Broken River Tent Page 2

  No stream runs higher than its source.

  Parents are natural banks and channels for the run of their children. Without banks, the water becomes a swamp that breeds infectious diseases. Channels that are too deep become choking dungeons where children can’t breathe, or can’t take a better view of the world. Channels of proper depth and right direction carry their children as tributaries to the fertile depths of the ocean, where life gestates life, and deep calls unto deep!

  Phila’s parents divorced when he was in his teens. He was now about to crown forty. He and his father had rarely seen each other, maybe once a year if they were lucky to bump into each other in town. Those accidental meetings were awkward, with both parties wishing to part as soon as possible after perfunctory greetings. But the harsh finality of his father’s absence in death confused Phila.

  Memories evoke a strong sense of incompleteness.

  Phila’s head felt clubbed as he walked to the bus stop, and his ears registered each step with a dull, dumb-dumb force against a water-filled tank. He didn’t feel grief per se. Remorse, rather. Remorse for things left unsaid and undone. Remorse for running out of time.

  Seated inside the bus, he opened his book where he had left off, the section about fate. What is fate, he thought to himself. A debunking of coincidences? The presence of driven circumstances beyond one’s anticipation? He tried reading about it, but mental and emotional fatigue fractured his concentration. It was as though he was entering an airy lightness between consciousness and sub-consciousness as his mind hiccupped into a no man’s land.

  He was aware of someone standing before him. He saw a stocky, muscular, prune-faced man with a cadaverous visage, wearing traditional Xhosa clothes and a leopardskin blanket thrown over them. The man quietly sat down next to him but Phila didn’t feel the seat give. Try as he did to move, Phila’s body stayed motionless as a jug. He suspected things were not following their natural order. The man, now seated next to him, wore voetskoene on his feet – nobody wore those things anymore – with his gnarled toenails protruding. Phila gave the man a slide-along, bent-down look. Something about the stranger looked familiar.

  ‘I came to this world when our nation was tottering towards serfdom.’ The man spoke with the heavy inflections of the rural Xhosa, to Phila slightly insular.

  ‘I’ve asked myself, time and time again, how could a couple of scum from the ocean manage to defeat and reduce us in such a short period to being refugees and beggars in our own land?’

  Phila was a little startled by the statement but he kept quiet. Possibly interpreting this as encouragement to continue with his speech, the man went on. ‘My cradle was of eutectic execrations. Misfortune dogged me from the start. It bred murder in a gall of bitterness and a bond of wickedness in me.’ Phila, whose Xhosa was demotic, found himself struggling to understand the old-fashioned construction, the unusual manner in which the man used words.

  ‘If you don’t mind, sir,’ he interrupted, more bored than polite. ‘I’m not having a good day myself. I have a lot of stuff occupying my head right now.’

  But the man continued regardless. ‘I was instructed to tell you about my life. To learn you the truth.’

  ‘You mean to teach me the truth.’

  ‘No – to learn you the truth,’ the man repeated, unapologetic. ‘The language of this world shall know and fall short to convey the meaning I am trying to impress on you. But we must both be patient. Everyone – children, especially – needs a secret world in which to live things that have not yet been. This is where the power of the imagination resides. This is what informs the character and personality.’

  Phila looked out of the window at St George’s Park, where the Nelson Mandela Museum had hung a banner advertising a George Pemba exhibition. Pemba had been born in Korsten, the Sophiatown of PE. The banner said the exhibition was in honour of his posthumous reception of the Order of Ikhamanga. Phila was trying to recall what type of flower ikhamanga was when the man interrupted his thoughts.

  ‘Sometimes you need to be invisible for people to see you,’ the man said. ‘Like now you are beginning to see your father. When you have the strength you require, after I have departed from your vision, you must tell of things you heard from me. Of tales of the old country. Of things not of this world but living forever in the hearts of its people. You must tell of the River People. Of how they haunted the heart of our nation into self-destruction. Tell of the ocean’s eye that opened to let in the people of wheat-coloured hair who brought a double-edged sword to our land. This is the only way you shall learn the truth of yourself. But you must first believe in your heart.’

