African Quilt : 24 Modern African Stories (9781101617441) (15 page)

“How can you be so unfeeling! Put yourself in his shoes—two years away from friends, from family, without the power to do anything you wish to do. Two years in
chains
! How can you talk of cigarettes and soap, as if that were substitute enough for all that he has lost?” She was like a teacher confronting an erring student. Her left hand tapped the table for emphasis as she spoke.

“Well.” He looked cowed. His scowl alternated rapidly with a smile. He stared at his portrait on the wall behind her. He spoke in a rush. “Well. I could have done something. Two weeks ago. The Amnesty International. People came. You know, white men. They wanted names of. Political detainees held. Without trial. To pressure the government to release them.”

“Well?”

“Well.” He still avoided her stare. His eyes touched mine and hastily passed. He picked up a pen and twirled it between his fingers. The pen slipped out of his fingers and fell to the floor.

“I didn't. Couldn't. You know . . . I thought he was comfortable. And, he was writing the poems, for you . . .” His voice was almost pleading. Surprisingly, I felt no anger towards him. He was just Man. Man in his basic, rudimentary state, easily moved by powerful emotions like love, lust, anger, greed and fear, but totally dumb to the finer, acquired emotions like pity, mercy, humour and justice.

Janice slowly picked up her bag from the table. There was enormous dignity to her movements. She clasped the bag under her left arm. Her words were slow, almost sad. “I see now that I've made a mistake. You are not really the man I thought you were . . .”

“Janice.” He stood up and started coming round to her, but a gesture stopped him.

“No. Let me finish. I want you to contact these people. Give them his name. If you can't do that, then forget you ever knew me.”

Her hand brushed my arm as she passed me. He started after her, then stopped halfway across the room. We stared in silence at the curtained doorway, listening to the sound of her heels on the bare floor till it finally died away. He returned slowly to his seat and slumped into it. The wood creaked audibly in the quiet office.

“Go,” he said, not looking at me.

 

* * *

The above is the last entry in Lomba's diary. There's no record of how far the superintendent went to help him regain his freedom, but as he told Janice, there was very little to be done for a political detainee—especially since, about a week after that meeting, a coup was attempted against the military leader, General Sani Abacha, by some officers close to him. There was an immediate crackdown on all pro-democracy activists, and the prisons all over the country swelled with political detainees. A lot of those already in detention were transferred randomly to other prisons around the country, for security reasons. Lomba was among them. He was transferred to Agodi Prison in Ibadan. From there he was moved to the far north, to a small desert town called Gashuwa. There is no record of him after that.

A lot of these political prisoners died in detention, although the prominent ones made the headlines—people like Moshood Abiola and General Yar Adua.

But somehow it is hard to imagine that Lomba died. A lot seems to point to the contrary. His diary, his economical expressions show a very sedulous character at work. A survivor. The years in prison must have taught him not to hope too much, not to despair too much—that for the prisoner, nothing kills as surely as too much hope or too much despair. He had learned to survive in tiny atoms, piecemeal, a day at a time. It is probable that in 1998, when the military dictator Abacha died, and his successor, General Abdulsalam Abubakar, dared to open the gates to democracy, and to liberty for the political detainees, Lomba was in the ranks of those released.

This might have been how it happened: Lomba was seated in a dingy cell in Gashuwa, his eyes closed, his mind soaring above the glass-studded prison walls, mingling with the stars and the rain in elemental union of freedom; then the door clanked open, and when he opened his eyes Liberty was standing over him, smiling kindly, extending an arm.

And Liberty said softly, “Come. It is time to go.”

And they left, arm in arm.

