The first common mistake to get rid of is that mankind consists of a great mass of religious people and a few eccentric atheists. It consists of a huge mass of worldly people, and a small percentage of persons deeply interested in religion and concerned about their own souls and other people's; and this section consists mostly of those who are passionately affirming the established religion and those who are passionately attacking it, the genuine philosophers being very few.
We debated these issues in Gordon Tube's class, and even explored another of Shaw's plays,
Saint Joan
, based on the records of the trial of Joan of Arc by the Roman Catholic Church. Shaw concludes that there were no villains in this matter because everyone acted in good faith â what I later described in one of my novels as âthe sincerity of belief'. This play and its long Preface reinforced what had been planted by the earlier play.
Gordon Tube was the most popular of all the teachers because in his class we debated issues unhampered by convention and taboo. He empowered us with the vocabulary to articulate our ideas. He liked the essays that I wrote and, like Scutum before him, read them to the rest of the class. But what made him most popular with the boys was that he was streetwise and spoke the
tsotsitaal
of Johannesburg. This slang, born of the urban streets and based on a mixture of Afrikaans and other indigenous languages, with a sprinkling of invented words, gave him the sophistication that many of us could only dream of.
I must add that Gordon Tube became my friend and drinking partner. But that was later, after I had completed high school and was carousing in Maseru. At Peka High School he became a mentor who encouraged my writing. After writing my first poem I gave it to him to critique.
Perhaps I should tell you how I came to write this poem since I never really planned to be a poet. In fact, apart from the essays that my teachers read to my classmates, and the articles and jokes that I wrote for
Lux Vestra
, I had not written anything creative since my isiXhosa story,
Igqirha laseMvubase
, in Sterkspruit.
The sleeping muse was awakened by the death of my dear friend Santho Mohapeloa. Don't confuse him with clarinettist Khomo Mohapeloa who taught me a lot about reading and composing music, or with Kingston Mohapeloa the artist who created cartoons for
Lux Vestra
. They were cousins. Santho Mohapeloa was a gifted artist in his own right. We used to sit on the banks of the Caledon River painting landscapes of the Boer farms across the river. I used to tell him, âOne day we'll own those farms.' But he was not interested in politics. Instead we talked about girls. One thing I envied him was his girlfriend Rebecca 'Nau, who at that time was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. She was herself an artist. We spent our weekends at Scutum's house
listening to music in John and Sammy's bedroom. Sometimes I visited his home in Maseru and we socialised with the beautiful girls from St Mary's High School.
Unlike other boarding schools, Peka High School did not have a boarding master. Two students chosen by the principal and staff served as Head Prefect and Deputy Head Prefect and performed all the functions of a boarding master. At this point I was the Deputy Head Prefect â a post that I held for two years â and shared a room in the Square with Lesupi, the Head Prefect. Our room was known as the Cell because it looked like and was as small as a prison cell.
One night there was a knock at the door. It was the Health Prefect with the news that Santho was ill. I was too lazy to wake up so I said, âGive him an aspirin; I'll see him in the morning.' And I went back to sleep.
In the morning when I walked out of the big gates of the Square I saw Santho accompanied by the Health Prefect. Although he looked pale and drained he was walking without assistance. The Health Prefect told me he was taking him to the Seventh Day Adventist Hospital at Mapoteng.
âHow are you feeling, man?' I asked.
He smiled wanly and sang something to the effect that next time I saw him he wouldn't look the same. This was a line from Champion Jack Dupree's âDeath of Big Bill Broonzy'. Dupree had made a promise to his friend Big Bill Broonzy that if Big Bill were to die first, Dupree would write the blues of Big Bill Broonzy, but if Dupree died first, Big Bill would do the same for him. This was comforting because it told me that Santho could still joke about his illness. Whatever it was, it couldn't be that bad.
I responded with another line from the same song.
So, they took Santho away. Later that evening as we were having dinner in the school hall the principal came to announce that Santho was dead.
