KHOĀ

I knew he wouldn’t be able to stay away from the drink. Just one day, and by the end of yesterday he was already sweating. Only one day after his professed sobering up, and already he was thirsting after Johnnie like nothing else could ever quench him. I understand his thirst; the Red Album has been haunting me since I made the mistake of opening it, and I have been thirsting after our family hi-story to fill these holes I feel echoing like hollow chambers.

I could hear him pacing outside my pygmy room while I stayed locked inside, still sore from his sharp words and still woozy from the ubuvimbo. His agitated fluttering has alarmed Mama Agnes, though. He’s going to get us caught! She came to see me yesterday evening in my pygmy room, saying she was worried about him, he’d been acting strange, going to church with her and then coming back home in a funk, and now outright possessed by some evil spirits. I was pleased that she sought counsel from me, and pretended to spend some minutes pondering this.

‘Should I call the Reverend Pastor to come and do some prayers? First my son and now my husband …’

‘No no, leave him to me, Ma. He talks to me, I’ll get to the bottom of this.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Hundred per cent.’

‘Let me call the Reverend Pastor …’

I sighed, and tried to smile. ‘Just wait, Ma. I know what I’m doing. I can help him.’

I didn’t think he would hold out through the night. I feared he would invade my lodgings. But he didn’t! He waited until Mama Agnes had left for work this morning. I applaud him! He respects my Mama Agnes that much, at least. We were supposed to go on another community search for Bukhosi today, and increase our radius, but he cancelled even that, telling our neighbours he would call them later, he just needed to follow up a lead or some such. I heard one of the neighbours saying that they would press on without him; he promised to catch up with them later and then he barged into my lodgings. The way he was sweating! The way his hands were trembling. The way his penny eyes glinted as they scouted my room for Johnnie.

I didn’t want to give him any, lest his conscience decides to come back again and he wants to blame me for his drinking. I offered him some tea, instead, with a pinch of ubuvimbo. He looked at the tea like I was trying to insult his tongue, his facial muscles twitching as he said he just wanted something to relax him, some little thing, nje, just one drink, what would tea do for him?

‘So tomorrow you can call me a fly?’ I said, inclining my head to one side.

‘Just one glass! OK, you are not a fly, half a glass, ke, just a little bit – give it to me!’

‘See, you are shouting now,’ I said sulkily.

‘I’m not shouting—’

‘—but you are.’

‘I’m just stressed, bantu, I, I just need a sip, please …’

I had to promise him a glass of Johnnie for him to try out the tea. He gulped it down impatiently, burning the roof of his mouth in the process, but I could see a sparkle in his eyes when he was finished. It was such a delight to see him looking so euphoric for a change, instead of the dull stupor that booze has been getting him into of late, where he can’t even talk, he just sits and weeps about Bukhosi or Baba, depriving me of the whereabouts of my Thandi.

And now, here we are, back in Mama Agnes’s sitting room where we belong; our hi-story room. His tongue has gone totally loose, my surrogate father, busy hooking me with roundabout yarns of Zacchaeus and Thandi and something about a war and a son, which I must now, with all the skill of arti-farce I can muster, put into proper order.

Following the death of his surrogate father at the hands of a wet-behind-the-ears private, and the stories circulating thereafter from all quarters about the old man’s perfidious nature, which many theorized was a hereditary trait carried in the Y-genome – which in village speak was a curse passed down from the ancestors for some wrong done by a forebear, thus manufacturing from their vitriol a lineage of traitorous Mlambo males who had been selling out everybody since time immemorial – my surrogate father had no choice but to flee for his life. Under night cover, he bolted into the bush, not to the war, no, but into hiding, hunkered down by my beloved Thandi who refused to be left behind.

As a result of the unpatriotic actions of both father and brother, my Uncle Zacchaeus, too, had to flee, for a Mlambo son Spear-the-Blood intended to conscript, whether older yellow face or younger parrot mouth he did not care. Under night cover, with the assistance of Father Dlodlo, who understood very clearly that his star pupil was destined not for the brawn of the bush but the brains of bureaucracy, where all the real decisions were made, my Uncle Zacchaeus fled the village for his first taste of big-city living, and, true to the vision of his haughty-roving-eye – but especially the influence of that great political body the Catholic Church – he tumbled across towns, cities and countries until he found himself at Oxford University, Oxford, England. Here he began studies in law but, taken over by the flourishes of the great English poets, that Wordsworth and that Keats – and also unsaintly visions of a naked Thandi gyrating before him with her swollen baby belly, to which he pumped his manhood repeatedly every night, ejaculating prosodies in her honour – he abandoned the law for a wispy BA in English Literature.

