The Broken River Tent
The Broken River Tent
Mphuthumi Ntabeni
First published by BlackBird Books, an imprint of Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd, in 2018
10 Orange Street
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© Mphuthumi Ntabeni, 2018
©Author cover image: Helen Ntabeni
All rights reserved.
d-PDF 978-1-928337-73-7
ePUB 978-1-928337-74-4
mobi file 978-1-928337-75-1
Cover design by Palesa Motsomi
Editing by Alison Lowry
Proofreading by Joey Kok
Job no. 003261
See a complete list of BlackBird Books titles at www.jacana.co.za
To my late father, Mzoli Ntabeni, who shadow-walks me
Contents
The Gravediggers
River People
Flower Chambers
The River Tent is Broken
The Apricot Tree
Kuyaliwa Ekhaya
Vagabonds
Algoa Bay
The Gadfly
Wagons and Moods
Makhanda
The Coming of Nxele
Ntsikana
Whichever Way the Wind Blows
We Must Attempt the Task of Living
Kicking Against the Goad
Even the Cur Will Turn
Intab’Enzima: Mount Misery
Hintsa’s Head
Brother, Brother
The Dappled Things
Nongqawuse and the Death of a Nation
Decluttering
Fleas Swallowing Elephants
Endnote
Acknowledgements
2017
The Gravediggers
THE ENTRANCE TO THE HANGBERG MULTIPURPOSE Sport Centre was unusually busy for a non-social grant payment day. Media cameras were everywhere. Their little village town had caught the attention of the nation, Phila thought, if not exactly the world.
“Ngawethu!”
The main speaker for the evening had entered the hall. While other speakers assembled on the podium Phila took a seat near the back. Although he regarded himself as part of this community, he felt somewhat out of place, as if he was faking his solidarity to leech onto the people’s pain.
It was soon evident that the community meeting had been hijacked by politicians and Phila had difficulty holding his concentration. A guy from something to do with Social Justice was saying something about the government marginalising and criminalising the poor. “The lies of the city and provincial officials who call us drug lords when we demand our constitutional rights shall be exposed!” he cried, becoming very animated. He spoke for quite a long time, mixing English in Afrikaans. People clapped violently.
Next a Rastafarian took the microphone, first hailing Haile Selassie and Jah and then dissing the “Babylonian governments and their system of oppression. Dem tell us to reconcile, meantime dem serve us snake for fish, and rocks for bread. Mandela se kak!” The crowd went wild. “Ons KhoiKhoi mense! We demand our land back …” There was something impressively radically anarchist about the Rasta.
As the meeting finally looked as if it was drawing to an end, after almost two hours, and the cameramen were packing up their equipment, Phila went outside to get some air and have a cigarette. He found himself reflecting on the reason for this meeting, the events of the past week which had culminated in what the media, with their flair for dramatic nostalgia, had called Black Tuesday. The police had come, around 2am, in what one of the speakers had termed ‘apartheid style’, to evict people who had illegally invaded land on the slopes of Hangberg. Phila wasn’t totally clear about the details but the violence had started when residents resisted the police. On his walk back home earlier, after having fish and chips at Fish-On-The-Rocks as the sun went down, his route took him close to where the events of Black Tuesday had unfolded. The place had looked like an abandoned movie set for the apartheid era. On his way he had stooped to pick up a used teargas canister shell, obviously from a police shotgun, and he’d slipped it into his pocket without thinking.
That speaker was right. The events of the previous week had introduced a reminiscent order of apartheid days in the streets of their village town. Phila himself had been there, doing what he could to help. When a TV newsman at the riot scene had asked him to give his opinion, on camera, he had wanted to sound revolutionary, to send a clear message that the impoverished should not be pushed around and criminalised for being poor. Instead, dogged by his middle-class timidity, he’d come up with a cautious statement about “the irony of the fact that when developers for the rich want to push mountain firebreaks it is done at the stroke of a pen, but now that the poor have run out of living space they are treated like brigands who are illegally occupying land.”
It irritated him that he was always so cautious, reasonable and unspontaneous. His mind was neither quick nor nimble; he lacked the gift of spontaneity, which was why he found it hard to improvise on the spot. At best he had keen powers of observation and some originality when given a moment to apply his mind, but his kind always got swallowed by the revolution.
He thought about how, a decade and a half ago, during the so-called rainbow era of Mandela, the country was full of hope and assertive belief in the renewal of its humanity. Now he saw the return of cynicism, suspicion, despair, and police terror, the suppression of freedom, with all the accompanying horrors. Community meetings with fired-up rhetoric. Loud-hailers on the streets, calling citizens to action – like the one on the red bakkie that had gone past his window and alerted him to this meeting tonight, urging residents to “do a postmodern on the BRUTALITY of the police last Tuesday, when they invaded our community APARTHEID style. Injury one! Injury all! The BOEREBOND is on the rise again!”
