Broken River Tent Page 15

  Everything here belongs to the past, Phila thought, as he walked over to a table. In fact, the whole town matched his oneiric mood of detachment. He was pleased, after sitting down, to discover a racially mixed group that looked like students from the university seated at the back tables, where there were no betting machines but TV screens that showed local and foreign soccer matches. This lot carried a carousing atmosphere. They were loudly discussing something that involved Fanon and Biko because those names kept popping up. Phila called for a draught of Windhoek Lager, when the barman gave him attention. The barman looked to be a hard-core exercise and weight-lifting fanatic. His biceps and tattooed shoulders did not erase his effeminate face. He had a sense of contentment with his place in the world that Phila envied. He wondered what the barman thought of him; the restless kind with hyphenated identity, dust and anxiety on their faces.

  “Anything else?” the body nazi asked politely, wiping the table with a wet cloth.

  “No, I’m good.” Phila dropped back in exhaustion on the chair. He drank the beer without relish, gaining awareness of his thirst as he slaked it. He lit a cigarette, took a long drag and shot a column of smoke to the ceiling. The body nazi immediately pointed to the no smoking sign behind, and directed him to the smoking area, which was where the students were sitting. After an hour or so, into the dregs of his second draught, Phila found himself thinking about Nandi, knowing very well it would be impossible for him to drive, as he was getting drunk already. The thoughts took him back to the days of their youth, of intense hope, fear, ambition, anxiety and, lately, dread. He was surprised by the depth of fondness he felt for her. He thought about the requirements that would keep him in the City of Saints, as they called Grahamstown. He would need to adopt new hobbies to amuse himself, pretend that its farm spirit atmosphere didn’t bother him and, after fifty, start chasing after student skirts to prove his failing vitality was still in élan, and with that earn Nandi’s resentment. Unless she herself would be keeping a student Ben 10 to plumb her pipes. He didn’t feel much attraction to that life.

  He ordered another drink to break his chain of thought. Everyone became increasingly expansive with the passing time. Phila, hyper-analytical as always, lent his ear to the students’ discussion. The white one was overcompensating by his knowledge of Biko’s I Write What I Like, although he seemed to have memorised rather than internalised it. His speeches were peppered with unacknowledged Biko quotes. The girl among them, mostly quiet and slightly embarrassed when the white dude spoke – denoting to Phila that he must be her boyfriend – was more intelligent. She kept driving the discussion to what she called the ‘existential paradox’ in Fanon’s work. It pleased Phila that she was also quoting Kierkegaard, who identified the paradox of achievement requiring failure, and flight from anguish involving a deeper anguish. Phila shared the girl’s suspicion of Senghorian Négritude, which conveniently wanted blackness to be subsumed into the light of white civilisation to prove its worth. In fact, the thing Phila respected from men like Césaire, Fanon, Du Bois, Biko etc, was the manner in which they disguised their hope with anger. But Phila had realised a long time ago that he did not share their hope, that his world outlook was too bleak. His only salvation was the fact that he not only accepted God’s silence but understood it also. And so his faith in humanity was based on God, not humans who squashed his flickering flame. Even if, with Job, now and then he wondered when God was going to return his camels and daughters, he accepted as necessary for a creature like him the inability to comprehend divine reasoning with equanimity if not humility. His eagerness was more for the fireside chat in God’s house than this perishing house-of-clay feet.

  The short student who liked using convoluted terms walked to the counter to order another round. On his way back to their table he invited Phila to join in a toast – although he didn’t say to what. Out of curiosity Phila joined them.

  “Nostrovia!” The students cheered before drinking their vodkas. Of course he had to introduce himself, buy most of the rounds later on, and engage in pseudo-philosophical discussions that exhausted him. When the girl asked what he thought about the existential crisis he admitted that the fact that we are alive at all was a crisis when not looked at from a religious point of view, which saw life as gift. Tactically extricating himself from the discussion, he added, “But I’ve not yet thought things beyond that, if I ever will.”

  “Rightly so, my man!” the overcompensating student loudly declared, giving Phila a high-five, which seemed to seal his acceptance into the gang. “Anything else is a distraction from the rich who want to keep us docile.” This was followed by a roar of laughter. They were all intent on polishing off the bottle of whisky Phila had bought, and looked set to continue into the early morning hours.

  At some later stage the overcompensating white boyfriend directed another question to Phila, who was by then quite tipsy. “Would it not be far easier to just cash in the ticket, if all the fuss is only about that?” Phila had not really caught what the ‘about that’ part was about but decided to play along anyway.

  “Ah! The operative word being easy. Far too easy. Some of us have a bigger problem than that. We’re interested in this world even when we can’t stand it – especially when we can’t stand it.”

  There was momentary silence while the students tried to make sense of what he’d said, followed by a chorus of laughter, indicating that they had either missed his point or understood it far too well.

  Feeling privileged and ill at ease, Phila left them. It was after two in the morning. His favourite overcompensating dude lay on the lap of his girlfriend with the wind knocked out of him.

