My Thandi!
My inamorata!
This cannot be.
That man! Black Jesus!
It can’t be!
My Laodamia!
Thou meetest death at the hands of that most vile Trojan brute,
that Hector that hath slain your beloved Protesilaus—
Here I lie roasting in this divine hell, Hades!
While thou, my belovedest,
That man! Black Jesus! He killed – you died at the hands of – that man! He who smoulders like an ember in my own skull! How has he ended up in Abednego’s—? Impossible! Why does he keep taking everything away from me? First my mother, then my past, my hi-story, my very essence, and now you, my inamorata!
Celestial pity, I again implore; – Restore her to my sight – great Jove, restore!
Celestial pity refuses to restore you to my sight. For the past two days, ever since my surrogate father’s confessions about your death, ever since he broke down, breaking me in the process also, ever since learning about how you, too, like my dear mama, died a brutal death at the hands of Black Jesus, I have been cooped up in my pygmy room communing with the religious teachers. I have prostrated myself before the ancestors, before Buddha, before Zoroaster, before Confucius, before Krishna, before Mohammed, before Jesus! I have begged them each in turn to guarantee that were I to take my own life, they would be able to unite me with you, my inamorata, on the other side, whatever the other side may turn out to be. I swore to the ancestors to drink from the ancestral shrine, I oathed to Buddha to follow the Eightfold Path, I promised Zoroaster I’d convert to Zoroastrianism, I pledged to Confucius to take up the banner of Confucianism, I vowed to Krishna to adhere to the laws of Karma, I swore to Mohammed to pray to Mecca five times a day, and I guaranteed Jesus a most ardent disciple. Please don’t think it is cowardice that has prevented me from going through with my Romeo-esque plans, my inamorata! I was only too prepared to drink from the poisoned chalice and declare, thus with a kiss I die. It is only that I’ve received no assurance of casting mine eyes upon your umber visage from any of these indomitable gods, and for fear of taking my life only to find no you waiting for me on the other side, or no other side in which to be waited for, I’ve decided it is best to suffer the rest of my days on this earth with the comfort of my surrogate father’s memories of you in mine manly bosom!
I don’t even know what the hell is going on. The very hi-story I am trying to run away from. The old me I am trying to purge. Memories I’ve been trying for so long to forget. About my Uncle Fani and the day he died. About my mama. I think Abednego broke me. I think I may have broken him also. We broke each other in the living room just as the morning outside broke the night sky, he crying for the family he had lost, and I crying for you my inamorata, crying, breaking, and falling into one another’s arms. He clung to me. I to him. I cupped those wet, yellow cheeks and brought that face close to mine. I stared into those penny eyes. He let me bring my blueberry lips close to his. He did not pull away. I kissed him. He let me kiss him. His lips were moist and cool; his warm breath smelled of ubuvimbo and Johnnie.
‘Uncle Fani!’ I cried.
‘Bukhosi!’ he replied.
I never got to kiss Uncle Fani, never got to cup his cheeks. I just sat and watched as he lay dying at Mpilo Hospital in January of 2002, struck dumb. Even as I sat beside his hospital bed, I was still unable to understand his crying. There he lay, a man of fifty-seven who looked closer to seventy-seven, wrinkles slashing the whole of his tawny face, travelling the breadth of his wide forehead, right down the impasse leading to his smooth, droopy nose, converging towards his uni-lip, to disappear beneath a grey Balbo beard. There were hi-stories mapped all over that face, laid bare by every single one of those wrinkles; perhaps that’s why, as he aged so prematurely, he became so unbearable to look at.
He lay on his hospital bed with my fingers in his cold bony grip and his other hand raised to the second-floor window, where he kept calling out a name, Zodwa, my mama’s name, though I did not yet know it, Zodwa Zodwa he kept murmuring, oh Zodwa you have come for me, but there was nothing there, just the bare branches of a jacaranda tree. His rheumy walnut eyes were fixed not on me, his nephew who had been like a son to him, and at times even tried to be a mother, lending him my skinny chest to cry on, but rather on Nurse Clarence, who was fluttering over him and checking his drip and fluffing his pillows, all useless, for he was dying and no amount of fluttering or fluffing would change that. Meanwhile, her ample rump busied itself with beckoning me away from this man who had been almost like a father to me, Nurse Clarence’s rump shaped like two voluptuous brackets that rolled in and strained against and threatened to burst out of her crisp uniform. It was as he lay dying and I sat mesmerized by Nurse Clarence’s undulating buttocks that Uncle Fani finally coughed up the hi-story that had been gagging him his whole life.
‘It was in ’83 when they came,’ he began.
