Sometimes There Is a Void (79 page)

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Authors: Zakes Mda

BOOK: Sometimes There Is a Void
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THROUGH MY BEDROOM WINDOW
I can see vapours of heat rising from the ground. One could easily drown from the humidity out there. I have to finish writing these memoirs of an outsider before the summer is over. I have moved my computer and my whole workstation upstairs to my bedroom so that I am not distracted by the kids. Gugu has gone to South Africa for her mother's funeral. Josephine left us a few weeks after suffering a stroke.
It is a killer summer, but I write relentlessly for hours on end. I must be done with these blinking memoirs because they have been holding
up my other projects for the last three months. I have a novel set in old Mapungubwe to write. It is titled
The Sculptors of Mapungubwe
and it makes me restless like a hen that wants to lay an egg. I have a novel titled
Rickshaw
to write. It is set in contemporary Durban. I also have to follow Toloki into the American hinterland in my second American novel. And then write the story of Noria and how she meets her death in Lesotho in a joint sequel to
Ways of Dying
and
She Plays with the Darkness
. This one will be called
Ululants
. I must reclaim that title which initially belonged to
The Heart of Redness
. When all these are done I must follow, through the focalisation of a fictional family, the journey of my revered ancestor, Mhlontlo – he who slew the magistrate Hamilton Hope – from Qumbu to Quthing. These darn memoirs must get out of the way.
I must focus on nothing but them. I turn down everything that comes my way. I have just turned down an assignment to write an article for the
Wall Street Journal
and another one for the
Guardian
in London. In both cases these were going to be very short articles which I could have written in a day. But I can't afford to break my concentration.
Unfortunately, there are things that one cannot ignore. When my friend, Tony Award winning actor John Kani, sends me the script of his new play which he wants me to critique I can't say no. I read the script and write elaborate comments, pointing out both the strengths and the weaknesses of the play. Even these memoirs cannot stand in the way of my commitment to South African theatre.
My routine is a simple one: I wake up at five-thirty, take a forty-minute walk in the suburb, or on alternate days go to the neighbourhood gym for an hour, take a shower, have a light breakfast of oats or cream of wheat and an apple, then start writing, but only after checking my emails and dealing with those that are urgent. Out of the blue I receive an email from Brian Kuttner, a professor at Washington University. He tells me that his daughter has been assigned my novel
Ways of Dying
as part of her reading for a class on South Africa and he was reminded that he was once a client of my father's in Lesotho in 1976.
He was extremely efficient and quite severe with his clients
, he writes.
I chuckle to myself because it is exactly as I remember my father. I
am curious, so I write back to the professor, asking him to share with me more of his impressions of my father. He responds:
Your father advised me on two matters. The first was a ridiculous situation I got into with the
moruti
[a pastor] in the village where I was teaching secondary school. The preacher was denouncing me from the pulpit [calling him an Indian, a communist and a Christ killer – Kuttner is Jewish] and your father effectively got him to cease and desist. The second was a trust he set up and administered for the benefit of a student.
I'm sure you remember the cinder block building his office was housed in on a footpath off the magistrates' courts. Inside, rather than having clients waiting – there was no waiting room – he saw 3 or 4 clients simultaneously – attorney client confidentiality notwithstanding. He was aided in this by a miraculously efficient secretary. He would switch from client to client, seated around his table, and the secretary would type on a manual typewriter as your father dictated, indenting when he gestured, so that a complete legal document was ready for the client's mark at the end of a one hour ordeal, which I will now describe. I gathered from my brief experience that many of the cases were for stock theft and the clients were often illiterate peasants. Your father would cajole the facts out of one client and then leave him to collect his thoughts while turning to the next one. I'll never forget he said to one old man, ‘The trouble with you is this: you see this thing,' he brandished an ashtray at him. ‘Instead of saying this thing is an ashtray. You say: “The first time I saw this thing it was in Johannesburg. I was visiting my son on the mines. He's a good boy and sends money to his mother every month”.' Then he gave the old man strict instructions to formulate his thoughts and turned to the next client who was already cringing in anticipation. The secretary pulled multiple sheets of paper and carbon out of the typewriter and rolled in the next client's document. I have often thought the No. 1 Exile's Law Office would have made a much more entertaining and certainly less demeaning series.