  When he got to his car he softly hummed his favourite poem from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon while fiddling to open the car door:

  Were my destiny not prepared by gods from getting more than its share, my heart, outstripping my tongue, would be expressing these things. But as it is, it mutters in pain in the dark, not expecting ever to accomplish anything in time, though my mind is on fire…

  ‘Mortal that you are, do not try to be wiser than gods.’

  It could only be Maqoma.

  Phila adjusted the position of his car seat to recline. Smoking a pipe, Maqoma regarded the drunk Phila with amused indulgence. Phila looked around furtively before answering, fearing that some of the students might have followed him. He didn’t want to lower their regard of him.

  ‘Since you come from the gods, or with the gods, or whatever you come with, why don’t you enlighten me?’

  ‘I listened to you debate with those students. I think you are still to realise that on this side of life the best you can hope for is perspective. The sum of truth is beyond human capability, especially those still caught up in time.’

  ‘What are you doing here then?’

  ‘Helping your perspective; clearing the fog so you may see well. Gather to yourself the flowering fruits while time permits. There comes a time, so to say, when you can only be what you’ve become without possibility of change or self-invention.’ Maqoma said this with startling intensity.

  ‘Feels like I’m Nietzsche’s fool, trying to drink the sea.’

  ‘Give to the language of your soul the virtue of fidelity, and keep your thoughts ahead of your tongue. Put kindness in your heart and honesty in your ways. The rest shall be added unto you according to need. And always be true to what you’ve heard and seen here. Always be true.’

  Phila felt something solemn and wise was happening to him, but he did not know how to interpret nor profit from it. ‘I see you’re in a philosophic mood today. I know what I don’t know, and the silence of God, though I accept it, terrifies me sometimes; that’s when I don’t …’ He could not think of a single thing to say.

  ‘Find a way to live comfortably with your cloud of unknowing, but not complacently. In a way, we are in closer position than you think. Imagine you had drowned in the river and came out on the other side only to realise you have lost all your senses but can
discern, more sharply and more urgently, everything in one permanent moment. That is what being dead feels like.’

  ‘Whoah, whoah! Were you not the one who told me to be wary of drowning people, because they take down with them whatever they can hold onto? You even made an example about Nxele who drowned with our nation. Are you saying something different now? Please be consistent.’

  ‘The worst of it is not being able to feel time. Nothing is more isolating than that for a fledgeling soul, fresh into the dead moment that is its rising into eternity,’ Maqoma solemnly answered.

  ‘You mean to tell me there’s no companionship where you are?’

  ‘I mean you arrive blind there too, and you must slowly acquire ways to recognise things by immersing yourself in their essence. We live as souls, with personalities we acquired here because we’re not corporeal. But you don’t need to know all of this because it doesn’t concern you for now.’

  Maqoma kept silent for a while, allowing for the revelation to sink in, before continuing on another topic. ‘I never liked this place. In our era it was the seat of colonial oppression. I always enter it with trepidation.’

  ‘Nothing much to it now, except a Supreme Court and the university,’ said Phila. ‘But you’re right on another level. There’s always that restless austerity I don’t like about this town, as if someone is planning something against you – your doom. In any case, I don’t like strange cities. The noises they make I cannot comprehend; I don’t know their meaning.’

  Maqoma’s vitreous eyes were trained on the street lights. ‘Our doom was contrived from this place,’ he said.

  ‘I’m planning to see my friend Nandi here, the psychologist. Your doom might be at hand again.’

  ‘Not really. I told you I will never make you do anything you don’t want to do. I don’t have those powers.’

  ‘And I suppose that makes you an innocent party in all this.’

  The ensuing silence was interrupted by a bergie knocking on Phila’s car window with an extended hand. Phila rolled the window down while trying to fish for coins in his ashtray. He handed them to the man, who left without thanking him. Phila kept the window unrolled, to let in some air, reminding himself of the crucial need not to let his left hand know what his right was doing.

  ‘I’m getting on a couch anyway.’

  Maqoma gave Phila a mischievous smile. ‘If you ask me, you just want to see her, and perhaps see if you can get into her pants again.’

  ‘And I’m supposed to give to a dog that bites me?’ Phila rolled the window up.

  ‘Let’s talk about something else then. In our era, anyone who fancied some popularity called himself a prophet. The diviner business boomed.’

  ‘As it does today also,’ Phila interjected. ‘Our people tend to go white, mystical and religious when under tremendous national strain.’

  ‘Indeed! Very perceptive of you to notice. Along with mystical longings went shouting and jabbering in the streets, the declaring of visions and all manner of things.’

  ‘Nothing much has changed, believe me. They just call themselves born again now, and rant in the name of Christ instead of Dal’ubomi – which, I guess, is the same person.’

  ‘Those who had run their lives foul went to the wild for a few days, ate wild spinach, honey and locusts; came back calling themselves prophets –’

  ‘– or men of God, in this era,’ Phila interjected again. ‘They feed people snakes, make them eat grass and drink petrol and chemical detergents, in the stupid hope of cleansing themselves internally.’

  ‘Then we were all supposed to drop everything and listen to what they were telling us. I became impatient with most of them. Makhanda, alias Nxele, and Ntsikana were no exceptions.’

