Mama has been exiled to the Transkei, but one night she wakes and exclaims, Hes dead! She means the Old President, and this is her chance to seize power. Astory by Achmat Dangor, from his new book
Mama had them shot in the afternoon. They were lined up facing westwards, so that the only blindfold they would need was the glare of the sinking sun. And when the shooting stopped, their crumpled-up bodies were dumped into heavy mailbags and dragged away. A deputy president, a few Cabinet ministers, half a dozen provincial premiers. A secretary whose squint eye Mama regarded as an evil omen was included at the last minute. Their blood did not have enough time to stain the earth.
Mama and Kid Freedom waited until the silence was absolute, then strode briskly towards the Cabinet room where the rest were assembled. She walked ahead, the Kid a few paces behind; an unspoken order of precedence had quickly been established. They paused before the grief-stricken portrait of the Old President, whose death a few weeks ago had started all this. Kid stepped past her with a deftness that brought a smile to her face. He held open the door and stared at the dull faces ranged around the table, until murmurs ceased and feet no longer shuffled and chairs stopped scraping, then he stood aside to let Mama in.
Nineteen days had passed since Mama sat up in bed in the middle of the night and said out loud, Hes dead. Shed walked through the moonlit rooms of the villa, throwing open doors and rousing her entourage in a loud and sonorous voice. The time has come, the time has come.
The ones who were slow to respond, those making love or sleeping too deeply, the coldness of their guns held close to their hearts, were spurred on by kicks and the kind of abuse they had not heard from her tongue for a long time. Drowsy resignation Its just another one of her crazy nights quickly turned to fearful wakefulness. There was a demonic brightness in her, recognised especially by the older hands. Many were certain that her eyes were closed, as if she herself was in a deep sleep, even when she gave the most detailed instructions for their departure, repeating over and over again, The time has come.
Her emissaries worked the phones throughout that night and the next day, until Mama was ready to leave her prison at the mouth of the Umtata River, surrounded by walls of sea and the cloistered comfort of wind-bent trees. She sat swaying in the lookout seat of an armoured car as they drove along the stony road to the city of Umtata, followed by a unit of serious young men, their naked chests sheathed in an armour of dust and manly sweat.
The ascetic column, with Mama at its head, soon swelled into a caravan of singing men and dancing women. In each village they passed through, there were people who knew that they wanted to be part of this deadly procession. They had not seen so much theatre since the days when the Old President was a young man. Anything was better than the dull virtues of patience and restraint he had asked them to suffer. Many did not even know who Mama was, though they heard vague legends of a famous witch who had come to seek refuge from the wrath of the city people up north. Nor did they appreciate the solemnity of half-mast flags when eventually they streamed onto the tarmac at Umtata airport. They could not understand why no one joined in their festive chants or the rhythmic freedom dance that everyone knew so well. Even Mama, who had sat without stirring on the swaying seat for two days on end, now wept as she alighted, and embraced those who came to greet her.
Only Kid Freedom, Mhlangu as he was simply known then, recognised the sense of occasion that the simple villagers had anticipated, the pomp and circumstance they had marched so far to experience. He rose from the bowels of the troop-carrier where he and Mamas other advisers had been seated throughout the journey, intoxicated by the petrol fumes they had inhaled, and climbed up to Mamas vacant seat.
Despite her angry glances, Mhlangu chanted, Viva Mama, viva freedom! Kill the faggots, kill the whores! He started to dance, a long-forgotten toyi-toyi of stamping feet and roughly swaying shoulders. The crowd drowned out his voice with the roar of their own response, but his words were of little consequence. What mattered was the poetry of the chant, the musicality of his military march upon the precarious stage of a wobbly lookout seat. He finished with a rousing, Viva Mama, viva freedom!
Mama smiled and announced that Kid Freedom, as he would henceforth be known, would be her General. Then she climbed the stairway to an enormous aeroplane, turning to wave at the multitude, who cheered even though they say how closely she was followed by a gang of disaffected politicians, deposed tribal despots and cashiered generals. Those familiar slanted faces brought only a momentary pause to the ancient ululation of praise. People sensed that they had been close to history that day. This, their parents told them, was the way life used to be when the Old President was first released from prison. Anyway, they had not had so much fun for a long time.
There is my mandate! Mama told her critics and waved her hands at the giant television screens which showed, over and over, the scenes of wild jubilation at Umtata airport. This is a good story, journalists said. They had been short of good stories lately, except for the Presidents death. And you can only do so much with the solemnities of a funeral. He was a good man, but dull in his last days and quite autocratic. He allowed none of this riotous venting of emotions, the smashing of shop windows, the burning of the flags of unity.
Our people want a strong leader, Mama said.
A breath of fresh air, Kid Freedom added.
On a night wild with the smell of rain, they began by rounding up the gays. Cars, trucks, vans, Jeeps, and seven ancient Cadillacs bought by a junior official on a junket to Detroit but never used before because of the Old Presidents enraged disapproval, were pressed into service. Any vehicle that the Security Forces could muster. People were picked up in bars and cafs, snatched from sidewalks where men and women foolishly felt free to stroll in the warm spring air, despite the talk of a coup. Others were taken from their homes, their heads covered with hoods. You never know whos a homo, a spokesman said. Weve got to rid ourselves of this vermin.
