The Commander

Saturday 3 December 2016

The Commander

by Dan Wylie

Foreword

As I write this, in late 2016, South Africa’s universities are in turmoil. What began as a legitimate campaign for better funding for poor students – indeed, better funding for tertiary education generally – has been compromised by factionalised and politicised campaigns by minority groups with muddled and obscure motives. Counter-productive vandalism has been met with police over-reaction; government dithering has been met with intensified utopian and undemocratic demands. Bullying; dancing; wild ideas; rubber bullets; mistrust. We have been here before, of course: the 1980s were witness to campus disturbances, albeit directed against apartheid – but some of the issues and the methods of both protest and suppression are of a piece – a continuous if entangled and self-contradictory history.

That history and its resurgence into the present have made me look again at the story I have to tell here. Some of our students, born in the ‘post-apartheid era’, indeed in the new millennium, despite being relatively freed, have survived some horrific experiences: bereavement, abuse, psychological meltdown. Most remain relatively privileged, however, not least in the fact that their story has hit the headlines – unlike the story of the man I call Vuyo , a man from a segment of society whose experiences are less often told. I knew him for about 15 years. Ill-educated but continually self-teaching, hard-beaten but uncowed, he had no sense of entitlement. He was unemployed but in his way ambitious, impoverished in choices but unselfish in his actions. He didn’t slavishly follow anyone, begged for no favours, and courageously crossed boundaries most of us dare not. So his obscure subsidence into tragedy has particularly sharp-edged lessons for us all.

It is a peculiarly South African story, peculiar in its tentativeness, in its perpetually unfinished quality. I serialise it in eight parts. It is told mostly in Vuyo’s own voice; it is what is left of him.

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Text and images (c) Dan Wylie

The Commander: Chapter 1

1 - Into the laager

He did not appear to be in command of the muscles of his own face. He grimaced and flexed brown rubbery folds of cheek, his eyes would disappear into San-like slits. He had a broad, almost square face; blue-black pits at the curve of the jaw from old acne. Not a student: a lack of care taken over his hair, perhaps, or the way the brown-scuffed end of his black trouser-belt lolled out of the buckle, his slightly soiled blue-striped shirt lapping its hems over brown pants. Scuffed black shoes without socks; on protuberant ankle-bones, grey keloid scars. I offered him my office’s one easy chair; he pushed himself down on it, almost horizontal, an exaggerated ease.

He grimaced and winced his way through his introduction: his name was – let’s call him Vuyo – and he was unemployed, and lived in the township – “the location”, he called it, a name that seemed to smack of the previous century. He wanted me to look at some writing he had been doing; he had heard that “Doctor Dan” would help him with writing. Doctor Dan found himself wondering what notions and tales were circulating about him in “the location” – why anyone in a place he seldom visited would talk about him at all. Vuyo felt he wanted to tell some of his community’s stories; there were so many, many stories. But he wasn’t sure of his English.

He handed over an old school exercise-book – those blue-grey lines, the slightly sallow paper, the battered grey cover with its name- and class-spaces empty, edges browned and curled with the dusty distances he had tramped on foot with the book wrestled into a tube in his nervous hands and stuffed in his back pocket. Several pages were crammed with blue ballpoint writing in that style that seems endemic to African schools, its distinctive crampy curls and uprights, or whole passages in forward-leaning disjointed capitals.

A glance was enough to confirm that the English was terrible. Though vastly better than my isiXhosa.

So I tried to smooth the exercise-book flat and said I would take a look.

I am not a South African, though I have lived here for a long time now and have made it, somewhat accidentally, my home. This small-town university has become my nest, rather than the country per se. Nevertheless, to the degree that I was raised in racially-structured Rhodesia, inheriting and, ambivalently, conscripted into its dying army to fight for some of its racist ideals, I understand some of the impulses, history and particular idiocies of South African racism. I have travelled widely but have found nowhere else I would rather live; South Africa is riddled with problems that often seem insurmountable, but they are problems I comprehend in my blood; they are, in some sense, my problems in a way British or American or Australian problems could never be.

Part of it is this: the brick-and-skin laager of my whiteness. The feeling that a history of arrogant dominance is still expressing itself through my very body-language, let alone words and thought-patterns and technology. It seems I almost sweat it through my pores, like a pale dye. Being in an historically white university, a still largely white department, conducting itself in a language marinaded in conquest, perpetuates this subtle sweat.

The smooth-faced sheen of this tower’s ivory – this body, the university’s commanding clocktower – is reflected in the geography of the town, its apartheid origins all too evident in its east-west split of well-treed suburbs and tarred roads, opposing in its very slope the scrappy minimalism of the adjacent “townships”, their unique blend of littered dishevelment and social-engineering regimentation. Streets designated only with numbers counter streets named after rapacious colonial colonels. Now, more than twenty years after “independence”, or “liberation” – haplessly ambivalent words, both – the boundaries are a little blurred: raucous street kids harass parking motorists, like wasps; ancient toothless beggars slump on colonial stone walls outside the restaurants, holding out a wheedling cup or jam-jar. In the supermarkets shoppers of every hue shop amicably for much the same stuff. And nowadays it is sometimes hard at first to tell scruffy young loiterers from students who affect a fashionable déshabillé and red-yellow-green woollen baggy-hats to contain their dreads.

But barriers and inhibitions remain complex and deep.

Vuyo never made eye contact; his lips seemed full of mercury, sometimes his accent and tangled syntax were difficult for me to follow. There was the nervy screwing-up of his face every few minutes. But there seemed to me even then something genuine about him, something intelligently different. I thought it must have taken considerable courage to find his way into a university English Department, almost in the centre of the ivory tower.

Maybe he was feeling somewhat as I had, a few years before, when I elected to teach in a “bush school” in eastern Zimbabwe. It was just a few years after independence there. I don’t recall bravery being involved; but strangeness, certainly, being the only white Zimbabwean for eighty kilometres in any direction. There, I was surrounded by, teaching and learning from, living among the same people, in much the same region, against whom I had ostensibly been fighting just a few years before. I learned better Shona; I shared a cottage with a Shona colleague, one of the most beautiful men I have ever known. I taught English, and History from the new post-independence textbooks that began with Marx and Lenin, to classes of lively Shona schoolgirls, fifty at a time. I met some of their fathers who had been guerrillas in the liberation forces. One of them said to me, “Those days are over. We do not need to talk of them. We are very glad to have you here teaching our children.”