This last reference alludes to Alexander McCall Smith's
The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency
, which the professor obviously thinks is demeaning. I share his view.
What I find interesting about Brian Kuttner's description of my father and his methods is that it is exactly as I remember him, and the memory leaves me with a warm feeling. I get quite maudlin these days, especially about my father.
As I write these memoirs he haunts me in other ways too that may even be dangerous to my life. I am taken aback by this email that I receive from a South African woman called Naledi Mosaka:
I am Paul Mosaka's last born. I was reading some of your articles on the internet in which my father's name was mentioned. I took offence to some of the adjectives used to describe my father. I would like you to explain to me if you may what you mean by my father having no personality. Given that my father has been dead for 45 years now, and that you are only 4 years my senior, it means you were a small boy when he died and even younger when he was in Fort Hare, so what could possibly give you the right to describe my father in such terms at such an early age and continue to perpetuate this judgment even in your adulthood. This shows total lack of disrespect for an African child, for ourselves as his children as well as his memory especially when he cannot respond to such comments for himself. The self-righteous living like you should refrain from castigating the dead simply because they have no voice. As far as I am concerned my father was a man of great integrity, a great mind whose life was cut short by diabetes, that he was short did not make him ‘personalityless'. I bet you would like your family to read good things and bad things that are FACTUAL not based on opinion and personal perceptions when you are not around.
For the life of me, I have no idea what this lady is on about. I have never heard of any Paul Mosaka, let alone written all those disparaging things about him. And I tell this lady so. In all my writing, I explain to her, I have never referred to anybody as ‘lacking personality'. When I criticise someone it is for the content of what they stand for (and what they do) rather than their personality. I hate
ad hominem
arguments. Most of my writing is in the realm of fiction, but even there I don't have a character called Paul Mosaka. I am hoping that my accuser will cease and desist,
but she writes me an even more threatening letter. Instead of lying, I should be man enough to apologise publicly for disparaging her dead father, she says. I demand that she shows me the document she alleges I authored, but she claims she misplaced it or can't locate it again on the Internet. I am beginning to think that this is a scam. Only after I threaten legal action does she send me as an attachment a PDF document from some archive, an old interview that my father gave to some scholars. It turns out that Paul Mosaka was a politician in the early 1940s who was elected a member of the Native Representative Council, one of the government-created bodies through which the ‘natives' were governed. Obviously my father would be at loggerheads with such a body and with the politicians who participated in it.
Here I was being crucified for the sins of my father.
I never get to see Naledi Mosaka's face but I hope that when she realises that she has been accusing the wrong Mda she is shamefaced. She never apologises, though.
The third haunting of the past that happens as I am winding down these memoirs does not involve my father directly, but his father, the Headman of Goodwell, Charles Gxumekelana Mda. I receive an email from a certain Dr Bernard Leeman. I learn that he used to be in the Lesotho Paramilitary Force, planted there by the PAC and its ally, the BCP, and he worked with the guerrilla wings of these parties for many years. He is now a scholar in Australia.
I am sorry if this may offend you
, he writes,
but I wonder if you have ever heard any rumour that the true father of P.K. Leballo (1915 – 1986) was a member of the Mda clan, maybe your own grandfather?
I told you about Potlako Leballo quite early on in my story. Just to remind you, he was the leader of the Pan Africanist Congress who once dispatched me to kidnap the children of the Boers in the Free State farms when I went AWOL from the Poqo guerrilla forces.