I was devastated, and I don't think I ever really recovered from this. Not only was this boy my friend and confidant, but he died on my watch. I was gnawed by the fact that I had been too lazy to wake up.
The next day I wrote the poem in his honour, âDeath of an Artist', in
the same way that Champion Jack Dupree wrote the blues for Big Bill Broonzy.
But this didn't salve my feeling of guilt. And of loss.
Santho's death relaunched my writing career.
At about that time there was a buzz in Lesotho; Gibson Kente was coming to Maseru with his musical play
Sikalo
. We had read about this play in
Drum
magazine, and
The World
and
The Golden City Post
newspapers and felt honoured that Mr Kente did not forget Lesotho in his southern African tour of his musical. People hired buses from all corners of the country to the Catholic Hall in Maseru to see such stars as Kenny Majozi, Ndaba Mhlongo, Mary Twala and Zakithi Dlamini in live action.
I was in that audience. At last I would make up for Gibson Kente's first play,
Manana the Jazz Prophet
, snippets of which I saw in Sterkspruit years before, but never got to see the whole performance.
I was impressed by Gibson Kente's music and choreography, but I was rather disappointed by the storyline. It lacked substance and was nothing like the plays of Wole Soyinka and Harold Pinter that I read in the school library. The dialogue seemed inane and the acting was too exaggerated. I thought I could write better plays.
As soon as I got back to Peka High I wrote my first play,
Zhigos
, about a gangster of that name. I had fallen in love with the name from the stories that Peter Masotsa told the habitués of the shebeens of Mafeteng about the exploits of a ladykiller called Zhigos who was a student with Peter at Pax Secondary School in Northern Transvaal. Later that year I wrote another play titled
A Hectic Weekend
. Gordon Tube read both plays and declared that they were wonderful works of art. Too bad I can't locate them any more. It would have been interesting to read them today and see what was so wonderful about them. The only thing I remember about them is that
A Hectic Weekend
was a musical for which I composed the music â I sometimes catch myself singing one of the songs, the only one I still remember â and
Zhigos
was set partly in Nigeria. My characters sailed in a love boat from Port Harcourt to the island of Fernando Po. It didn't matter that I had never been to Nigeria. Mphunyetsane Thatho, from whose parents we were renting our home
in Mafeteng, had worked there for some years and told me how he used to spend idyllic holidays on the island of Fernando Po. In any event Nigeria was very much alive in many of us, made so by Chinua Achebe's novels and Cyprian Ekwensi's
Jagua Nana
and
People of the City
. For any African literature written in English to be valid it had to be set in Nigeria â or so I thought.
These plays were never performed and I kept the manuscripts for years but, alas, they got lost in one of the many times that I have moved house in my life.
If I imagined these creative activities would take my mind off Santho Mohapeloa it soon became clear that I was deluding myself. He haunted me and I saw him everywhere I went, especially at night. And every time he sang the line from Champion Jack Dupree.
I spent long periods just sitting on my bed in the Cell playing the flute. Or painting portraits of my distant cousin Sibongile Twala, about whom I was obsessing at the time. She was a student at St Mary's High School and through her I had cultivated friendships with some fantastic girls from that school. One of them was Ray Setlogelo with whom I exchanged constant letters like lovers, even though our relationship was platonic. So when I was not playing the flute or painting Sibongile in pencil and charcoal, I was writing letters to Ray.
Sibongile and Ray had become my Muses. But despite their constant presence in my imagination I got no respite from my melancholy and the spectre of Santho Mohapeloa continued its visitations.
To cap it all, at the end of the year Otis Redding died in a plane crash.