Everywhere the signs of a nation regaining a sense of self, of secure and straight-backed identity.

It was very different in South Africa, even in the days following Mandela’s release and the first elections, even when, in 1997 or so, when Vuyo first came to see me. Mentalities had not yet shifted much from when, as an undergraduate student myself in the 1980s, I had joined both community-based and university outreach programmes to teach extra English to deprived school-kids and post-Matrics, feeling that weight of mingled lassitude and neediness suffocating the classes, the debilitating ambivalence of it all. I remember sitting on sunny patches of lawn near the university swimming-pool, wrestling with overweight uniformed girls’ glum and stubborn reluctance to engage or ask questions; I wondered how much of that was gendered, how much was terror of my whiteness, no matter how gentle I attempted to be, how much was discomfort in this alien rich environment where legally they were not meant to be, how much was a kind of synecdoche of an entire cowed people.

Whatever I did to try to redress my own upbringing, there were limits. Over the years I forgot much of my Shona, and found it almost impossible to replace it with isiXhosa. I did a conversational course but thereafter I failed to converse much, and it withered. I blame it on the ossification of brain cells as I have aged; on the utterly different grammatical structures of the language, so hard; on the pervasive desire of even Xhosa people around me to speak that all-powerful English. But I know these are paltry excuses, really. When I was in Patagonia I learned more Spanish in a month than I’ve learned isiXhosa in a decade, simply because I had to. The laager still holds, because it can.

Vuyo was different. He was uncowed, polite without being deferential, self-contained without over-compensating swagger. His hands were hard as a labourer’s, but there was a softness about him, a vulnerability. He was asking for help from a member of the community he, too, had been fighting, or at least struggling against.

As Vuyo began to bring me more writings, I tried to strike a bargain with him. I was afraid – I think afraid is the right word – of a crushingly one-way relationship of need and supply, especially of money, which in my experience always gets entangled in increasingly awkward dance-moves of desperation and resentment. So I asked Vuyo if he would teach me some isiXhosa. He was instantly keen, launched into a string of words – chair, sit down, tree, I want to go home now. It was immediately evident that he would be a lousy teacher.

And so much of what he said and wrote, throwing up dense veils of grammatical obscurity and accentual difference, I simply could not at first understand. And what those writings were about, I confess, I can no longer recall.

Nevertheless, in time I got to know quite a lot about Vuyo. When I typed up a CV for Vuyo, he put down amongst his “Hobbies”, “Writing an autobiography.” This was another deal we made. I suggested that the two of us recorded his memories; then the idea was I would shape this material as much as needed without obscuring his distinctive voice and perspective on life and politics, which I came increasingly to see as highly idiosyncratic, thoughtful, self-made. I sensed there was enough to make a little book out of it, maybe. I wanted this mind to come to light out of its unpromising milieu, a level of society all too often lost to sight. I wanted to help him construct the story, clarify and make it presentable without losing the unique timbres of his voice. He was hugely enthusiastic about this idea. I felt his was a story worth telling: not because it was heroic or triumphant, but almost the opposite, a story of ordinary disappointments and betrayals, of hardscrabble survival, family traumas, grimy civilian warfare, of love and love lost. Its very lack of direction, I thought, might turn out to be its point.

But by the time I realised what an extraordinary story he had to tell, it was almost too late. We had the time, to be sure, but the time we had was not used. We made appointments which he failed to honour, or I failed to honour. Things distracted and interfered, as they do. Time trickled away, until it really was too late. This is a story of how much we failed to do, how our fragments failed to cohere.

I had secured a little digital recorder, and this is how we began.

Text and Images (c) Dan Wylie

"Life turned upside down"

Grahamstown 2016

The Commander: Chapter 2

2 – He cried quietly

My family come from Middledrift (said Vuyo). My grandparents’ mother is from the traditional house, the amaMpondo. Although we fully understand that we are originating from the kingdom of amaMpondo, but we are not claiming that, and according to our culture, if let us say, originally you are from amaMpondo, and let’s say the mother of your grandfather – according to our culture, there is something they call umtchana, a nation, so even us, we are nephews of amaMpondo, according to our tradition. The name of my grandmother was Na-Mountain. They died early sixties because of natural causes, and they had a big land in Middledrift. They lived next to MaNgconde’s house. MaNgconde, she is well-known, and the University of Georgia, I think five years back, called her, recognising her for being a mother, for being a good mother in the Eastern Cape, a preacher, and they gave her a degree, an honorary doctorate for her role, you know. But there is something I want to confirm, or to say it very loudly and clear, that one of the major things that resulted them to escape, to preferred the escape route in Middledrift, there was a tension, within the family. Some of them – it’s like there was no trust, within the family. It’s like, if for instance, you married someone, it’s like the wives of other grandparents, it’s like there was an accusation, let’s say for instance, there was no trust. There is this African tendency, if you are a female and you are too much black, you have witchcraft. So, some of the family members died. So they died because of natural causes, sometime, but you will find that there are accusations within the family. So there was no trust, with the family, so that resulted for my father to left his cattle in Middledrift. He had a farming there, agriculture; he was planting everything, mealies, everything, beetroots, carrots, everything, but he left them, he left those things there, because the time he left Middledrift, he never notify anyone, any member of the family, that he was leaving Middledrift.

Vuyo said that he wanted to take me to Middledrift, there were members of his family still living there. But we never did make the trip.

Vuyo came to my office to announce that he had had a dream about our doing this autobiography. He had dreamt it was the launch of the book – only it was not merely his autobiography, it was much bigger than that, since the shades of the dead of the liberation struggle – Walter Sisulu and others – were there, all presided over by Thabo Mbeki. He giggled, but I could tell he took this dream seriously; dreams are the presence of the shades. The point is, they seemed to approve of the project.

Before my father went to the circumcision in 1958 (Vuyo continued), he was unlike us because the time we went to circumcision we were students, we were studying, so if you want to go to circumcision during those years, you ought to work hard for yourself, because you are the person who want to go to circumcision. My father left school while he was doing Std 4, now I am wondering why he was doing Std 4 whilst he was 16 years old, I am wondering, although I understand the conditions of those years, so it’s not so amazing, but it’s something I laugh, you know, something I laugh. My father worked hard, he focussed on the farming and all that stuff, he was a hard worker; even now, if my mother, or my family member maybe you do something wrong, they will confront you by telling you the role my father played. If you do something which is not constructive, they will tell you, you are not taking the route of your father. My father was a hard worker.

