Fellow writer Zakes Mda spoke at the launch of Morabo Morojele’s novel. He waxed indignant about the media’s persistent query as to where “the African writers” are. “We are many,” he asserted, offering a litany of names. “What do they want us to do? Dance for them?”
Mda is, of course, right. But perhaps the illusion of a drought of writers is best shattered not by lists, but by the appearance of a truly original voice that does not simply tell important stories, but makes the words sing as he does so.
Unexpectedly, Morojele is such a voice. Unexpected because he is already a highly qualified development scholar and one of the country’s leading jazz drummers — and how many talents is it fair for one man to have?
How We Buried Puso is a remarkable book. Within the temporal unity provided by the preparations for his errant brother’s funeral, the thoughts of Morojele’s protagonist, Lefe, wander far and wide. He remembers childhood; the new ideas offered by freedom fighters and refugees fleeing the nameless “country neighbouring”; and the coldness of his academic exile in England. He reflects on the harsh changes ostensible development has brought to the landscape and social fabric of his homeland. He puzzles over his brother’s choices, and how he might have died — something no one is keen to discuss. And he dreams of tentative personal happiness and of a broader pan-African redemption tied to social values, not doctrinaire recipes.
The story asks more than it answers, and the answers are never quite what the reader expects. For, although in Lefe’s world the personal is certainly the political, Morojele gives that slogan a hundred vibrant, quirky and often wryly humorous faces. The glorious ringing rhetoric of national liberation can be reduced to the designer label on a suit; there is no easy answer in revolution.
Yet neither does the book call nostalgically for a return to tradition. The novel’s many strong women characters, named and nameless, have lives that do not fit some ancient patriarchal pattern. Precisely because the personal is the political, it is they and their neighbours who are shaping new traditions to keep today’s changed world turning.
What makes this message of modest hope more compelling, however, is its language. Morojele draws deeply on Lesotho’s traditional poetry and song (lifela) in direct quotes, in the use of multiple layers of metaphor and in the compelling rhythms built by the sound of his words.
He writes of the dark of night: “The air is dense at this time. It sits like a blanket on the village. Things pass through it. Animate things like bats and night birds and, when the wind is very strong, dust and debris and bits of paper and leaves. And things also that we do not have names for.” He describes the grass at the bottom of a valley as “thick and sweet and perfect for cows in fattening for a dowry”. And he gently satirises his teenage brother’s march on manhood with an elaborate Saturday morning shaving ritual: “A large black comb for the hair on his head, his shirt off for acclaim, and the radio and our ageing, frailer, still yelping dogs to bless the proceedings.”
Sharply observed, concrete details woven into richly patterned prose give Morojele his distinctive writer’s voice, and the book an appeal far beyond those readers narrowly interested in new African fiction or the dilemmas of development. Morojele, indeed, has no need at all to dance before those seeking new African writers. His words do it for him.