  Phila’s mouth was salty from the anxiety and fear he tasted from the man’s words. The calf of his left leg was shaking. He averted his eyes and looked out the window again, at the orange fuzz of street lights that were beginning to flicker outside. Two teenage boys, in cricket white attire, were racing across in a radius line by which the bus was circumferencing the park. They were obviously from Grey High School, the first black kids to attend such posh schools. They had the confidence to match it by the way they threw their bags behind the driver’s seat after clipping their bus tokens. Panting, they continued with whatever it was they’d been talking about before they’d had to face the bus. They spoke with the nasal timbre termed the Model C accent in South Africa. Phila’s interest in them faded with their voices. And with that grew his strange visitor’s voice.

  ‘Your side of life is to learn to control the use of your imagination to desire only goodness, which aligns you with the ultimate truth, the source of life, Dal’ubomi. When I was under the wheeling of time, like you, I was very unlucky. I was woken into maturity by thundering cannons and stuttering rifles. I spent my life writhing like a roped bull. That’s the fate Dal’ubomi dished me with the coming of white people in our land. Now I carry within myself a place of my own exile.’

  Phila looked around to see if any of the other passengers were privy to this Thespian performance. After he realised none could hear or see the old man he dropped his head on his lap. His first concern was that he might be losing his mind. Checking back with apprehension, he counselled himself into thinking straight. Tracing his mind back to the news of his father’s death, he comforted himself with the notion that he was just under extreme stress. Try as he might to put a distance between himself and this, by trying to concentrate on what he would cook for supper, the voice of the old man came back.

  ‘There were times in my life when everything that came to me was a source of misery. I was never given the opportunity to be my own self. Being born of royal blood in times of exceptional disquiet was my curse. I was groomed only to be a warrior. I knew very little beyond war. Its iron ate deeply into my spirit and flesh. In the end, what became more difficult for me was adjusting to peace; to fighting nothing. Outside war I was like an eagle without wings, clumsy with its awkward talons to scratch the itch. So I took a destructive path.’

  ‘Oh, for crying out loud!’ Phila threw his head on his knees again and tried to close his ears. But the old man continued narrating his story unabated.

  He used to think, he told Phila, his eyes narrowing, that his latent defect was being born of a weakling father in internecine times. ‘I was young then and ignorant of fate. Fate that pinned men to their doom. I had not properly learnt that we’re all like worms on the hook. Age confers a spirit of wisdom on a man.’

  The bus had now stopped outside the Greenacres Mall where the pollution of artifical light gave a mock festive mood with a garbage of screaming screens advertising electronic gadgets and women’s shampoo.

  When the white people first came, the old man continued, seemingly oblivious to everything around them, inside and outside the bus, they welcomed them, tried to learn their ways. He grew up under a person he called Khula, a white man who married his grandmother.

  The verbosity of light and the old man’s garrulousness were now getting Phila’s goat, but something told him anger wo
uld make things worse, so he tried placating the old man.

  ‘Look, this is really interesting, man, it really is,’ said Phila. ‘But I’m kind of in the middle of something right now. I’ve just learnt of my –’

  ‘The chief concern of mortal men is to keep their hold on life.’

  What the hell? The man was quoting Boethius?

  ‘As if this is the only life worth living.’ The old man finished the quote with an ease that went beyond disquieting Phila. This was freaking him out. They were now leaving Korsten, meaning next would be his own suburb.

  ‘This is the only life we know,’ Phila said, acting unconcerned.

  ‘The truth is, when white people came they took us by surprise. We were loosely organised tribal confederations, given to too much quarrelling among ourselves and against one another, and riling under the blind bondage of superstition.’

  ‘Amen to that.’ Phila attempted to be frivolous. ‘And since we’re quoting Boethius – “Luck is good luck to the man who bears it with equanimity.” Makawe amazulu ukuba ayasindwa yinyani!’

