I feel myself changing, undergoing hydrolysis – for the body is but a land mass steeped in seventy per cent water – darkening as I come into contact with hi-story’s iron particles, cleaving my being from the present to form new bonds with the past. Perhaps I shall succeed in saying of the past, ‘Thus I willed it.’ Perhaps it is yet to do a number on me, denying me the pleasure of becoming a self-made man, one who has transcended hi-story and got hold of the present, and is thus able to rule the future.
I’ve been trying to understand why I find myself here today, as the man that I am, a man wrestling with that fiction of many versions, hi-story. It is through hi-story’s shadow that we conquer the past, this past in which nothing can live but from which everything springs.
When I returned from my travels abroad earlier this year, in February, I found the country living in hi-story. Everywhere, odes to the past were being composed, sung, recited; here, the past lived more vividly than the present, for there was no future that could be seen, no future to be imagined. Each time somebody important, like Uncle Zacchaeus, tried to talk about the future, they quickly became part of the past, in this way encouraging us to always look back.
I, too, feeling this strong pull of the past when I returned home, went in search of mine; first to Tshipisane, the village where my mama and my family come from, with the hope, quite an illogical hope, now that I look back – like Trymore – of finding their remains so as to give them a proper burial. I was refused access to enter Antelope Mine by a pudgy, self-important guard, where I had hoped to uncover what had once been Bhalagwe. The landscape was dry and unyielding, scattered with several markings of mass graves, in the form of rushes placed over an area or branches boxing in a piece of the ground. None of the graves were labelled, and it was only thanks to the locals that I was able to identify them for what they were. Whenever I mentioned that word, Gukurahundi, though, I was met with shakes and fears, trembling, blubbering, and advised to leave the area immediately.
This one word, Gukurahundi, you only have to say it slowly, in order to understand its weight:
Gu – that’s a hard g, like go – and I can imagine her, my mama, as she went, bundled into the back of a truck as a teenage girl with those, like Mama Agnes, from neighbouring villages, my Uncle Fani by her side, my Cousin Khohlwa with them, bundled by the Men in the Red Berets, with Black Jesus leading the charge.
Ku – a hard k, like Kool-Aid – and the truck took flight into the night, swallowed whole by the darkness, headed for that death camp Bhalagwe, near Antelope Mine fifty-six kilometres north-east of Bulawayo. In the back, my mama sat huddled in the arms of another young girl, bouncing rickety-kickety-bounce as the truck lurched across dirt roads.
Ra – a rumble, like run – and the Men in the Red Berets watched, laughing, as the villagers leapt off the truck once it eased to a halt at Bhalagwe, leapt and ran, running for their lives, running to God knows where, for they were trapped from all sides, there was nowhere to flee.
Hu – a huff, like human – and he called my mama, Black Jesus, called her into his bunker, where he made her take off her clothes and appraised her supple, teenage body, her small breasts, big nipples, tiny waist and wide hips, the jet-black curls of her pubis. My mama stared at the floor and tried to cover her nakedness.
Ndi – a tender n, pronounced with the tongue tapping against the soft inner palate of the mouth, followed by a hard d, like ndy, handy – he ordered her to lie down and took her on the hard, cold cement floor. Afterwards, the Men in the Red Berets had a go too; they, my many fathers who later tried to smother my provinciality. At night, she would clutch her growing belly, my mama, clutch it and cry.
I, of course, have no way of verifying any of this. It is only through many-an-afternoon spent sniffing about in the National Archives, many-an-evening hunched over my MacBook reading this and that article online, many-a-morning flap-flapping through newspapers at The Chronicle in mid-town Bulawayo, many-a-sleepless-night at Dumo’s sunny flat in London, and perhaps the evidence of a mirror reflecting the telltale features of my face back to me, that I have been able to get but a blur of what hi-story hides in the shadows.
Gukurahundi: the early rain that washes away the chaff before the spring shoots. They washed her away, my mama, threw her body in one of the many mass graves. She was the chaff and I am the spring shoots.
So.
