Sometimes There Is a Void (23 page)

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Authors: Zakes Mda

BOOK: Sometimes There Is a Void
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At the Smoking Spot the intellectual Phanuel Ramorobi said, ‘Anyway, you guys know that those Arabs enslaved Africans long before the Europeans and Americans did. They are not our friends.'
I don't know if that consoled us at all.
 
 
 
BACK TO MR DIZZY
and me. I often sat in his parents' living room listening to him playing the blues à la Champion Jack Dupree on the piano. Or to his sister, Sekamotho, playing Chopin or Schubert. Here I enjoyed the plushness and the cosiness that was absent in my father's house. It was different here in other ways as well: his mother was the one who did not suffer fools gladly, rather than his father. The mother's strictness reminded me very much of my father. When she walked into the room we all better sit up straight. No slouching. My father exactly.
Mr Dizzy looked out of place in those surroundings.
He was more at home in the shebeens strumming his guitar for appreciative patrons. Often we spent days on end drinking home-brewed beer, be it hops or pineapple, from one shebeen to the next. Because we were always broke his guitar fed our habit. When we walked in everyone was happy because they knew they were going to listen to Mr Dizzy's humorous songs. A denizen would yell, ‘Hey, Mr Dizzy, play us “Tell me, tell me why”,' by which she meant Jeremy Taylor's ‘Black-White Calypso' made famous by the long-running Johannesburg show,
‘Wait a Minim!' The denizens, including me, thought it was Mr Dizzy's own composition, and he never disabused us of that notion. Instead he would oblige with relish, rendering in his bluesy voice the song that left everyone in stitches about advertisements in
Drum
magazine for skin lightening creams to make black people white, and in
The Star
for sun tan lotions to make white people black. We all chuckled in anticipation when he got to the next verses about advertisements in
Zonk
magazine for ointments to make black people's curly hair straight, while white people were at the Rosebank Beauty Parlour trying to make their straight hair curly. Everyone in the house would join the chorus that demanded an answer as to why black people wanted to be white and white people wanted to be black. We almost climaxed at the last verse that provided the solution: black and white folks should stop wasting their money on creams and lotions to change their complexion but should instead marry and give each other a little black and a little white in the night. At this the denizens would break into ear-shattering applause and cheers and whistles and then ply us with beer.
For days on end we did not sleep; we merely dozed off on the benches between gulps of the home-brew. We were never bothered by the stench of malt, rotting pineapple fruit, and hops emanating from the cauldrons in the corner of the room or those that were produced by our unwashed bodies. We drank and farted and laughed and sang until the next morning, and then moved on to the next shebeen. Sometimes a shebeen queen would refuse to open for us, especially if all the drinkers had left and she was trying to catch up on much-needed sleep or perhaps on some lovemaking. In that case we staggered on to the next shebeen. You only had to walk a block or two and there would be another.
On looking back, what amazes me is that we never got into drugs at all. Well, once in a while Mr Dizzy would have some LSD and would get psychedelic all over the place. Or sometimes he would have marijuana. I once tried it too, but it did nothing for me. I puffed on and on but didn't get high at all, though I did get the munchies. I decided there was no point; I'd rather stick to my home-brewed beer. As for hard drugs, I never saw them with my naked eye. Only the strips of paper with colourful butterflies and rainbows that Mr Dizzy chewed because they
had LSD on them. I never tried them. Not even once. I was scared of the stars and other psychedelic patterns that he claimed he saw after chewing and even swallowing the strips of paper. I've always been dead scared of losing total control of myself.
We saw ourselves as part of the international hippy culture. Make love, not war. Janis Joplin was our chief prophetess. ‘Mercedes Benz'. That was my song asking God to buy me the luxury German sedan. The one that I sang as Mr Dizzy strummed the guitar. I never learnt how to strum it myself, so he strummed it for me. And hummed along. Another prophetess was Joan Baez with her folk songs. And the prophets were Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix with his psychedelic rock. When we were around the shebeens of Maseru reverberated with some of their music instead of the traditional Sesotho songs that were a staple of drunken sing-alongs. And Mr Dizzy strummed his guitar.