I HAVE KNOWN GUGU
for more than twenty years. Even before we got to know each other well we discovered that we shared common values in a very uncanny manner. As if we had been brought up in the same family. I would utter something and it would sound so familiar to her she would ask: âAre you sure you're not Josephine's child?' Josephine is her mother. It turned out that, like me, she would insist on buying her kids black dolls â this was long before she had kids of her own â and would never let them play with toy guns. We love the earth and we value all sentient life, a position that led us to become
squeamish about meat, even though we came from a strong meat-eating culture. Remind me later to tell you of the ducks that forced us into vegetarianism. We are against the death penalty, and celebrate the fact that our country did away with it, but deplore the lenient sentences that our criminals get from our courts. We are pro-choice in so far as women's reproductive rights are concerned and believe that gay rights are human rights. We celebrate the fact that these rights are enshrined in our country's Constitution, one of the very few in the world that spells out sexual orientation. We believe in these rights so strongly that we have at various times involved ourselves in campaigns whenever they were infringed. Gugu is more of an active gay rights activist than I am and attends LGBT activities on our campus. To crown it all, she has undertaken the arduous task of educating and counselling a neighbour who is the parent of a beautiful gay son but, much as she loves him, is ashamed of him because of his sexual orientation.
We both recoil at homophobia in all its manifestations.
So, we walk into the spacious bar of Maseru Sun Cabanas this particular evening and order a drink. We are both teetotallers so she asks for a glass of water and for old times' sake I order a non-alcoholic passion fruit cocktail that I remember the barmen here mixing so well. We are both bushed after the long drive from the Bee People.
And there is Mr Dizzy sitting in an easy chair counting a lot of coins that he will obviously be sharing with a scruffy partner who is sitting opposite him. The two gamblers must have won the money in the slot machines in the next room. He doesn't see me; he is too engrossed in stacking the coins into two piles. At the same time he is trying to stop his gambling partner from grabbing a stray coin that rolled on the thick carpet and lodged itself near the leg of the coffee table.
âHey, Mr Dizzy,' I call him.
He looks up and squints his eyes to make sure that what they think they are seeing is indeed what they are seeing. He forgets all about his slot machine winnings and comes over to the bar counter where we are already seated.
âHey, you Saferi! You Sopete! You Masoba-a-Lieta!' he says, calling me after bumbling cartoon characters whose exploits we used to follow
decades ago in
Moeletsi-oa-Basotho
, a Catholic Church newspaper. He is so excited to see me that he gives me a hug and kisses me â smack! â on the lips.
I see the disgust on Gugu's face.
After some small talk â me trying to find out what he has been up to in the years that we have not seen each other and he waffling something that I cannot understand because he is too drunk â Mr Dizzy goes back to the serious business of counting coins.
â
Sies
,' says Gugu. âHe kissed you on the lips.'
âYes, he did,' I respond. I am quite amused.
âAnd you seemed to enjoy it,' she says, even more disgusted.
âYes, I did,' I say. Of course, I did not; the man reeked of beer, although his lips were surprisingly soft for someone so alcohol-ravaged.
I break out laughing because I didn't think she would look so serious about a simple kiss from a friend. I have many female friends who are ravishingly beautiful. There is Nakedi Ribane, for instance, tall and graceful. She used to be one of the two black South African models who attained fame on international ramps and magazine covers some years back. She would have been called a super model if that term had been coined at the time, and of course she has lost none of her looks. And then there is Motshabi Tyelele, one of our leading actresses of stage, film and television, whose playwriting career I have mentored. Whenever I meet these women after I have been away in the USA for an extended period we kiss squarely on the lips. And that has never bothered Gugu. She has actually kissed them on the lips too.
So, why is she aghast at Mr Dizzy's kiss? I don't ask her. But clearly it is because Mr Dizzy is a man and convention dictates that real men don't kiss. We may be anti-homophobia rationally but some of the prejudices of our upbringing may continue to linger under our skin, only to crawl out at unguarded moments.
Â
Â
Â
I FIRST MET SECHELE
Khaketla, also known as Mr Dizzy after Dizzy Gillespie and after Tommy Roe's pop song, in the mid-sixties soon after
his return from England where his parents had sent him for his high school education. His father was B M Khaketla, the famous Sesotho novelist who was also the secretary general of Marematlou Freedom Party and a member of the King's Privy Council. His mother, 'Masechele Khaketla, was even more famous as a novelist and playwright. She was also the founder and owner of a prestigious private school. They had a palatial home in Maseru West, in the same street where the artistic Mohapeloa brothers with whom I was at high school lived. They were the elite of Lesotho who sent their kids for private piano lessons; hence Sechele and his sister were accomplished pianists. They were the bourgeois kids I felt my siblings and I should have been had our father not nailed his colours firmly to the mast of a proletarian ship.
