in the township knew Dilika had been dismissed from his teaching job because of his drinking problem. It had all started when I was at home during the winter break in June. Due to his laziness he’d asked me and two of his students that he had chosen from his standard ten class, to help him mark both his standard eight and nine mid-year biology exam scripts. Dilika had promised us a dozen ngudus if we finished the job in time.
The deal was concluded in a shebeen that we called The White House. Some of the scripts got lost in the tavern, but Dilika gave marks to the students nonetheless. This only became a problem when marks had been allocated, by mistake, to a student who had passed away before the exams were even written.
When the private investigators came to Dilika’s house, he was drunk and failed to provide an explanation why marks had been given to students whose papers hadn’t been marked, including the student that had passed away.
Dilika blamed his misfortune on the students he had selected from his class to help me mark the papers. He believed that since he hadn’t paid them for the job they might have alerted the authorities. Although I had also not been paid for the job, I escaped the blame because I was still in Cape Town when the investigations started.
As the BMW passed the new Gold Reef Casino, PP turned and looked at my uncle. “My bra, your mshana is fucking gifted upstairs,” he called out loudly, while drunkenly knocking his own head. “Yes, your nephew’s upstairs is sharp as a razor.”
“He inherited it from me,” said Uncle Nyawana. “Remember, I got position one in our standard two class esgele. It was 1971. There were no computers then, only typewriters.”
“Read my lips, my bra! I think you’re suffering from what intelligent whites call false memory syndrome, you’ve never been esgele,” teased Dilika. “How could this brilliant young man, who has conquered UCT, the great white man’s institution, be like you? If there is a person amongst us that should share his success, it’s me. I was his teacher.”
Dilika was right about my uncle. He had dropped out of school before I was even born. He had sworn to everyone at home that he would never work for white people and therefore there was no reason for him to be educated, but in actual fact we all knew that he was just too lazy to look for a real job.
“Don’t listen to Dilika, my Advo!” Uncle Nyawana said, smiling. “Let me tell you a secret. In our time we were only educated to speak Kaffirkaans. That’s the reason I was at the forefront of the 1976 Soweto uprising with Tsietsi Mashinini and others.”
We all laughed, but PP’s deep-throated laughter drowned everybody else’s. We knew that my uncle wasn’t telling the truth. I guess he was probably out in the township robbing people when the uprising occurred.
“Read my lips, these kids of today are lucky,” interrupted Dilika. “Just look at Advo! Young as he is, he’s already going to be an advocate.”
A wide smile spread to every corner of my uncle’s light-skinned face.
We were now in Chi and Zero turned into our street. We passed the Tsakani meat market which, as usual, was crowded with people roasting their meat, washing their expensive cars and drinking alcohol. From the open window of the BMW I could smell the appetising scent of braai in the air.
Next to the meat market was a beautiful pink house that, some five months earlier, had been an ordinary four-roomed township house belonging to a woman we called maMshangaan. It had been extended while I’d been away, and in addition to the high walls and the paved driveway, the house also had a satellite dish on its tiled roof. I concluded, without asking my uncle, that the owner had become a serious businesswoman, who no longer sold smiley and amanqina.
My uncle’s dog, Verwoerd, was sleeping under the apricot tree as the BMW entered our small, dusty driveway. Uncle Nyawana got out of the car first and immediately the dog jumped towards him and nuzzled his hand. But Verwoerd wasn’t impressed by my presence. As soon as I climbed out of the car to off-load my luggage, he gazed at me once with his jewelled eyes, then wrinkled his black lips up to show his fangs before he started barking.
“Hey, voetsek, Verwoerd! Uyabandlulula! You discriminate! This is my laaitie, you no longer remember him?” my uncle said, trying to silence his dog.
THREE
Wednesday, November 24, Soweto
I was still in my boxers, the first cigarette of the morning between my fingers, when I heard someone approaching the house. I knew that it was Mama because she walked very slowly with a heavy tread. I hadn’t expected her to visit us so early in the morning as a few months earlier she had moved in with her lover, Uncle Thulani, in Naturena. In fact, she was three-and-a-half months pregnant with his child.
When I heard Mama’s keys jingling at the door, I immediately pressed the burning tip of my cigarette with my fingers to extinguish it. Only my uncle suspected that I smoked and I didn’t want Mama to find out.
“Hau, hau, hau! Now that I live in Naturena, Jabu has turned this house into a breeding ground for cockroaches,” Mama protested loudly, using Uncle Nyawana’s real name. “Sies, man!” she said to herself. “Where are the men of this house? Is anybody home?”
I didn’t answer. I could hear some kwaito coming from inside my uncle’s room and I thought that he would answer, but he didn’t. I guess he was still in the toilet outside.
My uncle would lock himself inside the toilet for about an hour every morning. Inside he performed a strange ritual which involved syringing himself with warm water mixed with Jeyes Fluid. He was convinced that by doing his ukupeyta he would clear his mind and be able to focus on his business as a fruit-and-vegetable vendor at the back of our house. He also believed that ukupeyta and ukuphalaza were the only ways to get rid of bad luck and township witchcraft. In a way I regretted ignoring his advice. Maybe I would have passed my law exams if I had listened to him, but, unfortunately, I just found his morning practice of ukupeyta and ukuphalaza very funny as he would repeatedly curse every time he drove the hollow needle into his arse.
In the kitchen I heard plastic bags rustling and then, a few seconds later, Mama burst into a personal rendition of a kwaito song by Bongo Muffin that was coming from my uncle’s radio.
| Thathi’s sgubu usfak’ezozweni. | (Take the drum and put it in the shack.) |
| Ufak’amspeks uzobuzwa . . . | (Put on your glasses and you’ll feel . . .) |
| Ubumnandi obulapho. | (The joy that is there.) |
I laughed inside my room as I imagined the meaning of the song and my overweight mother singing it. She paused and called my name again.
“Bafana! Are you still in bed in there, my son?” she shouted.
“I’m here, Mama.”
“I haven’t seen you for ages. Wake up and come have breakfast with me while we chat. I want you to tell me everything about Cape Town, and I mean, everything. I bought you a newspaper as well. They’re looking for a legal advisor in this advert.”
“I’m coming, Mama.”
“Sheshisa! Hurry up! I’m dying to see how my boy looks. Five months is a very long time for a mother not to see her son. And Yuri’s here too.”
Yuri was my ten-year-old cousin whose mother, Aunt Thandi, had died of Aids-related diseases at the age of twenty-seven. Aunt Thandi was Mama’s younger sister. On her death certificate it said that she had died of tuberculosis, chronic diarrhoea and pneumonia.
Two days before she passed away, my sickly Aunt Thandi had called me into her bedroom with a feeble wave of her thin hand and asked me to help her remove a big rock from her chest. She had been coughing badly; coughing up slime and blood.
I still wish I could have helped Aunt Thandi to remove the rock she was talking about, but I