At that point I had told myself: to hell with education. Life was beautiful without it and Mr Dizzy was living proof.
Whenever we were very desperate for money, because even hippies needed to eat, we remembered that we were painters as well. We visited James Dorothy who lived a few blocks from Mr Dizzy's home. James Dorothy was a famous artist who had trained under Father Frans Claerhout in Thaba Nchu where his family originally came from and his style was very much reminiscent of the Catholic priest's Flemish Expressionism. We knew that we would get some art materials from him, and we sat in his living room which doubled as a studio and painted pictures – mostly watercolours and charcoals and pencils. James Dorothy himself was principally an acrylics man.
This was the period in my life when I still had the obsession with my distant cousin, Sibongile Twala. She was a student at St Mary's High School at Roma when I was at Peka High School. But when we were in Maseru we lived with our common aunt, Mrs Kolane, who was married to the Speaker of Chief Leabua Jonathan's parliament. So, most of my paintings were portraits of Sibongile or had something to do with her. I must stress, though, that she was not a romantic interest. Even after all these years my romantic interest continued to be Keneiloe, though her image was becoming blurry in my mind. Sibongile was someone I
had idealised as a goddess on some Mount Olympus of my imagination. I had mastered her dimpled face so well that I could draw it without looking at her or at her photograph.
Keneiloe was the one I was going to marry; Sibongile was the Muse who guided my painting and my poetry. And for that I became the butt of all syrupy and mushy jokes among my artist friends.
Living at the Kolanes – the epitome of Maseru high society and political elite – took me from one end of the social spectrum where I slept in a room with rows of sweaty guerrillas on the floor and on single beds, to a grass-thatched cottage in a garden with flowers and sprawling lawns all to myself. I could have my meals in the main house where Sibongile and my aunt's beautiful children would pamper me. What I loved most was that I could come and go as I pleased. I even forgot that I was in enemy territory: my aunt and her husband were staunch members of the ruling BNP – hence he was the Speaker of Parliament – and I was a Pan Africanist who supported the opposition leader, Ntsu Mokhehle. I was too comfortable to feel like a traitor.
When I saw any of the Poqo people in the street I would try to avoid them. If I spied a guerrilla coming down the street I would duck into some back alley. I had been avoiding them like that since the time I went AWOL when P K Leballo wanted to send me on a suicide mission to the Boer farms of the Free State.
One day I was browsing at the comic books shelf in Maseru Café when I discovered they had in stock the new omnibus edition of
Asterix
. I had lately fallen in love with this comic by writer Rene Goscinny and illustrator Albert Uderzo, and I fervently followed the adventures of the tiny Gaul Asterix, and his sidekick Obelix, and all the colourful characters of Armorica, especially the druid Getafix. I particularly liked the premise that Julius Caesar had conquered all of Gaul, except for the Armorican village which was effectively withstanding the might of the Roman Empire, thanks to the concoctions of the druid which gave the villagers supernatural powers through which they always beat the Romans legionnaires to a pulp. I had a few last coins in my pocket and I was debating with myself whether I should buy the omnibus or save my
money for a scale of pineapple beer in the evening. The ‘scale' was the unit of measurement for home-brew in the shebeens of Lesotho – about one and a half litres in volume.
I was startled by someone tapping me on the shoulder. It was Nqabande Sidzamba. He had just bought the
Rand Daily Mail
and
The World
, the two South African newspapers that we all read to keep up to speed with what was happening back home. He had recently been elected the PAC representative in Lesotho since the party had moved its headquarters to Tanzania after P K Leballo's deportation. I certainly would have hidden from him but now it was too late. I had quite some deference for him, not only because of his position in the party but because he was a close family friend originally from Qoboshane, where my grandfather used to be the chief. He had been one of my father's protégés, in fact. His younger brother Myekeni had been my friend when I was a little boy banished by my parents to my grandparents' custody after my misadventures in Johannesburg, and his older sister had been my teacher at Qoboshane Bantu Community School where she was famous for using the cane on boys and girls at the slightest provocation – to the extent that students named her Ram-Beat-Again. So, you see, I had all the reasons not to want to meet this man at this delinquent stage in my life.