As I have already mentioned before, that there was a tension between the family members, so he left Middledrift; so not only cattles and that farming only, and that land only, but he left even other goods, because he was rushing to Salem where he believed that he would be fine, so he decided to left everything there, and he told himself, that he will start fresh. he fled to the Salem farm, where he was highly welcome by the man known as Mr D.; he used to stay there for quite a long time, up until, he managed to have some other cattles again there. But mid 70s, he had a problem with Mr D. And another interesting thing is that my father decided to sold his cattle, because he had nothing to transport his cattle to town, and he did not have the right to come here in town, because of those pass laws and so on, but he decided to lie, because he said, he is the son of his sister, the one who was already working at the University at that time; he said, No, I am here and I am staying with my sister, while he was not staying with his sister. So he was staying here at R. Road, and he was unable therefore to buy even a plot here in town because of those laws. The past regime believed that if you are not a town person, if you are not born here, therefore you do not belong, according to those pass laws of the regime. So he was renting a house here at R. Road for almost twenty years; even after his death we were renting that house. Another interesting issue is that, if you are renting, during those years, you can’t cook something nice, like eggs, or meat, or boerewors, and all that stuff if the owner of the property don’t have that stuff, otherwise you will suffer consequences. He or she will chase you out of his property. It’s like you can’t enjoy yourself; we were experiencing those hard times. And you find that if you have a sisters with something in their pocket, there will be a negative attitude; or brother, if you are financially stable, the owner of the property won’t recommend; you can’t do even a party. It was one of the hard times we experienced; for almost twenty years, that’s what we experienced.

And another interesting story about my father; he was not an activist. Not like my grandparents, even the brother of my grandparents, they were so strong, it’s like they were so militant; you know, they don’t care; they were saying This is wrong, this wrong; this is right , this is right. They were politically-minded, my grandparents. They did not belong to a particular organisation; it was just an attitude; they believe also to mayibuye; bring it back, bring it back, bring my country back. So you find that they liked to lift up their fist, and say, Bring Africa back, mayibuye; like, when you talk about Africa, they will be angry, immediately. But my father was not like that; he was not even a politician, he will only work for his family. He was so nice, although I never spent quite a long time with him; but I remember the time when I was maybe 8 years old, I was playing with my younger brother Bongani. So whilst we were busy playing – in fact it was a mistake, you know – the ball had beaten me right on my nose, so there was that blood. My father saw my T-shirt with that blood, so he asked me what happened; and I didn’t elaborate; I said, No it was Bongani, and my father was angry, and he banished Bongani. And I was so worried that he banished Bongani; and I didn’t tell him exactly what happened; because I also respect him, I must only tell him what happened because if he question you and than you don’t come to the point immediately, you may find yourself in trouble; because he wanted us as straightforward kids, you don’t lie, he won’t accept that, so he want you to answer immediately. So he really was a nice person, he was really nice he was very nice; I mean, I know him. Although I never spent that much time with him.

My father died because of a cancer, I don’t know how to call it, but it is a cancer of the blood, and he died in Port Elizabeth, in Livingstone Hospital in 1985 on the 24th of August. So we buried him here in town. Another shocking story about him, my father, at the time he was buried, my mother was unable to buy a cross, to mark the grave, and to honour him. So after some few months, she managed to raise those funds, and she gave the money to one of the family members, of which the family member misused the money. So, one day my mum asked him, Can’t we go and see if it is beautiful or not? Unfortunately up until today, we still want to know: Where is our father’s grave? I am the one who spent almost a week, I and my friend, searching for the grave of my father, after I told him that, Hey my friend I have got this problem, searching for my father’s grave; then my friend was so shocked to hear that, then he said to me, No, let’s launch an operation, Operation Searcher; so we search and search up until we failed. We came up with nothing. So that is still shocking me; but the one who misused the money; he is not my enemy, he is still a family member; but I think God is the only person who will intervene in that.

In another interview, he gave a slightly different version of this: “I don't know the grave of my father. Ja, because in 1989 the policemen they went to those graves, then they destroyed those graves, trying to make the community angry. Then, because, the cross of those graveyards was just made of wood, so they were destroyed totally. So when we go there we find that we don't know our graves. I searched and searched and searched and I tried to contact some funeral parlours – unsuccessful. I've been searching for that, even now, when I'm praying I say God, hey, even if you can send a bird, and say here's your father's grave, then I'll be glad, I'll be glad, really. But that that makes me angry. That makes me angry because I want to visit my father's grave one day, you know, and just make it nice you know, even though I'm financially broke but, even if I've got a paint, just go and paint there.”

And he cried quietly.

And there is Vuyo’s mother, who as far as I know is still alive. But I have not attempted to find her. Is it sensitivity or cowardice keeps me from questioning her about her son’s sad history?

Text and images © Dan Wylie

"Township: Burial grove"

Grahamstown 2016

The Commander: Chapter 3

3 – Plans never bore fruit

And another interesting story (Vuyo went on) is that my father’s sister, who worked for the university, I thought that she was my mother. Even during the death of my father, I thought that she was my mother; I only knew that she was not my mum in 1988. Because she don’t have kids. So during the end of the month, she will buy some clothes for me, buy some nice stuff, because when you are a kid, you like to eat, so she would buy some nice stuff for me. My mum is still kicking. Since she came here to town, she worked as a domestic worker, even now she is working for the family of O., next to the College; she worked there way back and is still working for them now. The other interesting thing, is that family of O., they are speaking Xhosa early now, because my mum taught them. So now I was there a few weeks, back, and I found that, what I noticed was that there is that friendship now; so for instance, if there is something wrong, where I reside, that family will want to know exactly what is going on.

Another thing that makes me to believe that my father was nice; my father will never have chosen a militant wife. So I confirm that my father was nice, because of the behaviour I saw from my mum; my mum is such a nice person; she will gather with those who are quiet and nice, like him.

