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CELESTIAL CELEBRATION Ten Years of Truthspeak 1996-2006 DAY ONE MPHUTHUMI NTABENI, South Africa JOIN OUR MAILING LIST. It contains more jokes than not. G21 FICTION MPHUTHUMI NTABENI, South Africa GLOBAL*BEAT ROD AMIS, United States IRISH EYES MATTIE LENNON, Ireland SMOKE & MIRRORS ROD AMIS, G21 World HQ THE PREVIOUS EDITION MEET THE G-CREW! These are the people behind this jam-band every week. HOME TABLE OF CONTENTS & BACK ISSUES BECOME A SPONSOR OF THE WORLD'S MAGAZINE.
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G21 FICTION - ASHES OF OUR DEAD HOPES (Part 1 of 2): The debut of the latest short story from MPHUTHUMI NTABENI.I"I was hardly a woman when I fell pregnant with you. You know your father left me while I was still carrying you, now you do this to me... " Those are my mother's words ringing in my head from when I told her I was pregnant.
I had known Lusapho, the father of my child, since we were nine years old. We were neighbours, went to the same schools, broke each others virginities, and so on and so on. His was the first penis I ever saw, a crooked wicked thing I remember well. We were playing the game of hide and seek, of course. He and I hid, by design, at the same spot. That's when he let me touch his one-eyed snake. I brushed its turgid veins and ran away, more from bewildered amusement than fear. That game laid the seed that finally conceived our son.
Lusapho never cared much for me after our adolescent stage. He treated me with careless disrespect, as his play kitten, to amuse himself when there was nothing better available. Because we were neighbors, I had the advantage of seeing him more often than his other bitches. I was resigned to my role of being his crap-saver. It came to a stage that I became obsessed with the bastard. That's when I fell pregnant.
Accepting men at their own high evaluation of themselves has always been my weakness. That is why, despite what he did, Lusapho knew he could always smooth-talk his way inside my pants. He had other gifts, in bed, too, that gave spine-thrilling ecstasy to a woman. Nature armed him with an unfair advantage against women. It pains me to notice his character in our son; as the sapling is bent, so the tree will grow.
Looking back on the days of my youth brings back a mixture of sadness and gratefulness.
Phaks, my father, was a political activist at Fort Hare - the university renowned for producing the likes of Mandela and Thambo. He, like most people of his age, followed that trend, ending up having to leave the country when the apartheid security forces were hot on his heels. He went underground - that's the term they used when one joined Umkhonto Wesizwe, the military wing of the ANC (African National Congress). The term came from the days when Nelson Mandela had to hide from the security forces, earning the name of a 'Black Pimpernel.'
Phaks' path ended up in Tanzania, via Swaziland, Botswana, Zimbabwe and the USSR - where he got his military training. All my mother and I knew was that he was settled in a small town called Morogoro, about 190km west of Dar es Salaam, where he worked as a teacher at school called Somafco (Solomon Mahlangu College).
"Why didn't you follow my father to exile?" I once asked my mother.
"Come on, can you imagine me in a foreign country? Don't be silly here," was the only answer she gave me.
I gave birth to my son two months after my final High school exams. Lusapho refused to acknowledge our child; left me under the cloud, to go to Jo'burg, when I told him I would not abort our child.
My daggers glinted for his blood.
I heard he worked at a five star hotel in Sandton. News reached us also that he had the morals of an alley cat in the golden city. So when he came back, seven years later, wasted, with the frightful colour of a corpse, mere skin and bone and hacking coughs, none of us were too much surprised.
"You look like a zombie," said my, our, seven year old son with the detached, brutal honesty only children are capable of, when I introduced them.
I also thought it was time I told my mother who the father of her grandson was; I had kept it secret all those years. Actually she sort of put two and two together. Lusapho was walking me back home after I had visited him. His charm was at its peak.
"What we regret most in life are not mistakes but missed opportunities," he said with a sad visage, tapping the side of his nose as he always did when he was nervous.
"Whatever do you mean?" I asked, not suspecting much.
"In another world, at another time, I'd have found a job in this town, married you and taken care of you and our son." He said itwith a wry smile and bromidic overtones, revealing his perfect, like-piano-keys teeth. His face, my son's, our son's face, was twisted with what I took to be regret as he said that.
"But that wouldn't have been you. We're born the persons we become by our choices, and usually end up prisoners of our own characters." This sounded harsher than I had intended.
