The Commander: Chapter 8

8 – Give me a skeleton

Perhaps the profoundest moment of all between us came in about 2006.  He came into my office, much as usual, but looking more than usually dishevelled and sweaty.  Not because he had walked a long way, though he had.

            As an unexpected result of the minor procedures he had undergone, blood tests had been conducted.  The results had belatedly come back to him. 

۞

I did a circumcision in 1993.  So then after, I noticed some signs of danger in my penis.  And it was hard for me to pass urine and all that.  So I went to Dr Nka.  He was here in town then.  Then he said to me I'm having the problem of appendix.  So one of my aunts, she was working here at Rhodes since 1974, she said to me know, I must try another doctor, to balance the information.  So I went to Dr M. here in B Street. Then Dr M. said to me know, it's not an appendix, it's something else.  Then you must see some provincial doctors.  So he sent me to  Settlers Hospital, I slept there for three days, they sent me to Livingstone Hospital.  I slept there for one night, then they sent me to Provincial Hospital where I slept eight weeks.  Then they cross-examine me and all that stuff.  Then they tested my blood.  Then it was 1998, and they noticed that I am HIV/AIDS negative.  Then they said to me, no, it's just a rapid test, I must wait for a routine test.  Then they find that no, I am still HIV-negative.  So they sent me to the operations – three operations, then all those operations were successful, under Dr G.  Thereafter, I came back to town and my girlfriend then was Thami, but she went to Cape Town, then I heard later, 1999, that she's married there.  I find no problems with that because I was still young then.  So I had an affair with a lady called Patsy.  OK, and then Patsy was a blood donor then, so, there was full evidence that she was HIV/AIDS negative.  So, we were together until 2000.  There were differences, you know.  There were differences up until the separation. 

So, after that separation, I had an affair with a lady called Thembisa – the late Thembisa.  She died this year, and Patsy had an affair with someone else called Sipho.  Fortunately, or unfortunately, the time we had that separation, it was the time when we pay a visit to the people who are HIV/AIDS positive – both!  Both of us.  Then later we realise that no man, this separation, there was nothing fruitful for that separation of ours.  Because that guy was cheating and all that stuff.  So I wasn't happy also with that lady, she had cold hands, you know.  So we came back.  In 2001, no 2002, we heard that guy is late, he passed away – the former, or the ex-boyfriend of my girlfriend.   So, there were signs of shingles, just here on her face.  So, I ask her – fortunately enough we were working for Pick n Pay then, but I was a casual and she was working there permanently.  So I ask her to contact Dr L. and Dr L. find that no, she's HIV-positive.   Ja, it's like, since I heard that that guy passed away, I tried to talk with myself and say, okay, I must accept anything now.

۞

He sat in that brown chair and sobbed quietly while I held his calloused, heavy hand in my pale and unworked one, until he felt he could talk a bit more.  Did he have to go onto anti-retrovirals immediately?  Apparently not: his CD4 count wasn’t low enough.  The strategy for now was mainly dietary, and treatment of any opportunistic infections.

 I did not pry for more details, and he did not offer any, but after a time he felt he could go and face whatever it was he had to face.  I was the only person in the world he felt he could tell, he said. I was a father to him, he said. 

I felt completely helpless.

۞

I met Dan Wylie way back, you know [Vuyo related to a friend] .  It's like, I like to write, so, somebody told me about Dan.  So I went to him.  Then, instead of reading, we became friends.  Ja, we became friends.  But we realised last year that no man, Vuyo, you must write.  So there is an autobiography that I'm busy doing now with Mr Dan Wylie.  It's like in fact he's interviewing me, trying to give me a skeleton, the structure of how to write.  Because he want me one day to write a book alone.  He's very supportive.  He's the first person to know about my HIV.  I used to say to bra Dan – you know sometime I used to say, not Prof, or Dr, I used to say bra Dan.  It's like, since we met, I noticed that, no, he's beyond writings, you know.  He's my brother, he's my father and all that stuff.  It's like he's very encourageous, you know.  He's the person I trust, you know, I trust more than my family.   Even if I have a problem of – let's say, right, a problem of electricity, Dan is there.  Even I don't have groceries, he knows that I'm not working, Dan is there.  I worked all these places, I got these job through Dan.  He's driving all the time, he's driving, and then I know that he's worried that I don't have a stable job so far.

