Broken River Tent

by Mphuthumi Ntabeni

  He recalled how Maqoma had told him about the royal contention that followed Hintsa’s untimely death at the hands of white people. How his son Kreli was still too young and depended on his councillors. The British compelled the young king to register his people for the sake of census and paying taxes. The Gcalekas hated it. This put the young king under tremendous pressure.

  “So your people walked this land, climbed these mountains and fished these waters for centuries,” Matswane murmured.

  “Well, technically, my people did all that on the banks kuLundini loThukela, on the banks of the Tugela River and foot zoKhahlamba, the Drakensberg, present-day KZN, but I get your point,” said Phila. “To my people, amaMfengu, the British were lifesavers. They had come to these lands as starving wanderers. The Xhosas called them their beasts and dogs, because they employed them to do menial jobs, like looking after their stock and tilling their land for food and shelter. Hence when the British, in the form of D’Urban, came here amaMfengu saw an opportunity to unshackle themselves by turncoating. They pinched some of the Xhosa stock they were looking after, assuming it as their portion for the years they were slaves without real compensation. Naturally the Xhosas were livid. Meantime amaMfengu became the first natives to adopt the ways of the white man.”

  “Treacherous bastards your people were, babes.” Mat gave Phila a brush on the head while still training herself to the beauty of the Wild Coast that was beginning to appear.

  “In any case, Kreli’s powers were specious. Everybody knew that real power rested with Councillor Gxabagxaba in the Gcaleka chieftainship. There was too much confusion. Minor chiefs didn’t want to take orders from a commoner. Others mocked the young prince’s ceremony of induction by not attending. They felt he was just a pasquinade. You remember Bhuru?”

  “Hintsa’s brother?”

  “Yes. The funny thing is that he abandoned Hintsa’s son when he needed him most. When it was clear Gxaba was usurping the throne, Kreli resorted to consulting diviners and rainmakers to increase his grandeur, just as his ancestor Gcaleka had done. Kreli was forced to grow up fast. His first brilliant action was to move out of his father’s shadow by establishing his own great place beyond the Mbashe River. Obviously, he also wanted to be far from the reach of the colonial government. But this brought him into contention with the Pondos of Faku. He then went back to the land his father contended with Ngubengcuka of abaThembu. They had been given the greater portion of Hintsa’s land as booty by the British because they’d assisted them in the last war against the Xhosas. Kreli demanded his father’s land back. The Thembus drove a hard bargain. With the assistance of Myeki’s Mpondomise and their doctoring, Kreli was driven to the coast, almost destitute. And the greater area of Butterworth was given to amaMfengu, up to the present-day Peddie, by the colonial government. So Kreli, like your Maqoma, found himself without a home in the land of his ancestors. From the area of present-day Coffee Bay to Gatyana, to Cintsa, along the coast, is where the majority of the amaGcaleka were pushed in pockets of desperation. For a while, in desperation, it was where Kreli settled in to catch his breath before attempting to reclaim his land.”

  Feeling impressed with how much he had taken in what Maqoma taught him, Phila continued: “For a while it looked as if Kreli would amount to nothing much. Luckily for him, most Xhosa chiefs don’t take kindly to seeing their king made into a plaything and a vagabond. They felt an urgent moral need to be under some form of paramount, a king of the Xhosa nation. A conglomeration of Xhosa warriors were gathered to fight under Kreli’s banner to reclaim his father’s land. AmaNdlambe and amaNgqika across the Kei also agreed to set aside their quarrel, a rare thing, to join the army on behalf of Kreli. They routed the Thembus and drove them towards the Orange River, where they came under the pressure of Mshoeshoe’s Sothos and were obliged to press back to the fringes of amaGcaleka. Reading between the lines, Gxabha retreated to the background, handing the reins to Kreli, who re-established his great place at Hohita, where his father used to be. Hohita is here in Willowvale but we don’t have time to visit it.

