1972 - A Story Like the Wind (37 page)

!#grave;Bamuthi immediately signalled to François and led the way at the double to the kraals. They arrived at !#grave;Bamuthi’s own hut just in time to see two strange men leading Night and Day and Little Finger into the stockade of the kraal. !#grave;Bamuthi, after greeting them, unusually perfunctorily for so courteous a person, asked bluntly what the meaning of it was. Had these great gifts not been enough to open the eyes of The Right Honourable Sun-Is-Hot? Did they come back for more? Yet even as !#grave;Bamuthi spoke, François somehow knew that he would never have asked the questions so rudely and so vehemently if they were not asked in an effort to balance a terrible fear which had gripped him, as it had already seized Francis’s own imagination.

The two men slowly and politely replied that they had not come for more. They had merely been ordered by uLangalibalela to bring back the heifers to !#grave;Bamuthi and Little Feather, as well as a certain tin, which François recognized as Ousie-Johanna’s tin of condensed milk in the hand one of the strangers held out to !#grave;Bamuthi. They said that the prophet had commanded them to speak as follows: ‘uLangalibalela had a vision in the night and in the vision he saw the Great White Bird come in from out of the open to his home and that, therefore, the gift of the heifers and tin had not been earned and should thus be returned forthwith to the givers.’

It did not need !#grave;Bamuthi to explain to François that this was uLangalibalela’s way of saying that he now knew they had come to him too late and that Ouwa was already dead.

No telegram delivery, with all the authority of the efficient postal services of the land, informing François of Ouwa’s death could somehow have carried more conviction for them than uLangalibalela’s message and the manner of it. The shock was so overwhelming that François was not allowed, by some profound dispensation of man’s nature, to experience it all there and then. It was great not only because it was the death of a father but because it struck at his self-confidence that he should have been able, late as it was, to save his father by his own exertions.

He did not break down and cry in front of his Matabele friends, as some of them did, including !#grave;Bamuthi, who in that quite unashamed and uninhibited way of Matabele men when moved, stood with great tears running down his cheeks, and his wife beside him wailing in the manner of the women of the tribe when a man of their own is lost. François just went slowly back to the kitchen to tell Ousie-Johanna. Even when she broke down, and took him in her arms, sobbing, he did not cry. He went through all the superficial motions of a normal evening, forcing himself to eat his dinner, as he had always been urged to do by Ouwa and Mopani, not failing in moments of crisis, no matter how great his distaste of eating happened to be.

It was only when he was alone with Hintza in the dark of his room that a very small recollection among all the many memories he had of Ouwa, came to break through his composure. He suddenly remembered the morning of Xhabbo’s coming and how he had not left his room to fetch the gun he should have taken out with him into the dark from the hall, in case the broad floor-boards creaked and woke up Ouwa when he needed his sleep so much. He remembered Ouwa chiding him for not fetching the gun and how he had been unable to explain to Ouwa exactly why he had not done so but left him believing it was sheer thoughtlessness. All this came back to him vividly, and he thought, ‘Now Ouwa will never know that I did it all because I cared so much about him, that I preferred to face the dark with the wrong gun rather than deprive him of a little sleep.’ At that his restraint broke and he cried himself to sleep, a sorely troubled Hintza from time to time uttering a small whimper of sympathy in the dark beside him.

When Mopani arrived at Hunter’s Drift the following evening, he found that he had come merely to confirm what François, Ousie-Johanna, !#grave;Bamuthi and all the Matabele at Hunter’s Drift already knew. From that day on all this became the stuff of a new legend among the Matabele, growing in stature and mystery with each re-telling, and producing, as a by-product of its many consequences, a proverbial saying for describing the truly superfluous, which was, of course, ‘Bringing news to uLangalibalela’.

