Broken River Tent Read online

  Phila bent down to kiss her more. They crossed the street hand in hand.

  Nandi opened the door after a jingle of keys. She went to the kitchen, while Phila went to the living room to connect his iPod to the music system. He felt like the blues. Nandi came back with two glasses of whisky – one neat and another with an ice block and soda water. She handed the neat one to Phila as the song began.

  “Oh no! Not sad music. I thought we were playing happy tonight.”

  “Sad? Blues, sad? Where do you get such a notion? Blues is what Albert Murray calls the ‘music for good times earned in adversity’. It is the tool of the muse that feeds the subconscious. The blues, man.”

  Phila took Nandi by the waist to slowly dance to the shrill old voice that was recorded on American plantations.

  O Lawd, de cotton am so grassy, de work am so hard, and de sun am so hot dat I b’lieve dis darky am called to preach!

  As they moved they found themselves humming along to the banjo rhythm.

  “The blues, man, is the sigh of God in human spirit,” Phila softly murmured on Nandi’s neck. “It is the testimony of the indomitable human spirit under a black skin. The blues, man. How can you call the blues sad?” They were still dancing slow, and Phila was almost whispering in Nandi’s ear. “The blues is not a cry of those too dumb to avoid strife, as the slave masters thought in the plantations. The blues is the response of human spirit to the fallen nature of man; a burning smoke of the transcendental spirit to its maker. Not a cry of the one who has lost control. The blues is the power of control by the one who has lost hope in human affairs but keeps discipline to the promised hope of the divine. The blues finds all tools, including music and language, inadequate; the spirit strips bare to become the blues. The blues is the condition of hope for the hopeless and the price the spirit pays to rise to higher consciousness. The blues – shit, man! The blues …”

  The song ended and they sat on the sofa. Nandi lay down with her head on Phila’s lap, who was seeing diamonds against the lights.

  “What is the name of his play again?” Phila asked as they left the flat to go to the theatre.

  “Thuthula wamaRharhabe.”

  “Interesting.” Phila’s emotional nausea, mixed with the babalaza from the evening before, quickened with the busy festival streets.

  “We can watch something else if you like?”

  “Thuthula is fine.” Phila cut her short, like a blade that went through his own heart too.

  They walked on in silence, Phila too fast and Nandi deliberately strolling.

  “Are you coming?” Phila turned round, frowning.

  “Are we in a hurry?” Nandi, dawdling, gave him an amused smile. His moods always amused instead of irritated her.

  Phila knew he was being silly and unreasonable but could not help himself. He continued at his moody pace.

  The town was a warren of marketplaces and bars. The closer they got to the taxi rank, the more crowded the streets became. Phila, irritated with everything now, turned to look for Nandi. He could not see her. It was only then that it occurred to him that he didn’t actually know the way to the theatre. He asked the first person he thought would know and was informed that he had passed it about four blocks back. It irritated him further to find Nandi waiting for him at the entrance with a sarcastic smile on her face. They went and sat in the cafeteria without really talking to each other. Phila ordered an Americano, and Nandi a skinny latté. He regretted not having enough foresight to bring a book or something to while away the twenty minutes before the show. He had lost interest a while ago in the vacuous gossip of newspapers. Another complication developed after he finished his coffee. There was no way he was going to ask Nandi where the toilets were and conflate her already ballooned ego. He stood to walk left, hoping to meet someone he could ask for toilet directions.

  “The toilets are that way,” said Nandi, pointing in the opposite direction he was heading.

  He wanted to deflate her by telling her he wasn’t looking for the toilet but he knew it was pointless. She knew him well enough to know that coffee always went straight through him.

  “We might as well go in,” she said with irritating smugness when he got back. He plotted her downfall in his mind as they walked into the swallowing dark of the theatre.

  Half an hour into the show Phila heard a familiar voice.

  ‘This is not what happened,’ Maqoma whispered. ‘They’re making Ndlambe seem innocent in the whole thing.’

  ‘You and your beef with Ndlambe,’ Phila whispered back. He felt Nandi turn to look at him.

  ‘Ndlambe was a cunning man. He had no designs for giving up power when Ngqika came of age.

  ‘He assured his rule by a prodigality of generous gestures.’