  “Maqoma gained tremendous influence over Kreli as a result of the assistance he offered, since he was the brains behind the amalgamation. But Maqoma had bigger fish to fry. His next move was to whip Kreli into a frenzy about the treacherous way white people had murdered King Hintsa. But Kreli had other internal issues to deal with. His brother Mnyaluza was one of the group that chased the Thembus beyond Igqili. He made frequent sporadic attacks on Kreli, so that the young king never really offered Maqoma the strength he needed when fighting the colonial wars.”

  “What’s Igqi … Igqili, babes?”

  “Igqili is the Xhosa name for Orange River.”

  A journey is a series of irrevocable disappearances, thought Phila, as they got closer to Coffee Bay. What if a journey was a series of reemergings? One would have to be someone who no longer denies.

  Phila drove carefully on the gravel road, which was belted by scarlet, winter-blossoming aloe trees. Watchful forests thickened the closer they got to the bay.

  ‘The sources of our pain are intermingled with those of our strain.’ Maqoma spoke softly. ‘Thyali learnt that lesson late. He died under suspicious circumstances. In his dying, he came to visit me on a windy August day.

  ‘I could see he was not his usual jaunty, jerky self. He looked sickly. ‘“Is something the matter, mfo?’ I asked. “You look sickly.” I was a little concerned but also cautious because there was still a lot of bad blood between us.

  ‘He rolled his eyes up in his head in a manner that denoted all was not well. “I’m nose to the grindstone, Maqoma,” he answered eventually, indisposed and gloomy, which confirmed my suspicions.

  ‘“What’s the matter? Why have you come to see me in the dog days?”

  ‘“I’ll get straight to the point. The white government is changing Commissioner-General Stockenström. He shall no longer be with us. All our agents are being replaced too. Apparently this group has been too concerned with the welfare of kaffirs. No guessing the kind of men who will be replacing them. Our only choice is in refusing to accept such replacements. I think we shall soon be at war with the colony again.” This was towards the 1856 war of the millennialist movement of Nongqawuse he never reached. After the 1851-1853 war, when even our success in battles, like in Waterkloof, didn’t earn us back our land, I became depressed once again and reverted to drinking. “We need all of our courage; it is obvious where all this is going.” Thyali looked not just like a man in disappointment, but in despair.

  ‘“I can’t even spin a word to catch a fly these days,” he added, “not since I went to see Suthu. She gave me lumps of sugar. I’ve not been myself since.” He was harassed by stomach pain. I had a suspicion in my mind.

  ‘“Do you think she poisoned you?” I asked, genuinely shocked to believe that Sandile’s mother would go that far.

  ‘“I don’t know. Would she?”

  ‘“She’d do anything to secure the throne for her son.”

  ‘“I don’t think so …” Then Thyali changed the topic. “In any case, I knew the status quo was too good to last. The white people must be in need of more land and cattle now. Those robbers will not stop until they’ve taken every last arable acre from us. Their purpose has always been to drive us to arid thorn-infested land where we will dwindle from famine, and come begging to them for work and sustenance. I want you to take my people under your wing also. I’m sure very soon the colony is going to push us out of our land again. I don’t have the strength for it, so everything depends on you. But you need to ease up on white man’s liquor, Maqoma, because your poison is going to come through that.” He looked in my eyes for a long moment. “You know what to do, Maqoma. All this will culminate in another war. Better start preparing now. I’m afraid you’ll have to do this one without me. I’ve strange premonitions.”

  ‘After that we sat in gloomy silence. One thing I always appreciated about Thyali was the consistency of his mi
nd. Even when most of us vacillated and didn’t know what to do he was always constant. From the start he knew the only way to live in peace in our land was to meet the violence of white people head on. Whatever the situation, even in my strangled hysteria, when I was grasping at straws, throwing myself into the white man’s bottle, I always knew Thyali was there to keep the fire burning in our hearth. Whatever happened to me I knew he’d think himself into calmness and continue the struggle. Now he was telling me soon he would be no more. That shocked me into sense.

  ‘Women who had been preparing meat for us brought it, but we were both out of appetite. When they came back to claim the dishes they were surprised to find we had not touched a thing. “Anything the matter, my chiefs?” one of them asked.

