Little Suns (2 page)

Malangana decides he does not like these people. Not only for the reason that they are amaMfengu, a people who played a decisive role in Mhlontlo’s defeat at the Battle of Tsita Gorge, but because they are too kind to him. The woman especially. At least the man sits there chewing loudly and ignoring him. The woman is eager to make conversation as she walks in and out of the
ixande
– the four-walled tin-roofed house that is typical of
amakhumsha
– tending the three-legged pot on the fire outside and engaging in another exchange with the boys and girls sitting around the fire. She is able to switch automatically from one exchange to the other without missing a beat: immediately as she exits she admonishes the children for some transgression committed during the day, and as soon as she enters her attention is on Malangana and the purpose of his travels.

‘I must go now,’ Malangana says, putting his enamel plate on the floor. There is some food left, but no one comments on his lack of appetite.

‘
K’seb’suku
.’
It’s night
, she says as she takes the men’s plates and walks out.

Malangana can hear her outside instructing the girls to wash the dishes. And then she is back inside again telling him he will leave tomorrow.

‘Where does he want to go at this time?’ the husband asks his wife, not Malangana.

‘I don’t know,’ says the wife.

‘I thought you would know. You brought this old man here.’

‘I am not an old man,’ says Malangana to the woman. ‘I may even be his age.’

‘Then what happened to him?’ asks the man.

‘The world has beaten him to a pulp,’ says the woman. ‘We can’t let him go at this time.’

‘We can’t stop him if he wants to go,’ mumbles the man as he lights his pipe.

Soon the room is full of smoke and the pungent smell of home-grown tobacco.

‘Where are you going exactly?’ the woman asks.

He gives in. He can’t be stubborn any more. Maybe they will leave him alone if he tells them. Maybe they will stop smothering him to death with their kindness and will let him go in peace.

‘To the mission station.’

‘The gates are locked at this time,’ the man says. ‘No one will open for him.’

‘In any case the priests have stopped their acts of charity. Because of all these wars there are shortages of supplies.’

Malangana is offended.

‘I am not a beggar-man. I haven’t come for charity, yours or the priests’. I have come for my Mthwakazi. The
umkhondo
places her at this mission station,’ he says, talking of the trail he has been following.

Husband and wife look at him curiously. They expect him to expound, but he doesn’t. Instead he reaches for his crutches and stands up to leave.

‘I will sleep at the gate. I’ll walk in as soon as they open in the morning.’

‘Please sit down,
bawo
,’ says the woman. ‘Perhaps we may help you to find the woman you are looking for. Did they say she is here? What’s her name?’

Malangana knows only that she was called Mthwakazi, which merely means a ‘woman of the abaThwa’, the people who are called the Bushmen by the English. The Khoikhoi disparagingly call them San, which in their language means ‘scavenging vagabonds’ because they own no cattle and are hunter-gatherers. amaMpondomise call every Bushman woman Mthwakazi, so it will be difficult for anyone to help Malangana find his specific Mthwakazi. Even if he had a way of identifying her, these people never stay at one place, they are always on the move hunting and gathering.

The woman explains that she works at the mission station washing clothes for the minister and his family, while her husband is a lay preacher and a teacher of the Sub A class.

‘Occasionally there are bands of abaThwa women who come by selling ostrich eggs or doing piece jobs for the missionaries. Where did you meet this one and how did she disappear from you?’

Malangana does not respond.

‘How does he think we’ll help him if he is sullen like a pregnant goat?’ the man asks the wife.

‘It goes to show that your husband knows nothing about goats,’ says Malangana. ‘A pregnant goat is never sullen.’

‘The father of my children is right; there is no way we can help you if you don’t tell us anything.’

‘I do not think Mthwakazi is anyone’s problem but my own.’

Still he opens up; he does need help after all.

He first saw Mthwakazi at the Great Place of King Mhlontlo of amaMpondomise. He was one of the young men who were sitting by the kraal waiting for the
inkundla
to start. He does not remember what case they were going to hear, but it must have been one of those petty matters where someone’s cow had grazed in someone else’s sorghum field. Mthwakazi was with two old women well known for their prowess in the field of medicinal herbs, though they were not fully fledged
amagqirha
diviners.

At first Malangana mistook Mthwakazi for a child as she pranced along the pathway that led to the house of Mhlontlo’s senior wife – the Great House,
Indlu Enkulu,
as it was called. She was puny. But soon he noticed she was not a child, her breasts pointed perkily towards yonder mountains. The young men told him she was a special nurse to Mhlontlo’s ailing wife, the senior queen who was Sarhili’s daughter, king of the amaGcaleka people, also known as amaXhosa. They gossiped about the stories they had heard about her: her knowledge of herbs and her stubbornness. She was known to argue with the doctors about which roots were effective when boiled with which berries to cure which ailment.

As Malangana listened to the young men, and as he watched Mthwakazi disappear into the Great House, he remembered that almost two years had passed since his return from the school of the mountain where he was circumcised and initiated into manhood. Thanks to time served in the white man’s prison he was still a bachelor. It was high time he took a wife.

Even before Malangana can finish his story the woman interrupts him.

‘I know who you are talking about,’ she says. ‘I know this Mthwakazi you are looking for.’

The woman tells Malangana that immediately he mentioned a woman of the abaThwa people who was a nursemaid to Mhlontlo’s wife she remembered a weather-beaten woman who worked as an
impelesi
, or nanny, to the children of the missionaries. She stands out in her memory because she was different from the other abaThwa who are set in their wild ways. And she wore golden earrings at all times. She never spoke about herself. But when she suggested some remedy for an ailment that was eating one of the preacherman’s children to the bone, and the woman wanted to know how the Bushman woman got to know so much about curative herbs, she confided in her that she was once a nurse to the queen at King Mhlontlo’s Great Place.