I returned to Bulawayo, the same city I had fled five years before, after Uncle Fani’s death. I had forgotten just how gorgeous the city is! I walked for hours on end, feeling at once surreal and substantial, enjoying the wide thoroughfares, the sense of breadth and the flamboyant trees gracing the sides of the roads, how the buildings did not block out the glare of the sun. I had forgotten what it was like. Blackness pulsated around me, so unconsciously going about the business of living; men about Dumo’s age looking quite frumpy with their bellies hanging over their trousers, the women looking deliberately motherly in their modest floral dresses and retro perms, the young people cosmopolitan in their jeans and tank tops and NYC caps worn slanting to the side. Something was bursting inside me as I threaded through the crowds, brushing against a mélange of umber, tawny, walnut, coffee, caramel, hickory and carob hued skins teeming in the never-ending queues outside CABS bank on the corner of Jason Moyo and Seventh, stretching all the way around the block to intersect with a rowdy queue outside the Baker’s Inn at the corner of Jason Moyo and Eighth. Such noise! A cacophony of babbling, laughing, arguing and animated shouting that made me chuckle.
And there, diagonally across from the corner of Eighth and Fife, was that haunt of my teens, Haddon & Sly, outside which we boys would hang out after school, waiting to accost the girls from Townsend High as they alighted in the City Hall Square across the road. The H & S was still pasted on the off-white building in cerulean blue; it was reminiscent of the British high street shops I had spent the past five years wandering among in London, and, like many of Bulawayo’s Victorian buildings, gave the city a historic Sussexy-feel, leaving no question about its colonial past.
The past was an overpowering presence, too present and not past, as it should have been, cannibalizing our present, mutating our future.
It was when I alighted from the khombi in Luveve 5 that the nostalgia hit me proper. I dragged my feet wistfully in the dust, past the colourful houses with their satellite dishes angled on their roofs like fascinator headpieces, huddled together as though for comfort. You would think nostalgia is a beautiful thing, but not for me, no. I had never felt such emptiness! Such anguish! It was as though my whole childhood had been a lie; I, myself, was a walking lie.
It shocked me to realize how much things had changed, inside me but also outside; I gaped at the potholes gaping in the streets; at the daylight all shimmery-slippery, rippling across the varooming metal bumper to bumper in the fuel queues.
I wanted to weep.
It was in this state that I found the Mlambos living in my Uncle Fani’s house. It was thanks to Uncle Zacchaeus that the Mlambos were able to buy my Uncle Fani’s house. Dear Uncle Zacchaeus! After his death in the mysterious car accident in 2003, his inheritance, as per his will, went to my surrogate father, mostly in the dismaying form of boxes upon boxes of books, but also, thankfully, in the way of a sizable chunk of money. And thus, the Mlambos were able to sell my Thandi’s house in Entumbane and buy my Uncle Fani’s bigger house in Luveve Township.
(RIP, Uncle Zacchaeus, RIP! But if it so happens that the other side does, indeed, exist, and that you are over there having the time of your life with my inamorata, then may you fry and cry, you lucky letch, may you fry and cry!)
I was surprised to find signs of life upon arrival at my Uncle Fani’s house. I had fled without putting his affairs in order, leaving unattended the house in Luveve while I worked as a geriatric caregiver in London. (I had skedaddled to the place where it all began, to our former colonizer and present patron, Le Monsieur Boss Lady – God Save the Queen! It was during that time when the population curve of the Land of Her Majesty had got mountain-steep. Her snooty British offspring were not willing to wipe and swathe the wrinkled buttocks of their progenitors, and thus the floodgates of the nursing profession had been yanked open. Our former colonizer welcomed her former colonial subjects, beseeching them, beseeching us, to once again labour towards her glory. I filled in some application forms and before I knew it I was on a plane on my way to do a sponsored six-month training course towards geriatric care, and I even had free student lodgings and a stipend.)
Still, I expected to find things as I had left them. Instead, there were people living in my uncle’s house. I stood for a few minutes on the street, evaluating it. It looked nicer than I remembered, I’ll admit that. It had a new coat of yellow paint, and somebody had gone to the trouble of planting some peach and yellow flowers in the front. There was a ‘room for rent’ cardboard sign fastened to the gate. The gate no longer creaked; somebody had bothered to oil it. The yard had been swept clean. I made my way to the back, edging along a narrow corridor, for a pygmy room had been built opposite the house in huge, grey blocks, quite ugly; the proposed lodgings, I rightly guessed.