He graduated in ’79. That great political body the Catholic Church had had great civic ambitions for him but, having discovered in him not concrete precepts of the law but rather eccentric flights of linguistic fancy, they nevertheless put him to good use in the vaulted rooms where men of political intention gathered. He was even invited, the same year as his graduation, to Lancaster House in London where that new, sparkling babe Zimbabwe was conceived through some rather clumsy coitus. He bowed demurely before the men of political intention – those Britons who were led by Lord Carrington on one side, and on the other side the Patriotic Fronters led jointly by Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo – he bowed and trembled, felt the power of the politicos quivering through his body, felt it shivering down his spine and then shivering back up; he twitched as it crept into his soul; it tickled his tongue, it warmed his larynx, it summoned Keats, who laughed boisterously and declared, To Hope, my dear Sir Zacchaeus, an ode To Hope! and out tumbled the eccentric flights of linguistic fancy, and though none of the politicos could understand the effervescent young man’s libretto-like speech, they all agreed that he had outdone himself, and it was thanks to this stellar performance that he was later invited to wax lyrical at Zimbabwe’s first Independence Day celebrations at the Rufaro Stadium on 18 April 1980.

A young sage! declared the politicos. An old soul! Indeed, indeed, the young man would go far.

The young man would indeed go far, much farther and in more dangerous ways than any of the politicos, in their prophetic proclamations, had intended. He, after all, hadn’t the capacity for irony, my Uncle Zacchaeus. Hadn’t a satirist’s bone in him. If he had, he may have escaped the fate that befell him. For, it was at Oxford, where he returned after independence in 1980 to do his Masters and then PhD, that he cultivated the intellectual umbrage that ferried him to infamy in the late ’80s and ’90s, not only in Zimbabwe but also in New York where, fleeing state persecution for his writings about the Gukurahundi Genocide, he spent fourteen years of his adult life.

What I cannot forgive him for, though, and what was most likely the cause of the irreparable fall-out with my surrogate father, are his incestuous writings about my beloved Thandi, scribbled during his Oxford University days in his leather-bound diaries which, under the euphoric urgings of the ubuvimbo-laced tea, my surrogate father has retrieved from their hiding place atop his wardrobe and proceeded to show me. To covet your own brother’s woman! Who is with child! To not only covet her, but to indulge the most graphic of sexual fantasies, and to record them with maiesiophilic zeal! That, now, is the crime of crimes! The man – otherwise a genius – even plagiarized Wordsworth’s ‘Laodamia’, all in the name of Thandi. Laodamia, wife of Protesilaus, that great leader of the Phylaceans and the oracular hero of the Trojan War of Greek mythology, appeared in Uncle Zacchaeus’s dreams with the likeness of Thandi. He imbued her, the Laodamia of his dreams, with umber skin and the most sybaritic curves, falling during many an afternoon into a haze in which he heard Thandi’s voice lilting, Celestial pity, I again implore; – Restore him to my sight – great Jove, restore! While he, the intrepid Protesilaus, martyr and saviour of the idyllic kingdom Phylace, came up from the Greek underworld Hades to comfort and chide her, and at times French kiss her before laying down with her, and in one diarized fantasy even returning with her back to the underworld.

His is the type of family hi-story that deserves to be written out of the history books! In fact, the man deserves to be written out of our family hi-story altogether for his vices! I shall conclude by saying: my Uncle Zacchaeus, otherwise a very affable fellow, was a lecherous libertine who deserves to fry in the fieriest of furnaces for lusting after my Thandi.

What is it about my beloved that has us men banging our heads against each other so? If only my surrogate father would get to the part where he tells me what became of her, if only he’d tell me where she is now, I’d go and pledge my love to her this very day! I imagine she has aged well, my inamorata, that her lovely umber skin has only matured handsomely with time.