  ‘“Everything is the matter,” Thyali answered as he took a long pull from his pipe. He turned to me. “I have nothing to show for my life except blood, tears and toil. I’ve wasted a great deal of my life enclosed like an animal in strange lands because of white people. We’re like dogs going after their own tails, round and round in dizzy warring circles. Last night I dreamt I was a gnat in a blade of grass of a British soldier crushed under his boot.” A look of suffering was etched in his ferret eyes. It was the first time I got such intimacy from Thyali. I had always admired him for bearing the unhappiness we were born into with courage, however savage it was sometimes. I always found myself wanting compared to him in that department. And now here he was, pouring his heart to me, and I was discovering he had the same feelings about me, the same respect. How could it have been different? We were born to the same situation not very far apart in years. If anybody, it was Thyali who understood my situation best, and I his. We were the cats of the same forest, always stressing the ugliness of life while remaining vital in our heart of hearts.

  ‘To animate the disembodied silence between us I stood and went to the calabashes among which I kept my brandy. I poured a tot and offered one to Thyali. He refused it with indignation. He again reproached me about my drinking problem, which he blamed for my lack of attention to things that mattered.

  ‘“Contrary to your impressions,” I argued lamely, “the white man’s drink expands my mind – to receive better impressions. I’ve seen people throw away their lives because of white man’s liquor. For me it does the opposite. I find it a tolerable companion in times of crisis. On things that shattered me, Thyali – the death of Hintsa, the humiliation of our nation, the manner in which they murdered my wife in the mountains – alcohol has been my only companion, the only thing that gave me strength to cope. Have you no heart? I’m not able to face a day of my miserable life on my sober wits. It gives me the little will I have left for continuing; without it I’d be in an even worse state. It keeps my spirits up. If you cannot understand this, try to conceal your disappointment in me.”

  ‘I continued in that vein for some time, trying to make Thyali understand where I was coming from. I even became sentimental, trying to blackmail him into sympathy, but he did not budge.’

  ‘Things we addicts say to get a fix.’ Phila implicated himself in order to sympathise.

  ‘“It’s time you got your act together, Maqoma,” Thyali went on. “If alcohol is the only thing that facilitates your courage to life, then you might as well be dead. There’s another storm coming. I have a feeling it’ll be a make or break one. If we lose we’re done for, forever. So long as something remains of me I shall go down grabbing the throat of a white man. But should my ancestors call me before the war starts or is over, all will be dependent on you. You cannot expect the young chiefs, Kreli and Sandile, to be of much use. They look up to you. Show them you’re worthy of their respect. Break the shackles of white men’s liquor, which has such a strong hold on your life.”

  ‘He stood up, bowed his head, put his hands behind his back and walked out of the door, leaving a sense of dreariness and doom behind. His entourage and guards were waiting for him as he got on his horse. They left without once turning back to look at me. He didn’t look at me again. Do you understand what that meant? My father’s child didn’t look back at me. That’s how disappointed he was with my drinking problem. He had lost his trust in my abilities but was forced to rely on me as the only hope. And that was the last impression I had of him because he died within weeks.

  ‘I looked around at my people. Women turned their eyes down. They were all ashamed of me. My people were ashamed that I was dependent on the bottle. I went inside, took the last two peach brandy calabashes I had and threw them with all the strength I had against the boulder at the back of my hut. As they shattered among the rocks people looked up to see what the matter was. When they realised what had happened they started smiling, clapping and eventually singing praise-songs. Women came fawning and touching me.

  ‘“My chief, my chief! You’re back from the demon of white people.”

  ‘I never felt so proud of myself as I did that day. “Gather my councillors to be here the day after tomorrow,” I instructed. “We have urgent things to discuss.” Then I went behind the hut to vomit the last of the white man’s poison still in my system.

