Little Suns (28 page)

He meets a group of young men and women singing: ‘At last our king is coming back. We’ll get our land back.’

Malangana tries to summon the memory of the king that is coming. The image is blurry; the king sees nothing and hears nothing for he is preoccupied with counting beads on a rosary. The singers try to encourage Malangana to join them in song even if he can’t dance because of his crutches and the load on his back. He ignores them and stumbles away.

One of the singers stops and looks at him, and then asks, ‘Why are you so sad, old man? Are you one of those who fought against him?’

He does not stop to respond.

The river is the place to go, even though he was there early in the morning for his ablutions. This time he will walk as far as the confluence of Sulenkama and Gqukunqa. As he shambles along the bank he is struck by a new observation: this river he has been calling a river even in his dreams is not a river at all. It is just a stream. How did it manage to pass itself off as more imposing than it really is for all these years? And what film has been removed from his eyes so that now he can see it for what it is, in all its emaciated nakedness?

The water still sounds the same. But now the familiar sound is intermingled with a cacophony of hooting and screeching. And then he sees the source. Strange birds grazing on the grass like sheep. Quite big too. Among them he sees their shepherd. Very close to the confluence of the two rivers. The two streams, for that’s what they have become, after their lie has been exposed today. As he walks closer to the shepherd, he notices that the shepherd is not a shepherd at all. She is a woman.

She walks towards him, smiling.

‘What took you so long?’ she asks, her eyes squinting and her grin toothless.

He recognises her immediately.

Mthwakazi!

She’s grown old and her face is wrinkled and her eyes surrounded by crow’s feet, but she’s undoubtedly his Mthwakazi. Her ears are adorned with earrings of gold. He does not notice them though they are quite conspicuous. She is not wearing the tanned-hide skirt or front-and-back apron of the abaThwa people that she used to wear in the olden days. She is in a brown European skirt and yellow blouse but she is barefoot. The clothes are not ill-fitting like the last European attire he saw her in, the red-and-white floral silk dress the bulk of which she had to carry over her shoulders.

He looks at the geese. It is not a friendly stare.

‘What are these strange birds?’

‘They’re Rhudulu’s geese.’

‘You’re herding his geese?’

She nods.

‘They’re noisy.’ That is all he can think of saying.

She only sniggers.

‘And they’re ugly,’ he adds. ‘I don’t think they taste so wonderful either.’

She looks at him curiously, and then at the geese. She turns back to him.

‘I waited for you,’ she says again. ‘What kept you so long?’

‘A war happened.’

‘I can see it took its toll on you. And the load you carry is too heavy for you.’

‘It’s your drum,’ he says, and he unloads it and places it between them.

She looks at it for a long time as if trying very hard to remember it.

‘It’s the drum you stole. You are only returning it now? You can keep it; I am no longer a diviner.’

‘We’ll keep it still,’ he says.

She smiles and shakes her head, displaying the golden earrings. Nothing registers in him. They are standing to attention, facing each other with the drum on the ground between them. The twisted
umsintsi
crutches support his frail body. She shakes her head again; she wants him to notice the earrings and say something. He is looking at her face, mesmerised.

‘Don’t you remember them?’

‘Remember what?’

‘These earrings? You’re so stupid! I wore them all these years so that you could remember them.’

‘I remember the suns, though,’ he says. ‘There are many of them. Not just one.’

‘There is only one sun,’ she says with much enthusiasm. ‘I was right all along.
Amakhumsha
tell us that the world is round and it moves around the sun. It is the same sun that we see every day.’

For the first time in a long time Malangana laughs. It is real laughter from the guts. This is the real Mthwakazi, the woman who makes him laugh.

‘What do
amakhumsha
know? Look up in the sky on a cloudless night. What do you think those twinkling things are?’

‘Stars, of course.’

‘Stars are little suns.’

She cackles. She has lost some of her teeth, but she is still Mthwakazi.

They look to the hill that becomes a mountain after dark. The hill on which stars grow at night.

The end is always a journey.

Mhlontlo dies a commoner at Caba Location, Qumbu.

