Broken River Tent Page 13

  Feeling physical exhaustion from the walk, he found a bench to sit on. In no time he was joined by an old white man with a turkey neck and ashen varicose legs.

  “May I, mate?” He pointed to the seat.

  “By all means,” Phila replied politely.

  “Lovely day!” the old man said.

  Phila sensed a suppressed Cockney accent.

  “Indeed!” he politely replied.

  “Any particular plans for it?”

  “Not really. Just sitting here, cultivating wakefulness.”

  “Ah! Clever bloke, are ye?”

  Phila just smiled.

  “That’s a nasty scar ye have right there, mate. What happened?” The guy craned his head to investigate Phila’s sutured nose.

  “Aah … it’s a long story.”

  “I can see you have a story,” the man said, giving Phila another appraising look, which made Phila shift along the bench a little.

  “You can, can you?” What was it with old men who thought they could just intrude on his privacy?

  “Yes, I can,” the man said. “I have what you might call a gift.”

  “A gift?” Phila gave him a suspicious glance.

  “I can read a person’s aura. May I …?”

  Phila tried to suppress a flash of alarm but then he thought, why not? He sat very still while the old man ran his hands over his face, gently closing his eyes with his fingers as he went.

  “You’ve a green aura. With blotches of black, I’m afraid. That’s high mystical energy. And a tinge of sadness.”

  “You know this just by feeling my face?” Phila opened his eyes and gave him a sceptical look.

  “I can read palms too.”

  “Good thing I’ve been watching the flights of birds to discover the divine purpose. Perhaps I can offer you my interpretation of the nimbus around your own head?” Phila was not really in a mood for games but decided to bottle the egress and play along.

  “Aye! A man of letters too? Ye speak with a force of intelligence. We’re all immemorially known, mate.”

  “Something you read on a Hari Krishna flyer?”

  “Jung, actually. Weber, too, was of the opinion that dissipation is just a loss of horizon. The devil seeks to frighten us with the accumulation of ills. Now ye’ve woken up the priest in me!”

  “A man of the cloth who believes in superstition? Interesting.”

  “Retired Anglican clergy. And mysticism is not superstition. It’s closer to astral physics than ye realise.” He halted to take a breath before continuing. “Averse to complex narrative, eh?” He had an unattractive droop to his left eye when he asked a question.

  “Suffering from dialectical dizziness actually, or in your language, mysticism in dreams.”

  “I knew you looked like an interesting bloke.”

  “Well, I’m growing tired of dreams. Maybe I’m losing interest in the habit of living with the absence of God. Or maybe I’m suspicious of the sterilisation of history. Take your choice.”

  “Loss of belief? Pessimism of despair?”

  “Are you sure you want to engage with me on such topics?”

  “Well. Job tried his luck with God.”

  “And look where that got him. Any case, I don’t dispute God’s existence. I just doubt His absolute justice. Mine is the God of Job indeed. As Job knew but tried his luck anyway, I don’t have the strength to wrestle with God, because I know He’ll overpower me. So, like Simone Weil, whom you should know, being clergy and all, I just wait on. What complicates things is that I admire His silence, unlike Job, who was livened by it, because I cannot believe or trust in a God I can comprehend.”

  “I know what ye mean. And His priests … well, we’ve been rubbish at explaining His intentions.”

  “That’s because you wrongly assumed that He wanted them explained.”

  After some time of sitting in contemplative silence together, the priest suggested a drink at his flat, which he claimed was nearby. “Then we can properly interrogate this absence of God against the music of Wagner.”

  Phila was almost enticed until he recalled that Wagner’s music stupefied him, and he politely declined. Staring stolidly at the sea, he thought about Nietzsche’s fool drinking up the ocean.

  An ice-cream man jingled his bell as he rode past them on his bike. The priest made another offer. “Let me buy you an ice-cream at least?” he smiled, standing up, and deliberately touching Phila’s thigh.