He was more like family than just a leader of our party. He was not staying at the Poqo camp at Thakalekoala's estate, but had a house near Maseru Community Secondary School where he was principal. I had been to his house a few times and had listened to his records of the Manhattan Brothers, the Woody Woodpeckers, the Elite Swingsters, Count Basie, Duke Ellington and a lot of other band leaders of the swing era. I used to tease him that he didn't have any bebop because it was too complicated for him.
He took his responsibilities as a home-boy and a big brother quite seriously. And indeed he did not hesitate to express his disappointment that I was not turning out well and had abandoned the struggle for the ‘nice time' of Maseru.
‘I have not abandoned the struggle, Bhut' Nqabande,' I said. ‘I am fighting it in a different way.'
‘By vagabonding with that Khaketla boy, getting drunk all over Maseru and disgracing AP?' he asked.
I didn't know he knew I was vagabonding with Mr Dizzy. But then Maseru was a small town and people talked.
‘By writing and painting,' I said. ‘Art is also an effective weapon of the struggle.'
He was not convinced.
‘What do people say when they see you staggering in the streets
unxilile
?'
Instead of answering that, I asked him about some of the guerrillas I knew and had not seen since I left the camp. He told me about those who went on sabotage missions into South Africa and never came back, and those who were smuggled out of Lesotho to the guerrilla camps in Libya and Uganda which PK had established since his expulsion from Lesotho. He also told me that my friend and mentor, Ntlabathi Mbuli, had left the camp for Mafeteng. I wondered why he had gone there. Did my father perhaps invite him back to help him at his office which was what he used to do when I first met him? Whatever the reason, it was comforting to know that once I was back in Mafeteng there would be someone more politically mature to socialise with, in addition to the mindless romps with Litsebe and Peter.
Not that I had intentions of going back to Mafeteng any time soon. The life of a starving and hustling artist in Maseru was too alluring to abandon. I would rather be painting pictures at James Dorothy's apartment with Mr Dizzy than living under my father's strict discipline.
After producing a few paintings and sketches Mr Dizzy and I went to flog them to the tourists at the new Holiday Inn Casino, as the Maseru Sun Cabanas was then called. We had to do these transactions surreptitiously because no soliciting was allowed on the premises of this hotel. We competed with prostitutes for the attention of rich Afrikaners from South Africa at the various bars both inside and by the swimming pool. The Afrikaners were there to sample the delights they were denied in their Calvinistic country where sexual relations across the colour line were forbidden. They were therefore not interested in looking at art, especially expressionist works (I was in my anguished Kandinsky phase) that meant nothing to the eye of a hard-boiled Free State farmer.
We focused mostly on those men who were already safely ensconced in the company of our most beautiful prostitutes. Maseru was a much smaller city then, so we knew most of these women. We knew who their brothers were, or their husbands or their mothers. After all, we drank with some of them at the casino bar after they had scored big with their white johns.
We operated more like small-time drug dealers.
One afternoon, for instance, I was sitting at the end of the long outdoor bar by the swimming pool nursing a glass of water because I couldn't afford beer. Mr Dizzy was cracking jokes with a group of civil servants in suits and neckties a few patrons away from me. Mr Dizzy was always popular with everyone.
I spotted a potential victim in khaki shorts and sandals plying a giggling prostitute with beer. He was an old man, an obvious pillar of the community in some
platteland
town. I wouldn't have been surprised if he were a
dominee
, as the Dutch Reformed Church folks called their pastors. I had encountered quite a few
dominees
in the company of the ladies of the town at this establishment. Whether he was just a
boer
– a farmer – or a man of the cloth it didn't matter; it was enough that he looked like the kind who wouldn't want a scandal to follow him about his shenanigans with black women in this oasis of sin and iniquity, as Maseru was known among the upright white citizens of South Africa. Another thing that made him a prospective customer was that I knew something about the leggy brown lady he was with. I signalled to Mr Dizzy who excused himself from the civil servants, taking a beer they had bought him with him. He pushed his way between our potential customer and his lady of pleasure and whipped out rolled paintings from under his jacket, the lapels of which shimmered with dirt.

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