‘I remember the suns, though,’ he says. ‘There are many of them. Not just one.’

  ‘There is only one sun,’ she says with much enthusiasm. ‘I was right all along. Amakhumsha tell us that the world is round and it moves around the sun. It is the same sun that we see every day.’

  For the first time in a long time Malangana laughs. It is real laughter from the guts. This is the real Mthwakazi, the woman who makes him laugh.

  ‘What do amakhumsha know? Look up in the sky on a cloudless night. What do you think those twinkling things are?’

  ‘Stars, of course.’

  ‘Stars are little suns.’

  She cackles. She has lost some of her teeth, but she is still Mthwakazi.

  They look to the hill that becomes a mountain after dark. The hill on which stars grow at night.

  The end is always a journey.

  EPILOGUE

  Thursday December 12, 1912

  Mhlontlo dies a commoner at Caba Location, Qumbu.

  Though he had been found not guilty of Hamilton Hope’s murder he had been stripped of the status of ‘Paramount Chief’ by the Cape Colony Government and had been banished to Kingwilliamstown and later transferred to Willowvale, and was only allowed to live at Caba in Qumbu in 1906 when he was old and sickly. His heir Charles was not allowed to succeed either, since the intention of the colonial Government was to end the kingdom of amaMpondomise once and for all.

  (Joe H. Majija, a descendant of one of the junior Houses of Mhlontlo, writes in his Dark Clouds at Sulenkama that his body lies buried in a well-kept family cemetery at the Great Place of Ntabankulu. ‘His grav
e is a source of inspiration to many Pondomises who normally visit it to get spiritual guidance and protection.’)

  Malangana is not there to bid him farewell. He is still on a journey with his Mthwakazi.

  The end is always a journey.

  Acknowledgements

  In this historical novel a fictional love story weaves itself into the true history of the assassination of Hamilton Hope, a British magistrate in the 19th-century Cape Colony, and the exile of members of my family under the leadership of Mhlontlo ka Matiwane from Qumbu to Lesotho, and later to Herschel on the Cape Colony side of the Lesotho border. I am grateful first to my grandfather, Charles Gxumekelane (A! Zenzile) Mda, who was born in 1880 and was a baby when the War of Hope broke out, and whose father, Feyiya, was a member of one of the Houses of Matiwane. Feyiya and his family were part of that migration from Qumbu to Lesotho with Mhlontlo. I am grateful for the stories he used to tell us, his grandchildren, about our origin. I am also grateful to the late Robert Mda of the Lesotho Mdas, who used to cross the Telle River to his Cousin Charles’ homestead in Qoboshane when I was a little boy. He never ran out of stories about the exploits of Mhlontlo – much embellished and full of magic; for instance, he could turn the white man’s bullets into water. I was amazed when I was researching this novel to find a lot of consistencies (among minor inconsistencies) in Charles’ and Robert’s oral histories and the stories that other praise poets of amaMpondomise from different parts of the Eastern Cape, as the region is now called, tell about the origins of amaMpondomise from Sibiside of abaMbo right up to the change of fortunes as a result of the killing of Hamilton Hope. The most detailed of these narratives was left for posterity by the late Mdukiswa Tyabashe who lived at Cuthbert’s Location and used to be King Lutshoto’s praise poet, and whose oral history was one of those collected by Harold Scheub and published in The Tongue is Fire: South African Storytellers and Apartheid (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). I am grateful to Harold Scheub for this collection. Of course, I did not only depend on the oral tradition for my sources. Historical record, both primary and secondary sources, was crucial. Joe H. Majija of Mthatha, a descendant of one of the junior Houses of Mhlontlo, directed me to a lot of archival documents from the trove he used in his self-published booklet, Dark Clouds at Sulenkama. Here I must thank Wonga Qina, a Grahamstown teacher, who helped me track down Mr Majija and also took me to libraries and archives in Grahamstown. Ken Heath of Kingwilliamstown was a relative of William Charles Henman, one of the two white men killed with Hope. I thank him for the information he provided. I rediscovered Mhlontlo as a high school student in Lesotho in Sesotho praise poetry, ‘Lithoko tsa Lerotholi’, in historian Mosebi Damane’s Marath’a Lilepe (Morija: Morija Sesuto Book Depot, 1960). The Basotho called him ’Mamalo. I was proud that I, a refugee boy, had a great-grandfather who featured in the praise poetry of Lesotho kings. Other materials that were useful were: Clifton Crais, ‘The Death of Hope’ in The Politics of Evil: Magic, State Power and the Political Imagination in South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and J.S. Kotze, ‘Counter-Insurgency in the Cape Colony, 1872–1882’ in Scientia Militaria: South African Journal of Military Studies Vol. 31, No. 2 (2003) http://scientiamilitaria.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/152.