Adam’s belief in witchcraft is unshakeable, and possibly implicated in his need to believe that his mother had no choice but to leave him on his own.
‘My aunts got it from my grandmother. That is why my mother could not stay in the village. She was too afraid they would put witches on her. It’s a big decision for her to return with us today,’ he said as we pulled into the Mbagala bus station. Suna, who had travelled ahead of us, was standing at the side of the road, a blue bucket on her head. She looked tense.
‘Njia hii,’ she shouted to us, running across the rank in a turquoise khanga to stop a minibus that was just leaving its bay. ‘Haraka,’ she shouted, and climbed in.
‘Fuck man, she’s too stressed. It makes me stress myself, y’know. She needs to chill.’
We climbed in after her and seated ourselves on the ledge behind the front seats, facing the other passengers. Suna fished in her blue bucket and retrieved a black plastic packet, half-filled with pepeta – rice that has been cooked and then flattened and dried, and which tastes a bit like popcorn. We scooped out handfuls and crunched them between our teeth, splinters dusting our laps and the shoes of the facing passengers.
Dar es Salaam does not release vehicles quickly in any direction, but, when it does, it does so suddenly. One moment we were travelling between a dense press of shanties, with palm trees among them here and there, and the next we were shuttling between dense forests of palm trees, with just a few huts below them here and there. After an hour on this green sea, our daladala reached the end of its route and we disembarked and boarded another, which drove at frightening speeds for two hours before pulling into a sandy bay.
‘Kiparang’anda,’ Suna announced, taking a footpath that led into dense bush. This soon opened on a disc of foot-polished earth, on which two breeze-block buildings stood beneath giant avocado trees.
‘Kiparang’anda Primary School,’ said Adam, and pointed out the windows he had slipped out of whenever he wanted to bunk classes. Children streamed to the doorways to gawk at the odd procession. There was an irony to this return. Suna had brought her son to the village to keep him off Dar es Salaam’s mean streets. Now here he was, an advertisement for those streets with his tattoos and glinting teeth, encouraging the schoolchildren with gang signs borrowed from music videos.
Suna, carrying a melon on one raised palm, increased the pace and we soon dipped out of sight into a valley in which spiky pineapple plants, sugar cane, cassava bushes and banana trees flourished. It was nearing midday, and several women were lying in the shade of some cashew trees, waiting for the air to cool before resuming their chores beside the well.
The compound in which Adam had grown up was on the valley’s southern crest. It consisted of a large rectangular building with an open-air atrium at its centre, and a smaller two-room building a little way downslope, accessible through a fence of sticks. As we approached, a man lying on a reed mat on the veranda of the larger building sat up slowly and waved.
‘That’s my uncle,’ Adam said, without enthusiasm. Suna returned her brother’s wave but then ducked into the smaller building, pulling me into a gloomy, windowless room furnished with two beds at right angles along two of the walls.
‘A baby,’ Suna cried. ‘Baby, baby, baby.’
Adam’s grandmother was lying on the smaller of the two beds, being spoon-fed rice by her eldest daughter, Maria. Age had stripped the old woman of all musculature, leaving behind perhaps thirty kilograms of skin and bone, ending in toenails that had turned to vegetable ivory. She appeared not to notice the arrival of her youngest daughter, but when Adam walked in the creases on her face turned upwards. ‘Kitenga,’ she croaked, and raked the air with a hand, signalling that Adam should take over the feeding duties. Maria sniffed and stood to leave, and as soon as she was gone the old woman ordered Adam to eat what was left over on the plate. He did, explaining in a rice-slow whisper that, although he had been sent to live with his uncle, his grandmother had raised him.
‘Sometimes my uncle and aunt wouldn’t feed me for three days at a time, so me nan used to save her dinner and feed me late at night, when nobody was looking. Even now she doing it, you see. Nah man, I love me nanny too much. She raised me.’
