Sister Eusebia, a group of other nuns and the secondary school students in gym-dresses and white shirts still smile at me in black and white whenever I don a surgical mask to page through the photo album. The mask is essential because the dust mites that have accumulated between the pages over a period of more than five decades make me cough and sneeze and cry and itch all over whenever I visit those venerable pages. The mask, however, does not prevent the pain I still feel when I look at the angelic picture of a smiling Father Sahr â he of the Order of Mary Immaculate. His car killed my dog Rex when he drove through Goodwell once. Rex liked to bark at cars that drove on the dirt road in front of my grandfather's estate. And Manqindi â the name we gave to the German Catholic priest because one of his hands did not have fingers, the result of an incident in some world war â did not even stop his car after killing my Rex in cold blood. I vowed I would never own another dog for Father Sahr to kill. Since then I have never had another dog, though of course I have long stopped blaming the poor priest.
What strikes me as I drive past the Catholic mission is that it still looks the same. In fifty-five years nothing has been added; nothing has been taken away. All the stone buildings with red roofs are exactly as I remember them. Even the house where we lived when I was born. My father must have celebrated his new job at St Teresa's Native Secondary School with my conception, for I was born on the sixth of October, 1948, nine months after he joined the staff.
I wasn't born in that house, though, but at Mlamli Hospital a few kilometres from the mission station. My father named me Zanemvula, which has the double meaning of âthe rain bringer' and âthe one who has been brought by rain'. I do not think the heavens opened up and wept when I was born. Rather, I was named after a character in
Ingqumbo
Yeminyanya
, the isiXhosa novel by A C Jordan that was published in 1940 and years later translated into English by the author as
The Wrath of the Ancestors
. It was hailed as one of Africa's finest novels. It captivated readers because of its lyrical prose and its treatment of Western intrusion on the culture of amaXhosa. But what captivated my father most was that the novel was about our clan, the amaMpondomise people.
Father Sahr would not baptise me into the Roman Catholic Church without what he called a Christian name, which had to be a saint's name. But my father, an ardent Pan Africanist, insisted that he would not give me a âwhite name', so he opted for Kizito, after the youngest of the Ugandan Martyrs. Although Kizito had only been beatified at the time and was not yet a fully fledged saint (he has since been canonised), the priest approved. My third name, Gatyeni, was my father's way of giving a nod to his ancestors by naming me after one of them.
My earliest memory resides in that house. I was three years old when mother and father came home with two babies in fluffy white. They were the twins, Sonwabo and Monwabisi, fresh from Mlamli Hospital and smelling of Johnson's Baby Powder. They were not my favourite people because they seemed to grab all my parents' attention. These usurpers spent a lot of time crying or sleeping. When they were sleeping and there was no one else in the room I opened their eyes with my fingers and inspected their eyeballs. Then I poked their faces just for the heck of it. This practice continued on a daily basis until I heard the radio telling on me as soon as my father switched it on to listen to the news one evening. It was the same radio that once interrupted Glenn Miller's âString of Pearls' with ear-shattering static and then ratted on me that I had stolen sugar and condensed milk. Fortunately, on all the occasions it decided to be a tattle-tale no one else paid attention. Both my parents carried on with whatever they were doing as if they had not heard it. But I decided to stop all my criminal activities because I knew that one day the radio's snitching would ring loud and clear in their ears and I would be in deep trouble.
Yes, the grounds of the mission station are exactly as I remember them when I played with my friend Bernard Khosi on our tricycles, and when I followed my father around on a path between the buildings, a
newspaper in my pocket. Even though I could not read I always carried a newspaper with me, just like my father. Or a book. Any book from his shelf. It didn't matter that none of its pages was illustrated. The fact that I was walking around with a big book in my hand, just like father did, was satisfaction enough. It could be
Abou Ben Adhem and the Angel
, Shakespeare's
Julius Caesar
or a tome by George Eliot or one of the Brontë sisters that my father taught in his English literature classes, or the William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley poetry that he made his students recite. During these walks father would himself recite Mark Antony's oration or something from
Macbeth
. I had no idea what the words meant and he never bothered to explain, but his voice still reverberates in my head: âTomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time â¦'
My father was also an ardent gardener, and the staff quarters at St Teresa did not give him the opportunity to consummate his relationship with the soil. So, he rented a house at the nearby village of KwaGcina and we moved there. He cycled to work every morning, and after school he worked in his garden, particularly on those days when he was not conducting the school choir. When he was too tired to water the flowers and vegetables he sat on a chair on the stoep and drew pencil portraits of the twins and me and anyone else who happened to be around. People always marvelled at how he was able to bring out a person's likeness exactly as the person was.
Later, he bought a number of Jersey cows and employed village women to churn butter in big jars that were normally used for bottling peaches. I remember rows of women, some in the red-ochre
isikhakha
attire and big
iqhiya
turbans of the abaThembu people, sitting in front of the hatchery and shaking the jars to the rhythm of four-part harmonies. Occasionally a woman would be carried by the spirit, stand up and flaunt a few oscillations of the waist and shoulder, and then sit down to resume churning the butter.
In the hatchery there were batteries of incubators. Father encouraged villagers to raise chickens for meat. They bought day-old chicks from his hatchery.
When my mother got a job as a nursing sister in another village called Dulcie's Nek my parents employed a nanny to look after us. Nontonje was initially a red girl, which meant she wore the traditional red-ochre clothes, but she was soon socialised into floral dresses that were mostly hand-downs from my mother.
