Broken River Tent

by Mphuthumi Ntabeni

  ‘I’m not a chief,’ interjected Phila, attempting to re-enter the conversation and feeling simultaneously surprised by the sense of empathy he was developing towards the old man.

  ‘I know. Priest or president, same thing, different jargon.’ Maqoma showed no signs of irritation. ‘My advice might enable you to judge presidents and priests better,’ he continued. ‘There’s an advantage in respecting the beneficial magic that accompanies the business of living in one’s culture, but things can go too far, whereupon a chief has to stamp his foot. As a chief you must be tolerant of your people’s eccentricities when they don’t threaten the existence of the tribe. The most important thing for a chief is to respect his duties towards the ancestors and shun witchcraft. Witchcraft is the quickest way of destroying a tribe.’

  ‘You mean to tell me you believe that hocus-pocus actually exists?’

  ‘“Believe” is not the right word. I tolerated it for the sake of good governance. Once a chief gets involved in witchcraft, the tribe is sure to wither away. Rharhabe condescended towards Gcaleka’s theatre of superstition disguised as mysticism.’

  ‘There’s plenty of that going around even now in the name of tradition, or religion.’

  ‘When Gcaleka lost the respect of his people he gradually withdrew himself from their eyes and tribal activities. Rharhabe lost patience with him for being too associated with diviners. When he found no way of celebrating his valour without degrading the reputation of his effeminate brother, Rharhabe decided to leave his homeland. “Where will it stop, if even chiefs shall be susceptible to witchcraft?” Rharhabe asked, beginning to assume the tone of condescension and command against his brother.’

  ‘So, basically, this is the reason why today we have two houses of amaXhosa, divided by Rharhabe crossing Inciba to move away from his brother Gcaleka’s authority.’

  ‘Now you are getting it. I’m glad to see you have been paying attention.’

  Algoa Bay

  DOG TIRED AFTER HIS HIKE IN THE Amathole mountains, Phila went back to his accommodation in East London and slept, for once undisturbed right through the night. The next day he paid his bill and got in his car. He decided to take the coastal route back to Port Elizabeth, wanting to pass Port Alfred and Alexandria, but also to avoid passing, and having to stop over, in Grahamstown. He was in no mood to be psycho-examined by Nandi. Besides, he was eager to get to PE, to pack his stuff and be done with the place.

  Port Alfred was a town of felicitous waterspots for the affluent. It had the quiet grandeur of many small seaport towns: a clutter of masts and mizzens, bobbing yachts in the harbour, the sky the deep fiery blue you found almost everywhere in the Cape. The Dutch architecture of whitewashed walls predominated in the small town, which once was a major estuary for the Cape Colony, used for merchandise and materials destined for the then east capital town, Grahamstown, about sixty kilometres inland.

  Back in PE Phila started tidying up his affairs in preparation to leave the city. Misfortune, collaborating with fate, had encouraged him into the decision. He regarded this week as his last opportunity to visit places he’d always wanted to visit in the vicinity. One of these was the township of Bethelsdorp on the outskirts of the city. It had started as a KhoiKhoi mission station, founded by Reverend Read and Van der Kemp, or Nyengane, according to the Xhosas. Nyengane had quoted from the Bible in naming the place: Then Jacob said unto his household … let us arise and go to Bethel. Hence Bethelsdorp.

  On the day of the visit, two days after his return, Phila carried with him an old book by the Scottish missionary John Campbell, published in 1815, called Travels in South Africa, undertaken at the request of the Missionary Society. Part of the book concerned Campbell’s visit to Bethelsdorp in 1813.

  Phila arrived almost simultaneously with a tourist mini-bus. He could hear the voice of the guide above the shuffling. “Bethelsdorp has a historic association with English settlers of the early nineteenth century. It was here that the London Missionary Society established its first mission for the KhoiKhoi, in 1803. Since then a horde of famous, and infamous, settlers and missionaries have been associated with and have written about the place. From Van der Kemp, Henry Lichtenstein, Thomas Pringle, to poets like Thomas Baines. As you can see, ladies and gentlemen, nothing much of its earlier boom remains here now. The missionary site comprises only those tiny stone and corrugated-iron cottages.”