  He was preparing to leave, his attention on his stop coming up, but his joints were stiff and for some reason he struggled to get to his feet. The man jabbed him with a corner of his eye and Phila slumped back down again. Then the man did something even stranger. He translated what Phila had just said in Xhosa into German. ‘Bitte um Gerechtigkeit auch beim schlechten Aussiecht.’ That sent shivers down his spine. This apparition and now this Tower of Babel clamouring in his head – obviously they were connected but what did they mean? Was he going mad? Madness had always been what Phila feared most.

  If the man even noticed Phila’s anxieties, he disregarded them.

  ‘We had no precedent to follow in dealing with white people,’ he continued, as if he hadn’t been speaking German two minutes ago. ‘Other nations we understood. Arabs were our ancient visitors. The Quena, whom the white people call Otentottu, constantly found a home with us, constantly joining our tribes, intermingling and marrying …’

  ‘I hear you treated the Bushmen like trash,’ Phila succumbed.

  ‘I suppose you mean the hunting people who call themselves Kung? You must disabuse yourself from the habit of calling people by derogative terms. I do not even know why you call yourselves Xhosas. That was the name the Kung called us in anger. We never adopted it.’

  ‘I think it was the white people who adopted it for us. It has since stuck.’

  ‘We treated the Kung like trash only when they stole our cattle, but integrated them when they respected our customs. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Hermanus Matroos?’

  ‘Can’t say I have, and frankly I don’t –’ Phila tried to resume his aggressive sarcasm but got no chance as the man carried on.

  ‘A brave man for a runaway slave. We shall talk about him later. We had nothing against foreigners who respected our ways and didn’t just want to seize land from us. White people were different. They did not want to intermarry with us, they cheated us of our wealth, and generally held themselves with superior airs against our traditions. They found it beneath them to accept us as their equals.’

  From the curling of the man’s lip Phila spied reticent disillusionment.

  ‘Well, at the risk of generalising, nothing much has changed since. Why return? Didn’t find any tribes to lord in the netherland?’

  ‘Even my father, Ngqika, with all his cunning, ended up on the losing side where white people were concerned. While most Xhosa chiefs were still confounded by the coming of whites, Ngqika saw a gap. He sought to make white people his allies in the wars he was engaged in with the likes of Ndlambe. And what did that gain him? An addiction to white man’s liquor and an early grave, induced by a swollen liver. On top of that, he lost most of his land to the white men in any case. His friendship with them gained him no favours.’

  ‘Sounds familiar. Yourselves, you had taken the land from the Kung. Whites took from you.’ Phila had by now taken down his crock, as the Xhosas would say.

  The man appeared unperturbed by his tone. ‘Had we put aside our tribal differences,’ he said, ‘and recognised the common danger, stood together, we’d have stood a chance against the white people, no matter how many redcoats they brought from the sea. We knew the land better. We were beginning to exploit their greed by buying rifles and gunpowder from them, and we were generally numerous and agile.’

  ‘Ja, right!’

  The man seemed oblivious to Phila’s sarcasm. ‘In any case, no use crying over spilt milk. I’ve no need to justify myself. I’m done with prevarications and the elegant myths of historical lies. I had enough time to think when the white man incarcerated me in the wet limestone desert.’

  ‘You mean Robben Island, hee? Man! Were you alive now, you’d be famous! You would become a president or something; or at least a minister of something. Ask Mandela.’ Phila resumed a frivolous tone but the man didn’t appreciate his humour.

  ‘Mandela went there way after my time.’

  ‘So I’ve heard. You guys were pioneers. Robben Island was the University of Life for recalcitrant kaffirs, hee?’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘That’s what I’ve heard. If you don’t mind my asking – what does an incarcerated person do on the island with his time? Speak to the wind? I mean, I’ve always wanted to ask you lot, Mandela, Napoleon, St John – at least we know what St John did, he jotted his visions down into becoming Revelations in the Bible.’

  Clearly the man wasn’t going to rise to any of the bait Phila was offering.