  ‘Could we talk about it later on?’ Phila replied in a quiet voice, feeling uneasy, although by now he should have known better.

  ‘Ndlambe made himself colourful in the eyes of the people, bribing them by relaxing things like cattle fines and so forth. He wanted to live in their mouths even after death. These people are showing none of that.’

  ‘From what I heard,’ Phila whispered fiercely, ‘Ndlambe was a good chief. Which is more than can be said for your father, Ngqika, especially when he was young. Ndlambe fortified his chieftainship by driving the menacing chiefdoms west of the Fish River, like the Gqunukhwebe.’

  ‘Why did people want him out then?’ Maqoma hissed.

  ‘Because they were superstitious and thought it bad luck not to be led by a blood chief.’

  ‘Ndlambe was a divisive menace.’

  ‘And besides, he was like a father to Ngqika, raised him. And Ngqika betrayed him by sleeping with one of his wives – Thuthula.’

  ‘Fathers do not try to steal crowns away from their children, or get infatuated with their girlfriends. Thuthula was Ngqika’s girlfriend first. They were sweethearts growing up.

  ‘Ndlambe got infatuated with her and put her into his seraglio, tried to legitimise it by calling her his wife to spite Ngqika.’

  ‘Too many versions about this story of Thuthula for my liking.’

  ‘Oh, but she was a beauty, with a calm face no man ever grew tired of. Ndlambe seduced her. That sowed the seed of our tribal destruction. When Ngqika reclaimed his woman other chiefs saw it as immoral, saying it was like taking his mother to bed. That was how Ndlambe manufactured support for himself. War broke out. Ndlambe was defeated and taken prisoner by Ngqika. When he was a prisoner his followers smuggled messages of rebellion, telling Ndlambe to, “Always keep your leopardskin and goats in sight,” because they would be rescuing him soon. In due time they stole him in a daring act that led to daylight combat against the few guards assigned to hold him. Ndlambe and his followers fled across iNxuba.’

  ‘And thus amaNdlambe, your perpetual nemesis, were formed.’

  ‘A little more complicated than that, but yes. And about two winters before our last war with amaNdlambe, a cloud of locusts covered our land like a blanket of doom, making the skies quake with their sinister whirring wings. Those nefarious insects devoured the whole year’s harvest in a matter of days. The diviners, ever ready to allocate evil to nature’s idiosyncrasies, saw in them an omen of terrible things to come. They attributed this to the incestuous relationship Ngqika had entered into with Thuthula. They said by becoming bewitched with Thuthula he had allowed a curse upon the tribe. “Calamities we know,” they said. “This is not a calamity but a curse.” To exacerbate the situation Ngqika’s youthful lack of prudence made him sack most of the councillors who were critical of him. He abolished Mxhamli from office and created what today we call ixhiba, a corporate body of councillors. Mostly these were made up of his lackeys. He laid grievous yoke upon the people, introducing things like seignorial taxes on domestic stock, wanting to acquire the inheritance of all commoners who died without heirs in their direct line, and so forth. As a result more disgruntled people crossed iNxuba to follow Ndlambe.’

  ‘Verily!”
Phila attempted sarcasm by mocking Maqoma’s pattern of speech. ‘There’re only a handful of stories, and even those are just variations on legends and folklore.’

  The lights came on. It was interval. Maqoma was nowhere to be seen.

  Nandi and Phila filed outside with the rest of the patrons. They sat at the bar, where three of Nandi’s colleagues joined them, the bespectacled professor and his partner from the previous evening and a skinny looking redhead, as the waitress delivered their drinks. Phila was slightly disappointed Rebecca hadn’t made it. Because she was born in Maine, in the US, they had started talking about shad fishing towards the end of dinner and he’d have liked to continue that conversation.

  “So how is the play so far?” the professor was eager to know, although as it turned out the man seemed far more interested in telling them his opinion of the public reception than hearing theirs. When he finally stopped talking, Phila tried to think of something interesting to say about the play but couldn’t really come up with anything substantial. Quoting Maqoma he said: “There are some historical inaccuracies, but the humour makes up for them.”