Mr Dizzy didn't give a hoot for his good breeding. He had no intention of living up to his parents' expectations. Many Basotho people went to England or America for university degrees, especially graduate degrees, but it was unheard of for parents to send a boy all the way to England just for high school. Only the Khaketlas and King Moshoeshoe II did that. But over there Mr Dizzy didn't pay much attention to his studies. Public school was a waste of his precious time. So, he played the piano in skanky nightclubs and bars and drank himself into a sodden mess. No one was surprised when he flunked his A-levels. When his parents got wind of his capers they sent for him. He eluded the emissaries and went underground, sleeping rough with hoboes. It took his father months to track him down and bring him back to Lesotho.
That's when I met him, fresh from his merrymaking in London. What brought us together was art rather than music. He was a wonderful painter and I still have a vivid memory of one particular oil painting of his: an ashtray overflowing with stubs of cigarettes. It was not so much the subject but how it was rendered that fascinated me. The way the old impressionists of a century ago would have done it, using unmixed primary colours to play with light and shadows on the tablecloth, the ashtray and the smoke rising from a smoldering cigarette. I was also impressed by the fact that he could make such a mundane subject interesting. How many of us had seen ashtrays with cigarette stubs and never thought of painting them?
There was a strong community of artists in Maseru those days, led by Meshu Mokitimi whose work had first come to my notice, as I mentioned earlier, in the form of cartoons in the BCP organ,
Makatolle
. It turned out when I got to know him personally that drawing political cartoons was just a sideline for him; he was actually one of the very best painters in oil, acrylics and pastels that I have ever met. I remember earlier on when I was still at Peka High School that he used to give art lessons to a whole bunch of us. There I was with my brother Sonwabo, who was also artistically gifted, and Santho Mohapeloa and his girlfriend Rebecca 'Nau and Mr Dizzy painting murals in the small room he rented at the home of one of our beautiful St Mary's High School friends, Mokone Tlale.
Meshu introduced us to the nuns and monks at Mazenod who specialised in watercolour landscapes of the Maluti Mountains and to another Lesotho landscape realist, Paul Ncheke, whose work of the mountains and rivers and aloes and huts of Lesotho was exhibited internationally. Paul Ncheke was so much impressed with my charcoal sketches titled âNo Peace Without Justice' that he exhibited them alongside his work in Edmonton, Canada. It was my first exposure to the international art world. He brought me some cash from Canada; my charcoals had been bought. I don't remember now how much it was, but it was the first money I earned from my artwork. The excitement reminded me of the first money that I earned from my writing before I left Sterkspruit for exile.
All this art activity prompted Chief Leabua Jonathan â the prime minister that we despised so much for winning the elections against our hero Ntsu Mokhehle â to establish a museum of art in Maseru with Reggie Senkoto as its curator. It housed collections from such South African artists as Father Frans Claerhout, Percy Sedumedi, Dubile Mhlaba and Ephraim Ngatane. These artists also came to Lesotho occasionally to work with us.
Our creativity involved a lot of political activism as well. A war had broken out in Nigeria in 1967 after the Governor of the Eastern Region, Colonel Ojukwu, announced a unilateral secession of the region, then named Biafra, from the Nigerian federation. General Gowon, who was
the president of Nigeria, would have none of it, and he sent his federal forces to invade Biafra and bring it back into the fold of the federation.
We were fully in support of Biafra and we held art exhibitions to raise awareness of the plight of the Igbo people.
By 1969 Biafra was under siege from the federal forces and we heard of the terrible famine because Gowon would not let any food supplies into the region. We organised a big art exhibition in Maseru titled âThe Children of Biafra'. I remember oil paintings by such renowned painters as Phil Motsosi of Loretto and Paul Molefe portraying starving children with swollen kwashiorkor bellies. Both Mr Dizzy and I had our paintings in that exhibition.
