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
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