Suna broke out a flask containing our lunch of sugary noodles. Since we had only our fingers to work with much of it ended up on the concrete floor, before being pulled under the beds by two emaciated kittens. Adam remained cradling his grandmother’s head in his lap. She looked adoringly up at him.
‘She say she feels ready for the end of life now. She’s worried that if it don’t come soon all her daughters will die first, because they are old women already.’
Halima closed her eyes and fell asleep, and quietly as we could we retreated from the dark room and shut the bamboo door.
Slowly, reluctantly, Suna and Adam walked over to the main house.
‘Ah, Kitenga,’ said Uncle Mageni, extending a hand from his prostrate position on the veranda. The two of them ground through some pleasantries and were spared further awkwardness when Adam’s phone rang. He stalked away to the edge of the banana plantation, dribbling a deflated football as he talked.
‘Please, sit.’ The former headmaster patted the open space on his reed mat. He was dressed in shorts and sandals, and his legs were perfectly hairless. I sat down and we traded a few lies. He said Adam had been a good boy – ‘Happy, no trouble’ – and I said that Adam was doing well as a trader in Cape Town, that he lived under a roof, had many friends.
‘Why does everyone call him Kitenga?’
‘That is his name. A kitenga is a ... what can I say, like a basket, made of natural materials. We Tanzanians use them to carry coconuts. You tie the basket to the body, and fill it with coconuts. When Kitenga’s mother was pregnant with him she reached 11 months, and he still was not born. Her stomach was out here, and we worried the child was dead inside her. She went to see a doctor who told her the child was alive, and that she must call him Kitenga after he is born, to remind herself of how big he made her, like a basket full of coconuts.’
Adam’s aunt came out onto the veranda, her eyes made up with pink and green eyeshadow. For a few moments she watched Adam talking on his phone at the foot of the property, before turning and walking back inside the house. She did not return.
‘Hey Kitenga,’ I said, passing the football back and forth with Adam a few minutes later, ‘are we staying the night here?’
Suna, who was watching us, chopped her fingers across her neck.
‘No, no sleep.’
‘You see what Suna say, Sean? These people are witches. I’m serious. If we stayed tonight you gonna hear them whistling to each other. You heard about the witch’s whistle?’
‘No.’
‘Come on, you must have heard about it. Every witch keeps a whistle hidden somewhere, made out of a small boy’s dick. At night they use this to call each other.’
‘Where the fuck would I hear something like that?’
Adam giggled. ‘We call it a filimbi. Just imagine.’
But witchcraft was not the problem, or at least not for Adam.
‘What did my uncle say to you?’
‘He said you were a good boy.’
‘He’s lying. I used to run away all the time. Sometimes I would hear him coming down the path and I would hide in the bushes, just to miss him.’
‘What did his wife say?’
‘Nothing.’
‘That woman is evil, I’m telling you. You see this,’ he said, tapping his gold-plated incisors with his pinky fingers.
‘Look again.’ He raised his head so that I could see his upper dentures from below. The gold plates did not sit over his incisors, which were well back from his front teeth, and badly stunted.
‘That woman did this to me. She pushed me into a chair when I was a little boy and knocked my teeth out. Her own children use
d to fight, you see, but when their mother came they would tell her it was my fault, and she would always punish me, never them. My uncle saw this happening but he did nothing to defend me, even though I am his sister’s blood. When it came time for me to go to high school he sent his other children but he never sent me. His friend said he would train me as a railway engineer but my uncle refused him because his plan was for me to stay and work on the farm. That’s how my uncle saw me, like a slave boy. I don’t hate him, you know, but I don’t respect him either. I could have been different if he had been a kind man.’
These memories took the enjoyment out of our game, and Adam told Suna we were leaving.
‘Call us when you are finished here,’ he said, setting out on a different path to the one we’d come in on. We soon heard feet behind us and, turning, saw Uncle Mageni labouring up the hill.
‘Please give this man TSh10 000, just so that he will go away. It’s all he wants.’