My mother must have been watching us through her bedroom window because, when I came inside the house, she commented about the resemblance Lusapho had to my son, 'especially when he laughs.'
My unguarded reaction told her everything. I was too tired of keeping secrets, anyway.
She handed Lusapho a glass of juice with affable contempt. I suppose she was glad her cynical suspicions were finally confirmed.
That evening he sent me a poem he had written, a plaguey poor thing really, with a phony ring of self-dramatisation, but I appreciated the effort more than the results. He knew I loved literature. He often joked about how my love of books makes me neglect other people.
The sun was no more visible behind the mountains of our youth as we walked back. It shone its setting rays on his face. Everything was dyed by the red glow of dying things. The careless grace of things.
Life keeps rushing to the horizon!
There's a seed of failure in all things human, the freedom to misspend. Death being the ultimate of all human failures.
"Let us live always mindful of this moment," said he after a moment of eloquent silence passed between us.
Within weeks he became febrile. One night he started palpitating. I phoned the ambulance. I didn't have a car to drive him to the hospital. The caged animal in his chest beat frantically as I held him in my arms. His eyes were full of puzzled gentleness.
The ambulance never came.
Such things you expect when you stay in the black townships of South Africa. Either the drivers got lost because our houses are not properly numbered or they were stiff scared to enter the township, especially during weekends, at night.
I didn't mind anyway, because, as a doctor, I knew there wasn't much the hospital could do for him either, his CD4+ lymphocyte was too low. The intravenous injections were obviously not working for him since he was plagued with polymorphous lesions, a variety of cutaneous manifestations. There was candidiasis all over his mouth and tongue. His infected lungs had already spread the infection to the brain through the blood stream. His kidneys were bloated, having collapsed four days before. His cough and sweat revealed the symptoms of opportunistic tuberculsis in his system, which probably was why he failed to respond to any treatment.
He didn't show any signs of fear of death, which was admirable. He just looked at me with the resigned eyes of self-surrendering love, fluctuating between sleep and vague awakenings in my arms, often loosing his constitution and sinking into supine confusion. I sat with him, trying to engage him in conversations to keep him conscious.
One time I went to the kitchen to fetch a glass of water and, coming back, found him capering around the bedroom pop-eyed. He was dancing and twirling, shaking his head like a dervish dog that had just been splashed with water. I don't think he could recognise who I was by then.
He died that night, in my arms, of meningitis.
The AIDS virus had almost completely destroyed his immune system. The last thing he did, as he gasped for his last breath, was to grab - in fondling manner - my breast. Can you imagine that, with his last breath? Then a stone cold silence slowly settled on his face, wrapping it in a handsome corsage.
The night was darker than the ace of spades.
Sunrise got pink in the east, bringing soul-sickening waves of violet dawn, feeding on my nerves. People came out, one by one like ants, to the organised misery of their jobs. The rising noise, the bleak honky-tonk of hootering mini-buses, the wafting hazy mist, all, had a strange upsetting effect on me. The neon light blinked under the misty hug. The coming day was pregnant with unpleasant suggestions.
What use is prying fingers in our wounds? If I tell you his death turned me on woul d you be surprised at the persistence of sexual hunger, even in the dark face of death? Or would you be disgusted? I don't have to justify myself under the hostile stare of pusillanimous deaf piano tuners; I wear my hat in the house when I want to. If we must use the psychiatrists, those fumblers, as our crutches, these terrible goings are memories of a baffled life seeking an outlet.
I meet the day with a blend of insouciance and despair, an aura of defeat and to-hell-with-it-all. Why? Because things are creaking on the hinges. I can feel them on my veins. I'm holding traffic with strange spirits. Something is weighing me down, down.
I've never known the courageous freedom of seeking out the things I feel in my heart. Lusapho had that. He was always leaving me behind in dark desperation, with cuts that shed no blood. Not this time.
II
After Lusapho's death, I joined DWB (Doctors Without Borders) and requested to be assigned to Tanzania. I managed to settle in the same town Phaks, the father I never knew, was stationed, working at the local hospital called Mazimbu Hospital. There's a remnant of South African culture, languages, and children there, especially on the village-township outskirts of the town like Dakwa and Kihonda.
During my third month, a colleague invited me to her house in Dakwa. Since I had been meaning to visit Dakwa graveyards, where most South African 'guerrillas' who died in Tanzanian exile are buried, including my father, I took the chance with both hands.