Is she as spirited now as she was back then, in January ’76, when, still brimming with passion and a penchant for theatrics, she fled with Abednego who at that moment she hated for having brought her to the cesspool of backwardness that was Lupane? What else was she to do? She was with child and, besides, she certainly hadn’t signed up for the kind of hardcore militancy Spear-the-Blood & Co. demanded. No, this bhundu living with my surrogate father’s family had sobered her proper, especially having to witness the way Smith’s army had gunned down her nutso father-in-law in broad daylight and then had had the gall to go around claiming he’d been a loopy gook trying to blast them all to kingdom come.

No, my Thandi just couldn’t handle this crude rural warfare business, this running off into the mountains and what-not, gun-toting men on every side of her. She was a city girl through and through, and her true calling, she realized, lay in disrupting the ritzy eating rooms of the likes of the Sun Hotel and also prancing about on a stage wooing tears from an audience, whether sympathetic or hostile, for at the bottom of it all the essence of all (wo)mankind was feeling – sweet poignant, heady feeling – feeling which, with her pregnancy, was now terrorizing her and making her dizzy and weepy so that Abednego could do nothing but stare at her feeling helpless while she slapped him with all the feeling she could muster.

‘It’s all your fault, all your fault, all your fault …’ was all she could say, thrice like that, although secretly she must have been grateful: his bringing her here had forced her to see first-hand what would have been in store for her had they managed to enlist with the comrades and gone to Zambia.

‘I’m sorry,’ was all my surrogate father could say, though for what, he was not entirely sure.

Off they fled from the homestead of my grand-dada, the jingoistic Ziphozonke Majahamane Mlambo, renegade for Christ and also Second Lieutenant of the Rhodesian African Rifles, who’d been presented with his colours by the Mother Queen herself, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, back in those days in ’53 when her skin was still taut and chiffon-coloured and her hair had about it the spry hue of pecan-sangria. Off they scuttled, nipped at the heels by the gun-toting Spear-the-Blood, and also the venom-spouting raconteurs of the crimes of my grand-dada, that two-timer said to have been two-ing the RARs and timing the munts.

Off they went over the mild hills of Lupane, across the scraggly bush, headed south on foot, walking along the Bulawayo–Victoria Falls road, hitching a ride in the Morris Minor of a compulsive smoker with a Red Cross armband and a thick Swiss accent, who was not headed, as they had hoped, to Bulawayo, which lay further to the south-east, but who took instead the road that shot off like a forefinger from the thumb that is the A8, past Bayi-Bayi and Pondo and Tsholotsho, making a final stop in Plumtree, that bland, dull border town south-west of glamorous Bulawayo, where nothing ever happens, but which they found uncharacteristically ahive with activity. For war was on its way, and Spear-the-Bloods had sprouted everywhere, intending to make martyrs out of young men. And so, from here, too, they had to flee, tumbling across rivers, fences and towns until they found themselves at Dukwe Refugee Camp, Dukwe, Botswana.

The campsite, my surrogate father says, struck a terrible dread in my inamorata. It stretched over some fifteen square kilometres of unfenced scrubland, the entrance demarcated by a cluster of buildings that housed the Aid Orgs and the church groups, and next to this a gathering of large tents where a Sister Bhictoria of the World Health Organization – nunned up in blistering and biting weather alike – administered, on behalf of all the charities, the food and clothes rationing, her wimpled face a perpetually severe glare. Separated from these by a patch of Kalahari soil, red and fine and on windy days billowy, and where the refugee children liked to play, were rows of tents, their tarpaulins fastened to the outer edges of low mud walls that had been built to prevent the rain from leaking in. Thandi took on the pastime of decorating the mud walls using a blend of soil and spit, sometimes crushing leaves into the mixture to variate the colours.

She was angry at being separated from my surrogate father and allocated a women’s tent, in which they had to squeeze up against each other in groups of up to twenty. She didn’t understand what the hell was happening, the whole of her life just turned upside down like so, in a matter of months! From script-writing revolutionary-acting Citizen against the Colour Bar to preggas refugee in the middle of nowhere in a foreign land fleeing war from her beloved home!