Though he had been found not guilty of Hamilton Hope’s murder he had been stripped of the status of ‘Paramount Chief’ by the Cape Colony Government and had been banished to Kingwilliamstown and later transferred to Willowvale, and was only allowed to live at Caba in Qumbu in 1906 when he was old and sickly. His heir Charles was not allowed to succeed either, since the intention of the colonial Government was to end the kingdom of amaMpondomise once and for all.

(Joe H. Majija, a descendant of one of the junior Houses of Mhlontlo, writes in his
Dark Clouds at Sulenkama
that his body lies buried in a well-kept family cemetery at the Great Place of Ntabankulu. ‘His grave is a source of inspiration to many Pondomises who normally visit it to get spiritual guidance and protection.’)

Malangana is not there to bid him farewell. He is still on a journey with his Mthwakazi.

The end is always a journey.

In this historical novel a fictional love story weaves itself into the true history of the assassination of Hamilton Hope, a British magistrate in the 19th-century Cape Colony, and the exile of members of my family under the leadership of Mhlontlo ka Matiwane from Qumbu to Lesotho, and later to Herschel on the Cape Colony side of the Lesotho border. I am grateful first to my grandfather, Charles Gxumekelane (A! Zenzile) Mda, who was born in 1880 and was a baby when the War of Hope broke out, and whose father, Feyiya, was a member of one of the Houses of Matiwane. Feyiya and his family were part of that migration from Qumbu to Lesotho with Mhlontlo. I am grateful for the stories he used to tell us, his grandchildren, about our origin. I am also grateful to the late Robert Mda of the Lesotho Mdas, who used to cross the Telle River to his Cousin Charles’ homestead in Qoboshane when I was a little boy. He never ran out of stories about the exploits of Mhlontlo – much embellished and full of magic; for instance, he could turn the white man’s bullets into water. I was amazed when I was researching this novel to find a lot of consistencies (among minor inconsistencies) in Charles’ and Robert’s oral histories and the stories that other praise poets of amaMpondomise from different parts of the Eastern Cape, as the region is now called, tell about the origins of amaMpondomise from Sibiside of abaMbo right up to the change of fortunes as a result of the killing of Hamilton Hope. The most detailed of these narratives was left for posterity by the late Mdukiswa Tyabashe who lived at Cuthbert’s Location and used to be King Lutshoto’s praise poet, and whose oral history was one of those collected by Harold Scheub and published in
The Tongue is Fire: South African Storytellers and Apartheid
(Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). I am grateful to Harold Scheub for this collection. Of course, I did not only depend on the oral tradition for my sources. Historical record, both primary and secondary sources, was crucial. Joe H. Majija of Mthatha, a descendant of one of the junior Houses of Mhlontlo, directed me to a lot of archival documents from the trove he used in his self-published booklet,
Dark Clouds at Sulenkama
. Here I must thank Wonga Qina, a Grahamstown teacher, who helped me track down Mr Majija and also took me to libraries and archives in Grahamstown. Ken Heath of Kingwilliamstown was a relative of William Charles Henman, one of the two white men killed with Hope. I thank him for the information he provided. I rediscovered Mhlontlo as a high school student in Lesotho in Sesotho praise poetry, ‘Lithoko tsa Lerotholi’, in historian Mosebi Damane’s
Marath’a Lilepe
(Morija: Morija Sesuto Book Depot, 1960). The Basotho called him ’Mamalo. I was proud that I, a refugee boy, had a great-grandfather who featured in the praise poetry of Lesotho kings. Other materials that were useful were: Clifton Crais, ‘The Death of Hope’ in
The Politics of Evil: Magic, State Power and the Political Imagination in South Africa
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and J.S. Kotze, ‘Counter-Insurgency in the Cape Colony, 1872–1882’ in
Scientia Militaria: South African Journal of Military Studies
Vol. 31, No. 2 (2003)
http://scientiamilitaria.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/152
.

I hardly ever thank the two lovely women in my writing life: Pam Thornley, my long-time editor, and Isobel Dixon, my agent. It is high time I did so.

All the research for
Little Suns
was done, the initial chapters were written and the plan for the whole novel was executed during my sojourn as Artist-in-Residence at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (
STIAS
), Wallenberg Research Centre at Stellenbosch University, Marais Street, Stellenbosch, 7600, South Africa.