So after the death of my father, also going back to 1984, my aunt, the one I thought is my mum, she played such a role. We didn’t notice even that we don’t have a father, because she decided to play the role of my father; and she left her house, and stayed with us. And in 1997, she suggested that, No Enough is enough, you don’t have to stay here now, you don’t have to rent; I’ll buy a house for you. So she bought a house for R53 000 for us. Three years after, she died. And we thank her for the role she played. So my younger brother, A., he took the responsibility of paying for the house after the death of my aunt, so we still remember her for what she did for us.

My mother also is from Middledrift, but their surname is Klaas-Tshuni; so they played such a role for us; they became the family members as well. Another reason they call themselves Klaas-Tshuni; during the era of apartheid, it was very wise. It was like, for instance your surname is Mthimkulu, ‘big tree’, then you must change it and say Grootboom, so that the past regime would recognise you, or recommend you; so you change the surname. During the traditional ceremony, is where you reveal the truth; but after that occasion your surname is Grootboom again. You will notice that a certain Klaas-Tshuni; on my mother’s side the surname is Tyume; but since they spent years and years using the surname Klaas they are using both now – Klaas-Tyume. The side of my mum, my grandparents on the side of my mum, I don’t have that much history, because my mum’s parents died when I was so young.

Before my mum take any step she will pray and pray and pray, and she will say, What I want to happen, will happen: ndifunga amaqocwa. She is a church person; now she is attending a church there at Umzi Wase Ethiopia. During 1992-3, there was a split, there was that contradiction, that a male is the only people who is supposed to do this and this and this at the church, so Dr K. M. he opposed that, and other church members, so there was a split in the church, so my mum decided to follow the side of Umzi Wase Ethiopia, a traditional church. Another interesting thing is that my mum is still dancing, traditional dance competitions. And she is leading Umzi Wase

Ethiopia

, and she has won many competitions. In the last competition she was number two, there were many provinces for churches or missions; but in this town only, she will be number one. She is fifty-nine years old, next year by June she will be sixty years; and I remember she said to me I must write down a letter by next year for an old age pension, but she says she won’t stop working, because she doesn’t want to be old, she want to work up until such a time it is necessary for her to retire, but she is fresh now, she won’t retire. She is fat, she is fat, but she said to me, although she is fat even now, she dropped in weight after the death of my father. At the time when my father died, my mum was thirty-six years old, but she decided to raise us; because if she was someone else, she was going to remarry, but she decided to stay with us. And even now she is still with us.

Unemployed almost all the time I knew him, Vuyo did manage to pick up what is known as “work” now and then, in the so-called “formal sector” of poorly-paid exploitation. I wrote recommendations for him on departmental letterheads, which doubtless helped, but he never stayed in the jobs for long. He dangled for months on the prospect of a job in the municipality; he had some contact person there, but nothing ever transpired. He worked for a couple of years in a chain supermarket as a “merchandiser” – or so he put on his CV, though this probably meant just packing other people’s luxuries on shelves. And he worked in more menial capacities at a couple of service stations. One of them he left, he informed me, because he had a dispute with the owner-manager, a lean, aloof white man whom I’d seen myself berate his employees in public view. In Vuyo he encountered someone who had worked with MK and the Communist Party, a respected political mentor in his own community, and who was almost certainly better-read and deeper-thinking than himself. Vuyo was an individual, in short, who was, in the “new dispensation”, simply not going to put up with any such unreconstructed racist shit.

In between those occasional jobs, Vuyo was forever airing schemes for bettering his community. He wanted to promote reading, and do something with the local libraries. He had a scheme to clean up the plastic debris that perpetually littered his neighbourhood and blew all over the countryside to hang raggedly off fences and end up in the guts of cattle. He was going to embark on a chicken-rearing scheme in collaboration with a local farmer and some ex-APLA cadres, and was negotiating a patch of land on the edge of the Common. “We wrote several letters to the municipality,” he related. “We raised funds, let's say I asked R20 from you, ask R50 from there. Then we sent this guy to Pretoria, to Agriculture. There's no answer. They refer you here, they refer you here. You go to Mr Blablabla, to Mrs Blablabla. Mrs Blablabla sends you back to Mr Blablabla. And then we show some examples of other good municipalities who supported their youth. But here in this town they are politicising everything.”

At another point he and his mates were cooking up a scheme to prevent public phones from being vandalised, a combination of education and guarding. But somehow these plans never bore fruit: the land could not after all be provided, some exorbitant bribe was being demanded, or sheer practicalities intervened. Innumerable promises of institutional support evaporated. I remember saying to him that communities now had to think of achieving their betterment despite government, not through government support, not waiting for them to come up with ideas or resources. He agreed; and easy enough for me to say.

I kept printing out new copies of his CV for him, wincing as he folded each one roughly into a back pocket. Then I quietly provided plastic covers for them, thinking they would last longer and that employers would value a pristine document. But perhaps the crumpling didn’t matter that much; what is it with our culture’s fetish for the flatness of paper, anyway? I paid to put him through a basic computer literacy course, which he did, and passed, and showed me with a kind of offhand, coy pride his blue certificate. But it never did provide direct fruit.

Instead, he did some house-painting and other odd-jobs for university colleagues of mine, Doctor Such-such and Professor So-so. Vuyo enthused about his conversations with them: highly politically aware and compassionate people. But when I asked them for news or memories of Vuyo, they said they hardly knew him, or couldn’t remember him at all.

It was 1975 when I was born on the 18^th April. According to my mum, it was hot on that day, and she delivered just five minutes after 6 o’clock early in the morning, and it was hot, on that day, and she was so glad because – there are things that I might not say, but she is the best person to say, because during her pregnancy she thought there are twins. And after she delivered she was surprised that this guy was single; but she said to me the reason why she thought we are twins was because I had a big head, so she thought that we are two. What is interesting about my day is that I was not born in hospital. According to our culture, during those early days when you are born, when it is your mum’s delivery day, your mum, or one of the closer members of the family is supposed to call other relatives and neighbours, and old mamas who know a lot about the African teachings. So I was born next to Egugcwini, the place of fire, where we store our wood, so we call it Egugcwini. So everything was done there successfully. So when their job was done and finished, they refer my mum and me to hospital so that the professionals can do their job as well. Because, by using that system, they are not saying they are against the professionalism, of the hospital and that stuff, but they are supposed to start up with their culture and what they know; and by doing that you are blessing the kid, to grow well and grow strong. There was that belief that if you are born in hospital you are not as strong as someone born at Egugcwini. Even the behaviour, they believe that your behaviour will be quite different, from the one born in hospital; although there is nothing wrong with that; but according to their culture, they believe that you ought to start there.