I handed the former headmaster a pink shillingi elfu kumi bill, watermarked with Julius Nyerere’s face. He took it, turned and shuffled downhill. Adam continued on through the palms and greeny-yellow grasses, seeming smaller to me than he ever had against the vast concrete haunches of Nelson Mandela Boulevard. It was so completely still that at first I struggled to place the sound of an approaching motorbike. The machine and its driver came up behind us at speed, forcing me to step off the path. The rider came to a halt a few metres beyond Adam. He lifted his helmet and gave a delighted shout.
‘Pedi pedi!’
‘No way,’ said Adam, flicking his fingers. ‘Sean, climb on the back of this brother’s bike, we’re going to meet some people.’
We were soon blasting down bush paths and through the yards of reed houses, where the cry went up again and again. ‘Pedi pedi, pedi pedi!’
‘It means half-caste boy, that’s what they named me here,’ Adam called into the wind.
The motorbike came to a stuttering halt in a dense orchard of palms, beneath which young men and women sat among drifts of coconut hair, drinking gongo tippas from a tea bowl. Adam knocked his fingers against everyone else’s and handed a purple TSh5 000 bill to the motorcyclist, who roared off, returning after a few minutes with a foil package no bigger than a flower beetle. Adam lit a bit of coconut husk and held a fragment of a tile above it, then unwrapped the tin foil parcel and crushed the unga inside with the base of the gongo cup. He smoked alone, breaking off only to draw breath and loop spittle around the end of the joint. His phone rang in the grass beside him, and then rang again.
‘Me mum says she’s finished at the house. I told her she must wait by the road, I’m chilling with my friends.’
The conversations quickly homed in on the bad luck of mutual acquaintances. A boy they had called Gaga, who had played with Adam on the village football team, had been beaten to death after being caught thieving in a nearby village. Another acquaintance, having just bought a new motorbike, had been murdered by a bodaboda hijacking racket on one of the area’s many bush paths. The gang was known to comprise youths who had grown up in the area, but who had since relocated to Dar es Salaam. Their strategy was to return to the villages in the company of at least one person whom nobody would recognise. The outsider would engage the services of a local bodaboda driver, while the others waited in ambush beside the path they knew the bodaboda driver would travel. When the motorbike neared they would step out to hail the driver, who would be sure to recognise them and stop. The moment he put the machine in neutral the passenger would knife him in the neck and between the ribs. The friend in question had been found with his eyes stabbed out.
Adam shook his head, and flicked the ash off his cocktail. ‘Back in the day you had to leave Dar es Salaam before sunrise if you wanted to get to this village before nighttime. The road was terrible, but at least none of this shit was happening.’ It was not clear whether he was referring to the violence or the heroin he was smoking. Probably both.
‘Give me one tippa,’ he demanded of the drinkers, and when it was poured he threw it in the sand.
‘God bless the dead,’ he croaked.
Suna called again and Adam lost it, became truly furious. ‘My mother left me here when I was five years old. She dropped me in the bushes and went away. It made me crazy. It made me hate her. Today I love me mum but she left me, and she knows that. To be honest she can wait for me now.’
When the joint was done he started walking in the direction of the main road, but, with the news out that pedi pedi was back, men and women of all ages came streaming towards us, and in the next hour we moved no more than a hundred metres. At sunset we found Suna standing beside a daladala on the side of the highway, her eyes flickering between the red-eyed throng surrounding her son and the policemen manning a nearby roadblock. She practically begged Adam to climb in, and even then he kept us and the other passengers waiting for several minutes as he continued to shake hands and swap stories. When the bus eventually departed he was sweating. His mouth, which had not stopped moving for hours, kept up a jawing inertia.
‘I’ll come here one more time, to visit my grandmother’s grave,’ he said. ‘After that, it is finished. I hate this fucking place.’
◆
Lying awake on the grubby mattress in Sudi’s room, the barking of dogs curiously absent from Sinza’s nocturnal chorus, I was reminded of the last time I had slept this close to the floor in a room without electricity, running water or furniture. It was in the course of my return to the place of my own upbringing: my grandfather’s farm outside the agricultural town of Norton, in Zimbabwe.