  “It’s a play, not a documentary,” the professor said, rather rudely, with a grin. Then he went on, without irony, to teach Phila about what he called the “inner life of Xhosa culture”. Phila remembered the dude had been introduced as a philologist. He had unified theories that were supposed to explain everything. He decided, for Nandi’s sake, to be polite.

  “I hear what you say,” he said, “but the major error is not in humanising history, but in misrepresenting known facts.”

  Phila glanced over at the Xhosa royal house representatives who had been invited to the opening, and who were at a table close to theirs. They were deep in discussion and he wondered what they were saying.

  “You people need to learn to differentiate between drama and history,” the professor persisted. He had a voice like a bassoon.

  Phila, as usual, switched off after the “you people” thing and took advantage of the lull created by the returning waitress to change the topic. “I’ll have another double,” he said, gulping down the remains of his first.

  The professor raised his bushy eyebrows. “We’re certainly fond of our Russian Mule, aren’t we?” he said.

  “Leave him be, he’s better company when he’s had a few,” Nandi said.

  The situation felt irredeemable now in Phila’s mind, and as such the professor’s sarcasm didn’t affect him. But knowing that Nandi was addressing him through the professor – this offended him.

  “I’d like a glass of white wine, please,” Nandi ordered without looking at the waitress, but keeping a steady eye on Phila.

  “You seem fidgety, Phila,” said the professor, tightening the screw.

  “I’ve a lot on my mind,” answered Phila, feeling Nandi’s eyes on him.

  “Nandi tells me you’ve some problems – somatic delusions, I think?”

  Phila wasn’t fooled by the mock pretence of care in the man’s voice. He shot a look at Nandi, more in disappointment than anger. There and then, something broke between them. Nandi was looking down, in shame and mounting anger against her colleague. Phila knew better than to take the bait, so he kept quiet as he sipped his drink, and the group changed the subject. At Nandi’s insistence, they began instead to scrutinise the play. It baffled Phila to learn that, “The script was written in the shade of Plato’s moving image of eternity …” and that it spoke of “death as the Freudian aim of life and desire to return to the safety of the mother’s womb …”

  After a while of this, he felt an attack of Kafkaesque anxiety, looking now and then for an appropriate moment to say something so as not to be regarded as boring. He wanted to be neutral without being hostile. The problem, he thought to himself, was that you had to be rudely assertive to speak in such groups.

  Nandi looked at him. “You’re awfully quiet, Phila?”

  “I’m keeping watch over the dead.”

  There was uneasy laughter around the table.

  To cope, Phila assigned a theme song to the babblings as he drifted into his own dark corner – Duke Ellington’s Mood Indigo. Henceforth he wore an idiotic smile, occasionally nodding, pretending to be impressed with their talk.

  In no time Maqoma came to fill in the gaps. Phila was surprised at how relieved he was to hear Maqoma’s voice. It also concerned him that perhaps he was not just becoming anti-social but was crossing the divide, becoming more at home with the dead than the living.

  ‘That was just about the time Ntsikana came to our tribe. Ntsikana had been born of our tribe before his father, Gaba, left with the faction that followed Ndlambe. He got into trouble for disputing Nxele’s prophecies among amaNdlambe.

  ‘Ntsikana openly disputed prophecies that ran with the bent of Nxele on authority “of the thing that had possessed me, stirring against things Nxele is saying”. The thing was telling Ntsikana that the “Cape Corps would destroy Xhosa warriors with gunfire if they went to war with white people.” Ntsikana painted such a gruesome picture of death that most people were relieved just to get rid of him, as though he was the carrier of the deaths he was prophesying. This hoisted Nxele’s petard among amaNdlambe. Ntsikana came to us in disgrace when Nxele’s followers made it extremely difficult for him to stay.’

  ‘Your times were quite confusing.’

  ‘Yes! It is told that one day Ntsikana woke up early, as was his custom, to watch the sunrise. He saw the rays of the sun leaning strangely against the entrance of his hut. When he came close they came to rest on him. “Do you see what I’m seeing?” Ntsikana asked his servant boy, who was separating calves from heifers in front of his house. The confused boy replied in the negative. Three times Ntsikana asked the boy and three times he got the same answer. The rays left Ntsikana, proceeding to the cattle enclosure, where they came to rest on his favourite ox, where they stayed for about as long as they’d stayed on him. Ntsikana sat next to his kraal for a long time contemplating these happenings.