I grew up during the hard times, my family; in 1975 my father was working but was feeling pains here and there, until 1981, where those pains became the murderer of my father. So I grew up during those hard times, within the family. The person who followed after I was born was Aya, my younger brother, in 1978, and Noba, my younger sister in 1981. My first friend is Viyolo, now working for the South African National Defence Force, and another Viyani, for a timber company, at George. Both of them, it is difficult to know who is my best friend between them; but the person who introduced Viyolo, was me, so we became the Tripartite Alliance. There is one thing is also like about our friendship, we never had a conflict; although we were young, although there were many things that would result us to have a conflict; but we respect each other. If you are wrong, we are wrong. You ought to accept that. So those were the things I learnt from them. More especially from Viyolo, he was not someone from a family with money or something to eat, so we used to help each other; during the breakfast, exactly that we are going to have a breakfast where I reside to my mum’s place, dinner at the place of Vuyani, so there was that kind of a system we were using during those days. I remember the registration date, in 1981, when I was going to school for the first time. It was me and Vuyani; unfortunately Viyolo he was residing at Tyantyi Location, he was far from us; whereas we were in Fingo Village. So I and Vuyani, and our parents, we went to that primary school under the principal Mrs Z, so we went there, there were hundreds of students, there were high school students from Nathanial Nyaluza, because they were already matured, so they had no problem with the orientation day or opening day, so they were helping the parents, because their parents were working, so they act as parents even though they were students, from Standard 7 or all that stuff. Almost during the opening day, it’s a busy day. So fine, I and Vuyani, fortunately we were registered in the same class. Our first teacher was the late Mrs M. at the Primary School; she was short, white in colour, and she liked kids, that’s what we noticed also. But the hard time was after the registration, when our parents said, Okay Vuyo and Vuyani, Goodbye, No, we are panicking, and we cried, up until our teacher gave our parents a mandate to go and come tomorrow; so Mrs M asked our parents to make such a nice lunch for us; and we must add, they must to try to spoil us so we know the meaning of the culture of education.

Text and images © Dan Wylie

"Township: Shanty edge"

Grahamstown 2016

The Commander: Chapter 4

4 – The devil is somersaulting

Vuyo is ill, though he cannot say exactly why. He has been suffering pains, and blood in his urine. He has been going for some time to a traditional healer, taking admixtures, performing rites; but he has had to accept that this isn’t working and I sent him to my own “western” doctor. Now he has been diagnosed, but his medical vocabulary is not up to a clear explanation. I am guessing some kind of urinary tract issue. At any rate, surgery is required. He has elected to have the op in Port Elizabeth, since the local hospital is ill-equipped and has a dubious reputation; but I also become aware that the choices for an unemployed man are limited; and the waiting period is all but unconscionable. I give him some money for transport and some extra; he is almost tearfully grateful.

I do not see or hear of him for three months or so. When he does return it transpires that the first operation went awry somehow, and he had to be operated on again. He is looking run-down, but says it is all better now.

Coming out of hospital, though the state paid for the operations, Vuyo finds himself in a tighter financial corner than he has ever been. It has been clear between us from the beginning that our relationship is not to be about my giving him money. We have a mutual friend who is never exactly down-and-out but makes a nuisance of himself constantly pestering people for money for transport here or to produce a theatre flyer there – or so he will say. And it just gets uncomfortable, every time you feel inclined to refuse him. In my view, such a relationship promoted neither self-worth and achievement nor self-sufficiency.

Or is this just my way of avoiding getting trapped in responsibility for my own colonial inheritance?

Whatever it is, Vuyo seems to agree. For several years he has never asked. But now, perhaps out of some residual suspicion, rather than give him cash I offer to buy him food, to keep him going. We drive in my bakkie down to a dusty wholesaler on R Road and purchase pockets of potatoes, oranges, a couple of bags of mealie-meal, bread, eggs.

Then I drive him up to his house in the township. It is back in the broad warrens of dust and ruts behind the half-tarred main drags, where the streets only have letters and his address has not even a street name, just the house number, 704a. One of the earlier RDP houses, the paint already scuffed and mottled with black mould, rain-splash reddening its skirts, a piece of broken guttering hanging off a corner. But there is at least a little ground around it, a seasonal maize and cabbage patch roughly fenced against marauding goats. Inside, some space for a lounge suite, one of those grotesquely green items bought on usurous credit from the mainline furniture stores. The ubiquitous TV – even the most miserable of shacks out here can have a satellite dish. Some tattered but meaningful newspaper clippings stuck to one wall. A wedding photo crooked in its frame. A sense of assiduous cleanliness in the washing draped over the back of a chair, the dishes gleaming on the tiny sink.

A friend of his is there, a tall pleasant man named JJ, or Jay-Jay; and a ten-year-old cousin apparently awestruck at having this white man in the house. We drink water from enamel mugs; talk inconsequentially for a while; then Vuyo insists on riding with me as I drive out; there are areas here he doesn’t want me to venture through. It is no more than a few hundred metres, really: right at the power general store; left at the Vodacom container.

Take care of yourself, I say as he alights.

That was the only time I ever visited his home, that house of tragedy. He would never visit mine. Whatever our friendship was, if it was even that, it was not quite mutually social.

A typical visit to my office. Vuyo comes in; he is hot, a little giggly for some reason; he has a way of hunching his shoulders forward and raising his eyebrows so his forehead creases horizontally and chuckling wetly through gappy yellowed teeth. He has been reading the papers about Zimbabwe’s ongoing elections, reading as closely as anyone I know. The process has been riddled with endemic violence and electoral-roll fraud; hypocrisy on the part of the monitors; pathetic weakness on the part of SADC. For all that he was a Communist Party stalwart, Vuyo doesn’t like Robert Mugabe. “He was there at Fort Hare university,” he says. “I remember people talking of him here; he was a hero to people here. But he has thrown everything away, he has become too greedy.” He has been impressed rather by Simba Makoni, a political lightweight but someone with the courage to defect from Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party and run as an independent. Makoni hasn’t a hope in hell, I’d say, but Vuyo likes to think he might win this election. Perhaps he senses a fellow-spirit there.