  Phila declined again – something about Greeks bearing gifts teased at his mind – but his protest fell on deaf ears. After dickering with the ice-cream man the priest came back with two Magnum ice-creams. He handed Phila the death-by-chocolate one, which happened to be his favourite. Before Phila could protest further, he extended another invitation, this time to an Anglican music service that evening. “You might even enjoy it,” he said. “Our church is beyond the PnP building. Ask for Roger. I am the choir master also.” Phila promised to consider it, but more out of politeness than real intention.

  Something about the insouciance of nature had always bothered him. He thought about how the dunes, rocks and hills had looked down at their ancestors, who met here on the beach in tones of military aggressiveness, violently killing one another as a precursor to the Frontier Wars. Even then nature could not be bothered, as it was not bothered now when they met in friendly banter. Nature plays its part, he mused, by providing the stage, whatever the outcome.

  Two historical odysseys – the great Bantu terrestrial one and the European maritime one – resulting in a rendezvous of epic proportions at the foot of the African continent, the protracted bloody struggle of the nineteenth century known as the Frontier Wars, also produced the enlargement of human conscience that made it possible for Phila and this priest to sit on a bench at the beach, beneath the scintillating African sun, discussing the moral ambiguities of Weber, Wagner and Nietzsche, and the absent existence of God.

  Political or social conscience came at the price of tragedy. Of a Mandela spending twenty-seven years imprisoned on the quarries of Robben Island. And a Biko dying a gruesome death in a lonely prison cell at the hands of cowards who would not even own up to their nefarious deeds.

  Phila, looking at the ocean as the mirror eye of the distant past, wished he could lift the mist of myth, to excavate traditional oral narratives that were buried by colonialism, so that he could properly make out what was present in the authentic landscape of history.

  “I usually know that I am taking too much of my congregation’s time once they become quiet. It’s a sign of suffering.” The retired priest looked Phila in the eye as he said this.

  “I think we are way past that,” said Phila. “I was just thinking how our ancestors had probably fought each other on this beach.”

  “Ye mean when the 1820 settlers came …”

  “Even earlier than that.” Phila gestured towards the ocean. “Many ships – Hercules way back in 1786 was one – were wrecked around here.”

  The priest looked interested so Phila continued. “Chief Tshatshu was living in this area at the start of the nineteenth century. In fact he was probably the first black to have had a good command of the English language. He acted as an interpreter for your first missionary, Van der Kemp, whom the Xhosas nicknamed Nyengane, because of his stone stubborness.”

  “Nyengane means stubborn?”

  “Something like that. Nyengane is hard molten rock found around the river or sea. It gets its hardness from the rapid cooling of lava where it comes across the water. Because it made excellent rock tools but was difficult to break or mould, amaXhosa called it inyengane. Van der Kemp was the first to try to convert amaNgqika who, though amused by the story of the devil and all, were confused with the explanation of God involving the whole of humanity in His quarrels with ‘His boy’. They were annoyed with missionaries like Van der Kemp for trying to take advantage of their kindness – they regarded Nyengane as a poor wanderer, a ‘bushman of the sea’ – and trying to
make them his converts. That was how they viewed the whole matter of Christian conversion. I guess nothing much has changed. We can make an example of what happened between us just now. You offered me your kindness, which I refused because I felt no need for it. You proceeded to buy me the ice-cream anyway, even though I had declined it. What does this tell me? That you either do not value my opinion; or you condescend in your kindness, because you think I do not know what is good for me. In similar vein to Van der Kemp, who became angry with the Xhosas for rejecting his gospel. You put me in a situation where I must violate my own wishes in order to be polite to you; or be rude to you to maintain my own independence. What you are really after is that the basis of our interaction must be your gestalt, so we may proceed in triumph of your hegemony. That, in general, has been the problem between our nations: only your views matter and no one else’s.” Phila spoke decisively, with emphasis but without anger.