And war is exactly what it was. By 1976, it was raging in earnest throughout the whole country. I looked up the statistics at our National Archives. More than twenty thousand lost their lives, tens of thousands more, like my Thandi and my surrogate father, ruthlessly displaced. The ruckus between the colonists and the nationalists lit up the whole country – a fight over Anglo-Saxon values that was bitter to the end – spilling over into neighbouring Mozambique and Zambia. Meanwhile, a fratricide was going on between the nationalist parties themselves, a battle for the people’s souls.

All around Dukwe Refugee Camp was nothing but the red soils of the Kalahari, scattered with clusters of shrubs and the more resilient acacia trees and the occasional kopje; in short, a dry and unimpressive landscape graced by the hunchbacked kudu or the sprier springbok, which must have made my inamorata’s breath catch in her throat as it sautéed over three metres in the air or leapt across the plains in a nimble allegro, its tan and beige coat a rippling muscular sheen. They heard that lions roamed the area but had never seen one, but they glimpsed, occasionally, the Khoi San, who lived in the bush around the camp but who hardly ever made themselves visible, not until my Thandi joined the young women who ventured into the bush to pick mpulunyane, which they sold to the Khoi San, who then fermented it until it became a most potent brew, skittling even the most seasoned drunkard.

I imagine whenever she appraised this landscape and saw the drought-endued, cosmopolitan-deprived terrain that had become her life, my poor inamorata could not help but weep. My surrogate father watched her, helpless, for she was inconsolable. He had to be careful to keep his distance, for she could no longer stand the sight of him, in the same way that the smell of raw eggs or the taste of peanut butter made her nauseous. Not even his building them a hut in an area separate from the tents that was designated for the married, a lie they told Sister Bhictoria so they could live together and shored up by Thandi’s oversize belly, could mollify her.

I can see them, on that fateful day in April of ’76 in the bush where the baby was born. My poor inamorata must have felt the vibrations that travelled across the underbrush running through her feet and up her spine and into her pregnant belly. The ground trembled, and then somewhere, whether far away or nearby my surrogate father could not say, rumbled a rumble that swelled into a roar. And out of nowhere appeared a lion, out of that scraggly bush, a real, live, roaring lion, its mane shuddering, a delicious gold springing from the sides of its face and darkening to a handsome hickory as it travelled all the way down to its belly, its nostrils flaring as it dropped its chin and pulled back its lips to display moist, black gums and sharp, yellow canines.

My inamorata dropped her jaw and her basket of mpulunyane. The next moment, my surrogate father was in front of her, crouching with his hands spread wide, startling the beast, which roared and swiped at the air with its huge paw.

‘Run,’ he hissed at her.

But she couldn’t run, poor Thandi, she couldn’t run and instead her trembling legs gave way. It was then, as my surrogate father stared into Death’s ochre eyes, that my inamorata’s water broke and trickled down her thighs, that a Khoi San woman leapt out of the scraggly bush, out of nowhere she leapt thrusting herself between the lovers and the lion, my surrogate father tried to scream but couldn’t find his voice, my inamorata found her voice and screamed, the woman bared her teeth and barked, the beast bared its gums and snarled, the baby was coming, the Khoi San woman was hissing, Thandi was groaning, the lion was growling, she spread her legs, it licked its nose, she fisted her hands, it shook its mane, she began to cry, and off it sauntered.

This is the story of his son’s birth as told to me by my surrogate father. I admit, the ubuvimbo had done him a number, but this is what I got.

So. Baby Bukhosi was eased into the world by the hands of khoā of the Khoi San, khoā The Lion Whisperer. He announced himself to the world with a ferocious wail, a squirming mega-baby alarmingly oversize not only for the meagre diet on which my inamorata had subsisted for the previous months, but by any ordinary-world standards.

It was Thandi who named him Bukhosi, Princehood, for he had been born in the bush under the kingly roar of a lion and was thus a royal, lucky little neonate.

I must interject here, to clear any confusion, and state outright that this Bukhosi, this mega-baby who had his wrinkled little forehead smeared with a thumb of spit by khoā of the Khoi San, this princeling who received from khoā The Lion Whisperer a blessing recited in a click-click onomatopoeic tongue, whether in the language of the lions or in her own Khoekhoe dialect we shall never know, is not our Bukhosi, my poor surrogate brother who has been missing for two weeks now. I don’t know what happened to this other Bukhosi, where he is and why my surrogate father has not spoken of him until now. I worry that maybe he’s up to his fibbing again; perhaps he’s confusing things; perhaps, caught in the euphoric clutches of ubuvimbo, he’s given way to fantasy. But he seems now to be adamant about this Bukhosi, who he claims was born not on 18 April 1990, the birth date of our Bukhosi, but on 18 April 1976, a full fourteen years prior.

