Zakes Mda: The Heart of Redness

Only then did Camagu understand the full implications of life in this new democratic society. He did not qualify for any important position because he was not a member of the Aristocrats of the Revolution, an exclusive club that is composed of the ruling elites, their families, and close friends. Some of them were indeed leaders of the freedom struggle, while others had used their status and wealth to snake their way into the very heart of the organization.

The jobs he had been applying for had all gone to people whose only qualification was that they were sons and daughters of the Aristocrats of the Revolution.

Camagu could easily have benefited from this system if he had played his cards right from the beginning. He knew a lot of people in exile, many of whom were prominent members of the Aristocrats of the Revolution. He had even gone to school with some of them. He had been involved in antiapartheid demonstrations in various capitals of the world with a number of them. It would have been easy to attach himself to them, or even buy a membership card. But he chose to remain independent, and to speak out against what he called patronage. Now that he is unemployed he regrets his indiscretions.

But pride still kills him.

“Why don’t you talk with the minister?” asked yet another big man from the government, mentioning a powerful cabinet minister. “I can arrange an appointment for you. If I remember well, you two had a thing going back in the States.”

Indeed he had had a few adventures with the honorable minister, many years before anyone ever knew that one day there would be freedom and she would be a member of the cabinet. She was an ordinary poet who composed bad verses and was an aspirant performer of them.

And what breathless adventures! Camagu is quite smug about the fact that he once made the most powerful woman in the country, the woman before whom powerful men tremble, scream for mercy. While he screamed for his mother.

Fatal pride.

Maybe things would come right, he thought. In a year or two, doors would open.

A gravel-voiced man smashes his thoughts with “Noyana, noyana, phezulu” He is slapping his Bible to the rhythm of the bouncy hymn that demands to know whether those congregated here will enter the portals of heaven. The old ones dance around him in a solemn circle. Then the man breaks into a bout of preaching.

“He was in pain before he died, this our brother,” he shouts. “It was the pain of the spirit that was being denied the right to soar in its creativity. It was the pain of a suppressed mind. The pain ended up attacking his body. It ravaged his insides. The beauty of death is that it separates us from the pain that racks our bodies.”

Camagu’s hopes that things would come right were crushed by a strike at the school where he was teaching. The students kidnapped the principal. They demanded that their trade school be transferred from the Department of Labour to the Department of Education. They summoned a cabinet minister, who went cap in hand to negotiate with them.

“We are a liberal and caring government,” said the cabinet minister. “The students have genuine grievances. We are now negotiating with them to release the principal.”

After many days of negotiations the students released the principal. The minister, a man of the people to the last, was seen on the country’s television screens dancing the freedom dance with the triumphant learners.

That incident made up Camagu’s mind for him. The minister was doing a jig of victory with people who had committed criminal offenses. In the course of the jubilation the rights of the principal who lost his freedom for a whole week were not considered at all. His children counted for nothing. The message was clear: to get your way with the government you must break the law. . kidnap somebody. . burn a building. . block the roads. . thrash South Africa!

Yesterday Camagu resigned from the school. His suitcase is packed, and tomorrow he is flying away.

Inside the tent they are praying the final prayers of the wake.

“I’ll fly! I’ll soar!” shouts Camagu to the indifferent dawn. “Let me soar to the sky like the creations of the dead man!”

The mourners hear him, for now they are streaming out of the tent. The vigil is over. It is time to prepare for the funeral. They laugh and say madness sets in when people begin to talk alone.

They are all going down the mountain. Abseiling the steep rock faces. Camagu misses a step and almost falls when he finds himself next to the makoti.

“Be careful,” says the beautiful one.

“You sang those hymns beautifully,” says the exile.

“Thank you.”

“What is your name?”

“NomaRussia.”

“You are not from Hillbrow. You do not look like people from Hillbrow.”

“No one is from Hillbrow. Everyone here comes from somewhere else. I am from Qolorha.”

“Where is that?”

“Qolorha. Qolorha-by-Sea. Haven’t you heard of Nongqawuse?”

Of course, Nongqawuse. He has vague memories of history lessons where he was told about a young girl who deceived the amaXhosa nation into mass suicide. But he never associated her with any real place.

The hearthly one tells him that she came to the city to visit her “homeboy,” only to find that he was dead. She is going back to the land of Nongqawuse this very morning. She is saddened by the fact that she won’t be able to attend the funeral, for her bus to the Eastern Cape leaves very early in the morning. She is pleased, though, that she was at her homeboy’s wake, and was able to sing him a loving farewell.

An old woman drags her away and admonishes her for talking to strangers.

Camagu used to see himself as a pedlar of dreams. That was when he could make things happen. Now he has lost his touch. He needs a pedlar of dreams himself, with a bagful of dreams waiting to be dreamt. A whole storage full of dreams.

While the Unbelievers lament the sufferings of the Middle Generations, Zim celebrates the end of those sufferings. Although both he and Bhonco, son of Ximiya, patriarch of the Unbelievers, are descendants of the headless ancestor, they never see any issue with the same eye.

Zim, the leading light of the Believers, owes his existence and his belief to his great-grandfather, Twin, and Twin’s yellow-colored wife, Qukezwa. That is why he named his first-born son Twin, even though he was not a twin, and his yellow-colored daughter Qukezwa.

Zim himself is a yellow-colored stocky man with the high cheekbones of the Khoikhoi. He has taken more from his great-grandmother’s people. So have his children. Their Khoikhoi features were enhanced by their mother. NoEngland, who was from the amaGqunukhwebe, the clan that came into existence from the intermarriages of the amaXhosa and the Khoikhoi people even before the days of Nongqawuse.

NoEngland died a year ago, and Zim hasn’t stopped mourning her death. Even today as he sits under the gigantic wild fig tree in front of his hexagon, he is wondering how life would have been had the ancestors not decided to call NoEngland so early in her life. And it was indeed early, for she was only forty-four — eighteen years younger than her husband.

The wild fig tree knows all his secrets. It is his confessional. Under it he finds solace, for it is directly linked to the ancestors — all of Twin’s progeny who planted it more than a hundred years ago. Now the trunk is as big as his main hut. As soon as it leaves the ground its branches twist and turn in all directions, spreading wide like an umbrella over his whole homestead. Some branches reach as far as the top of the umsintsi trees — the coral tree that used to be called kaffirboom during the Middle Generations — and the aloes that surround his yard.