Then he goes on to tell me extraordinary stories of the township. One, as far as I remember it, concerned a radio programme, broadcast in isiXhosa and hosted by a woman who dispensed advice, largely from a Zionist perspective – largely, I say, since according to Vuyo she also believed entirely in ‘traditional’ witchcraft, which she attributed to Satan himself. To protect yourself against being bewitched, she advised, sprinkle around your house and over the front door a mixture of herbs, mthomboti, and battery acid. Battery acid!

Vuyo snuffled his giggle but you could tell he did not wish to disbelieve it. Such was the community in which he grew up. Postmodern, we academics like to call it; postcolonial, hybridised, irretrievably mixed up and wonderfully creative.

After another of our more extended sessions, in which he regaled me with rambling reminiscences of township life, I realised a world of extraordinary richness was slipping by me. It was garbled in its delivery, further mangled by my memories and misunderstandings, and it spoke of a world I could scarcely begin to comprehend, bubbling away just across the creek. So what I wrote down the moment Vuyo left – this was before we invented the digital-recording project – I reproduce here exactly, true to all the flaws, slippages and misspellings of our strange, quintessentially South African relationship, perhaps of all relationships.

“Yes, you saw that funeral leaving town on Saturday, many many cars, a very popular person. That was -----------. He was an activist, a commander in Umkhonto weSizwe, he was very active in the society. he was working at the museum. He was not old, he died in acar accident. He was overtaking another funeral, and wham! Five people in the car; the other four escaped without a scratch, only he, died at the scene. And even stranger is this: last year, a year ago, he had an accident on that very same spot. It says something.

Let me tell you an unbelievable story. There is a Reverend -------, he runs a radio programme from 6 to 9 in the mornings, and he interviewed this old man. This old man was 72, and he said – he confessed – that he had been worshipping devils for thirty years. The Devil, Satan. He was asked why he had changed his mind now, why he was saying this now? He said, You must know, these people are trying to destroy the universe. They will destroy everybody.

You know, every Friday, every Saturday, every single Sunday, we attend funerals now. Not the funerals of old people: young people. They are dying of AIDS. And the youth do not want to listen; they do not listen to education; they do not believe it. But there are also some others, who are spreading it deliberately, they know they have AIDS, they know it kills, they know exactly what they are doing. These are tricky cases. The police do not know how to handle it. They can come and deal with assault and such cases, but these ones, the investigative cases, they don’t know how to do it. Why are they spreading AIDS? Because they do not want to die alone. They want to bring down the whole nation with them.

But there are these people also. They go to the hospital, they take the bottles of donated blood, that which has already been tested. They exchange the ones which are HIV-negative with the others which are HIV-positive. The doctors then inject their patients with the infected blood. There are some doctors who know they are doing this. There are journalists also who know about it; but they are part of it. They are all together, they have been taken over by this thing umpundulu.

You know, way back, long before AIDS came, people used to die. They got very thin, their ribs stuck out, they got sores on their bodies, exactly the same symptoms as AIDS. This was called impundulu.

There is a woman called ---------. She was also interviewed on the radio. She also talked about all these things, she knows them, she was also with the devils. She told this story. A man lived with his family in a house. The house had no ceiling, just the zinc roof. In the zinc was a small hole; during the day a light would shine through that hole, a very bright light, down onto the man’s bed, exactly the same spot. It bothered him very much. His son was also worried, and suggested they go to a traditional healer. There are two kinds of healer, the herbalist (ixhwele), who just deals with herbs and bodily ailments, and the other (ugqirha) who talks to the ancestors, he deals with cases of witchcraft and the affairs of the mind. This man went to the ugqirha. The ugqirha told him to take some sweat. he told the man, Don’t tell your wife, or any of the other kids. The man went with the sweat, and he attacked that hole, he attacked it with the sweat. The light was being caused by the impundulu, which was a bird; it would come down there. Now the man’s wife, she used to stand outside the door washing the dishes. That day the man attacked the hole, the light went away. He went outside; his wife was dead; also the bird was dead. She had been taken over by the impundulu, she was a devil-worshipper, and no one knew this.

When women have miscarriages, this is the impundulu at work. They come at night; they put this white powder around the vagina, called isandhlwana [?], then they go inside, right to where the child is, and it dies. Then the women – some women - will give birth to a bird, the impundulu bird. It will fly away immediately. The women will just say, Oh, I have lost my baby.

Let me tell you something else you will not believe. There are people who die, but they do not die. They will be seen the next day. They are called isitenzulu [?]. You will bury them one day, then the next day they will be seen in one of the taverns. Always in the taverns. They are not like your European ghosts, they are the actual people. There were two soldiers from the SANDF, from the battalion base here. They came to one of the taverns, and they saw one of these isitenzulu, they knew this man had died and been buried. They tried to shoot him, but it was as if they were not shooting. They thought they were shooting, but they couldn’t hear the sounds of their shots; they were shooting but they were not actually shooting. They preferred at that point to run away.

These isitenzulu, they have a place they go to, it is there but we do not have eyes to see it. The place is called bhijolo or gwadana; it has buildings just like ours, but the buildings are built of the bones of human beings.

And they can take different shapes, they can change into anything. But when you look at them they look just like ordinary people.

When I went to the circumcision school, I knew that these devil-worshippers like that place; they go right there. When I was there, I heard my neighbours shouting and shouting, screaming, yelling. No-one could say what was going on. The impundulu was there, the devils were inside with them. At night you hear a bird, it is called the uholihowe [?], it makes a high mewing sound, whaah, waah, waah, then you know the devils are there, but it’s a deception; by the time you hear it, the devils are already inside. But I was prepared, I went to the incwe, the herbalist, and he told me to do this: you take battery acid, and you mix it with cheese, and you scatter the cheese and the acid around your door or your hut. Because they walk about with no shoes, in fact they walk about with no clothes at all, and when they walk on that acid their feet burn. I did this, and so I was safe; I had no problems.

This same woman I spoke of, who was a devil-worshipper, she was very clever, she was a nursing sister, and she was about to go to Germany for six months. Then she decided not to go because she heard about what happened to them. This plane, the pilot was a cat, he looked just like a cat; so the front was like a cat, and the back of the plane was like the tail of a snake, and it went very fast, faster than absolutely anything. So she did not go, or she would never return.