When that suddenly familiar fanfare of crashing car doors and screaming tyres was over, a silence fell over the streets. The gays were gone and the rest had fled indoors. In darkened homes mothers counted the silhouette of heads, acknowledging with startled cries the absence of a son or daughter or husband.
From then on, people took to speaking in whispers and home-spun codes, finding names for police and politicians, for jails and death, for the migratory birds who were their children or wives or husbands or lovers on the run. Just like the old days before the Old President came out of prison.
Dont worry, someone said, Ingolovane will get them, Mama and her kind.
Kid Freedom sat in his office on Heros Heights, comforted by the chatter in the Command Room alongside. Numbers were being totted up, the capacity of jails and detention centres calculated. Someone suggested re-opening Robben Island. The whole Cape peninsula is full of fucking moffies. The jails are full!
Hey, the Kids listening, a voice said.
The door shut, leaving Kid by himself. Being alone made him feel uneasy, as if there was another person in the room. He had to shrug this off. Paranoia. The stress, the responsibility. He looked around the office, walls stripped of photographs and decorations, the polished desk with its neat stacks of Top Secret files, carpetless floors, a soldierliness that filled him with pride. He had come a long way, from delinquent and renegade to General of the Security Forces. Today they had disposed of some of the old leadership, the rebellious ones, the ones whose faces were known, the ones whose eyes betrayed their dislike of Mama even while they smiled, dispatched without ceremony, a fitting end! And still the gays were being rounded up. How many are there?
He reached into his drawer and removed a bottle of whisky, a brand no longer seen in the country. Everything was for export, to earn foreign exchange. Thats what they had done to this country.
A soldier burst through the door, and Kid Freedoms rare moment of solitude was shattered. General, Mamas here, I mean the President.
Mama appeared in the doorway. Her hair, freed from the prison of her famous headscarf, stood wildly on end, and a bright shawl was held tightly to her near- naked body. She had the sleepy look of an innocent child. No one must see her like this. The soldier had already retreated into the Command Rooms bustle.
Find him!
Who?
Ingolovane! Find him.
Kid Freedom saw for the first time that her eyes were closed, that she navigated the darkness with the antenna of an outstretched hand, as she spun around and left him in the cold austerity of his office.
All around the country, Security Forces were placed on alert. Find him, Kid Freedom commanded. Find Siphiso Ingolovane.
It doesnt make sense, General, an officer protested, Ingolovane is not even a name.
Mama has sensed him, he exists. Find him, or there will be no peace in this country, Kid Freedom answered tersely.
They began the search on the mines, among the miners asleep in their compounds, for Ingolovane, they heard, was a carrier-of- gold. And they followed his trail to the villages, where it was possible for him to hide, for these carriers of ore were a clannish lot who quickly forgot the distinction between right and wrong and whose only loyalty was to each other. An intelligence source said he could be gay, what with a name like that, or an actor or a waiter. The net widened, until the jails were too full and detainees walked free because the guards could not cope, and whole cities were blacked out behind lowered shutters and drawn curtains. Until the soldiers were edgy from lack of sleep and shot at shadows in the street.
Ingolovanes name was the same in IsiZulu and SeSotho, though no one knew whether Siphiso was the name his father had given him, since Mamas allies among the Zulus denied that the man was of their tribe. Informers reported seeing him in different guises in a dozen places at the same time. He was a ganja-smoking, dreadlocked youth, a businessman whose suit pockets were stuffed with counterfeit dollars, a woman a whore dressed as a man, a spirit of darkness who threw outlawed bones to determine the future. No one, it seemed, had ever looked into his eyes. Indeed, they said he had no eyes, but hollowed-out cavities in his skull.
When they switched on their television sets, not to watch Loving, which Mama, bless her soul, had reintroduced, but to hear the latest news about the rebel and murderer Siphiso Ingolovane, the son of a Hillbrow prostitute and a drunken migrant worker, they saw Mamas face, no longer warm and smiling and motherly. Her long- suffering quietness had given way to a brooding anger, and she kept silent while others spoke, that young man in particular, the one with the strange name, Kid Freedom. Which mother would give her child a name like that? Hes not someone you can trust.
When Mama announced that they had caught this Mr Ingolovane and had had to shoot him, the rabid dog that he was, and burn his bones to prevent contamination of the air that good people breathed, everyone laughed. They had heard, on good authority, that Mama herself was hiding him, captivated by his beauty, she was keeping him all to herself. Bad blood was growing between Mama and Kid Freedom, the charlatan kings and bitter politicians were returning to their mountain hideaways, Mama had imported a thousand new wigs.
Somewhere in a city street a man sat down beneath a coloured awning. No, he said, he was not Ingolovane come back from the dead. He wanted a coffee, mild and no suger. He was sick and tired of those soaps. Hollywood crap.
This story is from Kafkas Curse, a novella with other tales, published by Kwela Books