‘Who, Uncle? Who came?’
‘Mina, I was herding the cattle back into their kraals, and Zodwa and Ntokozo were in the silo, I don’t know where mama was but they found her, they found us all. Me, mama, Zodwa, Ntokozo, Jabu, Andile, Donsekhaya, Velempini and his wife Khathazile, their daughter Khohlwa, then our brother Celani, then Phephelaphi, Hluphekile and Skhubekiso. Is that it, how many is that … ? Oh, yes, and Qedindaba. Baba was long dead by then, he’d died a hero in the war and had been buried at the Heroes’ Acre in Phelandaba.
‘They were just young men, nje, maybe five of them, but they had guns and they were wearing the red berets with these shiny scythe badges so, and so we knew who they were. They said there was a meeting at Tshipisane Secondary School, that an important man had come to the village and we had to be there. It was getting to be evening, I remember Velempini shook his head to them and said, it’s late, mama needs to take her pills for her high-high and then she needs to sleep. But as he was turning to go into the hut, they shot him. In the head. He just fell down, just like that, di. Mama started screaming and Khathazile flung herself at his body and she’s rolling and rolling and yelling mayibabo oh woe is me wangenza Thixo wami oh and now everyone is screaming and the killers are shouting shurrup shurrup wena mama shurrup all of you or-o you will be next but how can we stop we can’t stop. They are speaking Shona and nobody can understand them, me I can hear them because I had spent some months in Mberengwa panning for gold but I was staring at them with my eyes wide open like I can’t hear the swine. Then Celani is saying let’s go better we go with them it will be all right but mama is not going nowhere she is pointing and shouting Velempini my son oh bo oh my son how can you survive the war only to die like this oh and Khathazile is screaming better they kill me now also oh bo oh bantu oh what about Khohlwa think about your child and she is getting up and we are going with the killers and these are just youth you understand me I could snap their skinny little necks if it wasn’t for those guns.
‘We are at Tshipisane and it’s like the whole village is there, what is happening everyone is asking who is this person who is come is maybe it’s the President somebody says but the killers tell us it’s Jesus who is coming. Jesus? Yes they say don’t you know you stupid fools that you have a Jesus?
‘And then the man he comes he is wearing army uniform so, like combat gear and a beret but it’s green so, he is black black so, like a polished stone and has these whitest eyes you have ever seen they put him on a stage and Celani says that is him that is the beast and we look at him because everybody knows Celani he’s working with the dissidents for days he goes nobody knows where he is going and then he is coming with fancy things at home that don’t belong to him. You know him I ask he nods says that’s Black Jesus.
‘Black Jesus is walking up and down up and down the stage he starts to talk to us he says with man nothing is possible but with me your Jesus everything is possible. He is speaking in Shona and one of the killers is translating for us to Ndebele. Where two or three are gathered I am there with them says Black Jesus and here we are all gathered in my name do you know why I’m here? He asks. Hmmm? Do you know? I’m here because my disciples here are not spreading my gospel. I have told them that we need bodies, we need bodies to sow here in this barren land, but what are they doing, they are just slapping you, just beating you, why are they not shedding your blood? Heh? Are they afraid of you? Heh? Are the women too beautiful? Heh? So I am here to help them do what needs to be done. You maNdebele all of you are busy hiding dissidents in your midst you are a useless good for nothing people and what has no use must perish. But we won’t make it easy for you no no no, you are going to feel it, you will feel it, you will go hungry here there will be no food allowed here, we shall burn all your crops and you will starve until you start eating your dogs, then you will be eating the rats and even the cockroaches, and then you are going to start eating your children. Horayiti now sing! I can’t hear you, mhani, I said, start singing!
‘And we are trying to sing and many hours are passing by and mama faints, yoh, and we are trying to wake her but they beat us they say leave her Celani shouts mgodoyi fuseki and he is trying to pick her up and they shoot him and now he’s dead.
‘Now they are throwing us into these big trucks so and just like that they are driving and when I look back I see mama they have left her kneeling in the dust cupping her head and shake shake shaking it so like somebody who has lost everything. Nobody knows where we are going me I’m with Zodwa and little Khohlwa we can’t see anybody else here after a long time the trucks stop later we find out we are at Bhalagwe camp and there is nobody around for kilometres to help us.