I didn’t knock but pushed open the back door, which creaked still, and stepped inside. The cement floors shined in a way they had never shined during my years of living there, so much so that I could make out the outline of my body. The smell of Cobra polish mingled with the residual aroma of beef stew. There were pretty, motherly things in the kitchen; pots and pans lined up along one wall, hanging from a rack. A white kitchen cupboard with blue finishings stood against the wall to my left; dish and cup sets, stacked one atop the other, were visible through the glass-fronted cupboard doors. The door leading to the sitting room stood ajar. The first thing that caught my eye when I stepped into the sitting room was not the brand-new, sparkling cobalt kitchen table vying so desperately for my attention. It wasn’t even the bottles of cooking oil stacked in the corner, to my right, behind the TV stand, with a measuring cup and varied smaller bottles, clear evidence of a black market operation. No. It was the framed portrait of baby Bukhosi hanging above his sofa to my left, next to the bookcase, his emerald eyes gazing at me, frightened, imploring me, pleading with me.
I was still standing there, studying the portrait, resisting its entreaties to move closer, to caress the glossed-up cover, to perhaps plant a kiss on those glossy baby cheeks, when I heard a shriek behind me, and turned to see Mama Agnes. She was standing by the back door, her bags of groceries scattered at her feet.
‘Who are you?’ she cried. ‘What do you want?’
‘Who are you,’ I said, ‘and what are you doing in my uncle’s house?’
A look of comprehension darted across her face, quick as a street thief, before she put on a blank stare, no longer frightened this time, but rather deliberately recalcitrant. ‘This is our house,’ she said. ‘We bought it from the previous owner, fair and square. Please leave.’
I did not want to leave. I was so drawn to the baby portrait. And there were such pretty, motherly things everywhere. And this was my Uncle Fani’s house. But I was not about to physically attack this lady who reminded me so much of a mother, and here I wish I could say my mother, if only I’d had the chance to know her, my life would have been different! I may have had no mother growing up, but Uncle Fani did his best to raise me proper, and I never forget my manners around mothers. So, I walked over to Mama Agnes, who was still standing by the back door, picked up her groceries, walked her to the kitchen, placed them on the floor next to the fridge, offered to unpack them for her, she shook her head, and then I said sorry for having walked in like that, unannounced, and I was looking for a place to rent and had seen the sign on the gate.
‘We are no longer renting,’ Mama Agnes said, eyeing me through slit-eyes.
‘Please,’ I said.
‘We already have somebody,’ she said.
‘I’ll pay you six months in advance,’ I said, and pulled out a wad from my pockets. ‘In pounds,’ I added, counting the bills carefully for her to see.
She looked at the pounds, then looked at me, looked down at the pounds, looked up at me. ‘My husband used to be a soldier,’ she said. ‘So, I won’t tolerate any trouble.’
‘I’m a good boy, madam,’ I said, taking her hand.
Finally, she smiled. ‘All right, all right. It’s the room at the back, you saw it coming in? It’s small, but we’ve made it as comfortable as possible, and for what we’re charging, it’s really cheap cheap.’
I am now ashamed to say that in spite of all my smiling, I went straight to the Luveve Housing Office the next day to report the theft and/or illegal sale of my Uncle Fani’s house. But there seemed to be no record of the initial sale of the property to my Uncle Fani, only a record of sale to one Abednego Mlambo by a Mr Edward Msimangu, registered owner. I knew Old Edward, he’d lived on our street and had since, after selling a house that did not belong to him, skipped the country to Australia.
‘We need at least a title deed,’ said the man who served me. ‘That or a birth certificate at least, to start somewhere.’
I had neither of these things. Uncle Fani, ever since the concentration camp, ever since Black Jesus, had been, like many of Gukurahundi’s victims, unable to get a new birth certificate. I suspect the man knew this, that there was no title deed and no record of an identity document, and that’s why Old Edward had managed to sell a house that didn’t belong to him, probably with forged papers or even a bribe. Such were the new times in the House of Stone.
