One Day I Will Write About This Place (23 page)

George snaps his briefcase open and takes out a flyer. It is very glossy, in full fashion-­magazine color. He looks at me from the flyer, in a sharp suit, eyes facing the sky in a Visionary™ pose, Go-­Gerrit, his body says, looking at his target with a squint, like the Six Million Dollar Man. Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. Next to his left shoulder is a picture of a mud hut. Next to his right shoulder, a bionic building swooshes to the sky like Nike—­glass and steel and sky. The Durban Convention Center! Breathtaking architecture! Epic settings! Panoramic foyer! African flair! UB40 concert! Where Africa and the world meet. Sit there agog, you failing fucker, eating our ribs greedily! Wipe your mouth!

I wipe my mouth. On the top of the flyer, right above his glowing head: “George Majola was born in a mud hut. When he grew up, he built the largest conference center in the Southern Hemisphere.”

A mud hut? Hmm. Here I was thinking their four-­bedroom home with a double automatic garage door in Fort Gale was built by a very good credit rating. Goodness. I don’t think George is more than twenty-­eight years old.

I open a new beer and chew my bone.

George has decided to come home to the Eastern Cape and give something back. He is giving a series of PowerTalks, motivational workshops for GoingSomewhere people. That’s what the flyer is for. He has a bootful of them in his car, just above the valves, which are sitting right next to my green gills and my bobbing Adam’s marble. I can drink! The Windhoek beer chugs down my throat effortlessly.

So George had hired some slick Durban marketing and PR consultants to promote his talks in Umtata and East London. They are doing nothing! No bookings!

Now. Me, what do I have to lose, and my patterns are in good order, look, no dribbling! So I let the golden liquid speak; it trickles out of my throat like piss, warm and good and full of bullshit and beautiful… AySssymmetrical Guerrilla Marketing, Finding Your Center, Speaking the Right Brand-­gauge.

He is startled. Do you want to market my talk?

Lift one eyebrow, tilt your head like Steve Austin, and look straight at somebody through your left squinty eye, and sound impatient, like he has lost his marbles, like you are a
hughagh
guy who leads from the front and that is the guy you want giving you cover when you run out of ammo, and the going is tough, so the tough get going,
hughagh
.

This is a technique for making people fall inside your patterns, or burst out laughing.

Alice is looking at me strangely.

“It’s a busy time,” I say. “Let me call up some people and see whether we can make this work. I don’t want to promise anything until I have a strategy and a team. How much can you offer?”

He speaks. My face remains still. Agog is a marble bumping up and down my throat, a swollen epiglottis. I sip some more beer. That is more money than I need to live for six months.

“Hmmm,” I say, still squinting bionically, hands televisioning like itain’tworthmytime, that won’t even cover my costs. He nods in agreement and his offer starts to climb up like black empowerment; soon it is paragliding in the sky, wheeee, and my stomach is billaboinging in fear.

I nod and step outside, worried I will throw up in excitement. I light a cigarette and think to myself that, truth be told, George Majola has always been a sweet guy, not a malicious bone in him at all, and he must have some idea of my situation, if only from my wild scribbled hair and greedy fingers, and he is offering me this with grace.

Like how Sylvia Nkanyuza offered to let me stay rent free in her house; like Sylvia’s father, a physics professor who left South Africa in the fifties unable to get a job in Verwoerd South Africa and who was adopted in Nigeria where they lived for many years, and he taught a generation of Nigerian physicists at Ibadan. He often turns up at Sylvia’s house when she is traveling, to chat, see that I am okay. He always brings beer, refuses to let me buy any. Like Victory’s endless free beers and small loans; like how DoomDoom let me sleep in his small room for two months and showed me how to use a computer; like how Chuma Koyana took me home to their lovely place in East London one long holi­day; like how Chuma’s mother took care of me as if I were her own son; like Kaya’s uncle asking me, a Kenyan he did not know, but an African they trusted, to tell Kaya his mother had died; like how Mrs. Baguma asks no questions; like how my uncles brought us here and watched over us. This is how to become an African. This town—­full of doctors and teachers and professors and nurses and civil servants from all over the continent, and from all over this country—­has taken good care of me, and given me more than I have given back.