Now she cannot get a job. Six years she has applied and applied and cannot get anything; now she is going to study a higher diploma. All over town there are people who cannot get jobs – doctors, attorneys – who are better qualified than the people in positions of authority. The people who have jobs are not from here, that is why they can get the jobs. The townspeople have been prevented by the devil-worshippers.

And I’m telling you, I am not going to join any church, because that is exactly where they go; they like the churches. This same woman, she told how they wanted to kill a reverend from Johannesburg; they had heard that his blood was very powerful, and they were going to mix his blood with the paint, and they would paint the inside of the church with this paint. But to this day that reverend is still alive. I’m not sure why.

But that accident is very strange. Because they will know when you are going to die. Then the week before, they will come and cut your tongue, so you cannot speak. It will be cut like the tongue of a snake, but you cannot speak. You will know that you are going to die, but you are going mad with not speaking; then the following week you die. The accident was like that; it was a sign.

This is the world we live in. The Devil is somersaulting.”

So he goes, and I nod, and question, and take some notes, and try not to judge this farrago of strange beliefs wrestling with modernity, offloading, political insight, maybe a touch of genuine insanity, certainly a sly humour and desire to shock this white man with strangeness. A gulf between us yawns, one that might take a lifetime of ‘anthropological’ study to even begin to fathom, but we laugh together, and hug our farewells, and promise to meet up again soon.

Back in the 1980s, I was here: there were demonstrations by a fringe of activists on campus, searchlights on the hills overlooking the townships, distant gunfire, circling helicopters, rumours that this or that lecturer was really a Special Branch spy, or maybe an ANC sympathiser posing as a spy posing as a lecturer.

And maybe during those years Vuyo and I passed one another, he just a kid, a anonymous to me amongst the running youngsters drifting about the streets on missions unknown; me (to him) anonymous student in T-shirt and bare feet, also trying to define my political credentials.

"Township: Throwaway people"

Grahamstown 2016

The Commander: Chapter 5

5 – Underground activities

After school hours, it was a hard time also; because we must go and cook for ourselves, because we were all young and we were all studying. Another worrying factor was that, there was this system of a platoon system when were doing Sub B, because there were few classes or buildings. But what happened during the riots, you’ll find that those people who are not studying, they would make a petrol bombs and destroy schools, fighting with our future. Because we believe they are no longer fighting a white regime, but fighting our future. Another disadvantage of the platoon system is that, you wake up early in the morning, you start by playing; by one o’clock you are supposed to go to school, then you are tired, you are not fresh, not ready to study. Another worrying factor we were against, when we were students, was the corporal punishment, because some of the teachers, by using the corporal punishment, it was another system of the white minority regime, of confusing and refusing us. Even if you make just a little mistake, you are going to be punished; it was unlike the corporal punishment, it was like a torturishment, it was like being tortured; some students even decided to leave school. I remember one of my friends, China, left school while he was in Standard One, and since then he never went back to school again, because of that corporal punishment, and he was scared of it. I understand that it was one of the systems that our parents recognized, the corporal punishment, but I personally believe that it was wrong, because I believe that there are many systems that our teachers or our parents were supposed to use, but I personally believe that they failed by using corporal punishment because they saw the consequences of the corporal punishment.

When I was young I told myself that I'll play safe, whatever I'm doing I'll play safe.

I know exactly that, after six o'clock I must be at home. Because I grew up in a notorious area and it is still notorious, even now. So, I told myself that I mustn't die because of a knife in me on the street and all that stuff, or the gun. So I must play safe, stay away from all those things. So, I blamed myself here and there, but later I said, no fine, no problem, I'll stand firm. But I'm still playing safe now. By half past seven I'm watching SABC1, watching news. Every night. Stay at home.

Even our school classes or school yards were regarded at that time as battle zone, although it is a zone of the culture of education. So those are the things we experienced during our lifetime when we were young. Then also after we went home, then we cooked there, and we washed our white T-shirts, because were supposed to wear a clean T-shirts tomorrow, and then our parents, when they came, they were making ironing for us and all that stuff. When we were doing Standard One, you will remember that after school hours we go back, we were using the close fields, such as the Roman Catholic Church fields, but we used it as kids, not as students, after school hours, we used to play there, and sing songs, like as kids. Do you know Bishop M------? Yes, I grew up under his command, in charge. And people of my area used to call me Rem Ref. I was also a server. I took part in church. Even the struggle, I learned the struggle in church, because reverends from there were too much active in the struggle for liberation. And above all my role model was Bishop David Russell.

But the scared security forces, whilst they see that we were young, then they would open fire to us, and we start to spread out. It was where we started to say, we don’t want to play, but we want to provoke them. Sometimes we do want to play, and then we feel, Ag, these guys are going to disturb us; although we were young, we were not scared. So that was where we began to start those battles, and our sisters, the elders, will join us and will collect us and say No, go to a place of safety now, we are going to deal with them.

What we noticed, during those days, in order for a policeman to shoot, there was no need for him or her to get an order from the commander or the senior staff member. If someone wants to shoot, he or she will shoot, a random shot and shooting whether necessary or not. There was a game that girls used to play, it is a gambling of some sort, they play with cards; I remember one day at Wood Street, the street we call Emazizini, those ladies were there playing with cards, playing their own gambling; then the security forces, when they were scared, when they saw people gathered together they know that there is something, they are planning something, so they are going to shoot us. Okay fine, what happened was this: the members of the SADF they went to that game, they say some few things, but they were not fighting, but they end up playing that game as well. We were so surprised to see members of the South African defence Force. And somebody said, No, is it because maybe these guys are from that pass system, of conscription, because sometimes a white man don’t want to be a soldier, but because of conditions. Some were young, they were there because of pass law, their intention is not to fight.

As a youngster, around 1988 and 1989, he told me, he had got involved with “underground activities” for the ANC. He had been approached by a friend of his, a man who had become a soldier with APLA. He started working for the “pioneer department”, acting out plays, he said, sketches of future missions, so they would get a sense of what was coming. He was the leader in his group. “Those were the days they called me The Commander,” he giggled.