B
ESSIE
H
EAD

Bessie Amelia (Emery) Head was born in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, in 1937 to a mother from a well-to-do white family and an African who cared for horses. Because of her illicit relationship and unwed pregnancy, her mother was sent to a mental hospital, and Bessie was raised by two adoptive families, one Afrikaner and one “colored,” both of whom ultimately rejected her, leading her to be sent to a missionary orphanage at age thirteen. She became a journalist and taught elementary school and, after a divorce, took her son and emigrated to Botswana. She worked for the Bamangwato Development Farm, where she grew vegetables and made guava jam to sell. There she was inspired by the lives of the men and women in her village of Serowe and began to write fiction. Her three novels are
When Rain Clouds Gather
(1969),
Maru
(1971), and
A Question of Power
(1974), a very autobiographical story about a biracial woman struggling to maintain her sanity as she works to gain acceptance in an African village. She also wrote two other works,
Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind
and
Bewitched Crossroad: An African Saga,
which combine sociological and historical accounts with elements of folklore, and
The Collector of Treasures and Other Botswana Village Tales,
a collection of related short stories. She died in 1986.

 

Earth Love

(1993)

T
he sky was a brilliant red glow when he came home that evening. He could have arrived home at midday, except that to do so was unthinkable. The message must be sent on ahead, passing from mouth to mouth, scurrying along the winding African footpaths. He must then delay, dallying here and there so that on arrival home the wife would have swept the hut, shaken out the sleeping mats and prepared a special meal of good food.

For two months he had been out in the wild bush, collecting the skins of jackal. Now he would sit at home and leisurely piece together these skins into a sleeping blanket. Always in demand, a well-made sleeping blanket can fetch a good price. A jackal blanket with its thick pattern of silver and black hair is very beautiful.

For two months he had lived on wild meat of wild animals, wild berries and wild bush-watermelon.

For two months there had been only the stunning, numbing silence of the bush. Above, in the sky at evening, the brilliant flight of the red-and-white flamingo birds; on the ground, the ceaseless, heavy jogtrot of the foolish kudu; or the startled, delicate flight of buck; or the rustle, rustle of small, round, furry animals among the low thorn bushes.

“Man can never separate himself from earth and sky,” he would often think with tender amazement. “Always they are there, flamingo birds and kudu. Wild, beautiful sunset flamingo birds and the foolish kudu.

“What does a man love best?” he thought. “In the bush I am only a breathing man with eyes and ears alert for the treacherous jackal. Soon, village life will close about me again. I shall drink beer and make the rounds of the village courts, and listen to the repetitious tragedies and comedies of our life. Everywhere there is some sadness. In the village life and in the silence of the bush. Man must continually exchange one sadness for another to make his life a livable thing.”

He felt a cold rush of wind on his face. He looked up at the sky and quickened his homeward pace. There were huge streaks of rain shadows on the east and southwest horizons. It was raining there, far in the distance, and the strong south wind had rushed through it and become a cold, fresh rain-wind. The earth was so flat and broad and wide and endless that the canopy of sky overhead had to stretch with all its might to keep pace with the breadth of the earth. The sky was always brooding about this. It did not like to be outdone by the earth. At evening, it dressed itself up in a brilliant splash of red and yellow glow, leaving the earth a black, stark silhouette of thorn trees. Man had to leave off his intense preoccupation with the earth and raise his eyes to the sky. Then, it seemed, the eyes and soul of man became the wild, beautiful sunset flamingo bird flying free in the limitless space of the sky. The ache and pain and uncertainty of earth life was drowned in the peace and freedom of the sky.

“How strange,” he thought. “One part of me is the flamingo bird. The other the foolish kudu. More often I am the foolish kudu, my feet jogging heavily along the ground. I can see neither left nor right nor behind, but only straight ahead. All things beat down on me and I dart off in one blind direction, and another. I am a slow earth man of little wit. I am the foolish kudu. How is it then that my eyes and soul drown in the flight of the wild flamingo bird? Can I be two things at once—the flamingo bird and the foolish kudu? Man cannot separate himself from earth and sky.”

There was a rumble of thunder and a flash of lightning as he entered the village. The rain-wind rushed along the village pathways and swirled about the circular mud huts. The wife was happy to see him but subdued about expressing this happiness. The children came shouting about and he spoke to them with rough, abashed male tenderness. They took the jackal skins to store away in the spare hut and fled out of the yard to continue their interrupted game.