For the first time Malangana’s eyes shift excitedly from the man to the woman and then back to the man.

‘Where is she? Take me to her right away!’ he says. ‘I do not care if the gate is locked. I will break it open.’

‘With what?’ asks the man of the house. ‘How is he going to break the gate open?’

‘She is no longer here,’ says the woman of the house. ‘I could not keep the secret to myself . . . the secret that in our midst was a woman who knew Mhlontlo personally and had worked at his court.’

She told other school people.

A few days later she left. In the deep of the night the woman of the abaThwa people jumped over the gate and disappeared. She was afraid that the news of her association with Mhlontlo’s Great Place would reach the missionaries. And maybe even Government. When people talked of Government (rather than the Government) they meant the resident district magistrate and his minions. She feared she would be locked up in jail. The name of Mhlontlo sent fear and loathing into the hearts of the white people.

The
umkhondo
was getting warm. And then all of a sudden it gets so devastatingly cold! But Malangana vows he will find his Mthwakazi again, just as he found her that first time.

Gcazimbane was full of tricks. He had this habit of taking off at full gallop, neighing and swishing his tail from side to side in mock irritation. Malangana knew that it was all part of a game. He just wanted his groom to run after him. And then look for him when he disappeared down the gorge. Gcazimbane enjoyed playing hide-and-seek. Malangana, on the other hand, was exercised by this kind of behaviour because it was the cause of Mhlontlo’s annoyance with him whenever the king needed his horse and Malangana could not locate it.

‘You can’t even look after one horse,’ Mhlontlo would say. ‘The white man’s jail has made you stupid.’

Malangana should have been angry, walking the wilds looking for the horse. But who could stay mad at a fine Boerperd specimen like Gcazimbane for any length of time? He was hiding somewhere among the boulders down the hill. And the bounder did it on purpose, just to cause a problem for him.

He whistled as if calling a dog. Gcazimbane sometimes responded by whinnying back when he thought it was time to be found. He didn’t this time. Malangana did not know what direction to take so he wandered aimlessly.

Suddenly the air was filled with a strange combination of whirling and chirping and buzzing and humming sounds. The sky had been blue all along with nary a cloud, but without warning Malangana was walking in the middle of deep shadows. Above him was a dark cloud of swarming locusts flying in the direction of Sulenkama.

Malangana marvelled at their stupidity – invading a month before the planting season instead of waiting till the fields were green. Their folly saved the land of amaMpondomise from famine.

Unless they were the harbingers.

At that moment Gcazimbane came cantering up. He was neighing with his head held high in search of his groom. He was obviously agitated by the sudden darkness and his tail was swishing violently from side to side.

Malangana burst out into a belly laugh while Gcazimbane nuzzled and blew.

‘I thank the locusts for routing you out, you silly nag,’ said Malangana.

He began to walk back to the village with the horse following him.

On the outskirts of Sulenkama, children, maidens and young women were spread all over the veld. Malangana knew at once that the locusts had landed and were feeding voraciously on the grass. When he got closer he saw that the people all had containers of different sorts, ranging from clay pots and grass baskets to enamel basins. They were picking up the locusts that had formed a thick carpet on the grass, and were stuffing them into the containers. They were all singing and beating rhythmically on their containers. The children were laughing and giggling and prancing about on the hapless creatures. In the evening the whole of Sulenkama would be feasting on stiff sorghum porridge and savouring fried or grilled locusts.

Locusts were destructive in the fields. But they got their comeuppance by becoming a juicy meal for the day and a sun-dried snack for weeks to follow.

Malangana could see Mthwakazi among the locust gatherers. He made a point of passing her way, though it was a detour from his path to the Great Place. He stopped next to her and gave her a mischievous look, folding his arms across his rippling bare chest and leaning against Gcazimbane’s head. Mthwakazi surveyed him from toe to head and then back to toe, one arm akimbo and the other holding a basketful of locusts. She looked cheeky in her tanned-hide back-and-front apron, a single-strand ostrich eggshell necklace gleaming on her bare chest.

He suspected she was impressed with his European trousers, though the turn-ups were frayed – most young men in his age-group wore loin cloths. He knew immediately that she was different from other girls. An ordinary Mpondomise maiden would have cast her eyes on the ground shyly. But this Mthwakazi was staring back at him. And she was giggling to boot, as if there was something funny about him.

‘I’ve seen you before,’ said Malangana. ‘You’re the Mthwakazi who nurses our queen.’

‘I know you too,’ said Mthwakazi. ‘You’re the man whose buttocks were shredded by the white man’s
kati
.’

He chuckled. That was his claim to fame, the fact that he was lashed by Hamilton Hope with a
kati
or cat-o’-nine-tails. And the magistrate had done it himself, personally, instead of assigning the task to a policeman. After that he had summarily sentenced him to imprisonment. Malangana had served almost one year in prison in Qumbu. He had only just been released, and yet his reputation had spread. He knew that women pointed at him when he passed and whispered to one another: ‘That’s the man who was in a white man’s prison.’ Part of the fascination was that the whole concept of locking up transgressors in a building was new to the amaMpondomise, and Malangana had been among the first inmates of the new jail in town. The proud pioneers, so to speak.

Gcazimbane nuzzled him at the back, pushing him until he staggered. He wanted them to leave, but Malangana resisted.

‘I do have a name though,’ he said. ‘I’m Malangana.’

‘Little Suns? Ha! Your name means Little Suns!’ she said in the language of the abaThwa which he did not understand.