‘They are beating us every day and taking the women as their wives Zodwa they take to Black Jesus. There is a white man who is coming there they call him Lakin I know him he has come before to our village during the war with Smith’s army and taken us to the Protected Villages where they wire us with electricity and hang us upside down and they are shoving sticks up the women and saying we are good for nothing munts who should have gone extinct long ago. He’s CIO first he was CIOing for Smith killing us in the war now he is CIOing for our President doing the same thing. He keeps directing the killers telling them what to do more force he keeps saying it’s the only thing the kaffirs understand and he’s laughing showing us clean shining teeth and the killers are laughing with him and beating us harder. CIO Lakin is taking me they take me to the holding shed he makes the killers wire my thing and tie a rubber around my balls and this man Black Jesus he is shouting me in Shona saying I’m a dissident me I’m screaming no no never then where are the dissidents he asks I tell him I don’t know. Lakin is twisting the electricity and one of the killers he is coming for me with a truncheon—’ He began to tremble, Uncle Fani, he began to tremble. I tried to stop him.
‘Uncle,’ I said. ‘Uncle, stop. Nurse Clarence! Nurse!’
But he wouldn’t stop. ‘I never see Khohlwa again but Zodwa tells me that they took plastic and burned it until it was hot hot hot and then they made her spread—’ He gulped. ‘And then the next time I see Zodwa her tummy is growing and growing Black Jesus is punching her in the stomach and saying my little bitch my little whore when the cunt explodes I’m going to – he was going to kill you but your mother she loved you she makes me promise, promise to try to escape take the baby with you please look after my baby please and you were born in the night and we put you in a satchel and I took night cover and we managed to cross Zamanyone hill in the west and a headmaster there gave us a ride to the missionary hospital but I get home I find there is nobody. I am waiting and waiting for them; mama Andile Donsekhaya Ntokozo Skhubekiso Jabu Hluphekile Khathazile Qedindaba Phephelaphi. How many is that? Yes, ten. Out of ten zero come back and I am like to myself I must burn this place down and forget and go away and never come back otherwise I am going to die being here alone with all these memories it is going to kill me better to not remember. Your mama I made her a promise to look after you and I keep that promise.’
He exhaled, a long, seemingly infinite exhalation, I think with relief. Me, I couldn’t think. I couldn’t think and, for a long time, I didn’t want to understand what he had said. How could he lay on my shoulders something like that? Wtf was I to do with it? He died that night, the relief of passing on the burden of knowledge enough to allow his spirit to finally soar to the heavens.
Isn’t this the hi-story Bukhosi always wanted to know, before he went missing? For which he got a beating whenever he asked our father, ‘Baba, what happened in the ’80s, what was Gukurahundi?’ That was Gukurahundi, Bukhosi. It was the lead rain of our new country, Zimbabwe, sent to wash away us, the chaff. It was the state-sponsored murder of twenty thousand of your kin. How was our father to tell you that? How was he to tell you that within that number were the only two people he ever really loved?
I saw how it hurt the boy. I saw how it was hurting my surrogate father. It hurt me also. That’s why I took the boy to Dumo, to get answers. Dumo who never beat him or turned him away but answered all his questions earnestly, with an intoxicating passion, proclaiming, ‘We must secede! We can never be free, until we are allowed to mourn our dead, to acknowledge that they died, and how they died, and to exhume their bones in the unmarked mass graves in which they lie with strangers and perform the proper burial rites!’
I’m not ready to perform any burial rites for my inamorata! It feels as though she died only yesterday! How can she be dead? Stolen from me by Black Jesus, just like he robbed me of my mama! Will I never be free of Black Jesus? Shan’t I ever be able to cleanse my blood of him? My past of him? The beast! Destined in life to be the henchman of a President, plagiarizing, during that terrible time right after our independence from white rule, the most creative ways of torture: severe-beatings hut-burnings asphyxiation falanga abnormal-body-positions rape dry-submarine electric-shocks lack-of-sleep immobilization constant-noises screams stripping excrement-abuse sham-executions and special-contraptions-copied-from-Pol-Pot-Dacko-Amin-and-perhaps-some-unnameable-elements-of-the-CIA-with-speculated-but-unconfirmed-blessings-from-jolly-Uncle-Sam. His reputation preceded him in red carpet fashion all over the land of Mthwakazi, his shadow blotting out even the tiniest suns of children, who were deemed by his Christ-like powers to be guilty-by-association.
Proudly granted, in ’87, after this most impressive exhibition in Matabeleland of ruthless ambition, a spot at the Royal College of Defence Studies in the Land of Her Majesty.
Proudly capped, in ’91, Commander of the Air Force.
Six foot two and thin-shouldered.
Skin the colour of hematite.
Would she have been able to love my face, my mama? Would she not have looked into it and always seen … but no, she loved me, my mama, she loved me! She even had me smuggled out at birth to get me away from that Black Jesus.