  Phila gently moved away from the guide’s range, allowing the voice to begin to fade. “Unfortunately, soon they, too, will be gone …”

  Places like Bethelsdorp, he thought, should be visited by those people who have the ability to see beauty in barren places, or those with a pressing nostalgia or need to understand the colonial and missionary mischief. For the rest it was probably just a place of desolation where people now termed coloureds had gathered to escape the violence of colonialism. Now its surrounding township was the most violent and murderous in the province. Interesting heritage for Bethel Town, a Holy Place or a House of God.

  What was left of the mission station looked stranded and baffled. Aloes, with their inordinate capacity for surviving the harshest conditions, thrived, beaten only by the choreography of the stratospheric winds of the Windy City. Phila lacked energy and interest to register anything else. Most of the KhoiKhoi who stayed in the area were Stuurman people, from the Gamtoos River area. They had flown from the white man’s violence after killing the Boer commander Adriaan van Jaarsveld in revenge for an incident in which he threw a bag of tobacco for them and then mowed their warriors down while they were busy collecting it. That started what he would call a fourth war encounter with the white people, which was joined by imiDange, themselves angered by the loss of their land around Algoa Bay.

  Nyengane acquired Dyani, uTshatshu, to be his companion because, being umNtide, who mostly took wives from the KhoiKhoi people, and were close to the missionaries, he could speak three languages: Dutch, Xhosa and English.

  Phila looked at the hustle and bustle of township life around him and felt undifferentiated murkiness, something similar to the eerie feeling one gets from places of grief. Fleecy clouds tried to usher tranquillity but it was in vain. He decided to leave Bethelsdorp’s fatalistic resilience and stoicism to the aloes. As he drove off, he saw a sign that pointed to Redhouse. It provoked his interest.

  To his pleasant surprise, he discovered Redhouse to be a quiet sanctuary of old houses with trellised verandas and trees twisted by salt-prevailing winds, treasured by those who like quiet village life while not being very far from the convenience of city amenities. The area was under the shade of those leggy, ubiquitous invaders from Australia, eucalyptus trees. When he reached it Phila investigated the ruins of a fort and some deserted colonial-looking houses, with deep circular cellars that, it was evident, homeless bush dwellers used as toilets. Jeremiah’s prophecy came to mind: I shall make Jerusalem a heap of ruins, a haunt of jackal; and I will lay waste the towns of Judah so no one can live there.

  That aside, the place gave him the impression of contained energy, serenely quiet, with the exception of rich folks from the affluent suburb of Blue Bay down the estuary speeding up and down the river on speedboats. Phila sat near the river bank and watched a kingfisher dive into the water and come up sporting a small fish in its beak. The tranquillity settled him into gentle sleep.

  Soaked in cold terror from hearing voices he felt his mind going in die Irre, astray, into the mystifying process of imagination valorising him again. I am becoming exotic to myself was the last thought he remembered.

  ‘I don’t feel too good. It’s getting late. I need to be going,’ Phila cut Maqoma before he could speak.

  ‘Going where?’ Maqoma asked as though surprised that Phila would have somewhere to go.

  ‘Not that it’s any of your business, but I don’t live on river banks.’

  ‘You could have fooled me.’ Maqoma hesitated after that failed attempt at irony.

  ‘I’d understand if you chose not to c
ome along, if you’ve places to go. In fact I’d be glad. I’m kind of tired of hanging around dead people.’

  ‘Do I look dead to you?’

  ‘You got me there. Whatever you are, frankly, I’m really not in the mood to discuss different states of being today; my head is spinning.’

  ‘Your head is always spinning.’

  ‘The world makes me dizzy …’

  ‘Your breath smells of ice.’

  ‘How do you know how my breath smells? You know what? Never mind. I don’t want to know.’

  ‘It’s these books you always have your nose in. No wonder you end in no man’s land.’

  ‘Says the man who meets me dead. Is that the name of the state we meet in?’

  ‘I’m not supposed to talk about that. I’m not allowed to take you out of time. I can only take you into history, past and present.’

  ‘But not future?’

  ‘No. That you must figure out on your own, otherwise it would be cheating.’

  ‘Mfxim! Why did I know you were going to say something like that? I’ll see you when you please.’