And so, cradling that chubby load, beholding in that tiny face the agreement of my surrogate father’s teardrop nostrils with her own sepia eyes, stroking skin so buttery and honey like the father’s but which would, in the coming months, darken handsomely to her own burnished umber, my Thandi began to cry. When she lifted her tearful gaze, my surrogate father’s eyes, too, began to moisten.

The birth of Bukhosi, according to my surrogate father, seemed to mellow my inamorata, so that all inclinations of impregnating herself with the liberation struggle went out the proverbial window, and instead motherhood colonized her.

Their baby felt to my surrogate father like a focus, so welcome in the never-ending monotony of the camp: lining up outside the USAID tent for food, lining up outside the Red Cross tent for hand-me-downs, attending the abstinence lessons outside the WHO tent, lying under the cluster of acacia trees near the camp entrance … It had begun to seem to him that waiting had become his whole life.

But, each time Thandi clasped his hand or leaned her head against his chest – he taking this moment to bury his face in her mfushwa hair, which sprung from her head like a tropical forest – he was overcome by a lightness of spirit. These memories of her give me a lightness of spirit!

This Shangri-La was destined not to last, however, for one day in May the following year, just a month after little Bukhosi turned one, a truck arrived without warning at Dukwe Camp to take the men of Rhodesia away to a separate camp at Chifombo base in Zambia, that country which is shaped like a Fattail scorpion and rests its portly abdomen atop teapot-shaped Zimbabwe, née Rhodesia.

This request to separate the sexes had been put forward by Sister Bhictoria. She had tired, she wrote in a redacted report to the WHO, which I found gathering dust in our National Archives, of waging a losing war against the STD epidemic ravaging the camp, and having to deal with the refugee babies who popped out almost on a daily basis, and was fast losing faith altogether in the possibility of un-lusting these fugitive infidels of Aafricah.

As they dragged him on that fateful day in May to the idling truck, my surrogate father grabbed hold of Thandi’s hand and tried to hug his son for what could be the last time. Sister Bhictoria stood pursing her lips and waving her rosary, murmuring how everything was going to be all right, no need for all this crying now, abstinence for Jesus, blessed be the celibates.

My surrogate father thought of Thandi and his son every single day in Chifombo, which turned out not to be another refugee camp, as had been promised, but a clustering of a different kind; he found himself in a training base for the guerillas, where every day he ran combat drills, during which they learned the Art of War as strategized by the great Master Sun Tzu, and where every day my surrogate father saw young men being loaded into vans and driven back into the charnel house from where they had just fled.

There were whiffs in that base of rebellions-within-the-rebellion, fantastical rumours of coups and assassinations, and the most ferocious power struggles going on at the very heart of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU (PF)), which had broken away from my Thandi’s hero, Joshua Mqabuko kaNyongolo Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union ((PF) ZAPU). Something about some eager beaver with a serious face and oversize glasses named Robert or Gabriel or some such said to be playing some sick chess moves in this breakaway party and managing to manoeuvre to the top seat of the High Command. But more matter-of-fact and thus maddening was the buzz about the High Command having already betrayed the lunchpail principles as expressed by Chairman Mao, for they could be seen busy gorging themselves on hotel food and first class flying to that Britain and that America, and preferring to secure spots for their offspring brats in that Harvard and that Oxford, instead of maybe Shanghai Jiao Tong University or People’s Friendship University.

Meanwhile, as the leaders of the revolution pigged out on first class living, the guerillas languished on weevil-infested rice in bases such as Chifombo. My surrogate father did not care much for this power grabbing business by this Robert nerd-boy or angel Gabriel whatever and his breakaway ZANU what-what party; he cared neither who was gorging on what in which hotel nor whose beloved among the guerillas was sleeping wherever without whatever; he concentrated instead on trying to remember the smell of Thandi’s hair, on rendering her smile, on recalling Bukhosi’s face, day after day, polishing their memories in his mind until they began to fog, to his horror, from all that rubbing, a day becoming a month becoming a year becoming three, and he spit-shining the same memories still as though to shield himself from this useless progression of time that seemed to be hustling him further and further from his beloveds.