The wife brought the basin of water so that he could wash. “Tell me the news,” he said, taking off his tattered, soiled shirt.

“There isn't much to tell,” she said, sitting on the ground near him. Then all at once a lot of words poured out so that he could hardly sort out one story from the other.

“Manga's quiet wife has left him. He beat her severely, so that she had to run to the police camp in the middle of the night. He immediately took in another woman. Then it appears that he made a young girl pregnant and when this young girl called at the house, this other woman beat the young girl. Manga was roaring drunk and beat his other woman almost to death. Her cries were so terrible that the police had to be called. Manga is now in jail. Three teachers and a principal were dismissed for making schoolgirls pregnant. Do you know Sylvia? She works in the shop. The one of whom people say she has no food at home, but dresses like a shop window? People are indignant about her behaviour. It is known that she has slept with many men in the village, but now it seems that her husband took up with a quiet young teacher who is now in the place. It seems that the story was whispered to Sylvia by a snake in the green grass. While the teacher was at work, Sylvia went to her house and opened her belongings. In a suitcase were many letters from Sylvia's husband. Sylvia waited there and when the young teacher returned home, Sylvia removed her high-heeled shoe and beat her about the head. She almost beat another woman's child to death. No one can forget this terrible story. Sylvia's husband has fled away, as he does not want to face the trouble. I received a report from the cattle-post that one of the bulls has his eye damaged. The young one who was not yet castrated. He got into a fight with one of the old bulls who put a horn in his eye. I thought of going to the cattle-post to attend to the matter but then I received word that you were on the way home, so instead I sent instructions about how the eye should be treated.”

She was silent a moment. The husband commented almost to himself, smiling with quiet amusement: “We are all foolish kudus.”

“What is that?” the wife asked, puzzled. She had never heard that expression before. The husband did not reply, and the woman went about her business. She accepted him as he was, a quiet, reserved man. He could never be driven into a quarrel, and all the things in life he looked at with an interested detachment.

The wife brought him a plate of boiled ground millet over which she had put a piece of soft braised meat, spinach and pumpkin. In another plate she had two steaming fresh young mealies. While he ate, the storm clouds gathered overhead and the thunder rumbled. A small black kitten hovered near. Its eyes were grey-green and it was soft and beautiful. He tore off a long shred of meat and put it down. The kitten ate with great delicacy; then it sat down at his feet, shot one straight black leg upwards and began cleaning its tail. Also at his feet the large, fat, brown earth ants were as busy as anything. A huge team scattered over the earth, cutting down blades of grass and carrying them back to the edge of the hole. Another team gathered these deposits of grass from the edge of the hole and all the time he could see their fat round abdomens disappearing into the earth's depths. He placed his foot over the hole for a few seconds and at once caused great confusion among this well-organised community. The team outside fell back, consulting among themselves, then dropped their blades of grass and ran panic-stricken hither and hither. When he raised his foot, four large soldier ants, with menacing, shiny claws waving about, slowly emerged from the hole. They surveyed the surroundings. There was nothing wrong, just maybe some foolish kudu had temporarily interfered. They consulted with the panic-stricken workers, threw about their weight a little, then walked majestically back and disappeared into the hole. The rhythm of work replaced itself, but this time with a speeded-up tempo. The rain was near.

The wife called the children home. They had eaten a while ago and now, with the first isolated drops of rain, they came tumbling and shouting and tussling into the yard, and scattered to their separate sleeping huts.

The man felt tired and content. When he entered their sleeping hut, the bed of jackal blankets was neatly prepared. There was an oil lamp, made from a Milo tin, burning in one corner. There was the thunder and rain outside. There was this hut, and his wife's quiet, warm female body which was very satisfying.

