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.
۞
Text and images © Dan Wylie
"Township: Throwaway people"
Grahamstown 2016
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