by Mphuthumi Ntabeni

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QUEENSTOWN, SOUTH AFRICA - I've been having urgent longings to visit places of my youth. I started at Zingquthu where I had not been for close to eighteen years. Zingquthu is where I spent most of the first eight years of my life and is about twenty kilometers outside my home town of Queenstown. I went there, I suppose, to clear my mind from the burden of memory. Tando, my elder brother, and my two sisters came with me on the visit. It all seemed like a dream after an absence of about two decades.

Tando, puckish and primed with liquor as ever, kept us entertained on the journey. It suddenly occurred to me that I shall not have to forever, with my fathe,r to resolve the tension between us. Years of separation had exacerbated this tension.

I think it unfair that we (children) were caught between our parent's problems but couldn't imagine how else it could have been. I've always felt a vague anger towards my father for not making time to visit us. After all, it was not our fault that their marriage failed.

On my father's side, I think, he has never forgiven me for robbing him of a chance to send me to the school of circumcision. In our culture this is a moment of crucial pride for fathers. The interesting thing is that this was not my doing. My mother, wishing to strip him of the honour of boasting about a son he never raised, perhaps, arranged for the preparations while I was still at boarding school. When I came home after finishing my exams there was an uncommon diligence around our house, sorghum-porridge cooking on an open fire, and all that.

When I enquired about the occasion I was dully informed it was for my going to the mountain (school of circumcision).

I gave up being angry at people long ago, due to laziness, perhaps. Anger requires too much futile energy. I've learnt to expect very little from people. Instead I'm constantly surprised by the goodness that lingers behind people's failures. And my effort now is to see others through the eye of charity that subsides in God. I can't help it when the failure between my struggling fortitude conflicts with the inner tenderness I feel to render me at my worst externally.

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When we arrived at Zingquthu, it was hard for me to believe I had spent the first nine years of my life predominantly in that place.

Looking at this place with the eyes of my accumulated experience (an internal fund) it looked like a far cry from what my memory had preserved. For one, it was more patched and more resilient than I expected it to be. The kloofs that were magnified extensively by the eye of my young mind looked tame in reality. I loved the fact that their rambling village life is still composed of small incidences and petty occurrences. I saw that, in people, there's still the sense of timelessness even though there're signs that this too is being raided by the complexity of modern life with its pressures of materialism.

But people in Zingquthi are still less oppressed by their own reputations. They don't see much point in collecting personal importance by ever appealing to their prides for every action they make; i.e. they're not living a false semblance of what they wish to be, as we do in the urban areas.

When most people saw me, and I reminded them who I was, they couldn't believe it. They all sang the same chorus: "You have lost weight. When you were young it seemed you were the one who was going to be stouter than Tando, but now it's the other way around. Why is your wife not feeding you well? You see the problem of marrying amagqobhoka. They do not know how to take care of men."

Though I don't remember myself being stout, I had to surrender under overwhelming evidence.

With my township parti pris mentality I made a mistake when asked by one wizened old man my name. I gave him my first name.

This to him indicated my rootlessness. Postmodernity always imposes the superficial impression of instant intimacy. It earned me a gentle chide. "Have you no people?" he asked in pretended bashfulness with a strain of rough warmth in his eyes. "Of what people do you spring, is what I'm asking?" he continued.

It was only then I understood that I was supposed to start with my clan name, a far more important identity that reveals the community one belongs to. I should follow that with my surname to indicate my immediate family and then my first name -- which no one cares much about. With that the sense of ones identity is complete.

The appreciation of family connection to the people of Zingquthi is an essential part of understanding oneself.

Once I had given these names, in the correct order, the old started to recite my ancestors' valour and proclaim their part in resisting the encroachment by white settlers, something he called "raking up the ashes of my past". From this did I discover we were related. It explained why he was tenderly vexed when I did know my own people.

We stopped at the house our family use to stay in. The house connected to a rural general dealer my father owned. Fond memories came rushing into my head:

how I used to run wild in that rugged wild land and waving buffalo grass; how we'd fish for crabs in the river and swim all day only to hide ourselves (my brother and I) from our mother. The house itself, now with its falling skeleton walls, is little more than a lair for jackals.

Standing inside the walls, imagining where the shop counter used to be, I recalled how my mother used to read the wives' letters from their husbands in the mines in Johannesburg. I recalled them listening attentively with chins cupped in hands, eyes eager and gleaming with warm shyness whenever something remotely close to cosiness was read by mother from the letters.