  ‘Tell me more about Makhanda – I mean, since we’re in his territory. This municipality has been renamed after him now. I hear he got his madness from a white man, a priest or something?’

  ‘That’s the thing about madness people do not notice; it is contagious. I was wondering why his name is written on everything I come across around here. Have they named anything after me?’

  ‘A tourist route around Stutterheim, I am told, but nothing much else. Sorry, man. Public opinion is very fickle. You must not read too much into that. King David didn’t have a single book named after him in the Bible, yet his name appears almost in all that came after him.’

  ‘Not even at the Ngcwenxa territory and Ngqegqe?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I might be wrong.’

  ‘Yet they honour commoners like Makhanda with a whole district?’

  ‘Well, we have this democracy thing now, which means princes and kings have no real hold over us, just a ceremonial one. If the majority of people think Makhanda contributed more than you for our freedom, then his name gets to be on top of yours.’

  Maqoma made a noise of disgust. ‘Contributed more than me for the freedom of our people? Makhanda? He killed thousands of our people with lies and stubbornness! Makhanda was the son of a commoner who worked for a white farmer. That’s where he picked up the white man’s tongue and religion. He learnt a lot by observing, whetting his curiosity on the ways of the white man here eRhini.’ He paused. ‘Are you sure they have not named anything after me? Surely I did more to keep our nation off the shackles of the white man’s ways than Makhanda? In any case, why should care, as if I need my vanity to be bolstered by mortals?’

  ‘I’ll ask around. But why do you care? I thought you were not vain?’

  ‘This is different. Nxele’s strength was always in persuasive lies. Like all liars, he sought to mystify his origins. And he had strong powers of speech, providing creative answers, not necessarily proper solutions, to the things that dumbfounded the nation. I’m afraid you lot have fallen for his tricks too. He always was able to endear himself in the eyes of the people, being a learned man in the white man’s ways. When he gained a substantial following he started seeing things in his own light. The missionaries who had initially showered him with praise could not stomach it when Nxele saw himself as the brother of their Christ too, demanding equal status with them. They wanted him to know his place. When it became clear that they’d never admit him as their equal Nxele, correctly, receded from them and established his own following.’

  ‘That, in our eyes, makes him the founder of the Pan Africanist Movement. Do tell – have you met Steve Biko down – or up – there, if I may digress? I myself am of more Black Consciousness persuasion, a movement founded by Soga but developed by Biko in our land.’

  ‘What does it make me, who devoted his entire life to preserving the independence of our people? Anyway, I am neither down nor up there. I am just in the ether.’

  ‘Whatever. Did you meet Bantu?’

  ‘Yes. Quite a feisty, headstrong young man.’

  ‘Perhaps you could bring him with you sometime? I would like to chat with him.’

  ‘I’m assigned to you, not Biko.’

  ‘Touchy!’

  ‘As I was saying. Nxele started with the white man’s religion, which he picked on a Dutch farm his mother worked on. But when white missionaries refused to accept him as their equal he began the process of ukuthwasa, with the usual hysterical symptoms that gained him a following as a flamboyant clairvoyant: nervous paroxysms, dreams, visions and so forth. When these became too frequent he went to live in the woods and fields, refusing to eat any prepared food. He was of the view that prepared food was contaminated by the sins of those who prepared it. When he had been with the missionaries he preached against polygamy, witchcraft, adultery, incest, warfare and so on. But on his own he started saying different things, peppered with mystical ravings. The people took him as being possessed. They seized him and gagged him, put a rope around his neck to hang and burn him as a witch. That was when a diviner called Qalanga saw signs of ukuthwasa in his madness and rescued him. With that he turned a madman into a diviner and, eventually, a prophet of doom.’

  ‘I’m kind of tired of this ukut
hwasa thing in your stories. Didn’t you people have anything more interesting?’

  ‘I’m trying to make you understand what’s been happening to you also.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The spirit of the ancestors sometimes chooses to come into the individual they feel would be the best instrument to transmit the message they want to convey.’

  ‘Don’t freak me out, man.’

  ‘There’s nothing nefarious about it; the interpretation is still yours. They just concentrate on the visions provided by incidence and opportunity. Remember when you dreamt about being assailed by a swarm of bees?’

  ‘Yes. Wait. How do you know that? And one of them stung me?’

  ‘That was me. In fact three of us were allowed to sting you: myself, Soga and Mqhayi. They will take over after I am done. This is the infusion into essence I was telling you about, my soul into the bee essence. Where we are now we’re being taught to infuse ourselves into the divine essence, more like seeing through the godhead.’

  ‘And with me? Us?’

  ‘You and the bee are a slightly different thing, not as comprehensive as assuming divine essence, just your physical nature. Your body, of course, takes strain from running both our minds, hence the headaches you keep experiencing. But they’ll go away as soon as we’re done. Meantime, let’s continue with Nxele – he’s part of your syllabus for now. Nxele came back from the school of witch-doctoring speaking of Mdalidiphu, god the creator of the deep, whose son is Tayi. He said his god was angry with white people for killing his son Tayi.’

  ‘That must have excited your lot?’