During the day, he often imagined what kind of father he would be to the boy, while at night, in that damp room in the guerilla base, he would think of his own childhood. More often than not, his mind would turn to Farmer Thornton, who had once tried to claim him as his own, and who had always shown him a disturbing amount of kindness while treating Zacchaeus – that libertine who is now dead to me and shall henceforth be referred to only as that brother, for I intend to deny the letch the honour of recognition in my chronicles – with the contempt he deserved.

When my surrogate father was thirteen, he cut holes in the fence of the Thornton Farm with that brother, who was ten at the time. They slithered across Farmer Thornton’s fields, stealing sugar-cane and green-squash and maize-cobs that were not quite ripe, which they’d roast over the glowering embers of the evening fire, in the camouflage of night so their mama wouldn’t see. He’d never been caught, Abednego, but Farmer Thornton had happened upon that brother many-a-time, and proceeded to swat him with the cord of a telephone plug; Baba on the other hand had never walloped him, but thrashed Abednego constantly, sometimes without reason.

They were squatting in Farmer Thornton’s fields, that brother cradling their loot, when they heard, coming from the direction of the farmhouse, the barking and howling of the farmer’s Tibetan Mastiffs. They fled back to the high fence, but couldn’t locate the holes. They were trapped.

‘If you give me a leg up over the fence, I’ll teach you how to read,’ said that lecherous-then-treacherous brother to Abednego.

Abednego hesitated; he also didn’t want to be beaten up by the farmer! But, oh, how he yearned to learn how to read! How many times had he begged that brother to teach him?

‘All right,’ he said finally. He put the huge watermelon he had stolen to one side and laced his fingers together, letting that brother of his step into his hands and scramble over the top of the fence.

No sooner had that brother disappeared from view, not even sparing a backwards glance, than a hand grabbed him from behind; he felt his shirt tightening around his chest. When he looked up, it was into the terrifying eyes of Farmer Thornton. He yelped, even though he’d promised himself he’d be brave.

‘Now, what have we here? So, you are the other little thief.’

He had seen blue eyes before, those of the missionaries who came door to door, proselytizing and patronizing; he had even seen russet eyes, but never eyes as green as Farmer Thornton’s. He had never been so close to a white face before, so close he could feel the tobacco breath hot on his skin, and follow the strange mesh of capillaries, like tribal marks across the white skin, glowing red in the sun.

The farmer dragged him all the way to the farmhouse. There, he dropped him on the floor by the kitchen entrance, where Sonny Boy, who had just turned sixteen, was busy fiddling with wire and sticks to make a bird trap he intended to set by the banks of the Bubi River. Farmer Thornton disappeared into the house. Abednego was too scared to move.

He could hear Mrs Thornton rattling around in the kitchen. He smelled an aroma that made his stomach fart. Were they going to cook him? Was that it? Chop him up and stew him for those ferocious Mastiffs of theirs? They looked like they could eat a human whole, those dogs. A boy, especially.

Sonny Boy studiously ignored him, still fiddling with his trap. There was a time when they had been cordial to one another, even played together, but the tensions between their families, and between the farmers and the kinsfolk living on the Tribal Trust Lands, had been thick in the air ever since the state of Rhodesia had declared itself independent two years before, in ’65 – a furious response to the Mother Country’s betrayal of her promise to grant the self-governing colony independence under minority rule (and in return for which she had received the colony’s best armies during the Second World War) and not majority rule as she was now trying to do.

When my surrogate father heard the wooden floors groaning beneath the weight of the farmer’s boots, he tensed his pelvic muscles. He stared at those boots, afraid to raise his eyes. They were tan and faded and wrinkled like an old man’s cheeks. They were huge. Farmer Thornton must have had the biggest feet he had ever seen. The big boots got bigger and bigger, until they came to a halt by the kitchen entrance, right beneath his face. They made his nose crinkle; they smelled of Kiwi polish and paraffin.

Finally, he looked up. The farmer was carrying a plate in one hand, a knife in the other.