Outside he was joined by a podgy fellow who had been at the podium table and whom Phila was sure he’d seen somewhere else. Initially he couldn’t place him but then he realised: he was the security guard at the local supermarket, who usually greeted him when he went there for supplies, who sometimes helped him with the groceries, very politely, to the car. Phila always made sure to tip.
“Nice of you to join us, sir,” the fellow said with his usual politeness.
Phila was glad to recognise a face in that sea of strangers. The fellow swapped his cigarette to his left hand before extending his right, and they ended up shaking hands for a little too long and more vigorously than was necessary.
“I never figured you as the revolutionary type,” Phila said, regretting the statement the moment it went out of his mouth. It turned out the fellow was a community leader of some kind. Inside, when people had kept referring to community leaders and shouting socialist slogans, they had been referring to him. An ironic twist surely – socialists guarding the doors of capitalism? Talk about capitalism producing its own gravediggers, thought Phila.
He was still turning fiery phrases over in his mind, of the type he could have used in front of the TV camera when he’d had the chance. The government is wiping our turned-up noses with the sword; our liberators have turned into our oppressors. A luta continua! Deep down he knew there was no way he could have said all of that. Even in his head it all sounded fake. He was no revolutionary; neither did he want to be one. He believed more in the evolution of the mind, the gradual progress etcetera. The usual crap of weak characters who never want to be involved in the real struggles under the guise of being civilised. The irony was that he spent almost all his life trying to civilise his mind; now he was doing everything possible to escape the fate of Prufrock, the ineffectual, well-bred
man during times of rising tensions and turbulences.
Irony struck him again as he said goodnight to the community leader and set off home. These riots, when it came down to it, were all about one thing. Land. The irony, in the twenty-first century, was that the players were still the same as before. You had the KhoiKhoi people on the slopes of Hangberg, and the Xhosas – mostly from the Eastern Cape, where their forefathers had fought the British colonial powers – on the slopes of Karbonkelberg where Imizamo Yethu informal settlement was situated. And then in the affluent valley down below were mostly the white people, progeny of the settlers from the 1800s.
Phila walked home under a maturing sheet of darkness. Moonlight cracked the sky with pale fissures of light.
2007
River People
THE DAY WAS WINDY AND COLD. Phila sat in the bright silence of Prospect Hill, against the stone walls of Fort Frederick, reading from the book The Consolation of Philosophy by the Ancient Roman philosopher Boethius. He had to hold tight with both hands to keep it steady against the wind. From a short distance, a racket of laughing-quarrelling homeless people broke the hum of the motorway traffic. Lately he had been feeling lethargic. The arrival of a luxury bus, carrying Chinese tourists, distracted his reading. Soon the tourists filed past him with their digital cameras and smartphones, taking panoramic pictures of the city below. Phila raised his eyes to meet smiling faces exposing bad teeth. Some rudely took pictures of him without the courtesy of asking. He felt insulted. Others came to sit next to him, making hand gestures indicating that he must keep reading while their friends took photographs. “Nî hâo. Zuò! Bùyào zhànlì.”
Hemmed in and harried, he resented being made into an exotic object but, as usual, was too polite to protest. He distrusted their exaggerated laughter, as if they were trying to convince themselves and the world that they were free to do as they pleased. Their fake exuberance was instructive.
Eleven years bunkered in the city of Port Elizabeth had been, for Phila, more of a retreat from his failures than progress towards something. The city, with its sleepy aura and lost industry, felt like a place for quiet endings. It was easy to be indifferent within its village soul, stubborn colonial character and bland industry. Its pleasing forlornness was the natural habitat of his melancholic spirit. The city had achieved a spiritual victory over the crassness of urbanisation by expanding in interconnected village towns that conceal its industrial areas.
Often, when people asked what he did, Phila felt defeated. His explanations differed according to mood, but they all touched on his failed architectural firm and musings about collecting material to write the history of the area. He tended to be vague with the specifics except that it was historical, with an emphasis on Xhosa resistance against British colonialism. Many were awed, others suspicious, but nobody disputed his bona fides. In reality, he wandered about the city, like Mr Biswas, looking for something to turn up and a place to call home. He visited museums and art galleries when he got tired of reading in the library where hobos bullied him with their intransigent attitudes. He frequented the nightlife of Central, where the extorted comforts of social misfits and the excluded flourished. He lived in the township, where residual anxieties threw sharp light on the rising standards of revolt. In short, he was a dangling man.
Aeons ago, when apartheid was still in fashion, Phila had got a scholarship to study architecture in Germany. Such ambitions were still forbidden to black people in his country in the 1980s, but a way was found for him to beat the system. He went overseas, did what was expected of him, even managed to find his way around Deutsch. He never anticipated he would feel unheimlich upon returning home. Nine years in Europe had made him a stranger to his roots. He felt ‘his people’ – the ones he shared culture with by birth, whom he had had to leave before he could cognitively feel part of – did not share his ambitions or intellectual torments. Before he’d left he’d presumed a superior destiny to them, even disdain for what he thought to be their indolence because he felt spurred by a sense of elevated sensitivity far above the typical township aspirations. Hence it was not too difficult for him to leave, to expose himself to other frontiers. Voluntary exile tested his salt, and taught him humility towards ‘his people’.
