When Hoopoes Go to Heaven (37 page)

Eh!
It was a cake, and it was Mama’s oven! People looked at the cake, then they went into the kitchen to look at Mama’s oven, then they came back again to look at the
oven-cake sitting on the dining table.

‘
Eish!
’

‘Exact-exact, nè?’

‘
Ag
, even that silver nut where the knob is missing!’

‘Ooh, nè?

The cake ladies beamed and Mama took off her glasses and wiped her eyes with a tissue, and Zodwa told everybody that Mrs Levine had ordered a cake to remember the family by, and they had chosen
the oven because everybody who knew the Tungarazas had tasted cake from that oven. One of Baba’s colleagues said that was true, and everybody else agreed and looked around to see that
everybody else was nodding.

Benedict had spent a long time worrying how people would ever celebrate Mama with a cake. It would have to be a cake about cake, but how could anybody make a cake about cake without it just
looking like a cake? The oven-cake was perfect. And even though it had come out of a box, it wasn’t the kind of box that a cake from the other house would have come out of. It was a proper
cake, made with proper flour and eggs and butter and sugar. It was almost as delicious as Mama’s own cake, but not quite.

After the cake, while Mrs Simelane was still wiping some of it off Sifiso’s face, Benedict slipped off to his bedroom and changed from his suit into a T-shirt and a pair of shorts. He had
promised Mama that he wouldn’t take anybody up to the dam before the meal was over, and that he wouldn’t go in his smart suit and spoil it. Okay, the suit was too small for him now, but
it was still good, it could still go to another boy.

He gathered Giveness and Sifiso, but he couldn’t see Nomsa. He would find her in a moment. Meanwhile, as his two friends stood outside the kitchen door, he sat on the small step there,
putting on his old pair of shoes.

‘There’s a bridge at the dam,’ he told them. ‘We can walk along it right to the middle.’

Giveness looked excited. ‘We can stand in the middle of the water?’

‘Mm.’

Sifiso was a little giddy with sugar after too much cake. ‘
Eish!
Can we shout out our names there?’

Benedict smiled. ‘Yes! Let’s do that.’

Nomsa came round from the far side of the house as Benedict stood up from the steps. ‘We’re going to the dam,’ he told her. ‘Do you want to come? There are still some
nests.’

‘We’re going to stand in the middle and shout our names,’ said Giveness.

Nomsa smiled. ‘Okay,’ she said.

Inside the kitchen, washing up at the sink, Mavis heard the children talking.
Eish
, a name was a very important thing. The remembrance cake for her boy, the cake that
Titi’s madam had finished making just that morning, was safely inside the wardrobe in the room she shared with Lungi. After church tomorrow morning, Doctor was going to drive her with it to
where her mother lived on the far side of Manzini. She would have one week for her Christmas, and then she would come back and Lungi would go for hers. Mavis’s sisters were going to be
waiting for her with their mother, and together they were going to cleanse themselves of the loss of her baby boy and let him go. The ancestors would know who he was, the ancestors knew everything.
But how would her boy know who he was? He had been pulled from her belly already late, and they had never given him a name. They had never spoken about him, what would a name have been for?
Eish!
When she finished here, when everything was clean and nice, she would phone her mother and ask her to speak to the priest. They would give her boy a name before they let him go. He
would have a name to know himself by. He would have a name to shout into the world.

Benedict led the way up to the dam, going more slowly than he usually did on account of Giveness’s umbrella catching in bushes and needing Nomsa to free it, and on
account of Benedict practising at being a game ranger by pointing things out and stopping to tell his friends about them. There was a bird’s nest high up in a tree near the water-tank, and
close by there was a large spider’s nest with a small spider in it. He didn’t know what kind it was, but they all looked at it carefully, and Nomsa said she would look it up in Uncle
Enock’s spider book. Benedict couldn’t help hoping that his new sister Josephine was going to be the kind of girl who would know about looking something up in a spider book.

Giveness was nervous of getting spider-web all over his umbrella, and Sifiso teased him by pretending there was a big spider sitting right on top of it. Then they all laughed and said
sss
because Sifiso had said spider, and then Benedict and Nomsa said
shh
because soon they would come out of the trees onto the plateau and they mustn’t make noise that would scare away
birds.

For the last few steps they were as silent as they could be. Leading them, Benedict broke from the trees first, but quiet as he was, his movement startled a bird into flight – not from a
tree, but from the ground to the side of the dam. It flew up and away, then it circled back and flew towards him.

Eh!
It was a hoopoe!

As he held his breath and watched it flying directly above him, its beautiful black and white wings seemed to move in slow motion, with every beat almost meeting below its cinnamon body as if it
was clapping silently.

Benedict imagined it was the same one he had buried so respectfully. Maybe it had come from Heaven, just to thank him.

Then he caught his breath as a new thought came to him. Imagine if it had come to show him where King Solomon had hidden all his gold!

Eh!

Imagine.

How a statue of the Indian god, Krishna, came to be buried deep in the mountains of Swaziland is a puzzle which will probably never be solved. The head was unearthed at the
entrance to the Mlawula gorge in the Lubombo mountains during the building of the Swaziland-Maputo railway line in the early sixties. There is a body as well, this may have been found with the
head, accounts vary.

Although reliably identified as a late 18th or early 19th century statue of Krishna from eastern India, its presence in Swaziland cannot be explained.

The statue was never put in the hands of the Swaziland authorities (there were no relevant authorities in the colonial early sixties).

Its present whereabouts are as mysterious as its past.

Bob Forrester

IN AUGUST 2005, KING MSWATI OFFICIALLY ABANDONED
the anti-AIDS campaign obliging girls to wear
umcwasho
tassels and to practise abstinence. Only
four of its intended five years had passed, during which the king himself had ignored it, his teenage daughters had flouted it, and many girls in urban areas had refused to participate in it.

Swaziland continues to have the highest rate of HIV/AIDS in the world.