۞

And who else was he to tell, in his tight-knit, gossipy community, in the miasma of stigma that surrounds AIDS?  “Since I was active in the struggle for liberation,” he said, “I am well known here in this town.   I am not scared to disclose, but I must meet certain people, certain individuals, not everybody.  It must be on my terms.”  Even amongst professional people, he would feel exposed.  “It's like our people, they are there to enjoy salaries.  They are not there because they love their work.  There's no confidentiality there, it's like, at the end, once you tell them your problem, it will mean that it's the defamation of a human character, because they are going to spread it wrongfully.  So, I don't trust them, ja, I don't trust them.  Some of them, I don't know them but they know me since I used to address gatherings, you know, and all that stuff.  So going to our clinics, it's a waste of time.  It's a waste of energy also because they are going to give you a Panado.  The Panado you can buy.  Going to give you Disprin.  So what is the use of going to them?  At least a doctor will address you, draw out everything and say you've got this problem.  So you need someone who's well educated to tell you that.”

            He went missing for a few months, but this was not unusual, and I thought little about it. Friends said he was around, or in PE.  Eventually he turned up; he had noticeably lost weight.  He had had TB, he said, been in hospital in PE.  I was shocked, saddened that he hadn’t told me, as well as a little relieved; I had had visions of needing to carry him through some final appalling decline.  But he said he was fine now; he was watching his diet carefully; he was back working with Patsy, selling stuff.

            He shook my hand warmly and fell towards me in a slightly awkward, musty-smelling hug.

۞

Vuyo became increasingly disillusioned with the ANC party he had supported so long; the unseemly tussle between Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma disturbed him; the arms deal controversy, he was convinced, was only the tip of a corruption iceberg that was threatening to sink the whole liberation project.  He railed gruffly against greed and selfishness, curling up his lips in reluctant disgust.  Doubtless the failure of the ANC-led municipality to lend him any support, or to deliver the services they’d promised to the poor communities generally, weighed heavily on his opinion.

            So when Mosuia Lekota – once ironically and a little disturbingly dubbed ‘Terror’ – Lekota broke away from the ANC and formed a new party, COPE, the Congress of the People, Vuyo joined them.  For a brief period in 2008, he threw himself into campaigning for the upcoming election.  For a brief period, he was again ‘The Commander’, organised small cohorts of friends and supporters to campaign for a different order.

            I remember him being supremely confident of COPE’s prospects of success; they would sweep the board.

            It was not to be.  There was violence here and there; an Eastern Cape COPE worker was killed.  And historic loyalty to the ANC proved too strong: countrywide in the 2009 election, COPE garnered just 1.3 million votes, 30 seats in Parliament.

            Vuyo stuck to his guns, continued to profess his individualistic beliefs.  But this renewed surge of political activism was soon subsumed in more personal concerns.  I was not seeing him for many months at a time.

۞

In the second half of 2012 I was on sabbatical and away for much of that time.  People came to look for me, I learned later, but I was not there, and they left no messages.  So it was only early in the following year that I heard, almost by accident, that Vuyo was dead.  He had been dead for three months already.  He and his girlfriend Patsy had burned to death together in the house at Number 704a.   

In time I made contact with JJ and other of Vuyo’s friends.  There was neither clarity nor consistency amongst them about what had happened.  A suicide pact?  An alcoholic accident?  One said that someone had said there had been a smell of petrol.  Another said there had been mention of a rope.  Someone, or both, were tied up?  A gangster’s revenge?  Rivals in the booze business?  No one could say.  Or would not.  Maybe the impundulu had caught up with him at last.  He had flown, like a bird.

And so it stood.  It had apparently been ruled an accident, and that was that.

And so it stands: a friendship half conceived, and a story forever half told.

          The End



Text and images © Dan Wylie

"Township: House on fire"

Grahamstown 2016