Sometimes There Is a Void (47 page)

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Authors: Zakes Mda

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I discovered that she was humourless and had no time for my silly jokes and childish pranks. But that didn't bother me. Her positives far outweighed that little flaw. She was serious and ambitious and solid and would certainly bring stability to my life. She also had a very strong sense of family.
What bothered me was her political outlook. She was a staunch BNP member even though the rest of her family, including Willie, were BCP members or supporters. This on its own wouldn't have bothered me. After all, we had come to accept the BNP as a de facto government which was in alliance with the ANC. It was no longer the old BNP that was supported by the apartheid government, but had actually come out blazing against South Africa, to the extent of declaring that Lesotho was at war with the apartheid state. At that stage, therefore, I wouldn't have viewed her BNP membership as a cardinal sin. But what brought fear to me was her membership of the BNP Young Pioneers, then just known as the Youth League, which was armed. It was trained by troops from North Korea which were stationed in Lesotho for that purpose.
The Youth League used its North Korean training effectively by
making every civil servant toe the party line. This was the group that marched senior civil servants out of their offices at gunpoint and up and down Kingsway, the main street of Maseru, shaming them in public with searing insults and threats of removing them from the face of the earth if they didn't display their support for Chief Leabua Jonathan. This happened a lot to those civil servants who shunned Chief Leabua's political rallies. Quite a few of them were seen being frogmarched and whipped in the streets of Maseru by the Youth League. I once saw the governor of the Lesotho Central Bank, a fellow I knew well from my youth in Mafeteng, suffer the same fate because the youths felt he was becoming too much of an independent thinker.
Adele was surprised that I didn't have a gun in my house.
‘How do you live without a
thoboro
?' she asked.
She called it a
thoboro
, an onomatopoeic term of endearment for a machine gun. She thought I was a sissy when I told her the sight of guns, never mind touching them, made me cringe. The last time I touched a real gun with my hands I was a teenager who was being used by adults to commit their dirty acts of assassination. Even when I lived at the Poqo camp I never messed around with guns because whatever arms and ammunition was there was hidden so that the police didn't find them; the camp was in an urban environment and everyone in town knew about it. There were never any arms lying around there.
‘Maybe you're right, I am a sissy,' I said. ‘But I don't want a gun in my house. I hate guns wholeheartedly. Even our kids, when we have them, will not play with toy guns.'
Those were the days when I thought I could lay down the law!
The next time I visited Mohale's Hoek with Adele I expressed my reservations to Willie about his sister's involvement with Chief Leabua's lawless bands of armed youths. He didn't seem to take it that seriously because he thought it was just a phase that was influenced by her relationship with the Molapo boyfriend. Now that I was in her life, he said hopefully, she would give that up. I took his word for it. But I didn't take comfort in the fact that when we sat down for lunch he teased her about the activities of the Youth League and they laughed about it as if it were a joke.
Although Adele continued to be a staunch BNP member she stopped
participating in the activities of the Youth League. She also had to accept that she was now involved with a man who would have nothing to do with
thoboro
or any other weapon of death.
Nevertheless, I was very proud of Adele and I wanted to introduce her to all my friends. I once took her to meet Ntlabathi Mbuli – my Poqo friend and mentor. The last time I told you about him he was losing his mind in England where he had gone to study for an MA degree. He did complete the degree at the London School of Economics and returned to Lesotho to work for the Lesotho Christian Council while he was trying to get a lecturing job at the National University of Lesotho. He had built himself a nice concrete block house in one of the townships on the outskirts of Maseru where he lived with his wife and children. I don't remember exactly how many children he had but I think there were three. Adele knew his daughter from a previous relationship in Mafeteng; she was a fellow student at the National University of Lesotho before the daughter went to study medicine at the University of Cape Town. She was therefore quite keen to meet her friend's father.
We found Ntlabathi running up and down his living room with his arms outstretched; he was ‘flying' like an aeroplane and making the appropriate sounds. He stopped long enough to express his joy at seeing us and to acknowledge the woman I introduced as Willie's sister, and then he resumed his ‘flight'. His wife Karabo came to join us and asked him to settle down and attend to his visitors.
He told us about the voices that kept calling his name. They started while he was in England battling with conservative dons who were dismissive of his Marxist approach. Now the voices had become worse. I didn't say this, but it was obvious to me that if he were a believer in African traditional religions he would have interpreted these as a call from the ancestors to become a diviner, a
sangoma
or an
igqirha
– a traditional healer. But unfortunately as an unbeliever he had to settle for a mundane diagnosis – that of schizophrenia. That of course was my own
tiekieline
diagnosis which I shared with Adele on our way back home. I don't think he had sought any medical advice since he didn't see that there was anything wrong with him. He had become paranoid and we listened while he told us of enemies who were bent on destroying him.
Before we left he gave me manila envelopes of his manuscripts – most of them true manuscripts since they were in longhand. But there were some typed pages too. These were his poems and short stories. I didn't want to take this material because I didn't know what to do with it. But he insisted. Later, when Ntlabathi returned to South Africa after our liberation in 1994 and was teaching at a high school there, he sent me another envelope of manuscripts. They were accompanied by a letter listing a number of attempts he had made to get the material published and asking me to keep them and maybe in future he would self-publish them after getting my comments. I still have all that material. I never gathered enough courage to read it after I got the news that Ntlabathi had died from an undisclosed illness. I am hoping to give all this material to his heirs when I get around to attending to that.
 