When the Chinese tourists had filed inside the fort, Phila made to read again. Distracted once more, this time by the sounds of construction work from the City Hall down below in Main Street, he closed the book. He recalled how his architectural firm had won the tender to refurbish that historic building, and subsequently lost it when he’d refused to grease a certain government official’s hands. At the time the country had been under the euphoric cloud, the new freedom of the Mandela years. It had been waking up, if slowly and with a hangover, from the National Party era. But Phila hadn’t felt a part of anything. He’d found himself wandering the streets, trying to be part of one thing or the other, but nothing had quite fitted. His internal space was disconnected to the national jubilant echoes. That was when he’d felt he needed time to rediscover home. By and by he found himself searching for reasons behind the present situation in the country. Most of the answers lay in history, so he started there. He never thought whatever he needed to do would take more than a few years. Complications kept piling up, mostly driven by the need for a corrective catalogue of his shortcomings.
His cell phone vibrated in his pocket. The sounds of the tourists coming back to the revving noise of the tour bus made it impossible for Phila to hear properly. He moved away from the maddening crowd to the leeward side of the fort, regretting losing the faint heat from the sun, what the Xhosas called the baboon sun.
“Hello?” he answered, noticing on the screen that it was his home number. It could only be his sister Siya. After perfunctory greetings, she went straight to the point.
“We’ve just been informed that our father died from a peptic ulcer last night. I’ve been trying to get hold of you but your phone was off,” she said, in her usual matter-of-fact way.
Phila felt there was something of a veiled insinuation in her brisk tone.
“Ja … my phone loses signal sometimes …”
Static silence ensued before Siya broke it with another tacit comment – “I guess you’ll be coming home soon then?” – although this time it sounded as if she was retracting the insinuation.
“Yes, of course.” He did not know what else to say.
Home was Queenstown, about four hundred kilometres from PE.
“Okay then, see you soon.”
The phone went dead. Phila’s ears transmitted very little beyond a grim tinnitus buzz. He faked a yawn to open them, but the trick failed.
He walked, with a lost stride, around the fort to the side facing the harbour where the slow-moving green Baakens River surrendered to the sea. The highway over the river, itself collapsing on entering the suburb of Humewood towards the more affluent Summerstrand, was a wonder to observe. His grandma used to call highways ‘flying roads’. “White people can milk birds if you ask them to,” was her leitmotif on such things. To Phila, this estuary area was where things came to a head. It was there – or thereabout – in 1820 that the British settlers had landed. Phila had read in the papers that they were planning to build a gigantic statue of Nelson Mandela, like the Statue of Liberty in New York, in the area. For what, he thought to himself. To counteract the colonial spirit?
Down below, huddled in the groove of the hill against the harsh wind that combed its crest, Phila recognised some of the homeless people who were always around here. He descended towards them. They were cooking in tin pots over an open fire. Secretly envying their carefree vagabond lives, he thought about the nobility of poverty. He didn’t really believe in it, though. He was not a Franciscan in spirit; his tendencies were more epicurean. He liked clean clothes, the comfort of restful sleep on clean white sheets, hearty food properly prepared, and many other such pleasures. Among these friends he felt like an impostor, not really fitting in even if they let him laugh at their
crude jokes. He knew the only thing he was good for with them was an occasional note to buy something to soften the harsh realities of passing time. They greeted him with welcoming familiarity. The lady with laughing eyes (he could never tell whose girlfriend she was) passed a bottle of vodka to him after swiping a pull from it. He politely declined and moved on a bit.
His sister’s phone call managed to settle, in a less than a minute, a question he had been wrestling with for some time now. There was nothing for him in the city anymore. He thought about making a fresh start somewhere, even as he knew there were no fresh starts because we carry ourselves wherever we go. We bring our lares with us, the Romans, according to Boethius, would say. It worried and relieved him that he was not really part of anything: the dangling man. The Germans called it Heimweh nach der Fremde. Wanting to be where one is not, a continual process of deferral. His bane.
He trained his eyes back on the river, thinking he might learn something from the manner in which it gave itself to the vastness of the sea. Anything to take his mind off his father’s death was preferable at that moment. The thing about nature, he thought to himself, is that it knows its part in the bigger picture, because it is driven by forces beyond its control. To Phila this was the meaning of fate. He took out his pencil, as was his habit, to scribble some of these thoughts down.
Rivers are instructive and fascinating. In a river stream there are levels of flow. Where inhibitions occur swirls develop. A swirl creates noise but does not run deep. If it tries to take short-cuts it often eddies, spins off and dies. This is due to lack of depth. Or else it scatters into a swamp that festers with either life or disease. If the eddy is lucky, it gets caught up again in the deeper current of the river to become part of the wider, silent stream.
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