  “Ye misunderstood me, old chap,” the retired priest told him. “It’s not like that at all. I am not like that. Van der Kemp was not like that. Van der Kemp was a man of profound faith who felt in himself the missionary spirit of St Paul –”

  “That’s my point,” said Phila. “He was filled by the anxiety of salvation for others to the point of neglecting others’ points of view. Also, he forgot to live by the principles he wished others to adopt. That is usually how it goes with you guys, and your missionary lot. Van der Kemp preached against youthful brides, but could not contain the burning of his own loins for a seventeen-year-old Madagascan slave girl he kept as a concubine before marrying in his old age. He was already sixty when he absconded with her to Mauritius.”

  “Aye. And that sin tortured his soul as a thorn in his flesh.”

  “Don’t misunderstand me. Nyengane and the Reads were good people, probably the only real Christians among that missionary lot, hence amaXhosa also loved them. Myself I’m rediscovering our shared history. The other gang that came later, Wesleyans and Anglicans, were an imperialist bunch, who came with the white man’s burden of Christendom rather than Christianity. That is why the likes of Maqoma despised them with a vengeance while, at the same time, they liked Nyengane and the Reads. The colonial government of the time loathed Nyengane, and the Reads also, and no wonder. You cannot doubt the wisdom of the Xhosas in regarding missionaries as the precursors of British colonial and mercantile aggression, what today is called war capitalism in learned centres.”

  The priest was looking somewhat bewildered – doubtless he was more at home with Western philosophers and ice-cream – but Phila took no notice.

  “Be that as it may,” he went on, “when he could not make any converts among the Xhosas, whom he found too argumentative, Nyengane came here and found fertile ground among the destitute KhoiKhoi people, and Tshatshu’s people, whose chief had recently been murdered by Cuyler’s tragic trickery across the Gamtoos River. Naturally, your government, founded on crime, rewarded handsomely such murderous acts. Cuyler was appointed a landdrost of Uitenhage, whose jurisdiction covered this area.”

  “I –”

  “This scar you asked about?” Phila touched his nose, which was still tender. “I got this scar after a recent visit to Bethelsdorp, just a few kilometres north-west of where we are sitting. Did you know it was the first Christian mission station in this area? It was founded by Nyengane, founded to protect the KhoiKhoi against colonial violence. It still stands today, with a flavour of its inherited violence. As I indicated, Nyengane and the Reads were good people. But this does not mean they escaped the trappings of your condescending culture.”

  “I have been to that mission station,” said the priest. “I know the one you mean.” He seemed uncertain about where the conversation was going. “We cannot fault its foundations because of what the area turned into.”

  “I didn’t say I was. I am saying also to you that, where the natives of the land were left alone, in the rural areas, for instance, they developed organically into peaceful societies, if poor ones. But where they were aggressively touched by Western civilisation and its religion they developed into violent societies. Why?”

  The priest shook his head.

  “In any case, these were not really my thoughts when you found me; I shared them with you only because you asked,” said Phila. He got up and threw his ice-cream paper into a bin, causing a flurry of seagull wings. “I was actually thinking about a young man who walked these streets once, climbed these hills, with great sadness in his heart. His name was Tiyo Soga, and he lived a very short and tortured life.” Phila pointed out towards to the bay, where sunshine sparkled on the surface. “Having just got off the wharf, towing his white Scottish bride, he was welcomed by racial scorn and hatred. He was torn apart and cut to the core by the pain of seeing his proud nation, the Xhosas, falling into slavery. He composed one of the greatest Xhosa songs from the effect, Lizalis’ indinga lakho Thixo Nkosi … The Xhosas had just committed national suicide, urged by the superstition of Nongqawuse, by killing their cattle, their major sustenance. The superstitious call fell on fertile ground because the Xhosa cattle were dying in numbers already. The white people had brought with them the rinderpest, a disease that cut to the core of the Xhosa’s self-sustenance by killing the cattle their lives depended on. This confused them and made them extremely vulnerable. In a way it made them the nation of servants to white industry you see today. All I am saying is that the whole thing has too much coincidence about it not to see the intelligent design behind it. Now, whether we call that fate, or the God of Job, thus of the Hebrews, is immaterial to me. I just find it impossible to ignore.”