My relationship with Adele was tempestuous from the word go. I played some part in creating the initial storm. For instance, one day I was on campus with members of my theatre company, most of whom were also her friends. When she arrived to join us the first thing that struck me was her new hairdo. She had obviously come straight from a hair salon because her hair was relaxed and set in some fancy style.
I called her aside and said, ‘What did you do to your hair?'
Even before she could answer, I added, ‘I can't go with you when you are like that.'
She was perceptibly shocked by my outburst and looked very hurt. I knew immediately that I had been tactless and insensitive. But she didn't say a word in her defence. Instead of apologising immediately I went back to my troupe and continued with whatever I was talking about. Her friends didn't make things any better for my feelings of guilt when I overhead them admiring her new hairdo and asking which salon she had been to and which particular hairdresser, so that they might go there themselves. I heard her tell them sadly, ‘He doesn't like it. I did it for him but he doesn't like it.'
I only apologised when we got to my house later that evening. But the incident haunted me for a long time. Just like the slap on Ruth's beautiful face. It was a good lesson for me. Even today, I marvel at the
arrogance of thinking I had the right to tell a woman she should look or dress or do her hair in a manner that met with my approval just because she happened to be my girlfriend or even wife. Today I am reluctant to give an opinion even when it is solicited. There is no question I dread more than ‘How do I look in this dress?' All right, I am exaggerating; there are worse questions. But still I have feelings of trepidation about that one because it forces me to lie.
Although I thought we had made our peace about that particular gaffe, our life was mired in conflict. For instance, when Sonwabo's children came to visit me she became very jealous and would mope and not even talk to them for hours on end. I told you that my brother Sonwabo had gone to the United States to study for an MA degree in International Affairs and never returned. We heard from Ohio that he was no longer a student there. He left before completing the degree and no one seemed to know where he was. So, for these children – Limpho, Solomzi, Thembi and Mpumi – I was the only father they knew.
One day they came to visit and we went for a walk around the suburb of Florida. When I came back Adele didn't want to talk to me. I only realised then that maybe I should have invited her to join us on the walk. She felt left out when I was with these kids. But then I had thought she would understand that I saw these kids only once in a while and I needed to give them all my attention just for those few hours of their visit. It was essential for that time to be just with them.
My own children were still in Mafeteng in the care of my mother. Occasionally they visited me in Florida, and if Adele happened to be there she would be unhappy about it. I hoped she would learn to love them, especially if she was going to be my wife.
Sometimes I could not understand Adele's logic. She still had her room at one of the residences at the university, although she visited and spent the night in Florida whenever we had made such an arrangement. One day my brother Monwabisi, who was practising as an attorney in Mafeteng, visited and we went out to my neighbourhood shebeens to drink ourselves silly as was our habit. When we returned at night Adele was waiting outside.
Immediately she saw me she attacked with: ‘You locked me out of your house! You locked me out!'
I would be angry too if someone had locked me out of the house, but I had not.
‘Did he know that you'd be coming?' asked Monwabisi.
‘No, he did not,' she said.
‘Then he didn't lock
you
out of the house. He locked the house because that's what you do when you leave a house unattended.'
She had no answer for this, but she was still fuming.
But there were also moments of pure joy, when she was such a sweet person that I would soon forget about the stormy moments. I would convince myself that the turbulent times were an aberration, and that when we were married things would settle because neither of us would have reason to feel insecure.
 
In the meantime the university decided to promote me from lecturer to senior lecturer. I had not applied for this promotion. It just had not occurred to me that my work merited a promotion and I should take steps to bring it to the attention of the university senate. Positions did not mean anything to me; I was just happy teaching my students, writing plays and articles for journals and organising the work of the Marotholi Travelling Theatre.
I also had outside interests that kept me busy when I got to Maseru. These included a company called the Screenwriters Institute which I had established at Mothamo House. I had bought cameras and editing suites and was producing videos on various social development subjects. Entities such as UNICEF, the Ministry of Health and the International Labour Organization engaged our services to produce VHS videos for their workshops. Some of these were dramas on such topics as HIV/ AIDS and TB. I employed the services of freelance camera people and editors each time I had a project. I remember one of them, Lineo, a petite and outspoken young lady, who would regale us with stories of her adventures as we travelled in a Land Rover to the mountain villages of Lesotho shooting footage for a UNICEF documentary. She had travelled with King Moshoeshoe II and Archbishop Morapeli of the Roman Catholic Church between Paris and New York in a Concorde, the British-French supersonic jet. The four of us in the Land Rover – our driver, 'Mamotsepe the UNICEF Representative, 'Mope our second
cameraman and I – had never been in a Concorde so we listened with fascination as Lineo brought the experience to life for us. But what we found even more titillating was her detailed description of how she was planning to seduce the Archbishop whom she was eyeing all the time they were relaxing in the first class cabin of the supersonic flight. She outlined for us how she would strip off his robes one by one until she got to the undergarments and what she would do to him when she finally had him at her mercy, stark naked like the day he was born. She lamented that she had missed her opportunity on that journey to New York but vowed that she would still get her chance since when these big shots travelled they quite often engaged her services to record their expeditions on video for posterity.
Alas, one day we had to part ways with Lineo as she went to seek better opportunities in South Africa. The last time I heard of her she was directing the soap opera
Generations
which was screened every weekday on SABC 1. And then she died. I don't know what killed Lineo, but I hope she got her heart's desire before she died.

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