My blood relationship to him is news, of course, and I ask Dr Leeman about his sources for this kind of information. He says that Leballo told him this himself. Leballo claimed that he was not the son of his official father. There was some hanky-panky between his mother and my grandfather while his father was busy fighting against the Germans
in the First World War. Leeman writes:
Leballo claimed Mda family history (the incident of the magistrate) as his own, housed with Owen Mda and was devoted to A.P
.
The ‘incident of the magistrate' refers to the time when my people became refugees in Lesotho after Mhlontlo killed the magistrate in the Cape. Leballo was born in Lesotho.
I know that Uncle Owen liked Leballo a lot and Leballo regarded him as his younger brother. But it was news to me that Leballo was devoted to my father. When he swore me into membership of the PAC he actually denounced my father as a fence-sitter. My father, on the other hand, thought he was just a demagogue who had no content. He told me so himself. Scholars like Bob Edgar and Luyanda ka Msumza who have studied my father are sceptical of Leballo's or Leeman's story. But I guess we'll never know the truth. All the players are dead. But this confirms that there was a lot of drama in my family. A lot is yet untold.
Father haunts me like a song that persistently rings in my head. Like a jazz number that wiggles itself in and out of my consciousness. Like the deep and dark tone of Abbey Lincoln. I have just read in the paper that she is dead. An era is passing before my eyes. I remember her with Archie Shepp in ‘Golden Lady'. But even more significantly I remember her with Coleman Hawkins in Max Roach's ‘We Insist' – from the ‘Freedom Now Suite'. It was music they created in honour of our freedom struggle in South Africa and the United States. It spoke of the atrocities of the Sharpeville massacre. Overwhelmed as a young revolutionary by Roach's drums, Michael Olatunji's congas, and the percussion of Raymond Mantilla and Tomas du Vall in ‘Tears for Johannesburg' from the same Suite, I composed my poem ‘A Sad Song' –
Who will bury us, we who died a painful death of the sounds of the drums of death? We whose screams were swallowed by the winds? It is not an untruth; our own shall be our own. In death and in life, We Insist!
This is the last stanza. I wailed the poem out like the wind at poetry performances in the exile of Lesotho.
Oh, how romantic it was to be a revolutionary those days! Our prophet was Frantz Fanon and jazz was the hymnal that nourished our souls. Yet there was death too. Real wars where sons and daughters of
loving parents shed blood on the roadside. We were certain of victory. We were certain
matundu ya uhuru
– the fruits of liberation – would be enjoyed by all in a land of equal opportunity.
Equal opportunity?
Father haunts me in such a way that I cannot extricate myself from his ghost. I have become him for he lives in me. He shunned the limelight and was what he called a ‘backroom boy' – a thinker behind the scenes. I am even worse in that regard; I am an ultimate outsider on a road to hermitage. Like him, I work with peasants in the villages, and despite myself I am satisfied with the little that I have, and give the rest away. We differ, though, because he was doing it for the people, as part of his commitment to the struggle. I am doing it for myself. For my own happiness.
Yet the void widens.
Cion
The Whale Caller
The Madonna of Excelsior
The Heart of Redness
She Plays with the Darkness
Ways of Dying
Here's to that beautiful Sculpture Climber of Des Moines, Melisa Klimaszewski, who read every chapter and gave me very useful feedback. I cannot thank you enough, dearest Melisa – Lover of the Figure 8. I also thank two of my former students, Dr Elly Williams and John Kachuba, who read the first two chapters and assured me I was on the right track. I greatly appreciate comments and encouragement by Maureen Isaacson (who flattered me by asking, ‘Are you not a little young to write a memoir?'), Isobel Dixon and another former student, Dr Spree McDonald – all three read part of the work-in-progress.
 
The lines of poetry quoted
here
are from the book
The Dead Lecturer: Poems by LeRoi Jones
(New York: Grove Press Inc., 1964). (LeRoi Jones is now known as Amiri Baraka.)

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