James Archibald Sinclair Monckton, K.C.M. G., D.S. C., B.A. (Cantab.), and daughter

F
rançois never cried over Ouwa’s death again. This was not because he had, by the long uncontrolled crying of the night before Mopani’s coming, rid himself of grief. He would go on grieving for the death of Ouwa for ever, he felt, but he had done with tears. This was partly because of the great natural education into the processes of life and death that life in the bush had given him, and partly because of an intimation which would acquire clarity and increasing conviction as time went on, that Ouwa’s death, the causes and the manner of it all, had added a new meaning to life for him.

This new sense of meaning was purely instinctive. Most people, had they been aware of its existence, might well have dismissed it in the reductive manner of this reductive moment in time as sheer, obscure, an over-emotional reaction and not the reasoned sublimation of cause and effect that those responsible for his upbringing should have made it. None the less, to some extent consciously but, of course, in far greater measure unconsciously, François was about to begin to realize how much Ouwa’s fatal decline and loss of will to live had been a byproduct of the widespread rejection by the European world (to which he himself ostensibly belonged), of the natural man of Africa and his values. This rejection as far as Ouwa was concerned was summed up aptly for him in uLangalibalela’s phrase, ‘the turning of the backs’.

This ‘turning of the backs’ on Ouwa by his own people seemed to François not merely cruel and unimaginative, but so deliberate and sustained a cause of his father’s decline and death that François felt he had died not from natural causes so much as from an act of calculated murder. More disturbing, more subtle and more profound still was the first glimmering of a belief that, without knowing it, Lammie and Ouwa themselves had been caught unawares in some of this mechanism of rejection of the natural man in Africa, despite all the great love they had devoted to him and his welfare.

François experienced this aspect of Ouwa’s and Lammie’s lives, of course, only in its effects on his own, and in no sense ideologically. The jargon of our time would have called it a form of over-compensation for their unawareness of some vital element in themselves. And one is forced to admit that their concern for educating the natural man of Africa was most unusual. It would not have been possible to maintain this against their people and the trend of a whole age in Africa, had it not possessed so powerful a compulsive character. Reviewed under the microscope of tragedy this concern appears not to have prevented them from presupposing a kind of universality and absolutism in European values of education, which implied that the natural children of Africa themselves had little of value to contribute. One suspects, therefore, that François was about to take the first step towards the full realization that Ouwa and Lammie, in assuming that their values were superior, had themselves unwittingly and, however lovingly, been participating in this widespread system of rejection of natural Africa. Thereby Ouwa himself unknowingly became an accessory to the act of his own undoing.

François could not imagine two people more truly concerned in giving what they held to be of the best in themselves and their culture to the people of Africa. That had been demonstrated beyond doubt by Ouwa’s career and the shared enterprise he had created at Hunter’s Drift. Its vindication had sustained until his death. Yet there remained a still, small voice on some remote horizon of François’s mind whispering the questions, ‘Had Ouwa and Lammie ever really matched their longing to give with an equal longing to receive? Did they ever allow the people of Africa to give them what they could give only in their own unique way?’ The questions moved like an unseen magnet below the surface of his feelings, and conditioned in a single pattern hitherto unrelated fragments of experience. The pattern was all the more telling because had not he himself experienced the agony of always being, at the receiving end and so rarely at the point where one was allowed to give something of oneself? This was perhaps one of the greatest burdens of being young; one was always expected to take, and so rarely thought to be in a position of ever wanting and needing, to give as well. And what one had to give, even when accepted, once measured in the scales of deliberate values of the grown-up world, appeared trivial.

Surely no coincidence had ever been more significant than the fact that Ouwa’s and Lammie’s favourite maxim in regard to Africans happened to be, ‘They are just like children really and must be treated like children.’ Was one not forced into the position a mature philosopher would have found hard to sustain; to give to persons like one’s parents only by offering oneself to them as a living receptacle for receiving everything they thought desirable to give from a lofty grown-up height? François was fortunate that he had experienced this less than others of his age. Yet the fact remained that much of what passed for education in the European world of Africa was a painful process of being extracted like an impacted wisdom tooth from the immense world of antiquity to which the young naturally belong—an extraction so complete that finally all contact with one’s aboriginal self was lost and the instincts through which it had been maintained were totally discredited.