The day was oppressively hot with the high humidity that comes with Tanzanian easterly winds. The graveyard stood among a venerable cluster of trees that untidily claw the sky from the distance. The graves, choking with rambling weeds, were hard to identify due to their sparse engravings on the headstones, some even had none at all.
As I surveyed the gravesites, I discovered familiar South African surnames like Dlamini, Sikota, Vabaza and so forth. I stood there wondering about the lives of these young people who braved the apartheid head-on to die very far from their homes. Sizwe Jikwa, never got his chance to live, he died too young, twenty-three in 1989. Nomonde Kota, who died in 1991 was twenty-five. What do you say to that? She was just a young girl.
Third on the westerly corner, overgrown with weeds, stood a grave with a humble undressed stone engraved: 'Phakamile Maseti; Born 16 June 1956, Died 24 December 1993.' That would be my father. So he died on a Christmas Eve, and the eve of our country's liberation hour, was all I could think of, less affected by the situation than I had imagined.
Indeed he was an eleventh hour man, always running out of time just when it mattered. A renaissance man, my mother called him with rancour, 'leaping from one thing to another'.
I noticed also the error on his birthday date. My mother had always told me that he was born 16 October 1956, not 16 June. I know because we celebrated the birthday every year with my mother, she always sayingm as she blew the candles with her face turned away; 'This one is for the husband of my heart. GraÁias á la Vida! Here's to life!'
The contradicting emotions she had for Phaks confused me most of the time. She would then put the music tape on of the brilliant Chilean singer, Victor Jara. We would dance, with her holding me ever so close in a slow dance. I could hear and feel her struggling for breath on my shoulders.
I looked around the place of Phaks' final rest, wondering if, wherever he was, he was angry for the freedom he gave his life for but did not see. Was Moses, meek as he was, angry with God for not keeping the final promise. Or, rather, the question should be, did God promise Moses freedom or that he'd lead the Israelites to freedom? Freedom he would not see. A harsh master this God of wonderers.
A drunken cripple, whose crutches creaked with every swing of his body, approached me while I stood there wondering. The drunk wore mismatched dirty cheap pair of takkies, darned with copper wire where the soles had cracked. He must have seen a lot of grieving relatives and learnt to take advantage of them. When he noticed I was a woman alone, he saw a chance.
I refused to give him anything.
He threatened violence.
I became nervous and moved away a little.
He bounced towards me.
I decided to leave but he blocked my path with elbowing confidence and outstretched crutch-carrying arm, clutching his crotch with one hand while making gyrating rude moves with his pelvis.
I interpreted that as his invitation for sex.
He took out his penis, erect as Moses' wad at the Sea of Reeds, and began rubbing it softly, yelling; 'Ndio! Ndio!'. There was a blank stirring look about his eyes. When he noticed I was not interested he disgorged a catalogue of curses on me. He was drunk, not only with spirits, but also with a complicated rebellion that I'm sure he himself didn't fully understand. I saw in him shadows of internal exiles, those who've been left behind drowning in the puddle of failed lives. I fear the violence of vandalised minds, so I left the graveyard.
Young boys played soccer inside the graveyard, the boisterous intrusion of playful shouts to pass the ball. Not far from them, where there used to be a graveyard fence, were stands of costermongers selling nig-nogs and different kinds of fruit and vegetables. A few scrawny chickens scrabbled at the background where young girls played hop, skip and jump around. Further down was a crowded line of dhabbas, buzzing with flies, selling fresh and dried fish, garnished boiled eggs, bruised bananas, shriveled oranges, sweets, cigarettes, plastic combs, traditional shrubs and roots used as medicine, old magazines and books.
Most of the sellers were women, and busy fanning themselves with cardboards while their babies lay under shades wrapped in dirty towels. Flies probed the concavities of the baby's nostrils. Jalopies stood on alert for those, like myself, who needed public transport. I bought a packet of roasted peanuts from a vendor and left them calling: "Chinniabadaam! Chinniabadaam!"
There was everything around that graveyard except the silence of the grave.
IIISandi, my colleague, is a nurse in the dank prefabricated building we call Mazimbu Hospital. I had grown to like her tactless honesty, her feisty, sunny smile and the way she decorates her sentences with a throaty laugh. She had told me she'd be at her boyfriend's place in Dakwa township, when giving me directions. I took a jalopy taxi and twenty minutes later I was there.