  Phila left Maqoma morose, sitting under the gumtree. The road, initially poor gravel, quickly became tarred, at which point Phila discovered he had a flat. Cursing, he brought the car to an abrupt stop before going to the boot to take out the spare, spanner and jack.

  He discovered Maqoma there before him.

  ‘Well?’ questioned Phila. ‘Are you just gonna stand there without helping?’ The air clicked with the noise of crickets. Phila had a headache.

  ‘No, thanks. I’ll sit this one out,’ Maqoma said. ‘Besides, I thought you didn’t want me around.’ He made to sit on the grass.

  ‘Since when do you let a small thing like not being wanted stop you?’ Phila held his head for a while to off-shoot the dizziness before getting to jacking the car. ‘At the river bank just now, when you said my breath smelled of ice. You did that deliberately, didn’t you? You knew it would remind me of Keats’s poem?’

  ‘Something about you reminds me of Keats.’ Maqoma gave a fizzing laugh before continuing in mock poetic tone.

  ‘You’re a dreaming thing, a fever of yourself.’

  ‘Quoting poets is a long way from being a warrior, isn’t it? It must be nice being dead. I doubt if Keats would be impressed with that stunt.’

  ‘The one whose name was writ on water.’ Maqoma teased Phila. Then, after a pause, he said: ‘Knowledge is communal where I come from.’

  ‘So is river water, but it does not mean you should drink from a man’s well without asking his permission after he has collected the water on his own.’

  ‘The two of you have a lot in common.’

  ‘You’ve met Keats?’ Phila couldn’t resist the question.

  ‘Dead people meet each other, especially those in the same sphere.’

  ‘You mean you are in the same state of being with poets? How interesting.’

  ‘The same state of being. We are! We’re just in a different state to yours. You’re plunged in the dying moment, and we are on the rising one.’

  ‘So poets and warriors occupy the same plane?’

  ‘Why not? Instead of words warriors are poets of physical deeds.’

  ‘Help me change the tyre, or give me some space.’

  ‘I don’t know how to do that sort of thing.’

  ‘It’s not really rocket science.’

  ‘No, thanks. As I said, I’ll sit this one out.’

  ‘Thank you very much. You are quite a useful ghost.’

  ‘Sarcasm is the last resort of cowards.’

  ‘Kindly stop misquoting people.’

  By the time Phila finished changing the tyre he was almost blind with fatigue.

  Lights. Blinding lights in his eyes. And pain. Phila tried to sit up but someone was saying something, pushing him firmly back down. He realised with alarm that he was in a hospital, lying on a hospital bed, and that a doctor was doing something on his nose.

  Phila had a faint glimpse of Maqoma at the window, where the sky was beginning to be streaked with early morning light. When the doctor was finished bandaging his nose, Phila was wheeled into a recovery room, where he found Maqoma fiddling with gadgets. He summoned enough strength to ask him what had happened, but Maqoma only exacerbated his confusion by talking in allegories.

  ‘Hyenas got to you,’ Maqoma said nonchalantly.

  ‘Hyenas? In the middle of a town’s roads?’

  ‘Ja, three of them. They attacked you with knives. The first one stabbed you in the shoulder. Then others came in on the party. You would not have survived if I had not been there.’

  ‘Oh, ja? And what did you do, instil the fear of the Lord in them while they were stabbing me before becoming their understanding?’

  ‘Something like that. The important thing is that you’re alive, thanks to me. Some taxi people came to your rescue, and your car was not taken. I think that is what they were after.’

  ‘I don’t really feel grateful. I would have preferred to lose the car and keep my nose.’ Phila felt murky and aggrieved as he watched morning light seep through the window. He knew it was bound to happen sooner or later, with his solitary investigation of secluded places. He felt irrelevant, insignificant, as he watched people through the window hurry past to their respective places of care.

  Seeing Baudelaire’s ‘forest of symbols’ in everything, Phila thought about the neutered life of hospitals. The doctor had told him he was going under the knife again in thirty minutes, to adjust his nose, which was still a little skew apparently. Phila took his word for it because he couldn’t see his nose under the bandages. A nurse gave him an injection, which did nothing for his tenuous grasp on reality. A teabag rotating in the cup someone was stirring was the last thing he saw as he began to fall asleep. Through all of this he continued to hear Maqoma’s voice. He was beginning to accept that Maqoma was welded to his imagination closer than Deianeira’s tunic on Hercules.

