Sometimes There Is a Void (62 page)

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Authors: Zakes Mda

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Nelson Mandela did not write back. No. He phoned. He told me that he had received my letter and somebody would call me to arrange for a meeting with some of his ministers so that I might outline to them these problems I was talking about. And indeed after about two weeks or so I got another call from the presidency. Whoever I spoke with there – maybe a personal assistant or a secretary – told me that reservations had been made at Sahib Indian Restaurant in a Pretoria suburb where I would have lunch with three cabinet ministers: Joe Modise, Minister of Defence, Penuell Maduna, Minister of Minerals and Energy Affairs, and Zola Skweyiya, Minister of Public Service and Administration. I could understand why Mr Mandela had chosen Zola Skweyiya to meet me; I had complained about the public service and the patronage system that had emerged particularly in doling out jobs for pals and political cronies. But I had no idea why the military guy and the energy and minerals one were part of this. Even though I didn't have any idea what the agenda was going to be, I agreed to the lunch.
On the appointed day two ministers were there promptly, Maduna and Skweyiya. They conveyed Joe Modise's apologies. He had been urgently summoned by the president because of the Meiring affair.
‘The Meiring affair? What is it exactly?' I asked.
‘You'll hear about it soon enough,' said Maduna. ‘It's bound to be in the papers this week.'
If I was a newspaper reporter I would be digging further for a scoop, but I let it rest.
Skweyiya struck me as a very quiet guy; he did more listening than talking. Maduna on the other hand was garrulous. Once more I outlined my position as already stated in my letter to Nelson Mandela. Skweyiya did not say much on the issues I raised. He just looked at me sadly. Perhaps he thought I was making a fuss over nothing. He didn't say so, though; it was just my own impression. Maduna, on the other hand, was clearly dismissive of my concerns. Instead he tended to lecture: the youth must pull themselves up by their bootstraps. He
presented himself as an example; he came back from exile with a law degree from Zimbabwe. He didn't just sit there but went back to school. He continued his education even when he was already a minister until he got a PhD from Wits University.
‘As we speak, I've enrolled at RAU for a diploma in energy and in transportation so that I don't depend on experts and consultants in my cabinet portfolio,' he said. ‘I need to be an expert in my own right.'
RAU was the Randse Afrikaanse Universiteit, which has since become the University of Johannesburg.
I admired Maduna for his resolve and dedication, though he didn't strike me as a likeable fellow. There was a tinge of arrogance in his attitude.
‘You are indeed a good example that all South Africans – not just the youth – should follow,' I told him. ‘I like people who pursue education as relentlessly as you do.'
After the lunch I drove back to Johannesburg. I didn't know what the meeting had achieved. I wondered what the ministers were going to tell Madiba, or if they were going to report back to him at all about it. It looked like a public relations exercise to me. Nothing changed in the areas that I complained about; today patronage and cronyism are worse than ever before. We are overtaking Nigeria. Worse still, blatant racial arrogance – ‘closing ranks' – and a culture of impunity have developed among some of the ruling elite who have obviously taken good lessons from the laager mentality of the Afrikaners of yesterday.
Perhaps the meeting was just a way of shutting me up. Well, I shouldn't complain; in other countries they shut you up by imprisoning you if you're lucky, or by feeding you to the crocodiles instead of feeding you sumptuous Indian cuisine of vegetarian biryani, assorted pickles and chutney, served with garlic naan.
The Meiring scandal broke in the weekend newspapers. General George Meiring, who had been inherited from the apartheid era, was the commander of the South African National Defence Force. He presented what he claimed was a military intelligence report to Nelson Mandela that an organisation called FAPLA – Front African People's Liberation Army – was plotting a coup to assassinate Mandela and
overthrow his government. What made the story even juicier was that FAPLA was alleged to be composed of well-known ANC loyalists, including the president's ex-wife Winnie, the deputy chief of the defence forces Lieutenant General Siphiwe Nyanda, former MK guerrilla Robert McBride, and politician General Bantu Holomisa and a host of black soldiers. Don't laugh now, but even pop star Michael Jackson was implicated in the plot. One hundred and thirty names in all were listed in the report. Nelson Mandela appointed a judicial inquiry which concluded that the report was utterly fantastic. It was the work of what was referred to in the press as the ‘third force' of the old guard security operatives who were bent on provoking uprisings and mayhem. Meiring resigned in disgrace.
 
