Zakes Mda - Ways of Dying

It was during one of those drinking sprees that he learnt of the move by homeless people to establish another shanty town on an empty piece of land outside the city. Everybody in the shebeen was agitated. The government was refusing to give people houses. Instead, they were saying that people who had qualifying papers had to move to a new township that was more than fifty miles away from the city. How were people going to reach their places of work from fifty miles away? And yet there was land all over, close to where people worked, but it was all designated for white residential development. Most people did not even have the necessary qualifying papers. Their presence was said to be illegal, and the government was bent on sending them back to the places it had demarcated as their homelands.

The people decided that they were going to move en masse, and unilaterally take this land on the outskirts of the city, and build their shacks there. This was Toloki’s opportunity to get himself a house. He joined the settlers, and allocated himself a small plot where he constructed his shack.

That was the shack that he decorated with newspapers and magazines. He was very proud of it, for it was the first property that was his alone. He was very angry when bulldozers came and destroyed it. But like the rest of the residents, he immediately rebuilt it. Sometimes state-paid vigilantes would set some of the shacks on fire, but again the shanty town was resilient.

After about a year of his doing part-time work, or piece jobs as they called them, things changed at the harbour. Times were difficult. Jobs were hard to come by. Fortunately, Toloki had saved enough money to set himself up in business.

He applied for a hawker’s permit from the city council, and bought himself a trolley for grilling meat and boerewors. It was a four-wheeled trolley with a red-and-white canvas canopy hanging above it. There was a grill on one end, with a gas cylinder underneath it. In the middle were two small trays into which he put mustard and tomato sauce. At the other end was another tray for bread rolls. Mostly he put mealie-pap on this tray, as most of his customers were working people, who did not care for slight meals such as boerewors in rolls. They wanted something more solid, like pap and steak.

Toloki conducted his trade in the central business district of the city. He had many customers, some of whom would come all the way from the docklands to buy their lunch from him. He knew how to spice steak in such a way that it was suitable for the taste buds of men who were tortured by the demons of a hangover. His was the first business of that type, and he had no competition. As a result, he made a lot of money. You must remember that this was in the early days, before such street businesses became fashionable. Today there is a proliferation of them in the streets of every city in the land.

He left his shack in the mornings and caught a train to the city. Trains were still safe those days. Preachers preached about eternal damnation in them, and passengers sang hymns and clapped their hands. Souls were saved in the trains, not destroyed. The only nuisance was the pickpockets. In the city he first went to the butchery to buy meat and boerewors, and then to the bakery where he bought bread rolls. He brought the pap, which he cooked on his primus stove at home, in a big plastic bag. Then he went to the Jewish shop where he stored his trolley overnight for a small rental. He pushed his trolley to his usual corner, which the customers already knew. He wore his white overalls and an apron, and soon the air was filled with the spicy and mouth-watering aroma of grilling meat. From midday onwards, a line of hungry people would form, and his pockets bulged with profits.

He was able to furnish his shack. Soon he was going to build himself a real house. Then he was going to send for his mother in the village. At that time, Jwara had not yet completed the process of dying. He was still in his workshop staring at his figurines, but we had already given up taking offerings of fruit and food to him. Toloki did not know what was happening to Jwara. Nor did he care. He was only interested in looking after his mother in her old age.

It was not to be. One day, business was particularly brisk. He ran out of meat. There was no one he could send to the butchery, so he chained his cart to a pole on the corner of the street for half an hour while he went to buy meat. When he came back, his cart was nowhere to be seen. He heard that city council employees had used bolt cutters to remove the chain and had taken away his trolley.

Toloki immediately reported the matter to the officer in charge of the informal trading department of the city council. He was told that his cart had been taken to the dump, and when he got there, it had already been squashed. All that was left was the front wheel. The officers of the city would not say under which regulations the action had been taken, nor who had given the instructions to demolish the cart. They said the matter was being investigated. To this day, it is still being investigated.

Toloki was reduced to cooking boerewors on a small gas cylinder cooker at the same spot where he used to park his trolley. But the customers did not come. It was not the same without the trolley.

For a while, he did not know what to do. He had some money in his post office savings book, but it was not going to last forever. And it was not enough to buy another trolley. His life had become reckless and free-spending. He had many friends who always kept him company in the afternoons and during weekends. He bought them drinks, and they swore eternal friendship. Women, too, were his ardent admirers. Not once did anyone mention his looks. He had finally found the love and fortune he had been yearning for. But when he could not maintain his life-style, the friends who loved him very much began to discover other commitments whenever he wanted their company. Women began to discover faults in him that they had not previously been aware of, and proceeded to derisively point them out.

Soon his money ran out, and he stayed in his shack all day and all night racking his brains on how to improve his lot. Then he remembered Nefolovhodwe, the furniture maker who had been his father’s friend back in the village. He had been very close to Jwara and Xesibe, and the three of them used to sit together in those distant bucolic afternoons, drinking beer brewed by That Mountain Woman, and solving the problems of the world.

Nefolovhodwe used to be the poorest of the three friends. Xesibe was doing well in his farming ventures, and in animal husbandry. He was the wealthiest of the three. Jwara was not doing too badly in his smithy — until Noria destroyed him, that is. There were always horses to shoe, and farming implements to mend. Nefolovhodwe, on the other hand, was barely surviving. He had learnt carpentry skills in his youth when he worked in town. He was very good with his hands, and knew how to make chairs and tables that looked like those that were sold in stores in town, or those which were pictured in magazines. But who in the village could afford chairs and tables? Both Xesibe and Jwara had each bought a set of four chairs and a table from their friend. There were very few other men of means in the village.

Once in a while someone died, and Nefolovhodwe made a coffin for this our deceased brother or sister. His coffins were good and solid, yet quite inexpensive. At times, an order for a coffin would come all the way from town, two hours away by bus. He looked forward to the deaths of his fellow men — and women — for they put food on his pine table. But the deaths were not frequent enough.

A man from the city visited the village one day. He was one of the village people who had gone to work in the city many years ago, and had decided to live there permanently. He had come to the village only to lay a tombstone on the grave of his long-departed father, and to make a feast for the ancestors so that his path should always be covered with the smooth pebbles of success. He was drinking with the three friends when all of a sudden he said, ‘You know, Nefolovhodwe, you are satisfied with living like a pauper here. But I tell you, my friend, you could make a lot of money in the city. People die like flies there, and your coffins would have a good market.’