‘My wife took a deep sip from the brandy and sat at my feet, tucking her kaross away between her knees. A harsh frown puckered her forehead as she rearranged her hair. I was slightly annoyed that at a time like that she was concerned with the crinkly puff of her matted hair. I took it to be a sign of indefatigable vanity. I struggled in my mind to find a proper way to spend the senseless grind until the end of the day. The best thing for that time was to make love, or rather, unburden ourselves. Mental pressure went to my loins. With the goose-grass scrub as our bed, spurges prickling us and grating against her back and my knees, we tried flooding the shame of the day with sweaty lovemaking and the wind dancing on my back. We moved together, rising and falling in conserved tenderness until we had our fill. Her laughter tailed off into gasping convulsions. There was chattering of teeth; the squeezing out of breath; the quivering of lips to signify the coming intensity. It gave a sneeze relief. Unfortunately, the spilling of seed didn’t staunch the pain in the heart.
‘Lovemaking and liquor were things that always managed to take my mind off brooding, but not that day. I sat on a boulder feeling hollow and defeated with my hands on my head. A female smell in my hands compounded the haze of melancholy. A developing ulcer in my stomach stirred a sense of despair. There was a pain of loss in my breathing. No one has enough strength to keep the finger pressed on the wound when one’s life is slowly ebbing.
‘A hawk circled in the sky; marmots whistled in the hollows. Fatigue invaded the body. Horror hung in the air, threateningly in deathly sultriness. When I am under pressure I have a need for solitariness. I moved away from my wife, putting about three trees’ distance between us. It felt as if everything was failing me that day. If a man sees truth in the morning, he may die in the evening without regret. Suddenly it felt like a good day to die. I spent the next hours with feelings of mystification and edifying insights, my mind saturated like a steaming jungle of thoughts. As the sun began to dip behind the mountains, and shades of evening widened, I called to my wife. “Come collect our stuff. Let’s be gone to our people. The time of reckoning has come.”
‘As we descended the mountain we saw hideous and leaden smoke coming out of every hearth in our villages. The skies had become ashy with clouds. I wanted to hear a sheaf of village news but none was forthcoming. People were all hiding in their houses. Others had fled the coming wrath of hunger to other parts of the land. By the time we entered our enclosure people were already gathered outside demanding an explanation for the non-visit from the River People and the sun’s failure to stop at noon. I suppose, as their chief, I owed them an explanation, but I was too weary. I surveyed them for a moment before speaking in a soft voice, delaying and measuring my words. “Neither rest nor peace do I get from you people.” I then proceeded to my sleeping quarters where I spent the next two moons looking at the thatch from the inside, hardly eating anything.
‘After two moons I made bold to visit our villages, to assess for myself the actual damage done by the deliberate famine. Death hung in sorrow and woeful atmosphere. The air was saturated with the reek of putrefying flesh. Old men sat around their houses, some even eating their blankets; wilting and crumbling with loss of spirit. When you went too close they grabbed you by the tail of your blanket, enquiring if Nxele or the River People, or the ancestors had come yet. Nothing you told them altered their minds still conjured by the illusions of Nongqawuse. It is amazing how stubborn a convinced mind can be.
‘Young men paced back and forth between huts and kraals, hanging their heads. The wailing of children replaced birdsong. The whole scene raked me over the coals. I was emotionally stymied. I don’t know which was worse, the heavily brocaded wails, the shrieking and tumulus panic of women, or the granite-like deadening silence of middle-aged men.
‘When it became clear Nongqawuse had devastated the nation into famine, loss of hope followed. Things got worse. I saw an old lady repose in silence while dogs devoured her rotten leg. I saw a young woman cook, nonchalantly and quietly, a dead foetus from her womb. One man walked, trance-like, over a cliff, falling onto jagged rocks. Nobody even winced; instead boys and dogs raced each other to claim the carcass down below for food. Horses and donkeys competed for the thatch grass on the roofs of the houses. Before long, their mouths bloody, foaming, from trying to eat cactus where there was nothing else to eat, they had all been slaughtered and consumed. Rodents as large as hares screamed for the oozing ankles of the living, and were in turn hunted for food by young boys.
‘Within a few months things fell on disaster. Hardship protracted by hunger reduced us to extreme passive distress. It was common to see people gaunt and wild-eyed from want of food. Flies drank their fill from the blood-flecked saliva running from the corners of starving people’s mouths. Terrible problems of indigestion became common, as a result of people eating tree bark as a substitute for bread; it also induced hallucinations born of delirium tremens. When food supplements such as nettles, dog-meat, and rodent flesh were no longer obtainable people moved about like ghosts, wasting away. It was not rare to see people fighting with spent strength over white ant nests. Some dropped by the wayside where they lay, exhausted, feeble hands trying to clasp and tear up blades of grass. Some cooked their goatskin blankets, strops, and so forth, but hunger would not be averted. We had no seed to plant anything. Unburied skeletons lay scattered all over village roads.
‘Many times I had watched people reveal the courageous side of their nature during times of pressure, like when we were at war. During famine it is not so. Hungry people behave like animals – hyenas and crows.
‘Only the devil could have been satisfied with the way events turned out that season.
