Chris Dunton
SINGING AWAY THE HUNGER: STORIES OF A LIFE IN LESOTHO by Mpho M’atsepo Nthunya (University of Natal Press, R79)
IN her foreword to this autobiography of a 66-year-old Mosotho woman who has ” little formal education, less privilege and almost no experience of books or w riting”, Ellen Kuzwayo comments: “One has a tendency, in looking back, to feel nostalgia for days gone by, but these stories of Basotho people’s lives are t
oo shocking, one might even say brutal, to feel that longing for times past.”
First comes Mpho Nthunya’s mother’s story, as told to Nthunya – an account of the brutal insensitivity of an attempt at an arranged marriage (an attempt tha t fails, through good/evil fortune). This is in rural Lesotho, in the first qu arter of the century. Nthunya describes her childhood – the dominant image her e the kind of hunger under which possession or provision of a small lump of pa p becomes an issue of fierce contention.
Her father is a migrant worker and so at the age of eight she moves to South A frica, to Benoni (here, as throughout, her account is absolutely precise in it s detailing of material life, of social relations). Marrying a Mosotho called Alexis she returns to the high maloti and the village of Marakabei. She is bot h entranced with the beauty of the mountains and unable, at first, as a “been- to”, to co pe. “I was just like a fool. They were right. I didn’t know how to do anything .” But with the help of Alexis’s family, adjustment is happy and rapid.
With Alexis at work, the couple enjoy relative wealth. There is an absolute lo ve between husband and wife. “We had a good marriage, and I know this does not happen for many people.” There is a deeply touching account of Nthunya’s rela
tionship with her motsoalle, or special woman-friend. For “when a woman loves another woman, she can love her with a whole heart”.
Enough to be able to look back in bliss, then, surely? But this has also been a life riven with loss, cruelty and exploitation. Three children die in childb irth or soon after: the first – and the bleak and hapless scenario here is typ ical – with Nthunya’s exertions travelling across the maloti, after misunderst anding a doctor’s instructions. In her account of the death of three more sons in the 19
80s, the harshness of life in Lesotho has rarely been put across with such imp act.
It isn’t an account that enables straightforward conclusions (on impoverishmen t, injustice). Nthunya describes her brother-in-law as “a cruel man and a murd erer” and attributes the deaths of her sons and her own illness to him. He has , as a sangoma reveals, achieved this partly through witchcraft. A constant th roughout the book, this, the author’s belief in, participation in, Basotho med icine. Aft er going to a sangoma for explanation or a cure she says, “I always – as we sa y – ‘grow hard’. Strong. From experience I learn from these things. I live thr ough these things, and I learn from them.”
The last chapters deal with Nthunya’s work as a domestic servant and her frien dship and working relationship with the book’s editor, Limakatso Kendall. Seei ng her knowledge made tangible, seizing on the significance of this (to tell), she still knows that “the people of Mafikeng, where I live, will never read m
y book”. In an afterword, Kendall gives a detailed account of the telling/writ ing proces s and of its ethics, which is, I think, particularly aware and clear-headed.
Kuzwayo sees this book – and she describes it as a “great” book, which is perh aps not wide of the mark – as constituting, implicitly, a call for action and for change. I’m not sure; but part of the value and challenge of the book (in debate) is to prompt the question, does it offer this?
Kuzwayo again: there is no rage in Nthunya’s telling, “her stories are not any where touched by emotions of sorrow, self-pity, anger, or revenge”, but are “s pare and factual”. This is partly why the book is both so beautiful and so pro foundly disturbing to read: again a point that compels debate.