Declaring the matter not over, I returned to my new pygmy lodgings, which were rather sparsely furnished, with a little put-me-up bed and a lamp, and a plug extension running in from the house and looping through the small window that faces the gate and looks out onto the street, where on many-a-day, and sometimes during the early evening, while clickety-clacking away on my MacBook, recording for posterity the chronicles of my Mlambo family, I have had the pleasure of glimpsing children playing Catch on the street. In a way, although I have not yet and probably, like my surrogate grandpapa, shan’t be able to reclaim the land on which I found myself – whether by hook or by crook – I can say I am somewhat glad things turned out the way they did, otherwise, I would never have come to know the Mlambos and love them as I have, and they never would have come to know me and – in their own ways – love me as they have, taking me in as their surrogate son and enveloping me in a family warmth the thought of which just makes me all mushy inside.
Mama Agnes invited me to join them for supper on my first night, that and the following nights, and then, realizing the impracticality of expecting me to cook in that pygmy room that did not even have a gas cooker, she began charging me for meals, as well as washing my clothes, which I was only too happy to pay for, money being only a vulgar estimation of the immeasurable, motherly love she was showering on me. On that first evening, I met my surrogate father, and also Bukhosi. Bukhosi, whose emerald eyes swam like precious stones in his face, staring out into the world with a beguiling fragility. I could already feel, though, as he walked into the sitting room and, without so much as a greeting, ordered me to move, I was sitting in his chair, that air of entitlement he carried about him. It was an entitlement to love, to Mama Agnes and Abednego’s love, I could tell by the way he ladled the beef stew from the warming bowl in the centre of the table without first waiting for his elders, by how he complained to Mama Agnes that the stew tasted ‘bland’. Tasted bland! It was the most delicious beef stew I had ever had the good fortune to taste, and I made it a point to say so to Mama Agnes, who, although she smiled and said thank you, seemed fazed by the boy’s complaint. He had an appetite to match his father’s, hampered only by the food shortages. Mama Agnes had to keep standing up to attend to the steady stream of customers who arrived to purchase the cooking oil and, it turned out, also rice measured and sold per cup, which she kept stashed in her room.
They were a perfect little family, the Mlambos. Mother, father and son. I admit, I did not know the devastating secrets that roiled beneath the surface then, but what family doesn’t have secrets? All that matters is that they were together in my Uncle Fani’s house, making it warm in a way it had never been when I was growing up. And they looked so happy! So complete as a family.
It was on the fourth night, I think, while seated at the dinner table, having rice and beans, with no cooking oil, for a disciplined and enterprising Mama Agnes said we had run out of the family portion for the week, and she had no intention of dipping into her side business, that a fidgety Bukhosi, perhaps high on the fizzy drinks I saw him gulping down so often, said, ‘Baba. What was Gukurahundi? What happened during Gukurahundi?’
It seemed this was not his first time asking that, for he was on his feet before he had finished his questions. Our father winced with each mention of that word. He got up, tried to upset the cobalt kitchen table, couldn’t upset it because the portly maroon sofas were in the way, lunged around the table, grabbed the boy, who was trying to escape on the other side but couldn’t fit his oversize rump in the space between the wall and the table, dragged his flabby behind, laid him face down on one of the sofas, pulled down his trousers, unbuckled his own belt and proceeded to thrash his buttocks proper. The boy writhed and screamed. Mama Agnes, too, tried to shout, attempting to grab hold of the belt while ducking the lashes. Finally, whether overcome by or exhausted into common sense, our father dropped the belt.
‘How many times have I told you I don’t want to hear that word mentioned in my house?’ he said. ‘Stop talking nonsense about things you know nothing about!’
The boy sniffled in response.
‘Heyi, wena, I’m talking to you! Do you hear me?’
Again, the boy refused to answer.
Panting, our father stumbled out of the house and into the night.
‘My nanaza,’ murmured Mama Agnes, over and over again, trying to kiss the boy’s face, which he kept snatching out of reach of her pouted lips.
I got up, went to the bathroom, filled a bucket with water, which was warm, for the Mlambos, having moved from Entumbane to Luveve, had moved up in the world, and to celebrate this rise in middle-class-hood had not only acquired the cobalt kitchen table and the kitchen cupboard, but also installed a small boiler, which is useful especially whenever the water goes, which is less often than the electricity but is, nevertheless, very much a nuisance, and returned to the sitting room with the bucket and a cloth. There, I knelt and pressed the wet cloth to the boy’s bruised buttocks. He grunted each time, but did not raise his head. I admit I felt tender towards him. But what had just happened had also shown me the dynamics of the family. Perhaps the first seeds of opportunity were already beginning to sprout. I understood, very clearly, one thing: the boy, who absorbed all the heat of Mama Agnes and my surrogate father’s love, leaving me out in the cold, was the key to gaining the family’s affection.