George and Alice come and stand with me, and we chat about this and that, and watch the meat grilling. The door to her house is open, and music is playing.

…

I call up Chuma. He has a new Golf GTI, which he always needs money to service. Chuma is like family to me. He too is presently jobless. But he is better subsidized than I am, by an inheritance from his late father, a lawyer who died in the 1970s.

We draw up a thing of beauty. It has charts, projections, colors, and trenchant analyses cut and pasted from the Internet. George loves it. He gives us a fat deposit for expenses. And several giant boxes of his posters.

We spend the next few weeks driving all over the Eastern Cape, talking to “contacts,” the media and other important people. Chuma knows everybody, so the work is easy. Mostly we attend parties. We call up George to report, and he tells us he has something to tell us. Can we drive to Durban?

Sure.

We drive to Durban—­six hours from East London. He hosts us in his firm’s corporate flat. He says he has decided to cancel the tour. Work. Priorities and… he looks uncomfortable. We are nervous. I look at him and keep my lifted eyebrow bi-­ronic.

But—­but… of course he will pay us in full. Do we mind staying in that flat, and partaking of its black Johnnie Walker whiskeys and minty black powerments, and being driven around Durban for a few days as his corporate guests while he organizes the money? There is a big Empowering launch tonight at the beach. You are invited. Many celebs and free drinks floating on the swimming pool and bikinis and DJs.

Hmm, my eyebrow sighs, like timeismoney.

I look down and notice a hole in my shoe. “Oh,” he says, “and here is a small something for now.” The envelope has crisp notes.

After three days George brings the money. Himself. Lovely man. We get the money. I walk into a secondhand-­book shop: three floors of heaven. I buy more than a hundred books that day.

I decide to pack immediately when I get back to Umtata, and move to Cape Town.

Hayibo. What is up with Brenda Fassie? Why can’t she stay dead?

We have pounded her right into toothless history. We laugh and gossip-­column her. Three years ago her lesbian lover, Poppie Sihlahla, died, an overdose of crack cocaine. In Hillbrow! Once Struggle Central, now Hillbrow is the drug-­dealing capital of Africa, where the broken are robbed by the new and hungry. We can see now, how broken she is. Her son, Bongani, says he tries to hide drugs from his mother.

How could we ever have followed her?

She storms out of rehab, after only one day there, and speaks to journalists, saying, “I went there, and they made me wear a uniform and said I should say, ‘Hi, my name is Brenda and I am a junkie.’ Me! Me! Brenda Fassie! No way.”

She is finished.

Finished. We are listening to bling music, which thumps and talks about hip and hop, gold and going places. There is no past, everything is sampled. Kwaito.

She is finished. Bubblegum.

But… she isn’t.

It is 1998. I have been in Cape Town for a year, and things are moving. I started a small catering business with a friend, making African food—­all those years of free meals taught me a thing or two about peanut butter chicken and Nigerian
ogbono
soup. We are failing mostly, but things are moving, a few deals here and there.

It is a chilly day, lunchtime, and the wind is blowing like mad. I haven’t slept, but I need to find a cheap phone to call Mum. I have news.

I board a black taxi in Sea Point, in Cape Town, and two white women keep asking the taxi driver to play some song. He puts it on, and the taxi falls silent.

It is Brenda’s new song. In Xhosa.

It is strange. There hasn’t been any real crossover music in South Africa, except Mango Groove. Artificial Tropicana juice has been drunk by generations of Day-­Glo bright, banana-­leaf-­wearing natives of a rainbow nation, who dance and sing daylight come and me wan’ go home. That is the general idea behind Mango Groove—­a white woman with a group of anonymous blacks in faux tropical clothes cheerleading her.

Cape Town whites listen to rock music and the ethnic music of all places not in South Africa. The word
edgy
appears a lot in music magazines, music that takes people outside themselves to some cliff, so one can bungee jump off and get the “energy,” drum and bass and techno and a thing called ambient. Urban black South Africans love R&B, and Kwaito, reggae, and gospel.

One day, a couple of months ago, I was living in a backpack hostel, and the common phone booth was ringing early in the morning. Somebody picked up and called me to the phone. “It’s your father,” he said.