  The priest frowned. “The first error of the young, mate,” he said, “is being angry about history. Ye cannot change history, no matter how hard ye try.”

  “But you can recover what you lost from it. History is the father of the present and the grandparent of the future.”

  “History is like the created; it cannot be changed.”

  “But the present and the future it gave birth to can be changed by learning lessons from it.”

  “I don’t see what’s to be gained by being imprisoned by it.”

  “So you’d prefer us to erase the past realities of expropriation, slavery and colonialism from history to maintain the sham of civilisation?”

  “We can talk about this until the cows come home, mate,” the priest said, getting to his feet and stretching. “The most important thing is what we do with where we are now.” He held out his hand for Phila to shake. “Cheers! Lovely meeting you, mate. Employ less anger, and you’ll see a little more clearly.”

  There are no footpaths in the water, thought Phila.

  He sat for a while, turning over in his mind the historical events that gave birth to his cultural identity. He tried to think about the history taught in South African schools, all about the British, the Boers and Shaka Zulu; for whatever reason, Shaka was the black monarch included in their textbook. He now regarded it as little more than demonology, and a cult of villainy heaped against black people.

  Stale heat hung, solid as a wall. He lit a cigarette. He wiped his perspiring forehead with his T-shirt, drawing suspicious looks from a huddle of housewives walking past.

  He walked back to the city, aiming at passing the harbour, where he hoped to have a glass of beer.

  To Phila the harbour of Port Elizabeth was little more than a depot for car manufacturers to load assembled cars and ship them off to different regions of the southern hemisphere. Most of the space was taken by them, the fishermen and the yachts of the rich, in that order. It had no spirit beyond the industrial. In fact, almost everything about the city gave Phila the impression that it was attempting to provide a pedigree for a more consistent form of cultural conservatism that combined economic levelling with traditional and local ways of life.

  As he entered the harbour, he spotted the station tower clock, which was right only two times a day. He remembered that there was a heated, ongoing debate about tearing it down to
erect a statue of Mandela. As was always the case with these things in his country, the division on the debate were drawn along racial lines. The progeny of white settlers felt the clock was their heritage, and the black native felt no nostalgic association with it; if anything, it formed part of their jarring history. Then there were those people such as Phila who didn’t really give a toss, but just objected to the settler mentality the new government was adopting, of building statues on land stolen from natives, like the Statue of Liberty in New York. It also seemed extravagant and unnecessary to Phila for a nation that had not even been able to solve its basic needs, like feeding, housing and clothing itself. But then again he was not a politician.

  Phila sat down at one of the harbour bar’s wooden tables and took in the view: a forest of cranes rising into the air; the vast spread of the sea, smooth as a mirror, and something that never failed to impress him. Container ships lay at anchor in the harbour, cranes labouring the intermodal activity above them. Above, Prospect Hill – insouciant nature – distilled the essence of the activity ready to outlast all intent and time. He ordered calamari and chips for his lunch from an Indian waitress with an unassuming natural beauty. And added a draught of Windhoek lager.

  Phila could not get away from the Mandela statue thing. He began speculating where specifically it would be erected. He identified a spot he thought would be visible from afar against the bustling activity of the cranes. He thought about the words engraved at the base of the Statue of Liberty on the Island of Manhattan: Give us your tired hands, your foreign song … and all that jazz the majority of Americans no longer believed because of their growing fear of black immigrants – the irony of a nation founded by immigrants being afraid was not lost on anyone. He wondered what they would write on Mandela’s, something tired like Long walk to freedom, he presumed. What would be the best epithet to fit the area and its history? His thoughts were interrupted by the waitress bringing his food. She put it on the table and asked Phila if he was from around there. He never knew how to answer that question so he just smiled to imply either yes, or I don’t really wanna talk about it now. The waitress seemed to take the benign side of the assumption and smiled back before turning to another customer.