Adele returned from America. I was happy to welcome her back. I had stayed celibate all the time she was away, hoping that on her return we would start afresh and build a family. I was not going to give up on this marriage that easily. I resolved to have more patience and not be abrupt or brutally frank. I had to realise that my views, and indeed my values, were not sacrosanct; there were other views that might be opposed to mine but were just as important. I also had to learn not to respond to every little provocation, and accept the simple fact of life that things would not always go my way because I was not the alpha and the omega but a simple human being replete with flaws.
When she was still in Vermont I had sent her information about a vacancy at Vista University and encouraged her to apply. When she returned there was a job waiting for her at the East Rand campus of the university.
For a while she commuted by train from the Johannesburg station to Daveyton, Benoni, where the campus was located. It was very inconvenient because she had to take Melville 67, the metro bus, which had its bus stop across the street from our townhouse, to downtown Johannesburg, then walk to Park Station, as the Johannesburg station was known, for the train. She felt very unsafe. A month or so later she bought a brand new Toyota Tazz hatchback, which made her commuting easier. I was impressed by her resourcefulness so soon after
she had arrived in Johannesburg – she just went to a Toyota dealership, selected the car she wanted, the dealership got a bank to finance her, and in a day she had a car. I had never thought it was that easy. I would have got a car for myself long before if I had just thought of doing what she did. Or if I had even thought of getting a car at all. So, I followed her example and got myself a new Mercedes Benz.
Our life at the townhouse in Westdene was cordial, though one could feel the tensions bubbling beneath the surface. I tried very hard not to tread on her toes. Zukile was also happy to have his mother with him at last. But he was the only child who was pleased with her presence. Dini moved out and I heard he was staying with a group of gardeners his age who were employed by a neighbouring townhouse complex. He dropped out of the Roosevelt High School in Roosevelt Park where I had enrolled him after his return from the United States. He told me he was now working as a gardener as well. I tried hard to persuade him to come home and return to school. He told me he had been very much traumatised by our bickering when we were in Vermont, to the extent that he had moved out and gone to live with friends. He remembered vividly the names that Adele called me in his presence, referring to my genitalia in a degrading manner. He did not want to experience that again.
‘People can change,' I pleaded. ‘Give us a chance.'
He was not prepared to go along with that. This was a dilemma. I wanted to work things out with Adele, but in the process I was losing my son.
The two older kids, Thandi and Neo, stayed however and continued with their schooling at FUBA Academy.
I spotted an advertisement for the post of director of a non-governmental organisation called L-MAP in Bloemfontein. The organisation produced materials on language training methods and conducted workshops for language teachers. I advised Adele to apply and she got the post. This meant that she had to move to Bloemfontein, a city in the Free State Province, four hundred kilometres from Johannesburg. She rented herself a flat in the city centre.
I often visited her there and we had a great time. Her brother Willie
told me that now that we were living apart our marriage had a chance. But the harmony was not to last. When she visited our townhouse in Johannesburg she used to spread her files and work papers all over the dining room table and everywhere else in the house. The whole place looked very untidy when she was around and it made me very uncomfortable. I have always been a neatness freak. One day after she had been working at the table she just left everything there. I wouldn't have minded if it was only for a day or so, but she was returning to Bloemfontein and would only be back after two or three weeks. This meant that the room would be in a mess for that long.
In a situation like this my old self would have said, ‘Please remove this mess from the table. I am trying to keep the room clean.' But, as I have already told you, I was trying to tread lightly to keep the peace. So, I said, ‘Do you mind if I take these papers and store them away in my drawers until you come back?' She was at the door carrying her bags, about to get into her car. She turned around and exploded in a tirade about my reproductive organs that you wouldn't want me to repeat here. I felt so small, more so because she said these things in the presence of my niece Limpho, who was visiting from Lesotho. I yelled back at her, telling her how peaceful it had been for everybody before she came back into my life.
‘You dare touch my papers, you'll know me,' she said.
‘I know you already,' I said. ‘And I don't like what I know.'
She stormed out. I was so mad that I took all those papers and put them in a garbage bag. But I did not dump them. I put them under my desk in our bedroom; she would find them next time she came.
The next time she fired the young girl we had hired from her village in Lesotho as Zukile's nanny. Her crime? I had enrolled her at a dressmaking school in the city. The objective was that when Zukile was at pre-school she would not just be idling at home but would be learning a trade so that she would not have to spend her whole life working as other people's maid.
‘Why would you be interested in sending this girl you don't even know to school if you were not sleeping with her?' she asked.
There had to be some prurient reason for my charity. That was always the problem in our relationship – she assigned motives and in
her mind they became fact even if there was glaring evidence to the contrary. She held to them firmly and refused to change her mind. The more sordid the motive she invented, the more stubbornly she held to it. I created one or two characters like that in my future novels as a way of trying to understand her.
This new round of hostilities was followed by a period of truce. We were going to make it. For the sake of Zukile, we were going to make it.
We bought a house in Weltevredenpark, a previously all-white and mostly Afrikaner suburb of Roodepoort, one of the satellite towns of Johannesburg. It was a big brick house roofed in brown tiles, with three garages, five bedrooms, three bathrooms, two living rooms, a big kitchen with modern gadgets and a small dining room. We were doing so well that we were able to furnish the whole house all at once and pay in cash. She, for instance, paid in full for a custom-made living room suite. She was a homemaker and didn't hesitate to splash out on household items and even pay extra on the mortgage so that it would be fully paid long before the period stipulated by the bank.
I enrolled Zukile at Popeye Nursery School in Weltevredenpark and Thandi at Allenby Film School, which was in Randburg.
The truce did not last long. When she came home from Bloemfontein the bickering resumed. I wrote her a long letter expressing my grievances and suggesting divorce was the best solution. We were in Maseru on an outing to discuss an amicable divorce when Adele told me that she was pregnant with our second child. Neither of us seemed happy at the thought of another child when our marriage was so rocky that we were contemplating divorce.
During the nine months that we were expecting this baby Adele was the sweetest person I have ever known. I looked forward to the weekends when I would be driving to Bloemfontein to be with her. Sometimes she drove to Johannesburg to see me and Zukile.
I took her to Paris and we sailed on the River Seine and visited the Louvre and Musée D'Orsay and La Defence and the Eiffel Tower and did all the silly tourist things one does in France. We joked that this was our honeymoon, since we had never had one.
The sweetness continued until our baby girl was born. I named her Zukiswa, which was a female version of Zukile. I also named her
Moroesi, which was the name we had always said we'd use if we had a baby girl even when we were still at Roma in Lesotho. The name had actually become a joke among her friends. They would ask: ‘When is Moroesi coming?' I don't know what the name means, but in Sesotho fairy tales Moroesi is always a very beautiful girl. I once wrote a play titled
Moroesi
, about a beautiful young lady who saved her village from foreign forces that were threatening to take it over and subjugate her people. Adele suggested we also name the child Zenzile after my grandfather – the one who was a chief of Goodwell, the present-day Bee Place. That's the name that stuck and everyone called her Zenzi.

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