Sometimes There Is a Void (18 page)

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Authors: Zakes Mda

BOOK: Sometimes There Is a Void
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‘The shebeen queen took my watch,' I said. ‘And my father's going to kill me if he finds out.'
‘AP would never kill anyone,' he said laughing. ‘I bet he has never even meted out corporal punishment to you.'
‘Of course, he is not a beater but a talker,' I said. ‘But that's not the point.'
He borrowed some money from one of the coal merchants and covertly gave it to me. I immediately went to the shebeen and paid the woman for her damned nip. But she said I should come the next day for the watch because her boyfriend had borrowed it.
The next day I went back to the shebeen. Once again I didn't get my watch back. The shebeen queen gave me another flimsy excuse, something about misplacing it somewhere in the house and she was too busy serving her customers to look for it. I just stood there powerlessly.
‘Get out of my house,' she yelled. ‘Unless you have money to buy another nip,' she added with a smile.
The men sitting at the table with bottles of Black Label Lager laughed.
As I scampered out of the house and the yard littered with plastic bags, dirty papers and beer cans I knew that I was never going to see my watch again. I had lost an expensive Rotary watch, a gift from my father, for a nip of cheap brandy.
Just then it dawned on me that I was not cut out for the hard-living and hard-drinking life of a revolutionary. I needed to get back to school, get educated and become a lawyer like my father.
 
 
 
THE RUDENESS OF LESOTHO
officials to visitors is legendary. It is not just because of one or two isolated incidents that I have decided only an emergency or some really important occasion that has to do with my family will bring me back here after my mother has gone to join the ancestors. But today takes the proverbial cake. We are crossing the Maseru border post back to South Africa in my son's Nissan four-wheel-drive twin-cab truck. My son Neo stops in the parking lot and the three of us – we are with Gugu – walk into the building to have our passports endorsed. After paying the toll fee, completing the immigration and customs forms and having our passports stamped, Gugu and I wait outside near the door while Neo goes to get the truck from the parking lot. There are two young men in police camouflage uniforms armed with AK47s sitting on chairs a short distance away. Gugu and I are holding hands as we normally do when we are together. I see that the police guys are looking at us curiously but I pay no particular attention to them. We just banter as usual. She says something funny and we laugh while I embrace her. One of the policemen stands up and says, ‘Hey, we don't do that here.'
We are both taken aback.
‘Do what?' I ask.
‘Hold women like that in public,' he says. ‘We don't do that sort of thing in this country.'
‘Says who?' I ask.
‘Are you arguing with me?' he asks moving towards me threateningly.
I am getting really angry now. ‘I want you to tell me what law says it is illegal for a man to hold his wife in Lesotho.'
At this time Neo arrives with the truck.
‘Let's go, Dad,' he says.
‘No, I am not going,' I shout. ‘I want this man to arrest me for giving my wife a hug.'
I then grab Gugu and plant a kiss on her lips.
‘There, now I have committed an even worse crime. Did you see that, sir? I kissed her.'
I don't think she welcomes the kiss. She is afraid for my life and would rather I jumped into the truck and we left. I can sense that Neo is of the same opinion. He is a brawny iron-pumping man in his late thirties and he visits Lesotho regularly enough to know that you don't argue with an armed Lesotho policeman. They once locked him up in prison for a few days for some minor traffic violation.
‘Please, let's go, Dad,' he pleads again.
But at this point I am a raging lunatic. Even as I demand to be arrested and taken to jail forthwith I am aware I am being stupid. What if the cop obliges? He will load us into the police van and take us to the charge office where he will have to manufacture some charge because this one of hugging or even kissing my wife won't fly with his superiors. I will finally prevail but only after our whole day has been wasted. So, why don't I just shut up, get into the truck and go? But there is no stopping myself at this point. My people are already in the vehicle and I can see the impatience on their faces. And the fear. Only a fool argues with an AK47. But I demand that they give me a cellphone so I can call my lawyer. It is a bluff, of course; I have no lawyer in Lesotho. Well, my brother is one of the top advocates in the country, but I wouldn't call him for anything. To put it mildly, we are not the best of friends.
The policeman just stands there looking foolish. His partner breaks out laughing. He saves his partner's face by ordering me to go because we are blocking the road.
‘Tsamaea, ntate, o koetse tsela mona.'
Obviously he has not come across such a round-the-bend South African traveller before and he would like to see me disappear immediately, especially because I am embarrassing him. He saw our truck's South African number plates and thought we were just tourists whose ignorance of the laws and customs of Lesotho he was going to exploit, only to find that I am making a fool of him. Well, hard luck for him; I grew up here.
Finally, I get into the truck and we drive away. I fume for quite some time while Gugu keeps on saying ‘Sorry' as if she was responsible for the conduct of Lesotho cops. I keep on muttering to myself: ‘Motherfuckers.' Until Elvin Jones shakes me out of the world of arrogant policemen into another realm with a gong followed by cymbal washes. It is a Radio Metro jazz programme. Jimmy Garrison soon joins with his four-note double bass, with McCoy Tyner on the piano. When John Coltrane comes in with his tenor sax solo I am transported to an age of innocence
…
well, a world of less guilt
…
forty-three years ago. I chant along with Coltrane:
A Love Supreme.
I am back at Peka High School.
 