I didn't know of my father's activities besides his teaching and farming. Sometimes he was away for extended periods. We heard adults talking about how he had been banned by the Minister of Justice, C R Swart, from attending any gathering in any place within the Union of South Africa. Then we heard that there was a big problem between him and some local villagers, particularly the village chief, Steyn Senoamali, who was supported by Mr Fihla, the primary school teacher. We never got to know the nature of the problem exactly, but it was somehow related to a civil action in which my father was suing Steyn Senoamali for calling him a communist and the Native Commissioner of Herschel, our district, was in full support of the village chief. Perhaps Fihla was going to give evidence on behalf of Senoamali and the Native Commissioner and tell the court that they were not being libellous since my father was indeed a communist as confirmed by his membership of the African National Congress. Anyone who fought against apartheid was regarded as a communist and was likely to be banned under the Suppression of Communism Act, even if he was as anti-communist as my father was. Most likely, Senoamali and Fihla were being used by the Commissioner to spy on my father.
There was so much bad blood between my family and Senoamali that he haunted my dreams. He was reputed to be a powerful
ixhwele
â medicine man â and I feared that he was going to harm my father with his wizardry. Nontonje, who understood these issues better, kept me and the twins abreast of events, particularly on Senoamali's prowess in the field of magic. She painted a vivid picture of a stick that he used to cast spells, which was also capable of transforming into a snake. His name, which is Sesotho for âthe one who drinks blood' or, even more ominous, âthe blood-sucker', added to my anxieties about the safety of my family.
One night I was woken up by a loud knock on my bedroom window.
And there was Senoamali's stick peeping between the curtains. âHello, Kizito,' it said. â
Ndiyeza ngapho
â I'm coming over there.' Behind it out there I could see white horses dancing in the dark, flames raging from their hoofs. The next morning I told Nontonje about the visit, and she confirmed that indeed that was clear evidence that you don't mess with an
ixhwele
of Senoamali's stature. Two decades later I wrote a poem titled âDance of the Ghosts' based on the incident. It begins:
I dream/ And my dreams/ Are dreams of ghosts/ I see them prancing/ And gamboling/In the moonlight/ Their eyes glow/ With impish pride/ And their feet dance/ To the rhythm/ Of no music.
As the days for the court case approached, the dream became recurrent. Until Nelson Mandela came from Johannesburg to rescue me. His presence assured me that Senoamali's stick would be defeated.
He was a lawyer from the firm of Messrs Mandela and Tambo and was instructed by my father to handle the case against Senoamali and the Native Commissioner. I liked him because whenever he visited our house he never forgot to mention how handsome I was. He was quite handsome himself, with finely combed hair parted on the right in what we called âthe road'. That was my father's style too â a style that I often asked Nontonje to do on my head. Alas, my mother never allowed my hair to grow long enough to make âthe road' noticeable.
Mandela was not just my father's lawyer but he was his friend as well. When Anton Lembede died in 1947 my father, a founding member of the African National Congress Youth League, took over as its president. But the following year he had to leave Johannesburg because of ill-health and went to teach at St Teresa. He continued with his presidency and periodically made the trip to Johannesburg to catch up with ANC Youth League business. Later he set up a working committee comprising Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo to manage the activities of the organisation in his absence.
Even when we still lived at St Teresa Nelson Mandela would sometimes drive all the way from Johannesburg to consult with my father. One day Mandela came to St Teresa with a briefcase of documents in preparation for some ANC conference where the Youth League was to present its strategy. He was not aware that the Special
Branch cops were following him. When he arrived my father was in his Junior Certificate literature class. Sister Eusebia called him outside, and he and Mandela conferred for a few minutes before Mandela handed him the briefcase. Mandela drove away, but as soon as my father got back to his classroom there was another knock. He opened the door thinking that it was Mandela who had perhaps forgotten to tell him something. But it was the police â both uniformed and Special Branch. They pushed him aside and walked into the classroom. They wanted the briefcase. But it had disappeared and my father did not know where.
âWhat briefcase?' my father asked.
âWe know that Mandela gave you a briefcase,' said an Afrikaner Special Branch officer. âWhere is it?'
My father pretended he did not know what they were talking about. At the same time he really did not know what had happened to the briefcase. The policemen turned the classroom upside down but there was no briefcase. They were fuming because they had hoped to arrest my father with incriminating documents, and then of course arrest Mandela before he got to Umtata where he had clients to defend in a criminal matter.
âPerhaps he didn't leave the briefcase after all,' said a black Special Branch man.
They left in a huff.
No one said anything about the briefcase for three days or so. My father was wary of asking, lest he incriminate himself by admitting ownership of it. One could never be sure whether or not there was a police informer among the students.
One day Sister Eusebia called him to her office.
âAre you not missing something, Mr Mda?' she asked.
Before my father could answer she gave him the briefcase. There was a sigh of relief. She told him that as soon as the students realised that the police were at the door the student in front reached for the briefcase and passed it to the student sitting behind her. It was passed from student to student until the one who was sitting at the window threw it out. Sister Eusebia was there to catch it and hide it.
Some of those students became political activists. Ezra November and Nqabande Sidzamba, for instance, became PAC leaders.
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MY MOTHER ALSO KNEW
Nel or Nelly, as she and her girlfriends called Nelson Mandela, long before she married my father. She, Albertina Sisulu and Evelyn Mase trained together as nurses. Albertina was the oldest of the girls, and she occupied herself with matchmaking. Thus Nelson ended up courting and then marrying Evelyn, and after about two years my father married my mother.
Nelson and Evelyn were so close to my parents that a few years later they looked after us â me and the twins â at their Orlando home in Johannesburg when politics and then law studies uprooted us from the stability of KwaGcina and our farming activities. At the time the Mandelas had three children of their own: Thembi who was two years older than me; Makgatho, two years younger; and a toddler named Maki. So, three extra kids and their nanny must have been quite a burden, although I never heard anyone complain.