 

A
LEXANDER
K
ANENGONI

Born in 1951, Alexander Kanengoni was trained as a teacher before he joined ZANLA, an African nationalist guerrilla force. Much of his fiction was inspired by the anticolonial struggle and Zimbabwean war for liberation. After Zimbabwe gained its independence in 1980, he attended the University of Zimbabwe and majored in English literature. He became a member of the Ministry of Education and Culture, where he worked as a project officer and was responsible for overseeing the education of ex-soldiers and refugees. From 1988 to 2002 he worked for the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Service, but then returned to his familial roots when he became a farmer. He recalled that his father had owned his own land and that he himself had grown up “living on and knowing the land.” He thinks that the relationship between the people and the land has an almost spiritual quality about it. Kanengoni's works include
Vicious Circle
(1983),
When the Rainbird Cries
(1988),
Echoing Silences
(1997), a collection of short stories titled
Effortless Tears
(1993), and
Writing Still
(2003).

Effortless Tears

(1993)

W
e buried my cousin, George Pasi, one bleak windswept afternoon: one of those afternoons that seem fit for nothing but funerals. Almost everyone there knew that George had died of an AIDS-related illness but no one mentioned it. What showed was only the fear and uncertainty in people's eyes; beyond that, silence.

Even as we traveled from Harare on that hired bus that morning, every one of us feared that at last AIDS had caught up with us. In the beginning, it was a distant, blurred phenomenon which we only came across in the newspapers and on radio and television, something peculiar to homosexuals. Then we began hearing isolated stories of people dying of AIDS in far-flung districts. After that came the rumors of sealed wards at Harare and Parirenyatwa, and of other hospitals teeming with people suffering from AIDS. But the truth is that it still seemed rather remote and did not seem to have any direct bearing on most of us.

When AIDS finally reached Highfield and Zengeza, and started claiming lives in the streets where we lived, that triggered the alarm bells inside our heads. AIDS had finally knocked on our doors.

For two months, we had watched George waste away at Harare Hospital. In desperation, his father—just like the rest of us—skeptical of the healing properties of modern medicine, had turned to traditional healers. Somehow, we just could not watch him die. We made futile journeys to all corners of the country while George wasted away. He finally died on our way home from some traditional healer in Mutare.

All the way from Harare to Wedza, the atmosphere was limp. January's scorching sun in the naked sky and the suffocating air intensified into a sense of looming crisis that could not be expressed in words. The rains were already very late and the frequent sight of untilled fields, helplessly confronting an unfulfilling sky, created images of seasons that could no longer be understood. The crops that had been planted with the first and only rains of the season had emerged only to fight a relentless war with the sun. Most had wilted and died. The few plants that still survived were struggling in the stifling heat.

Now, as we stood forlornly round the grave, the choir sang an ominous song about death: we named the prophets yielded up to heaven while the refrain repeated: “Can you see your name? Where is your name?”

This eerie question rang again and again in our minds until it became part of one's soul, exposing it to the nakedness of the Mutekedza communal land: land that was overcrowded, old, and tired. Interminable rows of huts stretched into the horizon, along winding roads that only seemed to lead to other funerals.

Not far away, a tattered scarecrow from some forgotten season flapped a silent dirge beneath the burning sun.

Lean cattle, their bones sticking out, their ribs moving painfully under their taut skin, nibbled at something on the dry ground: what it was, no one could make out. And around the grave the atmosphere was subdued and silent. Even the once phenomenal Save River, only a stone's throw away to the east, lay silent. This gigantic river, reduced to puddles between heaps of sand, seemed to be brooding on its sad predicament. And behind the dying river, Wedza Mountain stared at us with resignation, as if it, too, had given up trying to understand some of the strange things that were happening.

The preacher told the parable of the Ten Virgins. He warned that when the Lord unexpectedly came and knocked on our door, like the clever five virgins, we should be found ready and waiting to receive Him.

Everyone nodded silently.