  ‘At the hour when the sun reaches its highest peak, Ntsikana went inside his hut to prepare for a tribal dance taking place in the village that afternoon. When he left for the dance he was still feeling a little queasy.

  At the tribal dance, an uncanny spirit carried him into a mild trance. The moment he recovered he stopped and sat down, feeling queasier. He recovered when the spirit momentarily left him. Having caught his breath and feeling better, he stood up to dance again. The same thing happened. Three times this happened, until he gave up and called his entourage to accompany him home. When they were about to cross the river he had an irresistible impulse to cleanse himself. Stooping over the waters, he washed the ochre off his face, threw his beautiful leopardskin kaross away and demanded they give him something less pretentious. People were astonished. They asked: “What has fallen over Norhongo, the heifer that stints its milk?”

  ‘Ntsikana answered them by saying, “There’s an insistent voice within me that says, ‘Let there be prayer! Let everything bow its knees to Dal’ubomi.’

  ‘When they reached the house Ntsikana told them again about, “The thing that has entered me, commanding me and all of you to pray ceaselessly. It tells me we must convert from our sinful ways and not listen to that liar, Nxele, who is misguiding people.” His thought developed away from Nxele’s and moved closer to Christianity, which caused him a lot of troubles in Ndlambe’s land as Nxele then was at the peak of his power.’

  ‘And you guys, amaNgqika, distrusted Ntsikana also, thinking he must be Ndlambe’s spy when he came to you.’

  ‘Exactly! He spread the prophecy thing too thickly for my liking, screaming all the time that, “The people are being lied to by Nxele at Ndlambe’s place.” I thought it was one of Ndlambe’s ploys.’

  ‘But Ngqika trusted him?’

  ‘Well, my father’s credulity took Ntsikana to heart from the start. By taking Ntsikana under his protection he also brought us more to the centre of the controversy.’

&
nbsp; ‘And then Ntsikana went around converting people to Christianity?’

  ‘Which made me hate him more.

  ‘His first converts were the councillors of our courts, men like Noyi and Soga, the grandfather of your friend Zisani.’

  ‘Zisani? You mean Tiyo?’

  ‘His name is Zisani. It was his mother, who fell under Ntsikana’s influence, who named him Tiyo – after Nyengane.’

  ‘Oh … Van der Kemp’s name was Theodore … hence Tiyo? In the manner the Xhosas like to Xhosa-ise English words?’

  ‘Exactly. Soga’s father, Jotello, was my coeval. When my father married Ntsikana to Soga’s sister Nomkhini, I knew we were done for. Soga was one of my father’s trusted courtiers, who had secretly been given the task of investigating Ntsikana’s sayings. I was impressed by my father’s sagacity in this matter until I discovered that Soga was already a convert of Ntsikana’s. Where’s the sense in sending the convert to investigate the converter? The whole thing was rigged.

  ‘As I expected, Soga came back on fire with Ntsikana’s religion, and wasted no time proselytising too. My father, wavering, spineless character that he was by then, became one of the initial converts. I almost despaired for our tribe. They handed Ntsikana a dwelling place near Soga’s, between the villages of Thwathwa and Mankazana, which was subsequently called a sacred place. From there Ntsikana took hold of Ngqika’s palace, from the royal palace at Tyumi and Gwali to beyond Nciba. We were everywhere plagued with kaffir pseudo-Christians, people turning to the “Word”. When Soga came to report to my father he said: “The Word has given birth out of our rocks. KwaGqoboka rocks are flowing water, the desert has given birth to rivers in the wilderness.” I could have easily killed him but for my father’s credulity. The Ngqikas were possessed.’

  ‘You must admit, though, that Ntsikana’s teaching had a moral effect on the land.’

  ‘Granted. Men whose lives had been base and dissolute changed their habits and punctiliously practised the duties of the tribe. Everyone talked about belonging to Ntsikana’s denomination. They spoke in mystical fashion about the thing that had entered them, preaching the message that people should pray so that sins might be forgiven, while pointing to “the great … who art in heaven”. People spent their days praying on mountaintops with Ntsikana. He composed songs, one of which they called Thou Art Thou. Let me remember how it went: