One Day I Will Write About This Place (14 page)

…

Club Dazzle is packed now with university students and some high school students. A Brenda Fassie song is playing, and all the girls have rushed to the floor to dance. We stay behind.

Nomarussia comes back, with her friends. Their little shiny bags open and little gold penises with red, coral, and pink tongues pass across the tables, lips stretch, and contract, shared lipsticks are returned, and necks are dabbed.
Mpah!

Kofi is dancing now. His girlfriend moves awkwardly next to him. The song changes, and now he is doing something MC Hammerish that looks like running on the spot while he is pushing his elbows up and forward and down again. The waiter is here.

I lean my eyebrow to him. “I’ll have another Black Russian,” I say, my arm around Nomarussia’s back.

I feel her stiffen as the waiter turns to her for her order. “Savanna,” she says quickly and blushes.

“Would you like to dance?” I ask. She blushes and says yes.

“So what do you want to do when you finish matric?” I ask.

“Finance or information technology,” she says, with certainty. Her father, she says, was in exile in Russia fighting apartheid. Her mother called her Nomarussia. Here, in Umtata, Transkei, South Africa, the girls drink Savanna cider. Men smoke and drink beer. Women cannot smoke in public in Transkei. Everybody wants to study accounting or computers. Women cannot go to a nightclub on their own in Transkei. It is 1991. Mandela was released a year ago.

Victory Ngcobo, my new friend, is a long happy guy with arms and legs like the last piece of spaghetti slithering across the plate as your fork chases it. His life is set. He works weekends, driving a taxi to Butterworth, two hours away. He studies hard and does well in his exams. He is twenty-two years old. He supports himself fully, and his family and extended family. He pays school fees for four of his brothers and sisters. He pays tuition for his younger brother, who is a first-year student at the University of Transkei.

He makes most of his money selling beer and dope from his room, which is a shebeen. He smokes ganja only once a week, on Friday night.

Lulama, his girlfriend, studies at a technical college not far from us. She is quiet. She visits every weekend. During the weekend, she runs his business, cooks food for him, and hangs his laundry for the week, which she takes home with her every Sunday to wash and iron. They are going to get married as soon as Victory graduates.

Victory pays Lulama’s school fees at Butterworth Teknikon. She is studying social work and business management. He writes her management assignments for her. He is doing a BCom, majoring in business management.

Victory is a demonstrative lover, full of kisses and hugs. “My wife,” he says. You cannot persuade him to go to a party when she is around.

Lulama wears no makeup. Whenever Victory is busy, she comes to my room and sits on my bed, reading a magazine and asking me shy questions about Kenya. She has no fear of me, and I am uncertain around her; she looks me directly in the eye, not afraid to smile and stare at me without blinking. Whenever she speaks to Victory it is in their language, Xhosa. Mostly, she does not speak to him with others around. Sometimes, if there is a group of customers drinking with Victory, she creeps up to him and sits on his lap and whispers something in his ear. She never joins in the conversation if there are men talking in Victory’s room.

In this filthy drunken residence, in this homeland university, the garbage chutes are piled high with rubbish. Students regularly shut the campus down, over one or another political issue. All over South Africa is liberation talk.

I hear the first moment of a protest march while I am lying down in bed. A thin reedy sound rising. Laughter, doors slamming, a student politician mouthing slogans, laughter, some drunken jeers, and bottles breaking on tarmac. Chants.

ANC. PAC. ANC. PAC.

Sounds slide away from the weak strings of song, doors slam somewhere, and the sound bursts out: clapping, and then thumps, loose and leisurely, feet thumping randomly, but stronger; another door slams, now there are echoes as a swarm of wings flap their way through the floors of Ntinga Female Residence next door and burst out of the door, a wind of sound, flapping and rolling like sheets, like the sea; now a group thump, tenors swoop like a swarm of swallows diving to earth, ten thousand beaks of attacking altos, ten thousand wildebeest feet stomp in Xhosa.

The train is sound flying in circles. Sometimes it glides, feet thumping as the train whoops.

I peep out of the window and see no swarm—­two thousand students have gathered in a messy sprawl at the door to the residence, but every foot, every voice is doing what it is supposed to do to support the strike.

…

Victory and I are drinking in his room, with Monks, his roommate, and Sis D, who came to the university in her thirties and so drinks publicly and nobody says anything about it. It is the second day of the campus­wide strike.

We talk about Brenda Fassie’s new scandals. They are fast and furious now. She was seen playing soccer with young boys on the streets of Hillbrow, Johannesburg, topless. Then she shocks the conservative country by announcing she is a lesbian.

Then she is touring in the United States, dancing at a club in Washington, D.C., when one of her breasts pops out. She grabs it and says, “This is Africa!”

Brenda is where sex and struggle politics met. She is Hillbrow, in Johannesburg, where tens of thousands of illegal immigrants find themselves selling and trading and changing and dying and making money and losing money. Where black meets white, drugs meet dreams, and music soaks it all in. Hillbrow is where she always seems to end up when she is down on her luck.

Finally, we have watched TV, and we shake our heads. Brenda is finished. Drunk and incoherent, she misses concerts. Rumor has it she is on crack cocaine, which has landed in Johannesburg and is ravaging whole suburbs.

…

The strike stretches. The faculty union, the workers’ union, the students’ union join. On Friday, hungover, I make my way to Victory’s room. Reggae is thumping on the stereo. Ayibo! Victory is always laughing as he complains about the striking students. I am always worried that things will break, as he whirs around the room on unsteady-­looking limbs. “Damn. Damn. Not enough stock,” he says. “No class tomorrow and I don’t have enough dope.”

Once you have spent enough time with him, you see his grace: counter­intuitive, not moving the way the group moves—­he always looks for the gaps between things: opportunities and ideas. If so many black students live only for the utopian future, Victory is on the ground, looking out for the things nobody noticed. Many students don’t approve.

Yu! A whole university student! Selling something? Ayibo. Why can’t he get a scholarship and apply for store credit cards?

I met a Ghanaian man a few months ago at a baptism for Kofi’s niece. He is a bitter administrator of an agricultural college in the Ciskei. His students were on strike because he had cut the maintenance staff on the farm.

“Clipboard farmers!” he shouted. “They want to become clipboard farmers!”

Victory offers me a beer. I never seem to pay for beer when I drink with him. I gave up insisting. He is excited.

“I will make a lot of money this weekend. It is month end, and students have money.”

“Where is Lulama today?”

“Lulama stayed in Butterworth for the weekend,” he says. “She is studying for an exam.”

He jumps to his feet and is out of the room. He comes back an hour later with crates and crates of beer. We load his giant freezer together, and wait for the liberation songs to become partying songs so Victory can start counting money.

Non­racist, non­sexist South Africa. This is shouted everywhere, every day, on walls, on posters. Villages. Cities. Hills. Student residencies. It is scrawled on the walls of toilets.

…

A year passes.

We are at Club Dazzle. My new friends Trust, Kaya, Feh George, from Sierra Leone, and I. Kofi is in America. We notice something strange. There is a huge group of women on the dance floor. All of them have baby dreadlocks; they are wearing trousers and men’s shirts. They are all smoking on the dance floor, laughing and looking free and happy. We are not happy.

The bouncer makes his way to them, and tries to pull one of the smoking girls off the dance floor. The group attacks him, pulls their friend back in, and continues dancing.

My friend Trust goes up to them, to ask one of them for a dance. He comes back, sweating. “What is it?” I say, laughing. His eyes are wide open. “They say they are lesbians.”

Soon, they are on campus too, girls having all-­girl parties, buying their own booze, and smoking in huddled groups in public. Every single one of them has dreadlocks. Liberation is coming. It is all over the radio.

I have a small black-­and-­white television in my new room off campus. It is on all day. A metal hanger thrust into the broken aerial helps me get a good picture. It is 1993. Mandela snaps and crackles onto the screen. De Klerk is whirring backward, stuttering and all
kimay
and defensive. Bodies pile up in Zululand. Chris Hani is the angry man of the left, popular among the youth. White South Africans are terrified of him. They like Mbeki—­he speaks smoothly and smokes a pipe. Ramaphosa too is a contender—­for the next generation after Mandela, which is aging.

Over the past year, as I fell away from everything and everybody, I moved out of the campus dorms and into a one-­room outhouse in Southernwood, a suburb next to the university. I do not know what happened. All of a sudden, I was moving slower, attending class less, and now I am not leaving my room at all.

My mattress has sunk in the middle. Books, cigarettes, dirty cups, empty chocolate wrappers, and magazines are piled around my horizontal torso, on the floor, all within arm’s reach. If I put my mattress back on the bunk I am too close to the light that streams in from the window, so I use the chipboard bunk as a sort of scribble pad of options: butter, a knife, peanut butter and chutney, empty tins of pilchards, bread, a small television set, many books, matches and a sprawl of candles, all in various stages of undress and disintegration.

There is a secondhand shop in Umtata that is owned by the palest man I have ever seen: he has long spindly fingers, almost gray, and wears a brown sweater. He is Greek and talks to his mother a lot on the phone. He has a book exchange section. I take my batch of books out; he values them and gives me a list of my options. I will steal a few. He never watches. I walk out with books thrust into my trousers, front and back, and head for the bus station.

Back in my room, my head aches. It always aches when I leave my room for too long. I have managed to avoid my landlord for two months. When he knocks on my door, I do not respond. My curtains are closed. The keyhole is blocked. I am not home. Notes are slipped under my door. Notes are thrown away.

Ciru is about to graduate. Computer science. She is teaching at a local college and working at the computer center on campus. Sometimes she comes and knocks and knocks. She slips money under my door, even brings food sometimes. Once in a while I find myself at her apartment. She opens the door, doesn’t say anything serious. We chat. She pours me a drink, she laughs, and I find myself laughing too, like we did when we were young. Twin Salvation Army marching bands on a hot dry Sunday in my hometown, Nakuru, Kenya. They bang their way up the sides of my head and meet at some crossroads in my temple, now out of rhythm with each other. I am thirsty with the effort of them, but my body is an accordion, and can’t find the resolution to stand.

I relearn finger-­tatting patterns, from my childhood, unraveling my sister Ciru’s new handmade poncho and getting belted for it. There are several odd shapes, little curling braids and bracelets, on the floor next to my bed, all made from my winter sweater. I can hear my landlord, a Ugandan geography professor, moving about in his room. Three Mozambicans have been thrown off a train in Johannesburg. It is in the news. Black immigrants are being beaten daily now in Johannesburg.

I stretch in bed. New books by my side. Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer. A matchbox sits in a saucer, Lion matches, its belly sunken and crusty with crumbs of cigarette coal. It is stuck in a hardened wallow of wax. It leaves a clean wedge as it rises, swelling ominously and blurring as I swing it away from the full glare of the bedside lamp. The candle roars to light, spluttering like late-night cats fucking near the garage outside.

…

We are children of the cold war. We came of age when it ended; we watched our countries crumple like paper. It is as if the Great Lakes are standing and rising above the map and tilting downward, and streams of Rwandese, Kenyans, and others are pouring into Congo, Tanzania, Kenya. Then Kenya shook and those stood and poured into South Africa.

Spring is coming, and I am agitated. My hair is no longer chemically treated. It has grown kinky. My fingers watch themselves on the candle­lit wall as they play with an Afro comb splitting my scalp into clean squares, section by section, pinky swung away, thumb, fore-, and middle fingers set to work, bumping each other first, soon remembering Mary’s clicking fingers in Mum’s salon.

On the news here, a fourteen-­year-­old Rwandese boy crossed the border into South Africa. On foot. Build your little tower of hair, watch it droop sideways, run your forefinger and feel the hidden orders of all that mass of kink, split and squared and built into a field of short stumps of lace. Do not look at your fingers; they will immediately seize and get confused.

Auntie Rosaria lives in Rwanda. With her three sons and husband. We haven’t heard from her since the killing began. Mum is beside herself. I should call her.

I don’t call her.

Doctors from Kenya, old Mangu boys, are flooding South African hospitals to work. Let time be each open-­ended knot; time is your fingers reaching into the back of the head and grabbing the wild bunch of unsorted hair—­squeaky from just being washed and brittle from drying. Pull the bunch together, so it does not curl back into itself, and hold it like a posy of flowers; rub your fingers off the sides of your posy to keep them from becoming too slippery. In minutes you, the uninitiated, are moving across the growing chessboard of plaits, finger pads kissing each other rapidly, like Mary’s—­eyes glazed, and talking softly to the back of Mum’s ears, nothing at all you will ever remember.