George's grandfather mourned the strange doings of this earth. He wished it was he who had been taken away. But then such were the weird ways of witches and wizards that they preferred to pluck the youngest and plumpest—although George had grown thinner than the cattle we could see around us. We listened helplessly as the old man talked and talked until at last he broke down and cried like a small child.

George's father talked of an invisible enemy that had sneaked into our midst and threatened the very core of our existence. He warned us that we should change our ways immediately or die.

He never mentioned the word “Aids,” the acronym AIDS.

George's wife was beyond all weeping. She talked of a need for moral strength during such critical times. She readily admitted that she did not know where such strength could come from: it could be from the people; it could be from those gone beyond; it could be from God. But wherever it was from, she needed it. As if acting upon some invisible signal, people began to cry. We were not weeping for the dead. We were weeping for the living. And behind us, while Wedza Mountain gazed at us dejectedly, the Save River was silently dying.

The coffin was slowly lowered into the grave and we filed past, throwing in clods of soil. In the casket lay George, reduced to skin and bone. (Most people had refused a last glimpse of him.) During his heyday we had called him Mr. Bigstuff because of his fast and flashy style—that was long ago.

As we trudged back to the village, away from the wretched burial area, most of us were trying to decide which memory of George to take back with us: Mr. Bigstuff or that thread, that bundle of skin and bones which had died on our way back from some traditional healer in Mutare.

Out there, around the fire, late that Monday evening, all discussion was imbued with a painful sense of futility, a menacing uncertainty, and an overwhelming feeling that we were going nowhere.

Drought.

“Compared to the ravaging drought of 1947, this is child's play,” said George's grandfather. “At that time, people survived on grass like cattle,” he concluded, looking skeptically up into the deep night sky.

No one helped him take the discussion further.

Politics.

The village chairman of the party attempted a spirited explanation of the advantages of the government's economic reform program: “It means a general availability of goods and services and it means higher prices for the people's agricultural produce,” he went on, looking up at the dark, cloudless sky. Then, with an inexplicable renewal of optimism peculiar to politicians, he went on to talk of programs and projects until, somehow, he, too, was overcome by the general weariness and took refuge in the silence around the dying fire.

“Aren't these religious denominations that are daily sprouting up a sign that the end of the world is coming?” asked George's grandfather.

“No, it's just people out to make a quick buck, nothing else,” said George's younger brother.

“Don't you know that the end of the world is foretold in the Scriptures,” said the Methodist lay preacher with sharp urgency. He continued: “All these things”—he waved his arms in a large general movement—“are undoubtedly signs of the Second Coming.” Everyone looked down and sighed.

And then, inevitably, AIDS came up. It was a topic that everyone had been making a conscious effort to avoid, but then, like everything else, its turn came. Everyone referred to it in indirect terms: that animal, that phantom, that creature, that beast. It was not out of any respect for George. It was out of fear and despair.

“Whatever this scourge is”—George's father chuckled—“it has claimed more lives than all my three years in the Imperial Army against Hitler.” He chuckled again helplessly.

“It seems as if these endless funerals have taken the place of farming.”

“They are lucky, the ones who are still getting decent burials,” chipped in someone from out of the dark. “Very soon, there will be no one to bury anybody.”

The last glowing ember in the collected heap of ashes grew dimmer and finally died away. George's grandfather asked for an ox-hide drum and began playing it slowly at first and then with gathering ferocity. Something in me snapped.

Then he began to sing. The song told of an unfortunate woman's repeated pregnancies which always ended in miscarriages. I felt trapped.

When at last the old man, my father, stood up and began to dance, stamping the dry earth with his worn-out car-tire sandals, I knew there was no escape. I edged George's grandfather away from the drum and began a futile prayer on that moonless night. The throbbing resonance of the drum rose above our voices as we all became part of one great nothingness. Suddenly I was crying for the first time since George's death. Tears ran from my eyes like rivers in a good season. During those years, most of us firmly believed that the mighty Save River would roll on forever, perhaps until the end of time.

But not now, not any longer.