"Awu mkaMzoli (Really Mzoli's wife) how can Zakude's father say such things before your ear?" they'd exclaim with giggling amusement and hands cupping their mouths.

Now most of those eyes are half blind, that is those who've escaped the sword of AIDS, the commonest killer of rural women. Their husbands bring it from the prostitutes in J'burg to sow around the villages. An aura of desolation hangs around the skeleton of the shop now.

When I finally met my father I felt his puckered forehead, the earmark of the men of our tribe, was more pronounced for some reason. His corrugated face has always animated pain more readily than joy, something that gives him a very sad face.

I proceeded to meet my grandfather and I ask him about things I had heard that day. He told me legendary stories, calling by name every field, rock and mountain he knew. He told me how his older brother, who was the better historian and flag-bearer among them, used to rock me to sleep by telling stories of mour past, and read from the Xhosa books stories of near the kraal towards the end of his years. As the result he named Mphuthumi, after the supporting hero of his favourite novel, Ingqumbo Yeminyanya by A.C Jordan.

The professor had died a week before I was born. The other reason was that when my mother, who was then working at the hospital in the city of Durban, was about to deliver me, she resigned and came home. So they said I fetched her, as is the meaning of Mphuthumi. What my grandfather said went to explain, for instance, why mountains in Zingquthi easily arrest my attention so much. They're embedded and ingrained in my psyche. Here's how my grandfather use to praise Mt. Lukhanji, the prince among mountains in our area:

Ah! Mt Lukhanji, tower of Ndaba's mountains. How glad am I to be standing where your lengthening shade can reach me. Did you think I had forgotten you in my gallivanting? Let the she goat forget her kid first, a matriarch elephant forget the water spot, before I do.

What is this I hear of you? News is you were unconcerned the day the British usurped Phalo's land from his children. Why are you so remote to human squabbles and the fog of their passions? When Gunguubele was at loggerheads with those thugs you warned Mfanta not to leap into action. You told him there was no use resisting those thieves because they are wizards, they fight with thunderbolts and magic sticks. But Mfanta ignored your advice and seized his weapons. Weapons clashed at Gwatyu, the rod of Victoria crushed them to the ground. The Brits took Mfanta to follow Maqoma who followed many who had gone to the incarceration at the Leper colony (Robben Island). And to catch its breath the nation of Phalo curtseyed to Victoria's tears (alcohol especially the hot stuff). A double curse indeed the spirit of Britannia brought to our land.

Prominent mountains, where shall we begin now to wake the nation from the drug of colonialism and imperialism? I hear something whisper in the land of Kreli, the honourable scion of the royal house. I sense things in their seed, but my tongue is sore from occidental dishes. If Awutshumayo (Harry the Strandloper), Nxele, Mfanta, Maqoma, Sobukwe and the rest had not brushed the cobwebs for Mandela and the rest; where would they have gotten the unfailing spirit to languish in the land of Lepers, threatened by raving waters from every direction all those years they were only visited by howling winds. Their bones have turned the soil of that caceral Island of destiny into chalk. Ah! But what am I saying, you know all that already. Things you have seen watchful mountain. Let me disappear from your majesty I do not wear a leopard skin on my shoulders, where do I get the authority to address the royal house?

To me, these legendary lores complete the character of our native land. They tame everything by investing it with a personality.

It felt strange to be crossing rivers I use to dread from the smallness of my childhood frame, o be skirting the forests of Hoho again. Ah humble land what have they done to you? What to make of diminished things? (Robert Frost). And what of England? Her torched idea of an empire? England, their England, of torturing enlightenment torch, Ever seeking to outdo ancient Rome in vice.

The world of our idealistic youth seems to be receding with the setting sun. Give me to gain the stillness of the heart in order to perceive the heights and the depths of my life. And let them keep the heated dust.

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MPHUTHUMI NTABENI attended the school of Architecture in the University of Witswatersrand after High School, though he's not certain now what he was doing there. A misunderstanding occurred somewhere as he was looking for an education and all they could do was to train him. After that he left in a despairing mood for the city of Port Elizabeth where he re-invented himself. When he suspected there was nothing more to learn from the honking gulls of the sea, and he had paid off the government loan for his studies, he went back to his home, Queenstown. He now lives there under the nurturing care of his mother (no one else will have him) trying to make sense of the society he grew up in and exorcise the demons of growing under the apartheid regime. He's also waiting to grow up ad dreaming of being a member of that wretched tribe that earns its living by composing thoughts into words. This is his fifth article for The World's Magazine.