As a result one came to adolescence stripped of one’s natural armament, if not utterly naked and ashamed, as if to a second birth, a purely private and personal birth into the contemporary world. It was not through imparted knowledge, but through experience of this process that François’s heart suspected how fatal for Ouwa had been the deprivation of the life-giving riches which might have come to his aid in the terrible moment of his rejection and decline, through his inability, however plausible its rationalizations, to let the indigenous world around him give to him as much as he himself had given it.

The question, of course, existed only through its pull on François’s emotions. At his age he was too busy acting out the new meaning that life was bringing to him to recognize it consciously. All one can say with confidence is that the immediate fact of Ouwa’s death was to attach François more firmly than ever to the African influences of his surroundings. He valued them more, and held on to them even as a tree, through its roots, has its being in the black earth which forms the sap that sends it hurtling green into the daylight. If contact with the roots in the dark deeps below are cut, the tree withers and dies, as Ouwa had died.

So, instinctively, François now turned, as some hurt young animal shies away from the lash of a whip, from the presumptions of all-knowingness in his native European culture. It was significant how once he had recovered from the shock that Ouwa’s death had administered to his self-confidence, his self-respect was restored through the conviction that it was not his fault that he had not listened sooner to the instinctive voices of Ousie-Johanna and !#grave;Bamuthi, as well as to his own. He had been overawed by Lammie and Ouwa’s reasoning, based on an assumption of the supremacy of European medicines and science. Had he listened to his own instinctive self and gone to uLangalibalela straight away, Ouwa might still be alive. It was a fact not of his contriving that now, whenever he thought about uLangalibalela, the seer stood out in his mind as a saintly example of man; the most truly devout person he had ever seen.

François, as one may have noticed, was not a person of a predominantly accepting nature. The immediate effect of this tragedy on his feelings was to start a change in his attitude of relative indifference to the European world of Africa into one of aggressive antagonism.

The first intimation of this change was the way he came out of the sleep which followed his second night of grieving. He woke, finding himself stroking Hintza, who as always was standing by his bed and wagging his tail. Hintza was already looking straight into his eyes, the moment François opened them, as if the dog had known the exact moment at which this miracle of François’s waking would take place.

Stroking Hintza with greater tenderness than ever, he heard himself saying loudly, ‘If this is what they can do to Ouwa by turning their backs on him, let’s see what happens when
we
turn our backs on
them
. What do you say to that, Hin?’ Hintza’s tail smote the ground as François’s mind had done before uLangalibalela.

He had hardly made this determined pronouncement when Xhabbo came to his mind. Xhabbo had recently lost his own father and had been on his way to the secret cave to acquaint it with this fact when he had been caught in the lion trap. It seemed unbelievable that although Xhabbo was still somewhere alone out there in the great western desert making his way back to his own people, whom he had said were some thirty days’ walking away, all these momentous things had happened to François in less than a month. He recalled that when Xhabbo had first taken him to the cave it had felt more like a church to him than any European church he had known. All that one has said before about this new meaning, which demanded to be acted out in living behaviour, was demonstrated now by an overwhelming urge to report Ouwa’s death to Xhabbo’s cave as well. Had not Xhabbo told him, after all, that since Franjois had come into his life he was no longer one but two? Did not the same need, therefore, apply to him?

He got out of bed at once and dressed quickly, took his rifle and, with Hintza, hurried to the breakfast room. But early as he was, Mopani was there before him. Mopani himself had spent a sleepless night, wondering how best he could help François, and had looked forward to their normal meeting over coffee and rusks, hoping it would give him a clearer idea of what to say to the boy who, understandably, had been silent at dinner the night before.

But for once François did not respond to his greeting in his usual spontaneous manner. Without knowing it, grief and his overwhelming urge to deal with it had made him give Mopani the most perfunctory greeting, adding abruptly, ‘Excuse me, Uncle, but I just have to go off and be alone by myself for a while.’