‘It was reported that Governor Grey was pleased with the way things had turned out, because it meant more human labour for white farmers.’
Phila stopped talking. While he saw that he had shocked Martyana into silence – perhaps from his words as much as his voice, he couldn’t tell – she looked perplexed.
“What the fuck was that?” she asked.
“Me acting out from analeptic memory.”
“You’re a good actor. How does it work?”
“It comes from longing,” Phila said simply. “It enables one to cross borders of consciousness.”
“Interesting …” Martyana frowned, concentrating on his face. “I’m not sure what to call it – flood of ancestral memory or analeptic memory – but I’ve decided to embrace rather than fight it.”
“That is a tragic, tragic story.”
“Before famine took its dreadful toll,” Phila went on in his normal voice, “word circulated from Nongqawuse that non-believers had delayed the day for the coming of the River People because of partial or no fulfilment of requirements. It said the non-believers were the stumbling block to Nongqawuse’s prophecies. People formed what was termed ‘patriotic parties’ to persecute non-believers. These parties murdered and confiscated the cattle of non-believers wherever it was possible. Chief Maqoma wanted to drive people to desperation and, subsequently, war with the colonial government. Most of the non-believers exacerbated their lot by seeking protection from white missionaries. They flocked to colonial levees and missionary establishments. To save them from the wrath of the believers, who chose to put the blame for the failure of the prophecy on them, the colonial government took them under their protection. The British government saw the likes of Maqoma and the other chiefs who supported Nongqawuse’s prophecies as a menace to peace. They wanted to make an example of them.
“Maqoma was identified as one of the ringleaders of the believers in the absence of the likes of Mhlakaza, who was already incarcerated. Even Nongqawuse and her chief collaborators were put under house arrest. Maqoma was arrested for specious allegations of killing one of the non-believers through the hands of their war party.
“Governor Grey put the last nail on the destruction of the Xhosa nation by refusing them any food donations. Instead he instructed them to go and work on whit
e farms as hired workers, virtually slaves, on the land they had owned not very long before, tending for white people and Mfengus. The Mfengu now were the new black master race; the Xhosas were the new slaves. Proud Xhosas crossed rivers to chase ostriches for diamond stones; some found work on the diamond mines in Kimberley and, later, in the gold mines on the Witwatersrand.
“After a mock legal trial – Maqoma was first tried in King William’s Town by what he called ‘striplings who grew before me only yesterday, donning long black gowns and powdered periwigs, calling themselves magistrates’ – the accused were sent to the higher courts in Cape Town. After the hypocritical formalities, Maqoma and other chiefs were stripped of their royal clothes and made to stand before courts like common criminals and highwaymen. Maqoma was of the opinion they desired to have him done legally to death. Specious witnesses supported the court’s evidence and were themselves supported by the court’s bribes.
“Thus Maqoma and other Xhosa chiefs were taken to be tried in Cape Town before being sentenced to the leper colony – Robben Island today.”
Martyana and Phila enjoyed a final coffee together at the airport in East London a couple of days later. Martyana was flying to Johannesburg, where she would catch a connecting flight to Munich.
Coffee Bay had been their last resort stop before she and Arno were due to head back to Germany.
“Do you think we will ever see each other again?” Martyana asked.
“I don’t see why not. After all, getting dumped at the same time creates a deep bond between two people.” They laughed softly. “If I feel, when you’re gone, I cannot live my life without you, I’ll come seek you. But I need to sort my life out first. It’d be unfair to invite someone into it at the moment; it’s too messy.”
“And if I come visit South Africa again, I should look you up in Cape Town?” she asked, more solemnly than she might have intended. “What will you do there?”
“Truth be told, I don’t know. Sit down somewhere long enough to collect my thoughts and make something out of all of that has happened in my life since coming back to the country. Perhaps get a job in the municipality or an architectural firm or something; find my place in the world? Something like that. The rest I shall discover as I go.”
“I hear Cape Town is a beautiful city.”
“I suppose – but I am looking more for peace than beauty at present.”
“If I may, to satisfy my curiosity, or mend my pride … These past two days … why didn’t we have sex?”
Phila smiled. He had been asking himself the same question, without getting a satisfactory answer. “I can only speak for myself. I wanted to make love to you, but I also wanted it to be more than just a jilted thing.”
“Or a holiday to remember in Africa thing, in my case,” she said.
“Besides,” Phila added, “I am a little tired of grabbing onto things without really knowing myself. It has gotten stale for me. I need to show better respect to others by presenting a known, more composite self to them. Otherwise I am just gonna keep making the same mistakes and never mature. Let’s deal with what is fractured inside first. So if I end up in a monastery you shall constantly be in my prayers.” They both laughed.
“For that I would begrudge God!” said Martyana.
They were calling her flight. She stood up to kiss Phila before going to join the boarding queue. After they had stamped her passport she came back to give him a long hug and a last kiss. It was not vigorous but enough to raise her colour and was deeply felt by both.
“I hope to be buying your book at a bookshop near me soon,” Martyana said.
“I hope so too.”
Phila walked out of the terminal to the parking lot. Somehow he felt he was taking a big stride towards his future. He was anxious to see what was on the other side.