 
 
I WAS INTRODUCED TO
John Coltrane by Khomo Mohapeloa, who was two classes ahead of me. His parents were educationists and lived in the exclusive suburb of Maseru West, where their house was famed as one of the most beautiful in the city. I had long admired his brother, Kingston Mohapeloa, the artist who also drew cartoons for
Lux Vestra
. I hoped one day I would follow in his footsteps and draw the funnies for the school magazine. Both brothers were tall and handsome with very smooth faces. They were well-groomed and clean-cut. They very much reminded me of Willie Mafoso from my Mohale's Hoek days in the way they paid particular attention to sartorial elegance.
Khomo Mohapeloa played the clarinet in a big band in Maseru, the Studio Orchestra, led by the seasoned bandleader Lesiba Mamashela.
The band played mostly from Glenn Miller's sheet music. At high school he joined Maestro Michael Mosoeu Moerane's orchestra which was composed only of string and woodwind instruments: violins, violas, cellos, clarinets, oboes, and flutes, owned by the maestro himself rather than by the school. It was known as the Peka High School Orchestra, though. In no time he became the bandleader because he was a much more sophisticated musician than all of us put together.
The maestro was one of the leading composers of choral music in southern Africa whose modern classics such as
Sylvia
and
Tlong Rothothang
are sung by choirs in the region even today. Unlike other famous composers of his generation, such as J P Mohapeloa, he had a degree in music and his compositions were not confined to choral music but included orchestral music as well. He is reputed to be the first African to compose a symphony. Although I never heard this particular composition, I heard that it was in four movements.
I was a member of the Peka High School Orchestra too and played the flute. Although the maestro taught us the rudiments of staff notation, it was really Khomo Mohapeloa who taught me the more complicated major and minor scales. The orchestra played hymns on Sundays at the Church of Lesotho services, the Protestant denomination formerly known as the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society, about three miles from the school. But my best moments were when we played at school occasions such pieces as Boccherini's Baroque ‘Minuet Célèbre' and Jacques Offenbach's ‘Barcarolle' from ‘Tales of Hoffman'. The latter was my particular favourite because my flute had a dominant role throughout the piece, albeit a repetitive one.
We practised thrice a week outside the maestro's house or in the school hall and I looked forward to those moments. When the maestro was not there the woodwind guys played jazz instead of sticking to classical music. Khomo Mohapeloa would tell us all about John Coltrane and Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, also known as the Bird, and Stanley Turrentine and his wife, Shirley Scott, and a host of other jazz cats in all the different idioms. He would then make simpler arrangements of some of the numbers for us to play, and sometimes we would break into crazy jam sessions of bebop.
Here we also dabbled in our own compositions. One composition that still lives in my mind was ‘Matebesi's Farewell Blues' by the same Khomo Mohapeloa. Yes, he had written a jazz number for the Latin teacher who was the reason for my deserting school for a number of months after I cheated in an exam. He was leaving Peka High School to study law in South Africa and he had been so popular with the boys that the band was going to play this composition at his farewell concert. And I was going to be part of that band even though I still had a grudge against him. I had returned to Peka High School to find him still there. It was as if the incident had never happened because he never mentioned it. It was a silly grudge anyway, I told myself as I rehearsed with the band, because it was not his fault that I had been so foolish as to be caught with a