In 2001, when the news had come that my grandfather had been frightened off his farm by a powerful politician, I had been working 12-hour night shifts in a Devonshire trifle factory. I had been away from southern Africa for a year, and had found myself unable to engage with these distant events in any significant way. I had experienced a measure of relief, in fact. For much of the nineties, emphysema had been squeezing my tobacco-farming grandfather for breath; parts of the farmhouse and yard had begun to reflect inattention. By the time I had left the continent, orb-weaver spiders had embalmed the pigsties. In the mill, it had been the same: only, the billowing flour would turn the webs into giant silken stalactites.
It had become clear that my grandfather and his wife, who was also in poor health, were determined to farm until their hearts stopped working. What then? Who would the farm pass to? Which of us – now naturalised South Africans, living city lives – was capable of keeping such a place? The expropriation of the farm had simplified, in a sense, what would have been the administration of a complicated estate: 1 500 hectares of mixed-use sandveld, on which roughly fifty workers of mainly Mozambican origin had lived and worked with their families under the Damoclean sword of the Zimbabwean government’s xenophobic land-reform policies.
I had returned to South Africa to find my grandfather living on a smallholding in the Western Cape with my Zimbabwean uncle and aunt. My step-grandmother, too ill to leave Zimbabwe by road, had flown to KwaZulu-Natal, where several of her children had lived. A year had passed since their extraction, and I had offered to drive the old man across the country so that he might be reunited with his wife. But on the day of our planned departure he had been diagnosed with cancer of the stomach, and told that, if he wished to live out the year, treatment should commence immediately. So, instead of driving 1 800 kilometres to the east, we had driven 30 kilometres to the west, to the nearest radiology facility. He had lived another four years, as had she; but, both being too frail for travel, they had died without ever seeing each other again.
The experience of watching him wither away in exile had left me at odds with the country of my birth. Seven years had passed before I next crossed the Limpopo River, riding shotgun in Willie Phiri’s fifty-ton rig bound for Zambia. On that journey I had resolved to return to the farm. No sooner had I returned to Johannesburg than I had set off agai
n, by bus, for Harare. The country being starved of fuel, I had borrowed a bicycle and a tent from a friend, and had set out on the Bulawayo road in the early morning. Winter had passed through like an overloaded hay cart, leaving a trail of chaff on the shimmering tarmac. I passed the landmarks of my youth: Zanu–PF House, with its imposing cockerel emblem. The gold-painted Sheraton Hotel. The 40-metre-tall, black obelisk in Heroes Acre, topped with a red light signifying the Eternal Flame of the revolution.
I had passed a sign for Warren Hills cemetery and recalled that my grandmother’s remains were interred there. She had been weighing pigs when her heart had seized. My brother and I had been in a pen shooing piglets towards the beam scale. The first person to hear our screams had been Bindura, the farmhouse cook, who had just come out to the yard bearing a tray of mid-morning tea. We had remained in Bindura’s care when my grandfather had set off for the distant hospital, and it had been in Bindura’s care that my parents had left my grieving grandfather after the funeral. Both Bindura and August, the senior cook, had worked in the farmhouse for a decade before I had been born, and it was they who had helped to pack up its possessions at the end.
It had taken me two days to reach the red soils that mark the farm’s boundary. A fire had recently swept through the district, marooning a little knoll of rudimentary headstones marking the graves of men, women and children who had lived out their lives on the farm. August had emerged from his house in the workers’ village smoking a joint of uncured tobacco rolled in over-inked paper. Although cataracts had blurred his vision, he had recognised my voice from a distance. This had set off his laugh, which infected everyone who heard it. We had hugged and, holding hands, had worked through the roll call of people whose fates had remained a mystery for a decade.
The news of my grandfather’s death had hit him physically. He had sat down on his veranda and wept.
‘What of Bindura?’ I had asked.
August, to my immense relief, had slipped on white gumboots – ‘Let’s find him’.
Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard Page 21