It is said, in Africa, that at dusk the purity and beauty of God’s creation makes the devil so mad with envy that he weeps blood. “What the devil does not realise,” Phila’s grandma would say, “is that even his anger and envy add lustre to the beauty of God’s creations. How do you fight that, the one who uses even your wickedness to advance the cause of beauty and goodness?”
As he drove away from the airport Phila realised that he was weeping. Destiny disguises itself with trifling tidbits, he thought; no wonder it is so easy for most of us to miss it. Negotiating the traffic, he was already thinking how best to commit things Maqoma had told him to writing, to turn his notes and his thoughts into a structured whole. And thinking about Maqoma brought with it thoughts about Mandela, Sobukwe and all the others who had spent lonely hours surrounded by water on islands of human misery, and those who had perished on those islands of exile and sorrow – from Gyara off the Attica in the Aegean, to the katorga in the frozen Siberian gulags. He thought about the last days of Napoleon and John, the beloved apostle, almost blind in Patmos where he came back with a brilliant script of mystical rendering of the life of Jesus, the Christ. What could be more profound than the realisation that in the beginning was love, indomitable and indefatigable love?
Over the car radio Bob Dylan moaned: I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea …
2017
Decluttering
PHILA LOOKED AT HIS WATCH AND realised he had been standing at the window of his Hout Bay home for well over an hour, looking out as evening swept down the mountain. He went to the bathroom, picked up his razor to shave, and looked steadily at the face in the mirror with dust of age growing it into his father’s. It almost pleased him that its furrowing forehead etched the ineffable melancholic dignity he loved about his father’s face. “Stop being a spectator to your life,” he told the face in the mirror. “And stop putting so much emphasis on the life of your mind. Live.”
While planning his nineteen-second shower – because Cape Town was under the severest drought strain that threatened the city with what was being called Day Zero (taps running dry to make it the first modern city to run out of water) – he went to his computer to answer Martyana’s email. He had chosen to postpone his reply, wanting to think properly about her proposal on his way home from the office. He decided to agree to the suggestion of their visit to Cape Town. She had told Phila that her nine-year-old son was looking forward “to being in Africa”.
Martyana and Phila had kept up a sporadic correspondence since they’d last seen each other at the East London airport over a decade ago. This was the first time she had dropped strong hints of wanting to take their relationship to the next level. This was what had thrown Phila into a little confusion. He had been waiting for it for so long, now that it was happening it made him dizzy with excitement.
Martyana had become a well known fine artist, “prestigious” was how the newspapers Phila read put it, and had had several major solo exhibitions in different central European cities. Most of the pieces Phila told her he liked, when she gave him a sneak preview, she sent to him, so he’d learnt to moderate his compliments to avoid acting as though he was dropping hints. His favourite was a black township youth in a melancholic pose. Phila had told her it reminded him of his favourite Pemba painting. Though almost a reproduction of Pemba’s in posture and on the outlines, Martyana had introduced conflict on the boy’s face. She gave the face grave lines of expression, almost grim, with a scornful lift of one eyebrow, while suffusing the straight one with marks of tenderness. The major communication was in the calm of the eyes, like a fortress against the storm. The slight tilt of the head gave the impression of a contemplative air from a buttressed conscience. The face was Phila’s. She titled the portrait IMPREGNABLE WILL.
Hi there!
Kafka was of the opinion that written kisses don’t arrive at their destinations because they get drunk up by ghosts along the way. What did he know, couch traveller that he was?
I will be honoured to host the two of you.
I think we might be happy still.
Perhaps we can find love to last both our lifetimes? One thing I ask is that w
e aim to connect by the language of the soul. Everything else we shall learn as we go.
Keep well,
Phila
Phila never re-read his emails anymore before sending them. When he did they always sounded like gibberish and he ending up deleting them altogether. He hit the Send button before he changed his mind and waited as the bar gyrated before the yellow Sent message came.
He was sending it to his future life, his heart was telling him.
Feeling fresh after his shower, he went back and started typing.
The first time I met you I recognised you from the image of you formed in my spirit.
Phila’s mind was still on Martyana. He was tempted to send a follow-up email, because he felt he hadn’t properly communicated his sense of excitement. Instead he decided to tidy up things with the Maqoma business.
CHAPTER 1
FIRE NEXT TIME
I, Maqoma, son of Ngqika, prince of amaRharhabe and the tribal shoot of amaXhosa – I am incarcerated on this island of lepers by the British, for resisting their encroachment on our land. I am too weary and old to be angry; too old to nurse grievances, even against white people, despite the fact that they were the architects of my doom, and of my nation’s catastrophes. I have rheumatism, which makes it difficult for me to gad about this accursed island. All my pleasures in this life have faded. I eagerly await Qamata to send the wagon that will join me with my ancestors.
When my sister was learning how to read and write at missionary schools I taunted her because I saw it as a waste of time, a prolegomena to action that never goes anywhere. Luckily she didn’t pay attention to me, and later she taught me. Now, after my life has been stripped of everything dear to me, it is the pen I’m picking from its ashes.
Broken River Tent Page 36