I slept fitfully that night, dreaming of those frightened, imploring, pleading emerald baby eyes that haunted the Mlambo living room, wanting so badly to take in a world that did not want to be seen, only looked at.
It was from Bukhosi that I learned that our father was a reformed alcoholic. The height of his drinking, from what the boy told me, coincided with the time that he invaded the Thornton Farm and the resurgence of his beatings which Mama Agnes told me about. I’m not certain if it was finding out that his true father is a white man or being disowned by his own mother afterwards that drove him deeper into dipsomania. My surrogate grandma, who is living out her octogenarian days back in my surrogate-surrogate grand-dada’s homestead, refuses to speak to my surrogate father to this day still; as far as I know, after my surrogate grandpa was kicked off the farm thanks to him and his War Vet comrades, she said something to the fact of ‘you are dead to me’ and has lived the past seven years as though, indeed, he is dead to her.
By the time I met my surrogate father in 2007, he was a reformed wife beater and a recovering alcoholic. His infamy still ran far and wild, though, and during my first weeks as a lodger with the Mlambos I heard many entertaining stories about his public drunken performances.
‘I’m so sorry you have to hear such stories,’ Bukhosi said when I asked him about our father. ‘He wasn’t always a bad man! He could be very kind to us. I promise! How I wish it were you, Zamani, who is my father!’
If only he knew my joy! Not at this awkward projection of fatherhood, for I am only twenty-four and he had at that time just turned seventeen, but rather at his hero worship. I didn’t reply immediately, assessing him, trying to think of the best thing to say.
‘I’m here for you,’ I said, finally. ‘Anytime you need anything. And I know your father isn’t that bad. In fact, I think you should keep asking him about Gukurahundi. He wants to open up.’
‘But he keeps beating me!’
‘He just doesn’t know how to talk about it. And you, as his son, should help him do it. Trust me, he’ll thank you for it.’
Though I learned that my surrogate father had overcome his violent ways, it was plain to see that the boy and his constant probing about Gukurahundi was a trigger. I was truly pleased for Abednego for managing to quell his abusive tendencies. He reminded me of my Uncle Fani, without the tears, the sleepless nights and the drinking sprees. He rejuvenated my faith in the redeeming power of family, in the possibility of transcendence. At the same time, I couldn’t help but see, in his periodic outbursts with the boy over Gukurahundi, the glint of opportunity, and I admit I actively stoked those flames.
I began to spend more and more time with Bukhosi. I did enjoy our time together. He was sensitive and pliant, and looked up to me as no one else had. I could sense a similar disquiet in him, which I later attributed to our father’s determination that he be an engineer, for though he was over-passionate, making for a feverish Mthwakazi disciple, he was very weak in matters of rational and mathematical thinking, particularly where Newton and his theories were concerned. It was a mutual feeling of confusion and exclusion that attracted him to me, or I to him, what’s it matter, we were two elements with opposing charges brought together through a magnetism of vision and purpose. Both of us fumbling about in an unmoored present, untethered, without knowledge of a robust family hi-story in which to cultivate our roots.
But it’s not my fault that he went missing! It’s Dumo’s fault! His and the boy’s! I was never the instigator here, only the catalyst! And yet, every photo of the boy fills me with guilt. His pictures are plastered everywhere, on the walls of the High Tek Intanet Café by the shops, and also outside the Bakery and Spar Supermarket, and also the community hall down the road. Even in the city centre he’s there, on the streetlights, on the shop walls, on the City Council bins where he competes for attention with posters of the Reverend Pastor’s advertisement for his Christmas revival at Blessed Anointings. I can’t bear to look at those posters of Bukhosi! I can see his photo in my mind still. Black and white is that printed face, yes, just a picture, but his lips assault me with the memory of their nostalgic, fleshy plumpness, brown and moist like dewy soil. They hover in the air, suspended from the rest of the black and white printed image, and part to reveal two front teeth, the one on the left chipped. And now, they are guffawing, a voluble aaaha ha ha ha that tapers off into a tormenting chuckle, klklkl klklkl klklkl, spattering spit in its wake.