  He woke up in a different bed, next to an Afrikaner guy with slicked-back hair, who wasted no time telling Phila he was “an eternal bachelor” and promising to take him for a spin in his Dodge “when things go on the normal side”. Apparently, he had come for “an eye tuck”, the Botox injection, in order to create the false appearance of youth. Phila listened to the man talk up a storm, mostly reading aloud from Esquire magazine: “… casu frazigu cheese … which is supposed to be packed with so many live maggots … called kopi luwak, the Indonesian words for coffee and civet, to get a delicacy with a mark-up so steep it would make a drug dealer weep.” And, “They say the devotees fork out as much as $600 for a pound. Read it here, bru.”

  Phila looked at him with a wearied eye, his companion’s voice coming at him as if from an underground cellar. Fortunately, he soon found himself succumbing to sleep again.

  Eight hours later, feeling nauseous and still with a dull headache, Phila managed to climb off the bed and go and look out of the window. He realised that the roaring hub of a taxi rank outside was responsible for much of the noise that filtered through. Evening fell with its usual mood of impatience. The moribund hustling of costermongers created a stir and fidget that refused to be drowned by the noise of the traffic. The cicada rhythm sent telegrams, summoning the night. Phila marvelled at the mixture of commercial, industrial and residential cosmopolitanism of Korsten, which was where he recognised he was. The sophisticated gimmick in the next bed had been discharged, but he had left a note for Phila on the plastic bag containing his magazines, telling him he was giving them to him. Phila was touched by the gesture – they’d clearly meant a lot to the fellow – but sadly they held no value for Phila and he left them where they were.

  Maqoma appeared after a four-day hiatus, just when Phila was starting to think he might be cured of him.

  ‘I was begining to think we had parted ways. What is it? You don’t like hospitals?’ asked Phila in mock seriousness.

  Maqoma ignored Phila’s question. ‘I used to c
ome here, eBheyini, to consort with the devil,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean to consort with the devil?’ asked Phila, not caring to press the hospital issue.

  ‘It’s no secret that in my time I was partial to the princess’s tears. We used to come to this seat of the devil whenever we wanted to see who the white man was bringing from the seas, and drown ourselves with the fiery waters.’ He looked at Phila’s face, as if trying to study his reaction, before continuing. ‘I tried to lead my men by example. But there were times of crushing despair that revealed how trapped in clay my feet were. In those times I drank myself to oblivion. Drinking carried me to a happier past and soaked my spirit with consoling falseness. I tell you, there’s nothing that deranges like the daughter of Ludiza wearing a white head-dress of silk; the seething cold drink; quencher with a sting …’

  ‘Okay, I get your point.’

  ‘I see you yourself are partial to it. Anyway. Coming here put quite a strain on my body. The presence of white people in our land added to the natural dangers of travelling. We not only had to contend with wild animals and treacherous weather when we travelled, but now with white people too. It meant one had to take extra care before starting a journey; fortify oneself with charms and herbs such as inyongwane. Do you still use it?’

  ‘I don’t know. You might find some people in the rural areas are still using it, but none I know of. It has a scientific name now, Dicoma anomala.’

  ‘In any case, we also had to carry extra bundles of spears and sticks. As a chief, wanted by colonial forces, I had to travel incognito most of the time, with a minimum of compatriots and less provision of live cattle and dried maize kernels so as not to attract attention.’

  ‘Too many forested mountains?’

  ‘It was a never-ending journey, not to be undertaken by the weak. There were mountains, crowding shrubs, gurgling river after murmuring river and rolling, ribbed sand dunes. On foot, with no wagons, was not a child’s game. It might look easy now with your new wagons that need no horses to pull them but back then it was rough going. The road sometimes brought us precariously close to white farms where we stole our cattle back for provisions when we ran out of meat and when game was scarce. My favourite venison is wild boar. Have you ever had the smoked meat of a wild boar? You’ll never want anything else. Ratels, porcupines, antelope and buffalo were still common in our land then, before the white men hunted them to oblivion. Slaughtering anything in the wild meant inviting lions and the cunning of howling hyena. Hyena, unlike lions, do not care even if you sleep next to a burning fire. They’ll steal a full-grown man and eat him alive if he is not careful.’