I found them relaxed on a Don Pedro couch. She introduced him as 'my fiancé.' I felt guilty for intruding on their relaxed Sunday afternoon but, after all, she had invited me.
The township of Dakwa, in Morogoro, is like most townships I know: strangled with pervasive, anonymous gloom and the tight clawing poverty that is concealed by the exuberant energy of the people. Dust sweeps the streets. Most houses are badly built of monochromatic, coarse red brick. Houses are old and crumbling, with brick walls stacked without mortar in some places. Most have neither plumbing nor electricity and are roofed in rusting corrugated iron.
When I arrived, Sandi offered me Laziza, a Lebanese beer, a first for me then. It was marvelous and ice cold. The versatile eclecticism of my continent, I thought to myself as I gulped it down.
Once, in Zimbabwe, I was in need of my favourite afternoon drink, Pastis, but could not get it. Instead I was offered Ouzo, the Greek version of this French drink with a cool liquorice flavour. What surprised me was to learn that the Ouzo I was drinking was distilled in Zimbabwe.
After I was introduced to Tando, Sand's fiancé, I learnt he had a South African father. Tando talked fondly and intimately of Eastern Cape, the province I come from. You could have been fooled that he had grown up there. We never got to the nitty-gritty of things that day but on another weekend ,when Sandi invited me to his place again for her 23rd birthday party, Tando and I got to know each other well, very well.
On that party day, Tando's house was full, actually bursting to its seams. Some people were lounged outside, propped on their elbows against bales of hay, oil drums, wooden stumps, in front of his make-fit slop garage.
Tando is an industrious person and top-notch mechanic for the area when he's not blasting American hip-hop music. There were welding and motor mechanising tools around the house, planks, shovels, rakes, fork-spades, wheelbarrows and such. Car corpses and scraps were all over the yard. Even as we were getting ready to party, some people were still making final adjustments to their welding and mechanising jobs, while others sat cross-legged watching the operations with unrestrained intensity and stunned curiosity. Children pushed old tyres with sticks around the house; some flipped rusty bottle caps in makeshift tiddlywinks. A few mangy dogs scrounged silted-up rubbish sites with occasional clucking yelps from kicks on their trunks whenever they became too daring in their investigations.
Inside the house, Soukous music was blaring - a sign, I learned later, that Sandi was the DJ for the day - from an old Tempest Hifi that used car battery power. I saw a photograph hanging on the wall like a guardian of the house. The face on the photograph was familiar to me but the identification escaped me for a moment. I had not noticed the photograph when I first came to the house. While I was seated, my mind dwelled on the photograph, trying to see where had I seen the face, until, with Damascene intensity, it came to me.
The face was the same face on my mother's wallet, only slightly aged.
I had seen it several times, especially during the birthday parties we held for him. When I looked at the photograph again, there was no mistaking Phaks' bulging, big, soft almond eyes, frowning with concentration. He had a permanent expression of alarm, staring solemnly with a matted look that suggested proud isolation. My mother called him 'my alert gazelle,' because of those eyes.
"Who is that?" I asked Tando, pointing at the photograph. As I asked, I noticed Phaks' moustache and lithe structure on Tando and immediately knew the answer. He also had Phaks' mahogany complexion.
"That's my father," said he without much concern. "Was my father, since he's dead now."
The party music was too loud. The Zairian Soukous had been changed to American rap music with extra booster speakers that hoofed and blew like a final trumpet.
When, later on, I found myself outside with Tando, next to the braai fire, I thought it the time to sort things out.
The denim sky was slowly turning indigo with evening falling fast. He was in baggy jeans and a hooded track suit top.
"What was your father's name?" I asked.
"Why? Fucken no way man!" He took more sips from his tinned Zambian beer, Moshi.
"I would like to know, that's all." I was trying to make the topic light.
"You South Africans! You think you own Africa. You think you can just come late and solve our problems for us." Silence. Then he continued, more subdued. "He was Phakamile Maseti, but everybody called him Phaks."
"I know." said I, searching his face for signs of emotion.
Tando was a little tipsy. There were lines of pressure on his handsome face. He caught my gaze and wrestled it to the ground with his intense eyes. "What do you know?" He asked, as if he was making an effort not to care much.
"That everybody called him Phaks."
He stopped stoking the fire to give me a vacant stare.
I continued, "He was my father too."
CONTINUES NEXT EDITION
© 2006, GENERATOR 21.
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