I pick up the phone. “Hello.”

Baba was in Johannesburg. He had been in Australia on some work thing and had changed his ticket to try to come to South Africa for a day or two to see if he could find me. Somebody had told him I was in Johannesburg. Then Ciru called a friend, and they gave him this number.

“I…”

“Don’t say anything. Just listen. You have to stop worrying about us, and what we think, or what we want. Do what you need to do…”

I am quiet.

“But—­call your mother. She… you know she worries.”

I panic. There is something in his voice. They are hiding something. “Is she okay? I can… come home?”

“Oh no, no. We are fine. Kenya is bad but we are fine. Don’t risk losing your papers…”

He doesn’t ask what I am doing. Then he drops the bombshell. Ciru also had a baby two weeks ago. His name is William. “Oh,” I say. I am surprised. He is quiet on the phone. “She is old enough,” I say. “She can support herself.” He sounds tired. I wonder if I will ever manage to survive having children.

Mum and I speak a few times. I tell her about the writing. She sounds happy, wary, and encouraging. She doesn’t ask what I am writing about. Baba told me that the diabetes is back. I ask her about it, and she says she is fine. She sounds frail. She talks about the grandkids a lot. Paul is talkative and William is the quiet one. Everybody calls Paul Bobo. “He looks like you when you were a baby,” she says. Jimmy got married, to his girlfriend Carol, and I missed the wedding. I am not going home until I make something of myself.

Baba has retired now, and they have moved to a new place they are renting while they build the new house. Sometimes she has to go to Baba’s new office to receive a call while they wait for a landline. She can’t drive herself. Politics is terrible, more clashes, and the 1997 election was rigged. Moi is back and the opposition is broken.

I am working around the clock, writing, cooking, looking for catering contracts, not getting them. Charlie Sweet and I still share work. I am still trying to make my dreadful novel work. Last night, Charlie and I were e-mailing back and forth. I started to write to him about my trip to Uganda. A long, long e-mail. He is quiet for a few hours, and it is nearly dawn.

He doesn’t e-mail. Then the phone rings. It is Charlie.

“This is beautiful,” he says.

I can hear my jaw creaking open, its rusty hinges groaning.

“Your mother… she… wow… man, you really should publish this somewhere big.”

I work through the morning. Cut and shape it. I spend some time looking around the Internet for newspapers and magazines. I want to send it somewhere before I sleep and get all accordion and
kimay.

The
Sunday Times
is South Africa’s biggest and richest newspaper. I read the weekend magazine travel section. Yes, I could try for that. There is an e-mail address at the bottom of the page. I attach the story. It is just after 9:00 a.m., and I am about to shut down the computer when a reply arrives. “How much money do you want for your story?” asks a gentleman called Andrew Unsworth, who is the sub­editor. “It’s quite long,” he says, “but I think we can make room for it. Love it. Love it. It runs on Sunday.”

So, I am sitting in this taxi, floating. The two white women are saying, “Oh, oh. It’s so so beautiful, this new Brenda Fassie song.” Not a word in English in this first real crossover song in a new South Africa.

It’s the way the song begins—­a church organ, playing on a scratchy old record, a childhood memory of a sound, for the briefest moment, then come her first few words, slurred like she is drunk and far away, lost inside an old short­wave radio. The first word is
vulindlela
—clear the path—delivered in a soft, childlike candor, and for the next few sounds, we are left alone with her voice, pleading to us softly,
vulindlela,
let me in.

The country has all its defenses up. Everybody is screaming and jostling for space. Young hip-­hoppers with trousers showing the crack in their buttocks have announced the end of innocence, the death of the village, the end of the struggle; young white kids shrilling, “Emigrate, we are emigrating to Australia because of affirmative action, which is racism in reverse.” At the supermarket last week, the cashier, a colored woman, shut her till when she saw me and told me to join a new queue.

“But… but…,” I said.

She laughed. “What will you do?” she asked. “Go report me to Mandela?”

All that disappears for a moment, as the first ten seconds of the song turn us all into mush.

The song starts to thump, and Brenda continues to twist the gut, sounding like she is sixteen again, and our shoulders are popping in this taxi. Everybody in this car is in exactly the same place. I hide my tears.