When Abednego saw the knife, he began to cry.

‘What’s wrong, little fella? Here you go.’

Farmer Thornton placed the plate next to him. There was a wedge of watermelon, which the farmer began to slice. He handed Abednego a piece. Abednego was too scared to refuse. The watermelon was cold; a sharp pain cut across his teeth.

‘Tastes good?’ Farmer Thornton asked.

Abednego nodded, wiping the juice dribbling from his lips.

‘When you want, you ask, OK? No more stealing. You’re lucky you’re not hurt; I’ve put traps all over my fields, ever since my produce started going missing.’

That was the last time he ever slinked into the Thornton fields. And although that lecherous-then-treacherous brother did not keep his promise of teaching him how to read, he became a little legend among the village boys as he told of his ordeal:

‘He lifted you up, with just one hand, high up in the air?’

‘Yes, and he had eyes like a green mamba…’

‘Yo, yo yo yo, yo!’

‘And as he lifted me his eyes turned red …’

‘Red!’

‘And then blue …’

‘And then blue!’

‘Yes, and he took out a big hunting knife, and said he would skin me alive and paste me on his wall, like the heads of the antelope hanging in his living room…’

‘Yoh, yoh yoh yoh, yoh!’

‘But I fought him, and wrestled the knife from his hands …’

‘Ah, ah ah ah, ah!’

‘Then he said I was so brave, and that I have such nice skin, and I shall marry his niece when I grow up …’

‘Wo, wo wo wo, wo! White girl, mfana! You are going to be a big man!’

‘Yes, and he said he will take me to go and see his great big god who lives in the sky, who gives them green eyes and red eyes and blue eyes, and his god will give me green eyes like he has, and pale glowing skin …’

I glance at my surrogate father’s eyes to check their colour, and am disappointed to see that they are still brown, and furthermore, that they are getting moist once again. ‘Dukwe was a terrible time for my chicken-pie and my boy, and they didn’t have me there to protect them!’ He fumbles about for a tissue – ah, but where will he find some Alibaba Facial Wipes these days? He lands, instead, on yesterday’s Chronicle, crumples the face of His Most Excellent Excellency, looking solemn at some inauguration or other, brings it to his nose, and blows. ‘We’d left home without really thinking it through, you see, had had no choice, uprooted from our home and all we knew just like that. Oh, the trauma of it!’

Oh, the trauma of it! For little Bukhosi, the camp at Dukwe was all he knew, it was his home. The other refugees – people I’m sure my Thandi wouldn’t have otherwise associated with had it not been for their being cooped up together in that camp under the grind of time, day after day, month after month, year after year, until one year became two became three, all feeling the same as the one before – had become their family.

Thandi remembered the refugees well, and would often tell my surrogate father about them, when they reunited after the war. There was Ndali, whom she described as a grown man who was skinny like a boy, always lying beneath the acacia tree outside one of the men’s tents, sniffling and dipping his head every now and then to smear his tears against his SWAPO tee-shirt, declaring loudly that the world was a motherfucking Gehenna. There were the Mbilu twin sisters, who could be found entangled in one another in the sand outside their tent, busy disentangling each other’s hair, which sprang from their heads with a delicious lushness, squishing lice eggs between thumb and forefinger, making little Bukhosi squeal as they made a ‘cc cc’ sound. There was Sister Bhictoria and her Bread of Life, given to Bukhosi by the Sister’s wrinkly hands, made from her great-great-Nanna’s special recipe, as she always told the plump little boy and his mother, stuffing the oily bread into his mouth, pausing every now and then to appraise him, to lift his legs and arms, press her hand against his belly, and peer into his mouth, admonishing him not to go out and play with the savages, they’d give him ringworms, that’s what.

Little Bukhosi would nod but, after receiving the Bread of Life, one morsel at a time, he’d slip away and scamper off to the edge of the camp, where khoā of the Khoi San, khoā The Lion Whisperer squatted, just outside the camp demarcation, but within viewing distance. khoā in whom Thandi had entrusted her son’s well-being, much to Sister Bhictoria’s chagrin, Sister Bhictoria who never tired of the opportunity to wave her King James bible in the direction of the wilding woman.