The time I started to realise there were differences between my community members and the police, we thought that there is a fight between our community and the police, not knowing that the fight is between our community and the government; so when you see a police truck you know exactly what to do, you ought to fight. I think I was about eight years old the time I noticed that, Here is the enemy, here is my side. Though I was young, I was able to speculate, what I noticed was that even if we were playing nice games, we were discussing our writings about our future, the white minority regime would come and destabilise us and to shoot us. I started to question, Why, why is that, because there is nothing wrong. So without taking any information from our community or our parents, we just noticed that automatically these people are wrong, they don’t want us and all that stuff.

I remember in 1983, there was a funeral in JD stadium, because here in Grahamstown, once a comrade died they would only use JD stadium as a venue, because it was big and open, so people know that if police come and start to shoot we can escape. During that period of the 1980s people were attending the mass struggle in big numbers without even being mobilised because they were so thirsty for freedom. What happened at that funeral, I was upset at that funeral; we saw a mob and fire, fire all over in our location, so I came out – I was at my home inside, inside my yard; you remember I told you about that house we were renting, so I was there; it was a big property there, with many families there; so I was staying in front there, so I was able to go and see. And I didn’t see my father standing next to me, so I was shouting, and calling slogans, because we were young, we knew these slogans, Amandla! I never heard that from my family members; during school hours, someone would say Amandla, and Long live the ANC and all that stuff; so what my father did, he klapped me, ‘Go inside the house’. So I went inside. That’s what I remember, my father was not a political active, he was not even politically involved. But he was a good father, even in our community, he was an African teacher without degree, we can see, although he was not that much educated.

So, I went to Achimbolekwa, there was a taxi violence; and there was a fight between AZAPO and UDF members, or ANC members, because the UDF was playing the role of the ANC whilst it was banned; that is why it was dismissed after 1990, because their role was to mobilise and to play the role of the ANC. And I remember one my friends Mputumi called me one day, whilst we were students at the Primary School, we were in the hall, and said, Vuyo, turn your head, and I turned my head, and looked through the door, and everybody was trying to get out of the windows, because there was a policeman, he was surrounded by fire, he was dying there; there was this guy handling a tyre, a ‘necklace’, that is when you put petrol, and newspapers, and they put petrol inside the tyre, and they hand you the light, or they give you the bottles of petrol to drink it, and they give you a cigarette, and they ask you to light; so you explode [he clicks his fingers].

So I grew up during those days. I also remember, because my aunt, the one who worked for the University, one day, it was a Sunday, sent us to a shop we called here W., W. is one of the families that played a role in the business industry. So whilst we were going to the shop in the location, we saw a mob – justice – burning a policeman, whilst we were there – also a necklacing. So we decide not to go there to that aunt, the one who was working with my mum; we decided to go back; whilst we were going back next to the Apostolic church, we were told that policeman, he was from Joburg, or Durban, something like that, but he was not Xhosa-speaking. During those days if you were not speaking Xhosa but you were in our region or in our location you were in danger, unless you are a student of the university, or at Rhodes, or let’s say you are from Zimbabwe; they will fight with you. But the focus in our community in terms of the language was with those people who were speaking Zulu, because the Zulu people were used by the past regime during those days to do some work for them. There was also another unit of the police, called the amagundwana; those were the municipal police. People throughout the Eastern Cape, they vowed they would not join those municipal police, because the job was to oppress, worse and worse, our communities. A very few members of our community joined those police units, so the government decided, in order to fulfil their mission of fulfilling those municipal police, they went to Kwazulu-Natal to mobilize more police. Their strategy, or plan was so successful; they came to town in big numbers and they did exactly what we were scared of, they were shooting our people. I remember the death of C., she died whilst she was nine years or ten, shot by those municipal police. You ask a reason, there is no reason for a policeman to kill a ten year-old kid. Even us, we were the victims or targets, because during the mob, we would join the mob, and there was some other politicians they would ask some leaders not to allow the kids, but some would say, No, they must learn now because we don’t know what will happen in future.

So I went to Achimbolweka to study Standard 3, when the students appointed me a prefect, or we prefer to say class representative, because the fear was that once we say ‘prefects’ we follow exactly what the past regime wants, so let’s call them ‘class reps’. In our classes, we were doing it to be represented; there were so many things we were lacking, so as students we were supposed to gather and send a representative. During that time, the management, the governing body would always obey the instructions from the past government, so I used to show them that I don’t like that, that I hate that, and we are the people we do have our own ways; if right is right and wrong is wrong, definitely. For example, they were against the Freedom speeches, they will tell you that a school is not the terrain of politics or the struggle, and if you gather as students and you forward your demands or requests, sometimes they will take the information straight to the Department of Education and the Department of Education had no solution than to call the police. So those were the things we disliked; and as I grew up I didn’t surrender or withdraw to ask a student or to mobilize a student not to accept a corporal punishment, so I was in that struggle also. Also we had some progressive student movements, such as COSAS, PASO, AZASO, something like. So when we formed the branches or the structures, the governing body would report that straight to the Department of Education, and the security branches, the governing body was the cause of the arrest of the students. The number of students were increasing here and Port Elizabeth prisons, and some of the senior students they were sent to Pollsmoor, if they see that a certain guy is a mastermind they will send him to Pollsmoor prison. So those were the things that I was supporting. Also the position of the teachers was not, how can I say, they were not clear exactly where they were in the struggle, while we were all oppressed, they were oppressed themselves, so we said No they must join us, because we are not fighting for us as students or as individuals: we are fighting the national struggle, or facing the common enemy.

And another thing, what the national defence did, the South African Defence Force, during the weekends, they will supply kids with oranges, and apples and all that stuff, but the committee members they became angry because they believe that anything can happen, they may be poisoned; there was also an accusation that in those oranges maybe they will supply TB, TB medication; you will remember what happened in Angola and other countries whereby the freedom fighters were poisoned.

Then also the question of black-on-black violence. Yes, it is something I observed with my eyes, but what I noticed is what is actually happening even now, the culprits or criminals were used to fight, to form a gangsterism of some sort, using the name of the freedom fighters, then the past regime gave them weapons to destabilise everything but to use the name of the freedom fighters. There are many people who died in front of me, people who were innocent, people did nothing wrong; but they died because a mission of the past regime was to be fulfilled and those people, the perpetrators, they are walking free even now, because they were paid for what they did, just to kill and to reverse the high morale of the revolution. That’s what happened. Yes, there was a black-on-black violence, but there was a motive or an agenda; because the past regime played such a role.

"Township: Edge of winter"

Grahamstown 2016