Zakes Mda: The Heart of Redness

She is now singing “Nearer My God to Thee.” She is nearer to God. The distance from the havoc, murder, and mayhem in the streets down below attests to that fact.

She is an incongruous mirage. A young woman of hearthly beauty in the midst of shriveled old fogies with shaky voices. She is somebody’s makoti , or daughter-in-law, judging from the way she is dressed: a respectful doek on her head, a shawl over her shoulders, and a dress that reaches a considerable distance below the knees.

Camagu’s eyes cannot leave her alone. Her beauty is not in harmony with this wake. It does not speak of death. It shouts only of life. Of the secret joys that she harbors under her wifely habit.

He wonders who she might be. A relative of the deceased, perhaps? Certainly she is not the widow. Otherwise she would be sitting on a mattress in some dark room, weeping her eyes red, and being fussed over by a bunch of fat females. She is most likely a neighbor. Or a family friend.

Camagu walks out of the tent and joins a group of men who are smoking what smells distinctly like dagga. They are joking about the deceased. From what they say, he must have been a jolly good fellow. But then so are all dead people, especially on the night of their wake. Or on the day of their funeral. The living remember only good things about them.

Camagu wonders who the dead man was. Obviously he was not one of the important people of the slummy flatland: the gangsters and the pimps. Otherwise the wake would have been teeming with fastguns celebrating by firing in the sky. And prostitutes bidding a fond farewell to a business manager by flaunting the wares he’ll never exploit again.

He must have been a simple upright citizen, for he is mourned only by the aged and the forgotten. There are no gongs. No dancing girls. No fanfare. No songs of freedom. No fashion parades. Just the grandmothers and grandfathers. The dilapidated orphans of the night. The wanderers whose permanent homes are the tents of the nightly wakes — each night a different vigil. And the young makoti singing the dirge. And Camagu.

Camagu himself is at the wake not because he has any connection with anyone here. He just found himself here.

He was at Giggles, a toneless nightclub on the ground floor, when he decided to take a walk. He is a regular at Giggles because he lives on the fourth floor of this building. He does not need to walk the deadly streets of Hillbrow for a tipple.

Most of Giggles’ patrons are disaffected exiles and sundry learned rejects of this new society. He is one of them too, and constantly marvels at the irony of being called an exile in his own country.

It was becoming too hot at Giggles, with the exiles moaning and whingeing, or going on nostalgic reminiscences about what they sacrificed for this country, enduring hardships in Tanzania, Sweden, America, or Yugoslavia.

Others were hurling accusations at him: that he was unpatriotic, that he was deserting his country in its hour of need for imperialistic America.

Perhaps he shouldn’t have told them that his suitcase was packed and he was leaving for his second exile tomorrow. He had to tell them, though, because even at this last minute he is trying to sell his old Toyota Corolla. If no one buys it he will have to leave it at some garage, which will sell it for him and cheat him out of a sizable amount.

Giggles was not the place for him tonight.

The band too was not at its best. Screeching saxophones rasped his eardrums. The out-of-tune piano murdered Abdullah Ibrahim with every clunk.

That was why he decided to take a walk. He did not dare go onto the streets. Throughout the night they swarm with restless humanity. Hillbrow never sleeps. Yet he is dead scared of this town. It is four years since he came back from his American exile, but he still has not got used to the fact that every morning a number of dead bodies adorn the streets.

As he stood outside Giggles, planning his next move, a group of old people walked into the building. They were softly singing a hymn. Since the lift is always dead in this building they began to climb the stairs. He decided to follow them. He did not know where they were going. He did not care. He just wanted to get as far away from Giggles as possible.

It was a long climb to the top of the building, where a vigil was in progress in a tattered tent. He was out of breath. The aged ones continued with their song as if climbing Everest meant nothing. He joined the mourners and mourned the dead.

The singing has stopped. A man is declaiming about the wickedness of the city, which has stolen this brother in his prime.

“This brother was gifted,” shouts the man. “His hands could create wonders. His fingers were nimble, and could mold enchanted worlds. Yet this city swallowed him, and spewed him out a shriveled corpse. This ungrateful city decided that he could survive only if he created ugly things that distorted life as we knew it. He refused, for he was attached to beautiful things. He waned away as a result, until he was a bag of bones. .”

The man goes on. The old ones respond with “amens” and “hallelujahs.”

But only the image of the makoti lingers in Camagu’s mind. He becomes breathless when he thinks of her. He is ashamed that the pangs of his famous lust are attacking him on such a solemn occasion. But quickly he decides it is not lust. Otherwise parts of his body would be running amok. No, he does not think of her in those terms. She is more like a spirit that can comfort him and heal his pain. A mothering spirit. And this alarms him, for he has never thought of any woman like that before. After all, she is a stranger with whom he has not exchanged a single word.

His unquenchable desire for the flesh is well known. A shame he has to live with. Flesh. Any flesh. He cannot hold himself. He has done things with his maid — a frumpy country woman who has come to the city of gold to pick up a few pennies by cleaning up after disenchanted bachelors — that he would be ashamed to tell anyone. Yet he did these things with the humble servant again and again.

There is something about servitude that seems to set the crotches of men of Camagu’s ilk on fire. It must have been the same urge that drove the slave master, normally a levelheaded, loving family man with a rosy-cheeked wife and bouncing babies, from his mansion to a night of wild passion with the slave girl in the slave quarters or in the fields. Of course it was wild passion only on his side. To the slave girl, consent was through coercion. It was rape.

In Camagu’s case it was not rape, or so he comforted himself when shame confronted him, for the servant encouraged it. She saw it as a chance of making more money from the master.

The makoti starts another hymn. Camagu rushes back to the tent. The dagga smokers are making the place livelier by clapping hands and dancing what looks like the toyi-toyi —the freedom dance that the youth used to dance when people were fighting for liberation. Its political fervor has been replaced by a religious one. Camagu joins them. His steps are rather awkward.

He never learned the freedom dance. He was already in exile when it was invented. While it became fashionable at political rallies, he was completing a doctoral degree and working in the communications department of an international development agency in New York. He regrets now that he acquired so much knowledge in the fields of communication and economic development but never learned the freedom dance.

He remembers how in 1994 he took leave from his job and came back to South Africa to vote, after an absence of almost thirty years. He was in his mid-forties, and was a stranger in his own country. He was swept up by the euphoria of the time, and decided that he would not return to New York. He would stay and contribute to the development of his country.