koantsanyane.
Thanks to
Down Beat
magazine we became connoisseurs of jazz and started accumulating our own collections of LPs which we ordered from Kohinoor in Johannesburg. I had albums of Duke Ellington, Mackay Davashe, Count Basie, Dollar Brand, Chris McGregor and the Blue Notes, Johnny Hodges, Thelonious Monk, Early Mabusa, Sonny Stitt, Jimmy Smith, Milt Jackson, Sonny Rollins and Miles Davis. I identified mostly with Roland Kirk because he played the flute so well, in addition to the tenor sax and many other instruments. Later we were to discover Herbie Mann and ‘Memphis Underground' became our anthem.
Our tastes were quite catholic though. We also loved the soul music of the time; Booker T and the MGs, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding and of course Aretha Franklin. And when I visited Scutum's sons John and Sammy at their four-roomed home on campus just a few yards from the Square where we had our dormitories, we listened to the blues of Champion Jack Dupree and to the pop of Tommy Jones and the Shondells.
But of all the different kinds of music we listened and sang to, Coltrane's ‘Love Supreme' was sacred. To this day it has a powerful effect on me. I don't go out of my way to listen to it. I don't even own it. But on those very rare occasions when I hear it played I get goosebumps and am attacked by pangs of nostalgia.
I was grateful to have returned to Peka High despite the shame that
had made me consider going to a different school. My father would have none of that nonsense, especially because I could not give any good reason why I wanted to change schools. Anywhere else in Lesotho I would not have had the opportunity to immerse myself so much in the world of jazz and classical music – not only as a consumer but as a creator and interpreter through my flute.
One day the maestro heard me play Dvorak's ‘Humoresque 7' and he was amazed that I had mastered it on my own even though it was not part of our repertoire.
‘We've got to play this together some time,' he said. ‘I'll accompany you on the piano.'
I thought he was just talking. But sure enough, months later he called me to his studio in his big stone house and we started rehearsing for the end-of-year concert. He invited Shadrack Mapetla to join us with his clarinet. He had recently taken over as bandleader after Khomo Mohapeloa completed high school and went to the University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland where we heard to our consternation that he had abandoned music for mathematics.
My performance of ‘Humoresque' with Shadrack Mapetla and Maestro M M Moerane accompanying my flute haunts me to this day. It was my first public performance and my last – apart from playing the hymns in church. I brought the house down with an instrument that the musically challenged boys never thought highly of because all they had ever heard from it were the trills as it accompanied the ‘Barcarolle'. I can still hear the applause and the whistling from a standing ovation.
Years later, when I was teaching at a Roman Catholic high school in Maseru, Maestro M M Moerane came to see me. He talked fondly of the performance and wanted us to play together again, more than just the Dvorak. I was excited about the prospect, though I thought I was a bit rusty. I looked forward to it. As soon as he left I fetched my flute which had been lying idle in some cupboard for years and started playing again. I played the
kwela
music that I used to play on a pennywhistle on the verandas of the stores in Dobsonville when I was a little boy. I also played Dvorak's ‘Humoresque'. Over and over again. I could already hear the maestro's piano in the background. Tinkling
sounds like drops of rain. I could already see a mesmerised audience, and then the kind of standing ovation that we received at Peka High.

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