  ‘Thyali died from a similar sickness as our father, although he didn’t drink white man’s alcohol. Everyone was of the suspicion that white people were doctoring our chiefs to death. Thyali suspected Sandile’s mother, Suthu, and the lumps of sugar she gave him just before he contracted the disease. Suthu fled to the colonial authorities for safety and told them I was the one orchestrating the campaign against her. You must hand it to her, she was shrewd. She knew she was through with Thyali and now she wanted the white authorities to come after me so her son Sandile would have no contender to the throne. Thyali went to his grave wondering if Suthu had poisoned him. When he died, because his sons were still young, his chieftainship fell to Xhonxo, who was not very effective. Suthu overpowered him with the threat of a barrel of a white man’s gun, and the influence of Tola. Sandile was supposed to be the supreme ruler but we all knew Suthu held the real reins. That irked me. I became, in their eyes and words, “just another drunkard chief like Ngqika”. This was probably the most frustrating time in my life, Suthu conniving with white people to get rid of me.’

  The Dappled Things

  PHILA AND MATSWANE ARRIVED IN Coffee Bay in the soft misty rain that was common in those parts of the land.

  “When it rained like this in our area we said it betakes a monkey’s wedding,” Phila said, putting on the windscreen wipers.

  “What do you know, so did we,” said Matswane, taking in the green hills that rolled into the sea. They took a few wrong turns before they were on the right road towards the beach resort they were booked into. They parked the car immediately after entering the area in front of a bungalow with a sign saying Reception.

  After collecting the keys for their bungalow they drove to their unit. They carried their bags inside against the polite curiosity of a couple sitting on the veranda of the next unit with sundowners. Matswane decided to take a shower, while Phila stood at the window and looked out at the sea view. He whispered, “We’ve come for Light.”

  The river mouths are full of the Light, according to Xhosa lore.

  “I am making a cocktail – would you like one?” he called out to Matswane, whom he suspected was beyond earshot, as he opened the window to let in the connotative notes of the sea.

  “Make me something with mint, please,” she shouted back above the sound of shower water.

  Phila mixed vodka with soda water and lime cordial before realising they had no mint leaves. None the less he went outside to the veranda satisfied with his Russian Mule. He lit a cigarette and felt obliged to give another nod to the couple next door.

  “Dat sunset is de schamptin out of dis werld?” the guy said, with a heavy accent Phila immediately recognised as German, possibly from Thüringen. He stood to extend his hand, introducing himself as Arno. It turned out he was actually from Herrsching, a small town outside Munich. For some reason, he felt compelled to tell Phi
la his exact address (corner of Leitenhöhe and Adolf-Ochert-Weg), which Phila found amusing because he knew it to be a German thing. Arno, who attended the University of Stuttgart, was on an exchange programme with the University of Port Elizabeth. Phila didn’t feel like lingering too long and so he chose to withhold the information that he had spent some years studying in Germany, especially since he had not even found the appropriate time to tell Matswane yet. He felt it’d be inappropriate for her to hear it in front of strangers.

  “I’m more Deutsch than Schwiss, but my vader kheeps insisting dat ve are Schwiss. Last I vas in Zürich vas ven I vas twelf hears hold. My mama is German, born in Cologne.”

  Arno, looking self-conscious, then gave a slight giggle as he went on in stagey reluctance. “Is dis too much information?”

  “Nein, nein, ich habe gehofft, daß du mir zeigen könntest, wo die Bar oder die Küche ist. Ich hätte gerne für Bonbons gefragt.” As usual Phila’s natural sympathy took hold of him. Arno was fascinated.

  “Du kannst ein paar von unseren haben. Wir sind immer vorbereitet. Meine Freundin ist Polinisch; sie denkt an alles.

  “Willst du mit mir zu ihr kommen?”

  He went inside to bring a sprig of mint before continuing rabid talk, telling Phila his life story in five minutes, interjecting every second line with a “Gottverdammte”.

  Late that night the couples sat around an open fire, cooking lamb potjiekos and roasting garlic bread. Martyana, Arno’s girlfriend, contributed an Austrian cabbage dish, though lacking the crucial garlic ingredient. They talked late into the night about their respective lives; growing up in different provinces, countries and continents. The European couple wanted to hear more and more apartheid stories, which, in the end, slightly irked Phila because they had to keep inventing horror stories they were fresh out of. Arno said he had wanted to come to Africa ever since a tarot card reader in Berlin had told him his fate was in Africa. Phila found this quite amusing.