What was the basis of our support for Colonel Ojukwu? I have often asked myself this question. After all, we were staunch Pan Africanists who believed that one day the continent would unite into the United States of Africa despite the setback the Pan African project suffered when Kwame Nkrumah, the one we called Osagyefo the Saviour, was overthrown in a coup by a bunch of CIA-supported soldiers. We lionised Mwalimu Julius Nyerere for working towards this Pan African goal by uniting Tanganyika, Zanzibar and Pemba into the Republic of Tanzania. We believed that instead of dismantling the colonial borders carved at the Berlin Conference of 1884 by breaking the colonial states into smaller ethnic-based national states, we should work towards uniting neighbouring countries into bigger and bigger federations until we had reached the ultimate goal of a United States of Africa. And Julius Nyerere had shown us how it could be done.
And yet there we were supporting an ethnic group, the Igbo people, when they formed their own ethnic-based state â we who adamantly wrote and preached against tribalism. It dawned on me that our support for the Igbo became apparent as early as 1966 when we heard that they were being massacred by other ethnic groups in Nigeria. And why did we take this massacre so personally when normally massacres are just statistics on the pages of newspapers? Because we identified very closely with the Igbo. It was almost like they were our own people. We knew a lot about them, whereas we knew nothing of the groups that were involved in the conflict with them. The Yoruba, the Hausa and
everyone else were just names of ethnic groups, whereas the Ibgo were real people. We had lived in their village of Umuofia and knew of their customs and traditions, we had participated in their ceremonies and rituals, we had eaten their food, and we had enjoyed their proverbs and even greeted each other in their language:
âUmuofia kwenu!'
a boy would shout when he arrived at the Smoking Spot, and the rest of the boys would roar back
âYaaa!'
while puffing on their
zols
or hand-rolled cigarettes. Yes, we were the Igbo people. We were the sons and daughters of Okwonko and the siblings of Nwoye, Ezinma and Ikemefuna. Of Obi and Clara.
It was obvious whose side we would take if the Igbo were at war with anyone, whatever the reason was and whoever was in the wrong. Thanks to Chinua Achebe's
Things Fall Apart
and
No Longer at Ease
, the Igbo were our flesh and blood and Colonel Ojokwu's cause was our cause. We rooted for Biafra's victory and were outraged at the siege. The dream of the United States of Africa could well stay in abeyance if it meant our Igbo people should remain in a federation where they were being oppressed and even massacred.
That's the power of narrative for you. We always sympathise with those whose story we know. Sometimes the cause is good, as I believe it was in Biafra, sometimes it may not be so noble. I remember as kids we watched a lot of Tarzan-type movies in Dobsonville. We always sided with the white hero against the âsavages' because we knew the white hero's story, his family background, his trials and tribulations. The white hero had history; the âsavages' did not. We didn't realise that those âsavages' were us. Narrative manipulated us against ourselves.
The Biafran War was not the only war that we made our business, although it was the only one where we were active in doing something about it. The Six Day War was another one. I remember when it broke out we, the Peka High School boys, were at the bus stop in Maseru waiting in the bus that was going to take us back to school when Mohlomi Ramonate, a former Peka High student who had now gained fame as a newscaster for Radio Lesotho, came into the bus and announced to us that we were on our way towards winning the war. We, in that case, were the Arabs. We were the forces of Egypt, Syria and
Jordan. Remember we were Pan Africanists and the president of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, was one of the major leaders of that movement. Why, Kwame Nkrumah our Saviour had even married a woman from Egypt to seal the Pan African bond. So, we cheered when Mohlomi Ramonate announced our impending victory. As a newsreader for a national broadcasting station he was an authority on such matters, and throughout that bus journey we sang songs of victory. But only a few days later we heard of the defeat of the Arabs. The Israelis under General Moshe Dayan had captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip. We cursed Mohlomi Ramonate for promising us a victory he could not deliver.