Bukhosi would sit on khoā’s lap and bring his little umber forehead to her big peanut butter one; he’d stare into her slanting, laughing eyes, dazzled by the glimmer there, the glimmer of the sun, she called it; he’d tap-tap a chubby little finger against khoā’s petite, triangulated nose and watch with glee as it crinkled, the nostrils flaring in playful annoyance; and then, he’d break into giggles, quenched by the knockabout laughter that gurgled deep and full from khoā’s small, fleshy lips.

And just like I used to bellow to Uncle Fani as a child, ‘Tell me again, Fani, the story of how the world began!’, I can hear little Bukhosi screeching, ‘Tell me again, khoā, the story of how the world began!’

‘All right …’ khoā ever patient, unlike my Uncle Fani, never tiring of telling the boy his favourite story, never yelling at him to go away, but taking instead his hand and leading him into the bush, where she proceeded to frown thoughtfully at the shrubs. ‘One day Kaang, the San god, created the world. But he was lonely, and so he decided to change into an eland, so he could run across the plains. But, again, he got tired, so he decided to make himself into a praying mantis, so he could jump from tree leaf to tree leaf. In this way, he created every animal living in our world. But then, one day …’

‘What happened one day, khoā?’

And she, plucking the roots of a shrub and slipping it into her leather bag: ‘One day, the animals that Kaang had created turned against him, and so, heartbroken, he decided to go and live up in the sky, away from all that he had created …’

‘And what did he do to the moon!’

Sinking her teeth into a bulbous root, which at once began to sputter with an onion-coloured juice, which she squeezed out into a calabash: ‘Well, it was dark and lonely up there, and his wife Coti had stayed behind here on earth, so Kaang made himself a light, a great big round light, which he called the moon …’

‘And he made the moon cry!’

‘Here, drink this, it will protect you from the diseases of the white man – so whenever the people of the earth need water, they do a rain dance and plead with Kaang, who is still angry at them for attacking him, so angry that their rain dances make him cry, and thus his tears fall from the sky and rejuvenate the earth.’

And he, little Bukhosi, trying to make a brave face as he gulped the bitter juice, just like the brave face I tried to make at Uncle Fani’s rebuffals: ‘Tell me the story of the beast Ga-Gorib!’

‘All right. One day there was a beast called Ga-Gorib…’

I can imagine Thandi watching them from a distance, her Bukhosi and his khoā, fascinated by the ease with which the boy had picked up the Khoi San woman’s click-click language, with how he laughed so easily in her presence. I imagine this intimacy between khoā and little Bukhosi sometimes made my inamorata envious, as it would any mother upon seeing her son mothered by another woman, much like how Abednego’s continued snubs of my affection while he pines after the boy, who didn’t even appreciate him like I do, hurt me.

It was thanks to khoā and her strange herbs and roots, Thandi told my surrogate father, that she and little Bukhosi never suffered, in that refugee camp, from any disease, despite the poor diet and, during one month, a vicious cholera epidemic. khoā who – at once impenetrable and penetrating, distant and contemplative as she watched the goings-on of the camp with curiosity and yet without the slightest envy, cackling in response to Sister Bhictoria’s ape-like gestures beckoning her with the King James bible towards the light of the Lord – had made Thandi see just how big the world was, how it existed on many plains at once.

It would crumble, this world in which Bukhosi spent his formative years, on that historic day in March 1980, when they heard a terrifying drone coming from somewhere up above. Three aeroplanes descended upon the camp, whipping up a terrific dust storm. The camp unravelled as everyone flung themselves to the ground – they looked like fighter jets for sure. But it wasn’t bullets that sprayed the cowering refugees, just flyers; sheaves upon sheaves rained down upon the camp and its surrounding areas like the dead quail and frosty manna for the Israelites in the Desert of Sin. Thandi stood up from where she had flung herself beneath a scraggly bush, her eyes moving wildly, her chest fluttering, until she caught sight of her son in khoā’s grip by the entrance of the camp. She sighed, grinned and began to make her way towards them, the flyers crinkling under her bare feet. She bent and picked up a leaflet.

‘RHODESIANS COME HOME,’ she read. ‘WE ARE ZIMBABWE NOW. MUGABE HAS WON! COME HOME. ZIMBABWE WELCOMES YOU.’