  ‘With the wind the degrees of fellowship are levelled. All distinction is obliterated and things are naked as they should be. Your conscience becomes the only tribunal. The lesson I understood late in that miserable dungeon is that it is better to listen to the wind than to brave the storm.’ He stopped to contemplate his point.

  ‘Sorry I asked.’ Phila reverted to sarcasm again.

  ‘I, Maqoma, son of Ngqika, have seen and done horrid things, things that nearly broke my spirit. I’ve languished under a dark roof; talked to parliaments of owls in that dungeon; slept in the flummoxing environment of screeching bats. But …’

  Maqoma. So that’s who he was. Phila had thought he looked familiar.

  ‘That’s the rod of Victoria for you,’ Phila said. ‘Mandela’s spirit was still not broken, though, when he came out.’

  ‘When I contemplate what I was, what I became as a result of white people, I tremble to the core of my being. I used to have the temper of a snarling dog. I would pass my days in planning their annihilation and nothing else. We softened the horror of murder by calling it war, or defending our motherland. But I learnt patience upon the rock. Dal’ubomi, Qamata kaTayi, is now my only quest.’

  ‘They got you good, hee? The whites tended to have that effect on native warriors the world over. I guess you had your winter training?’

  ‘I am gathering the wind from the four corners of the earth. Before my body became the property of maggots I had no wisdom in me. But when I joined the ancestors wisdom became my companion. I’ve come to you as a friend, and a guide for your thoughts. Far have I journeyed to share this year with you. My duty is to teach you the message I denied with my own life on this earth. I have been a man of misfortunes. Yet my heart is not bitter. And that I carry to Qamata as my prize.’

  ‘You know what they say: no man is completely happy that something somewhere does not clash with his condition. It was nice meeting you. But I am in no mood to be a student, or an initiate of bygone wisdom …’

  ‘Human life can be a trivial illusion. Like a meteor, it fades away after momentary brightness.’

  ‘Amen to that. Now you see why I don’t have time for all of this.’

  ‘I present my life story to the wind. Catch its meaning and learn from it if you want. One thing is certain – vanity is the commanding passion for your age. It is the weakness of mortal man and proud principalities. But it shall be your downfall if you don’t change y
our ways.’

  Something was happening. People were standing up. Jerking motion and the whoosh of electronic doors opening. Some women were talking, laughing, and a baby was crying somewhere behind him. Phila opened his eyes and realised the bus had stopped. He had cramped feet. The seat beside him was empty. He looked around but the man was nowhere to be seen. Only his body odour lingered in the air – smoke mingled with old sweat, sharp as the smell of aloe juice.

  Waking up the following morning at his house Phila was troubled by yet another strange dream that felt more like a vision. He wondered if it was mental pressure from learning of his father’s death causing all this, or whether there was something sinister at hand, more than mere psychological disturbance. He decided to research the phenomenon at the library.

  The best he could find when he got there was a condition he decided to call ‘triple N’ – a combination of neurasthenia, narcolepsy and intellectual ne plus ultra. He received renewed energy from the diagnosis. The trick now was to manufacture the cure. The best way to deal with your fears is to face them directly, he told himself. After a few hours in the library he went back up to Prospect Hill and Fort Frederick. He sat in the same spot against the stone wall as he’d done the previous day, daring things to follow the same course to the phantom circuit again.

  Nothing happened.

  Looking down on the bay below, Phila tried to imagine the reaction of the Xhosas watching the first British ship dock at what was then known as Algoa Bay. What a strange phenomenon indeed it must have been to them: a house floating on water, then white people coming from it, with hair flowing like maize cobweb, whose ears ‘lighted’ when hit by sunlight. The Xhosas, as quintessential wanderers, hardly had any feelings of xenophobia then. In fact, like Abraham of the Jewish clan, they treated visitors like honoured guests, as sacred beings. They had a saying: Isusu somhambi asingakanani, ngemva ngumhlonzo. Its casual translation would be that sojourners don’t have many demands a simple kindness cannot quench. This was probably the seed of their demise with the colonising people whose predominant attitude was one of gain. The colonists tended to interpret generosity as a sign of weakness.